One of the Dream Things-the Flowered Caterpillar or the Mouse's Child, that sometimes lied and sometimes told the truth? Or something in the blackness, something that was trying to keep him from this final secret, the secret Tir had begged not to be forced to reveal?
It seemed to him that more crystal pilasters glittered before him, a double line of them. Surely there had been only four rooms, three archways? He counted three or four more before him, and a guessing of others beyond.
A trap?
A man sat in the darkness before him, a little to one side of the next arch.
There was something very wrong with the darkness, something amiss about the shape and perception of that chamber and the next. Voices seemed to be murmuring all around him, a mutter of anger, desperation, and a loneliness that had long ago plunged over the black edge of abyssal madness.
Go back. Go back right now.
The man before him stood. "Nyagchilios?" He spoke his true name, the name of the pilgrim-falcon in the tongue of the Talking Stars. "Icefalcon?"
The Icefalcon retreated, terror of a trap flaring in him, a trap whose nature he could not even guess. But he knew, as surely as he knew the name the man had said, that if he lingered even another few moments he would be caught in some unguessable doom. Carefully, never turning his back, he edged away, through chamber after chamber, toward the door.
The man-or illusion, he wasn't sure which-took a step or two after him, then stopped. But the Icefalcon could see him between the pilasters as he retreated, see him clearly in the dark: the broad shoulders beneath a ragged mantle of brown wool, the close-cropped white heard and the face gouged with scars and creases and laugh lines. Blue eyes that hid terrible knowledge under wise brightness, like sunlight on the well at the cosmos' heart.
If any illusion could have called him into the gullet of a snare, thought the Icefalcon, it would have been that one. Because of all people he could have summoned to his aid, the first on his list would certainly have been Ingold Inglorion.
The second chime sounded as the Icefalcon emerged from the narrow door of the vestibule. He hastened down the hidden stair, passed like a fleeting ghost through the jungle of vines. It was in his mind to make a detour and fetch Tir and Hethya, but aside from the fact that they would undoubtedly still be awake, it would do them little good to walk straight into the arms of Bektis.
Who he needed now, he thought, was Cold Death. There had to be a way to send warning to Blue Child and her band that the illusion of the hunt they pursued would lead them to disaster. Possibly Cold Death knew it already.
The Doors stood open. Lamps gleamed in the dense white mists of the passage, in the ice tunnel that stretched beyond. The cold there cut his brain like a knife, but he welcomed it: he was out of the Keep, out of the trap of its walls, running now for the sleeping flesh of his body like a jack hare running for his burrow, with the glowing hounds of hell coming behind.
The bright glare of morning smote him. He was free.
Another war band coming up, he thought. Some scouting or hunting party that had cut the trail of the Earthsnake People and followed to see what hunting they sought in the Ice in the North. What hunting indeed?
He would not, he thought, pausing, be able to see them once he returned to his flesh.
It was dangerous, the tearing and weight of exhaustion and pain tightening on him like the tightening of the torture boot or the rack. Still, he was going to be coming back this way in his human flesh to lead Tir and Hethya to freedom. After a moment's thought, the Icefalcon flung himself skyward, flying the way Gil-Shalos-and long ago Dove in the Sun-had told him that they flew in dreams.
The ice dropped away below him. Seracs reared like fortresses, aretes and nunataks traced in black the shape of buried mountains behind the green-white blister of the ice. Higher the Icefalcon rose, through a gray mistiness that almost hid the land. It would be easy, he thought, to become lost here, to become lost entirely from his body. To rise and rise, above all cloud, until his soul united with sun and air.
He understood suddenly that the pain and cold and loneliness he felt were the result of trying to hold the shape of the body that lay somewhere in the Ice. The terror and suffocation would last only as long as he clung to the memory of that shape, clung to the illusion of lungs and heart, the intention of returning to that abandoned flesh. Indeed, they were nearly unbearable now. If he embraced the sunlight and the air, he would be free.
Or was that another illusion of the demons of the air?
He looked about him, as his namesake would look about for the white hares of the ice.
He saw the crevasse where Blue Child had tipped the broken Dark Lightning: no child of the Real World would hold a weapon that could so easily be taken back by its original owners and turned again. Antlike men slipped and fell near the crevasse with the clumsiness of those who had never navigated on snow, hauling what pieces they could find or dragging the bodies of the slain.
To the west he saw Blue Child's band-nowhere near any crevasse-and among the rock ridges southeast of the Keep's bubble the dark ragged assemblage of the Earthsnake People. Far off, coming up from the south on the trails left by the others, was the new band, well over two hundred strong.
The Icefalcon flew toward them, effortless as a silver rag of cloud. From the air he recognized Breaks Noses, younger brother to Loses His Way, war leader of the Empty Lakes People. Bundled thick in double-sewn fur and mammoth wool, others followed him: Buttonwillow, Spindle, and Doesn't Bathe.
The friends and kin of Loses His Way. And with them Beautiful Girl, the mother of Twin Daughter-the wife of Loses His Way.
Cold raked him, tearing his attention, shredding his mind. Terror swamped him, and he was falling again, plunging toward the white and blue and black of the broken ice. Gray things and darkness clotted his sight and the laughter of the winds his hearing.
Elementals.
It was hard now to pull his attention away, hard to fight clear of the terror, to remember that he had no bones to break. He couldn't breathe, and weariness rent him beyond bearing.
He saw the shadow form of his hands and arms that had once been clothed in wolf-hide tunic, in the appearance he knew, torn tatters of ripped clothing, flesh gone and bones bare from biceps to wrist.
Something like a vast spider of cloud and ice-fog clawed out his entrails, and he could not think his body whole again. Elementals vast as mammoths walked over the snow below him like pond-skimmers, waiting for him to land.
Go away. Go away. Go away.
He leveled out a few feet above the snow, hearing them like swarming bees above his head. A flying tangle of shreds and bones, he skimmed the broken whiteness, dodged between hummocks and ridges, seeking the crevasse where his body lay.
The thoughts of the air and the brilliant, hurting sunlight frightened him now, and he found himself crying for the comforting armor of muscle and bone.
Voices below, cold and hard as the shattering of glass. A bellowed war cry and the clash of steel. Light exploding among the gashes in the ice, and columns of steam, hard and nearly tactile, marble and diamonds and then gray, all-choking fog.
Dread such as he had never known slammed his heart.
He dropped to the ice at the head of the crevasse, leaped down the jagged blocks as though possessed again of human legs and human muscles. Tracks of booted feet marred the snow before him, booted feet and those bound in rawhide.
Another levin-bolt and the crack of thunder, another billow of steam. The Icefalcon raced between the narrow sapphire walls, hearing a man curse in the choking mists. "Little bitch got away."
No, thought the Icefalcon. No.
"Don't kill that one." He heard Crested Egret's voice as he came around the projecting shoulder of ice and saw four or five clones holding the struggling, thrashing Loses His Way, dragging him down with their sheer weight. Two clones lay dead in the crumble of snow, and a third sat bowed over, his back to the frozen wall, numbly clutching his belly.