Chapter 19
The Keep was alive.
Blue worms of phosphor fleeted along the join of the ceiling, slipped away out of sight into the wall.
Somewhere far off, knocking could be heard, tapping and pounding on the black walls in blackness; once one of the walls of the Silent cell on the second level bled a little, liquid black in the dim pulse of the little fire, but red when Hethya went and touched it and brought the smear of it back to the fire on her fingers. She said, "T'cha!" and quickly wiped it away, but not before Tir saw.
The whole Keep was whispering. Names, Tir thought-the names of those who had departed. The names of those who had gone away. Sometimes it whistled, a sad little tune, an air Tir almost knew.
And sometimes it was only silent, and that silence was worse than anything. One could almost see in it the lifted ironic brow, the wet silver eye beneath.
Hethya raised her head sharply. Picking up one of the swords the men had left, she crossed to the cell's door. For a time she listened, face profiled in the ocher glow that twined her curls with brass and laid a thread of fire along the blade's edge. "Now what would they be after?"
Far off, almost unheard and thrown from wall to wall in a distant ripple of echoes, Tir could hear the barest strain of sound: a trumpet being blown.
"It only needed that," panted Loses His Way, "to make the hunt complete."
The Icefalcon, concentrating on igniting the end of a stick from his firepouch without putting out the hot little banked coal, muttered, "The hunt is far from complete."
To his huge annoyance his hands were shaking and would not stop. Even the short run through the darkness had winded him, and the presence of enemies who might appear at any moment made him edgy as a panther.
"Myself, I would not advise you wager any substantial sum on old Ingold being dead."
"Dead or living, he's of no use to us." Loses His Way pushed back the aureate mane of his hair, loosened from its braids during the beating and streaked with gore and filth, but still brilliant as summer light. "Can this shaman Bektis turn the very walls against us?"
The Icefalcon shook his head. "The Hand of Harilomne-the crystals he wore that shattered-were a spell of summoning, of focus, by which he made himself stronger. Being a fool, he summoned and focused the Ancestor of Shamans, Zay, he who sacrificed himself to become the ki of this place. Now that he has brought him to life he cannot send him away."
Lights flitted through the corridor, pale violet flames that lost themselves among the pallid spill of dead vines and mushroom forest growing from the cross corridor before them. It might only have been the quiver of the tiny flame on the end of his match, but the Icefalcon would have sworn the vines were moving.
Loses His Way used a colloquial term, common in the Real World, which meant "stands downwind from mammoths."
The Icefalcon looked around and knelt to hack chunks from the stringers of dried vines growing along the base of the wall. "The boy might know where that gulf of darkness would take him."
"And what then?" demanded the chieftain. "They will be sending forth this decoy soon. Without your shaman to aid us..."
A trumpet sounded in the Aisle. A peremptory note, the call the Icefalcon recognized from the presence of the armies of the South at the Keep of Dare seven years ago. "It is a summons."
"That?" Loses His Way bridled. "Only fools would summon their warriors so, where anyone can hear."
"They are fools," said the Icefalcon dismissively. "And what enemies have they that they would fear in this place?"
The blue eyes narrowed, suddenly the eyes of a beast. "Us," he whispered. "O my enemy, they have us."
Cautiously picking their route so as to leave no track, the Icefalcon and Loses His Way took some time to find a stair to the second level upon which they would not meet Vair's warriors, most of whom were assembled in the Aisle when the two enemies slipped into a cell that had a window.
Extinguishing the torch and leaving only the single match burning, propped against the wall by the door, the men crept to the square outlined in dull red light and, looking down, saw the crowd gathered almost directly beneath them, where the vines had been trampled flat into a stinking mush.
The bald pates of the clones caught a glister of the torchlight. They seemed, the icefalcon saw, to herd instinctively together, like with like, brothers seeking the comfort of their brothers without knowing why, twelve or sixteen or in one case eighteen together, staring stupidly before them.
The Icefalcon counted the heads of the whole men, the tufts of white or black or red hair still pulled up in topknots or lying loose on their shoulders: the men who moved briskly and spoke among themselves, glancing all the while at the dark Doors, the solemn lunacy of the water clock, the vast seethe of plant life at the Aisle's end.
Such a man was talking to Vair, his voice loud enough to carry to the unseen watchers above.
"Demons led them," he was saying, and gestured to two clones standing nearby, staring about them foolishly. Brother-clones, the Icefalcon saw, White Alketch with their fair skin scratched and torn from vine shards and thorns.
"It's a long way around, going in through the back because of that, my Lord." He nodded toward the hueless tangle of the jungle-though the Icefalcon didn't understand many of his words, his gestures made clear enough what he said.
"But there are no vines around the place itself." Ha' ekkorgn-selfsame place-the Icefalcon recognized too, the word for vines.
"It's just as my Lord Bektis described it, my Lord: four chambers leading one out of the other, with pillars of crystal flanking the arches." The gestures of his hands-one, two, three, four-made his meaning unmistakable.
"They've found it," whispered the Icefalcon, and he felt a cold grimness settle around his heart. "The transporter Vair has been seeking. The road that leads directly from this place into the heart of the Keep."
"How do you know?"
The Icefalcon shook his head. Vair was speaking to Bektis now, more quietly. "How far are these barbarians from the crevasse's head?"
"As I see them in my scrying stone, my Lord, they come on quickly." Bektis didn't look a hair the worse for his battle with Ingold: long hair combed smooth over his shoulders, beard like a curtain of snow. The Icefalcon noticed, however, that Bektis kept his right hand tucked out of sight in his ermine muff.
"Can Prinyippos reach them from here?" Vair, too, was uneasy, watching the black Doorways, the colorless vines, like a man expecting attack. "If Inglorion knows of our presence here, whether he came through the Far-Walker or followed you over the mountains, you can believe he will relay that information to the Lady of the Keep."
"My Lord, I tell you there is little to fear from the man now. I wounded him, unto the death, I think."
"So you have told me." Vair's eyes returned to the wizard's, with a coldness in them the Icefalcon could sense even from his high coign. "But you told me also that you were not pursued. You told me that Inglorion himself was in Gae."
"He was, my Lord. On that I will swear."
"Then he came after you, Bektis, with truly enviable speed. Perhaps he was even here before us. In either case we have no time to waste."
"As you say, my Lord." Bektis managed to make a gesture of submission without taking his hand from his muff.
"It is best," Vair said, "that the matter be pressed to conclusion without delay. Is Prinyippos ready?"
Bektis smiled, a hint of smug triumph in his eyes. "I trust," he purred, "that my Lord will find my work satisfactory."
He held out his hand, and a slim form stepped from the door of the nearest cell. That door was almost under the window where the Icefalcon and Loses His Way watched, so they didn't see the scout until he reached Bektis' side. Beside him, the Icefalcon felt rather than heard the thick hard jerk of breath.
It was Twin Daughter.
Twin Daughter as she had ridden to battle on Bison Hill, when all she thought, was that here was an easy raid. Twin Daughter with her three flame-bright braids wrist-thick over a coat of mammoth hide, her scarred oval face thin with hardship and brown with the sun-glare on the ice.