"What is it?" whispered Loses His Way, seeing Tir flinch.
"That's where they put the needles in," the boy replied in a strained undervoice. "When they make the tethyn."
"They are the map of the body, the sources of its energies. Anything can be used for evil as well as good, Little King."
In the corridors far off the chime spoke, and once the Icefalcon heard the rustle of hide-shod feet, two or three turnings away, and a mutter of scared voices. But they faded-evidently the ventilation in this chamber was good enough that the smell of the smoke did not carry-and the dense silence returned, thicker, it seemed, than before.
Hethya never dropped into sleep. The Icefalcon sensed her mind always working, dragged away to one course or another despite the discipline-which, he guessed, she had never practiced as the Wise Ones practiced it.
In the corridor the vines rustled, a sighing of movement, though there was no wind.
You think you can escape?
"What was that?" Hethya's eyes popped open.
Tir whispered, "The old man."
Loses His Way made a move toward the fire.
"Don't be an ass," breathed Hethya, her hand on his wrist. "He'll see in the dark."
The warchief was on his feet already, drew his sword, stepped to the doorway, a bearlike bulk in the gloom.
"Out the back," said Hethya. "We can..."
"We can't leave the Icefalcon." Tir was on his feet, too, trembling like a leaf in a winter storm.
"For pity's sake, laddie... "
"He's a Guard," said Tir. "I'm his lord. I can't."
Hethya made a move back toward him. "Too late," murmured Loses His Way, firelight tracing the blade's edge as it lifted to strike. "Can you see him? White hair, like a ghost in midnight."
Silence flowed out of the dark of the corridor, a long thinking silence, palpable as the ever-thickening cold. Far off a demon bobbed, backlighting the spiderweb of white hair, the dark shape cloaked in magic. Somewhere a voice whispered, thin and envenomed with rotting hate.
There was another rustle, sharp as the hiss of a snake.
Then two soft swift steps, a dark bulk emerging from darkness... A muffled curse, and Ingold Inglorion threw himself through the door, white hair disheveled and drawn sword flickering with pale light.
He rolled under Loses His Way's strike and turned, panting, to stand for a moment in the doorway, facing out into the haunted abyss.
For a moment it seemed that the shadows reached out to him, surrounded him, smothering and evil...
Then it seemed that something altered, shifted, and there was only darkness again.
"Dratted plants." Ingold turned; his voice was like flawed bronze, brown velvet, and rust, unmistakable.
"To think I once liked salad. Miss Hethya-or should I say Lady Oale Niu-I do hope you have something with which to make tea."
Chapter 18
"It was you that I saw." The Icefalcon pulled the thick mammoth-wool coat closer and experimentally flexed his hands. Though this part of the Keep wasn't noticeably cold, he could not stop shivering. It seemed to him that he would never be warm again. "In the chamber with the crystal pillars-last night? The night before?"
In the dark of this place it was difficult enough to keep track of time, even without the nightmare of suffocation, cold, demons, and terror. An echo of pain remained, a phantom imprint burned in his mind.
Every few minutes he would feel his own arms again, not trusting himself to believe that there was flesh over the bone.
"That was me." Ingold dug into one of the packets of food he'd brought in his knapsack, which he and Loses His Way had retrieved from the corridor while the Icefalcon, numb, dizzy, and feeling like a piece of very old driftwood on a beach, lay staring at the ocher firelight patterns on the ceiling, blinking now and then and rejoicing obscurely in the friction of a real eyelid over a real eye. "Have a cake."
The old man extended a potato cake to him. The Icefalcon devoured it ravenously and immediately felt queasy at the revival of digestive organs. He wasn't about to say so, however. He was the Icefalcon-and food was food.
"You might have informed me," said the Icefalcon, "that you'd followed us after all. Your presence would have been useful in any number of instances."
"I'm very sure it would have been," Ingold replied soothingly.
"I take it your interesting little accounts of the Siege of Renweth were fabricated from reports sent to you by Ilae and Wend?"
"By no means." The wizard look a bite of dried apricot-apricots grew well in the Keep's crypts, along with grapes, cherries, and several varieties of nuts. Other than the usual cuts and scratches gained from cross-country travel and sleeping rough, and a bandage around one hand that the Icefalcon remembered from his vision in the pillared chamber, Ingold did not seem much the worse for wear: shabby and unprepossessing as an old boot and several times tougher.
"Four days ago-which was the last time your sister spoke to me-I was in the Vale of Renweth, readying the latest of my half-dozen attempts to draw off General Gargonal's troops long enough to let me slip through the Doors. That one succeeded, I'm pleased to say-it's quite surprising what men will believe if you take them off guard in the middle of the afternoon. When you saw me, I was in one of the laundry rooms in the Royal Sector, specifically, the chamber Brycothis designated, or seemed to designate, as the Renweth end of what Gil refers to as a transporter."
"Surely you knew it had to be something of the kind," he added, seeing the Icefalcon's expression of startled enlightenment. Gil had told a number of tales that involved transporters.
"Vair na-Chandros is many things, but he isn't a fool. Of course the only reason he would take such a troublesome journey would be if he thought there was a way from here straight into Dare's Keep. Even with the Hand of Harilomne, Bektis couldn't have overpowered Ilae, Rudy, and Wend together, and the wards on the Arrow River Road were strong enough to have warned us of the army's approach in spite of all Bektis might do."
Ingold extended his hands gratefully to the fire. "I guessed as soon as Wend told me Tir had been kidnapped that it had to be something of the sort, and Cold Death's information only confirmed my suspicions. Vair sought such a thing at Prandhays first, didn't he, Hethya?"
"I don't know what he was after seeking at Prandhays." Hethya, still sitting in the circle of Loses His Way's arm, raised her chin from her fists. She had been staring dully at and past the cell's obsidian wall, as if defeated or expecting punishment; there was a questioning look as she met the wizard's bright-blue gaze.
Whatever she saw in Ingold's eyes must have encouraged her, for she sat up a little straighter and said,
"That Bektis, he went through every stick and stitch of Mother's scrolls-dragged 'em all down and spent all the winter at 'em, the ones she'd never known the tongues of-while Vair and Bektis hauled me out of me cell every couple of days and asked me this and that, and me never knowin' what it was they wanted to hear or what they'd do to me if they didn't get it."
Her nostrils flared, and she fell silent again, the twist in her lips a line of ugly memories.
"Now you speak of it, they did ask me about travel between Keeps-they asked Oale Niu, that is-and I kept sayin' there wasn't much, there wasn't much. Stands to reason, you see."
She shrugged and took another bite from the dried fruit that ingold had passed all around. "You'd never want to get farther than you could find shelter at sunset. I would have said, 'None at all,' but Mother did find some pretty old scrolls of what she said looked like copies of copies of things from far, far back, talkin' of travel, so there must have been some. You'd never have got me out."