He was still kneeling there, soaked with sweat and shaking, when Hethya found him and told him that she had to take him to Vair. It was time the train moved on, out onto the ice itself.
Chapter 12
With dawn they brought the Dark Lightning up to the ice face and began to carve.
"Behold their road." The Icefalcon wrapped his arms around himself, shivering. He had already seen how clouds hung over the ice cap, columns of gray and black and dazzling white where the sun struck them.
Up on the ice it would be world-winter indeed.
"It is bad hunting." Loses His Way passed him one of the doublesewn coats of bison-hide and a short-handled war ax. "Never have I seen so bad a hunt. See how the lady holds close to the boy? She fears for him." From a distance he'd become very taken with Hethya.
"She fears for herself. He is in her charge."
Loses His Way shook his head, and for a time they watched Hethya and Bektis, together at the controls of the Dark Lightning. The unholy colorless glim in the air wickered forth, played across the pearl face of the Ice. The notch at its edge deepened, steam gushing to join the cloud cover, and milky water flowed in a sputtering, steaming stream.
"She is wise," he said approvingly, watching her issue instructions to Bektis, who turned the Dark Lightning in its geared cradle, the apparatus moving like a hunting cat seeking prey. They had been busy in the night, for, around them, many new clones affixed leather boots to the feet of the mules and dragged the sledges up the rocks.
Vair in his quilted garments of white fur and silk spoke to Hethya, and she returned some haughty reply.
"She knows not to show her fear. Does your man in the ice pool know aught of this Dark Lightning, little shaman?"
A few minutes previously Cold Death had blown on and rubbed one of the hard-frozen puddles near their camp, scratching the surface with a pebble and speaking Ingold's name. The Icefalcon had been aware of the sweet high bird chitter of her voice all during the bringing up of the Dark Lightning, as she narrated what she saw to the Archmage of the Wizards of the West.
He saw the old man in his mind, shaggy and scrubby and filthy as Ingold generally was after his journeyings, tucked like an apologetic old dog into some cranny of the rocks close enough to the besiegers to go and help himself to supper at their campfires. If he knew Ingold, the old man was doing it, too, on a nightly basis. The thought brought a pang of envy. The Icefalcon was heartily weary of pemmican.
"Ingold says he has never heard of such a matter." She came to the two men to watch, gloved hands shoved in her pockets like an impish girl. "But he did not seem surprised that the magic of the Ancestors of wizards could be turned to such a use."
"Did he say what he thought," inquired the Icefalcon, "of this woman who claims to be possessed by the Ancestors of wizards? Whether what she says is possible?"
"All things are possible," replied Cold Death cheerfully. "From the remaking of the world to the rescue of this child. Come. If we're to be on the Ice before them, it is well that we start to climb now. We have no Dark Lightning, no magic from the Ancestors of wizards, to help us."
The horses Cold Death turned loose to forage to the south, laying a Word on them to return at her summoning.
Vair appointed ten men, none of them clones, and these took what remained of his horse herd and drove them away south. "A present for Blue Child," said Cold Death, and grinned. "How kind!"
But not the act, thought the Icefalcon, watching the beasts grow smaller in the desolate valley's distance, of a man who had any intention of returning along the road he had come.
Curious.
The wall of ice that rose beyond Daylily Hill was broken into a succession of chimneys, towers, crevasses and blocks, mushrooms and cauliflowers of ice and fanged overhangs that forbade ascent.
Snow shoes weren't the only things the Icefalcon and his companions had worked on in the starlit dark and reflected ember glow. The thinner garments they'd taken from the cache, the empty food bags, and anything they could not use they had sliced up, weaving ropes of the rawhide strips.
Still it was a difficult ascent. The Icefalcon led, hacking his way with an ax and cutting steps for the others, looping the rope that Loses His Way could follow. The food, and the rough sled they had made to drag it, they raised after them in slings, and last of all Yellow-Eyed Dog, puzzled but content to follow Loses His Way.
The world at the top was alien beyond belief, long snowfields alternating with broken hogbacks and chopped zones of ice hills, rough seracs and towers all colorless, cold, and dead in the clouded light.
Iron-hued rock ridges carved the distant horizons-the Icefalcon recognized with shock the crests of the Little Snowy Mountains-and dunes of snow rose to the west, hiding the notch carved by the Dark Lightning. Above those dunes, however, billowed columns of steam, marble-white in the grizzle of the sky.
"They'll know they're being followed, do they but look over the crest of those dunes." The Icefalcon contemplated the windblown powder snow, the mush of tracks they had left, and Yellow-Eyed Dog bounding idiotically about snapping at flying flakes.
The cold tore at his face despite the thick coating of bison fat and seemed to eat through his gloves. His breath froze hard in his beard, and the air burned not only his lungs but his eyes and his teeth.
"They know it already." Cold Death shrugged. "What are three more barbarian scouts and a dog?
Nothing in our tracks says, Here is a man who has trailed you from Renweth Keep. At least not in a tongue they can read."
The Icefalcon wasn't happy about it-it offended his sense of fitness to leave so much as a mark on the snow-but he knew she was right.
Still, he chose the hardest snowpack and black ice to traverse once they got their snowshoes on and led the way up the wind-carved slopes, single file to obscure their numbers, to a vantage point where they could observe the wagons' ascent.
Fog drowned the space beyond, the ice cut nearly hidden as the columns of steam spread and dispersed.
In the dead light it was difficult to judge distances, and the murk made it worse; the sound of water trickling down the artificial couloir came dimly to them, with the sound of axes cutting steps in the snow and voices calling orders. A mule brayed, protesting to the Ancestors of animals at the task it was required to perform.
"Cruel hunting, o my sister," the Icefalcon murmured. "And to what end I do not know. We will now need your wisdom indeed."
They moved thereafter through a world of ice and fog, like wolves pursuing reindeer across the heart of winter. Sometimes they could approach the caravan no closer than several miles, laboring through rough ice and the broken wildernesses.
At other times, when snow whirled down or white fog reduced everything to the ghostly stillness of the gray territory that lies between death and life, they drew nearer, concealed by Cold Death's spells.
By night they dug snow-caves in the sides of the long glacial ridges, and sometimes the Icefalcon would hack his way up a serac or block or ice tower, and sit for as long as he could endure the cold, watching the lights of the distant camp.
These were the lands that had been the Night River Country. He knew it, sighting on the familiar peaks in the distance: the Yellow Ancestor, the Peak of Demons, the Peak of Snows, in exactly the distance and relationships he had known, it seemed, since before he knew his name.
More than anything that knowledge, that awareness, lodged in the Icefalcon's heart, a buried unacknowledged hurt, like an arrowhead embedded in his flesh; that under the ice, under his feet, lay the world of his childhood summers, the aspens and the meadows and the place called Pretty Water Creek.