Bektis and Hethya set up the Dark Lightning on the western side of the ice hill and began to carve. The notch grew into a tunnel, steam rushing out in white torrents to innundate the surrounding world in fog, and the stupidest clones were sent to bail out the meltwater that collected as the tunnel grew deep. At the same time the wind eased and changed direction. The cinder-hued roof of cloud fractured. Lakes of green-stained pale sky shone through.
"There will be a moon tonight," said the Icefalcon.
He and his companions had dug a snow-cave in the sprawl of crevasse, ice wall, and dune that crazed the glaciers around three sides of the blister of ice. Scouting in the last of the evening light he'd found signs of the Earthsnake People among the ice and rocks of the rising mountain wall behind; this morning there had been more and, near them, later prints, prints he knew.
The Talking Stars People. It was difficult to tell much in snowshoes, but he thought he recognized Blue Child's characteristically long stride. Those deeper prints of massive weight would surely be Red Fox, and always close at his side Stays Up All Night, who had been his strongest supporters against her.
She would have sent Spider Music and Eyes In Her Pocket and some others after the horse herd, but most of the peoples of the Real World were wary about invaders in their territory, especially invaders whose intentions were not immediately apparent.
It was more than a matter of many wagonloads of forged-steel southern weapons, though that was a consideration even above horses. They had suffered before, from the incursions of the mud-diggers of various sorts. They would not let themselves be surprised or outflanked again.
From the top of the ice tower where they sat, the Icefalcon watched Nargois and Sergeant Red Boots set extra guards and confer worriedly with Vair. Bektis remained within the articulated spiral of the Dark Lightning's cage, like a hermit crab in some fantastic shell. From these, the Icefalcon turned his eyes to the sky, to the guards, to the flawed blue ice. The moon would be in its last quarter tonight, he recalled, but it should rise early and bright.
"Will the weather hold clear tonight, o my sister?" She considered a moment, then nodded.
"Vair will know that, too," remarked Loses His Way. He scraped a fingerful of sweetened bison fat from the heel of the rawhide bag and passed the bag along to the others. "He's expecting an attack, and I don't think he'll be disappointed."
"Even so," said the Icefalcon. "They will all be on the watch for the Earthsnake People, or for Blue Child, whose coming, I think, will only help us. I think this may be our chance to get Tir out."
Chapter 13
Bodiless, the Icefalcon circled the camp.
He found the Earthsnake People, bivouacked at the mountain's feet. The jagged terrain concealed their fires and the snow-caves where they awaited the night. The Dark Ones had taken their shaman seven years ago, as they had taken Walking Eyes of the Empty Lakes People, but his amulets were still strong.
Bektis would have trouble putting spells of madness or terror on them.
He saw the Talking Stars People moving in from the higher ground, one by one, Blue Child herself scouting the lead.
Strange, thought the Icefalcon, to see her again, face-to-face. She did not seem aware of the shadow-walker keeping pace with her over the hard granular snow. She picked the way for her warriors masterfully, out of sight and out of the wind.
Her face, like theirs, was greased thickly and wrapped to the eyes in a scarf of knitted mammoth wool stiff with the ice of her breath; all that he could see of her indeed were her eyes. Sky-blue, cold, and suspicious always, demanding of herself the perfection that the Icefalcon had always sought; they hadn't changed.
She was a heavy-muscled woman and a tall one, acid scars of battle with the Dark Ones adding to the marks of the old burns. She would be difficult to defeat, thought the Icefalcon, when he issued his challenge-which she must accept if he backed it by the word of Loses His Way. He had been training hard, but she had been living hard, surviving in a world colder and crueler than the world of the Keep.
Leading the people who should have been his to lead.
"I think you don't want me to go because you want to keep me back," Dove in the Sun said to her-he could still hear the girl's voice and see the anger in those sapphire-bright eyes. "You think I'll be a warrior to match you. You're jealous of your standing."
"I'm not jealous." Blue Child's harsh voice was calm. The Dove was the only person in the steadings she'd let talk back to her. "You're too young. You're not strong enough to survive a fight, or an injury.
Not quick enough, and not hard enough."
Her eyes had gone past the girl-pretty as a fox kit and as fierce, to the Icefalcon, her rival, watching from the corner by the sod-roofed longhouse of Noon's family, and she'd added, "And don't you let her talk you into taking her, either. She's not ready."
But of course he had. The Dove could talk anyone into anything. Except Blue Child.
Had it been because he loved her? Or because he was angry at Blue Child, who already clearly saw herself as Noon's heir? And for whose sake was the anger-the Dove's or his own?
But in any case, he thought, moving off up the rime-ice on the dune, marveling still that in his shadowy state he left no tracks, it was not his doing that the Dove was killed. She had been speared, she had not the strength to keep her horse from panicking, and both had fallen. And that was all.
But it was he who had had to tell Blue Child that her lover was dead.
Demons floated, whispering, all around the camp.
More of them, now, a dirty brown beating in the air. Sometimes only the glister of disembodied eyes, the dripping sheen of fangs. Mouths that tore at him, hissed-lights that jigged insanely over the snow.
That sly fire peered from the eyes of at least eight of the clones in the camp. Two of them wore demon-scares. One, seeing the Icefalcon-or the demon within it seeing him-pointed straight at him and ran toward him, screaming and pointing and giggling.
But two of the booted guards brought up their crossbows and shot the demon soldier, and the demon rolled forth from the man's mouth with the coughed blood of his collapsing lungs.
It mauled and tore at the Icefalcon for a moment, but experience had shown him how to put aside at least some of the pain, how to shut his mind against it. The thing spat at him and reviled him in Noon's voice and went its way.
The Icefalcon moved on, shaky with shock, with the fear and cold that were inescapable in the shadow state. The light was thinning away, fogs and steam drifting between the wagons from the ice mountain where the Dark Lightning still bored rendered all things strange and flat.
When he passed the place where the clones' bodies were piled-more had died during the day, though they were only a few days old-he saw that the bodies, stripped of their clothing, were piebald, skin like human skin in places, in others strangely textured, rough and granular, or covered with a fine fuzz of grayish wool.
He found the wagon where Tir slept, set in the midst of the camp. There would be confusion when the Earthsnake People attacked later in the night. He ghosted from wagon to wagon, estimating distances, terrain, and what the lighting would be like in torch-flare and darkness.
Judging where the Earthsnake People would make their attack and where the Talking Stars People would. Where he could make his entrance to the camp from the crevasses beyond-bundled in coats of bison and mammoth fur, one man looked much like another. Once back in his own body, the body that now slept in the ice-cave they'd dug last night, he'd be able to...
The hissing of the Dark Lightning ceased. Clones slopped, shivering, into the tunnel with leather buckets-a huge slab of clear ice marked the dumping area of the meltwater they carried out.
Someone said, "Bring the boy."
"And fetch me a tisane, for God's sake!" Bektis called from the metal cage of the Dark Lightning's cradle.