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

them. The wind’s main force was easing, but the snow came down harder now. The pass would be choked long before day.
    It took Gil and the Icefalcon nearly two hours to work their way down into the defile. Rudy lay on ice-sheeted rock beside the still obsidian ribbon of the stream. He had dragged himself to the shelter of a toothed overhang, where spruces clustering on the rock above further broke the wind and snow. Remnants of a heat spell lingered in the place, melting the snow where it skirled around his body.
    “You still with us, punk?” Gil pulled off her gloves to touch the long-jawed face with its bent nose, brushed back the blood-matted hair. Her face was expressionless as bone, but she had gentled, the Icefalcon thought, since the Summerless Year. “Don’t check out on me now.”
    They had been friends for seven years, coming together from that other world where Ingold had found them, unthinkably different from both the Real World and the world of the civilized mud-diggers in their cities and their palaces. Both had told him of their former home many times, but still he could not picture it, other than thinking it uncomfortable, crowded, noisy, and utterly lacking in sense. Gil-Shalos was a woman whose heart was a sealed fortress, able to survive any loss, but this man was as much family as any she had in this world.
    Under her hand, his fingers moved.
    The week preceding had been fine and dry. The snowstorm, magically summoned, had not lasted long enough to soak the fallen branches in the crevices and rock chimneys along the walls of the gorge. The Icefalcon made a dozen trips, digging under deadfalls and dragging tinder to the shelter of the overhang, where he piled branches to catch the snow and so form a protective wall, as his people did in wintertime. While he did this Gil probed andmanipulated the broken bones and smashed ribs, ascertaining damage and making sure Rudy could breathe easily. The Icefalcon was personally a little surprised that the young wizard had survived the fall at all. By the light of Gil’s fire he could see the side of Rudy’s face was scorched, as it had been in last autumn’s explosion in Ingold’s laboratory. His gloves were burned away completely, and his clothes blackened and torn.
    “I doubt the Guards will be here until day.” The Icefalcon sat back and pulled on his gloves again. “The wind’s fallen, but it’s snowing more heavily now. In a few hours the pass will be utterly blocked.”
    Gil said nothing for a time, but her eyes seemed very blue in the firelight. Stars of snow spangled her ragged black hair around her face. She and the Icefalcon regarded one another, each knowing the other’s thought and what had to be done.
    “Will you be well here until dawn comes, o my sister?”
    She nodded.
    “It stinks,” she said, and her breath blew out in a jeweled sigh. “I’m sorry, Ice.”
    “I shall do what I can to leave a trail in case some do make it through. And I shall at least be on hand to help should the boy attempt to flee.”
    “That’s good to know.” She was already sorting out possessions: the lantern, most of Rudy’s arrows, and his bearskin overmantle as well, for the niche was warm now from the fire and there was wood to last well into the next day. She offered him part of her own rations, which at his advice she had started carrying whenever she left the Keep, but he shook his head:
    “We cannot know what will befall, o my sister. Your own life may depend on it.”
    “Myself, I think Tir has too much sense to run for it once they get to the other side of the pass,” she said, adding a fish hook and a couple of her own hideout knives to the Icefalcon’s already formidable collection. “He’s only seven and a half. There anybody I should pray to?”
    “To your Straight God of civilized people.” The Icefalcon adjusted the last of his accoutrements, his mind already on the ice-rimed rocks beyond the waterfall, the angle of wind in the