was a fool,” said the Icefalcon.
It didn’t take them long to cut Bektis’ tracks. Snow still lay thin where the shadows of the Hammerking mountain fell on the trail, and the prints of the old man’s boots were there, long and narrow, with the heel and nail-work characteristic of Alketch bootmaking. Prints that had to be Hethya’s mingled with the wizard’s, along with the marks of a second donkey, and the three identical bandits with hide wrapped around their feet.
“Where’s Tir?” Rudy held his staff close to the sparkling ground. The magelight playing around the pronged metal crescent at its tip glittered on the crisp edges of the new prints.
“On a donkey.” Gil forestalled the Icefalcon’s reply. Night wind coming down cold off the glacier tore long wisps of her smoke-black hair where it escaped from the leather cap she wore. “We’re lucky the herdkids were just bringing in the horses from pasture when Bektis was getting ready to get out of there, or we’d have lost a couple for sure.” She bore a lantern and a firepouch like the Icefalcon’s, though the lantern was dark; like the Icefalcon, Gil believed in never making assumptions about who she’d be walking with or what she might need.
Some way farther, they saw Tir’s tracks where he’d gotten off the donkey to relieve himself behind a boulder.
“Are they keeping a guard on him?” The Icefalcon scanned the ground by the witchlight’s glow, seeking other tracks near the small boot prints, the little puddle of frozen urine.
“My guess is Bektis has an illusion on him.” In the bluish witchlight Gil’s thin face, scarred across cheek and jaw, was impassive, her gray eyes steely-cold. “He probably thinks Rudy’s with him and that everything’s okay.”
Rudy cursed. He’d been silent most of the way up the glacis, but the Icefalcon knew that the Prince was like a son to the young wizard and that Alde would be frantic with anxiety for her child.
Winds blew down the peaks, pregnant with the scent of coming snow. Not unusual for this time of year, reflected the Icefalcon bitterly, but too useful to a Wise One fleeing over the pass to be accidental.
“I should have known him,” he said grimly, “long before they reached the Keep.”
Gil regarded him in surprise. “How could you?” she asked. “Wend and Ilae – even Rudy – didn’t see through the illusion. I didn’t, and I saw him just two years ago in Khirsrit.”
“Neither Wend nor Ilae ever saw him before the Wizards Corps was organized for the war against the Dark.” He moved off again, leaning a little against the iron hammer of the wind, a bleached, silent-moving animal in the wild dark. “Nor did you, or Rudy, know him much longer. Not to know his voice, or his manner of movement. Not to recognize the way in which he speaks. As court mage to Lady Alde’s brother he was about the palace from the time of my coming there. I knew him well. And in any case,” he added dryly, realizing too late yet another truth, “why would they have camped for the night within five miles of the Keep they claimed to be seeking? I should have recognized a fakement when I saw one.”
“Bektis is a wizard,” retorted Gil. “It’s his job to deceive. Don’t be so hard on yourself.” She tucked her hands under her armpits, cold despite the gloves she wore. She was a thin woman, all bone and leather; cold until you saw her smile. Many of the Guards had affairs with the women of the Keep, the weavers and brewers and leather workers and those who tended the hydroponics gardens. The Icefalcon’s affairs, when he had them, tended to be with women in the Guards or in the military companies of the other Keep Lords. At one time he had considered Gil, though it had been obvious to him from the first that her heart was given elsewhere. His only serious love, many years ago, had been so also, and this time he had not deceived himself.
Now he returned her gaze with some surprise. “I speak only truth,” he said. “Had I gone about my business and left these people to their own devices, the Keep would not now be in danger of losing its link with the memories of its Ancestors.”
The pass had grown steeper, Gil and Rudy falling behind the Icefalcon’s swifter strides, though Rudy was tough, as most wizards were, and Gil a proven warrior. From the top of the boulder-strewn slope the pass ascended, a narrowing corridor of gray-black cliff and blacker trees, losing itself in night. Wind bellowed in the pines and all the world smelled of snow, hard spinning granules of it flying through the white circle of the staff’s light. The ki of Sarda Pass were said to be capricious, malignant, and stern, hating equally mud-diggers and the People of the Real World.
Rudy propped his staff against a juniper in a boulder’s shelter and fumbled through the slits in his overmantle to get to the pockets of his vest. Carefully – his hands awkward because of his gloves – he drew out the slip of amethyst that served him for a scrying stone and tilted it back and forth a little until the light of his staff caught in its central facet.
“Wend?” he said. “Wend, can you hear me?”
Watching shamans and Wise Ones communicate always reminded the Icefalcon vaguely of the games children played. Evidently the priest-wizard replied, speaking in Rudy’s mind, for after a time Rudy said, “Look, we’ve found Tir’s tracks. Linok and Hethya took him. Linok put a spell of some kind on him to get him to go with them. The Icefalcon says Linok is actually Bektis, and, you know, looking back I think he’s right.”
There was a pause, occupied, the Icefalcon presumed, by Brother Wend’s exclamations of astonishment – useless in the circumstances. Spits of snow stung his cheek.
“Tell Minalde what’s going on.” Rudy scrubbed a nervous hand over his face. His profile, a little craggy with the bump of an old break in his nose, cut blue-black against the witchlight, flat white triangles of which reflected in his eyes.
“Tell her he seems to be okay. Whatever they want him for, it isn’t to kill him, or they’d have done it already. They’re taking him over Sarda Pass and calling down a storm to close the pass behind them.”
The Icefalcon could well imagine Minalde’s reaction to that information. She loved both her children with a passionate ferocity: he clearly recalled, during the last desperate stand against the Dark Ones in the palace at Gae, her holding Ingold against a wall, the tip of some dead man’s sword pressed against the wizard’s breast, crying that she’d kill him if he did not save her child’s life.
Bektis did well, he thought, to summon the anger of the snows. It was certain that nothing less would stop her.
“Gil and the Icefalcon are with me,” Rudy went on. “We’re going to try to overtake them and hold them if we can. Tell her to get Janus and a party of Guards out after us ASAP.”
He used a colloquial shortening of the phrase as soon as possible transliterated from their outland tongue – the outland trick of using the initial letters of each word in a phrase to represent the phrase itself was one that was creeping steadily into the Wathe as well.
“Tell her not to worry.” Another foolishness, in the Icefalcon’s opinion. “We’ll bring him back.”
Given that Rudy was a seven-year apprentice in arts that Bektis had studied through his lifetime, the statement was wildly optimistic to say the least, but the Icefalcon did not remark on it. Rudy started to put the crystal away, then changed his mind and gazed into it again, bending his head and hunching his shoulders to shield his eyes from the wind.
“Ingold?” he said softly. “You there, man?”
The merchant who had brought Ingold word of the library cache at Gae had said that it was in a villa on the town’s far side, an area largely under water now. The Icefalcon had accompanied the wizard on last summer’s quest – when Gil’s baby Mithyas had been only a few months old – and had familiarized himself with the city in its new state: sodden, ruined, head-high with cattail and sedges and creeping with ghouls. The old man would have to watch his back.
Ingold was evidently there.
“Look, you got to get back here. A wizard showed up at the Keep – Bektis,