At the next crossing of the corridors he stopped again, flattened into the shadows. Men filled the passageway before him, coughing in the smoke. Torch-glare caught bald heads, naked faces, eyes staring glazedly at the bent sweaty necks of the men in front of them. Someone yelled an oath in the ha'al tongue and the men stopped, jostling, and began to mill-fire ahead?
The Icefalcon doubled back, sought yet another way around. Fire was spreading. Grown by the stubborn, angry magic of the Keep of the Shadow, the gourds and bean plants, the groundnuts and potatoes, had penetrated every crypt, every level, even ventilation shafts and water pipes.
Some still lived, knotted in spongy symbiosis with fungus, lichen, moss, and toadstools, and slowed the fire's spread while emitting suffocating billows of smoke; in other places wizened vines made fuses along which the flames raced faster than a man could run.
Twice and thrice the Icefalcon was stopped by walls of flame, hearing behind him all the while the panicked shouting, the bellowed orders of Vair's army as it, too, sought a way to the transport chambers that now were their only hope of egress and life.
The Icefalcon wondered if Ingold would make it through the blaze to the round chamber where the spells of the transporter could be worked-wondered if Zay had spoken the truth to the old man in the end or had decided to play one last devil's trick on them all.
Which, he reflected, would be just like the old bastard.
A corridor lay open before him, walled both sides in fire as the vines along each wall burst into flame-roofed with fire as the fungal mat overhead ignited.
Flakes of flame snowed on the Icefalcon as he wrapped his scarf over his mouth and nose and ran, praying the passageway wouldn't end in another incendiary wall.
Behind him he heard someone yell. Of course, he thought. They think I know the way. Let's hope they're right.
"Man, we'd given you over for dead!" Hethya sprang to her feet. "We were giving you another few minutes..."
The Icefalcon pitched gasping through the vestibule door and whipped sword from sheath-"They're behind me!"-and turned even as he cried the words to slice the first man through the door behind him.
More yelling, more milling in the vestibule-weapons thrusting through the narrow opening; seize, slash, block. Blood gouting out in streams and a severed hand flying against the wall like a swatted bug.
"Mother of Tears!" cried Hethya, and Loses His Way demanded, "Where's the boy?"
"With Ingold" was all the Icefalcon had time to rasp as a halberd opened his leather sleeve.
"He's safe?"
"God, no," panted the Icefalcon. "Don't be a fool."
"Oh," she said, evidently realizing the absurdity of the word in the circumstances. "Sorry. If you've got any brilliant strategies at this point, boy-o," she added a moment later, "how about trottin' 'em out?"
Smoke poured from the vestibule, thicker and rank with the smell of new burning. The air was like an oven, the floor underfoot hot through his boot-soles.
"A curtain wall would help," panted the Icefalcon. "Machiolations. Boiling oil." It was impossible to breathe.
"We'd have that if we hadn't eaten all the pemmican."
The Icefalcon sliced hard at the next head to appear through the doorway, had his blade intercepted on a two-pronged halberd. The inexperience of the clone that wielded it was the only thing that saved the Icefalcon from having the weapon wrenched out of his hand; he was able to slip in under the shaft and slash the man's arm with his dagger, then pull free. Instinct made him keep low-Hethya's swordswipe at the next enemy would have taken his ear off.
"Waste of good food," he said.
The ventilation shafts gushed nothing but smoke now; the Icefalcon felt his skin blister in the scorching air.
"Can we ourselves use the Far-Walker?" asked Loses His Way. Blood streamed from his chest and arm where a lance had pierced. "Get out of this place and warn the people of the Keep?"
"We can't activate it." The Icefalcon hacked again with his sword, his arms like lead. "It takes a Wise One to do that." Blood spouted over him from the man whose throat he opened; someone in the rear rank pulled the dying clone aside.
"And that's what Ingold's gone to do?"
"Don't be a fool, woman," snapped the Icefalcon. "The last thing we need is to open the way into the Keep with Vair right outside."
"Well, I've no intention of roasting to death to save your lot!"
"You think Vair will spare you?"
There was an outcry from deeper within the vestibule, beyond the heads of the crowding clones. The clones themselves-hundreds of them-were barefoot, scantily clothed, their skin patchy and odd looking, greenish even in the livid light, or the slick, vile orange of the monster toadstools.
Now and then during the confused struggle in the doorway the Icefalcon had the impression that one or more would suddenly go berserk in the vestibule, turning on his companions, slaying and being slain or rushing out into the bellowing furnace of the corridor.
Then a voice cried beyond the press, "Put down your weapons!" The clones in the doorway ceased to fight, fell back untidily to show the defenders Vair na-Chandros, his white tabard soot-blackened, a tulwar in his hand. Bektis stood beside him, smutted, filthy, gasping, holding Tir against him with one hand, a silver knife at his throat.
Vair's teeth glinted under pulled-back lips. "Get back," he said. "Let us pass or the boy dies."
"I thought you said," began Hethya furiously, and the Icefalcon said, "Shut up!"
His eyes met Tir's. The boy's were stretched with panic under a mask of smoke and blood. Anything could go wrong in any hunt, thought the Icefalcon. All it would take, in that maelstrom of smoke and heat and darkness, would be for Ingold to lose his grip on Tir's hand; for the old man to have been overcome by fumes, or fire summoned by Bektis, or some trap in the Keep itself.
Bektis was weakened and in no good case to fight, but then Ingold wasn't, either. The Court Mage would have found it easy to lure the child to him in the confusion.
The Icefalcon stepped back. Tir screamed, "Don't let them! Let me die, I order you! Please! Don't let..."
Bektis shook him, hard. "Be still, boy."
The Icefalcon retreated, sword pointing out, Hethya and Loses His Way closing in on both sides. Vair stepped through the vestibule door, clones surrounding him, their stupid gazes wandering. Some were beginning to rot already, stinking appallingly above the calcifying heat.
"Good." Vair's eye traveled calculatingly around the big chamber, seeking other defenders, finding none.
"Very good. Prandhays Keep has been broken, time and again through the years; its walls would never stand against the Devices that harridan wife of mine, Yori-Ezrikos, now commands. But Renweth..."
He smiled under his dark mustache, though he was panting for breath in the heat. "Renweth is another story. Whatever weapons we find there, Bektis, in Renweth we will have a base to raise and provision the force I will need to march south and retake what is rightfully mine. And who knows what Devices are hidden there."
His lips parted in an ugly grin as he thought of the twelve-year old girl he had raped on their wedding night, the girl who had hated him so much that she'd murdered the son she bore him. And the relish in that grin, the vile amusement, made the Icefalcon realize that by comparison Blue Child's ferocity was as innocent as summer rain.
"I look forward, Bektis, to seeing Yori-Ezrikos again. Is the way open, Bektis?"
The mage edged at his heels, long white fingers closed around Tir's jaw in a strangling grip. "The way is open, my Lord. Behold."
He lifted the hand that held the silver knife and made a pass in the air, speaking words that sounded nothing like Hethya's made-up tongue of the Times Before. Behind him the columns of crystal, ranked room to room in a line, flickered with cores of greenish light, and threads of starshine seemed to race along the floor between them.