Icefalcon’s Quest. Barbara Hambly

diggers, the Talking Stars People called them, these people who had lived so long so fat and easily, with their wheat fields and their furniture and their clothing that tied up one’s sword-hand-it did not surprise him at all. Civilized people would have trouble guessing what was amiss should a uintatherium take up residence in their parlors.

      “But why here?” he asked. “Why make up such a tale?”

      “Because we’ve got food here.” Gil shrugged. “And we’ve got the only setup that guarantees production of food. Since those bandits took over Prandhays Keep last summer, we’re just about the last stronghold for the length of the Great Brown River, from Penambra to the Ice in the North, and the most productive. You know how many bandits these days are from the Alketch, soldiers displaced by fighting there since the old Emperor’s daughter gathered troops and threw out the general who thought marrying her against her will would be a good way to become Emperor himself, the more fool he.”

      “They are fools,” said the Icefalcon dismissively, “the Alketch.” The original owner of the finger bones he wore in his braids had been a prince of the Alketch.

      A door in the Aisle’s south wall, and a dark vestibule, led them into the watchroom of the Guards. The triple-sized cell was bright with glowstones – ancient crystal polyhedrons that shed a kind of stored magelight – and redolent of the warm reek of potatoes, venison stew, and sweaty wool. Sergeant Seya was playing pitnak with one of the rookies – Gil glanced at the sergeant’s tiles and shook her head.

      “If our girl Hethya was passing herself off as some kind of ancient wizard to gain status wherever she lived,” she continued, turning back to the Icefalcon, “Alketch bandits’ religious scruples might not have stretched to keeping her around, especially once they found out she couldn’t come across with anything useful. You know what the Church in the South does to wizards. My bet is she and Uncle Linok had to get out of there fast.”

      “So they stole a donkey,” said the Icefalcon, “and came here … For what purpose? To hoax us?”

      “At a guess. To buy status. Maybe they thought we wouldn’t let them in. Everyone loves a good story.”

      “Civilized people do,” retorted the Icefalcon, who wasn’t about to admit to a weakness of that kind. “They could make a good living,” he added thoughtfully, “just selling the donkey.” Knowing some of the speculators who operated in the Keep, Linok had probably already been offered the little animal’s weight in gold, which was cheap these days, since it would neither hold an edge nor stand up to the heat of a cook fire. It was just possible that someone would make an attempt to steal the creature, though with so few animals in the Keep such a theft would be difficult to hide.

      It occurred to him that he could have killed both the old man and the woman and sold the donkey himself to the highest bidder, always supposing anyone in the Keep possessed anything he wanted that badly.

      None of the Talking Stars People were particularly interested in things they couldn’t carry two hundred miles on foot. The habits of the Icefalcon’s upbringing died hard.

      Gnift the Swordmaster came in, calling together his afternoon practice, and now that her son Mithrys was able to walk – and learning to talk, may their Ancestors help them all – Gil had returned to training regularly with the Guards and taking her turn on the watches. While she and the others were stripping to their undertunics and wrapping their hands and wrists, the Icefalcon again put on the soft jerkin of black-dyed wolf-hide he wore on patrol, marked with the white quatrefoil emblem of the Guards of Gae, and pulled on over it a heavier vest, and his gloves. Though it was April, in these high valleys the wind blew cold, colder now every year. There was still chance of snow.

      Janus, the stocky, red-haired Commander, called out, “You’re not on now, you know,” and the Icefalcon shrugged.

      “I’m just going up the Vale to see about those bandits.”

      “There can’t be a lot of them.” He straightened up from lacing his boots. “The watchers at the Tall Gates never saw them. Neither have any of the patrols.”

      “Even so.” He gathered up his bow, a blanket, a quiver of arrows, and then, because he had been raised among the Talking Stars People, added to the sword and water bottle at his belt a leather wallet of dried meat and flatbread, enough for a hard day’s walking, and some dried fruit. Like most of the Guards he carried a firepouch at his belt, the whole cured hide of a woodchuck lined with horn and clay, in which was packed a smolder of rotted yellow birch that would burn for a day.

      There were few enough guards, and Renweth Vale stretched eighteen miles from the sapphire wall of the St. Prathhes’ Glacier down to the spruce forest at its lower end. A fairly large force might hide in the pinewoods or the rock caves above, and it was not impossible they could have come in over the ice-crowned spine of the peaks, rather than the eastward pass.

      It would be as well to know where they were and what they were up to. The regular patrol had departed only an hour before – the Icefalcon briefly considered rounding up a band to go with him, then dismissed the thought. On simple reconnaissance, he would do better alone. Besides, he thought – the reasoning of a White Raider, Ingold would tell him, but he was a White Raider, and the reasoning was logical – bandits might have weapons and horses that could be appropriated.

      Instinct made him seek the trees as quickly as he could. From the stones called the Four Ladies at the glacier’s foot one could see all the clear land of the Vale. He worked his way carefully under cover of the woods up to the round meadow where Linok and Hethya had camped. He did not seriously think that anyone was watching from the Four Ladies, but there was no point in giving anyone a hint of his movements or intentions.

      He had not seen tracks of bandits yesterday, he thought, nor the day before. The watchers on the Tall Gates that guarded the lower pass to the east had not sighted them, either.

      Odd.

      From the edge of the trees he scanned the pale sky northward, orienting himself. His upbringing in the Real World had taught him to learn every facet of his surroundings, tree by tree, gully by gully, mudflat, spring, and stone. He knew Renweth Vale as well as he knew the ranges of his childhood, the Haunted Mountains and the Night River Country. Had the sky-shadowing devil-birds of legend carried him off and set him down anywhere in the range of the Talking Stars People, he would have been able to determine where he was, where the nearest cover lay, where to find water and in what direction to walk to come to the steadings and horse herds of his people were it winter, or their summer hunting camps wherever they might be, depending on the rains and the grass.

      Therefore he knew exactly where the lightning-scarred elm tree and its three sisters lay.

      And above them, there were no carrion birds.

      Scrupulous bandits? In his experience bandits didn’t even bury their camp garbage, let alone their dead.

      When he wanted to, the Icefalcon could travel very swiftly, but the terrain here was rough, cut with streams and dotted with pale boulders among the trunks of pine and fir. It took him over an hour to reach the place, and when he did the sun was barely a hand span above the marble-white knife of the Great Snowy Mountains in the West.

      The bandit still lay at the meadow’s edge, arms flung wide, head twisted over to the side. Both face and head had been shaved a little less than a week before, and though the man’s face was young, the beard and hair stubble were white, a common color among the Black Alketch. No bird had torn his eyes or his belly, no fox chewed the soft parts of his face. Nothing, as far as the Icefalcon could see, had invaded the gaping flesh of the severed throat or begun to eat at the corpse.

      It had simply rotted where it lay.

       In four hours?

      He knelt beside it, pulled off his glove to touch the cheek. Liquefying flesh had already begun to drip away, showing the pale jawbone and teeth.

       Plague?

      Not a pleasant thought. Particularly not with Ingold a week’s journey off in Gae seeking