Ingold swung in a long pendulum swoop and fell, hard, against the side of the pit, clinging there with demons dragging at his ankles and the freezing wind raking him. Tir screamed, "Ingold!" in terror.
"I'm all right," came Ingold's voice, half drowned in the spectral howling. "I'm all right."
Beside the Icefalcon, Tir was white as a ghost; the Icefalcon pretended not to see and called down, "I know you're all right, old man, but don't hurt the chain. It's expensive."
It was very seldom that the Icefalcon-or anyone-could make Ingold laugh out loud, but that one succeeded. His laughter came ringing up out of the lightning-slashed maelstrom of the pit, followed by a soldier's epithet. The metal clanged softly against the stone as the wizard started to climb.
Wind redoubled around them in fury, ripping at the torch flames and nearly rocking the torch from Tir's hand. The Icefalcon staggered, caught the vines at the pit's edge for balance, and then pulled his bloodied hand back with a curse. Driven leaves slashed their faces, blinding them, colder and colder...
Then the wind abruptly ceased. In the stillness that followed, mist began to rise from the vines underfoot, from the fungus clumped along the walls, from the pit itself.
The Icefalcon spun, rising to his feet, sword in hand, heart hammering. "Get back from the edge of the pit, Tir," he said softly. "But don't go far from me. Old man, get up here."
In response there was only the zapping hiss of lightning below.
"Get up here!"
A shadow in the mist, forming slowly. Stringers of white hair and glabrous flesh peeking through holes in black rags; the glint of crystals... The Hand of Harilomne? The smell of him, thick as the reek of a privy years uncleaned. The shadow opened its mouth, but all that came out was a hiss.
The Icefalcon didn't dare take his eyes off him to see where Ingold might be. He heard the chain clank again, and the chill flare of lightning illuminated from below the mists that now filled the pit.
Gil had told him once that the best bet when confronted by an angry wizard was to get him talking; the Icefalcon, no conversationalist, groped madly in his mind for something to say, something to hold this spirit of insane power distracted until Ingold could arrive.
"As you see," he said, "we have not escaped you after all."
Zay's head turned. The eyes that regarded him were white pits of mindless rage.
"I wonder that you will let those others depart, the black generalissimo and the men he makes from mushrooms and filth. He does not regard you, does not even know your name."
The old face, wrinkled beyond humanity, did not alter its expression, but the mouth opened a little, showing the brown broken stumps of teeth, and he hissed again.
Then the chain clanked, and Zay's hand flashed up with reflexes a young warrior would have envied, and fire roared across the dry carpet of the floor like a drench of water hurled from a basin.
The Icefalcon grabbed Tir and dove for the half of the floor uncovered by vines, striking the rock hard and rolling. There was a clashing of chain and then Ingold's voice crying out words of ward and protection and the roll of oily heat.
Looking back, in the flaring crimson light the Icefalcon saw Ingold, standing on the lip of the pit, wreathed in fire and smoke, and before him himself: senile, filthy, reeking, drool dribbling from a toothless mouth, blue eyes blind and wandering, but the face his own.
Flame swirled in columns from the floor again, and Tir screamed in pain: spots and threads of fire burst to life all along Tir's arm, across the Icefalcon's shoulders and thighs, then quenched suddenly with the lifting of Ingold's hand.
The flames shrank to fingerlets in the vines, died to a bed of throbbing coals, though blazes continued to gutter and flicker all around the room's walls, and smoke filled the air.
A woman now stood before Ingold. Gil-Shalos, sluttish and loosemouthed and obscene.
"Zay," Ingold said patiently, though he was panting with exertion and sweat streaked his soot-grimed, blistered face. "It is you that I wish to see." He stood perilously near the edge of the pit, driven back by the flames, holding up his hand to shield his eyes.
He's holding Zay's attention, thought the Icefalcon. Holding him so I can get Tir out of here.
Looked at logically, what good that would do if Ingold were killed he couldn't imagine.
Still he calculated the route, not a good one-past Zay, along the wall where the fires still smoked and sputtered, up the stairs... Wind roared up out of the pit again, slashing at Ingold's beggarly rags, almost rocking him from his feet.
Sleet mixed with it, chips of rock, dead leaves, sparks, and stinging insects. The Icefalcon pressed Tir's face to his chest and bent down his head, blind, frozen, waiting to get the strength, to find the moment, to flee.
Trapped by the vines in the corridor outside Tir's hiding place, he had felt the power of the Keep: the cold, the icy wind, and the water that had poured down over him from the broken pipes had sapped most of his strength.
Zay's strength was endless, the strength of madness, night, cold, rage.
And in the end, flight would do no good. Keep him talking, Gil had said.
The wind increased, blackness at the world's end. The hate of three thousand years in solitary hell.
Cyclone fury that would shred flesh from bone. The Icefalcon closed his fingers hard around the vines of the floor to keep from being blown into the pit and pressed Tir to him until he thought their bones would lock.
Stillness fell. An angry whisper among the vines. The Icefalcon was aware his hands were bleeding.
In the cold black darkness images flooded into the Icefalcon's mind: the Dark Ones surrounding a camp in open country, the Keep of the Shadow looming tall and cold above a valley where three springs glinted diamond-bright in gray rock.
A wolf surprised where it fished in one of those springs. The white hard moon ringed in ice and ringed again with the huge frost-flashes of moon dogs halfway across the sky.
Men and women packing, loading food and clothing into hampers and bins. A girl in her teens pressed back against a corridor wall in the Keep, a basket of laundry in her arms and her hand clamped tight to her mouth as pale-blue lights ran along the wall into darkness. Knockings in the night.
A child crying as her bedclothes caught fire.
They had left because he had begun, slowly, to go mad. The Icefalcon suddenly understood why.
Smoke and mist funneled down on Ingold again, a black whirlwind like a dust devil through whose ragged fringes lightning flared blue and deadly. Wind and lightning drove him to the edge of the pit, wind and lightning and concentrated malice, blinding and tearing and cold.
Now was the time-Zay's mind centered on destroying the rival mage-Noon or any other of the people of the Real World would have told him to flee. But instead the Icefalcon stood up and shouted, "Zay!" at the top of his soft voice.
The howl of fire and darkness, smoke and nightmare, drowned his words.
"Zay," he cried again, pitching his throat to the cutting edge of flint, "Zay, she tried to come! Le-Ciabbeth tried to come to you!"
He hoped to his Ancestors-not that they were ever very helpful-that he had the name right.
The smoke and lightning died. The whirlwind grew still. A leaf skittered, came to rest among the dead snakeskins of the vines. Ingold, driven to his knees on the pit's edge, looked up in considerable surprise but had the good sense to say nothing.
Stillness filled the room, stillness and darkness broken only by the flickerings of the fires in the corners, the malign whisper of lightning deep in the pit.
Anger.
He felt as he felt in the summer hunting on the plains, when the sky turned green and hail slashed sideways over the grass and the long yellow-brown funnels of the cyclones began to finger silently from the clouds.