Icefalcon’s Quest. Barbara Hambly

black ducts and pipes of the Keep. Though Maia was shaking his head in disapproval, she spoke of apparatus that would melt snow and cause plants to fruit and put forth crops twice and sometimes thrice in a year – the sort of things the more foolish of the people of the Real World west of the mountains attributed to their Ancestors, as if anyone’s Ancestors would be interested in such matters. The Talking Stars People had more sense.

      “I know not whether these things will remain,” Hethya said, the Felwoods brogue dissolving again, the antique inflection returning as the pitch of the voice itself deepened and slowed. “We hid them deep, for the world in those days was full of foolish men and the acts of a few evil wizards had brought down the persecution of the Church on them all. A world of time has passed over them, and time contains many things. We thought, me Uncle Linok and meself …” She was all Felwoods again. “We thought to lay hold of some of these things, to buy ourselves at least a place to dwell, now the eastern lands are all warfare and bandits and death.”

      Her nostrils flared a little, and the hazel eyes darkened again, and her fingers clenched the faded gilding of her chair arm.

      “You need not trouble yourselves about the purchase of refuge.” Alde rose from her own chair and held out her hand, her full garnet oversleeve falling straight. Against Hethya’s height and strength she had a fragile look, like the chair she had sat in, the delicate workmanship of a world fast slipping away. “Whatever you seek, be sure that you will have our help. Whatever you find, be sure that it will not be taken from you so long as your use of it be honest. That I pledge you.”

      Hethya curtsied deep with her borrowed skirts and kissed the Lady’s outstretched hand. Linok carefully unwrapped himself from his many shawls and made his bow, an elaborate Court obeisance that once again tripped something in the Icefalcon’s mind.

      But then, it was the sort of silliness that civilized people did, and he had lived among them for four years before the coming of the Dark Ones. There were many in the Keep – not just the Keep Lords, either – who scrupulously maintained the old forms, and it was not unreasonable to suppose that such a one might have a niece with a roving eye and a Felwoods turn to her tongue.

      It was the mark of civilized people to make such allowances and not live with one’s hand forever on one’s sword-belt. Commander Janus of the Guards, and the Lady Minalde, and others over the years, had told the Icefalcon repeatedly that every snapped twig did not necessarily presage the swift onset of bloody disaster.

      But the reflection that he was right, and they wrong, was of little consolation to the Icefalcon in the face of what was to come.

       Chapter 2

      “If you mean, do I think she was faking,” said Gil-Shalos half an hour later, walking along the broad Royal Way at the Icefalcon’s side with her gloved hands stuck in her sword-sash, “the answer is yes.”

      At midday the mazes of the Keep were sparsely populated, especially in spring. The rasp of files and saws, characteristic noises that rose and faded with the turnings of the fortress’ tangled hallways, were stilled as the men and women who labored all winter in their dim-lit cells joined hunting parties or optimistically cultivated what arable land there was – anything to add to the Keep’s slim stores of food and, especially, clothing. With the destruction of the entire sheep herd in the Summerless Year, the Icefalcon had immediately reverted to the wearing of leather and furs, dyed black as the clothing of the Guards of Gae was always black; others were following suit.

      Uneasy torchlight flung shadows over the black stone walls but couldn’t pierce the gloom collected under the high ceiling vaults. Here and there vermillion slits of poor-quality-oil light marked the rough louvers or curtains that closed off doors of the dwelling cells. Raised largely in the open, the Icefalcon had had a difficult time getting used to living under a roof in his years at Gae. The Keep was like dwelling forever in a cave.

      A very safe cave, of course. But a cave, nonetheless.

      But he had played in caves as a child, up in the Night River Country. He had memorized their most intricate twists and turnings, their tiniest holes and pass-throughs, in order to ambush his playmates, even as the children here learned to run the mazes without lights in the course of their games. He still practiced several times a week, finding his way about the back reaches of the Keep blindfolded. Following his example, as in many other things, Gil did this as well.

      “It is not exactly what I mean,” the Icefalcon said, as they turned left and descended the Royal Stair. Many people had trouble keeping abreast of the Icefalcon’s long-legged stride, but Gil was fast. “But tell me why you think this woman lies about the Ancestor who dwells within her head.”

      “There’s too much of a difference between her uncle’s class and hers.”

      “I thought of that. It is not inconceivable, o my sister, that the man’s sister could have married beneath him.”

      “Maybe.” She didn’t sound happy about it. She understood watchfulness as few civilized people did, the awareness of patterns and when a single trace or scat or spoor looked not as it should. “But anybody can make up gibberish and say it’s an unknown language. Religious fakers in my world have been using that one for centuries. And logic would tell anybody that people had to live somewhere while the Keeps were being built. If you think about it, it would have to be in caves.”

      The Icefalcon nodded. It was, he reflected, part of a storyteller’s art, and he’d frequently teased Gil about the fascination all civilized people had for stories that sounded true but weren’t.

      They passed under clotheslines draped with garments hung between the Royal Stair’s spacious arches to take advantage of the up-draft of warm air and on into the Aisle. Hundreds of yards long and over a hundred wide, its ceiling vanished high in darkness above them. The obsidian walls, like those of the densely twisted corridors, glittered dimly with squares of scattered lamplight; doors, and windows. Multifingered streams trickled dark and clear as winter midnight under railless stone bridges that cut the black expanses of floor. At the Aisle’s far end, pale daylight leaked through the Doors, the single entrance to the whole of the Keep’s great inner dark: two pairs of massive metal portals separated by the twenty- or thirty-foot thickness of the outer wall itself.

      Dare’s Keep. The final stronghold. Unbreachable by the Dark that had shattered the world.

      “Both she and that uncle of hers have been eating pretty good,” said Gil, and twisted a tendril of her dark hair around one of the sharpened sticks that held it out of the way. “And there’s a limit to what you can pack on a donkey. But mostly what tips me off is that she thinks – or she says this Oale Niu bird says – that the Keep is powered by machinery. She thinks that the heart of the Keep is a machine. And that would be true for Keeps like Prandhays and the Black Rock Keep in Gettlesand. Keeps where a wizard, a mage, didn’t sacrifice himself or herself to enter into the heart of the Keep as a source of magic to keep it going. If Oale Niu really were a mage from the Times Before, she’d know about that. She’d know about Brycothis.”

      She spoke softly the name of the wizard who had sacrificed herself: Ancestor in a way, the Icefalcon thought, of all those who lived here. When first he had been told the secret of the Keep, known only to a handful, he wondered why he had not guessed it already.

      There was life here in the lamp-sprinkled midnight among the catwalks overhead, life in the flow of the moonless water along the streams of the floor, life in the breathing of the air. The life of the Keep, like the spirits that dwelled in rocks and trees, in the ocean and in each of the thousand thousand stars. It was the only time he had heard of a human being transforming herself into a spirit, the ki of a place, but it did not surprise him.

      The spirit was the mage Brycothis, who had abandoned her body and been absorbed into the magic walls to draw power from the earth and channel it to the uses of her people within those walls forever.

      Sometimes he wondered that everyone in the Keep did not