"What does Bektis have to do with Tir being gone?"

The Icefalcon hadn't even broken stride, forcing Rudy and Gil to fall into step with him as he led the way fast through the knee-deep ground fog and on toward rising ground, the shouldering bones of the hills that guarded Sarda Pass and the road down into the West.

"We have been had for dupes." The Icefalcon's voice was bitter, anger at himself tempered by fear.

"Made fools of by a shaman's illusion. The old man Linok was Bektis the Sorcerer. I thought I recognized his voice and the way he stroked his beard. Were we to waste time going back across the meadows we would find his tracks-long and thin, not the tracks of the little short-legged man we saw.

The whole thing was a fakement, a lure, a tale, so that he could get into the Keep."

Gil swore. Rudy, who was a little slower on the uptake, said, "Well, I'll be buggered. But he isn't in the Keep. He and that broad Hethya disappeared about two hours ago..."

Gil concluded for him, guessing, but at the same time sure. "And they took Tir with them."

Chapter 3

"I 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.