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

As far as he knew, his love for Alde was unknown to any, except perhaps his fellow exile Gil. He doubted anything serious could happen to Alde because of it— she was, after all, Queen of what was left of Darwath, and the King had perished in the holocaust of the burning Palace at Gae. But he knew too little of the mores and taboos of this place to want to risk discovery. And hell, he thought, maybe there's some kind of noninterference directive in force, since I'm from another universe and really shouldn't be here at all.

But if there was, he did not want to know.

At the moment it wasn't critical—there were plenty of other stairways down. Some of them had been part of the original design of the Keep, built like the walls of black, massive, obsidian-hard stone. Others had evidently been rigged millennia ago by ancient inhabitants who had simply knocked holes in the floors of the corridors where it suited them and let down jerry-built steps of wood. The same process had clearly been in force with the walls and cells of the Keep, for in places the black walls marched into darkness in rigid rectilinear order, while in others makeshift chaos prevailed. Passages had been blocked to build cells across the right of way, access routes had subdivided other cells, and partitions of brick, stone, and wood had chopped the original plan into literally thousands of self-contained units whose forms had shifted with their functions, with a result, over three thousand years, that would have challenged the most worldly rat in all of B. F. Skinner's laboratories.

Optimistically, Rudy set off into the maze.

“I feel nothing,” Janus of Weg said quietly. The big Commander of the Guards of Gae sat on the edge of a bunk near the guardroom hearth, his face grave in the loose frame of coppery-red hair that surrounded it. He glanced across the hearth at Ingold. “But I trust you. If you say the Dark are outside, I would believe you, even if the sun were high in the sky.”

There was a stirring among the other captains and a murmur of assent. The Icefalcon, like a foreigner among the Guards with his long white viking braids, said softly, “The very smell of the night is evil.” Melantrys, a diminutive girl with the eyes of a ninja, glanced nervously over her shoulder.

“Smell, hell,” rumbled Tomec Tirkenson, landchief of Gettlesand, a big craggy plainsman whose domains lay on the other side of the mountains. “It's like the nights when the cattle stampede for no reason.”

The Icefalcon glanced coolly across at Ingold. “Can they break in?” he asked, as if it were a matter of no more moment than the outcome of a race on which he had bet only a small sum.

“I don't know.” Ingold shifted his weight on his perch by the hearth and folded sword-scarred hands on his knee. “But we can be certain that they will try. Janus, Tomec— I suggest that the corridors be patrolled, on all levels, to every corner of the Keep. That way…”

“But we haven't the men for it!” Melantrys protested.

“We've enough for a patrol of sorts,” Janus admitted. “But if the Dark effect an entrance, it's sure we've not enough to fight at any one place, spread so thin.”

The Icefalcon cocked a pale eyebrow at the wizard. “Are we going to fight?”

“If we can,” Ingold said. “Your patrols can be eked out with volunteers, Janus. Get the Keep orphans as your scouts. They're always into everything anyway; they might as well be put to use. We need to patrol the corridors, simply to know if and where the Dark break in. It isn't likely that they can,” he went on gravely, “for the walls of the Keep have the most powerful spells of the ancient world woven into their fabric. But whether the spells have weakened, or whether the Dark have grown stronger in the intervening years, I do not know.” Despite the calm in that deep, scratchy voice, Gil thought he looked grim and driven in the uncertain flicker of the hearth-light. “But I do know that if the Dark Ones enter the Keep, we shall have to abandon it entirely, and then we will surely be lost.”

“Abandon the Keep!” Janus cried.

“It stands to reason,” the Icefalcon agreed, leaning back against the wall behind him. He had a light and rather breathless voice that sounded disinterested even when discussing the loss of the last sanctuary left to humankind. “All those little stairways, miles of empty corridors… We could never drive them out.” The captains looked at one another, knowing the truth of his words.

“It's not only that,” Gil put in quietly. Their eyes turned to her, a quick glitter in the room's shifting shadows. “What about the ventilating system?” she went on. “The air in here has to travel somehow. The whole Keep must be honeycombed with shafts too small for a man to fit through. But the Dark can change their size as well as their shape. They could fit through a hole no bigger than a rat's, and, God knows, we have rats in the Keep. All it would need would be for one of them to get into the ventilation—the thing could attack at will, and we would never be able to find it.”

“Curse it,” Janus whispered, “that the Dark should rise at the start of the worst winter in human memory. If we quit the Keep, those as aren't taken at first nightfall would freeze before they came to shelter. These mountains are buried in snow.”

“Rats…” Tirkenson said softly. “Ingold, how do we know the Dark aren't lurking somewhere in the ”upper levels already? The Keep stood empty for nigh two thousand years."

“We would have known,” the wizard said. “Believe me, we would have known by this time.”

“But their eggs?” Tirkenson went on. “How do the Dark Ones breed, Ingold? As Gil-Shalos said, it would need only one to go through the air tunnels, laying eggs like a salmon along the way. We could be sitting on top of a spawning ground of the Dark.” Though the Guards were not as a rule nervous people, a ripple of horror seemed to pass through the assembled captains. The instructor Gnift shuddered and exchanged a quick, worried look with Melantrys.

“You needn't concern yourselves with that, at least,” Ingold said quietly. He picked a bit of straw from the frayed sleeve of his mantle and avoided all their eyes. “I have seen the breeding places of the Dark beneath the ground, and I assure you that they do not multiply in any fashion so—tidy—as that.” He looked up again, his face carefully calm. “But in any case, we cannot allow the Dark entrance under any circumstances. The corridors must be patrolled.”

“We can get Church troops,” Janus said, “and Alwir's private guards.”

“I have my own men,” Tirkenson added, rising. “The lot of us can take the south side of the Aisle.”

“Good.” Ingold stood and lifted his head to search the faces of those crowded into the narrow barracks, seeking someone in the uncertain yellow light. “I doubt that the Dark will be able to breach the walls themselves, but if they do, we must know it.”

“Can we know?” Melantrys straightened her sword belt, glancing up at him with chill black eyes. “The Dark can swallow a man's soul or blood or flesh between one heartbeat and the next, a yard from his fellows, before he can cry out.”

“A Guard?” Ingold inquired mildly.

She bridled. “Of course not.”

“There you are.” He picked up his staff, his shadow looming behind him like the echo of the darkness waiting beyond the gates of the Keep. Once more he scanned the room, the figures there fading into milling confusion of preparation and departure. It might have been a trick of the firelight, but the lines seemed deeper in that calm and nondescript face. Whether this was from weariness, apprehension, or sheer annoyance, Gil could not tell.

All around them men and women were slinging on swords and finding cloaks; voices called to one another through the dark, narrow doors of the barracks. The air seemed somehow heavier, the fear in it as palpable as electricity; if she had touched Ingold's cloak, Gil thought, sparks would have jumped from the fabric. Janus remained for a moment at Ingold's side, towering over him, his broken-nosed, pug face grave.

“That is for the corridors,” he said quietly. “What of the gates?”

“Yes,” Ingold said. “The gates. I feel that is where they will concentrate their attack. But with the height of the ceiling in the Aisle, once inside they can strike from above, and ground defense will be almost useless.”

“I know,” Janus said softly. “They'll have to be fought in the gate tunnel itself, won't they?”

“Maybe,” the wizard replied. “Gil—I shall need your help at the gates.” Then he frowned and cast a swift, raking glance over the remaining Guards. Bright azure eyes hooded like a falcon's glittered in the shadows. “And where,” he asked grimly, “is Rudy?”

At the moment, it was the question uppermost in Rudy's mind as well.

He knew he was still somewhere on the second level; but that was about all he could be sure of. Having missed the turning for the stairway he sought, he had tried to double back along an allegedly parallel corridor, with disastrous results. A makeshift hall through what had once been a large cell beckoned, only to dead-end him in a black warren of crumbling brick and dry rot that spiraled him eventually into the center of the maze, a long-deserted outlet for the Keep's indoor plumbing system. Cursing those who had designed the Keep and those who had felt called upon to improve it alike, he crossed through the dark, water-murmuring privy and out into the corridors beyond.

He walked in the darkness without light. This was another ability which had surprised him, like being able to call fire from cold wood, or light to the end of his staff. Ingold had told him that this wizard's sight had been born in him, like his other talents, the seeds of a magedom that could bear no possible fruit in the warm, lazy world of Southern California.

And still he felt it—the building of tension, like water mounting behind a weakening dam, the brooding horror that seemed to fill the dark mazes through which he walked. His step quickened with his heartbeat. The conviction grew in him that the Dark were outside, focusing inhuman lusts and will upon the smooth, impenetrable walls of the Keep. Beyond human magic or even human comprehension, their numbers and power were so great that their presence could be felt through the ten-foot walls wrought of time and stone and magic. He had to find Ingold, ha

He found himself in a short neck of corridor that bore every sign of having been part of the original Keep. A flow of warmer air indicated a stairway somewhere nearby, leading down to the first level. Rudy paused, trying to get his bearings. Directly in front of him loomed the end of the passage, black and seamless, as if poured from a single sheet of dark glass. That would be the back wall, he realized in surprise, of the Keep itself.

Fantastic, he thought. I've come in a bloody circle and, after all that wandering around, I still get to come down in the middle of Church territory anyway. He shrugged. But it beats hell out of wandering around up here all night.

He did not go forward, however. A short stairway of a few steps branched up to his right, with a door at the top. The mirror-smooth blackness of the stone proclaimed steps and wall as part of the Keep's original design, but the setting of the door caught his attention. It was so placed as to be absolutely shadowed, thrown into virtual invisibility, from any light carried in the corridor itself. Only a wizard, walking like Rudy without light, could have seen it at all.

Fascinated, Rudy moved forward. His sense of the mounting peril and terror of the Dark grew no less. They would strike, and strike soon—he felt that much in his bones. But he knew that, provided they survived the night, he and Ingold would be setting out on their journey in the morning, traveling hundreds of miles through the barren plains and desert to seek the City of Quo where it lay hidden on the Western
Ocean. Concealed as this room was, he was not altogether sure that he'd be able to find it when he returned.

But above all, pure curiosity drew him as a string might draw a cat, the unslakable curiosity that was the leading trait of any wizard.

The door was shut, the ironwork of the lock so rusted as to be almost unworkable. But it was no worse than the oil pans of some cars Rudy had wrestled with in his time. The chamber within was circular, unlike the uniformly rectangular cells elsewhere in the Keep. A bare workbench ran halfway around the walls; under the bench, wooden boxes proved to contain miscellaneous rusted junk.

But in the center of the room stood a table, rising from the floor itself and built of the same hard, black, glassy stone. It was about four feet across, and inset in its center was a plug of heavy crystal, like the glass covering of a display case. But when Rudy perched himself on the table's edge and called a ball of witchlight over his shoulder to look, the white gleam glared back into his eyes, for the crystal was cloudy, showing only a kind of angular glitter underneath. First with his nails and then with the tip of his dagger, he tried to pry the cover off, without results. But there was something under there, of that he was sure. Elusive glimpses of angles and surfaces whispered in those frosted depths. An observer, watching him as he examined the impenetrable stone, would have been reminded of a large and gaudy cat frustrated by a mirror.

To hell with it, he thought in disgust and made as if to rise. This is no time to be messing with toys.

But he was drawn back again. His shadow lay hard and dark over the gray glass, sharp-edged in the cool, steady light of the ball of phosphorous that hung behind his shoulder. After a moment's thought, he dimmed and diffused the light, trying to peer past the flickering crystal, but the thing still denied his gaze. Gradually he let the witchlight die entirely and sat looking at the thing in the dark.

Around him the room had fallen utterly silent. He knew that he should go but did not. He sensed that the thing was magic, of a deep and mechanistic sorcery far beyond his natural talents. Was this the magic, he wondered, that he would learn at the school at Quo?

His fingers probed at the crystal again, finding no seam between glass and rock.

Another thought came to him. Hesitantly, he projected a thin sliver of light into the crystal itself.

White and blue and lavender reflections blossomed forth around him like the three-dimensional tail of a celestial peacock. He shied back, shielding his eyes from that bursting fountain of light, then dimmed it, working awkwardly with the few light-spells he had been taught, like an artist's child with his first crayons. He suffused the crystal with a dim light and leaned over again to look inside, to the glittering bed of colored rock salts that lay at the bottom of their crystal cylinder.