For a time, grief clouded her vision, and she saw nothing. The Icefalcon had been her friend, the first of her friends among the Guards. Cool, aloof, and self-contained, he had only once paid her a dubious compliment - if she wanted to take being told she was a born killer as a compliment; in the course of training with her as a Guard, he had given her welts and bruises enough to qualify in most circles as a deadly enemy. But they had both been foreigners among the people of the Wath, and that had been a bond. And they had both stood behind Ingold, the night the Dark had come to the Keep.
For that, Alwir had sent him south. And he had not returned.
The messenger was dismounting. The murmuring among the vast, dark crowd around the doors of the Keep was like the lapping of the distant sea. He was a youngish man, black-skinned, with haughty, aquiline features and great masses of curly raven hair. Under a patched scarlet travelling cloak, he wore a knee-length tunic stamped with gold, its pattern picked up again on his close-fitting, high-heeled, crimson boots. A
small horn recurved bow hung at his back; on the saddlebow rested a spiked helmet of gilded steel, and a slim, two-handed killing sword was scab-barded below. In his dark face, his eyes shone a bright, pale grey.
He made a profound salaam. 'My lord Alwir.'
Standing above him on the lowest step, Alwir gestured him to rise.
'I am called Stiarth na-Salligos, nephew and messenger of his Imperial Majesty, Lirkwis Fardah Ezrikos, Lord of Alketch and Prince of the Seven Isles.' He straightened up, diamond studs glittering in his earlobes.
'In the name of the Realm of Darwath, I greet you,' Alwir said in his deep, melodious voice. 'And through you, your master, the Emperor of the South. I bid you both welcome in the Keep of Dare.'
Gil heard the murmuring behind her rise at that, and a man's angry voice grumbled, 'Yeah? And all his bloody damn troops as well?'
'Ration our bread to feed the damn southerners,' someone else growled, the sound of it almost lost among the general whispering, and a third voice replied, 'Murdering fags.'
With this in her ears, Gil watched Minalde come down the steps to greet Stiarth na-Salligos, her head high and her face very pale. The graceful young man bent over her hand and murmured formal courtesies. She asked him something; Gil heard only his reply.
'Your messenger?' Those elegant brows deepened in an expression of concerned regret. 'Alas. Our road here was fraught with perils. He was struck down by bandits in the delta country below Penambra. The land is rife with them, hiding by night to haunt the roads by day, stealing and killing whatever they find. Barely did I escape with my life. Your messenger was a brave man, my lady. A worthy representative of the Realm.'
He bowed again, deeper this time. And as he did so, he swept his scarlet cloak back like a mating bird, its scalloped edges like blood against the snow. Gil had a brief glimpse of the token that hung on his gilded belt - small, oak, shaped to a man's hand. Hot rage swept her, more Winding than her former grief. She stood motionless as Alwir offered Minalde his arm, the massed troops and the populace of the Keep parting before them, and led her upward to the dark gates, Stiarth of Alketch trailing elegantly at their heels.
What the messenger wore at his belt was the token of the Rune of the Veil that Ingold had given to the Ice falcon for his protection before the man rode away.
'He murdered him.' The tapping of Gil's boot heels sounded very loud in the arched roof of the great west stairway. The Icefalcon would never have given up that token.'
'Not even to someone who was empowered to negotiate for the troops we'll need?' Minalde asked quietly. She and Gil reached the landing, where an old man from Gae seemed to have homesteaded with two unofficial wives and large numbers of caged chickens. 'Not even in the case of an emergency? If it was a choice between one or the other of them? He'd fulfilled his own mission in summoning the messenger.'
'The Icefalcon?' Gil sidestepped two chicken crates and a cat and continued down the steps. From the corridor below, dim yellow light shone up, marking the back door of the Guards' barracks; with it came a whiff of cooking odours and steam. 'Believe me, there was no one he valued as much as he did himself. Least of all some- some scented Imperial Nephew whom he could have broken in half on his knee.' They turned right at the foot of the steps, went down a short stretch of corridor whose walls looked to be of the original design, and then passed through a makeshift side door and into a jumble of rough-partitioned cells to the right again. 'He never went in for that kind of altruism, Aide. The only way Stiarth could have gotten that amulet of Ingold's was by force, in which case he'd have had to kill him, probably by trickery. Stealing it from the
Icefalcon would have been tantamount to murder; that was his first line of defence against the Dark.'
Gil spoke quietly, but her anger was still hot in her breast. Maybe it was the memory of the messenger's creamy smirk, or the fact that the negotiations were first and last with Alwir, with Aide being used merely as his rubber stamp. Maybe it was only the memory of waking up in the rain-dripping dimness of that stable back at Karst, when the Icefalcon had come to check in his cool, impersonal fashion whether she was well. But something of it must have carried into her voice, for Aide touched her sleeve, bidding her to halt.
'Gil,' she said, 'whether the Icefalcon would have given it to him of his own free will or not - let it be.'
'What?' Gil's voice had an edge, sounding sharp in the gloomy half-darkness of these deserted corridors.
'I mean - Gil, you're the only one here who knew about that token. But you're not the only one who thinks that -that Stiarth na-Salligos might have had something to do with the Icefalcon's not coming back. And, Gil, please...' Her low voice was suddenly urgent, almost frightened, her eyes plum-coloured in the grubby and flickering light. '... Alwir says we can't afford to let negotiations fall through. Not for that.'
Gil bit back a cruel reply. She stood for a moment, struggling with her sullen rage, knowing that Aide was, in a sense, right. What's done is done. The murder by treachery of one of the few friends I had is done. Past.
'Maybe,' she said slowly. 'But if that kind of treachery is common coin, do we really want negotiations to continue?'
Aide turned her face away. 'We don't know that.'
'Like hell we don't! Aide, you've been reading those old histories and records as much as I have. Compared with some of the crap they've pulled on settling the Gettlesand border question, murdering the Icefalcon would be Scout's Honour.'
Aide looked back at Gil, her face imploring. 'We don't know that he murdered the Icefalcon.'
'Don't we?' Gil asked. 'He sure as hell lied about it. If bandits had killed him, they would have looted the body, and Stiarth never would have gotten that amulet.' Minalde was silent.
'All right,' Gil said softly. 'I won't talk it up with the other Guards, though Melantrys is as convinced as I am about it. And I won't take any kind of revenge that would wreck negotiations. But I can't answer for anyone else.' Silence and shadow lay between them for a moment, broken only by the distant random talk in corridors closer to the Aisle than this one. The great gates would soon be shut for the night; the Church had tolled its bells throughout the Keep, and no few participants had made their way to the nightly services in the great cell beneath the Royal Sector where the Bishop Govannin centred her scarlet domain. Among them, Gil knew, would be Stiarth of Alketch, like all the dark southerners, a fanatic son of the Church. Someone Bok the carpenter, she thought had told her the Imperial Nephew had supped with the old prelate and had been closeted with her for some hours before the Council meeting with Alwir, Minalde, and the other notables of the Keep. Now Aide looked strained and worn in the dim light of her clay lamp, her loosely bound hair kinked and wrinkled from her formal coronet. She was a royal princess and the source of her brother's power, Gil thought, looking at that white, withdrawn face. And she was as much a pawn as any one of the Guards. 'Thank you,' Aide said quietly. Gil shrugged. 'I hope it's worth it.' 'To establish a bridgehead for humankind at Gae?' Aide blinked up at her, startled. 'Once the Nest there is burned out...'