"They're fools," she said. "Idiots!" Like Hethya she used her hands when she spoke. "They should be learning about these things, not trying to figure out how to extract the magic from them to heat their rooms or make their little vegetable patches grow! That wasn't what these things were made for!"
"Well, Mother," pointed out Hethya, "we don't know what they were made for."
She was younger then and trimmer, and there was a lightheartedness in her eyes that had disappeared over the intervening years. The yellow silk gown she wore was new enough that the Icefalcon guessed she dreamed of a time six or seven years ago, the Time of the Dark or just after it.
She had a child on her knee, a year or two old, dark-haired and green-eyed, reaching with round pink hands to snatch at the braid she dangled in play as she spoke.
"We know why some were made." Hethya's mother flicked with the backs of her fingers at the pile of scrolls on the desk before her: heaps of them, tablets and codexes and books.
Gil-Shalos, thought the Icefalcon, would perish with envy at the sight. "Most of this is rot, rubbish, but some of it, my girl... Some of it has told me some most interesting things."
"Such as?" Hethya hoisted the child on her hip and crossed the cell to stand by her mother's chair. For a time the two women studied the scrolls with heads together, the child grasping and reaching for the older woman's hair-sticks, the resemblance clear between the three dissimilar faces.
In the corners of the cell, and through the archways and half cells and vestibules opening from it, the Icefalcon glimpsed dim half-familiar shapes: the sections of canopy that had been over the iron vat in the wagon, the half-assembled midpart of the Dark Lightning's cradle.
There was a black stone table in one of the vestibules that the Icefalcon recognized, such a table as Ingold and Gil-Shalos used to read the smoky polyhedrons that held the records of the Times Before.
If bandits had taken Prandhays Keep, the Icefalcon could guess what had become of that child, what had become of Hethya as well. When the armies of humankind were being raised for an assault on the Dark, Ingold and Alde had both sent to Degedna Marina, landchief of the Felwoods, begging for all and any machinery or relicts of the Times Before, for any mageborn they could find.
Degedna Marina had dispatched a small force of her warriors-and those of her lesser lords-but denied finding such mechanisms in any of the three Felwoods Keeps. No wizards, she said, dwelled among those who survived.
Hethya straightened up, began a sort of dance with her child on her hip to make the toddler laugh. She stopped at the sound of a sharp scratching by the cell's curtained door, called out gaily, "I'm coming, Ruvis."
"Ruvis, is it?" Her mother looked up, exasperated, amused. "Mal Buckthorn just brought you back here an hour ago!"
"Shh! Ruvis'll hear you!"
But her mother had kept her voice down, evidently knowing her daughter well. Hethya put the child in a cradle wrought of forest twigs and ancient goldwork, tucked it up with a sheepskin and a bright-patched quilt, and said, "You be me good, little dumplin', till I return, me peach, me blueberry."
She checked a mirror, readjusting the jeweled comb in her hair. "Dub Waterman's coming by for me around midnight, Mother. If so be he gets here before I get back, tell him I've gone out for a few minutes to fetch you some lampblack from Oggo Peggit in the Back Warrens and I'll be right back..."
Her mother rolled her eyes, "You are incorrigible." But she laughed as she said it and kissed her and tousled her hair. And because this was a dream the Icefalcon felt Hethya's sorrow and the pain of her loss and knew the grown Hethya, the woman Hethya, wept in her sleep.
He stepped away from her, back into the Keep of the End of Time. They lay together in their cell, Hethya and Tir, the child snuggled in the woman's arms.
The earlier guard had been replaced by a clone, who sat just outside the shut and bolted oak panels, staring indifferently at the dirty torchlight on the opposite wall. Only the thinnest fuzz of hair covered his scalp, but what was unmistakably a patch of wool grew from his cheek.
Within the cell, an oil lamp burned, a grimy fleck of fire in the close-crowding shadows. Tir, too, dreamed of a Keep.
Not Dare's Keep, not the Keep the mage Brycothis had surrendered her human life to enter as Heart-Mage and core.
The Icefalcon recognized the Keep of the Shadow, though the vast Aisle was cleared to its rear wall and the light of glowstones outlined from within a patchwork of balconies, open archways, winding staircase, and a rose window like the lost sun of summer.
The streams on the black stone floor spoke with gentle music; the voices of the men who walked there echoed very softly, like single pebbles dropped into still ponds.
Tir was there. Sometimes he looked like Tir-Tir worn to his bones, sunken eyes desperate in a scarred face-and sometimes he looked like someone else, a sturdy boy just coming into adolescence, with the dark-gray eyes of the House of Dare and black hair growing unevenly out of what had been a close crop. He walked in the wake of two men and looked about him as he walked.
One was a burly middle-aged warrior whose initial pug-faced ugliness had been recently augmented by scars and burns. The Icefalcon recognized the wounds.
He carried such marks on his chest, right arm, and hand from the acid and fire of the Dark Ones. Most adults in the Keep did. The other man was small and fine-boned, his shaved skull illuminated with the intricate tattooing that Gil-Shalos said was the mark of a mage in the Times Before.
"I know you weren't ready for this," said the scar-faced warrior. "But with Fyanach's death I don't think we have a choice."
"No," the mage said in a voice that could have been contained in the smallest of pottery jars. "No. And I understood there was the possibility when I assented to come."
But there was stricken pain in his eyes. He was fair-skinned and, like his friend's, his face and scalp and tattoo-written hands were crossed with burn scars and the pink, brittle flesh of acid scalds, the track of battle against the Dark Ones. "Will they ever know?" he asked.
"Some will." They weren't speaking in the Wathe, or the ha'al, or any tongue the Icefalcon had ever heard. He knew his understanding of it came only through Tir, who remembered in his dream. "It's not a knowledge many share, even at Raendwedth."
The name meant Eye of the Heart-the capacity to read a person or situation clearly-coupled with the locative for mountains; the Icefalcon hadn't known that was the derivation of Renweth Vale's name.
"There have been too many corrupt wizards, too much evil magic. Too many hate magic on principle now, and small blame to them. So it's not a knowledge that can be shared. But some will always know, down through the years. Your name-and what you do-will not be forgotten. That I promise you, Zay, my friend."
"I do not... want to be forgotten." Zay rubbed his chest, half unconsciously, as if to massage away some cold or grief. "And Le-Ciabbeth?"
"I'll tell her."
The great clock spoke, hard leaden chimes that flattened on the air.
"She'll want to come here," said the scar-faced man after a time. "I'll detail warriors to escort her, as soon as they can be spared."
"No." Zay stopped and caught his companion's arm, desperation in his face. "Too long."
He led the ugly man across a succession of footbridges, down the vast plain of the floor, through a silence that diminished their footfalls to a thrush peck against rock, then up the double stair way that curved to a pillared door at the Aisle's inner end. In the Keep of Renweth the territory at the end of the Aisle on the first level belonged to the Church and that above to the Lady of the Keep.
The two men stopped again at the top of the stair, on the threshold of a triple archway. "You'd best go back, son," said the warrior; speaking to Tir. "In time you'll know this secret, but now is not the time."