bleeding wound in his head by the remains of a small campfire, a donkey squealing and pulling its tether, and a burly, coal-black warrior of the Alketch in the process of dragging a buxom red-haired woman into the trees. In the filmy eggshell brightness of the spring afternoon the old man’s blood glared crimson, the warrior’s yellow coat in brilliant contrast to the emerald of the grass, the beryl of the close-crowding trees. The knife in the woman’s hand blinked like a mirror.
Seeing no point in making a target of himself by crossing the meadow openly, the Icefalcon ducked immediately back into the belt of hazel and chokecherry that ringed the clearing and kept to cover as he worked his way around. The woman was putting up a good fight. She was as tall as her attacker and of sturdy build, dressed as a man for travel in trousers and a padded wool jacket. Still, the man got the knife away from her, twisted her arm behind her, and seized her thick braids. The woman cried out in pain – she had not ceased to shriek throughout the encounter – and the Icefalcon simply stepped from behind an elm tree next to the struggling pair, flipped one of his several poignards into his hand, and slit the warrior’s throat.
The woman saw him a split second before he grabbed the man around the jaw to pull his head back for the kill. She screamed in what the Icefalcon considered unreasonable horror – what did she think he was going to do? – as the man’s blood soused over her breast and belly in a raw-smelling drench, and jumped away as her attacker collapsed between them. The Icefalcon had already turned, sword in hand, to scan the woods behind.
“Shut up,” he instructed. “I can’t hear anything.” A single bandit was even rarer than a single cockroach.
But there was no second attack. No sound in the woods, at least as far as he could tell over the woman’s hooting gasps.
He glanced back at her after the first quick check and pointed out, “Your companion is hurt.”
“Oh!” she cried. “Oh, Linok!” and rushed across the clearing to where the old man lay.
After looting the fallen body of weapons, the Icefalcon followed more slowly, listening, watching all around him, tallying sounds and half-guessed movements in the shadows of the trees. She’d made noise enough to have brought the armies clear from the Alketch, let alone from higher up the Vale.
He came up on her as she was dabbing clean the old man’s scalp. The cut looked ugly, blood smeared all over the round, brown, wrinkled face and matted dark in the salt-and-pepper hair. “Hethya?” moaned the old man, groping for her arm with a shaky hand.
“I’m here, Uncle. I’m all right.” Her jacket had been pulled nearly off her shoulders in the struggle, her tunic torn to the waist. She made nothing of her half-bared breasts, round and upstanding and white as suet puddings under the terra-cotta spill of her hair. The Icefalcon put her age at perhaps thirty, a few years older than himself. She had a red full mouth and the porcelain-fair skin of the Felwoods and an easterner’s way with vowels as well.
“We’re all right for now,” corrected the Icefalcon, still listening to the too silent woods. “Your visitor’s companions will be along at any time. How is it with you, old man? Can you back the donkey?”
“I – I believe so.” Old Linok had the well-bred speech of the capital at Gae, before the Dark Ones destroyed it along with most of the rest of the works of humankind. He sat up, clinging to his niece’s fleshy shoulder for support. “What happened? I don’t …”
“Your niece will explain on the way to the Keep.” Impossible that the bandit’s companions weren’t only minutes away – the Talking Stars People would have already left the old man behind. The Icefalcon had with some difficulty been taught to follow the dictates of civilized people about those too infirm to look out for themselves, but he still didn’t understand them. “Get him on the beast and don’t be a fool, woman,” he added, when she turned to gather up bedrolls and packs. “The bandits will have those one way or the other.”
“But we carried those clear from …”
“No, no, Hethya, the boy is right.” Linok struggled with maddening slowness to get himself upright. “There will be others. Of course there will be others.”
The Icefalcon already had the donkey over to them. He reminded himself that among civilized people it was not done to grab old men by the backs of their clothing and heave them onto pack-beasts like killed meat, no matter how much more efficient such a procedure might be for a speedy getaway. His sword was in his right hand, his attention returning again and again to the place in the trees where the birds were silent – somewhere between the big elm with the lightning scar and the three smaller elms close together.
“You’re from the fortress, aren’t you, young man?”
“Be silent, both of you.” He was too preoccupied with trying to track potential attackers by sound to inquire where else they thought he might have emerged from, if not the monstrous black block of the Keep, whose obsidian-smooth walls were visible from nearly any point in the lower part of the Vale.
They were there. He felt their presence as one sometimes felt the spirits of holy places, felt their eyes on the little party with all the training of his upbringing in the Real World, the empty lands beyond the mountains. He’d killed their companion and was in charge of two and perhaps three sets of weapons and a donkey, far rarer than gold in this devastated world. He and his companions were outnumbered …
So why didn’t they attack?
And why didn’t these two idiots he’d rescued shut up?
But they didn’t. And the bandits kept to the trees, invisible and unheard. As far as the Icefalcon could tell, they didn’t even follow them as they moved from clearing to clearing down the ice-fed stream, until they came to the open land that surrounded the Keep of Dare, the last refuge of humankind between the Great Brown River and the glacier-rimmed horns of the Snowy Mountains, somber towers blotting the western sky.
“You were fools not to come to the Keep when first you entered the valley.” The Icefalcon glanced back at them, man and woman, for the first time taking his eyes from the surrounding woods. “Where were you bound? You must have seen it.”
“Now listen here, boy-o,” began the woman Hethya, apparently indignant at being called a fool, though the Icefalcon would have been hard put to devise another term that covered the situation.
“No, niece, he’s right,” Linok sighed. “He’s right.” He straightened his bowed back – he was a little, round-faced, stooped man, with blunt-fingered hands clinging to the ass’ short-cropped mane – and looked back at the Icefalcon walking behind them, long, curved killing-sword still in hand.
“A White Raider, aren’t you, my boy? And clothed as one of the King’s Guard of Gae.”
Civilized people, the Icefalcon had discovered, loved to state the obvious. In the improbable event that a man of the Realm of Darwath – and they were a dark-haired people on the whole – had been flax-blond and grew his hair long enough to braid, it was still unlikely in the extreme that he’d have had dried hand bones plaited into the ends of it.
The bones were those of a man who had poisoned the Icefalcon, stolen his horse and the amulet that guarded him from the Dark Ones, and left him to die. The Icefalcon saw no reason for civilized people to be shocked about this, but mostly they were.
“Had you journeyed as far as we have, young man,” Linok went on, shaking a finger at him, “in such lands as the Felwoods have become in the seven years since the coming of the Dark, you’d beware of anyone and anything you don’t know, too. Cities that once were bywords of law and hospitality are nests now of ghouls and thieves …”
His gestures widened to dramatic sweeps, like an actor declaiming. The Icefalcon wondered if Linok sincerely believed that the Icefalcon had somehow missed these events or if he simply liked to hear himself talk, a failing common among civilized people who didn’t have to deal with the possibility of death by starvation or violence as the result of ill-timed sound.
“The very Keeps