Sadness crept into the darkness, the hopeless grief that colored her dream. Far off, as if on the other side of the trees, he saw the reflected glow of flames in the sky and heard the shouting of warriors looting, the screams of women.
"Will you go with Tir?" he pressed her. "Help him to hide? Not give him over to Vair? You know once Vair's forced what he wants of Tir, you'll just be handed over to the troops again."
He felt the flash of her hatred for him, for speaking of it, but he only spoke truth and she knew it. At length she let her breath out in a sigh and said, "Aye. Aye, friend ghost, you open that door for us and I'll do it. How much worse can matters get?"
The Icefalcon forbore to enlighten her on that head and said only, "Good. Wake now, and wake the boy.
By the next time you sleep I'll have scouted a way through the warriors outside."
The Icefalcon's one fear, as he stepped through the desiccated wood of the door, was that the clone had succumbed to possession of demons or that he had been joined by another man.
There were demons in the corridor, tiny floating lights that sometimes had the appearance of eyes, and a cold and sluggish elemental of some kind, hissing and whispering in a circle around the warrior and reaching out to pinch his toes.
He was one-the Icefalcon remembered-of a clone group of thirteen, and by the dull glaze of the man's eyes the Icefalcon guessed he wasn't far from a state of permanent dream. In anycase it shouldn't be difficult to step into the dreaming halls of that vacant awareness.
Nor was it. At the last instant before going in the Icefalcon smelled what was in there, but it was too late to stop: he should have realized, he thought, that having no mind to speak of, the clone would recall its only memory.
Pain. Over, and over, and over.
As when the demons ripped his flesh, it did little good for the Icefalcon to tell himself that this was illusion, and somebody else's illusion at that. The pain drowned him, a vat of fire and worse than fire: blinding, specific, agonizing.
The pain of the skin bursting at every needle's entry point and peeling slowly back. The pain of every sinus and cavity of the skull bloating up with blood until the membranes burst. The pain of every nerve-fiber outlining itself in scalding heat, searing into a pain-ghost strong enough to reduplicate its image down to the smallest screaming shred of oozing flesh...
Not real. Not real. Not real.
Disorientation, horror, cold, and the laughter of demons who'd seen it coming.
Mind, consciousness, concentration crumpling under the blinding assault, the Icefalcon could only speak to the hazy fragments of consciousness that remained in the clone:
"Unbolt the door behind you, then walk to that first corridor and go down it until you reach a wall." He could barely get the words out and then dropped out of the man's dreaming, to lie sobbing on the black stone floor while all around him the demons shrieked and bit each other with laughter and the sodden elemental rolled over onto him to see if there was anything of him it could absorb.
Oh, get off me, you stupid wad of slime. The Icefalcon slid wearily aside. And the pack of you have my permission to sodomize one another repeatedly with splintery sticks.
Howling with mirth, the demons manifested the ghostly echoes of splintery sticks. The Icefalcon looked away, repelled.
He couldn't imagine any being sufficiently stupid as to obey his bald and desperate instruction, but then, Gil frequently told him he had no imagination.
Very much to his surprise, the clone got to his feet, slid back the door bolt, and ambled through the daisy chain of demons and down the corridor, to vanish around the first available corner.
The Icefalcon started to repeat Rudy Solis' favorite expression of astonishment- Well, III be buggered-looked at the demons, and said instead, "My goodness me."
As he got to his feet the door opened.
Hethya looked scared, but, curiously enough, considering all he'd been through, Tir only wore an expression of quiet alertness, with a trace of the inward look he got when he went fishing through the ancient darkness of other people's memories.
He whispered, "This way." Hethya paused long enough to check the lamp-which she had almost covered with its pierced lid-and latch the door again before she followed.
Demons frisking around him, the Icefalcon made his way down the hall to where the clone stood, facing the blank black inner wall of the Keep.
It will hurt. I will let the pain pass through me and give it to the Watchers behind the Stars, who eat pain.
He stepped into the man's dreaming again, fast, and said, "Turn around, go back up this corridor and to the latched door again. Sit down outside it as you were."
He still lay on the floor, groggy with shock, trying hard to keep his spirit from dissipating until the pain's echoes lessened, when the clone and its attendant pack of demons rounded the corner.
So much, he thought, for that.
It took him a little time, pacing the Keep's straight black corridors, to find Tir and Hethya. Even as a shadow-walking dream, he moved as he had in his waking body, though he could stride faster than they because of his height.
The Keep might be intact, but it was a crazy-house nevertheless, clogged with foliage, corridors and stairs blocked entirely by lichen and molds, by mushrooms colorless as dead men's flesh and the size of newborn lambs. In some rooms light shone, curious and sickly and from no apparent source, and these rooms were choked thick with growths that then spread through corridors.
In others-and not necessarily those near the outer wall of the Keep-there was no heat at all and frost coated the walls three and four inches thick, the ceilings turned to wildernesses of icicles and the floors to knee-deep mountains of cauliflower ice.
Tir and Hethya had to turn back repeatedly, either because the corridors were clogged or because they could afford to leave no track, either in frost or leaves.
"The Icefalcon said-in my dream he said-Rudy and Mama were still alive." Tir's voice was tiny, a despairing whisper of hope as they stole through the square-cornered warrens. "He said Vair was just lying. Do you think that was true? Don't step there," he added, pulling Hethya back from a stretch where ice sparkled in a sugary shroud. "We have to go around again."
"Me blueberry, I don't know." Hethya squeezed his too thin shoulder. Her breath was smoke in the firefly glow of their lamp.
"Vair's a born liar sure enough, but a born liar can still tell the truth, and Bektis hit your friend with enough levin-fire to stop a megathere in its tracks, and that's a fact. Sometimes it's best just to put it from your mind, sweetheart, and not tell yourself yes or no. Your ma may still be alive, and him just sayin' she's dead so you won't try to get away back to her, but it's a bad world, and bad things happen. Can you put it aside, tuck it up in a little box in your heart, till it's time to find out?"
Tir swallowed. "I can try."
The Icefalcon followed them until Tir, after long trial and error marked by two more dim chimes of the endless clock, found the cell he sought, a double in the far front corner of the second level, marked with Runes of Silence and reached by an inconspicuous stair whose entry was hidden by one of those tricks of shadow and perspective so dear to the mages of the Times Before.
There he left them and started back the short way for the Doors, having no fear of leaving his footprints in the frost. Being only shadow himself he saw clearly in darkness, but it seemed to him, descending the hidden stair and striding quickly along the straight silent passageways, that the darkness lay somehow thicker than it had, thicker than it should.
He paused, tingling in all his nerves. Far off, at the end of the corridor, something moved: three violet lights, not the marshfire flicker of demons, but something else. Then darkness again, and a moment later, soft and thready, a breath of a whistled tune.