Darwath 2 - The Walls Of The Air (26 page)

Alde got quickly to her feet. “What is it, Tad?”

The children roiled to a stop, red-faced and snow-flecked, in the steaming cloud of their breath. “It's the messenger from Alketch, my lady,” the boy gasped. “Lyddie here saw him coming up the road from the valley.”

What seemed .like the whole of the Keep had assembled on the steps to watch the coming of the messenger from Alketch. But whether they were ones who had come from Gae or from Penambra, they were silent, a sea of watching faces. From her position among the ranks of the Guards, Gil could see that the messenger rode alone. The Icefalcon had not returned with him.

For a time, grief clouded her vision, and she saw nothing. The Icefalcon had been her friend, the first of her friends among the Guards. Cool, aloof, and self-contained, he had only once paid her a dubious compliment—if she wanted to take being told she was a born killer as a compliment; in the course of training with her as a Guard, he had given her welts and bruises enough to qualify in most circles as a deadly enemy. But they had both been foreigners among the people of the Wath, and that had been a bond. And they had both stood behind Ingold, the night the Dark had come to the Keep.

For that, Alwir had sent him south. And he had not returned.

The messenger was dismounting. The murmuring among the vast, dark crowd around the doors of the Keep was like the lapping of the distant sea. He was a youngish man, black-skinned, with haughty, aquiline features and great masses of curly raven hair. Under a patched scarlet traveling cloak, he wore a knee-length tunic stamped with gold, its pattern picked up again on his close-fitting, high-heeled, crimson boots. A small horn recurved bow hung at his back; on the saddlebow rested a spiked helmet of gilded steel, and a slim, two-handed killing sword was scabbarded below. In his dark face, his eyes shone a bright, pale gray.

He made a profound salaam. “My lord Alwir.”

Standing above him on the lowest step, Alwir gestured him to rise.

“I am called Stiarth na-Salligos, nephew and messenger of his Imperial Majesty, Lirkwis Fardah Ezrikos, Lord of Alketch and Prince of the Seven Isles.” He straightened up, diamond studs glittering in his earlobes.

“In the name of the Realm of Darwath, I greet you,” Alwir said in his deep, melodious voice. “And through you, your master, the Emperor of the South. I bid you both welcome in the Keep of Dare.”

Gil heard the murmuring behind her rise at that, and a man's angry voice grumbled, “Yeah? And all his bloody damn troops as well?”

“Ration our bread to feed the damn southerners,” someone else growled, the sound of it almost lost among the general whispering, and a third voice replied, “Murdering fags.”

With this in her ears, Gil watched Minalde come down the steps to greet Stiarth na-Salligos, her head high and her face very pale. The graceful young man bent over her hand and murmured formal courtesies. She asked him something; Gil heard only his reply.

“Your messenger?” Those elegant brows deepened in an expression of concerned regret. “Alas. Our road here was fraught with perils. He was struck down by bandits in the delta country below Penambra. The land is rife with them, hiding by night to haunt the roads by day, stealing and killing whatever they find. Barely did I escape with my life. Your messenger was a brave man, my lady. A worthy representative of the Realm.”

He bowed again, deeper this time. And as he did so, he swept his scarlet cloak back like a mating bird, its scalloped edges like blood against the snow. Gil had a brief glimpse of the token that hung on his gilded belt—small, oak, shaped to a man's hand. Hot rage swept her, more blinding than her former grief. She stood motionless as Alwir offered Minalde his arm, the massed troops and the populace of the Keep parting before them, and led her upward to the dark gates, Stiarth of Alketch trailing elegantly at their heels.

What the messenger wore at his belt was the token of the Rune of the Veil that Ingold had given to the Icefalcon for his protection before the man rode away.

“He murdered him.” The tapping of Gil's boot heels sounded very loud in the arched roof of the great west stairway. “The Icefalcon would never have given up that token.”

“Not even to someone who was empowered to negotiate for the troops we'll need?” Minalde asked quietly. She and Gil reached the landing, where an old man from Gae seemed to have homesteaded with two unofficial wives and large numbers of caged chickens. “Not even in the case of an emergency? If it was a choice between one or the other of them? He'd fulfilled his own mission in summoning the messenger.”

“The Icefalcon?” Gil sidestepped two chicken crates and a cat and continued down the steps. From the corridor below, dim yellow light shone up, marking the back door of the Guards' barracks; with it came a whiff of cooking odors and steam. “Believe me, there was no one he valued as much as he did himself. Least of all some—some scented Imperial Nephew whom he could have broken in half on his knee.” They turned right at the foot of the steps, went down a short stretch of corridor whose walls looked to be of the original design, and then passed through a makeshift side door and into a jumble of rough-partitioned cells to the right again. “He never went in for that kind of altruism, Alde . The only way Stiarth could have gotten that amulet of Ingold's was by force, in which case he'd have had to kill him, probably by trickery. Stealing it from the Icefalcon would have been tantamount to murder;' that was his first line of defense against the Dark.”

Gil spoke quietly, but her anger was still hot in her breast. Maybe it was the memory of the messenger's creamy smirk, or the fact that the negotiations were first and last with Alwir, with Alde being used merely as his rubber stamp. Maybe it was only the memory of waking up in the rain-dripping dimness of that stable back at Karst, when the Icefalcon had come to check in his cool, impersonal fashion whether she was well. But something of it must have carried into her voice, for Alde touched her sleeve, bidding her to halt.

“Gil,” she said, “whether the Icefalcon would have given it to him of his own free will or not—let it be.”

“What?” Gil's voice had an edge, sounding sharp in the gloomy half-darkness of these deserted corridors.

“I mean—Gil, you're the only one here who knew about that token. But you're not the only one who thinks that— that Stiarth na-Salligos might have had something to do with the Icefalcon's not coming back. And, Gil, please…” Her low voice was suddenly urgent, almost frightened, her eyes plum-colored in the grubby and nickering light. “… Alwir says we can't afford to let negotiations fall through. Not for that.”

Gil bit back a cruel reply. She stood for a moment, struggling with her sullen rage, knowing that Alde was, in a sense, right. What's done is done. The murder by treachery of one of the few friends I had is done. Past.

“Maybe,” she said slowly. “But if that kind of treachery is common coin, do we really want negotiations to continue?”

Alde turned her face away. “We don't know that.”

“Like hell we don't! Alde , you've been reading those old histories and records as much as I have. Compared with some of the crap they've pulled on settling the Gettlesand border question, murdering the Icefalcon would be Scout's Honor.”

Alde looked back at Gil, her face imploring. “We don't know that he murdered the Icefalcon.”

“Don't we?” Gil asked. “He sure as hell lied about it. If bandits had killed him, they would have looted the body, and Stiarth never would have gotten that amulet.”

Minalde was silent.

“All right,” Gil said softly. “I won't talk it up with the other Guards, though Melantrys is as convinced as I am about it. And I won't take any kind of revenge that would wreck negotiations. But I can't answer for anyone else.”

Silence and shadow lay between them for a moment, broken only by the distant random talk in corridors closer to the Aisle than this one. The great gates would soon be shut for the night; the Church had tolled its bells throughout the Keep, and no few participants had made their way to the nightly services in the great cell beneath the Royal Sector where the Bishop Govannin centered her scarlet domain. Among them, Gil knew, would be Stiarth of Alketch, like all the dark southerners, a fanatic son of the Church. Someone—Bok the carpenter, she thought—had told her the Imperial Nephew had supped with the old prelate and had been closeted with her for some hours before the Council meeting with Alwir, Minalde, and the other notables of the Keep. Now Alde looked strained and worn in the dim light of her clay lamp, her loosely bound hair kinked and wrinkled from her formal coronet. She was a royal princess and the source of her brother's power, Gil thought, looking at that white, withdrawn face. And she was as much a pawn as any one of the Guards.

“Thank you,” Alde said quietly.

Gil shrugged. “I hope it's worth it.”

“To establish a bridgehead for humankind at Gae?” Alde blinked up at her, startled. “Once the Nest there is burned out…”

“But will it be? With Govannin and the troops of the Alketch trying to get rid of the wizards, and the Archmage, whenever he shows up, and Ingold, and with all the other leaders fighting Alwir for power? With the old-timers in the Keep resenting Maia's Penambrans and the common people accusing the merchants of stealing grain? Alde , you have a gunnysack full of cats here, not a team of mules that's going to pull together.”

“I know,” the Queen said softly. “And that's why I thank you for not—not making the situation worse.”

Gil paused in her steps, looking curiously over at the sweet, sensitive face on the other side of the lampflame, seeing a girl who in Gil's world would be barely out of high school, yet with all the experience of ruin, horror, and death, of judgment and the soiled meshes of political expediency, behind those tired dark-blue eyes. Gil's grievance against the Imperial Nephew seemed suddenly very personal and rather petty. “Better thee than me, honey.” She sighed. “But you know I'll back you all the way.”

“Thank you,” Alde said again. Their footsteps chimed together as they turned down the black hallways toward the barracks. In the dark weeks of winter, the friendship between them had grown, a friendship born of loneliness and mutual respect. Alde stood a little in awe of Gil's learning and her quick, cold intelligence; Gil envied Alde 's patience and compassion, knowing them as qualities which she herself lacked. The two women recognized each other's courage, and Gil, from her own disastrous family life, understood Alde 's misery and confusion at her increasing isolation from her brother in the welter of Keep politics. But if Alde understood the trouble that Gil had found growing in her own heart these dark, snowbound days, she never spoke of it.

After a time Alde asked, “Were you going back to your research tonight?”

Gil shrugged. “I don't think so. I've decoded most of that last chronicle, and there isn't a whole lot in it. It's late —I think Drago the Third was the last King to rule from Renweth, and that was centuries after the Time of the Dark. When he disappeared, they moved the capital back up to Gae, where the big citadel of wizards was in those days.”

“He disappeared?” Alde asked, startled.

“Well—he took off with somebody named Pnak for some place called Maijan Gian Ko, and there was this huge fuss about it, and he never came back. Where's Maijan Gian Ko, I wonder?”

“That was the old name for Quo,” Minalde said. “The greatest fortunate place or Great Magic place—the centerpoint of magic on earth. If Drago took off for Quo, no wonder everyone was upset. Was Drago a wizard, then?”

Gil shrugged. “Beats me. But his son was the one who started the campaign against the mages of Gae, which eventually got them kicked out of the city. Why do you ask?”

“Well,” Alde said, “I've often thought about how we found the observation room—just by closing my eyes and walking. Sometimes at night I'll lie in bed and do that, just remember walking down halls, seeing things around me. Most of the time it's nothing. But once or twice I've had the feeling that there ought to be more levels in the Keep. Do you think there might be levels beneath this one, dug out in the rock of the knoll itself?”

“It makes sense,” Gil agreed. “Even if the power source for the pumps was magic, they had to put the machinery for it somewhere, and we haven't found it yet. But as to how we'd find the entrances—you've got me there.”

They stepped through the wide, dark archway into the Aisle, where the gates were being shut for the night. The warriors of the day and evening watches were grouped around them, the soft run of their talk carrying over the general noise of that great central cavern, Melantrys was making her dispositions for the night, sharp, small, and arrogant next to Janus and the head of Alwir's troops. In the shadows of the gates, the white quatrefoils of the Guards shone like a ghostly meadow of asphodel on the faded black of their massed shoulders; black stars strewed the scarlet heavens of the uniforms of the House of Bes like an LSD vision of the Milky Way; the ranks of the Church wore deeper crimson, somber and unrelieved.

Alde frowned in thought. 'The best way to explore this, I think, is for you to get the tablets on which you're making the Keep map and for us to go back to the observation room. We can start from there and go…"

“Wherever,” Gil finished. They headed for the barracks door, almost tripping over a woman who loitered in its shadow. She hurried away from them as soon as they came near, a tall, red-haired woman whom Gil found vaguely familiar, clutching a threadbare brown cloak around her broad shoulders. A few moments later, when they emerged from the barracks with Gil's maps, they saw her again, hanging around the fringes of the group by the gate. She looked about anxiously, rubbing her reddened knuckles and twisting at her cloak; but when Seya went over to speak to her, she fled again.

Starting from the corridor outside the observation room, Gil and Alde worked their way steadily back through the Keep, comparing the composition and design of walls, floors, and doorways, stopping repeatedly for Gil to scratch additions to her maps on the wax tablets she carried and for Alde to think. Her memories were not always reliable, but weeks of research and mapping had fleshed them out. By this time, there was probably no one who knew more about the Keep than the two of them.