Bektis emerged from the fog, stuffing his chilblained hand, the Hand of Harilomne still flashing on his fingers, into an ermine muff. The smoke of a heat-spell surrounded him, mingling white with the general vapors as he scrambled down from where the deeper gash of the chasm narrowed and ascended. He was panting and looked put out. Even his beard was mussed. "You should have those guards of yours flogged," he snapped at the little officer. "The fools let her slip by!"
Crested Egret's expression did not change. "I'll see it done, Lord sorcerer." He had a prim voice-he was one of the Alketch who, like Vair, had kept up shaving even in the wilds and battles of the North. "Which of them failed you?"
Bektis hesitated a moment, looking from man to man of those standing near, then said, "That one, that one, and that one," pointing at random, the Icefalcon thought. Two of the men looked startled and angry; the other, a clone, seemed barely aware that he'd been singled out. Before anything further could be said someone called out, "Here's another!"
No. No. No.
Steam still poured in a misty river from the ice-cave where they'd spent... last night? The night before?
Two clones emerged dragging something. Loses His Way flung himself against his captors like a chained bull and bellowed.
They were carrying the Icefalcon's body.
"Dead, sir," said one of the clones. The Icefalcon knew those words from his time in the South.
"Your little pretty-boy, is it?" another added in a kind of mixed dialect as Loses His Way wrenched at the hands that held him. "Not bad," said someone else, or something along those lines; there was crude laughter and jostling.
Crested Egret silenced them with a couple of flat, yapped orders, and they bound Loses His Way, not without difficulty, and slung the Icefalcon's body on the sledge with the two dead clones and the wounded man. All the men worked together to drag the sledge back out of the crevasse, slipping and skidding and falling on the ice.
No. The Icefalcon was trembling, or would have been, he thought, had he flesh to tremble in. He ran back along the mist-drowned crevasse, seeking for Cold Death-melt-pools and scars, blue as glass, showed where Bektis had struck at her with the lightning of his crystal Hand, which had evidently been designed for single combat and spells rather than armies or groups. But of Cold Death herself he could find nothing.
The fog was thick here, and demons slipped like lampreys from the ice walls, reaching out to him with thin white hands of pain. Cold Death! He tried to call his sister's name. Cold Death!
But there was nothing. Frantic, he turned and ran after Bektis and the retreating guards through the bloodstained snow to the blue tunnel, keeping as far behind them as he dared. Hurting, shaken, and more frightened than he had ever been, he saw before him the black Doors of the Keep framing torchlight within.
The dead chime of the clock reached out to meet him, and as the warriors dragged their booty through-living and dead and one body that was not quite either-the Icefalcon slipped in after them and heard the Doors shut again behind.
Chapter 16
"Huh," said Hethya. "So it's yourself again."
She'd been dreaming about her daughter and the forest Keep. Dreaming about the rooms that had been carved off the crypts in those long years between the time when the Dark Ones had returned to their underground realms and the time when the forest Keeps had ceased to be fortresses with the return of order and the rule of the High Kings of Gae.
She'd been playing hide-and-seek with her child while her scholar mother investigated the caches of long-buried junk at the bottom of those twisty wooden stairs: hibernant glowstones gone dark with time, old chests of brown brittle scrolls, broken furniture and hidden doorways concealing still-deeper fastnesses, still-more-curious treasures.
Her daughter could only toddle but staggered with a child's blithe tumbledown delight among the shadowy warrens, barely illuminated by the lamps that Hethya and her mother bore; her laughter was gay in the dark.
But with the Icefalcon's appearance in the crypts of Prandhays Keep Hethya transfigured once more to a woman of thirty, a little blowsy, a little haggard, with bitter eyes and the dirty hair of one who has traveled far and hard. She put her hands on her hips, and leaned her back against a plastered archway, and asked, "And what is it you'll be wanting now?"
It was hard to speak the words. "Your help," he said. "Please." The Icefalcon took her hand-his own no more than shreds of flesh clinging to white bone-and led her across into the Shadow Keep, dark tunnels cancerous with fungus and strange white ivies.
He was very cold now, disoriented and weary beyond speaking, every wound and gash given him by the demons of the misty air open, bleeding, weakening him; drawing away his concentration from the task of keeping bone and flesh clear in his memory. The sun kept coming back into his mind, and the free flight in the air, the desire to dissolve and to sleep.
He was beginning to realize that he might not make it back to his body. If it were destroyed he knew he would not last long but did not know what would become of him in that event.
"Did you find a way out?" asked Hethya. A reasonable request, but in his weariness he felt a flash of dull rage at her, a desire, unprecedented in his experience, to strike her across the face.
"No." It was unworthy of a person of the Talking Stars-and also a pointless expenditure of energy-to show anger. Also, he would not give her that. So he kept his voice neutral.
"I was unable to leave the Keep until the Doors opened, and then I found Bektis had encountered Cold Death: she fled from him, I know not where. Here."
There was a guard outside the door of the triple cell where the vat and its horrors had been set up, one of the very few that still possessed a solid door. The corpses of the slain had been dragged there and heaped in a corner; bundled bales of dead foliage and whatever else could be gathered: fungus, the last of the wood, a dead mule.
A new, stout bar had been slotted into the makeshift sockets on the door, though the Icefalcon knew that Loses His Way was bound. Had he not been, the wood, long dehydrated in the cold, might not have held him.
Because it was a dream the Icefalcon passed easily through the thick wood, and Hethya stepped gamely behind.
"Faith!" she whispered, shocked.
Not, the Icefalcon was certain, because of the bodies. Anyone who had passed through the Time of the Dark had seen bodies, in all stages of decomposition and ruin. Certainly this woman had seen worse if she'd watched the making of the clones.
Even the fact that the clones had begun to decay in the warmth of the Keep was something she already knew. She went over to where the Icefalcon's own body lay on the pile, forehead and eyelids smudged with the remains of Cold Death's ward-spells, and touched his face, something the Icefalcon found extremely disturbing.
"Faith, are you a ghost, then?"
"No." He said it a good deal more vehemently than he had intended. "I am alive, only separated from my flesh for the time being."
It crossed his mind to wonder whether that was in fact the case. Whether removal from the ice-cave, and from Cold Death's spells, had in fact killed the life-spark of the emptied flesh so that he would return only to die as the body died.
Could he return at all without Cold Death's help?
"But I can be of no help to you if I return to my flesh in a locked room with guards outside. You will have to get me out."
On the floor beside the piled corpses, Loses His Way lay chained, spanceled the way the Alketch spanceled deserters or criminals, wrists locked to ankles, with a cord around his neck tied to the short chain that joined the ankle manacles, only long enough to permit him to breathe as long as he did not struggle.