Though Daylily Hill lay a fair distance from the camp, it was still possible to see what the tiny figures did: chopping trees, slaughtering the remains of the sheep herd, making additional sledges on which wood for fires was being lashed. One man was occupied in taking something from one of the wagon-boxes. "Boots for the mules," said the Icefalcon.
The Chieftain of the Empty Lakes People stared at him as if he'd said they would provide the mules with pink satin ball gowns. "They give their animals boots and let these wretched clones of theirs wrap their feet in hide like slaves?"
"To keep them from skidding on ice," said the Icefalcon. "It is a thing the mud-diggers do in the wintertime, when they wish to take a heavy load from one place to another."
"Why don't they take their heavy loads in the autumn before the fall of the snow?"
"Because they are fools," said the Icefalcon. "They are muddiggers."
But they had carved the bones of the hills to build their road and laid the foundations of bridges that still lay in the riverbeds as fords, even though that road led to the emptiness of the North. They had built the Keeps, proof against all the evil magic of the Dark.
"They are asking for trouble," he added after a time. "Even a child knows you draw and dress an animal if you plan to eat it."
"Perhaps they're in a hurry. They may have seen the horses of the Earthsnake People."
Someone in the Earthsnake People had a spell that kept the horse herd close by their hidden camp, away over behind the hogback called Honey Ridge, and not enough sense not to use it.
"They make camp for the night," pointed out the Icefalcon. "And see, they're only heaping the sheep carcasses up, near the black tent there." The fact that men had erected the black tent against the side of the largest wagon made his nape lift with horror, and he was mindful that the last of the clones had died the previous day.
Several of the laborers apparently agreed with the Icefalcon's estimation of the proper method of transporting dead sheep. There was conference, heads shaken, argument: "What do they do?"
"The finger game," said the Icefalcon. Behind them among the fallen and dying spruces he heard Cold Death laugh. She was communing with Ingold Inglorion through the medium of a pool of frozen meltwater; over the weeks of journeying she had spoken to the old man nearly every night, and they had become fast friends.
"They play it as we would cast a knucklebone, to choose a man for some unpleasant task. Ah," he said, watching one unwilling man head in the direction of Vair na-Chandros, deep in conference with Bektis and the trapmouthed Truth-Finder. "The matter explains itself. Myself, I should not only cast a knucklebone but cheat, were it a matter of speaking to that one."
The chosen unfortunate plainly thought so, too. He bowed and abased himself profoundly, gestured toward the dirty-gray piles of dead beasts.
"Are they dogs, that they let themselves be whipped?" asked Loses His Way, when Vair had made his reply and the messenger, holding his bleeding face, returned to inform his colleagues that yes, his lordship really did want the entire sheep-wool, guts, and all-heaped beside the tent.
"Generally," said the Icefalcon.
The scouts they had sent came back from the glacier. Vair na-Chandros listened to what they said, then turned and studied the ice itself. It towered above the camp, above the hills, an unimaginable opaline fortress whose translucence shed a queer blanched reflection on the faces of the men below. Cold-killed spruce, birch, hickory, and mountain laurel lay in a crushed gray rummage along its base, mixed with and buried under vast avalanche spills and chunks of rotting ice.
A monster, thought the Icefalcon. A monster that would in time eat the world.
"He is mad," Loses His Way repeated after a little, "if he thinks he will get all his possessions to the top."
The Icefalcon shook his head. "Whatever else may be said of this Vair na-Chandros," he murmured, "he is not mad."
The boy Tir was escorted from among the wagons. "It is well the woman is there to look after him," said Loses His Way. "She is good, that one."
"She is the one who deceived him into leaving the protection of the Keep," retorted the Icefalcon, with whom the subject of Hethya still rankled.
Loses His Way shook his head. "I have watched her now many weeks," he said. "People can be pressed into any hunting, good or ill, o my enemy. She cares for the child, and cares more for him each day. She has the way of one who has had a child herself. Has the boy been here, then?" For Tir made signs, pointing along the right side of the talus.
The Icefalcon hesitated, not sure what to say. "It is a knowledge in his family."
"But how can he know what does not exist?" How indeed?
He himself had gone to scout another way up the glacier, on the far side of Daylily Hill, a deep crevice and chimney that could be scaled with the help of axes. The road led to the North, but the end of the road was now covered in the trackless ice. Vair asked another question, and Tir assented, seeming very small and helpless among the men.
If you strike him again, thought the Icefalcon, though he is no kin of mine and has no claim on me, still I will have an accounting from you.
But Vair did not strike the child. Instead he gestured to Hethya, who even at this distance the Icefalcon could tell was possessed by the spirit-or imitating the mannerisms-of Oale Niu.
"What new hunt is this?" murmured Loses His Way.
Cold Death came over to them, having finished filling Ingold in on everything that had so far passed that day. The old man had finally reached Renweth Vale, she had informed them yesterday, having come down from the north over the St. Prathhes' Glacier, a nearly impassable trek; he had been most interested in Vair's journey.
"Did you see this when you shadow-walked into the camp?" she breathed, and the Icefalcon shook his head.
"It was packed in its boxes in a wagon." His voice was the murmur of ice winds through the naked roots of fallen trees. "I thought the boxes had about them an evil light, like the thing in the tent. Do you know what it is?"
She shook her head.
Under Hethya's instructions, the crates were opened, the pieces lifted out and put together by Bektis and the Truth-Finder, helped by the scout the Icefalcon called Crested Egret, a clever young man who managed to stay at Vair's side without ever incurring his wrath. Tubes of gold of varying thicknesses looped over balls of glass, crystal rods bound in iron and covered over with brittle-looking encrustations of salt.
"Is she indeed possessed of the spirit of an Ancestor of the shamans?" asked Loses His Way, as Hethya moved forward to help connect the many components into one single, sleekly lumpy finger, glittering like an extension of the ice wall itself.
"Either that or some instruction survived, writ on paper or embedded in the heart of a Wise One's crystal, that she studied to lend credence to her lies." The Icefalcon, crouching beside him, rested his crossed hands on his drawn-up knees. "Anyone can make up stories, it is an art among the mud-diggers, and many are adept at it."
"Pah," said Loses His Way. "She has not the look of a woman who tells lies."
Oh, hasn't she? he thought. But he only said, "it has something of the look of the things we found in the Keep many years ago. Rudy and Ingold made of them weapons that spat fire at the bidding of the Wise Ones, but they did not work overwell. They needed no Ancestor of shamans to show them how such things were made."
Slowly, with dignity, Hethya walked around the apparatus, touching the tubes and the rods, the balls that fit sometimes into the rods and sometimes into one another.
Bektis nodded wisely at her side. Gil, thought the Icefalcon, would be open-mouthed with awe, but to him it was merely what it was, glass and iron, gold and salt, elements of the earth that had existed in their current form only somewhat longer than other formations of the same substances.