"I hope to meet you face-to-face when you're not a corpse or a ghost... There."
She snatched up the guard's abandoned torch, blew out her lamp again, stepped through into the triple cell, and made a face a little at the growing odor of rot. The torch's light ran redly over the curves of glass and gold, slick and cold on the quicksilver lining of the vat.
The needles on their table grinned, demon teeth. Loses His Way, panting like a trussed bull, half rolled up onto one shoulder, squinted at the light, defiance still in his swollen eyes. Near him the Icefalcon's body lay pale among the darkening corpses, long braids like age-bleached serpents with their rawhide thongs and tangled bones.
"He's all yours, me hearty." Hethya stood aside from the door. The Icefalcon stepped forward, reached down to touch his own face, his own hands...
And felt nothing.
It was a stranger's body.
The face was his; his the blood moving slow as a winter stream in the veins. Bones, muscle, sinew... But it was as if he could no longer remember the language he had spoken as a child. Could not recall the route to a valley he had visited at the farthest edge of his memory.
The terror was like a blow over the heart.
"Come on." Hethya glanced over her shoulder at the open door, stuck the torch in a wall sconce, and crouched to slap the still face. "Wake up, boy-o, there's a good lad. Open your eyes, curse your lizard-eating heart..."
"He is dead," Loses His Way mumbled through puffed purple lips. "A shaman cursed him to his death, cursed his flesh and everything it touches..."
"That's not the story his ghost told me in me dreams, handsome." Loses His Way's blue eyes flared, caught between astonishment, hope, and suspicion; Hethya was already cutting the cord that stretched down his back, fumbling in the guard's coat pockets for the key to the spancels.
"He says he'll be able to get back into his body, not that I think he can do it without a good dollop of witchery for a shoehorn. Me mother was always on about idiots thinkin' there wasn't a thing to magic but sayin' the words of a spell."
She pulled the chains away and thrust her shoulder under that of Loses His Way as the warrior tried to rise and stumbled, limbs cramped and feeble from the binding and the beating he had undergone. "Can you help me get him out of here?"
"Where?"
Remind me never to put you in charge of my horses, thought the Icefalcon in disgust. You'd trust a demon who pointed out a waterhole. Loses His Way tried to pick up the Icefalcon's limp body and staggered, dropping it to the floor Thank you very much. When I get back into my bones, I'll find half of them broken.
"I'll take him-no, I know how to carry a man. Next room along, gather as much of the clothes and gear as you can, boy-o-you know how to get in touch with this sister of his? This shaman that served him his eviction to begin with?"
Loses His Way shook his head. "She fought this Wise One Bektis and his gem of lightning but was driven back, burned by his fires; hurt, I think."
Hethya cursed and manhandled the Icefalcon's body up across her shoulders. "Well, we'll just have to do what we can. There's no chance he's off waitin' elsewhere for us, is there?"
"Were it me, I would not."
They stepped into the corridor, Hethya watching nervously in both directions while Loses His Way gathered up clothing from the other room, then made their way swiftly down the first crossing passage that would take them out of the general area, shadows lurching in the torchlight in their wake.
The Icefalcon was filled with a kind of fascinated dread at the sight of his own face cold and slack against Hethya's shoulder, his own braids dangling down, the scarred arms and calves loose and lifeless. Twice he came near, reaching into the flesh, and twice stepped back, defeated, alien, and desperately frightened.
Like a ghost he could only follow, in the shadows behind the torch's light.
The old man was there.
Huddled beside the bead of lamplight, Tir felt him, out there in the corridor, waiting.
The room was safe. It had been spelled against the scrying of wizards, and the spells held true against other things as well.
But he was there.
Closing his eyes, Tir looked down into memories, as if looking into a well, though whether they were his own or the old man's he didn't really know.
The long-haired warrior, the man that other boy had called "Father," stood before the chair where the old man sat. They were back in the chambers with the crystal pillars: the third chamber, which came right before the fourth one that was so shallow it was barely a niche.
The old man he had seen in his visions of the caravan train, the old man who had been one of those to set out the flares against the Dark Ones. The magelight feather above the aged wizard's head gleamed on the blue patterns of his scalp, the heavy overhang of his tall brow, the questing jut of nose. He looked up, and Tir could not see other than shadow in the sockets of his eyes.
Gently, Tir's father said, "It's time, Zay." Zay made no reply.
Tir's father licked his lips. "We can't wait any longer." His long hair was dressed up in a comb, black with garnets that glinted like droplets of blood.
"No." The old man's mouth formed the words, but there was no sound to them. His sigh, though not great, was louder, like the tearing loose of the soul from its moorings in flesh. "Just... till morning comes.
Please."
"We'll take the road in the morning," said Tit's father, and Zay looked up at him more sharply, hearing something in his words beyond what he said.
"There is no other way," the long-haired warrior went on. "As long as we know so little of the magic of the Dark Ones, we cannot risk-we dare not risk-using the shorter path. LeCiabbeth..." He hesitated over the name. "Ciabbeth did not come?"
Zay shook his head again, and his voice was only a fragment, a splinter of bleached glass. "No."
There was long silence. Then the long-haired man said, "I'm sorry. Truly, truly, I am sorry, Zay. But there can be no more delay. Too many lives depend on it, not only the lives of those here now, but their children, and their grandchildren-all the generations of humankind who will shelter within these walls.
They will thank you, and bless your name."
The old man nodded. "And that," he murmured, "will make it better, I suppose?"
Tir's father said, "If I could do it, Zay, I would."
Zay looked up into his face, bitter, weary beyond words-Tir didn't think he'd ever seen such wormwood wryness in human eyes. "Yes," said Zay softly. "I believe you would, Dare." He got to his feet, straightened his dark robes around him, his hands fumbling. "Ciabbeth..."
"When she comes," said Dare softly, "she will thank you, too." Tir shivered as the men walked away between the crystal pillars. The cold seemed to grow on him, the cold of memory in that place, and it seemed to him that he heard someone's voice whispering, She never came. She never came. She never came.
The whispers seemed to echo from the dark beyond the room where he now sat, the impacted blackness that not even the fire's tiny light could dissipate. It seemed to him that cold flowed in from that blackness, a cold worse than the bitter chill of the frost-stricken chambers, a living cold, malicious and vile.
Footfalls that weren't really footfalls. Bitter hatred, wormwood resentment.
She never came.
A badness deep and rotted, a badness that collected in pockets in the turnings of corridors, the neat cells that no one had lived in long enough to make their homes, in the black well at the heart of the crypts that Tir knew plunged down eternally into darkness.
Fickle, wretched, cowardly whiners... The resentment was a stench imbued deep within the stone.
Ingrates. Cowards and ingrates.
From the corridor came, with the cold, a thread of whistling, a half-identifiable tune.