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

knees. Tir got to his feet; Hethya too. Tir tried hard to keep his voice steady. “I won’t run away. I just …” He couldn’t finish. Couldn’t tell this tall bearded man how badly it terrified him, not to have the use of his hands, not to be
able
to run in this place where the Dark had descended on them, this place at the far end of that blind corridor of memories.
    Bektis said softly, “See that you don’t.”
    The flourish of his arm, wrist, and elbow leading—like Gingume at the Keep who’d been an actor in Penambrabefore the Dark came—seemed to reach out, to gather in the formless prairie night.
    Gold eyes flashed there. Ground mist and shadow coalesced. Something moved.
    Tir’s heart stood still.
    “You know what I am, don’t you, child?” murmured Bektis. “You know what I can do. I know the names of the wolfen-kind; I can summon the smilodonts from their lairs and the horrible-birds from where they nest in the rocks. At my bidding they will come.”
    The camp was surrounded with them. Huge, half-unseen shaggy shapes, snuffing just out of the circle of the firelight. Elsewhere the glint of foot-long fangs. A snarl like ripping canvas. Tir glanced back again, despairingly, at the pitiful handful of flames, the three black warriors crouched beside it, staring around them into the dark with worried silver-gray eyes.
    Hethya put her arms over his shoulders, pulled him to her tight. “Quit terrifyin’ the boy, you soulless hellkite.” She ruffled Tir’s hair comfortingly. “Don’t you worry, sweeting.” Bektis glared at her for silence—after hesitation she said, “Just you stay inside the camp and you’ll be well.”
    Stomach churning with fright, Tir looked from her face to Bektis’ cold dark eyes, then to the lightless infinity beyond the fire’s reach. Movement still padded and sniffed in the long grass. Waiting for him. He didn’t want to—she’d kidnapped him, dragged him away here, lied to him, she was part of Bektis’ evil troupe—but he found himself clinging desperately to this woman’s arm.
    She added, a little more loudly, “He’s such a great wizard, he can keep all those nasties at bay, sweeting. They won’t be coming near to the camp, just you see. Now come.” She drew him toward the fire, opposite where Bektis had resumed his seat. “Have yourself a bite to eat, and roll up and sleep. It’s been a rough day on you, so it has.”
    She meant to be kind, so Tir didn’t say anything andtried to eat a little of the meat and potatoes she offered him. But his stomach hurt so much with fear he could barely choke down a mouthful, and he shook his head at the rest. When he lay down in her blankets next to her, with the swarthy guards keeping watch, he could still hear the
hrush
of huge bodies slipping through the grass, the thick heavy pant of breath. Could smell, mingled with the earth smell and rain smell and new spring grasses, the rank carnivore stink. All these interlaced with the clucking of the stream in the gully and lent a horror to dreams in which Rudy’s death—over and over, struck by lightning, endlessly falling from the jutting rocks into blackness—alternated with the slow flood of still darker blackness spreading to cover the wizards’ flares, to cover them all.
    Then he’d wake, panting with terror, to hear only far-off thunder and the endless hissing of the prairie winds.

CHAPTER FIVE
     
    On the third day out from Sarda Pass, Bektis and his party were attacked by a scouting band from the Empty Lakes People.
    This didn’t surprise the Icefalcon. He had never rated the intelligence of the Empty Lakes People much higher than that of the average prairie dog.
    He had overtaken Bektis around noon of the second day, though the wizard was not aware of the fact. Sometimes the Icefalcon trailed them north of the road, sometimes south, taking advantage of the gullies that scored this land and the low clumps of rabbitbrush and juniper that lifted above the