Darwath 2 - The Walls Of The Air (27 page)

When they could, they stuck to the places where the original structure of the Keep remained. They descended by one of the original stairways to the first level and followed the line of the original corridors. “We seem to be heading back toward the barracks,” Gil remarked as they turned down a narrow access corridor to find themselves in a long, deserted chamber that appeared to be the center of its own minor maze. “In fact, I think we're almost directly behind them, in the southwest corner of the Keep.”

“The observation room was in the southeast corner.”

Alde said. 'That's where the main pump shaft seemed to connect."

“'I wonder…” Gil stepped through an obliquely set doorway and looked around her. Alde raised the lamp as high as she could for what better light they could gain. “Well, we're close, anyway. This was part of the original design, and I think that wall there is the inside of the front wall of the Keep. You can see there's no trace of blocks of any kind. If we've come three rows in…” Gil turned and pointed with her silver hairpin. “Through there.”

“Through there” proved to be not a cell or a closet, as she had supposed it would be, but a tiny passageway that ultimately ended in a square corner room, so jammed with junk as almost to hide in shadow the wooden trapdoor in the floor. With a cry of delight and without the smallest consideration for what Frankensteinian horrors might lurk in the shadows below, Gil pulled on its rusted metal ring and was greeted by a black well of shadows, a great smell of dust, and a soft, billowing cloud of warm air.

“It's like a different world.” The great dark space took Minalde's soft voice and echoed it back to her like the sighing murmur of a million past voices. “What kind of a place was this?”

Darkness yielded unwillingly to the feeble glow of the lamp. Shapes materialized: tables, benches, the gleam of metal, scattered polyhedrons, white or frosty gray, and the twinkle of faceted crystal. Gill stepped forward and was greeted by the leap and sparkle of the lampflame repeating itself in countless tiny mirrors. Fragments of gilding slipped over the close-curled edges of a scroll and flickered in glass vessels half-filled with ashy powders or pale dust. The black floor rose in the center to form an altarlike platform, its hollowed top lined with charred steel.

Gil turned around, her wheeling shadow turning with her. “At a guess,” she said, “this isn't so much a different world as one that's more the same. I think it's still as it was when it was built, the work of the last generation born in the Times Before.” She ran her hand along the smooth, obsidian-hard edge of the workbench. “This is one of the old labs.”

“Like Bektis' workshop?” Minalde asked, coming timidly into the center of the room.

“More or less.” Gil brought the lamp closer to the workbench, touching, first with light and then with hesitant fingers, the frosted glass of the polyhedrons that lay there in such disarray.

“But what is all this?” Alde lifted a short apparatus that looked like a barbell made of glass bubbles and gold. “What's it for?”

“Beats me.” Gil set a smooth, meaningless sculpture of wood up endwise; the lamplight slid like water from its sinuous curves. She rolled a sort of big glass egg haltingly into the light and saw it crusted inside with whitish crystals that looked like salt. “It's one hell of a thing to find the laboratories of the old wizards at a time when all the wizards on earth are on the other side of the continent.”

Alde laughed shakily in agreement. Her eyes in the shadows were wide and wondering, as if she remembered what she saw from another personality, another life.

“And it's warm down here,” Gil pursued thoughtfully. “I think this is the first time since I crossed the Void that I have been warm.” She pushed gently at the steel doors at the far end of the room, and they slid back on their soundless hinges, poised like the gates of the Keep itself. In the room beyond, she heard the faint echo of machinery pumping; the light of the lamp she bore touched row after row of sunken tanks, the black stone of their sides marked with vanished water and a climbing forest of steel lattices. Gil frowned, walking the narrow paths between them. “Could it be—hydroponics?”

“What?” Alde knelt to trace the water stain with a curious finger.

“Water-gardening. Alde , what in hell did they use for light down here? Light enough to get plants to grow?” She pushed open another door, and vistas of empty tanks mocked her from the shadows. She turned back. “You could feed the whole damn Keep down here if you had a light source.”

“Are we going to tell Alwir?” Gil asked much later as they ascended the straight, narrow little stairway back to the hidden storeroom. Alde carried the lamp now, walking ahead. Gil's hands were full of bits and pieces of meaningless tools, half a dozen jewels of varying sizes she'd found in a lead box, and two or three of the new polyhedrons, frosted gray instead of milky, but just as uncommunicative. She shivered as they came up from below and the colder air of ground level nipped at her rawboned hands.

“N-no,” Alde said. “Not yet.”

They dumped their finds on the dusty trestle table that ran down the center of the large, deserted room and set the lamp down among them in its pool of dim and wavery light. Through the door and down the corridor they could see the blurred echo of other firelight and hear a baby cry, with a man's deep, smooth, bass voice rising in the snatch of a lullaby. The smell of food cooking came to them there, together with the odor of dirty clothes. All the sounds and smells of the Keep were there, telling of life safe from the Dark. Here in this small complex of cells was only shadow, and dust, and time.

“Gil,” Alde said slowly, “I—I don't think I trust Alwir.” The confession of disloyalty seemed to stick in her throat. “He—he uses things. This—” She rested her hand on a frosty crystal before her, joined spheres of glass and a meaningless tangle of interwinding tubes. “This is part of something that could be very important when the mages come back. But Alwir might destroy it or lock it up if he thought he could get some kind of concession from Stiarth by doing so. He's like that, Gil. Everything is like cards in his hands.”

Her voice trembled suddenly with misery. Embarrassed, Gil spoke more gruffly than she'd meant to. “Hell, you're not the only person in the Keep who doesn't think he's God's gift to the Realm.”

“No,” Alde agreed, her lips quirking in an involuntary smile that was instantly gone. “But I should. He's been very good to me.”

“He ought to be,” Gil commented. “You're the source of his power. He has no legal power of his own.”

Alde shook her head. “Only the real power,” she assented. “Sometimes I think even his friendship with—with Eldor was part of his games. But Elder was strong enough himself to keep him down, strong enough to make Alwir work for him, like a strong man riding a half-wild horse.”

She sighed and rubbed at her eyes with one long, white hand. “Maybe Elder knew it,” she went on tiredly. “Maybe that's why he always kept so distant from me. I don't know, Gil. I look back and I see things that happened then and I start to doubt everything. Sometimes I think Rudy's the only person who ever loved me for who I am and not for what I could be used for.”

Gil reached out and rested a comforting hand on the slender shoulder. “That's what happens when you mess with power,” she said softly. “We are what we are, God help us.”

Alde laughed suddenly, tears still filming her eyes. “So why must I have all the disadvantages of power and none of its rewards?” She picked up the lamp, her expression wryly philosophic. “But you see,” she said as she led the way back toward the corridor, “why I don't think Alwir should know of all this just yet.”

They stepped into the Aisle again, into a confusion of lights and voices. There was a little group ahead in the shadows of the gates. Even from here, they could hear a woman crying. A quick glance passed between them, and they hurried up the steps.

By this time of night, not many civilians were in the Aisle. It was, Gil guessed, a few hours before the deep-night watch came on. Her own watch began at eight the following morning, but training was at six; she was uncomfortably reminded that she ought to get to sleep.

It was the red-haired woman she had seen earlier who was crying, huddled against the wall with a small group of Guards around her, the torchlight like fire over the thick, tangled rope of her hair.

Janus was saying, “Dammit, are we going to have to post a watch to keep the people inside at night? You'd think the Dark would do that.”

“It's the food,” Gnift said simply, and those elf-bright eyes flickered toward the closed gates. “Things are thin now. With the troops coming up from Alketch—”

“Surely the Emperor can't expect us to feed his armies!” one of Alwir's lesser captains protested.

Melantrys gave him a snort of derision. “Hide and watch him.”

“What is it?” Alde asked. “What's happening?”

The woman raised a face smeared with tears in the yellow torchlight. “Oh, my lady,” she whispered. “Oh, God help me, I never thought he'd do it. He said he would, but I didn't believe.”

“Her husband,” Janus explained briefly. “Man named Snelgrin. He hid himself outside the Keep when the gates shut to steal food and cache it in the woods.”

“I never thought he would,” the woman moaned. “I never thought…”

“Obviously he never thought, either,” Melantrys retorted softly. Gil remembered the couple now—Lolli was the woman's name. They were the first instance of an old-time Keep dweller marrying a Penambran newcomer. Maia had performed the ceremony less than three weeks ago.

Lolli was speaking again, her voice low and muffled, an animal moaning. Alde knelt beside her and took her gently by the shoulders for comfort, but she scarcely seemed to notice. “He didn't mean any harm,” she groaned. “I tried to tell him, but he only said there was a full moon and a clear sky and no harm would come of it. I prayed and prayed he'd change his mind…”

Gil turned silently on her heel and left them there. There was nothing she or anyone else could do, and privately, she agreed with Melantrys. The man's stupidity was his own business and he had evidently not given much weight to the possible sufferings of his wife.

On the other hand, she thought as she lay awake in the narrow darkness of her bunk, people did all kinds of things when impelled by fear or love. She found it impossible to dismiss them, as she once would have done, simply as silly people engaged in incomprehensible stupidities. The love and suffering and fear there were too real and too close to what was in her own unwilling heart.

In time she heard Janus and Gnift come in and return silently to their bunks. Somewhere in the Keep, she thought she could hear the woman Lolli wailing still, though it might have been her imagination or some other sound entirely. She wondered what they'd find of Snelgrin when the gates were opened in the morning.

She thought of the Icefalcon, cool, aloof, and very young, riding away down the river valleys, then of Ingold and Rudy, setting off like the hapless King Drago III on a journey to the greatest magic place, never to return.

Maijan Gian Ko.

Sleepily, her scholarly mind picked at the etymology of the words.

Gian Ko.

Gaenguo.

Her eyes opened in the darkness. What bad Bektis said? “… in Penambra and in Gae itself, on the very spot where the Palace now stands?”

She felt the blood turn to water in her veins.

But it doesn't make sense
, she thought. The terrible silence of the Vale of the Dark returned to her, the heaviness of the vaporous air and the louring sense of being watched. She remembered the hideous geometry of the place, visible only in the angled light of sunset from the tangled rocks of the cliffs above, the sense of breathless confusion there, and the disruption, rather than the magnification, of Ingold's spells.

But was the effect always negative with regard to magic? At one time, could it have been positive? Is that why wizards built their citadels and people their cities near those … fortunate places?

And in that case, she thought, is that why the places were fortunate—the effects positive—to begin with?

Gil did not sleep that night.

Gil had never had much of an opinion of humankind, and it went down several more notches when the gates were opened at dawn. Word had evidently circulated through the Keep, for over a hundred civilians had shown up, idling in the Aisle since before seven in the morning for no better purpose than to be present to see what was left of the hapless Snelgrin. Gil was on day watch, logy from a sleepless night and bruised and exhausted from morning training; she felt she could have turned in her tracks and cursed them all.

As she had hoped, Alde was there, half-supporting the taller and heavier Lolli. It was clear that neither had slept Lolli's face was blotched red and swollen from weeping; Alde 's was very tight and calm. It was only her manner that kept the people there from pushing and staring. Rather to Gil's surprise, Alwir had shown up, too, and Govannin, keeping to the background but making their presence felt Quite an audience, Gil thought sourly, surveying them as Janus and Caldern worked the heavy locking wheels of the inner gates, then walked down the dark tunnel to open the outer. I hope they find something worth their while.

But in the end they were doomed to disappointment, of a sort. The Dark had had other fish to fry last night. Snelgrin was found, alive but stunned, on the steps of the Keep, half-frozen from lying in the snow. The Dark had been known to devour the minds of their victims while leaving the bodies living, but Gil had seen those pitiful remains; they stood still, like cataleptics, or moved if jostled by the wind. Snelgrin managed to get to his feet, his movements odd and jerky, and stumbled up the steps without assistance. His wife was screaming and sobbing with joy. In a way it was touching, Gil thought, shivering in the icy cold of the sunrise. But it must be poor exchange for a pile of ice-crusted bones to some of the spectators.

After the smells of grease and smoke and human frowziness, the ice-water clarity of the morning was a welcome relief. Mauve clouds piled the lower slopes of the peaks above. Beyond them, the sky was a pale bluish green, the light cool and holy on the tracked brown slush and ice-crusted mud. Gil stood on the steps, her cloak wrapped tightly about her, thinking of the three men on whom she had closed the gates—of the Icefalcon, when the slender protection of the Rune of the Veil had been stolen from him, of Ingold, journeying slap into the biggest Nest of the Dark in the West of the World, hoping to find the Archmage there, and of Rudy— “Gil?”