Icefalcon’s Quest. Barbara Hambly

taking him over Sarda Pass. Me and Gil and the Icefalcon are on their trail, and we’re going to try to hold them until the Guards come up, but it’s gonna be rough. I don’t know what’s going on, but I got to get going now. I’ll be in touch, okay?”

      “How did he look?” Gil asked when they were climbing again. Rudy dimmed the glow of his staff to a marshlight flicker, barely enough to permit his non-mageborn companions to see. There was no sense in advertising their location, but no sense in getting lost either, and the night was without light. Flakes of snow filled the air, blurring the donkey and boot tracks.

      Women, thought the Icefalcon. They had to ask. Gil-Shalos was a fine warrior and had a logical mind, but she was a woman to her bones when it came to matters concerning the man she loved.

      “I would assume,” he said, bending to examine what might have been marks of someone leaving the party – they showed only the later investigation of that medium-sized black bear that laired on the other side of the Squaretop Rocks – “that he looks like a man of seventy who has been sleeping on the ground for three weeks without trimming his beard.” Gil slapped his arm with the backs of her gloved fingers and turned back to Rudy.

      “Not bad. Couple of scrapes and cuts, and his left hand was bandaged, but it looked like he could use it okay. What the hell is Bektis doing here anyway, Spook? I thought you said he was working as Bishop Govannin’s gofer down in Alketch.”

      “He was. God knows what influence she had over him, but she ordered him around like a servant. Yori-Ezrikos – the Emperor’s daughter – used his power, too; used her friendship with Govannin. But he hated Govannin. I could see it in his eyes.”

      “He hated everyone,” remarked the Icefalcon. Blown snow was swiftly obscuring the trail, but there was nowhere to go in the pass but ahead if they wanted to get through before the storm closed it. He wondered how long the Court Mage would keep up the illusion that Rudy was with the little party – if that was in fact the glamour he had cast over Tir’s mind – and that all things were as they should be. Or had Tir realized already that the man he thought was his stepfather and mentor was in fact only a ghost wrought by a mage’s cleverness?

      Tir had never seen Bektis – or at least he had been only an infant when the Court Mage had departed in disgrace from the Keep – though he had heard his name. He would understand soon enough that something was wrong, when the man he had seen first short and pug-nosed gradually melted into another form, tall and thin with long white hair, an aristocratic, aquiline nose, and haughty dark eyes.

      Why take him over the pass?

      “Why take him over the pass?” That was Rudy.

      Gil’s reply came raggedly, her words fighting the storm winds. “They have to want him for what he remembers from his ancestors. If it was just to cripple the Keep, they’d have killed him before they reached the pass and split up to get out of the Vale undetected.”

      “But he doesn’t remember everything!” protested Rudy. “And we don’t know what he does remember! Bektis should know that.”

      The Icefalcon led them into the lee of a small cliff under the Hammerking’s flank, where the wind was less and the snow thinner underfoot, allowing them better speed. Unseen above them the glaciers that armored the Hammerking’s shoulders sent down their slow, glass river of cold.

      “More important,” said Gil, “Govannin should know that. Unless she figures to have Bektis put a spell of gnodyrr on Tir, to dig into what he doesn’t remember consciously. That’s the worst kind of black magic, and God knows what it’d do to a kid that young, but that’s never stopped her before.”

      Rudy cursed, viciously and with every step as they scrambled up the protected trail.

      By the ground’s shape underfoot and the way the wind roared and shifted, the Icefalcon recognized where they were and steered the others hard to the right. To the left streams had cut gorges in the floor of the narrow, U-shaped canyon. The forty or fifty feet that separated this gash from the mountain’s hip were safe enough to navigate in fine weather but perilous when visibility was poor.

      This far from the Vale wolves lived, too, and saber-teeth. The Icefalcon listened for their voices above the sea-howl of the trees.

      “There they are,” said Gil.

      Light flickered and whipped against the rocks ahead and made buzzing diamonds of the snow. As the Icefalcon had suspected, the donkey had slowed them, as had the presence of the Alketch warriors, unhandy in cold weather. Of a certainty none of them knew the pass.

      “How many are there?” asked Gil.

      “Warriors? Three.” The Icefalcon glanced around him, calling to memory what the terrain ahead would be like. The deepening gorge, the cliff, the stream; the waterfall that would probably be frozen still and the shouldering outcrop of rocks beyond it, narrowing the pass to a gate thirty feet wide. Remembering the wisdom of Gil’s alien upbringing, he added, “They were alike, in stride and weight, even to the way they walked. More alike than any brothers I have ever encountered.”

      “Clones?” Gil spoke an outlander word and looked to Rudy for confirmation. His eyes were half shut, as the eyes of Wise Ones were who concentrated on the casting of a spell.

      “Come on.” He seemed to wake from reverie and pressed on again, striding ahead of the Icefalcon now, pushing against the pounding winds. “I put a Word on the donkeys, but I’m not sure how long it’ll last. Bektis can use a counterspell …”

      “If Bektis figures out why the donkeys stopped.” She was running beside him, a lean dark gazelle leaping up the sheltered goat trail. “He’d have trouble figuring out a Chinese finger puzzle,” a judgment that meant nothing to the Icefalcon but that made Rudy laugh.

      “Are we anywhere near that big spur?” he asked in the next breath. The light from his staff dimmed to nothing, but sparks of blue lightning crept along the ground at their feet, barely illuminating the way. “If I can get a rockslide going ahead of them, we can hold them …”

      Thunder cracked as blinding light split the darkness. The Icefalcon grabbed Gil by one arm and Rudy by the back of his bearskin mantle, thrust them forward as the snow-roar in the swirling obscurity above told him that Rudy wasn’t the only one who knew how to start avalanches. Rudy yelled “Damn it!” and cried out other words, magical words, answered from far off above the storm.

      “Rudy!” It was a child’s voice, piercing and terrified.

      The winds checked, failed. Rudy made a pass with his hands, and cold blue light showed the crowding enscarpments of the Mammoth and the Hammerking bizarre in the harsh shadows, the glistening headwalls of the glaciers above. Dune and drift snow clogged the way, and against the thrashing trees, the scoured shelter of the rock-spur and frozen falls, their quarry could be seen.

      The donkey was rearing and fighting in terror, the second animal dragging at its rein. Tir was fighting, too, on foot in the clutch of a black-faced Alketch warrior whose grip held him almost up off the ground. Two other warriors, who even at this distance could be seen to be of the same height and build, stood with drawn swords, blinking in the magic refulgence, waiting.

      “Bektis!” yelled Gil. “Where’s …?”

      A crash of rock splintering. White lightning cleaved the already fading brilliance of the air, and the Icefalcon shoved Rudy in one direction and Gil in the other, springing clear himself as a levin-bolt skewered the ground where Rudy had stood and steam exploded from the snow in a hissing cloud. The renewed glare showed up Bektis, tall now and thin in Linok’s rough furs and quilted trousers, arms uplifted on the rock pinnacle beyond the ice-locked falls. The bandaged head wound – an illusion from the first – was gone. Now his head was flung back, his long white hair and patriarchal beard transformed to flags by the battering wind, and lightning laced his fingers in blue-glowing flame that hurt the eyes.

      Rudy shouted a word of stillness, swept away and drowned. The storm winds took