The cold that had tortured him since the shedding of his flesh redoubled, curling around the shadows of his bones and clutching tight. Not fear, he told himself, but reasonable caution made him back away and seek another route downward to the Aisle and the Doors.
Not fear at all.
But as he hastened along the corridor the Icefalcon heard the ghosts of demon laughter and the slow, horrible knocking that seemed to come from nowhere, a giant fist hammering the stone.
Somewhere a man cried out in fear, and when he passed a wall white with frost the Icefalcon saw clumsy words scrawled in the white crystals, higher than a man could reach. There were no footprints on the frost below.
Tir was hiding in this haunted place. The Icefalcon quickened his stride for the Aisle.
There was torchlight there, and hemp-oil lamps. Voices echoed far less than they did in Renweth, for the sharpness of the sound was absorbed by the muck underfoot and the leathery monstrosity growing into darkness. Even the voices of enemies were a comfort after the darkness, the sight of men engaged in mundane tasks like sorting weapons and boots and blankets under the eye of their sergeants.
As the Icefalcon watched, another clone dropped his load of cornmeal, flung up his arms, and fled away into the chamber's vast darkness, leaping and dancing and shrieking with demon laughter.
The sergeant in charge turned uncertainly toward a doorway behind whose brittle, decaying louvers the white glow of magefire burned. But in the end he hadn't the courage to enter. From that doorway the Icefalcon heard Vair's harsh snap of orders and the scrape and chink of metal.
They were setting up the vat, thought the Icefalcon, and wondered what substance the generalissimo would use this time to flesh out the numbers of his creations. The Talking Stars People had gotten most of the mules.
Not that the Icefalcon had any intention of lingering to find out. The naked cold of being bodiless had grown to a torment, and the ever-present sense of suffocation, the formless anxiety and grief, were making it harder and harder to concentrate. He felt weary and scraped, exhausted and craving sleep-Cold Death had warned him against sleep.
It would be night outside. His mind was already charting the passageway between the two sets of Doors-cleared now of weeds, gauging the hundred feet of slick blue ice tunnel to be negotiated...
He stepped between two clones and laid his hands on the locked inner Doors.
And could not pass through.
The shock was an abrupt one, almost physical. After a little practice he had moved through wood or stone or metal like a ghost, matters of the physical world as irrelevant to him as the pains of demons.
But the Doors were magic. The wall in which they were set was magic, wrought long ago to forbid the passage of the Dark Ones. Probably-although he certainly meant to check it inch by inch-the whole of the outer wall of the Keep was so imbued with spells.
As long as the Doors were shut, he was trapped.
Chapter 15
"I will eat them all!" The deep toneless shouting hammered flatly on the black walls, echoing from some remote place. "I will eat them up!"
"What's he saying?" Tir asked almost without sound, not sure if he understood the ha'al speech correctly.
There was a goatish sound to the words, not human at all.
Hethya turned the horn cover of the lamp just the tiniest bit, uncovering only a hole or two, enough to outline the white leathery leaves, the unspeakable shapes of the fungal horrors that crusted the snout of the fountain where it emerged from the wall.
"He's talking of eating everything or everybody." The words were a bare whisper. They'd already learned that sound carried farther in the straight halls of the Keep of Shadow. "He's gone mad, I think. It'll be one of the clones."
While Tir stayed back with the lamp, Hethya edged between the obscene jungles to what had been the fountain's basin and dipped both their water bottles full. Some of the leaves were white, others black and shiny as jewels or furred like bison, shapes barely recognizable as what had been the leaves of potatoes, or peas, or squash. "Faith, you'd think they'd die in the dark, after all these years."
"They grow on magic." Tir drank gratefully from the dripping bottle she handed him. "They should have dirt and stuff to eat, too, like we do at the Keep-Lord Brig showed me, he's in charge of the crypts-but there's magic here, too." He shivered, and it seemed to him that the bleached leaves moved. "The magic is still alive."
"Faith." She hooked the water bottles to her belt, listening. Far off came a dull pounding, like a moron child beating on a wall, but huge and viciously strong. As she moved off Tir caught something, some anomalous shape, from the corner of his eye and turned back to look.
For a moment there was a trick of shadow, of the movement of the lamp no doubt, where the tangled vines swung and clustered around the fountain, so that Tit's heart stood still with terror.
But there really wasn't anyone there.
Not a gleam of bald-shaved head or deep-sunk watching eyes. The noise he'd thought for one instant to be a soft-whistled tune was only the wind moving through the corridors.
The thought came into his mind, You'd be happier away from the light. Happier in the dark alone.
Tir knew he would be. Since leaving the dark warm protection of the Keep of Dare he had encountered nothing but pain and terror and grief, and he never wanted to go outdoors again.
Still, he turned away and hurried after Hethya, and tried not to listen to what was almost a voice, whispering among the leaves in the dark.
They had to open the Doors sometime.
The Icefalcon stood, his whole existence a hideous wrack of anxiety, in the lambent golden shadows of the triple cell Vair had taken as his theater of operations, watching the generalissimo and his tame mage argue.
"Savages!" Bektis' gray velvet sleeve bellied like a wing with the theatrical indignation of his gesture.
"Savages! Too stupid to consider using the apparatus for their own advantage, though of course they never could. But they don't know that. And they're too stupid even to try!"
Vair regarded him narrowly across the table set up at the head of the vat. "And this is what you see, is it, sorcerer, in that scrying glass of yours? That the karnach no longer exists?"
"My Lord, the White Raiders began dismantling it before our Doors were even sealed! They've smashed the luminar-broken the core rods-" His honey-flower tenor went squeaky with fury, the only time the Icefalcon had truly believed him to be a mage as Ingold was a mage, with a mage's instincts. "What they couldn't break they tipped into crevasses in the ice! It is gone, my Lord! Gone!"
"And so you don't have to put yourself in peril by attempting to retrieve it?" Vair cocked his head, primrose eyes cold. "Is that what you're telling me?"
Bektis drew himself tall, his beard rippling with the jut of his chin. The Icefalcon noted briefly that Bektis' beard, though waist-length and white as winter ermine, was perfectly combed and bore none of the matted and sweaty appearance of the hair and beards of Vair's warriors.
He must work at it for hours a day. Even Vair's long gray hair, though dressed back in a ridge, looked as if he'd been through a battle. Perhaps a spell kept the wizard's beard clean?
"What I'm saying is truth, my Lord!"
Vair lowered his eyes again, counting out the crystalline needles from their box. He worked deftly, moving them onto the tabletop with his single hand. The Icefalcon, his mind still charred by the memories of the clones his shadow had spoken to, could barely look at them, could barely endure remaining in this room.
The doorway and the ceiling's four corners were strung with demon-scares, which was a relief, for it was growing more and more difficult to push aside the demons and elementals that oozed through the clogged darkness and snuffed among the bleeding lichens.