He was heavily wrapped in his long coat, his head protected by a series of embroidered caps, scarves, and a hood.
On the refugee train from Gae to Renweth after the city's destruction by the Dark Ones, Bektis' collection of warm garments and muffs had been a source of never-ending derision among the Guards.
The Icefalcon wondered what these southern warriors had to say about him when Vair na-Chandros wasn't there to hear.
More voices in the tunnel, and churning in the fog that filled it. Bektis had the air of a man at rest and would, the Icefalcon was certain, be occupied with his tisane for some time to come; he wasn't sure whether the dark flicker of the machine's beams would harm him, though it wasn't anything he cared to put to the test.
He stepped into the tunnel's fog.
The walls were slick ice, melted and frozen hard again, and blue as sapphire. The floor slanted downward, straight as if ruled, vanishing into dense fog and darkness.
The ceiling dripped with water condensed from the steam, and the clones hurried past, water steaming and sloshing from the buckets they bore. Gil had described such a place in the heart of the Saycotl Xyam, the cursed mountain in the South, and the Icefalcon wondered if Vair na-Chandros sought here the same kinds of demons that had dwelled in those terrible caves.
Vair and Nargois strode past him in the mist, torches haloed in woolly yellow light; Hethya walked behind. "Can you see it?" Vair called out.
Fog hid them, but for fidgeting shapes in the saturated ocher glow. "There, me Lord. Look where the runes catch the light. We give it another burst, a short little one-a foot, maybe."
"Don't be absurd, woman, we'll destroy them and then where will we be?"
"For sure your Bektis has never cooked, then. You can tamper with the heat, surely. It's a thing he operates with his mind, after all. Can't he be stopping at a foot?"
A warrior emerged from the choking brume, reflections from his torch frolicking through the mirror-smooth walls as if an army of lampbearing demons ran through the ice on either side.
Hethya followed him, and Lord Vair, their breaths visible in the cold that flowed down into the tunnel from without. Hethya's round, jovial face had thinned with the journey across the ice, and there were smudges of weariness below her eyes. Vair looked like a snake mummified in pitch.
The Icefalcon hesitated, looking back into the dripping vapors, then turned and followed them out again.
"You call this a tisane?" Bektis waved the boiled-leather cup at a stone-faced guard. "The dishwater of a poor man's house is stronger! If... My Lord," he turned expressively to Vair, with the air of a man more put upon than human flesh can bear. "My Lord, might I please, please prevail upon your goodness to instruct your fool of a cook not to drown these tisanes in bergamot! They're undrinkable, absolutely undrinkable!"
Vair took it, tasted, and threw it in the guard's face, adding a terse instruction in the ha'al tongue in which the Icefalcon was fairly sure he caught the word flog.
To Bektis, Vair said, "Hethya claims that as a sorcerer you should be able to shorten the beam of this apparatus with your mind."
He tapped the gold and iron of the intricate frame. It flickered with quicksilver brightness, and the Icefalcon had the renewed sensation that it was a living thing, attentive, waiting to hunt again.
"We can see it through the ice," explained Hethya. "I'd say a foot of ice, not more. Melt it off within an inch or two and we can go after it with hammers."
Bektis looked momentarily nonplussed.
"The beams won't hurt it." Tir stood beside the Dark Lightning's cradle, flanked by two guards, bruised face white and pinched around huge, hollowed eyes. His voice sounded distant, as if he slipped for a moment into some faraway dream. "Nothing will hurt it."
"Pray your recollection is correct, boy," said Vair, and Tir shivered, the movement of his eyes to the big man's face saying everything about what the past month had been like. "Can you do this, sorcerer?"
"Of a certainty, my illustrious Lord." Bektis drew himself up with an air of injury not noticeable prior to Tir's reassurance that whatever lay within the Ice would not be damaged by Bektis' miscalculation. "A foot, you said?"
He stroked his beard, the huge crystals on his hand shining among the niveous river of silk. "Perhaps it would be best to touch it with the beams to a distance of ten inches or so and have the men remove the final few inches with hammers." He nodded grave approval of his own wisdom. "I believe that would be best."
Hethya rolled her eyes.
Bektis drew a few deep breaths, as if collecting his strength for some mighty effort, then with dramatic suddenness spread his hands.
The crystals flashed in the last pastel whispers of daylight. With disembodied eyes, the Icefalcon saw the cold blue energies that came flickering out of the ice from unknown depths, saw the crystals in the iron nets stream with sparks as they drew in the forces of the airheard, too, a kind of dry, crinkling glitter, like galaxies of suspended needles brushed by wind.
Bektis shut his eyes-If he thought he could get away with crying 'Abracadabra" like a street-conjurer, he'd do it, reflected the Icefalcon, and laid his hands on the bubble-thin ball of iridescent glass that seemed to be the apparatus' heart...
The Icefalcon saw the energies flash and change. With a vibration that tore at his nerves, he felt the beam of darkness lance out, a touch, a breath; a hissing deep within the tunnel, white light glaring in the clouds of mist, and steam rolled out, a dragon's sneeze. Then Hethya took a torch from a guard and strode down into the mists, and, at Vair's signal, the two warriors followed, axes in their hands.
Her voice floated back, "We've got it!"
Vair took Tir by the hand; the boy's face went rigid as carved bone at the touch. Even Bektis disentangled himself from the latticed gold and iron and followed them into the luminous blue tunnel, leaving the guard who had come up at that moment with a second tisane to stand waiting, cup steaming in hand.
Like a cat's ghost the Icefalcon trod softly in their wake.
The tunnel itself was close to a hundred feet long, and mist reduced visibility to inches. Voices echoed wetly; there was a dripping of water, the crunch of axes, and the thin splish of a boot in a puddle. Clones bore dripping buckets past, and though there was no perceptible sensation of heat, the air felt damper.
Shapes clarified in the vapors, and the Icefalcon arrived at last at the tunnel's end and saw what it was that Vair sought.
Even as men chipped at the edges of the ice, white rime was forming again on what the Icefalcon could see was a pair of enormous, coal-black doors. It seemed to him that he could see, too, through the heat-cleared ice, the black wall in which they were set. It stretched away on either side, vanishing into the glacier's green eternal midnight.
Black wall, black door, untouched and unscathable, and underfoot, beneath a heap of ice shards and mush, the suggestion of steps leading down.
The goal of the journey was a Keep, long ago covered over by the Ice in the North.
"Open it, child." Vair's voice clanged on the diamond silence, a hammer affixing shackles, an ax striking a door.
The Icefalcon, a wary distance from Bektis, could see Tir trembling, his breath a plume in the light of torches and magic. "They open out," he said, his voice tiny in the stillness of watching, of awe. "If they weren't locked from inside, it still took a wizard to open them."
"Lord Wizard?"
Bektis self-consciously adjusted the crystals on his hand-the Icefalcon wondered whether the wizard had had that look of haggard thinness, of wasted flesh and waxen skin, the last time he had seen him close.
He made a great flourish of his arms and a dozen graceful gyres with wrists and fingers, lights sparkling and leaping from the gems he bore. The right-hand leaf of the dark portal grated against the ice where it hadn't been completely cleared. A shower of scrapings rained to the muck and water and refreezing slush.