"balance."
What warrior, after traveling nearly eight hundred miles from the Alketch, would still not know how to harness mules?
Another man came up carrying bowls-the same man. Not just a pale man of the White Coasts, but identical in face, in body, in the way he walked. A black sergeant in red-laced boots had to tell him where to stow his burden. The Icefalcon looked around. There could not be so many pairs of twins in a single company of warriors. Not just twins: sets of three and four, as alike as millet seeds.
Clones, Gil had said.
The Icefalcon looked again. Never more than four to a set, and only one of any set wore boots. The other three had rawhide rags wrapped around their feet, as had the clone warriors he'd followed from the mountains.
The rawhide strips were all new.
The men with full heads of hair, and boots, tried not to look at those without them. Sometimes they'd mutter but most often only turned aside.
Vair na-Chandros passed him, close enough to touch, the reek of blood and attar of roses mingling in his clothes. He was making for the black tent, the Truth-Finder walking quietly at his side. The Icefalcon would sooner have picked up a live coal, but he followed them as they lifted the black curtains and passed within.
Masses of lamps hung from the roof, like hornet's nests in a building deserted for three generations, but fewer than half still burned. Most of the candles ranged on planks along the walls, or, standing clumped on iron holders, were guttered to yellow phantasms of twisted wax, and the smell of spent oil, smoke, and tallow mingled with the stench of rotted blood. You could have cut the block of air contained within the tent with a wire, like cheese.
As the Icefalcon had already guessed, the blue cloth of the wagoncover had been tied back so that the wagon itself made a raised annex onto the square chamber of the tent.
There were demon-scares everywhere, depending from every lamp-cluster and pole-end. Being in the tent was like being devoured by ants. A couple of the clone warriors were taking down lampstands and packing up candles. They'd be breaking the tent soon.
The tent contained what was almost certainly apparatus that dated from the Times Before.
Gil will be pleased, thought the Icefalcon.
It resembled in workmanship the little that the Icefalcon had seen at the Keep, the pieces from which Rudy had constructed flamethrowers to fight the Dark Ones, and some of what had turned out to be lamps in the crypts where the hydroponics tanks were.
A deep vat, or sarcophagus, occupied most of the wagon-bed. Wooden stairs went up to it, the straw on them, and on the floor of the tent itself, so soaked in blood that it squished under the feet of the men.
The vat's curved sides were wrought of what looked like the same black stone as the outer walls of the Keep, but within-the Icefalcon climbed cautiously to the wagon-bed to see-it was lined with silvery glass, and like fragments of twig and leaf caught in ice, there seemed to be transparent crystals, shards of iron, and tiny spheres of amber and obsidian embedded in the darkly shimmering inner layer.
A canopy of three linked half arches surmounted it, intertwined metal and glass-two men were taking them down now. They wore boots and moved with more intelligence and purpose than did the clones, and packed the apparatus carefully into great wooden crates, stuffing in wadding of dry grass, wool, crumpled parchments, and rags of linen and rawhide.
At their apex the arches had been joined by a many-sided obsidian polyhedron and linked down their sides with dangling nets of what appeared to be meshed gold wire, worn thin and tattered, and woven with more spheres of glass and amber.
Two more polyhedrons, glass or crystal, tentacled in gold tubes and set on wooden plinths-the plinths were raw-new-stood at the opposite end of the tub. One of the booted warriors boxed them up as the Icefalcon watched.
To the Icefalcon's spirit sight, the whole of the apparatus shimmered with magic, and he understood why Cold Death spoke of it with uneasiness and fear.
There were petcocks and drains on the vat, and the straw underneath them, sodden and stinking, was being cleared away. Sockets, too, made dark little mouths in the corners of the vat to accommodate what looked like poles with ingeniously geared crank-wheels, but these had already been dismantled.
Where had they had gotten all of this? the Icefalcon wondered. And how had it survived the centuries-decades of centuries, Gil said-since the Times Before?
Hidden away, as Gil and Maia had said?
It looked built to last, like all the possessions of the mud-diggers, who could not abide the thought of anything they owned passing into dust.
In the lower part of the tent, on the straw and rough carpets of the floor, the Truth-Finder was packing up a little box. Coming near, the Icefalcon saw that it contained needles made of crystal, dozens of them, each with a bead on its head: amber, iron, crystal, black stone.
White Mustaches, whom Vair greeted as Nargois, came into the tent and asked a question in which the Icefalcon recognized the words for corpses-only Vair used the word carcasses, the bodies of animals and barbarians. Nargois assented, and Vair seemed pleased.
Nargois asked something about the Keep of Dare, and Vair shrugged as he replied. Though he knew of it-how not?-the siege was clearly not a matter that deeply concerned him.
Eleven hundred men? Why not?
Blood-stench, magic, cold, and pain twisting at his mind, the Icefalcon left the tent. He saw no reason why he could not go directly through the walls, and he was right: the scrape and itch of every layer of the cheap black cloth and canvas, darkness, then the bright dry sunlight of the plains morning.
He investigated the other wagons as the men loaded them. Most contained food; one held weapons.
Two were packed with clothing, heavy furs and densely quilted jackets in addition to the loose, bright-hued hand-me-down trousers and tunics worn by most of the men.
In another wagon he found crates of the type he had seen in the tent: heavy wood, draped with demon-scares, and dimly glowing with the sickish pale light that played around the apparatus in the tent.
Some other apparatus, clearly.
May their Ancestors protect the folk of the Keep if it prove as evil.
But, of course, he thought, the Ancestors of the Keep folk could not protect them. The protection lay only in Tir's memories-and it was the Icefalcon's failure that had separated Tir from them.
Outside, men were taking down the demon-scares from their poles, the last thing done before moving on.
One or two pocketed them if they thought they were unobserved. It was an easy matter for the Icefalcon to leave the camp.
So Vair had machinery from the Times Before.
And a woman who claimed to be possessed of a spirit from those times, though Gil, who was wise in many matters, considered her a fraud.
From a rise in the windswept lands, the Icefalcon watched the caravan draw away. The snapping of whips, harness leather creaking, and the ceaseless bleat of sheep pierced him, musical as the light and the smells and the terror of the demons who now, he saw, materialized from the air and drifted after the wagons like thinly glowing sharks. The cold had grown on him, crippling and exhausting, drawing him toward the unfulfilled promise of the sun's ascending disk.
Slowly he let himself drift upward, until he hung like his namesake hawk far above the smooth curves of the land. His sight could follow the trace of the trail, a grass-filled groove paler than the surrounding hills, all the way to the dark tuft of Bison Hill in the distance.
In the other direction that pale groove drove south, arrow-straight, the scuffed smudges like footprints marking Vair's previous camps. Every draw and wash and coulee formed serpentine patterns of red and sepia, silver agonizingly bright through the dust-green cottonwood and sedge.
He could see the rabbits in the brush, the fishlike glowing sinuosity of water elementals in the stream. He was aware of the Empty Lakes People, riding in all directions still, scattered and broken after their defeat and going back to their hunting trails, telling themselves they were fools who followed fools when mammoth and uintatheria roved the draws.