The Icefalcon nodded. It was, he reflected, part of a storyteller's art, and he'd frequently teased Gil about the fascination a civilized people had for stories that sounded true but weren't.
They passed under clotheslines draped with garments hung between the Royal Stair's spacious arches to take advantage of the updraft of warm air and on into the Aisle. Hundreds of yards long and over a hundred wide, its ceiling vanished high in darkness above them.
The obsidian walls, like those of the densely twisted corridors, glittered dimly with squares of scattered lamplight; doors, and windows. Multifingered streams trickled dark and clear as winter midnight under railless stone bridges that cut the black expanses of floor.
At the Aisle's far end, pale daylight leaked through the Doors, the single entrance to the whole of the Keep's great inner dark: two pairs of massive metal portals separated by the twenty- or thirty-foot thickness of the outer wall itself.
Dare's Keep. The final stronghold. Unbreachable by the Dark that had shattered the world.
"Both she and that uncle of hers have been eating pretty good," said Gil, and twisted a tendril of her dark hair around one of the sharpened sticks that held it out of the way.
"And there's a limit to what you can pack on a donkey. But mostly what tips me off is that she thinks-or she says this Oale Niu bird says-that the Keep is powered by machinery. She thinks that the heart of the Keep is a machine. And that would be true for Keeps like Prandhays and the Black Rock Keep in Gettlesand. Keeps where a wizard, a mage, didn't sacrifice himself or herself to enter into the heart of the Keep as a source of magic to keep it going. If Oale Niu really were a mage from the Times Before, she'd know about that. She'd know about Brycothis."
She spoke softly the name of the wizard who had sacrificed herself: Ancestor in a way, the Icefalcon thought, of all those who lived here. When first he had been told the secret of the Keep, known only to a handful, he wondered why he had not guessed it already.
There was life here in the lamp-sprinkled midnight among the catwalks overhead, life in the flow of the moonless water along the streams of the floor, life in the breathing of the air. The life of the Keep, like the spirits that dwelled in rocks and trees, in the ocean and in each of the thousand thousand stars. It was the only time he had heard of a human being transforming herself into a spirit, the ki of a place, but it did not surprise him.
The spirit was the mage Brycothis, who had abandoned her body and been absorbed into the magic walls to draw power from the earth and channel it to the uses of her people within those walls forever.
Sometimes he wondered that everyone in the Keep did not guess. At other times, after he had been dealing with these civilized people for a while-mud-diggers, the Talking Stars People called them, these people who had lived so long so fat and easily, with their wheat fields and their furniture and their clothing that tied up one's sword-hand-it did not surprise him at all. Civilized people would have trouble guessing what was amiss should a uintatherium take up residence in their parlors.
"But why here?" he asked. "Why make up such a tale?"
"Because we've got food here." Gil shrugged. "And we've got the only setup that guarantees production of food. Since those bandits took over Prandhays Keep last summer, we're just about the last stronghold for the length of the Great Brown River, from Penambra to the Ice in the North, and the most productive.
You know how many bandits these days are from the Alketch, soldiers displaced by fighting there since the old Emperor's daughter gathered troops and threw out the general who thought marrying her against her will would be a good way to become Emperor himself, the more fool he."
"They are fools," said the Icefalcon dismissively, "the Alketch." The original owner of the finger bones he wore in his braids had been a prince of the Alketch.
A door in the Aisle's south wall, and a dark vestibule, led them into the watchroom of the Guards. The triple-sized cell was bright with glowstones-ancient crystal polyhedrons that shed a kind of stored magelight-and redolent of the warm reek of potatoes, venison stew, and sweaty wool. Sergeant Seya was playing pitnak with one of the rookies-Gil glanced at the sergeant's tiles and shook her head.
"If our girl Hethya was passing herself off as some kind of ancient wizard to gain status wherever she lived," she continued, turning back to the Icefalcon, "Alketch bandits' religious scruples might not have stretched to keeping her around, especially once they found out she couldn't come across with anything useful. You know what the Church in the South does to wizards. My bet is she and Uncle Linok had to get out of there fast."
"So they stole a donkey," said the Icefalcon, "and came here... For what purpose? To hoax us?"
"At a guess. To buy status. Maybe they thought we wouldn't let them in. Everyone loves a good story."
"Civilized people do," retorted the Icefalcon, who wasn't about to admit to a weakness of that kind.
"They could make a good living," he added thoughtfully, "just selling the donkey."
Knowing some of the speculators who operated in the Keep, Linok had probably already been offered the little animal's weight in gold, which was cheap these days, since it would neither hold an edge nor stand up to the heat of a cook fire. It was just possible that someone would make an attempt to steal the creature, though with so few animals in the Keep, such a theft would be difficult to hide.
It occurred to him that he could have killed both the old man and the woman and sold the donkey himself to the highest bidder, always supposing anyone in the Keep possessed anything he wanted that badly.
None of the Talking Stars People were particularly interested in things they couldn't carry two hundred miles on foot. The habits of the Icefalcon's upbringing died hard.
Gnift the Swordmaster came in, calling together his afternoon practice, and now that her son Mithrys was able to walk-and learning to talk, may their Ancestors help them all-Gil had returned to training regularly with the Guards and taking her turn on the watches.
While she and the others were stripping to their undertunics and wrapping their hands and wrists, the Icefalcon again put on the soft jerkin of black-dyed wolf-hide he wore on patrol, marked with the white quatrefoil emblem of the Guards of Gae, and pulled on over it a heavier vest, and his gloves.
Though it was April, in these high valleys the wind blew cold, colder now every year. There was still chance of snow.
Janus, the stocky, red-haired Commander, called out, "You're not on now, you know," and the Icefalcon shrugged.
"I'm just going up the Vale to see about those bandits."
"There can't be a lot of them." He straightened up from lacing his boots. "The watchers at the Tall Gates never saw them. Neither have any of the patrols."
"Even so." He gathered up his bow, a blanket, a quiver of arrows, and then, because he had been raised among the Talking Stars People, added to the sword and water bottle at his belt a leather wallet of dried meat and flatbread, enough for a hard day's walking, and some dried fruit. Like most of the Guards he carried a firepouch at his belt, the whole cured hide of a woodchuck lined with horn and clay, in which was packed a smolder of rotted yellow birch that would burn for a day.
There were few enough guards, and Renweth Vale stretched eighteen miles from the sapphire wall of the St. Prathhes' Glacier down to the spruce forest at its lower end. A fairly large force might hide in the pinewoods or the rock caves above, and it was not impossible they could have come in over the ice-crowned spine of the peaks, rather than the eastward pass.
It would be as well to know where they were and what they were up to. The regular patrol had departed only an hour before the Icefalcon briefly considered rounding up a band to go with him, then dismissed the thought. On simple reconnaissance, he would do better alone.