Bektis straightened his shoulders indignantly. "My Lord, even without the weaponry of the ancient ones, I am not without resources. My power is more than sufficient to clear the ice from the chasm after it has done its job."
"That," said Vair softly, "is well, sorcerer. Because I need flesh to multiply my men into an army capable of conquering Dare's Keep. And every delay increases the chances of something going awry, of that coward Gargonal abandoning his part outside the walls of the Keep or of those bitches in the South, Empress and Bishop, getting wind of my plans. The last thing they want me to have is a fortress that cannot be breached and a steady supply of food. I need not explain to you, I think, what will happen to you if they overcome us?"
The Court Mage looked away and cradled the bloodied crystals of the Hand to his breast. "No, my Lord."
"Then find the boy and find him soon. The spells you spoke of will break the information out of him quickly enough."
"Yes, my Lord."
"How soon until these new Raiders come close enough that Prinyippos can reach them?"
"From observing them in my scrying glass, my Lord, I should say that the chimes here will sound five times. On the fifth chiming, we should send out Prinyippos. It will be about the ninth hour of the day then and thus close to twilight when he leads them into the ice chasm."
"Good. Prinyippos, have a company ready to go out at that time." At least that was what the Icefalcon thought Vair said-he understood the words for company and go out and did not hear any numbers in the locative of time.
He didn't need to know that Prinyippos' words were "Yes, Lord:" The young scout all but rubbed Vair's legs and purred.
Flesh to make more warriors. Warriors to invade the Keep.
But he had the apparatus of the vat-the dethken iares-by the time he conquered Prandhays Keep. For what reason had he come north to this place? And even with hundreds of extra men, he must know the Keep's walls were impenetrable?
Tir knew something. Something that would enable Vair to break the Keep.
Bektis would find the boy, that he did not doubt. Whatever the Hand of Harilomne was doing to Bektis' powers, when he wore the thing it multiplied his own abilities a dozenfold, at least in certain situations.
Neither Hethya nor Loses His Way would be able to protect the child, and the Icefalcon had begun to understand that without the ability to return to his own body, his hours were numbered and leaking away fast.
Vair was going to trap and kill the Empty Lakes People.
Ironic, thought the Icefalcon, treading the stone corridors of the Keep of Night-easier to follow than those of Dare's Keep, at least in his bodiless form. The only reason the trap would work was because the warrior whose face Bektis knew and was at this moment reproducing for Vair's edification was, by chance, a member of that same people. The Talking Stars People or the Earthsnake People would kill the imitation warrior out of hand.
He passed through curtains of hissing, colorless squash tendril, traversed fused clumps of creeper and rock-tripe, cells packed thick with toadstools or white plate-fungus, as if in a dream, knowing no human body could go that way.
It worried him that this was growing easier, as if the bonds to his own flesh were dissolving. Demons crept through the moss like ants and tormented him with their bites and their poisons; it was harder and harder to tell himself that the pain was illusory.
He could end the pain. Sometimes he thought about it so desperately that all that kept him from dissolving was the knowledge that if he did so here in the darkness, he might not even be united with the warmth of the sun.
Only the chill of the ice-ridden night beneath the glaciers, forever. The pain was real.
Dove in the Sun stepped forth from the wall, the Dove with her chest opened and organs glistening through the smashed ribs, the Dove with blood on the wild roses twined in her sun-bright hair. "Why didn't you come back for me, o my kinsman? Why didn't you even look?"
That pain was real, too. It was hard to force himself to remember that he didn't have to stop and explain to her. As a child of the Talking Stars, she would have known, lying alone on the ledge beneath her dying horse, that her wounds were hopeless. He passed her by, and her voice followed him down the corridor.
"Why didn't you even come to hold my hand as I died?" He had no reply to that.
Then he came to a shattered black hell of frost curtains, hanging spears of ice lengthened to bars across corridors and throughout cells, hollow columns of water frozen harder than iron.
Words whispered there.
And an old man waited among cold-killed vines the thickness of a horse's neck, among translucent sheets of dribbled ice and obscene dead mushrooms.
An old man with his tattooed hands folded, as if sourceless light fell on them and left the rest of him lapped in darkness. The Icefalcon could see with the eyes of a ghost, and those eyes were blinded to the old man's face.
For some reason he knew he was ruinously old, white hair grown out shabbily around the base of the skull to a spiderweb cloak over the bent shoulders. Nails uncut for years beyond speaking twisted back on themselves, vile as the curves of the perished vines.
His teeth were not human teeth. His eyes no longer human eyes. "You came back." The voice was the glowing slime that drips from rotted meat. "You came back after all."
The Icefalcon felt the hair lift on his scalp. "I have never been in this place before, old man." Everything in him, ghost though that everything was, screamed at him: Flee. Flee. Get out of here at once.
"And they didn't tell you of me?" When the old man moved, his robes made a noise like thin paper, eroded by eons of time.
"They told me nothing, old man. Forgive me if I speak disrespect."
"Forgive you?" The old man put his head to one side, and there was something horribly wrong about the glisten of the unseen eyeball. "Forgive? I was told... I was told my name would be remembered. That I would be thanked. That I would be thanked forever."
He moved toward the Icefalcon, extending one thin arm, the crooked nails bobbing and trembling like twigs.
"I was not thanked," he whispered. "And she never came, though the way was open. The way was always open. She never came, and they all departed, all left me, after what I had done for them. And now..." He smiled. "Now that you're all back, I'm going to make sure that no one ever leaves again."
He giggled, reaching out, and into the Icefalcon's mind flashed the image of himself, his phantom consciousness, being absorbed into these black walls. Not to die, but to remain, forever, listening to the old man telling over names to himself in the frozen darkness.
Logic dictated immediate and precipitate flight, and the Icefalcon fled. Behind him he could hear the old man creaking with shrill laughter. "You think you can escape?" Glancing over his shoulder he saw the fragile form lift like a blown sheet, whirl through the air toward him, white hair swirling, skeletal arms outstretched. "You think you can escape me?"
They blew through corridors blocked with foul vegetation, past fountains knotted with ice. In one huge cell that was little more than a seething hairball of lichen and vine, three clones were struggling, fighting their way inward, not outward, at the whispered lurings of demons.
The men were weeping with fright and pain, trying to escape the leathery tendrils around them. The old man turned aside at the sight of them, laughing when the demons tried to flee.
"Not so fast, my little tender ones." He fell on them like a fast moving hawk. The demons tried to slip through the walls, and the black stone refused to let them pass.
The last the Icefalcon saw of the old man, he was holding the littlest of the demons between his two hands, eating its head while the clones wept and groaned among the bonds that clinched tighter and ever tighter around them, strangling out their lives.
In the hidden chamber on the second level, the Icefalcon's body lay wrapped in spare coats and clothing, his weapons in a pile at his side. At least they had that much sense, thought the Icefalcon, trembling with cold and exhaustion. The sight of a Wathe-forged sword, its hilt stamped with the emblems of the Guards of Gae, would have given Vair more information than he should have.