He found horses corraled near the shining jet walls of the Keep, his first day in Renweth Vale. Stealing two was no difficult matter. These he'd named Brown Girl and Wind.
Then, knowing he was going to live east of the wall for some time, he set himself to observe the mud-diggers who lived in the Vale. It became obvious to him at once that these were a war party of some sort, though he could not determine who their enemy was and where they lay.
They had neither flocks nor herds (except for their horses), nor did they plant fields of the corn, cotton, and beans that grew in the mud-diggers' settlements in the South. They had a few dooic as slaves-the slumped, hairy semihumans that the Talking Stars People would have killed out of hand-but he did not see children among them, or old people, though that could have been accounted for by famine or plague.
The men and women of the Keep, back in that far summer, wore either black clothing marked with a small white four-petaled flower or red with one or three black stars. There was a tall man who wore red much of the time and sported a chain of blue gems around his neck and a long black cloak that spread about him like wings when he walked, and he seemed to be in command of the men and women in red.
It was a day or so before the Icefalcon realized that another man-equally tall but thin, clothed no differently from all the other wearers of black, save that the emblem on his breast was an eagle worked in gold-was commander over them all.
This man was the one they called Eldor, or Lord Eldor, and this was the man who, the Icefalcon realized on his second day in the Vale, was stalking him.
"It only needed that!" stormed Blue jewels on that second day, when the two horses were reported missing. He made a great expansive angry gesture that would have startled game and drawn enemies for miles around, and Eldor folded his long arms and regarded him in self-contained quiet, his head a little on one side.
"Bandits in the Vale! I told you how it would be did you reopen Dare's Keep, Lord Eldor. It dominates all the valley for miles. Instead of expending effort and supplies to make it fit for a larger garrison which I understand, with the depredations of the bandits growing in the West-you would do better to leave it locked and expand the fortifications at the western foot of the pass."
His deep, melodious voice carried easily to where the Icefalcon lay along the limb of the great pine tree that still grew between the Keep and the stream. It was the custom of the Talking Stars People periodically to send warriors south to kidnap men from the settlements, whom they kept as prisoners for a winter to teach the children the tongue of the Wathe.
These men they usually initiated into one or another of the families so that when the time of the spring sacrifices came nobody who had actually been born into the families had to be tortured to death, though the hair of such men usually wasn't long enough to make good bowstrings.
"As sure as the Ice in the North," Blue jewels went on, "if you leave the Keep open, either bandits will take it as a hold or some troublemaker landchief will."
"If it was bandits." The tall Lord Eldor followed the offending sentry back to the horse lines, speaking to Blue jewels as they walked. "Tomec Tirkenson tells me bandits as a rule are too greedy for their own good. They'll lift the whole herd, not two out of the middle where they wouldn't be noticed until the count."
After a little more bluster, Blue Jewels-whom the Icefalcon later knew as Alwir of the House of Bes, one of the wealthiest and most powerful lords of the Realm-ordered out a party of his red-clothed warriors to search the Vale, and the Icefalcon made his leisurely way back to his camp near the standing-stones, to move it before they got there.
He later came to know both Eldor and Alwir well, but it sometimes seemed to him that all the years of acquaintance only deepened, rather than altered, his initial impression of them: Alwir declaiming and jumping to an incorrect conclusion, Eldor standing a little distance from him, withholding judgment, an expression of observation and a detached amusement in his steel-colored eyes.
Winter still held the land below the pass. The Real World that stretched between the Snowy Mountains and the Seaward was an unforgiving land, a land of little water in most places and few trees, a land of hard, steady winds punctuated by summer tornadoes and, so he had heard, of winter ice storms these past ten years that tore man and beast to shreds and froze them where they fell. Herds of bison and antelope wandered the open miles of grassland, and as the winters lengthened and deepened, mammoth, yak, reindeer, and rhinoceri joined them, followed by the great killers: dire wolves, saber-teeth, horrible-birds. Since the Summerless Year slunch had spread, the wrinkled, rubbery, faintly glowing sheets of it swallowing the ground for miles, sucking the life from any plant it engulfed. The slunch in its turn put forth a kind of life, strange creatures that wandered abroad but did not appear to either eat, or seed, or excrete. These things died and rotted with a strange, mild, sweetish stench and left patches of slunch where they lay.
The Icefalcon's hackles raised like a dog's to see how the slunch and the cold had altered the land. Many of the groves that dotted the western foothills were now dead, buried under the whitish masses. As he followed the westward road that first day, the stuff stretched on both sides, in patches or in sheets miles broad, and neither rabbits, nor lemmings, nor antelope moved over the dying grass that lay between. By the debris left where Bektis and his party stopped to rest, the Icefalcon learned that in addition to what Bektis and Hethya had carried on their two donkeys they'd helped themselves to the Keep's stores of dried meat, cheese, and potatoes. With his sling he killed two kites that came down after the cheese rinds and potato parings and added their meat to his satchel, and the rinds and parings as well. With slunch growing abroad in the lands food would be even more difficult to find, and he knew he could waste none. Only in the camps did he see Tir's tracks and guessed by the marks in the thin dust that they were keeping the boy's hands tied.
In a way it was just as well, he thought. Whatever Gil might say, the boy might have tried to escape while the mountains still loomed in the east, and his chances of survival would be nil in these desolate lands.
After black-cloaked Alwir with his blue jewels had declared him to be a bandit, hunting parties went out to search the Vale of Renweth for the Icefalcon for three days running. The Icefalcon had been more amused than anything else, patiently moving his camp every few hours-the invisible camp of the peoples of the North, which left no sign on the land-and watching them.
He watched, too, the trains of mules that came up the gorge of the Arrow River through the smaller range of peaks west of the Vale, food and seed and saplings; watched the training of the black-clothed Guards under the tutelage of a little bald-headed man with a hoarse voice; watched Alwir and Eldor walk around the walls of the Keep and the edges of the woods that surrounded its knoll, talking and making notes on tablets wrought of wood and wax.
Alwir continued to complain of the size of the Keep and its uselessness as a garrison against the Gettlesand bandits. "In times of siege it's a jail!" he declared, striding up and down the shallow steps that led to its single pair of dark metal Doors. "To be sure, no one can get in, but the defenders are trapped!
Unless there's a secret way out? A tunnel for sorties, perhaps, or a hidden door?"
His blue eyes glinted eagerly. He was a man who loved secrets, thought the Icefalcon, lying in the long grass beside the stream. Himself, he would never have entrusted any secret to this Alwir, who seemed to consider himself above the laws of common men by virtue of his descent from the lordly House of Bes.
"None that I know of," replied Eldor calmly and went on with his surveying, knee-deep in the long meadow grass.