Darwath 2 - The Walls Of The Air (17 page)

But Alde seemed to take no offense at the silence. In fact, she seemed to find a kind of comfort in it. Tir, having reached the end of the room, came crawling back toward the girls with his usual single-minded determination, and Alde smiled as she bent to help him stand once more. He was very much like Alde , Gil thought, watching mother and child together—small-boned and compact, with her wide morning-glory-blue eyes. Just as well, she added to herself, that there's so little of Eldor in his only child. When you're carrying on an affair with a man the Church says is a servant of Satan, it's no help to have the echo of his predecessor before your eyes every time you turn around.

Alde looked up suddenly, as if deliberately putting aside the pain and confusion of that first, hopeless love. “So where were you?” she asked Gil. “The Guards said you'd left right after breakfast.”

“Oh.” Gil shrugged. “Exploring, looking for something, really… You've never run across any mention anywhere of a—a kind of observation room in the Keep, have you? A room with a black stone table in it, with a crystal kind of thing in the middle?”

“No.” Then Alde frowned, her black brows drawing down into two swooping wings. “But that's funny—it sounds so familiar. A table—has it a crystal disc, set into the top of the table?”

“Yeah,” Gil said. “It's part of the table. How did you know?”

“I don't know. I have the feeling I've seen something like that before, but—almost as if I dreamed about it, because I know I've never seen anything of the kind. That's funny,” Alde went on quietly, sitting back against the desk, her face troubled. Tir, whom she had lifted onto her knee, promptly reached for the jeweled clasp that held her hair, and she undid it and gave it to him, her dark hair falling in a river down over her shoulders and her child.

Gil propped the arm in the sling against her knees. “Why is it funny?” she asked.

“Because—I've had that feeling a lot of times in the Keep,” Alde said in a worried voice. “As if—as if I remembered things, remembered being here before. Sometimes I'll be walking down a staircase or along a hall, and I'll have this feeling of having been there before.”

“Like deja. vu?” There was a technical term in the language of the Wathe for that—a circumstance which Gil found interesting.

“Not entirely.”

“Like the inherited memories that are passed on from parent to child in certain families?” Gil asked quietly. “You did tell me your House was a collateral branch of the House of Dare.”

Alde looked over at her worriedly in the gloomy yellowish lamplight. “But the memories only pass from father to son,” she said softly. “And Eldor told me once that his memories of other lives were like memories of his own. Very clear, like visions. Mine are just—feelings.”

“Maybe women hold inherited memory differently,” Gil said. “Maybe it's less concrete in women and therefore hasn't been called upon for centuries, because there was always a male heir of the House of Dare. Maybe you haven't remembered because you didn't need to.” Gil leaned forward, the grain in the sacks she sat on scrunching softly and giving off a faint musty odor into the tiny room. “I remember a long time ago, Ingold said that Eldor's father Umar didn't have Dare's memories at all, because there was really no need—that the inherited memory will skip generations, one or three or sometimes more. But he said that they woke in Eldor because it was necessary.”

Minalde was silent, looking down at the child who played so obliviously in her lap. Her unbound hair hid her expression, but when she did speak, her voice was soft and filled with doubt. “I don't know,” she said.

Gil stood up briskly. “I think it's neat,” she announced.

“Do you?” Alde asked timidly.

“Hell, yes. Come on exploring with me. See what you can remember.”

As the winter deepened and the snows sealed the Vale into a self-contained world of whiteness, Gil and Minalde conducted their own rather unsystematic exploration of the Keep of Dare. They wandered the upper reaches of the fourth and fifth levels, where Maia of Thran had established his headquarters. He greeted them amiably in his own church down near the western end, with his own armed troops about him. They explored the crowded slums that huddled around the stairheads on the fifth level, hearing nothing but the liquid southern drawl of the Penambrans in their ears, and probed the dark, empty halls that stretched beyond. Armed like Theseus with a ball of twine, they traversed miles of dark, abandoned halls that stank of mold and dry rot, with the dust of ages drifting like ground fog about their feet.

They found storerooms, chapels, and armories filled with rusted weapons in the back halls of all levels. They found the remains of bridges that had once spanned the Aisle at the fourth and fifth levels, thin spiderwebs of cable heretofore hidden by the clustering shadows of the ceiling. They found cells stacked halfway to the ceiling with spiky mazes of piled furniture, carved in unfamiliar styles and painted with thin running lines of hearts and diamonds picked out in gold leaf. They passed locked cells scurrying with rats, food stores cached by unknown speculators. They discovered things they did not understand— moldering parchments overwritten in debased and unreadable bookhand, or what looked like puzzling little white polyhedrons made of milky glass, three-quarters the size of Gil's fist, their function unknown and unguessable.

“You should let Alwir know about the bundle of parchments we found,” Gil remarked at one point as they retraced their steps back from a remote corner of the fifth level. The puddle of yellow lamplight wavered around their feet. The air up here was warmer, the crowding walls of the empty warrens of cells pressing down on the girls in silence. Grotesque shadows lumbered along the wall, bending around the flame like pteranodon moths about a diminutive candle. Gil felt wryly envious of Rudy and Ingold's blithe, unthinking ability to summon light. Damn wizards probably never gave it a second thought.

“I will,” Minalde agreed, holding the lamp up for better visibility. “He and Bishop Govannin are already quarreling about writing materials. Alwir wants to make a census of the Keep.”

“He should. And he should be keeping his own chronicles.”

“I know.” Alde had imbibed enough of Gil's historical sense to realize that the Church accounts of certain events differed radically from secular records. “But because there's almost nothing to write on, nobody's keeping any kind of chronicles at all.”

“Great,” Gil said. “So when in three thousand years all this happens again, everybody's going to be in as rotten a shape as we are now.”

“Oh, no!” Alde protested. “It couldn't—I mean—”

Gil raised her eyebrows and paused in a shadowy doorway. “Like hell it couldn't. This could all be part of a regular cycle. We don't know why the Dark came before or how many times it has happened. We know they have herds of some kind below the ground; we know they're taking prisoners. Are the herds descended from prisoners they took three thousand years ago? Did people drive them back underground, or did they just go away of their own accord?”

“But why would they?” Alde cried, much distressed.

“Beats the hell out of me.” Gil paused, catching a faceted glimpse of something in a deserted doorway. She picked up another one of those little white glass polyhedrons and turned its uncommunicative shape thoughtfully in her good hand. “But that's what we've got to find out, Alde . We've got to get a handle on this somehow—and right now the Keep and the records are the only starting places I can think of.” She shrugged. “Maybe we're wasting our time, and the Archmage will have all the answers when he comes back here with Rudy and Ingold. And then again, maybe he won't.”

They continued on down the corridor, Gil caching the polyhedron in her sling for further investigation later. Echoes whispered at their passing, mocking footfall and shadow and breath. But the Keep hid its secrets well, furled tightly within the spiral and counterspiral of the winding halls, or revealed them in enigmatic or incomprehensible ways.

Early in their endeavors, they decided to ask Bektis about the observation room with its crystal table, on the off chance that his lore might have preserved some clue to its whereabouts.

The Court Wizard of the House of Dare, however, had little time to spend on the games of girls. He looked up with a frown as they came quietly into his room, a large cell tucked away in the warren of the Royal Sector. The light of the bluish witchfire that burned above his head shone on his high, bald pate and the bridge of his proud, hooked nose. Dutifully, he made a stiff little bow. “All my pardons, my lady,” he said in his rather light, mellifluous voice. “In such a gown as that, one might easily take you for a commoner.” Rigid disapproval seemed to have been rammed like a poker up his backbone.

Still he listened to Gil's description of what they sought, nodding his head wisely with his usual expression of grave thoughtfulness, which Gil suspected uncharitably that he practiced daily before a mirror. As she spoke, Gil looked around the room, noting the few black-bound books lining the shelves in the little sitting room area at the far end of the cell, and the richness of the single chest and carved bedstead. Unlike the table in her own minuscule study, the bedstead was newish, and the latest style current in Gae at the time of the coming of the Dark. It had clearly been brought down from Karst in pieces and reassembled, rather than scrounged from the old storerooms at the Keep. What sympathy she had once cherished for Lord Alwir's transport problems faded. He couldn't have been doing too badly if he could afford to cart along his Court Conjurer's bedroom set. In the cool brightness of the witchlight, Bektis' sleeves twinkled with scarlet embroidery, stitched into a pattern Gil recognized as the signs of the Zodiac. She picked out her own symbol, the tailed M of Virgo, before it occurred to her that this was yet another unexplained transfer, in one direction or the other, across the Void.

Bektis coughed solemnly. “The men of the ancient realms, my lady,” he intoned, “had powers far exceeding our ken. Very little is known of them, or of their works.”

Alde broke in hesitantly. “My lady Bishop says that the people of the Times Before were evil and practiced abominations.”

A gleam of spite flickered in the old man's dark eyes. “So she says of all things of which she does not approve. In those times wizardry was a part of the life of the Realm, rather than a thing to be tampered with at risk. There were more wizards then, and their powers were much greater. Even in our own memory, my lady, wizardry has not been anathema, for did there not used to be citadels of wizardry, not only at Quo but in Penambra and in Gae itself, on the very spot where the Palace now stands?”

“Did there?” Gil asked curiously.

The dark eyes slid sideways at her. “Indeed there did, Gil-Shalos. We had respect then, in the great days of wizardry; it was wizardry that helped to build the Realm. But the Church drove us out, playing upon the sentiments of the ignorant; and one by one, those citadels closed, and such wizards as were left them took to the road. It was centuries ago,” he continued, his words soft and light but suddenly fraught with impotent malice, “but we do not forget.”

Gil shifted her arm uncomfortably in its grubby sling. “And your learning preserves nothing of their deeds?”

“Nor does anyone's, my lady.” The old man looked down, his voice turned smooth again. “The Archmage Lohiro made a study of some of the works of the Times Before, but even his knowledge is fragmentary.”

Probably because he didn't have a mechanized world-view to start with
, Gil thought, rising from her chair. She caught Alde 's eyes and signaled her away, and they left the Court Wizard carefully pestling pearls to mix with hogwort and fennel as a charm against indigestion, the blue witchlight falling over the spiderlike movement of his hands.

They searched, not only through the dark halls of the Keep itself but, in Gil's patient, scholarly fashion, through all the ancient records they could lay their hands on. But matters that were of interest to contemporary chroniclers were not always the things that historians sought. Gil found herself wandering through a second maze of trivial information regarding the love lives of vanished monarchs, petty power duels with long-dead prelates, accounts of famines and crop failures, and how high the snow stood in Sarda
Pass. Often her efforts took on a strangely surreal quality, as if she wandered back and forth through time as well as space, crossing and recrossing the myriad layerings of the universe on some curious quest whose meaning she only vaguely understood.

It was in this that she longed more than anything else for Ingold. She felt herself at sea, wrestling with facts and languages and concepts she barely comprehended. Alde 's help was invaluable, but her breeding had been upper-class and her education orthodox; there was much about the history of the Church, the Realm, and wizardry that she simply did not know. As Gil patiently decoded the masses of filthy and overwritten palimpsests in her tiny study far into the watches of the night, she missed the old man's presence, if not for actual help, at least for moral support or for his company. At times when the voices of the deep-night watch could be heard in the distant corridors and weariness made the unfamiliar words swim before her eyes in the smutty yellow gleam of the lamp, she'd prop her injured arm on the slanted surface of the desk and wonder how she'd gotten where she was. How in a matter of six weeks or so had she gone from the lands of sunlight and blue jeans to a freezing and peril-circled citadel in the midst of alien mountains, digging through unreadable parchments for mention of something he had asked her to find? And she wondered if he watched her in that little magic crystal of his, or if he cared.

Between the two mazes of present and past lay a third maze, far less comprehensible but, she sensed, far more important than the other two. It was a maze of memory, as elusive as a whiff of smoke or the faint sounds one might think one heard in the night—a maze only barely to be glimpsed by that inward remembering look in Minalde's eyes,

“That's interesting,” Gil said as she and Minalde emerged from the back entrance of a boarded-up cell crammed to the ceiling with old furniture and dozens of those useless, enigmatic white polyhedrons. Clouds of dust clung to their clothes; Alde sneezed in it, fanning it away from her face. Both of them were gray with it, like urchins playing in the construction yards. “From the furniture we found in there, it looks as if this area was growing increasingly crowded at the same time the fifth level was being abandoned.”