Only the single clone guard remained, outside the door of the vat-room. A flame of demon-light whisked around the corner, out of sight. Far off the Icefalcon heard, or thought he head, a muffled voice whispering words that he could not quite make out.
"We'd best work fast," said Hethya. "We're aye and far off up on the second level, and the boy's been a good little scout about not leaving tracks, but we can't push our luck too far. What's your plan?"
"I think I can get this man to go to the latrine around that corner there and take off his weapons and his clothing."
"As you did with the poor sod that was on guard over me and Tir?" She shrugged. "Sure and I've known men who did stupider, under the impression it would please God or their fathers."
She followed him around the corner to the dark latrines, one of the few on this level not entirely choked with boscage. "Should be easy enough to hide here. You might look up where they're keeping the food and get those guards to wander off as well. Or have 'em carry it up and leave it somewhere on the second level, on silver trays and with a bit of wine and perhaps a couple of dancin' boys into the bargain."
She winked at him; the Icefalcon merely looked coldly down his nose at her and led her back toward the dark stairs, the foliose tunnels of frost and darkness. "It's hard on the child," she said after a time of climbing stairs in silence. "He's brave as a little soldier, but now and then I see in his eyes somethin' that makes me fear he'll never trust again."
"And whose fault is that?"
"And what good would it have done me to say No, I'II not do it.?" Her autumn eyes turned suddenly hard as glass. "Or to have Bektis open up with that sparkler of his once we were in the Keep and scorch poor Lady Minalde and everybody to a whickerin' crisp, and me with 'em, if I'd said a word wrong during that meeting? Me mother always said to me, 'Wait and watch. No matter what they do to you, if you're living you can still do somethin' farther on down the road.' Which you'll have to admit you can't do if you're dead, me bonnie barbarian. And neither the boy nor his mother were kith nor kin of mine."
The Icefalcon opened his mouth to reply but closed it again. By the lights of the Talking Stars People, Hethya spoke the truth. Noon would have advised him so as well. At length he said, more quietly than he had intended to respond, "What you say is true. But I think that, far up the road, that may be what Bektis believed as well. One must know when one has gone down a road far enough."
Tir sat awake in the double cell on the second level front, at the top of its hidden stair. They'd dispensed with the lamp to save oil, kindling instead a small fire of broken-off vines and dry moss and the shards of the decayed wooden doors.
Hethya lay asleep, muffled in quilted coats-in her dream-shape she wore the bodice and petticoat and a sort of rough jacket that she'd had on in her dreams of Prandtlays Keep.
The Icefalcon watched as her form faded from sight at his side and her eyelids stirred on her body of flesh. There was a change in the texture of the air as her dreams melted into the reality of the Keep.
"Will you be well here by yourself?" she asked Tir, after she'd explained to him what the Icefalcon had said and what she had to do. "Old Vair's got men out searching, but half of them are clones, and once he splits up a man into all those parts it's like he's divided the poor soul's brain among 'em as well as his spirit. I doubt they'll find you here. You're not afraid, are you?"
Tir shook his head, though his eyes seemed huge, haunted in the tiny face.
Seeing in them the lie, Hethya knelt beside him and took him in her arms. "It'll be all right, sweeting."
"I know," he whispered. "It's safe here."
"'Course it is," she said. "'Course it is. Vair couldn't find this place in a year of market days."
Tir relaxed a little and nodded. Hethya touched the wick of the lamp with a spill from the fire and made sure that there was enough wood to last for a time and that the light of the little blaze could not be seen from the corridors.
But-by the way the boy looked around him as Hethya and the Icefalcon, visible and invisible, left the chamber, the Icefalcon had the sudden, irrational impression that it was not Vair whose coming Tir most dreaded.
I did this before. The pain did not kill me.
The Icefalcon stood for a long time in front of the clone in the corridor, gazing into the man's dulled eyes.
Memory of agony. The only dream he had, played over and over: skin flaying off, blood bursting the flesh ...
I did this before.
He felt shredded, ice-cold and ill. The thought of dropping again into the mind of a clone turned him sick.
And what would be so bad about dying anyway? At least the man wasn't possessed by a demon.
He waited until the man's eyes glazed with inattention, then stepped close, across the wall of dreams.
He could barely get the words out, drowning in pain doubled and redoubled to the screaming abysses at the core of the world: "Vair wants you to go to the latrine, take off all your clothing and your weapons, and walk away down the corridor beyond as far as you can, then stop."
He ripped himself free, lay shuddering on the floor, cold to his bones and gasping...
And the clone waked, blinked, and looked around him, frowning. Then he shook his head and settled back against the wall.
He would be one of the brighter ones. Or maybe he'd paid attention to what they did to Ti Men.
Had he had a sword of steel instead of shadow, the Icefalcon would have lopped his head off from sheer pique. Had he had a sword of steel instead of shadow, he reminded himself, he would not be having this problem.
Hethya would be in place beside the latrines, waiting. How often did they change the guards? How often did an officer come and check on them? Especially now, with Tir missing?
It was like waiting for the bison to go back to grazing, like waiting for the wind to shift so you could inch closer to a drinking deer. The Icefalcon had hunted injured, had lain for hours hungry and cold, motionless to surprise prey. This twisting, screaming ache within him wasn't much worse than that, he told himself.
Only waiting, as a hunter waits. The clone's attention drifted.
The Icefalcon wondered if he could alter what he looked like in the man's half dream.
To look, for instance, like Crested Egret.
One hunted raccoons by making a noise like a raccoon.
"Vair wants you to walk to the latrine, take off your clothes and your weapons, and walk away into the corridor beyond."
For a terrifying moment, confused by agony and shock, having made himself look like Crested Egret, the Icefalcon could not remember what he looked like himself. His mind groped, fumbling for a memory, any memory...
Demons shrieked somewhere near, cold fire pouncing.
He writhed out of the way, calling to mind Cold Death's voice and his own recollection of the person who heard her, who was her brother. There were demons all around him, grabbing at his thoughts, tearing and slicing at him with pain and confusion.
He thrust them away, but the pain remained, wounds opening and closing in his phantom body: spent, bleeding, trying desperately to breathe. Terrified with a sense of how close he had come to death.
And the clone was walking away toward the latrine.
The Icefalcon followed shakily, first on his hands and knees, though he got to his feet in a few yards-not that Hethya could see him, of course. He watched from the darkness as the man obediently disarmed and undressed and wandered naked into the blackness and jungles of the farther corridors.
Hethya was out of the side passage and pulling on the man's sheepskin coat almost before the clone had turned the next corner, fumbling in her haste to wrap the rawhide on over her own boots, wadding her disheveled auburn braids up under the fleece cap.
"Whatever else can be said of you, me lanky boy," she addressed the air around her, "you're a damn good dream-speaker." She strode back along the corridor, clumsy in her borrowed gear, to the barred door, shoved the latch aside.