Her eyebrows, coppery in the glinting amber light, pulled together. "Two accounts, they was, and both of 'em full of fightin' off the Dark with torches and wizards puttin' up flares all round the camps, and such, though we had no way of knowin' how far after the coming of the Dark those were written, nor who'd been at 'em and changed 'em around since. People do, you know," she added. "Mum found two or three times, where she'd have a tale written one way, and then another one fifty or so years later, where somebody'd changed it."
"That," the Icefalcon said haughtily, "is because civilized people make up so many stories to amuse themselves that they do not understand truth when they encounter it. Among my people it would not have happened."
"Among your people all you talk of is animal tracks and the weather, I've heard."
"Of a certainty." Loses His Way looked wounded by the distaste in her voice. "How else can you know where to hunt, or what the pasturage for your horses will be, or where the game will graze did you not know where the rains have been in the spring? How can you tell which herds travel where unless you know the tracks of their leaders and where they went last spring and the spring before? And besides," he added, "they are friends, those leaders. The herd of Broken Horn, the great rhinoceros of the Ten Muddy Streams Country, I have followed his tracks for fifteen years now. I know where he is likely to lead his people in seasons when the rain comes before the Moon of Blossoms and when it doesn't fall in the Twisted Hills Country until after the New Moon of Fawns."
"Be that as it may," said Ingold, turning encouragingly to Hethya. He had experience with the peoples of the Real World once they got on the subject of weather and animal tracks.
"Be that as it may," she said. "I cribbed pretty heavy off those travel stories, and Vair, he never could get around me."
"And I take it," said Ingold, his deep, scratchy voice a little dreamy, "that one of those two travel tales concerned this place."
"Aye," Hethya said softly. "Aye, it did that."
Far off a man's voice could be heard shouting nonsense words, or perhaps crying out in another tongue.
Ingold lifted his head, blue eyes wary under eyelids marked with tiny, hooked, vicious scars; listening.
Sorting sound from sound, as mages did, sorting the darkness with his mind.
The Icefalcon thought of those endless hallways stretching away into shadow, the chambers glimpsed in confusing dreams, rustling with lubberly vegetation that crept with demons, into which men bored stubbornly, stupidly, working their way inward, not out.
I will eat them all.
His memory had curious gaps in it, but some images were branded into his consciousness: an old man gripping a struggling demon between his hands, grinning as he tore chunks of its glowing, plasmic pseudoflesh with his misshapen teeth and drank of its life.
The Keep was coming to life.
There was something he was forgetting. Something he'd heard. Bektis cradling blood and jewels to his breast. Prinyippos preening himself. Vair...
You think you can escape?
"I couldn't say I'd been one of them as had left this place, see," Hethya went on after a moment, "because I didn't know how long after the coming of the Dark that was. And I didn't know what Bektis knew. But Bektis already knew that this place had been left, for whatever reason: left standin' empty, he said, and the people all just walked out and shut the doors behind 'em. God knows why."
"I can guess," said Ingold. "We came very close to it ourselves a few years ago-leaving Renweth, I mean.
An ice storm killed all the stock and most of the food plants. This far north, with the Ice advancing, it was bound to happen. Or maybe there was sickness."
The Icefalcon sat up a little, his back propped against the wall, his sword near his hand-he was never completely comfortable unless his sword was near his hand and he had a dagger where he could get to it fast-and accepted another potato cake. In the back of his mind a name tugged at him, a half-forgotten vision of a warrior and a child. "Who was the old man?"
"Zay." Tir looked up, a little surprised that none of them knew, none of them remembered. "His name is Zay."
Once Hethya spoke of it, Tir recalled very clearly the caravans from the Keep of the Shadow straggling into Renweth Vale over Sarda Pass. He didn't remember whose memory it was. The glaciers were low on the mountains, though not as low as they were nowadays. The mountains themselves looked different, waterfalls down bare rockfaces where trees grew now.
The air was very cold. He remembered how his breath-that other boy's breath-smoked and his fingertips hurt within his gray fur gloves. He remembered how few they were, only handfuls of women and a couple of children. The men had all perished, victims of the Dark.
He did know that whoever it was who had originally seen this emigration had known that these were the people from the Keep of Tiyomis who didn't know about Zay. He-whoever he was-could not remember all those other little boys, all those other young men, whose glimpsed recollections lurked in Tir's mind.
He, whoever he was, had been untroubled by the nightmares of acid-blood stink on the wind, the dreams of driving an ax home into another man's helmeted skull on the field of shouting battle, the sudden terrors of attempted murders long past: a happy and thoughtless young man.
He hadn't known about Brycothis, either.
Tir said, "Zay was like Brycothis. He was one of the wizards who raised the Keeps."
He spoke from the shelter of Ingold's arm, tucked beneath the old man's mantle like a chick under its mother's wing. Clinging to the old man, delirious with relief at the familiar smells of wood smoke and soap, of chemicals and herbs; the smells of the Keep.
After the first hysterical hugging, he'd stepped back, knowing a wizard needed space to work in. But he'd clung to the old man's robe when Ingold went out into the corridor again, down to another cell to work the spells to summon the Icefalcon back to his body, spells that couldn't be worked in the Silent room.
He'd had to bite his lip and then his hand to keep from speaking. At last, when Ingold rose from the Icefalcon's side, wiping his face, Tir had whispered, "Is Rudy okay?"
"Rudy is well." Ingold had ruffled Tir's black hair as he said it; there was no lie in the blue eyes. "I worked a healing magic on him as soon as I entered the Keep, before coming here. He's weak-he was badly hurt-but he will recover. The first thing he did when he woke was ask after you. Your mother is taking care of him and praying every night for your safety."
So his mother was all right, too. He wanted to kick Vair for lying.
No, he thought. He wanted to... There were other things, adult things, evil things, that he wanted to do to Vair. Things that frightened him, turned him sick even to consider.
He pressed his face to Ingold's side and tried to push the thoughts away, to look aside from those dark places where others before him had looked.
Ingold was here. Everything was going to be all right.
"Brycothis told the other mages about-about entering into the Keeps," he said after a time. "About becoming part of the heart of the Keep. Giving up their bodies, and their lives, so their magic would link the Keeps with the magic of the earth and the stars forever. Some other wizard was going to do it...
Fyanin? Fy-something. But he died on the way, when the Dark attacked them at that hill where we were."
"There were a lot of Keeps," he went on, looking from face to face of these people who surrounded him, these people he loved-even Loses His Way, who had scared him at first.
"But there weren't a lot of mages. The bad king killed them. And some of them were bad themselves.
And a lot of them they couldn't spare because they needed them to fight the Dark. But Zay rode north with... I think with Dare of Renweth... and Fyanach because Zay was from the North, from the Valley of Shilgae, which was real rich then. They were his people. He was their guardian."