Darwath 2 - The Walls Of The Air (16 page)

“Like the Rune of the Chain?” Gil countered a little bitterly. She got a dark, enigmatic look in return.

“The use of such devices is unlawful,” the Bishop said. “The Rune of the Chain can be spelled to bind and cripple a wizard's power, and I have heard of its being so used. But using evil's work in any way defeats the good of the cause. Only evil can come of this quest for the Archmage of Quo.”

“You don't think a wizard's power might be given to him by God?”

Her tone was perhaps more heated than she had intended. Govannin regarded her for a moment expressionlessly, seeming through the fog of fever and lamplight to be nothing more than a bodiless shadow and a fiery gleam of eyes. “You rush to his defense,” she said at last, and her voice had only the calm interest of a python that watched the world and chose what prey it would. “Beware of him, my child. He has great ability and much personal charm for a man who has traded his soul to Satan—which is what he has done, though he will not own it. Satan uses such men also, who from ignorance or pride will not see what they have done by giving in to the temptation to power. But I am old, Gil-Shalos. I have seen the other kind of wizard, evil wizards, renegades, headstrong, ambitious, and self-seeking. If you had ever met such a one, who worked for and openly welcomed the powers of Crookedness, you would never again think that the talents of a mage come from or have anything to do with God.”

“But he isn't like that!” Gil protested hotly. Images rushed to her mind and unwise words to her lips. She remembered Ingold standing in the brilliance of the mage-light, holding blizzard and darkness at bay until the Guards could get Tir and Alde to the Keep, the old man walking into a tunnel of sounding blackness, surrounded by runes of power that no one else could see, and the look in his eyes when he had handed her his glowing staff and asked her to guard his back. “He would never bend to evil, never use his powers for ill. There can be good and bad wizards, the same way there are good and bad men…”

Govannin raised dark, elegant brows. Gil stumbled and broke off her words, her cheeks suddenly hotter than even fever could account for, glad of the veiling shadows. “I'm sorry,” she stammered, confused. “I spoke disrespectfully, and all you have done has been kindness to me.” It had doubtless been decades, Gil reflected, since any member of hoipolloi had so lashed out at Govannin Narmenlion.

But the Bishop was only silent for a time, a curious, considering light in her eyes. When she spoke, her dry, cracked voice was kind. “I like you, my child,” she said. “You are a warrior as you are a scholar, single-minded, and never without purpose. Your heart is very pure—pure in its scholarship, pure in its violence, and pure in its love. Such hearts can be hurt and can do measureless good and measureless evil, but they cannot be bought or cowed.” She put out her hand, her fingers ice-cold against Gil's cheek. “I shall send you the Church records, if you desire it, and also someone to interpret the writing for you. The knowledge is my gift to you, with the consequences of what that knowledge shall bring.”

She held out her bony hand, and Gil dropped to one knee to kiss the dark bezel of the episcopal ring.

Later, waking in the barracks from feverish sleep, Gil wondered if this, too, had been a dream. But after supper, Minalde appeared in the barracks, bearing a heavy book which, she said, the lady Govannin had asked if she would take to Gil-Shalos.

“I was coming over anyway,” she explained, seating herself at the foot of Gil's bunk.

Through the doorway beyond her, Gil could hear the noises of the night watch going out, the creaking of leather, the faint clink of buckles, and Melantrys' light, bantering chaff.

Minalde ran her fingers along the metal-clasped edge of the cover. “What is it?”

Gil explained briefly her desire to probe the origins of the Keep to learn something of its secrets. “I mean, hell,” she said, “there's so much more to the Keep than meets the eye. Like—how come there's a flow of water in the latrines and fountains? Even if the Keep was built over an underground river, the stuff doesn't run uphill. Why is the air fresh in most places, not foul and stuffy? How was the Keep built in the first place? I know it was built three thousand years ago by Dare of Renweth, at the time of the first rising of the Dark,” she went on, “but how long did it take? Where did everybody stay during construction, if they didn't start on it until after the Dark began appearing? Or were the Dark only down in the river valleys and the mountains safe?”

“No,” Alde answered simply. “Because there's a Nest of the Dark not twenty miles from here, as you know.”

Gil remembered the tilted slab of black stone in the midst of those clinging woods and shuddered.

“And for the rest of it,” Alde went on, “you've already told me more than I knew before. I have heard that the magic in Times Before was different from the magic now, but I don't know what that means. I do know that centuries ago there used to be magic places, sort of temples of wizardry, in many cities, not just at Quo—so maybe back then it was the same way. Rudy says that magic is fused Into the walls of the Keep.”

At the mention of her lover's name, Alde 's cheeks colored faintly, and Gil hid a grin. In many ways this dark-haired girl reminded her of the freshmen she'd taught; she was sweet, shy, pretty, and very unsure of herself. At such times it was difficult to remember that this soft-voiced girl had passed through fire and darkness, had seen her husband die in the flaming ruin of the battle-broken Palace, and had gone against the forces of the night, armed only with a torch and her own wild courage. She was the Queen of Darwath, the true ruler of the Keep, sitting at the foot of the disordered bunk with her legs crossed under her multicolored peasant skirts.

“So anyway, the Bishop offered to lend me the books to look for the answers,” Gil said, edging herself up against her makeshift pillows. “Gnift's already told me that training or walking patrol is out for at least three weeks… I suppose he's right,” she added regretfully, looking down at her strapped shoulder. “I'll have to get someone to read them to me and teach me the language, though.”

“Oh, I can do that,” Alde said. “Really, it would be no trouble. I know the Old Wath and the High Tongue of the Church, which is very different from the Wathe. It would be the first time, you know, that I've ever really used anything that I learned in school.”

Gil regarded her for a moment through the barracks gloom, fascinated. “What did you learn in school?”

Alde shrugged. “Needlework,” she said. “Songs, and how to write the different modes of poetry. I did an entire tapestry once of Shamilfar and Syriandis—they're famous lovers—but it nearly drove me crazy and I never did another. Dancing, and playing the harp and dulcimer. Something about the major parts of the Realm and a little history. I hated history,” she admitted, shamefaced. “Most people do,” Gil said comfortingly. “You don't.” Alde 's slim, well-kept hands traced the curve of the leather cover's embossing.

“I always was a freak that way.” Rudy's teasing nickname of “spook” was hardly a new one.

“Well, the way you talk about it, it's as if—as if it has a point,” Alde said. “As if you're looking for something. All they ever taught us about history was these little stories that were supposed to be morally uplifting, like the one about the man who died in a valiant rear-guard action for the sake of his comrades, or the story about all those old patriarchs who let the enemy slaughter them rather than be enslaved. That kind of thing. Things that I suspect never really happened.”

The image of a stiff little boy in a powdered wig confessing to his father about who axed the cherry tree floated through Gil's mind, and she laughed. “Maybe.”

“But if you need someone to read to you, I'll be glad to do it.”

Gil studied Alde 's face for a moment in silence. She herself had closed out the UCLA library, the way some people close out bars, far too many nights not to understand. And as for having a Queen as a research assistant— Alwir, Gil reflected, will hardly miss her. “Sure,” she said quietly. “Any time you can get away.”

They took over the little cubbyhole in the back of the barracks of the Guards, which Ingold had once used as his quarters. It was private, yet close to the center of things, and, Gil noted to herself, at the opposite end of the Keep from the Royal Sector and its politics. Alde took to coming there every day, usually bringing Tir with her, to work laboriously through the ancient chronicles, while Gil scribbled notes on tablets of wood coated with beeswax that she'd found in an abandoned storeroom. In another storeroom she found a desk, spindle-legged and archaic, small enough to fit into the narrow confines of her study. She used a couple of firkins of dried apples for a seat.

Thus she entered into a period of quiet scholarship, her hours of transcribing and sorting notes alternating with long, solitary rambles through the back reaches of the Keep in search of some sign of the mysterious circular chamber Rudy had described before his departure. It was from one of these that she returned one day to find Alde sitting at her desk, studying one of the tablets in the dun light.

“Is this what you do?” the younger girl asked, touching the creamy surface with a doubtful finger. “Is this all?” Gil looked down over her shoulder. She habitually wrote with a silver hairpin as a stylus, in a combination of English and the runes of the Wathe. The tablet had written on it:

Swarl (?)'s. of Tirwis, ss. Aldor, Bet, Urgwas— famine, snows Pass 2, Tl Gts grsnd 4 (—)—no mtn Dk—pop Kp 12000 +3 stmts (Big Ring, ??)—buried gaenguo (?)—Bp. Kardthe, Tracho

“Sure,” she replied cheerfully. “That's from the chronicles you were reading to me yesterday. It's just a condensation—Swarl, whenever the bell he ruled Renweth, had three sons named Aldor, Bet, and Urgwas…”

“Bet's a woman's name,” Alde pointed out.

“Oh.” Gil made a notation. In the Wathe, pronouns had no gender. “Anyhow, in the second year of his reign there was a famine, and snows heavy enough to close Sarda
Pass. The population of the Keep at that time was estimated at twelve thousand, with three settlements in the valley, one of which was named the Big Ring—don't ask me why. There was no mention of the Dark in the chronicle, which isn't surprising, since we have yet to find any word of the Dark in any of these chronicles, and right around the fourth year of his reign there is a statement that the Tall Gates were garrisoned, though they might have been so for years. The Bishops during his reign were Kardthe and later a man or woman named Tracho—”

“That's the old spelling for Trago. It's a man's name.”

“Thanks.” Gil made another notation. “And in his reign they buried the gaenguo, which I meant to ask you about. Isn't gaenguo the old word for a—a lucky place, or a good place?”

“Well—not so much good as just—I guess awesome would be the best word.” Alde reached out with her foot and gently rolled Tir's ball back toward him where he was playing happily on the floor. “There were supposed to be places where certain powers were concentrated, where people could see things far off or have visions.”

Gil considered, while Tir came crawling busily back across the crackly mat of straw and old rushes that strewed the floor. Alde bent down and let the infant catch her fingers, then lifted him to a standing position beside her knees. Tir threw back his head and crowed with delight.

“You know,” Gil said thoughtfully, 'I bet what they buried was the old Nest of the Dark.“ She picked up the tablet and turned it idly over in her fingers, the touch of the wax as cold and smooth as marble. ”God knows, the place is creepy enough. But it's really sort of an opposite to a gaenguo. The atmosphere disrupts magic rather than channels it. Interesting," she murmured.

“Interesting how?” Alde glanced curiously up at Gil, holding her son's hands in her own.

“Because it looks as if by that time they had completely disassociated the idea of the Dark from the Nests. Which is less surprising than it seems,” she went on, “when you consider that the bonfire was the first line of defense against the Dark. Which, of course, is why we have no records at all from the Time of the Dark itself.”

Alde let Tir down, and the child crawled determinedly away in pursuit of his ball. “How vexing,” she said, inadequately.

“Well, more than that.” Gil sat on the narrow bed of grain sacks and covered her cold feet with her cloak. “It left everybody completely unprepared for it when it happened again. I mean, before last summer nobody had even heard of the Dark.”

“Oh, but we had,” Alde protested. “That's what— In a way it worked against Ingold, you see. When I was a little girl, my nurse Medda used to tell me not to get out of bed and run about the house at night because the Dark Ones would eat me up. I think all nurses used to tell their children that.” Her voice faltered—in the end it had been Medda who had been eaten up by the Dark. “It was something you grew out of. Most little children believed in the Dark Ones. It was only their parents who didn't.”

Gil momentarily pictured the probable fate of any shabby and unlikely pilgrim who tried to convince the authorities that the bogeyman was really going to devour America. “I'm surprised Eldor believed him,” she murmured.

“Eldor—” Minalde paused. “Eldor was very exceptional. And he trusted Ingold. Ingold was his tutor when he was a child.”

Gil glanced up quickly, hearing the sudden tension that choked off Alde 's voice. The younger girl was looking determinedly away into the distance, fighting the film of tears that had appeared so abruptly in her eyes. Whatever her love for Rudy, Gil thought, there is a love there which can never be denied. In the strained silence which followed, Melantrys' voice could be heard, arguing with Seya about whether or not she should get rid of her cloak in a sword fight.

Then Alde forced a small rueful smile and brushed at her eyes with the back of her wrist “I'm sorry.”

“It's okay.”

“No,” Alde said. “It's just that sometimes I don't understand what there was between me and—and Eldor. As if I never understood it. I thought I could make him love me if I loved him hard enough. Maybe I was just being stupid.” She wiped her eyes again. “But it hurts, you know, when you give everything you have and the one you give it to just—just looks at it and turns aside.” She glanced away again, unable to meet Gil's eyes. Gil, clumsy-tongued and unhandy with her own or anyone else's emotions, could find nothing to say.