"And they left him," murmured Ingold. "They left him alone."
The Icefalcon frowned. "He must have known why."
"Must he?" Ingold widened his eyes at the young man. "Why do you say that? When someone hurts you-hurts you very badly-do you ever really derive any consolation from the knowledge that they were only acting as they felt driven to act?"
The Icefalcon saw again Blue Child's eyes meeting his across the longhouse fire. Sometimes the Wise were too damned perceptive.
"And he has been here," he said. "All this time."
His mind returned to the eclipsed shadow, the wobbling fingernails, the vile glimmer of unseen eyes. He thought about the evil slow-growing plants that choked the corridors and chambers, about the spots of deadly cold. It was as if, he thought, they were locked in the body of a beast long dead, wandering in a vast, stilled, ebon heart. "Was this Far-Walker, this transporter, ever used?"
Ingold shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "If it was, it fell out of general use long ago. Certainly no record of it survived, not even in the archives of the City of Wizards."
He wrapped up the rest of the potato cakes and stowed them in his knapsack, which he shoved into a corner. He had always, thought the Icefalcon, looked more like a beggar than a wizard, except for the sword he belted at his hip. And indeed, within this chamber where the Runes of Silence were written he was not a wizard, only a very tough old man.
He settled now by the fire and extended his palms to the warmth. "I've never seen mention of it in any of the record crystals, either, and most of those were made well before the coming of the Dark Ones.
Perhaps it was originated by the mages of that time but in the end considered too dangerous. The Keeps depended for their safety on absolute impregnability."
"One set of Doors, and those locked and guarded with the most stringent of magical wards. And nothing else, as I knew to my sorrow, from those nights sleeping cold on the mountainside and stealing food from Vair's troops to stay alive. Fairly good food, too, if you knew which mess to visit-though one produced meals that tasted excellent but made me truly ill afterward."
"Ah, that'll be me cousin Athkum." Hethya nodded. "They took him on as a cook-as a slave, of course.
Cousin Athkum was another of me mother's pupils, though not to magic born. He was a dab hand at herbology and healing brews, though. I'd be surprised," she added casually, "if any of them live much past the end of summer."
"Good heavens," Ingold murmured, alarmed.
"You probably didn't take enough to hurt you." Hethya shrugged. "By the time enough accumulates in their systems-he says browncap mushrooms are the best-he'll be far away. It isn't as if they didn't ask for it."
"I suppose not." Ingold shuddered a little. "I shall take steps to invoke spells of healing on myself the moment I'm out of this room. As for the transporter, it may only have been an experiment and never used at all. In any case, all knowledge of it was lost at the Renweth end. This may have been deliberate, for the archways of crystal that seem to have demarcated its resonating chambers were bricked up and plastered over. Brycothis directed Ilae to it, of course, but she could make no sense of the images she placed in her mind. It was only when you, Icefalcon, came through the wall as I sat meditating there that I realized how the function and shape of the room had to have been changed."
"Can we go back?"
"We can," Ingold said slowly. "It would be best if we can do it without showing Vair where the transporter lies. I'm fairly good at covering my tracks, but magic won't work in the chamber itself nor in several of the corridors round about it, and I'm not sure that four adults could pass those corridors again without leaving traces that could be deciphered in the frost and the vines. That's what he wanted you for, wasn't it, Tir?"
The boy nodded. "I had to get away," he said. "I couldn't let him-I never will let him. He's evil. He's going to make more soldiers and take them to the Keep..."
"Out of what, pray?" demanded Hethya scornfully. "Mushrooms?"
"The Empty Lakes People," said the Icefalcon.
The others looked at him, silent with shock.
"They're on their way here, two hundred of them," he said. "I'm sorry. I..." He shook his head, angry at himself for not speaking of it before. Like a single black comb on the table of crystal needles, like a dream about Bektis summoning light, the conversation had slipped away in clouds of demon-laughter and pain.
"Breaks Noses leads them. After four more chimes of the clock Bektis will lay a glamour upon Crested Egret-Prinyippos-so that he can lead them into a crevasse in the ice, where they will be killed by an avalanche. Vair will use their flesh as he used the flesh of the sheep, he says, to manufacture ten or twelve or twenty warriors, where before he could only call forth four from his iron vat."
"And with that many warriors to assist in the search," he added reasonably, "stupid as they are, it can only be a matter of time before they locate the transporter without the help of our lad Scarface here."
Hethya said, "T'cha!" in offense, and slapped at his foot, which was the nearest part of his body to her.
But the Icefalcon saw Tir's fleet shy grin and the duck of his head, as the deformity and shame transformed to something men envied, the mark of battle survived.
"And where," Ingold asked gently, "does Vair keep this vat of his?"
Three corridors away from the dark triple cell beside the Aisle, Ingold paused and closed his eyes, dreaming or meditating or doing whatever it was that Wise Ones did. When they turned the final corridor, it was to discover the door guards of the cell gone.
By the muddy boot prints there had been two of them this time, Vair evidently having learned a lesson about single guards in that corridor.
The Icefalcon felt a twinge of irritated envy toward people who didn't have to step through a slashing fire-fall of pain in order to send the clones on some sort of wild-goose chase to the farthest latrine in the Keep, but he put it aside as illogical.
Ingold paid for his powers in other ways.
Neither the Icefalcon nor Loses His Way breathed a sound as they traversed the short stretch of corridor and Ingold slipped back the door bolt. The wizard paused on the threshold, like a cat balking at the entry to a haunted room.
Then he stepped in, moving with a wariness that made the Icefalcon uneasy. Anything that scared Ingold Inglorion was indeed to be avoided at all costs.
Whatever it was, he noticed that Loses His Way didn't seem to sense anything amiss. Saving, of course, the smell of old blood about the dethken iares, which was almost drowned in the overwhelming stink of the clones' corpses. Creepers had already grown through the doorway, probing into the brown mess.
The chieftain muttered, "Pfaugh! This is ugly hunting. He will make warriors of those?"
"Of their flesh, yes." Ingold was clearly fascinated. "I've read very old accounts of this procedure, though its use was lost with the technology of this apparatus. These" he lifted the crystal needles from their table, turning them to the dim feather of magelight that floated above his head, angled the glass beads on their heads to catch some gleam within them-"went into the nerve points of the body, the crystal into the head and shoulders, the iron into the limbs, the gold into the abdomen and organs."
He moved from object to object, running his heavy-muscled hands along the twisted glass and iron of the arches surmounting the tub and the visceral-looking glass tubes.
"The power was aligned through the canopy, though they've got it sourced wrong. Those two crystals at the foot belong on either side of this sphere here, in an equilateral triangle. Once that was done the power was self-aligning, and a circle chalked round the whole would close the circuit and start the process working. I wonder where Bektis learned of it?"
"Wherever he found that gem he wears on his hand, belike," said the Icefalcon. "He calls it the Hand of Harilomne. It grants him greater power than ever I saw him use."