Darwath 2 - The Walls Of The Air (8 page)

“You mean—there are dragons? Real live dragons?”

The wizard looked startled at the question. “Oh, yes, I have actually even slain a dragon. Rather, I acted as decoy and Lohiro did the sword work. As for the rest of it— blasting down walls and walking on water…” He smiled. “Need has simply not arisen.”

“You mean,” Rudy said uneasily, "that—you could? If you had to?

“Walk on water? I could probably find a boat.”

“But if there wasn't a boat?” Rudy pursued.

Ingold shrugged. “I'm quite a good swimmer.”

Rudy was silent for a time, his head pillowed on his hands, staring up into the black and featureless sky, hearing the belling of the wolves on their hunting trail, sweet with distance and incredibly lonely, and remembering the men he had known who had chosen to live as human wolves on a hunting trail of steel and gasoline. To live •with the wind and the pack… That he understood. That mind he knew.

Another thought came to him. “Ingold? When you said that the Dark Ones are—'alien intelligences'—you meant that humans can't understand their essence, didn't you? And because of that, we can't comprehend the source of their magic?”

“Exactly.”

“But if—if you took on the being of the Dark, if you took the form of a Dark One, then wouldn't you understand them? Wouldn't you know then what they are and how they think?”

Ingold was silent for such a long time that Rudy began to fear he had offended the old man. But the wizard only stared into the fire, drawing the stem of a dried stalk of grass through his restless fingers, the flame repeated a thousandfold in his eyes. When he spoke, his soft, scratchy voice was barely audible over the keening of the winds.

“I could do that,” he said. “In fact, I have thought of it many times.” He glanced over at Rudy. Gleaming from the wizard's eyes, Rudy could see the overwhelming temptation to knowledge, the curiosity that amounted in the mageborn to an almost unslakable lust. “But I won't Ever. The risk would be too great.” He dropped the grass stem he held into the fire and watched it idly as it curled and blackened in the veils of burning gold like a corpse upon a pyre. “For you see, Rudy—I might like being a Dark One.”

“I never thought it would come to this so soon.” Gil lobbed a hunk of snow down at the trampled muck of the valley road below.

Seya set down her bow and quiver, shook the powdered snow from her black cloak, and gave a perfunctory glance at the dark pine woods that rose behind the little watchpost. “Come to what?” she asked.

Gil got to her feet, cramped from her long watch in the icy afternoon. “Come to guarding the road against our own people.”

Seya said nothing.

“I've been watching the smoke of their campfires,” Gil went on casually, gathering up her own weapons, bow and sword and spear. “I figure they camped at the ruined watchtowers where the road comes into the Vale, the ones Janus called the Tall Gates. There were several thousand when they came up the road yesterday. By the fires, I don't think there's near that many today. The Dark must have come in the night.” She turned, prickled by the older Guard's silence. “You know, we didn't have to drive them on like beggars.”

Seya looked uncomfortable. She hadn't cared for it, either. The newcomers had been nearly frozen, in rags and starving, when they'd trudged up the valley road. It hadn't taken much of a show of force to send them on their way. But she only said, “When you put on the emblem of the Guards, Gil-Shalos, you gave up the right to have an opinion. We serve the King of Gae—in this case, Prince Altir. Or the Queen.”

Gil folded her arms, trying vainly to warm her hands under her dark, shabby cloak. In the distance she could still see the thin plumes of bluish woodsmoke rising in the clear, freezing air. It wasn't the Queen who gave the orders, she thought. It was Alwir. But it might as well have been her Majesty, for all the difference it made.

She thought of the Queen, a shy, dark-haired girl standing in her brother's elegant shadow. She saw the two now as they had been yesterday, standing in the dark gateway of the Keep with their guards ranged around them, the bullion on their embroidered robes flashing palely in the wan sunlight. We have neither food nor space to take you in, Alwir had said to the tall, ragged monk who had led the refugees up the Pass and who had stood at their head with his stained red robes as brown as old blood against the snow. What food we have will barely take us 'til spring.

There had been a stirring among Alwir's guards and a leathery rattle, like a dragon's scales, of fingered scabbards. The refugees had turned away, retracing their plowed tracks through the crusted snow.

“Look.” Seya's voice broke Gil from her reverie, and she turned her head quickly, following the older Guard's pointing finger. A single rider had appeared on the road, his tall, bony bay horse picking carefully through the slippery mess of ice-scummed potholes that was all that remained of the way. Even without the ivory braids that lay on the man's dark shoulders, Gil would have recognized the tall, thin body and the easy way he sat a horse. The colorless eyes sought the women; a gloved hand was lifted in hail and farewell.

Gil raised her hand in answer, not certain whether to laugh or feel sadness. It was typical of the Icefalcon that he would set forth on a journey from which he might never return with no more than a wave at his closest friends. It would be a long journey and a slow one—he had only the single horse. Stock was precious in the Keep of Dare.

As the dark woods of the Pass swallowed him again, she glanced worriedly at the blur of campfire smoke veiling the black trees and said, “You think he'll have trouble passing their camp?”

Seya raised one eyebrow. “Him?”

Given the Icefalcon's coldblooded ferocity, Gil had to admit it wasn't too likely.

Seya went on. “It's more probable that Janus and the foragers will have trouble. When I left, Alwir and Govannin were still going at it hammer and tongs about how big a guard should go with the wagons and how many of them should be mounted. Alwir kept saying we can't afford to strip the Keep of any more manpower than we can help—and he has a point, considering the attack the Dark Ones made on us last week—and Govannin's on the verge of apoplexy because most of the wagons they're sending with the foragers are hers.”

“I agree with Govannin,” Gil said. She set aside the weapons of guarding—the bow and spear—for Seya's use and shook the snow from the blanket. “The refugees didn't look as if they were in any shape to take on even a small band of armed men; but once Janus hits the river valleys, he may have to contend with the White Raiders. There's supposed to be a band of them there.”

Seya scrambled down the rocks and settled herself into the one niche under the overhanging boulders that provided both a view of the road and shelter from the biting winds. Four hours of guard duty had given Gil ample time to scout it out. 'It's anybody's guess what's in the river valleys now,“ she said quietly. 'They'll have enough problems with brigands and wolves and the Dark Ones.”

Gil resettled her sword belt around her waist. “Where are they heading, do you know?”

Seya shook her head. “Anywhere there was stored food. Deserted towns, well-known farms—anywhere they can find stored corn or straying stock.” She laughed suddenly, wrinkles stitching her lined face like the folds in wet silk. “That's the other thing they've been warring about all morning. Tomec Tirkenson and his people finally got on their way over Sarda
Pass for Gettlesand.”

“I knew they were planning on leaving as soon as the snows let up.” Gil shrugged into her damp cloak, drawing its dark, heavy, smoke-smelling folds about her. “Alwir should be pleased; it makes for fewer mouths to feed.”

“And fewer defenders.” Seya pulled the spare blanket over her feet. “But what really stuck in Govannin's craw was that Tirkenson took all his own cattle with him. She forbade him to take them, since the people of the Keep had greater need; she threatened to excommunicate him if he did. He said she'd excommunicated him ten years ago, he was walking around damned anyway, the cattle were his, he'd bought them in Gae, and he'd break the neck of anyone who tried to stop him from taking them back to Gettlesand with him. He had all his cowpunchers lined up behind him, so there wasn't much her Grace could say, and Alwir wasn't about to start a fight with the only landchief still loyal to the Realm. When I left, the Bishop was burning candles in the pious hope that he fries in Hell.”

Gil laughed. She liked the landchief of Gettlesand. But if he had left, taking not only his cattle but his horses, it was no wonder Govannin was anxious about those that remained. Starved as the refugees encamped in the Pass were, they might try to kill the horses simply for meat.

The wind veered around the shoulder of the mountain, blowing a light skiff of snow down upon them from the rocks above. The cloud-cover lay high that day, just skimming the tips of the white-blanketed peaks; when it shifted, Gil thought she could see the cold flash of the glaciers. Growing or retreating? she wondered idly. Growing, I bet, if they've had many winters as cold and overcast as this one. Just what we need to add to our problems. A goddam ice age!

She looked back down the Pass at the churned, muddy slop of the frozen road, the spatchcocked landscape of sterile black and sterile white, and the gloom of the woods that even deer had deserted. In the distance, the camp smoke made a little white streak, like a finger smudge in the murky air. “Where were they from, do you know?” she asked Seya.

The Guard shrugged. “Penambra, maybe. The monk who talked to Alwir had a deep-south accent. Probably some of them had been wandering around in the valleys for weeks.”

Maybe Alwir was right, Gil thought as she climbed the muddy path and started back through the woods toward the Keep. The vast quantities of corn, wheat, and salt meat stored in the top two levels of the Keep, or secreted in the mazes of cells in Church territory, looked to be a lot, until one realized that they would have to last some eight thousand souls through the winter. It was only early October. Whatever forage Janus could find in the valleys below was an unknowable quantity. Perhaps it was necessary that she and the other Guards had been a party to denying food and shelter to emaciated children and to leaving them for the Dark. It was the other side of the warrior's coin. The clean joys of warfare were part of a larger picture, and what to her was a way of life was to others above her simply an instrument of policy.

But, she reflected, she was hardly alone in that. In her light, tuneless voice she began singing “A Policeman's Lot Is Not a Happy One,” and the Gilbert and Sullivan melody floated on the drift of an alien breeze through the dark, stony woods of another universe.

The road circled a stand of pines, and the smells of the Keep reached her from afar, the stinging woodsmoke, as women rendered used fat and ash into soap, and the warm reek of cattle. Children's laughter mingled with the confused bleating of sheep and goats, with the ringing of an ax in the woods, and with the sound of a deep bass voice lifted, like Gil's, in song. Half-frozen mud squished under her boots as she picked her way around that last turning of the path. And there it lay before her, its sleek walls sheened by the pallor of the dull sky.

It wasn't as big, maybe, as the monster high-rises Gil was familiar with as a child of the twentieth century. But the Keep was well over half a mile in length, hundreds of feet in breadth, and close to a hundred feet in height. Enormous doors were dwarfed by the monolith in which they were set. Its teeming inhabitants swarmed the broad steps and trampled snow at its base. Black and enigmatic, the Keep of Dare guarded its secrets.

What secrets
? Gil wondered. Who built it, and how? She was aware that it lay far beyond the technology of the present age, with its constant soft currents of air and dark, ever-flowing streams of water. Was it raised by magic or only by superb engineering?

And her infinitely distractible scholar's mind scouted the thought: Who would know?

Eldor, maybe
. In a long-ago dream she had overheard the dead King speak of the memories he had inherited from the House of Dare, whose founder, Dare of Renweth, had raised those midnight walls. But Eldor had perished in the destruction of Gae. His son, Altir? The memories had been passed to him, to make him the target for the malice of the Dark. But he was an infant, too young to speak. Lohiro? Maybe. But the archmage was hidden at Quo, and it would be weeks before he came to the Keep, if he ever did.

Gil considered. Ingold had said that records did not go back to the time of the building of the Keep. The chaos of the first incursion of the Dark into the realms of humankind had been followed by centuries of ignorance, social dislocation, famine, and violence. But how far back did they go? And did they carry in them some memory of an oral tradition, like Merlin and his dancing giants who reared Stonehenge? What was in the wagonloads of Church records that Bishop Govannin had risked civil war with Alwir for on the road down from Gae?

A flicker of movement caught her eye and drove that thought from her mind. Someone was slipping through the trees to her right—someone who was furtive without being particularly skillful about it. Gil got a brief glimpse of a peasant's fluttering rainbow-colored skirts, all but hidden in the dark swirl of a cloak. She wondered if it •was any of her business.

The shadow flitted from tree to tree, working through the woods above the road. Probably headed for the refugee camp, Gil guessed. That's the only thing in that direction. At least somebody's showing a little compassion, for all the good it's likely to do.

In that case, it was her business. There was barely time to make it there and back before darkness fell. Gil paused in the road and, for the benefit of the fugitive, snapped her fingers and cursed as if she had forgotten something, then turned and hastened back. Once out of sight of the watcher's probable course, she doubled back through the rocks at the road's edge and scrambled her way to higher ground. She slipped between two shaggy-barked fir trees to wait, her dark cloak blending with the gloom of the shadowy afternoon, the white quatrefoil emblem of the Guards on her shoulder like a patch of snow on wet-darkened wood. In time she saw that cautious figure emerge from the trees, hurrying along the path above the road, keeping a wary eye on the backtrail, and huddling for warmth in the folds of a black fur cloak. The hood had fallen back. A great jeweled clasp glittered like Stars in the raven knots of hair.