Ingold, leaning over the vat to touch the brownish film that seemed to emerge from the quicksilver lining itself, looked up swiftly, and his white brows pulled together.
"Yes," he said, and there was old knowledge, old anger in his voice. "Yes, I know what the Hand does.
And it probably isn't what Bektis thinks."
The Icefalcon leaned his back against the doorpost. He found that even the walk down to the chamber had winded him. His calves ached and felt on the verge of cramping; annoying, he thought, and something he should be beyond. "I thought you said the Devices of the Times Before were beyond your ken."
"Many of them are. But Harilomne was hardly a mage of the Times Before, and he left accounts of his Hand-and of this Device, as it happens, which he tried hard to duplicate before he was driven out of the West of the World by the Council of Wizards. I should imagine your girl Hethya's mother encountered an incomplete copy of his work on what he called the Cauldron of Warriors, hidden away at Prandhays Keep."
"She is not my girl," said the Icefalcon indignantly, but Ingold had already turned back to the vat and was studying the pattern of tiny lights that gleamed starlike in its lining. The Icefalcon followed him and saw that the bottom was an inch or so deep in the brownish ooze that filmed the sides. He shrank from the thought of touching it, even should the salvation of his soul depend upon so doing.
There was evil here against which rivalries for love or power, revenge, or the falsification of a sacrificial omen were the spites of a pettish child. A true evil, a monstrous and vile greed that disregarded all but itself.
"What does the old one do?" Loses His Way nodded toward Ingold, his voice low so that the mage would not hear. "What does he need to know, other than that this thing must be destroyed before Vair can make use of it again?"
Ingold moved on, fingering tubes and cylinders, and glanced calculatingly back at the chamber's door.
Knowing him, the Icefalcon realized that the old man was wondering if there were a way of steal ing all or part of the apparatus, a way of carrying it intact back to the Keep of Dare, to be studied and preserved.
He came swiftly around the end of the vat and closed his hand on the heavy wrist. "Destroy it," he said.
Later he realized that the fault lay in them both. Ingold for not simply destroying the thing at once-provided that such a thing were possible-and himself for distracting the mage and for a fatal second tying up Ingold's sword-hand and his own.
"Fool, Inglorion!" thundered a voice from the direction of the door. "Ten times a..."
Had Ingold not needed to shake free of the Icefalcon's grip he might have leveled his staff, fired off a spell of lightning and ruin, a moment faster. As it was, Bektis had time to duck, slipping back out of the doorway and slamming it shut.
The blast of power Ingold hurled crashed the door open again, demolishing the heavy wood in the process; the Icefalcon stepped back from the wizard at the same moment Loses His Way stepped forward; Bektis' return blast of lightning caught them both.
Loses His Way went flying over the pile of corpses and against the wall, gasping with shock. Ingold staggered, catching himself on his staff for balance, and Bektis, in the doorway once more, cried out words in a voice of power, words the Icefalcon had heard before.
The Court Mage lifted his hand, and the Icefalcon could see it encased in the gold-woven crystal Weapon of Harilomne, chilly light lancing, flashing through the matrices of power and showing up the bones within the flesh.
Ingold flinched, ducked, holding up his hand. Fire shattered around him, ripped long scars in the black stone of the floor. He hurled something-cloud, darkness, a smell of dust and blood-and dimly through blindness the Icefalcon saw Bektis' free hand move, trailing light from its fingertips like an acrobat making patterns with ribbon.
The patterns traced and scattered, spreading out across the black walls of the room itself, engulfing Ingold like a reaching hand. Ingold rolled to his feet and tried to rush the older mage, sword held high, and the Icefalcon realized an instant before it happened what Bektis was doing and cried out, "NO!"
Bektis turned in a swirling extravaganza of cloak and beard and slapped his right hand, the Hand of Harilomne, outspread into the center of the rushing pattern of color drawn from the walls. Ingold had almost reached him when thin blue lightning fingered out from the ceiling, the walls, from every corner of the chamber, stitching into the old mage's body like needles.
Ingold stumbled, fell, got to his feet, and came on again, but shreds and shards of something that wasn't light and wasn't darkness seemed to peel from the very fabric of the Keep, ringing him in a nimbus of burning. He fell again, and Bektis removed Hand and Weapon from the wall and stretched forth his other hand, signing the flaring, chittering darkness to depart.
It did not.
Lightning flashed and wickered from the ceiling again, driving Ingold back along the floor. The old man rolled, tried to get to his feet, face set in shock and pain. Loses His Way charged Bektis with a roar of rage and was stabbed through with a finger of crimson fire from the crystal cap on the wizard's finger, dropping him in his tracks-the Icefalcon edged along the wall, sword drawn, waiting for his chance to strike.
Ingold tried to stand again; it was as if he were being devoured by a half-seen holocaust of stars.
Bektis took a step toward Ingold and said, "Stop it."
The lightning continued. Shadowy forms dipped and wavered around Ingold-he must have been using some kind of counterspell, for the Icefalcon could see his hands and lips move, even as he tried to get to his feet, gather his strength.
Harsh half-seen flakes of light pushed him steadily back, toward the far wall, Bektis advancing... But Bektis' hands fluttered uncertainly. In the reflected glare the Icefalcon could see that the Hand of Harilomne had crazed, like glass heated and suddenly cooled, the crystal clouded and dead.
Bektis' dark eyes were wide with terror and doubt. "Stop it," he called out again, speaking to the walls, the ceiling, the whole malevolent Keep itself that seemed to be bending and bowing toward him, funneling into the room like the heart of a killer storm. "Stop it! I command you!"
A darkness seemed to lift out of the rear wall of the cell, dry and ancient, covering it from the Court Mage's witchlight and from the illumination of the lightning that played and struck and slashed around Ingold's retreating form.
The Icefalcon saw Ingold's face, sweat standing on his forehead and eyes wide with desperation; saw his lips move in the words of counterspells, holding off the lightning as best he could. Sheets and threads and arrows of purplish quasi-light whirled around him like blown leaves, leaving black burns where they touched; cold filled the room, rolling in waves from the dark at the far end.
And there was a voice, the Icefalcon thought. A voice that laughed a slow, dry laughter, building in an almost silent crescendo of glee. "Stop it!" Bektis' voice was almost a scream. He gestured wildly, and the grayed chunks of burned crystal fell from his hand in bloodstained pieces that shattered on the floor.
Loses His Way, staggering painfully to his feet, started to rush forward to Ingold's side, and the Icefalcon grabbed his arm and dragged him back, behind Bektis, toward the door. A final flare of lightning sliced down, catching Ingold full in the chest. He staggered back and seemed to fall into where the wall should have been and wasn't. Falling back into the engulfing darkness that a moment later was gone.
Ingold was gone, too.
Purple threads of lightning flowed around the ceiling of the chamber, down the walls, across the iron sides of the vat. Harmless, heatless, an echo of desiccated laughter.
The Icefalcon closed his grip hard on Loses His Way's arm and fled.