Free Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath) by Barbara Hambly

something that made the Wise Ones mistrusted by merchants and farmers throughout the civilized realms. Shamans among the Icefalcon’s people also worked the weather, insofar as they would avert the worst of the storms from the winter settlements and the horse herds, but such workings were known to be dangerous. Besides, working the weather might let enemies guess where you camped.
    Alwir and Bektis referred to the Icefalcon as “Lord Eldor’s Tame Barbarian” and made little jests about the things that were, to him, simply logical, like always having weapons and a day’s supply of food on his person, keeping to corners and never being where he could not immediately get out of a room. Their jokes did not offend him. Merely they informed him that they were fools, as most of the people of the straight roads were either mad or fools.
    And most of them died with the coming of the Dark Ones.
    *   *   *
     
    Wind moved over the land, bitterly cold. Above the overcast that veiled the sky most nights now, the waning moon was a ravel of luminous wool. It had taken the Icefalcon most of a year to separate the reflexive terror about being outdoors after nightfall, developed by those who had passed through the Time of the Dark, from the reasonable wariness he had possessed before. Now he listened, identifying sounds and smells, gauging the scent of greenery and water somewhere beyond the slunch to the northwest that meant he might hunt tomorrow, measuring it against the certainty that there would be predators there as well. A small glowing thing like a detached head on two legs ran by along the top of the ditch—most slunch-born things glowed a little. A night-bird skimmed past, hunting moths.
    Tir was out there in the dark, in the camp with Bektis and Hethya and those three identical black warriors.
    Eldor’s son.
    Eldor was not the kin of the Icefalcon’s ancestors. By the standards of the Talking Stars People, he would be considered an enemy. But he had not been. And he was the only person in Gae—the only person in all that new life the Icefalcon had lived among civilized people for four years—to whom he had spoken about why he had left the Talking Stars People and why he could not go back.
    Speaking to him had made him less of an enemy. But what he would be called, the Icefalcon did not know.
    The Dark Ones ringed this place.
    Tir forced his eyes open, forced himself to look out past the campfire that seemed to him so pitifully inadequate; forced himself to look out into the darkness.
    They aren’t really there
.
    He had never actually seen the Dark Ones. Not that he remembered by himself—his mother had told him they’d all gone away when he was a little baby. Sometimes in nightmares he’d be aware of them, amorphous waitingstirrings in the shadows and a smell that scared him when he smelled things like it sometimes, some of the things the women of the Keep used to clean clothing with.
    He saw them now. The memory was overwhelming, like a recollection of something that had happened to him only yesterday: clouds of darkness that blotted the moon, winds that came up suddenly, seeming to blow from every direction at once, carrying on them the wet unnatural cold, the blood and ammonia stink. On this very stream bank—only the gully wasn’t this deep then, and the stream’s waters had lain closer to the surface, gurgling and glittering in the light of torches, a ring of torches—he had watched them pour across the flat prairie grass like floodwaters spreading and had felt his heart freeze with sickened horror and the knowledge that there was no escape.
    They aren’t really there
.
    He faced out into the darkness, and the darkness was still.
    The memory retreated a little. He felt weak with shock and relief.
    “For the love o’ God, Bektis,” said Hethya, “let the poor tyke eat.”
    She stood in the firelight, hair dark except where the reflected glare made brassy splinters in it, red mouth turned down with