The Icefalcon withdrew silently into the aquamarine chasms of ice, but followed the train as it veered eastward and dug a shelter within a hundred yards of it that night.
The clouds returned with nightfall, segueing into a morning of strange fogs, but by midday there was no further need of Tir's navigation.
Through the shadowy grayness and blowing ice the nameless mountain ridge pushed higher, a line of coaly rock like a cresting wave about to break, and at its base lay a great blister in the ice, a huge mound some five miles long, ancient ice, green and black at its heart and unchanging, the slow-moving floes all fractured and broken around its sides.
"What is it?" Loses His Way squinted against the shadowless glare, for in the white world beneath the clouds one was not sure if what one saw was what one seemed to see.
"At a guess," the Icefalcon murmured, "the ice is shaped by something that lies buried beneath."
"Hethya?" Tir rolled over a little and propped up on one elbow in the wagon's dark. By her breathing Hethya didn't sleep, either, and he wondered if she had the same dreams that he did, about Ugal's head bobbing up over the side of the iron vat, blood-gorged purple flesh bulging out around the iron of the gag, ready to burst, eyes conscious wells of agony.
No matter how close he held to her, no matter how many furs and blankets they piled on, he couldn't seem to stop shivering.
Her voice was not the slightest bit sleepy, but muted, so the guard outside wouldn't hear. "What is it, me lamb?" Southland rum whiffed on her breath. It was often so now, at night.
"Did your mama teach you about the machines? About how to work them?"
He felt her breath still. Then she said, "Faith, lamb, me mother was a hedge-witch and a scholar, not one of the great old ones. I've said how it was, when as a little girl this voice would speak words in me head that only I could hear or understand. Oale Niu, now, the great d'ian sian, Ladymage and Queen...
Whyever would you think it was me mother?"
But there was wariness in her voice.
"Well, in the Keep we found these crystals," said Tir. "And Gil and Ingold"-he still couldn't speak Rudy's name-"they found a way to look into them with this black table, and they see a lot of things, things from the Times Before. That's how they learned to bring the potatoes back to life, the earth apples, so everyone could have enough to eat."
His stomach clenched at the mention of eating. He didn't think he'd ever be able to eat again.
"And if your mother was a witch and found some of these crystals, or some other things written about those old machines, I thought maybe she'd have taught you about them. Especially if there were machines like that hidden in Prandhays Keep."
"Well, you're a sly one, and that's a fact," she murmured. "But I'm afraid you're out, me lamb, though it's true the... the dethken iares"-she carefully mispronounced the words Oale Niu used for the chknai'es-"was at our Keep, or part of it was, anyway. Oale Niu, she showed me the way of it, long before Lord Vair turned up with the rest of it all in pieces and jumbled together with bits of other things."
"Where did he get it?" He tried to sound casual and evidently succeeded.
"He's not said-he's a close one, the evil old so-and-so, but me, I think despite what all the southrons say about their land being pure of wizardry from the days of dawn and all that other chat... I think there was a Keep there in that city of theirs, that Khirsrit, once upon a time. And when he got driven out of the South by that poor girl he made his wife, bad cess to him, he took what he could."
"And did he take over Prandhays Keep?"
Hethya was silent for a time, running a lock of Tir's hair through her fingers. The iron winds had fallen, and noises could be heard around the camp, the squeak of the guards' boots in the snow, a man cursing one of the tethyn-the whole men, the real men, were always cursing the tethyn, usually for their stupidity.
Hitting them, too, though Tir wanted to protest that it wasn't the tethyns' fault they were stupid. It was Vair's, for making them wrong.
Still, there was a tension in the camp, a fear, screwing tighter and tighter. Yesterday a tethyn-one of the Hastroaals-had run amok, away from the lines, and had been killed by White Raider scouts not a hundred feet from the line of march; later a Ti Men and a Cia'ak had started attacking everyone in sight with their swords.
They were possessed by demons, the men said. Though Vair said this was not so, he and Bektis had distributed the demon-scares that usually hung around the camp on poles and wagon-boxes among the men for the rest of the march.
At least twenty hadn't given them back tonight, when they needed to make a Warding around the camp.
Everybody was scared. And the great silent whaleback of the ice mountain, that giant green-black blister under its covering of snow that overshadowed the camp, made it worse.
And if they knew what was under there, thought Tir despairingly, they'd be more scared than they were.
He shut his eyes, trembling and suddenly sick at the thought, and Hethya, feeling him shiver, hugged him tight.
"Well, and he did take over Prandhays," she said softly, and by her voice she was lost in a bitter dreaming of her own. "This past summer it was, in the days of the harvest, not that there was a great deal of that, and if me mother had lived I misdoubt it would have made a hair's difference. He's been gatherin' his southron troops and the local bandits together there ever since, him and that Delta Islands brute Gargonal, may the flesh rot from their stinking bones."
The hate in her voice made him turn his head, though nothing of her could be seen in the blackness. Her hand felt like a piece of wood, closing on his shoulder.
"Bastards, all of 'em, and Vair the biggest bastard of 'em. I don't know whether he came to Prandhays because he thought he could take it-Mother bein' dead and no wizard to go up against Bektis-or because he'd learned somehow there were bits and pieces of their foul machines left hid there, God knows by who, in the deep of time. But the first thing they did was go lookin' for 'em. And there's more such things, Bektis says, hid away in Dare's Keep, though he doesn't know where-leavin' aside the fact that anyone with a siege-engine or two could take Prandhays, and Dare's Keep, if Vair can take it, is near impregnable. If it hadn't been for me-for Oale Niu, that is-knowing the way of the weapons, I'd be there yet, bein'..."
She checked the angry spill of words, and her hand jerked a little, then patted his thin shoulder as if just remembering that he was there.
"Bein' treated bad by every man of his pox-rotted regiment, one at a time or all together in a bunch, the pigs. Don't think hard on me, sweeting. You've got to do what you can."
Tir nodded, remembering how he had kissed Vair's boots and told him he loved him before every man of the camp.
"I know," he said. "But the wizards-the old wizards-didn't put fire-spells around the camp. They had these round gray rocks in iron holders that threw white light, and they called the-the thing that spits light, they called it chen yekas, not karnach like you do."
"Ah," said Hethya softly. "And what did they call it, under the Ice, that we're seeking? What was their word for that?"
Tir said gravely, mischievous for the first time in aching weeks, "Doesn't Oale Niu know that?"
She tweaked his hair, hard, like an older sister, or his playmates who were dead. "Don't you be a clever boots with me, laddy-boy."
Even the thought of it chilled the brief happiness he felt at teasing again, playing again, remembering what it used to be like to play. Quietly he said, "Tiyomis. That was their word for the Shadow that Waits at the End of Time."