He felt no surprise.
The merchant came to mind, the brown-faced southerner who had claimed to be from Penambra, the man who had told Ingold about the cache of books in the villa in Gae. He had spoken the name of Harilomne the Heretic. And Ingold had gone.
It didn't take a Wise One or a scrying glass to deduce that the man had been dispatched by Vair.
Overhead, vultures made a slow silent pinwheel above the bodies of the slain.
The Icefalcon plucked a little dried venison from his bag and chewed it thoughtfully. "How fares Rudy Solis?"
Cold Death relayed the query to Ilae. The Icefalcon imagined Ilae herself, sitting in all probability in the long double cell the wizards used as a workroom, with its battered table of waxed oak and its great cupboards filled with scrolls, tablets, books salvaged from every library and villa they could get to, from the western ocean to the Felwoods.
Rank after polyhedronal rank of record crystals glittered frostily on shelves, the images of the Times Before for all those who could read them. He wondered if Gil would be there, too, studying the crystals by means of the black stone scrying table in the corner, seeing in it the faces of the mages who by their spells and arcane machinery had raised the Keeps against the first incursion of the Dark.
Single-minded and essentially lazy-for it was reasonable to rest and conserve energy when not either in an emergency or preparing for one-the Icefalcon regarded Gil's obsessive studies with some bemusement.
She had for years now been piecing together histories, both of the three and a half millennia that had transpired between the first arising of the Dark and the second, and of the Times Before, trying to learn what she could of the world the Dark had long ago destroyed.
This she did, she told him, as he would have sought knowledge of a trail long cold, by scratches on rocks or seeds in crumbling dung.
That she would or could do so while maintaining the brutal training required of the Guards and caring for a son now able to toddle purposefully in the direction of anything that could conceivably be complicated was, to the Icefalcon, merely an example of the alienness of her nature.
"She says he still lies unconscious." Cold Death's sweet murmur brought him from his thoughts. She held out her hand and he passed her the leathern tube-Cold Death was much enamored of venison sweetened with maple sugar. "The Lady Alde tends him, she says, and has not slept. She is much distressed."
"The child Tir is her son."
A shift in the voices of the men, the doleful complaint of mules, snagged his attention, and he swung up the stones of the low cliff until he could just put his head over the grass on the rim.
But it was only breakfast ready, not breaking camp just yet. They were lazy as bears in summer, these southerners. Some of the men gathered around the cook fires, holding out wooden plates and bowls made of gourds. Their heads were bald as new-birthed babies, their feet not clad in boots but, like the feet of Bektis' three clone warriors, wrapped in rawhide.
It was too far to distinguish clearly, but he thought they were all of the same height, the same build.
In the morning stillness the walls of the black tent hung straight, seeming to absorb the light of the pallid sun. The demon-scares flashed on their poles like the corpses of crystal insects, sinister and bright.
He slipped down the rocks to Cold Death once again. "Can you speak with the Wise One Ingold Inglorion?" he asked. "He was once called Olthas Inhathos, the Desert Walker, among the White Lakes People."
"Ah," said Cold Death softly, and smiled. She licked the venison grease from her fingers and plucked another grass blade, which she passed over the tiny pool in the rocks, no more than a cupped handful and frozen with last night's cold, and considered it with brightblack prairie-dog eyes.
"Olthas Inhathos," she said. "Desert Walker. You do not remember me, but..."
And she smiled at whatever it was that the Desert Walker replied. "Even so," she said. "I am in the badlands a day's ride south of Bison Hill with my brother Nyagchilios, the Pilgrim of the Skies, the Icefalcon of the Talking Stars People. The hook-handed bad man Vair na-Chandros is here... No, not with me but camped close by, and it appears that he can make warriors out of air. It is he who sent the army against the Keep in Renweth Vale, we think. He also-so my brother says-sent out the peddler whose story took you to Gae, that Bektis could enter the Keep undetected to steal the child Tir."
Her smile widened with delight, and to the Icefalcon she said, "The Desert Walker learned to curse from the Gettlesand cowboys, I think. My little brother is confused," she went on, turning back to the puddle of ice, "and does not know what to do."
"I never said so," the Icefalcon said frostily. Sisters. "Tell him of the black tent and the things that passed in the night."
While she did so he climbed the rocks again to watch the movements of the camp.
Under ordinary circumstances the Icefalcon would have felt no hesitation about his ability to creep into the camp itself, even by daylight. But the magic that hung so patently about the walls of that square black tent kept him at a distance.
Among his people there was a story about a coyote who went hunting with a saber-tooth and feasted in the end not only on the eggs of the horrible-bird while it was busy killing the saber-tooth-who after the fashion of such creatures didn't wait to see if there was unseen danger nearby before closing in-but on the entrails of the larger and more hasty beast itself.
"He is troubled, your Desert Walker," Cold Death said when the Icefalcon eased himself down into the crevice again. "He says he will make for the Keep with all speed. In the meantime he begs you, guard the boy Tir."
"And what of the black tent?"
"He says there is a tale about an old woman who wrought warriors out of bread dough and brought them to life with the blood from her left little finger, but he does not think this is the case. He says the Guild of Bakers would never stand for such a thing. He says he will meditate." She handed him back the bag.
"Thank him for me," retorted the Icefalcon, exasperated, and slung the bag over his shoulder again.
"Our enemy Loses His Way abides still by Bison Hill." Cold Death stood and tossed her grass blade aside. "He seems at peace, so I can assume that you were right, that the shaman Bektis awaits the coming of this Vair and will do naught to the boy in the meantime. Will you return thence now, little brother?"
"No." The Icefalcon looked around him, gauging the defensibility of the coulee. A water cut led from the main stream to their left, and having hunted here once in the past he knew there was a sort of cave under its bank a mile and a half upstream, hidden by chokecherry brambles.
"I have watched and seen no sign of another shaman," he said quietly. "Yet Vair himself is not mageborn, and there is power of some kind there. Ingold and Minalde need to know of it before Vair achieves his meeting with Bektis. Things may change after that, for better or for worse."
He unfolded his lean height-Cold Death didn't even top his shoulder-and sniffed wind and weather, listening to the voices of the camp and the sounds made by the vultures and the kites.
"If there is some magic there that demands sacrifices of pain, I think I had best know this, too, before they take possession of the child Tir."
Cold Death's face sobered, and she nodded.
"Can you work on me a spell of shadow-walking?"
Her mouth was still, but her dark eyes flickered to the brightening sky.
"I know. l have heard the Wise Ones of the Keep, Ilae and Ingold and Rudy, speak of such spells. They are more difficult to perform by daylight, but daylight would render me less easy to detect, as it does demons. I can sleep in the cave there, if you will weave the spells around me and stand guard above my body."
Still she was silent. He saw the concern for him in her eyes.