Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath) by Barbara Hambly Read Free Book Online Page A

at its rein. Tir was fighting, too, on foot in the clutch of a black-faced Alketch warrior whose grip held him almost up off the ground. Two other warriors, who even at this distance could be seen to be of the same height and build, stood with drawn swords, blinking in the magic refulgence, waiting.
    “Bektis!” yelled Gil. “Where’s …?”
    A crash of rock splintering. White lightning cleaved the already fading brilliance of the air, and the Icefalcon shoved Rudy in one direction and Gil in the other, springing clear himself as a levin-bolt skewered the ground where Rudy had stood and steam exploded from the snow in a hissing cloud. The renewed glare showed up Bektis, tall now and thin in Linok’s rough furs and quilted trousers, arms uplifted on the rock pinnacle beyond the ice-locked falls. The bandaged head wound—an illusion from the first—was gone. Now his head was flung back, his long white hair and patriarchal beard transformed to flags by the battering wind, and lightning laced his fingers in blue-glowing flame that hurt the eyes.
    Rudy shouted a word of stillness, swept away and drowned. The storm winds took the fire he threw and hurled it in all directions, and boulders rained down out of the sudden fall of renewed night, crashing against the walls of the gorge. The Icefalcon, very sensibly, flattened into the overhang of the eastern cliff and stayed there. Levin-fire ripsawed the blackness, granting brief visions of Rudy and Bektis, and it seemed to the Icefalcon that Bektis wore a device of some kind on his right hand, a thing of crystal and gold that caught and focused the searing light. When Rudy threw answering fire, the jewels seemed to engulf the old man in a protective coruscation of rainbows. TheIcefalcon did not watch the battle. Rather, with every explosion of brightness he worked his way a little distance farther toward the donkeys, the warriors, and Tir. They’d all be watching Bektis, too.
    It might give him a chance.
    The Icefalcon was not a believer in luck. No one was who had been raised in the Real World. He knew Rudy’s chances of defeating the more experienced wizard were negligible, and it was doubtful that he could even hold him in combat long enough for the Icefalcon to get in bowshot of Tir’s captors. Thus he was neither disappointed nor angry when a final incandescence smote the night behind him, a riven cry and the sound of falling rock. He thought he heard Tir scream,
“Rudy!”
Then the wind’s force smashed the pass with redoubled fury, burying all in night.
    The Icefalcon wedged himself into a crevice and waited, conjuring in his mind the slow progress of Bektis down the ice-slick boulders on the other side of the rock-spur, across the winter-locked stream. The temperature, falling all this while, plunged still further. He unslung his blanket from his back to wrap around him like a cloak, his gloved fingers aching and clumsy. There were broken brush and branches within the crevice, sheltered from the storm and still fairly dry, enough to form a crude torch, though it took him a long while to break kindling into suitably tiny fragments and he had to wait to open the firepouch until the winds eased somewhat for fear of killing the flame within. When he got a torch kindled at last—the Icefalcon was a patient men—he raised it high.
    Gil’s voice called out, “Here!”
    By the sound she was at the edge of the drop-off into the gorge.
    Black lines of charring scored the rocks and earth, as if the ground had been beaten with red-hot rods. Despite the snow already filling the scars, the air stank of burning and coals winked in the ruins of blasted firs all around. The pattern showed clearly how Bektis had driven Rudy leftward to the cliff’s edge, until he could retreat no more.
    Gil had kindled her lantern, and its feeble glow revealed a great final scorch on the rocks above the gorge, the boulders themselves split with the heat. Snow hissed and melted as it touched