Darwath 2 - The Walls Of The Air (25 page)

Behind him, Rudy heard Hoofprint of the Wind murmur, “Not for all the horses nor all the hunting eagles nor all the willing women of the earth would I seek thus the Eaters in the Night. Death there is in that tunnel. Cannot he smell it? This ghost that the Eaters themselves fear, this has swept these caverns end to end and slain the Eaters and their victims alike. Yet he will go to seek it, like a little priest on foot.”

The cold grew deeper and more bitter, driving men and horses together to huddle like sheep in the protection of one another's warmth. Rudy wondered if Ingold would freeze down there by himself among the rats and darkness. Now and then, searing winds shrieked along the tunnel from above, moaning through the cavern and sighing in the carpet of frost-bitten moss. Rudy had little sense of time, but suspected it was something over an hour before the light glimmered once again in the caverns below and Ingold returned, shivering like a frozen beggar in a killing snow. He handed his staff up to Rudy, who took the glowing end gingerly and found the blazing wood perfectly cold and solid to his touch. Ingold climbed the rope hand over hand, the powdering of frost on his cloak glittering like diamond dust. The Raiders made room for him among them.

“Well, Thief of the White Bird's Horses?” Hoofprint murmured. “Found you, then, what you sought?”

“I never stole the White Bird's horses,” Ingold responded automatically. Even through the freezing cold, Rudy could smell the taint of corruption on his ice-encrusted cloak. In the pallid witchlight, he looked white and drawn—like a man, Rudy thought, who had just got done vomiting up his socks.

“And no,” the old man went on. “I found only the dead. They're mostly skeletons by this time, but you can see they're all of the same date of death, not a gradual accumulation. Rats, worms, bloated white toads as big as your head… But that's all. Down to the farthest depths of these caverns, I can sense the presence of no living creature— neither the Dark Ones nor anything that might have driven them forth.”

Rudy hastily shoved away the images he had conjured from his too-vivid imagination. But something in the old man's scratchy, tired voice told him that Ingold would wander those caverns for many nights afterward in dreams. The sound of the furtive scampering in the deeps below turned him suddenly sick. “But why?” he whispered.

“Why?” Ingold glanced over at him. “If something did kill off the Dark—which I'm not altogether certain it did —it could have killed the herds as well. But if the Dark simply evacuated the Nest to go elsewhere, they could hardly take their herds with them, now, could they?”

“But could they not have defended this place against any ghost that came against them?” Hoofprint asked, and the frost crackled on his braided mustache.

“Perhaps,” Ingold replied softly. “But we cannot even be sure that there was a ghost. I don't think so. I am not even certain that they left in fear.”

The Raider's dark, animal face grew thoughtful. “If not in fear—then why?”

“Perhaps at a command?”

“And who would command the Dark?”

“A good question,” the old man said. “And one whose answer I will seek in Quo. If the wizards there cannot help me, perhaps that question and what I have seen here can help them. All I ask of you, Hoofprint of the Wind, is the leave to walk through your lands.”

The chieftain laughed softly. “As if the leave of any man could bid the Desert Walker to go or stay. As soon can a man bid the Dark. Nevertheless, you have my leave. And what will you do, wise man, you and your Little Insect, together •with all the wise men of the world in one place upon the Western
Ocean?”

“Find a way to drive forth the Dark indeed,” the wizard replied quietly. “Or perish together in trying.”

They emerged from beneath the earth to a world blasted and changed. As they struggled toward the livid remains of the daylight through the drifted snow that all but blocked the last twenty feet of the stairway, the cold seemed to grip Rudy's bones. Even after the bitter chill beneath the earth, it took his breath away with its brutal intensity. The small band of Raiders and horses came out to a surface landscape buried under hard, powdery snow so cold that it shrieked beneath the foot and to a sky black with clouds, where twisting columns of tornadoes wavered between dark air and frozen earth. Smaller winds chased each other aimlessly across the desolation, blowing snow now from one direction, now from another, in the confused remnants of the hurricane blast that had entombed the land.

“I thought you said the storm would be over,” Rudy managed to say through uncontrollable shivering,

“It is over.” Ingold swung himself lightly up onto his borrowed stallion. His breath crystallized to ice in his beard even as he spoke. “This is only its aftermath.”

On the way south through the sick darkness of the late afternoon, they passed a small herd of bison, half-buried in the drifted snow. The animals stood head-down, crusted with frost, their flesh and blood frozen to rock as they grazed. No wonder, Rudy thought, the Raiders will sacrifice one of their own people, if necessary, to propitiate whatever evil ghost it is that can do that.

It was long after dark before they made camp. Even the freezing desert night was warmer than the daylight after the ice storm. The Raiders set up a tiny war camp with silent efficiency, and Ingold sat awake for a long time by the fire, talking with Hoofprint of the Wind. Rudy could see them through the narrow entrance of his shelter, the flickering touch of the gold light on the chieftain's long braided mustaches and on the scars on Ingold's hands.

After a time Ingold came into the shelter and crawled under the fur robes. The fire outside had almost died. Rudy whispered, “Ingold? What do you think?”

Ingold's voice murmured back out of the darkness. “About what?”

“About the ghost, for Chrissake.”

One blue eye and part of a beard appeared from under the shaggy furs. The wizard raised himself up on one elbow. “I don't believe there is one. Or at least, not as the Raiders fear it. At the bottom of those caverns, I could sense no living thing.”

“You think the Dark left on their own, then?”

“I think it's possible.”

“Could they have been driven out by an ice storm like today's?”

Ingold was silent for a moment, considering. Finally he said, “I hardly think so. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a previous storm this far south, and the Dark left their Nests in the plains, according to Hoofprint of the Wind, at the time of the first quarter moon of autumn, some seven weeks ago. The Dark are not weather-wise, Rudy. Even the most skilled wizard cannot predict when and where an ice storm will strike more than a few minutes before it happens.”

In the outer darkness, a horse whinnied, a comforting sound. There was no other noise except for the endless groan of the wind. Even the wolves were still.

“Is that what they mean when they say something's as —as unstoppable as the ice in the north? Or as sure as the ice in the north?” Rudy asked.

“Not in reference to the storms, no,” Ingold said. “In the north you'll find the great ice fields, where nothing can live and where there is nothing but an endless waste of ice. In places the ice is growing as much as an inch a year. In some places, more.”

“Have you been there?”

“Oh, yes. That was long ago. Lohiro and I had—I suppose you could call it an errand in the ice, and both of us very nearly froze to death. At that time, the rim of the ice lay along the crest of a fair-sized range of hills that the old maps call the Barrier. The last time I was there, the hills were almost completely buried.”

“Ingold,” Rudy said softly, “what's the connection? Seven weeks ago was the first quarter moon of autumn. Gae fell. Lohiro and all the wizards in the world cut off contact with everyone and anyone. The Dark disappeared from the Nests in the plains after murdering their herds. What the hell is going on, Ingold? What's happening?”

The old man sighed. “I don't know, Rudy. I don't know. Is this one more catastrophe in a tale of random catastrophes, or is it all part of a single riddle, with a single key? We have shared this planet with the Dark for all the years of humankind's existence, yet we know nothing about them except that they are our enemies. If there is a key, is it at Quo? Or does the key lie with the Dark themselves, beyond human understanding at all? Or is it in the last place we would look for it, back at the Keep of Dare?”

The messenger from the Emperor of Alketch came riding up the valley on a rare sunny afternoon, after a week of snows. Most of the Keep was out of doors, working on repairing the mazes of corrals or building new fences for the food compounds, chopping wood or hauling rocks for the projected forge. The cohorts of warriors at exercise under various of the company captains ran, jumped, and swung weighted weapons with sweaty good will. Children of all ages scattered through the Vale, sledding, skating, or sit-down tobogganing on the frozen stream, their shrieks of delight like the piping of summer birds.

Gil had picked that afternoon to experiment with one of the little white polyhedrons that she and Alde had found in such numbers throughout the old storerooms and shafts of the Keep. These had remained a puzzle to them, turning up with ubiquitous regularity, businesslike and yet to all intents and purposes useless. Like the Keep, they were smooth and shining enigmas.

At first she had theorized to Alde that they might be toys.

“They'd break if they were dropped, surely,” Alde objected. The girls were walking along the new-dug path back to the clearing in the woods where the Guards had spent the morning in practice. Gil had recently returned to regular training and was black-and-blue.

“Votives?” she suggested.

“For what?” Alde asked reasonably. “Votives are gifts of light, candles, scent, incense, or of wealth given to the Church, in which case you present little bronze or lead models of what you've given.”

“Maybe they were toys,” Gil remarked. 'They do stack together.“ And they did, fitting facet against facet, like a cellular structure or a three-dimensional honeycomb. ”Do they really break?"

But, from an oblique sense of uneasiness at what she did not understand, or merely from an overdose of science fiction films in her own universe, Gil had elected to wait for clear weather to perform the experiment outdoors. She and Alde found Seya and Melantrys at the clearing, sparring with wooden training swords, and warned the two Guards of their intentions. There was a flat rock in the center of the clearing, and Gil set one of the white glass polyhedrons on this, threw a piece of sacking over it, and hit it with a hammer. The result was unspectacular. The polyhedron shattered into six or seven pieces, releasing neither poisonous gas nor embryonic alien beings. Gil felt embarrassed over her own apprehensions, but she noticed that Alde , Seya, and Melantrys had all stayed a respectful distance away.

The pieces appeared to be nothing more than glass of some kind, heavy and slick, like white obsidian. They were vaguely translucent when held to the wan sunlight, but otherwise unremarkable.

“You have me beat,” Melantrys remarked, taking one of them between her small, scarred fingers. “It's nothing I've even heard of.”

“I know,” Gil said. “The records make no mention of them. But we're finding them all over the Keep.”

“Maybe you're right about their being toys,” Seya said. “Tir certainly likes to play with them.”

And indeed Tir, who was bundled up in black quilting and furs, so that he looked less like a baby than like a stubby-limbed cabbage, 'was solemnly rolling another one of the milky prisms back and forth across the side of the rock. Alde sat next to him, sending the thing back at him every time he pushed it toward her. She glanced up at Seya's words. “But the Keep was built by people fleeing a holocaust,” she argued suddenly. “Would they have brought toys?”

“We can't know that these things are as old as the Keep,” Seya pointed out.

“No,” Gil said. “But on the other hand, we've found nothing to show how they were made.”

Alde turned back just in time to keep her son from crawling over the edge of the rock and tumbling into the snow beneath. Tir was growing into a quiet, compact infant whose calm demeanor and lack of fussing disguised an appalling capacity for mischief. He could crawl unnoticed for long distances, making his silent and efficient way toward any danger, gravely consuming whatever mouth-sized morsels fate placed in his path and his mother wasn't quick enough to get away from him. Sometimes he seemed preoccupied with the white polyhedrons, stacking and unstacking the dozen or so Alde kept in her room, examining them for hours in fascination. Gil wondered if this was simply a baby's marveling at the world or if he remembered something about them from some long-forgotten ancestor in the Keep.

“If the people who built the Keep came here in as bad a shape as we did,” Melantrys commented, pulling the rawhide thong loose from her hair and shaking down the thick barley-colored waves over her shoulders, “it would stand to reason that the things were pretty important. Maia says that when his people came up the Pass, they found thousands of crowns' worth of jewelry that people had chucked away in the snow.”

Voices came faintly to them through the trees. Looking up, Gil saw Alwir pass, his fine hands gesturing to the melody of his speaking voice. At his side, Maia of Thran was nodding, a seven-foot longbow held unstrung in his hand. The Chancellor glanced up through the thin screen of bare birches and saw the three Guards in their black, shabby uniforms and the young Queen with her son. He passed them by without a word. Gil heard the swift, ragged draw of Alde 's breath; turning, she saw the quick misery that had crossed the girl's face.

A voice called out, young and shrill, and Tad the herdkid came running up the path toward the Chancellor with a string of the Keep orphans at his heels. Alwir looked down his nose at the boy until he heard what Tad had to say; then Gil saw him bend forward, suddenly attentive. She didn't hear what Tad had said, but she saw the look that flashed between the Bishop and the Lord of the Keep. Then Tad and his little band were running toward the clearing, Tad calling out, “My lady! My lady!”