She paused, seeing the Icefalcon's raised brows, and explained, "It helps to picture someone you're tellin' a tale of. It makes for a better tale."
"I have never understood," said the Icefalcon, exasperated, "why civilized people wish to make a 'better' tale of something which is not true. It is useful to tell lies to one's enemies, but civilized people make a virtue of falsehood."
"Ah, it's not a falsehood, me lad," she sighed. "'Tis an art, like singin' or dancin', for the joy of the thing, and the beauty alone. And there's times when it's more. Sometimes when a person's in grief or in pain, that beauty'll carry 'em through until the pain gets less and they can go on. And sometimes when their mind is goin' in a circle of rage or hurt, they can find rest in some image, some way the words gyre, until they can think clearer and find a way through."
Gil returned to his mind, the intensity of her blue eyes in the glowing magelight as she wove her tales of men who could fly through the air and princesses who led armies through starry darkness to victory with the help of farmboys and smugglers and men wrought of metal and wire. Rudy, he recalled, had told a tale once, of a king stranded for twenty years on a desert island inhabited by two magical spirits and of the man who came to find him and fell in love with his daughter.
"Cool, punk," Gil had said. "I didn't know you'd ever read The Tempest."
"What tempest?" Rudy had replied, startled. "I'm talking about Forbidden Planet."
A drift of voices sounded in the darkness, soft at first but growing nearer. There was a cell several yards up the corridor whose door still partially survived; the Icefalcon indicated bare patches in the floor, and in three tiptoeing leaps made it to the place. Hethya followed so clumsily he wanted to strangle her-any competent enemy could have read her tracks-with Loses His Way helping her over the longest jump.
Fortunately, the voices belonged to clones, hacking free and gathering into blankets all the vines, all the lichens, all the monstrous, deformed toadstools that they could from the corridor. The Icefalcon cursed as they casually obliterated all trace of the child's tracks. He would be hours picking up the trail again.
Beside him Hethya whispered, "What are they doing? They can't be going to eat that stuff."
He clapped his hand over her mouth-the woman would talk through the ruin of the world-and waited until the clones finished their harvest and staggered trying to balance their torches with the unwieldy loads.
"No," breathed the Icefalcon. "Bektis has returned and informed Vair that there will be no fodder for his black vat."
"Then I succeeded." Loses His Way's blue eyes shone in the tiny seed of the surviving matchlight. He shut them then for a moment, breathing deep, remembering past the nightmare wall of pain. "It was not in vain."
"But he's gatherin' up that garbage naytheless."
"This is Vair we speak of," the Icefalcon pointed out. "He will have his men, and he will have them soon.
He knows his time is short. I think, my enemies, that we must give over our hunt for Tir, at least until we hold the transporter chamber. Then I will return to this place and take up the hunt again."
"The trail will be cold," Loses His Way warned.
The Icefalcon gestured at the mess of scraps and shards the three clones had left. "It cannot possibly be colder than it is now, and it may be that the delay will cost us the Keep of Dare. Come. The scout who found the place said it was roundabout to avoid the vines that grow in that whole part of the Keep. It will take us some little time to find."
In the event, it did not take him as long to locate as he feared it might, though over the next two hours Hethya had a good deal to say concerning the parentage and eventual destinies of Vair na-Chandros, the Icefalcon himself, and the builders of the Keep of the Shadow.
The explanatory gestures of the scout when talking to Vair had indicated, as such gestures subconsciously do; not only the manner but the direction of his search, and the scout himself had taken not the slightest precaution to cover his own tracks, those of the two demonled clones who'd first discovered the place, or those of the three guards Vair had subsequently dispatched to keep watch in the room.
It was easy not only to find the place once they cut the man's trail but to determine how many guards were there.
The fact that Vair needed all his nonclone warriors for other things helped, too. None of those on guard so much as questioned when Loses His Way-bald and beardless and clothed pretty much like everyone else in Vair's party-entered, greeted them with grunts, and killed two of them before any realized what was going on. By that time the Icefalcon and Hethya were through the narrow door and it was all over.
"Trust Vair, the bastard, not to provide the poor souls with a bite to eat on duty," sighed Hethya after searching the bodies. "Not that I didn't appreciate the pemmican back a while ago, me dear..." She flashed a quick grin at Loses His Way. "Just that it's worn off, if you take my meaning. Me mother would tell me to be glad I'd had that, and stop complaining."
"That," said the Icefalcon, hauling the clones over into a corner, where they could not be seen from the vestibule, "was said by the Ancestor of All Mothers to the first child born in the world. Personally, I derive little consolation from the knowledge that I have been hungrier in my life."
He moved along the walls of each chamber in succession, torch in hand, examining the place as a wolf would examine a trap.
It was as he had seen it in his shadow state, a succession of four chambers, each smaller than the last, dwindling in length in accordance with what he vaguely recognized as some mathematical ratio and connected by open archways flanked with pillars of what appeared to be frosted glass.
The last chamber of the four was noticeably colder than the other three, and there was a smell there, curious and disturbing, that he could not identify but that made his flesh creep on his bones.
He walked quickly out of it, back to the small watch fire where Hethya and Loses His Way awaited him, and looked back over his shoulder two or three times, troubled by the impression that when he did so he would see nothing but darkness at his back.
But there was always only the rear wall.
The vestibule was, like the suite itself, clear of growths of any sort, a circular chamber some twenty feet in diameter-he could recall no corresponding room in the Keep of Dare-whose inner doorway would barely admit a man. Stepping into the corridor outside, he followed it to where a thick plug of vine had been chopped clear, admitting to the second, spherical vestibule.
The Wise One stands here, thought the Icefalcon, raising his torch to look around.
From here he works the spells that enable the transporter to function. Light glimmered, as through a window, and, turning, he saw that there was a window indeed, a convex crystal set into one wall that showed the length of the transporter suite, down to its farthest end.
Though he had seen no corresponding circle of crystal in the first of the transporter chambers, it was clear that this was where the window opened: he saw plainly the small fire, the dead clones, Loses His Way standing beside the door that was narrower than his own shoulders.
Hethya went to him and put her hand on that massive back, speaking to him, the Icefalcon thought, though he heard no sound. Loses His Way turned, his blue eyes gentle in the firelight, and sad.
She asked him something, raising her hand to brush cheekbone and jaw with the backs of her fingers, and the firelight touched her curls with carnelian and put specks of sunset in her eyes.