Darwath 2 - The Walls Of The Air (15 page)

“And my final vote,” Alwir grated, “is that the merchant Bendle Stooft be publicly flogged with thirty lashes and imprisoned upon bread and water for thirty days. Minalde?” He glanced sideways at his sister, who had sat all this while in perfect silence, watching everything that had passed between the merchant, the prelate, and her brother. She raised her head, dark, jeweled braids swinging against cheeks that had gone as white as paper in the reddish shadows. “I vote death.”

“WHAT?” Alwir half-rose, speechless between shock and rage.

Stooft made an inarticulate whimpering cry and would have thrown himself to his knees again, had not Janus and Caldern prevented him. He began to sob. “My lord! My lady!” Tears streamed down his trembling cheeks. Alde raised her eyes and regarded him with desperately held calm, her full lips taut and gray, as if with nausea.

Gil wondered how she could ever have given herself airs about killing one man and maiming another in self-defense. There had been no question about the lightness of her action then, no storm of protest over it. The man had not hung there wailing between his two guards, pleading for his life, for pity, for time. She had been upheld by the double supports of desperation and rage. Minalde had to do her justice cold.

Alwir started to speak to his sister in a hushed, angry voice, but she spoke over him, sounding strained and thin. “In doing what you did, Bendle Stooft, you endangered my life and the life of my son, as well as the life of my brother, who has shown, I think, great mercy in even asking for your reprieve. You have endangered the lives of your own wife, your daughters, your young son, and everyone in the Keep, from highest to lowest.” Her voice gained strength and volume, but Bendle Stooft wasn't listening. He just sobbed, “Please, no! Please, no!” over and over again. Alde went on. “As Queen of Darwath and Regent for Prince Altir Endorion, I decree that at sunset tonight you will be chained between two pillars on the hill that faces the doors of this Keep and left there for the Dark Ones to take you. May God have mercy on your soul.”

The merchant screamed, “You're a mother, my lady! Don't leave my children fatherless!”

Her chin went up; her face was as calm and chill as a frozen pond, but Gil saw the small upright line that appeared between her brows. Janus and Caldern were obliged to lift the prisoner bodily from his chair and half-drag, half-carry him, shrieking like a damned thing, from the room.

Dizzy and ill, Gil followed on their heels. As she passed through the doorway of the hall into the darkness beyond, she looked back and caught a last glimpse of Minalde, sitting in the soft glow of the ranks of candles, her face buried in her hands, weeping.

Gil drifted slowly to consciousness, with the puzzled awareness that she had been asleep. The smell of incense clogged her nostrils, choking after the things she had smelled in a dream—if it had been a dream. Soft chanting, strophe and antistrophe, mingled in her ears. She was aware that she sat in a kind of octagonal anteroom, shadowed, dark, and empty. Fishing in her clouded recollections, she thought she must have come here to rest after the other members of the procession had returned from the sunset execution.

Or maybe the execution had been only a dream. She didn't think so. The mud and snow on her boots were fresh and dripping as they melted on the smooth black stone of the floor. She remembered stumbling in the wake of every man, woman, and child in the Keep across the road to the knoll that faced the gates, hearing the wailing of wolves and wind in the forest and the solitary weeping of the three of four women who would mourn Bendle Stooft and Parscino Pral.

Like a counterpoint to that melody, she'd heard the muttering in the crowds all around. “Good time, too. When we refugeed from Gae to Karst, the old skinflint charged me a penny for a loaf of bread—a whole penny! And me with six kids starving and no place to lay our heads!”

“Penny for bread?” A man laughed bitterly. “Him and Pral charged me six coppers for a bit of space on the floor of a wash-house, to spend the night in shelter. I lost my wife that night. For all of me, that Guard could have taken his hands and bead, as well as his sodding foot.”

Support your local Guards
, Gil thought, exhausted, and raised her head to look around her. Memory came clearer now. She'd been with Janus and Melantrys. Alwir had asked to speak with them up in the Royal Sector. She'd followed them, her vision graying, as far as the Church and then had fallen behind. Let Janus deal with him, she'd thought. I'm not going to climb the goddam steps on his say-so.

She saw now that the anteroom had been built like a turret against the back wall of the Aisle long after the Keep's original construction as an entrance-hall to the sanctuary itself. To Gil's historian's eye, this type of excresence denoted some period of overcrowding in the Keep's history, the same overcrowding that had caused the original passageways and cells to proliferate and tangle so alarmingly. The anteroom contained little but a few carved stone benches and an ikonlike painting of an unfamiliar saint being nibbled to death by snakes. On the far wall, a doorway led into the sanctuary itself.

Somewhere a door opened. Chanting drifted from the sanctuary, winding echoes of the monks' voices praising God in an archaic tongue. To Gil it was weirdly familiar, a confusing mirror of her medieval studies, a bizarre reminder of the Void that she had crossed to come here, as perhaps others had also done. The Scriptures Govannin had read in the place of execution had been familiar, oppressing her with the sense of dealing on two planes of reality.

The image of Govannin returned to her, silhouetted against the yellow sunset sky. Like a dark, hard heelstone between the massive pylons of the pillars, she had stood in her billowing cloak; the pillars lay like a gun sight between the gates of the Keep and the dark notch of Sarda
Pass, and Govannin's cruciform arms had formed bony cross hairs, sighting on the small, baleful eye of the sinking sun. Parscino Pral had hung limply in his chains on one pillar, half-dead already with shock and loss of blood. Bendle Stooft had cried and whimpered and pleaded throughout the Bishop's prayers. All around them, the men and women of the Keep had stood like a dark lake of watching eyes. On the other side of the knoll, that silent company had been joined by a second, smaller group of refugees, some two thousand ragged men, women, and hungry children come in silence to observe the justice of the Keep.

Snow winds had whipped across the Vale. The chains had clanked on the pillars, and the keys had rattled in Janus' hands. Alwir read out the charges in his trained, powerful voice, and Govannin spoke her prayers, formally requesting the Lord to forgive these men their sin, but implying by her tone of voice that it was all the same to her if He did not. Then, as the sun vanished into the bruised darkness of the banks of clouds, they had all turned their backs on the doomed men and returned to the Keep as the swift winter twilight enfolded the land.

Gil had a hazy memory of Maia of Thran, leaning on his staff as he limped up the Keep steps between Alwir, Govannin, and Minalde. She did not think she had seen anyone take the muddy downward road back to the Tall Gates.

But that, too, might have been a dream. Restless with fever, Gil got to her feet and walked to the sanctuary door. From its shadows, she looked into the enormous cell, double the normal height, with a floor space, if cleared, of possibly ten thousand square feet, although Gil's judgment of such things had never been very good. That whole shadowy vastness was lighted by only three candles, burning on the bare stone slab of the central altar; by their spare, small light, the monstrous chamber dissolved itself into a chaos of climbing latticework. Pillars, galleries, and balconies hung suspended one above the other like stone lace, with miniature chapels balanced in fantastic hanging turrets and irregularly shaped platforms winding upward in stair-step spirals; over all of it brooded inanimate armies of demons, saints, angels, animals, and monsters peering from jungles of carved tracery. In the intense shadows, not a soul was visible, but Gil could hear them chanting, chapel answering chapel, throughout that eerie gloom.

She had heard it before, on the road down from Karst— blessings and requiems, vespers and matins. Where did the roots feed across the Void, she wondered, and in which direction? What was the evolution of ideas? Straight transfer or the doubled branches of an archtypical Platonic root? Or something else, something wholly inconceivable? She wondered about that saint in the anteroom, whose curiously ellipsoid eyes held an expression of startlement rather than pain. Was there a Christian saint who had ended his days to give pagan vipers their elevenses?

It was all scholars' games, she knew, and would not alter one whit the threat of the Dark, or the inevitable clash between Alwir, Govannin, and the Archmage. But Gil was a scholar, and no amount of training with the Guards, no matter how many men she killed or what she felt about it, would change that. It was what no one, with the exception of Ingold, had ever understood about her— her delight in knowledge for its own sake, in the Holmesian reconstruction of long-vanished events, and her nosing quest for the uttermost roots of the world.

“Gil-Shalos.”

She swung around, startled. Through the haze of her delirium, backed by the lights of the antechamber. Bishop Govannin appeared like an angel in a fever dream, sexless and pitiless in the blood-scarlet of her episcopal robes, a creature of inhuman beauty, intelligence, and loyalty to her God. But her voice was a dry, woman's voice. “You are not well?” she asked slowly. “At the tribunal you seemed ill, and now it looks not to be going better.”

“The wound's a little feverish, is all,” Gil excused herself. “I'll get over it in a day or so.”

The long, bony fingers indicated, without touching, the slings and strapping that bound Gil's shoulder. “More than that, I fear,” she said. “Shoulders can be a bad business.”

Beyond them in the holy place, a fresh wave of chanting rose—for the soul, Gil presumed, of Bendle Stooft. Beside her, the Bishop raised her head, listening with a critical ear. In the golden fog of the lamplight, Gil considered that face, the high, intelligent brow shadowing a deep fanatic's eyes, the stubbornness that scarred cheeks and lips like dueling cuts. Fine, small ears, dainty as shells, ornamented the smoothness of the bald pate where it ran into the old, wrinkled power of the ropy neck muscles. It occurred to Gil that in her youth Govannin Narmenlion must have been a strikingly lovely woman, the toast of a regiment— except that women with that kind of cold and driving intelligence were very seldom the toast of anything.

“Your Grace?” she asked softly, and the dark eyes returned to her as if from a reverie. “How was the Keep built?”

The Bishop considered the matter carefully, not as Gil's friends among the Guards had. Finally she said, “I do not know. Which in itself is strange,” she added, her long fingers moving to caress the black stone of the doorway at her side. “For it is our shelter and our home.”

“Does anyone?”

Govannin shook her head. “Not to my knowledge. I was considered grossly overeducated for an heiress, yet I can recall no word of that.”

Gil had to smile. “Yeah, I was—grossly overeducated, too.”

A ghost of an answering smile touched those full ungiving lips. “Were you?”

“Oh, yes. I was a scholar in my own lands. I suppose in a way that's what I will always be. Would the Church records have any mention of the building of the Keep? How it was done, or by whom?”

The Bishop folded her arms, thinking. Past her, Gil saw movement in the sanctuary, gray-robed monks ascending narrow steps, dimly lighted by the amber glow of a censer. They vanished in shadows, but their voices remained, like the sound of winds in the rocks. “Perhaps,” Govannin said finally. “Most of the Scripture comes from the Times Before, but it contains teaching and wisdom, rather than engineering. The records that, no thanks to my lord Alwir, we brought here to the Keep go back to the time when the see was here at Renweth, but I do not think they extend into the Time of the Dark itself. But some might.” She must have seen the brightening of Gil's face. “Is this important to you?”

“It could be,” Gil said. “Those records could contain in them some clue, some information, not only about the Keep but about the Dark. What they are—why they came—why they left.”

“Perhaps,” the Bishop said again, after a long moment's thought. “But for the most part, I think you will find them simply tales of how much the harvest was, who was born and who was buried, and if the rains were light or heavy. As for the coming of the Dark to the Times Before…” She frowned, her dark, fine brows drawing together and the lines in that strong, crepy face hardening. “I have heard that the civilizations of Before were wicked and debased. Amid their pride and their splendor, they practiced abominations. It is my belief, now as then, that the Time of the Dark was just punishment, which lasted for the span allotted by God. The Book of lab tells us that God will let the Evil One have domination for a time, for the Lord's own purposes.” She shrugged. “I have lived a long time and have learned never to question the motivations of God.”

“Maybe,” Gil said. “But it seems like a lot of suffering and pain to go through, when perhaps it could be averted. If God didn't want us to learn from history, we wouldn't have hands to write with, nor eyes to read.”

“A wizard's sophistry,” the Bishop replied calmly. “One by which they are all tempted and all fall. No, I do not criticize the argument, though I do know you are loyal to your wizard friends. But I doubt the utility of struggling against the intent of God. His ways are slow but as sure and inescapable as the coming of the ice in the north.”

“But who,” Gil insisted, “can know the intent of God?”

.“Not I, certainly. And I do not think it evil to learn from history. I am not yet one of those monks who preach the burning of all books and the telling of Scripture from memory alone. Knowledge is power, whether over the Dark Ones, over Kings who would usurp unto themselves what is rightfully God's, or over sorcerers and mages who do not believe in God at all and whom the Devil uses for his own ends. We can combat knowledge with knowledge and their power with ours.”