He asked, too, about the pedigrees of the horses at the Keep and shook his head sorrowfully when the Icefalcon informed him that the Keep horse herd had been acquired at random from the South and that even before the destruction of the original herd, the ancestry of horses was not a concern of most mud-diggers.
"It is very foolish not to know whether your horses are the sons and daughters of brave beasts or cowards," he said gravely, stripping the skin from a woodchuck he had shot while Yellow-Eyed Dog slaveringly feigned disinterest.
They sheltered in another bison wallow, not the one southeast of the hill but an older one to the southwest, full of curly buffalo grass and pennyroyal, with a good view over the broken lands to the south.
"How can you know what they will do if you don't know about their ancestors before them? These mud-diggers of yours want all the wrong things and don't know what is important."
"They are not my mud-diggers," pointed out the Icefalcon. "And I have told them this many times."
"Then why do you follow this shaman? This child is not your kin. He may even be your enemy." He used the word dingyeh, "notkin," oktep in the tongue of the Talking Stars, and set the strips of woodchuck flesh over the hot coals of last night's fire to roast.
"The child is..." The Icefalcon was silent a moment, trying to phrase his relationship to Eldor-and to the people in the Keep-in terms that could be understood in the Real World. There was much about his new life that he could not explain in terms of the old.
At length he said, "The child's father helped me and gave me shelter when I departed from my own people."
"Did you need shelter?" asked Loses His Way.
"No. But for his sake I would not like to see the boy come to harm. What troubles me now, is that Bektis must be watching his back trail..."
And then they were no longer two, but three. The Icefalcon couldn't even tell how long she'd been there.
She was a diminutive woman, with the black hair that sometimes marked Wise Ones in the Real World.
From babyhood her parents had shaved it off, so she had never learned to regard it. It was hacked off short now, straight as water and heavy as the hand of fate. When the Icefalcon had seen her last, it had not yet been touched by gray. Her eyes were black, too.
"Little brother," she said.
"Elder sister." He inclined his head. "You know Loses His Way, our enemy from the Empty Lakes People."
She nodded. Everyone in the Real World knew everyone else, pretty much, or at least knew of them.
"It pleases me to see that you were not devoured by the Eaters in the Night, o my sister. I had heard that they singled out the Wise."
She smiled, small but very bright, like a star. "Then I suppose I am not all that Wise."
She picked a pink-edged flower of bindweed and turned it in her fingers, smiling at the silkiness of the petals under her touch. "Do they still haunt the lands west of the wall of snows, little brother?"
He shook his head. "At the end of that first winter a Wise One there sent them away to the other side of Night, where no people live and it is night forever. They have not returned again."
"Good," said Cold Death briskly and worked the flower into the end of the Icefalcon's braid among the bones.
"I thought it must have been something of the kind. Now who is this Bektis, and why does it concern you that he watches his back trail?" She sat down crosslegged between them and picked the woodchuck's heart out of the coals, devouring it with an expression of ecstasy. "Was it he who slew five of the Empty Lakes People and put their bodies in the coulee, or was that you, little brother?"
"It was Bektis," the Icefalcon said a little grumpily because he loved woodchuck hearts with a great, strong love. "And those with him."
He gave her a quick summary of the events of the past four days, finishing with, "He is a fool, but not so much a fool that he would not watch his back trail, knowing that he was observed in carrying the boy away. He knows that the warriors of the Keep will bear stronger amulets against his spells of battle illusion and battle panic than the warriors of the Empty Lakes People, whose shaman Walking Eyes was killed by the Eaters seven years ago, yet he displays no concern over the matter. He waits here for something."
Cold Death tousled the dog's ruff. "For the rest of the black warriors," she said. The dog sniffed at her and licked her hand.
"T'cha!" scolded Loses His Way amiably. "You kiss your people's enemies, o my brother?"
"He tastes her that he may devour her later," explained the Icefalcon, and the warchief nodded.
"Very well, then."
"Ninety-eight of them are a day south of here," Cold Death went on. "Tonight you'll be able to see their fires. As for why he shows no concern about pursuit... "
She frowned. She had sharp little flecks of brow, pulling together over a short snub nose.
"There is power in that band," she said. "They have twelve wagons covered in blue canvas, and surrounding them... not darkness, but a movement that bends the shape of the air."
She shook her head and tried to shape some kind of meaning with her square brown short-fingered hand.
"There is evil in them, such as I have never before seen. Demons follow them, and the elementals of water and air and earth. Blue Child follows these warriors and their wagons at a distance."
"And does the Blue Child," asked the Icefalcon softly, "ride these lands?"
"These lands are ours," said Cold Death. "Unto the Night River Country and down to the Bones of God."
Loses His Way hackled like a wolf at the suggestion that the Iarger portion of the Real World did not in fact belong to the Empty Lakes People, but Cold Death continued unconcernedly, picking another flower. "It was Blue Child who sent me scouting, to see who or what awaited this dark captain, with the hook for his hand, at Bison Hill."
Bison Hill was the only place the mud-diggers used for meetings, the only landmark large enough to catch their blunted attention. The Icefalcon only asked, "A hook?"
Vair na-Chandros, he thought. It had to be.
"A big man with hair that curls like that of a bison's hump, gray with age, not white in youth as many of the black warriors. His eyes are yellow and his voice like dirt in a tin pot. He has a silver hook in place of his right hand, and his men call him Lord. You know this man?"
"I know him." The Icefalcon's face was impassive as he turned the woodchuck meat on the flat rocks among the coals.
"In the days of the Dark ones, this hook-handed one commanded the forces of the Alketch that came to help humankind against the Dark. He abandoned them in the burning Nests that he might preserve his own followers when he went to war in the Alketch. After that I am told he tried to make himself Emperor of the South by wedding the old Emperor's daughter against her will. Now he rides north, does he, with less than six score men, and wagons filled with uncanny things?"
He sat up a little and gazed south across the broken lands, green miles of chilly springtime where a red-tailed hawk circled lazily and a couple of uintatheria, ungainly moving mountains with their tusked and plated heads swinging back and forth, ambled from one gully to another in their eternal quest for fresh leaves.
But what he saw was the rainbow figure descending the steps of the Keep in the mists and the hatred in those fox-gold eyes when they looked on Ingold Inglorion.
He saw too the upraised hooks, scarlet with firelight, summoning back his troops out of the darkness of the burning Nests. Saw Ingold-and hundreds of others-engulfed and borne away by the Dark.
It came back to him also what Gil-Shalos had told him about the Emperor's daughter of the South.
"I like this not, o my sister," he said at last. "This Vair is an evil man, and now you tell me he rides with an evil magic in his train. Whether this be a mage or a talisman or an object of power, I would feel better if I knew something more of his intent, before he takes the boy into his grasp. Will you remain here, my enemy, and look out for the boy? If they await Vair's coming, having brought Tir this distance, he should be safe enough."