Everyone stepped back.
The slit of darkness was like looking into the deepest heart of the earth, where the Dream Things wait forever. Bektis made another gesture, outer sleeves emphasizing his thin arms. The slit widened.
The smell rolled forth. "Mother of Mercy!" Hethya coughed and gagged.
Foul and green and thick as soup in the air, it seemed to clog the lungs like sewer water, a summer-smell of garbage long forgotten, borne on a rolling wave of heat that made the fog swirl and then thicken still more.
At the same moment a tendril of vine dropped through the crack of darkness: gray, desiccated, bearing on it still the deformed pads of what might have been skeleton leaves, the bumpy and twisted nodules of what could, three thousand years ago, have been fruit.
After a second of shocked stillness, Bektis sent witchlight drifting through the doors. It showed those closest the tunnel that would lead to the inner doors.
Vair said, "Good God!"
But what lay beyond, thought the Icefalcon, was not something that had ever been created by any god-at least by none that could by any stretch of imagination be called good.
Like a second door behind the first, the passage was barricaded with vines. They had a shiny look in the white witchlight, like the scarred flesh of a mummy's fingers: dried, withered, even in death tough as wires when the guards came hesitantly forward and hewed at them with their swords.
They sheeted the floor and walls above an indescribable mulch underfoot of vines, leaves, and fruit from which white ferns sprouted that had never seen light, mingled with pallid fungal growths that seemed to shift and bulge with the bending of the torchlight.
The inner Doors at the end of the passage stood open. Vines flowed out of the utter dark beyond like a filthy flood frozen in mid-spate, knee-deep or higher, silent, blanched, dead.
"It's impossible," whispered Vair. "What plants grow without light of the sun?"
"The Keep was reared by wizards, Lord," said Hethya, her voice the voice of Oale Niu. Vair shot her a sidelong look, suspicious and shaken, his hand straying to the topaz demon-scare he wore. "Else why are we here?"
Beside him, the Icefalcon heard old Nargois whisper, "Why indeed?"
"Get some men in here." Vair recovered his composure, glanced back at the older man. "Clear this, and have them start bringing the gear in." He walked ahead, straight white form glimmering, boots crunching and slushing in the rotted vines. The others followed, Tir and Hethya holding hands tightly and the guards looking as if they wished they could do the same.
Cold air seeped after them into the passageway, fog condensing like a convocation of ghosts. The ghosts drifted on their heels through the inner Doors, over the guardian tangle of vines, and into the Aisle.
Bektis flung up his hand-jewels flashed, and witchlight drenched the darkness and hurled it to flight.
"Mother of Sorrows!" Hethya cried, and made a protective sign.
Fully the rear third of the Aisle was choked with what appeared at first, in the hard glow of the magefire, to be a single monstrous organism: bristling, feathery, colorless against the ebon walls; five levels tall to the vaulted night of the ceiling a hundred feet overhead and stirring with movement and furtive sound.
But the Icefalcon saw, they all saw, with the strengthening of Bektis' magelight-that what at first appeared to be a homogeneous wall was in fact an impenetrable tangle of ash-hued vines that varied in thickness from the width of a child's finger to cables greater than a man's waist, of strange-shaped balls of fuzz and bristle that might have been leaves or spores, of pendant clots of moss that had taken on the bizarre shapes of giant fruits or carcasses hung to cure.
Molds and lichens pillowed everything in a pale upholstery that glittered with moisture; weird bromeliads sprouted from them in spiderlike profusion only to play host themselves to thread-fine mazes of pale-glowing fungus.
Arms and limbs and tributaries of this bleached jungle looped through the doorways of the cells that faced onto the Aisle and cascaded from the windows of the second and third levels; the whole of the floor was covered in stringy, wormlike tendrils.
Where streams of water flowed across the floor of Dare's Keep, here lay only crisscrossed seams of plant life, burgeoning out of the old channels like hedges and reaching all ways across black stone.
When the heat spilled through those empty eyeless windows, those gaping black doorways, drawn by the bitter cold of the Doors opened after all these millennia, the vines and the molds and the bromeliads stirred and muttered with its passage, and the great soured noxium of decay surged over the men and the woman who stood, shocked speechless, in the heart of that vast internal night.
But the Keep was whole.
Thousands of tons of ice lay above its roof, pressed on its walls-had so pressed for three thousand years, as if the building lay at the bottom of a frozen sea.
But the Keep was whole.
"It is good." Vair's yellow eyes shone as they traveled over the cyclopean walls, the stairways that circled up through towers of openwork, the bridges spanning the Aisle, rank with hueless fern and fungus and curtained with gray stringers that reached to the floor.
"Impervious, like Dare's Keep, in which one can raise and provision an army and laugh to scorn any who come against one. It is good."
As if in response to his words a chime spoke, echoes resounding, musical and yet queerly atonal, with a flat deadness that gritted on the nerves. At one side of the Aisle a vast series of wheels and gears had been built into the black stone of the wall, powered by water trickling from basin to basin, the basins cracked so that the water streamed down the stone.
To the nearest guard, Vair snapped out an order, flapping a hand at Hethya: "Cia'ak will go with you while you select a suitable room for yourself and the child. Qinu..."
He signaled up another man, rapped out words in the ha'al, the Icefalcon hearing (he thought) clothing and bed.
This was something on which he had not counted, and after a moment's hesitation, he followed the guard into the passage once again. More men entered, hacking at the vines with axes and dragging great mats of them not out, but in toward the Aisle.
At the outer end of the ice tunnel the messenger spoke to Nargois, who waited with a great crowd of clones bearing axes, torches, bundles of weapons and gear.
The elderly second nodded and began to issue orders. The Truth-Finder detailed men to the largest of the wagons and instructed the clones in unshipping the vat and its accompanying equipment.
The expedition's priest, with his servant and three clones, bore down the tunnel the portable altar and velvet-draped equipment deemed necessary for the approval of the Straight God.
It was at this point-though the dim slice of moon still lingered well below the hills-that the camp was attacked.
The first person to be aware of the attack was Nargois, one moment giving instructions to the perimeter guards-he, too, seemed confident that the attack would come with moonrise-the next moment looking down with widening eyes at the brown-feathered arrow sticking out of his diaphragm, as if he could not believe what he saw.
A second arrow went through his throat under his left ear, probably before he was aware of any pain from the first, and then the Earthsnake People and the Talking Stars People were in the wagon circle.
Sergeant Red Boots shouted an alarm, dove behind the cage of the Dark Lightning issuing commands, and battle was locked. A stray arrow went through the Icefalcon's chest, a weird cold wickering that caused no pain.
Demons flickered and danced in the fog-wraiths that haloed the torches and billowed pale underfoot.
Mules shrieked and dragged their leads, Alketch warriors and wolf-silent Raiders dragging them in two directions.