Hethya emphasized a point with a sweeping gesture that would have shamed a marketplace preacher in the days before the coming of the Dark, and her voice carried dimly across space to the three watchers-possibly to other watchers as well.
Still, it was a wonder when it was finished. It lay glistening in a cradle of geared wheels such as Ingold tinkered with in the crypts of the Keep, haloed, it seemed, by some curious condensation of the thin wicked afternoon light.
Tir hung back, as if he would conceal himself between the wagons-he came forward when Vair beckoned, but unwillingly and, when asked a question, would only shake his head.
Hethya and Bektis stood beside the new apparatus. It was Hethya who worked its ivory levers, making the whole of it swing about suddenly, like a live thing, articulate, quivering, balanced to a hair. Bobs and wires whipped like the antennae of an insect, and lights sang from the jewels that hung on their tips.
A strange shiver passed through the Icefalcon, the uneasy sense that Gil-Shalos was right. This was more than elements combined. There was a silence like the silence before an ice storm, a hushed waiting fear of the unimaginable.
Bektis laid his hands where Hethya showed him-tiny figures, gray and gold, white and red against the flinty gray rocks, the rinsed out aqua ice.
Then a flash, less like lightning than as if a star had spoken a curse of power, a curse that extended like a tickling feather a delicate, whickering, colorless whisper of unseen flame.
The sound that cracked across the valley was, the Icefalcon was sure, only the sound of the rock splintering where the shimmer touched it.
A great chunk separated from the wall of the promontory before them, pitching down the scree. Then like the sea-yammer came the wild whinnying of the mules and horses and all the men crying out.
Even old Nargois, whom the Icefalcon had observed to be a man of calm courage, fell back, hands fluttering in the signs against demons. Only Vair remained where he was, observing with interest as Hethya moved the levers again.
Bektis, who had flinched, stepped forward to lay his hands upon the apparatus again. Another shimmer, as if the air between the crystal horns of the machine and the raw rock wall had flawed, like the break in a pane of glass. The Icefalcon saw a slab of rock jerk outward, break, and tumble free down the slope before he heard the sound of it, a deep, booming crack and the hiss of heat.
"This is bad hunting," whispered Loses His Way, when any of them could speak again.
Bad hunting indeed, thought the Icefalcon. Three weeks' journey away that they were, he could not but feel that things would be worse still for the folk of the embattled Keep.
"What did she say?" Gil and Minalde both got to their feet as Ilae emerged from the hidden chamber in the crypt. The young mage stood in the doorway for a moment, a tall gawky girl, and gestured with one long-fingered hand that she was all right.
Encountering Brycothis, the mage spirit who dwelled in the heart of the Keep, was, Rudy had told Gil, frequently a disorienting experience.
Both Rudy and Ingold had tried to describe what it was like; Gil had the impression it was something only fully understood by another mage.
Brycothis herself-Gil had seen her image in half a dozen of the ancient record crystals, a rangy woman with smiling eyes and the tattooed scalp of a wizard of those days-had long ago transmuted into something far other than human, a pattern of memories and power whose center lay in the heart of the crypts. Those who entered that center, whose minds touched hers, experienced different things at different times.
"Did she speak to you?" Not that Brycothis actually spoke. Minalde led the girl to the bottom step of the hidden stairway, where she and Gil had waited, and made her sit down.
"Oh, yes." Ilae nodded hesitantly. "I mean, I saw things. She was there." She nodded quick thanks as Gil handed her the flask of tisane-now lukewarm-she and Alde had been sharing. "But I didn't understand what I saw."
Gil and Alde were silent. Shy and slow-spoken at the best of times, Ilae thought for a while, then said, "I asked her, Was there another way into the Keep. And I saw..." She spread out her hands helplessly. "I saw the laundry room up on the third level, back behind the sanctuary of the Church."
"The laundry room?" Gil almost laughed.
Minalde asked worriedly, "Are you sure?" Not because she thought Ilae would have been mistaken about anything she saw, wizards as a rule didn't make that kind of error-but simply because it made no sense.
"Sure as I'm sitting, m'Lady."
"But it's in the middle of the Keep," said Alde, baffled. "You couldn't have a secret passage going into it without it passing through my bedroom, or the sanctuary, or Lord Ankres' storerooms..."
"Christ, are we going to have to take measurements?" Gil asked, appalled. "That whole area behind the Aisle has been so changed and remodeled, with walls and cells partitioned and knocked together and new corridors put through, we'll never get an accurate reading. There's a dozen secret passages there already, going from one set of rooms to another. I don't even want to think about it."
"And in any case the entry has to be at or near ground level," Minalde protested. "Which means a stairway-maybe in the outer wall? At least we know it's in the rear quarter of the Keep."
"But who would have known of it?" Ilae asked. "And who'd Vair get to turn traitor? And how? It ain't like there's a stranger come, or anybody gone recently."
"If it exists at all," said Gil softly. "I'll tell Janus and we can make a search, and it better be a damn quiet one because the fewer people who know about this one the better. But if there's another doorway, I'm betting it's one only a wizard can see. That means you, Ilae, and Wend outside. You up for it?"
"I have to be," Ilae said simply. "Don't I?"
She corked the flask and got to her feet, preceding them up the snail-shell curl of the stair, the witchlight with which she had illuminated the chamber drifting ahead. Gil and Alde followed more slowly, Alde thriftily blowing out their single candle. The witchlight salted the embroidery of her overgown with sharp white sparks and glinted in the pins that held back her long hair.
When Ilae got farther ahead of them, Alde asked Gil, "Do you think there's a doorway somewhere behind the Aisle? Hidden by spells?"
"I think we'd better look for one," said Gil. "But no. I think it's something different. Something else."
He was the only person who could warn them.
Tir pulled the furs of his little bed nest closer around him and listened to the howling of the wind. It blew strong enough down from the glacier to rock the wagon on its new-made runners, and now and then it shrieked, like the ghost of a tormented man.
He had worked out, pretty much, what he had to do, and he would sooner have walked up and spit in Vair's face than go through with it.
The night was bitterly cold. Maybe too cold to get out of his furs. He might freeze to death. It sounded like a comforting alternative. He was the only person who knew about the chen yekas-that was the term for the machine he'd seen that afternoon, the terrible thing that spit, instead of fire, that cruel strange streak of purplish nonlight.
The word was clear in his mind, clear as his sister's name. He was the only person who knew the secret of Vair's tethyn warriors, though Vair and Hethya used another word for them that was what Hethya said Oale Niu called them.
But tethyn was what they had called them back in the deeps of time that his ancestor remembered. He was the only person who knew the most terrible secret of how it might be possible for him to warn the Keep.
And there was no way out of doing what he knew he was going to have to do.