So they mounted and rode north, into the rocks and gorges and lava beds called the Cursed Lands. The caravan moved, and the Icefalcon followed, and the stink of the corpses could be smelled in its wake until Bektis repeated his spells while wearing the crystal hand.
The moon waxed to full and began to wane again, and somewhere behind them, the Icefalcon was aware, drifted the Talking Stars People, like vultures riding the thermals and waiting for a sick animal to fall.
No road existed in the Cursed Lands, yet the wagons made their way north and slightly west unerringly, without halts and queries and casting about. The Icefalcon remembered the pale trace in the gamma grass, invisible from the ground but straight as a bowstring.
At night, or with the first dove-colored light, the frost a silver dust in the grass, the Icefalcon would see Vair na-Chandros and the woman Hethya come out from among the wagons with Tir between them, Tir thinner and more haggard by the day.
The Icefalcon never came close enough to hear-with Bektis in the train he did not dare-but it seemed to him that it was Tir who pointed to the gaps in the hills and gave directions by the dim-shining stars.
The land grew harsher. Gullies and washes creased the bare clay hills, steeper than before, dividing the scattered prairies where slunch glowed filthily in the dark. Twice the Icefalcon shadow-walked, investigating the edges of the camp and seeking a way to extricate Tir from Vair's grip.
But Tir was kept bound much of the time, and there were many guards, facing all ways, inward and out.
Cold Death was as fearsome a warrior as she was a shaman-something no one ever thought, to look at her-but with Bektis' crystal hand, even her aid might not suffice to get the boy away safely.
Vair would kill Tir rather than permit his escape. And, for all her frivolousness, the Icefalcon was fond of his sister and would not like to see the lightning of that cursed crystal hand skewer her as it had skewered Rudy. There would and could be only a single attempt, and it had better succeed.
Whatever it was that Vair wanted, it lay in the North.
His mind returned to the trace he had seen from the air. The work of the Times Before, built in the ancient days beyond the memories of the People of the Real World. He asked Cold Death about it, but Cold Death, who knew the properties of every herb and root in the great grasslands of the Real World, and the names of the ki of each tree and stream, could only say, "I have never heard of such a thing, o my brother."
And Loses His Way, who could (and nightly did) detail the family histories of every horse belonging to his own people and any number of other clans and tribes from whom the Empty Lakes People raided horses-who could recognize the prints and scat of king mammoths and individual musk oxen and reindeer in half a dozen herds and tell stories about them-only shook his head and said, "That's foolish. Nothing lies in the North but the Ice. Why would anyone build a road thence?"
"That's what I'm trying to figure out," the Icefalcon snapped, exasperated, though he knew he would have received a similar reply from Noon or any of his friends in his family-Red Fox or Stays Up All Night or Fifty Lovers.
And though Loses His Way could, like any of the people in the Real World, speak of the habits of animals long dead, or the small details of war parties and hunts for generations back, or recount from memory weather conditions mentioned to him in passing forty leagues to the south, he had very little interest in the slunch-born things that roved the hills abandoned by gazelles and rhinoceri, the lumpy misshapen beings that Gil said were broken echoes of life as it had been years uncounted in the past.
Why? the Icefalcon wondered. Lost dreams, Gil called them, woven in the slunch and repeated without meaning-but whose dreams? And what had the world been like that had spawned them?
He had been affected, he thought, a little embarrassed, more than he knew, by the habits of civilized folk and did not like to speak of this to his sister or to Loses His Way. And indeed, it was not the way of the Talking Stars People to show interest in such matters, which had no bearing on life as it was lived in the Real World.
Still, the road was there. And as the cold grew more piercing, and the great sheets of slunch that even the wind could not rustle lay more and more frequent and their voiceless denizens took the place of the creatures that had once grazed these dying prairies, the Icefalcon welcomed the far-off plaints of the Alketch sheep and the squeak of wagon axles, the only living sounds to break the stillness of these lands.
It was high spring, and they rode through a world filled with light. But the temperature fell, and the thunderstorms that at one time had crashed and raged daily over these lands were mute and absent as the vanished birds. There was only the wind itself, bearing the smell of stone and sleet.
By day they followed, and by night they worked by the tiny light of hidden fires, cutting hickory saplings where they found them for snowshoes and sled runners and slicing up coats of bison or musk ox or sheep to sew with sinew the pieces into double-layer garments, fur inside and out.
Twice the train halted for a day, by streams full enough that Vair, and Nargois, and Hethya, and some of the others could heat water and bathe in a tent set up for the purpose, and the priest held rites in praise of the Straight God.
Then one day in the distance the Icefalcon saw a glittering rind of blue-white, flashing in the heatless ghost of the sun.
It was too soon, he thought, far too soon. They should only be drawing near to the aspen groves, the woods of birch and maple, the streams and meadows that lay to the south of the Night River Country, his people's summer range and the home of his heart.
Loses His Way had told him this; Cold Death, too. But he understood that his heart had not believed.
The land of his childhood's joy, the place that would have been the center of his defenses as warchief of his people, was lost to him, buried under the rolling weight of time and snow and fate.
He could not deny to himself that he looked upon the Ice in the North.
"I was ill on that journey." Hethya gazed somberly into the leaden morning distance, with what Tir had come to recognize as Oale Niu's eyes. "The Dark Ones came, surrounding our encampment. We, the mages, fought them, ringing the camp with walls of fire and lightning. Their power was terrible."
She turned her face a little aside and passed her hand across her brow, as if to erase the mark of pain that appeared there. "We survived, but some of us lay like the dead for many days afterward, unable to move or speak."
She looked across at Tir, changeable eyes inscrutable, her mouth half hidden behind the heavy quilting of her collar. "Do you not remember this, Lord Altir?"
Tir shivered, though he was bundled thick in a coat of furs, a princely garment wrought in the fashion of the South. Vair had given it to him, for the cold was deepening daily, and though it was May there was frost every night.
Even through the layer of brocade, and the soft padding of lynx-hide that protected his narrow shoulders, the pressure of Lord Vair's hooks reached his flesh. It wasn't as bad as the tall man's pale eyes, which he felt pierce the back of his head.
"I don't..." he began, and then saw something else in her gaze. Not Oale Niu's eyes. Hethya's, peeking from behind them as behind a mask. Scared.
He swallowed, nodded. "I don't... I don't remember their names." It was the first time he had lied about his memories. He looked away quickly, gazing at the plain before them.
Sheets of water covered the rock and stunted grasses, milky with pulverized stone and floating with cakes and chunks of pale-blue ice, dyed straw and primrose and the fragile pink of sand lilies with the coming day.
Blots of slunch festered on such dry land as there was, further blurring and confusing the landscape, but some things had not changed.