Darwath 3 - The Armies Of Daylight (10 page)

The wizard considered this for a moment, looking intently into the shadows of the ceiling over his head. Then he rolled painfully up onto one elbow and reached for his cup of tea.

“Interesting,” he said quietly. In the half-darkness of the alcove, the witchlight falling on his white hair was like strong moonlight on mountain snow; his face, below it, was plunged in shadow. “You once asked me, child, why you were here—why it had been you, and not someone else, whom circumstances had thrust into exile from all you knew and wanted.”

Gil looked down at her knobbed and bony hands, lying on the frayed black homespun of her sleeves, and said nothing, but her lips tightened.

“What do you know about the moss in the Nests?”

She jerked her head up, thoroughly startled by what seemed like a whole new topic of conversation, to meet the old man's intent, curious gaze. “Nothing,” she said.

“But you guess something about it,” Ingold pursued. “You said as much back in the guardroom.”

Ruefully, she chuckled. “Oh, that. It isn't important. It's just that I flashed onto something from my college biology course which would explain why the moss is flammable, that's all. It's nothing that has anything to do with the Dark.”

“Isn't it?” the wizard murmured. “I wonder. Do you remember, Gil, when you and I visited the Vale of the Dark, how you looked back from the mountain above and saw by the slant of the evening light the pattern of the ancient walls that told you there had once been a city there? I would never have taken those changes in the colors and thickness of vegetation for anything but a rather curious pattern in the valley floor.”

“Well, of course.” Gill shrugged. “You didn't sit through three Historiography 10-B lectures on the subject of aerial photography, either.”

Ingold smiled. “No. Instead, I devoted a considerable portion of my brilliantly misspent life learning how to cast horoscopes—an interesting pastime, but not much to the point. What I am getting at is this: The answer to the question of how the Dark were defeated—how they might be defeated again—may require, not a wizard, but a scholar. And that could be why you are here.”

“Maybe,” she agreed wryly. “But the fact remains that no record I've seen—either Govannin's chronicles, the old books you salvaged from Quo, or what Alde and I found here in the storerooms—goes back to the Time of the Dark. Nothing gets within a thousand years of it.”

Ingold set his tea down and leaned gingerly back against his blankets. His white brows pulled together in a frown. “Why not?” he asked.

Gil started to reply, then left the words unsaid. The dog did nothing in the nighttime… and that, as Sherlock Holmes had once remarked, was the curious incident.

She returned to the barracks in a meditative mood.

Oddly enough, it was Gil's mother who provided the clue to the unraveling of the riddle of the records of the Times Before.

Gil seldom dreamed about her mother; it had been months, indeed, since she had even thought of her. The two had never been close; Mrs. Patterson's relationship with her daughter had been largely based upon emotional blackmail, from which Gil's morbidly sensitive spirit had never recovered.

Yet she was not really surprised to find herself, dreaming, back in her mother's house, sitting on the sky-blue upholstery of the uncomfortable antique loveseat and listening to her mother chat with a podgy young medical student whom she had invited over “… to meet you, dear. I told him I had a daughter, and he said he would be so interested to get acquainted with you.”

Gil reflected, in her dream, that her mother had not changed much at all. Spa-trim and tennis-golden, dainty and svelte in a designer suit of dusky rose, with not an electrum curl out of place, she did not look like a woman whose elder daughter had vanished without a trace and had been missing for months. As always, she monopolized the conversation with her vast fund of small talk, describing in detail how she had undergone the very newest thing in hypnosis therapy to stop smoking, and what wonders it had done for her—far more than any of the half-dozen other cures she had tried.

Feeling as gauche and tongue-tied as she always did, Gil looked down at her hands, wrapped around the thick crystal of a highball glass. She saw them as she knew them now, skeleton-thin and hard, nicked all over with the scars and blisters of sword practice. She saw that she was wearing her one rather unbecoming blue dress. Because her body had thinned with hardship and training, it fitted her less well than it ever had. Like a smear of dried ocher plastic, the scars she'd taken in her first fight with the Dark Ones showed below the line of her unfashionably short sleeve. She wore stockings and high heels, too; looking at her feet, she saw that one of the hose was developing a run.

“… of course, I do get tremendously nervous, what with my husband away so much and Gillian at school. What is it you're majoring in, dear?”

“History,” Gil said quietly, and her mother's face blossomed into a smile as pretty as an arrangement of silk flowers.

“Of course. Do you know, dear, Dr. Armbruster here uses hypnosis for his psychiatric patients, too? Really, I found it so useful…” She lighted a cigarette, the California sunlight flashing off the gold of the lighter and the pink polish of her nails…

Gil opened her eyes. Down at the far end of the womens' barracks, the banked embers of the tiny hearth gave out a feeble glow; but other than that, the room was in darkness. In the mazes beyond the thin wall of the long cell, she could hear the measured tread of the deep-night watch going on its rounds.

She supposed, thinking about it later, that she should have felt some yank of sorrow at the sight of her parent and the world that she had lost. But for the moment her mind was preoccupied, and she lay, considering the barracks ceiling above her in the dark.

“Hypnosis?” Ingold said thoughtfully, his tongue unfamiliar on the English word. He leaned an elbow on the workbench in Rudy's lab and scratched one corner of his white mustache meditatively.

“Christ, I never thought of that!” Rudy exclaimed, turning from the mess of tubes, stocks, homemade sticky tape, and glittering glass bubbles that strewed the table before him to regard Gil with awe and delight. “You think it would work?”

“I don't see why it wouldn't.” Gil pushed aside the glue pot and four of the odd, crystal-gray polyhedrons that they had found in such numbers in the deserted lab levels and perched herself on the edge of the workbench, her feet in their scarred old boots dangling above the floor. She picked up one of the polyhedrons and angled its frostlike facets to the ball of witchlight that floated over Rudy's head. “You ever find out what these were good for?”

“Sure,” Rudy said cheerfully. He daubed some glue on one of the hand-whittled gunstocks, fitted a glass bubble— one of the firing chambers they had found in a deserted storeroom—to the top, and used three of the crystal polyhedrons to prop the whole thing delicately together while the glue dried.

“But what is this—hypnosis?” Alde looked up from her corner of the lab, nearest the brazier that warmed the room. She looked very domestic, with gold embroidery scissors glinting in her hands and rags piled in her lap, which she had been snipping into long strips, to be later painted with glue to make sticky tape. Prince Altir Endorion, last scion of the House of Dare, was solemnly mummifying himself at her feet.

“It's kind of like being put to sleep,” Gil began, and Rudy shook his head.

“No,” he contradicted quietly. “A girl I knew did age-regression therapy—she said you aren't asleep. It's like— like all your concentration is on the hypnotist's voice. You relax to a point where your mind is open to suggestion. Anything sounds reasonable.” He glanced from the wizard to Aide. “And it can be used to uncover things that have been forgotten.”

“It sounds like gnodyrr,” Ingold mused, setting down the slightly egg-shaped firing chamber he had been examining and regarding the three young people with thoughtful, half-shut eyes. “Gnodyrr is a type of spell that relaxes and opens the subject's mind—and it is done primarily with the voice.”

“Have you done it?” Gil asked.

“Of course.”

“Would there be someone else here who could work such a spell on you? Because that's the way we could find out what it is that you have forgotten—the key to the defeat of the Dark. Would Thoth be able to do it?”

The wizard's smile widened. “Oh, I don't think so,” he said, his eyes beginning to twinkle impishly. “Thoth would never speak to me again if I so much as suggested that he knew such things. Gnodyrr is categorized as black magic— forbidden magic. The teaching of it is punishable by death.”

Aghast, Rudy gulped. “Why?”

There was a momentary silence, broken only by the faint throbbing of the pumps, hidden deep in the rock of the walls. Then Gil said, “Think about it.”

“Yeah, but you can't get someone to do something he knows is wrong under hypnosis,” Rudy argued. “That's been proven.”

“But we're not talking about hypnosis,” she pointed out quietly. “We're talking about magic—gnodyrr.”

Rudy was silent. He knew the power of Ingold's flawed velvet voice, the voice that could make all things seem possible, logical—even necessary. In the dusky laboratory, the witchlight that wavered over Ingold's head seemed to halo them both in disturbing brightness—this thin, dark-haired girl in her patched black uniform, sitting on the workbench among the confusion of crystal and steel, and the old man who stood beside her, the sleeves of his pale robe rolled up over his scarred forearms. Now that Rudy thought of it, he wouldn't have been entirely willing to bet that Ingold couldn't get her to do murder, cold sober and in the rational light of day.

“And in any case,” the old man went on, “I would hesitate to surrender the control of my mind to anyone, even to someone whom I trusted implicitly—Gil or Kta. I have far too much power to take a risk of that kind, even for the best of causes. If for no other reason, mine are the spells that bind the gates of the Keep against the Dark. And as holder of Master-spells…”

“Master-spells?” Rudy frowned, reaching out with one foot to prevent Tir, who had grown bored with his cocoon, from seeking his fortune among the piled junk under the workbench.

“Certainly.”

For an instant Rudy was conscious of what he had seen, one night in the depths of the desert—his own isolated soul, viewed through the bright sea-blue eyes that suddenly held his. Like an image made of crystal, there was nothing in his mind or spirit that the old man could not probe out, if he wanted. Ingold's thoughts, his will, were like a needle of ice and lightning, piercing to the bottom of Rudy's startled brain.

Then, with a shock as palpable as the cutting of a straining rope, he was released, and had to catch his balance on the edge of the table, for all the strength seemed to have gone out of his legs. The shadows in the stark, rectangular lab had deepened. Rudy realized that his own witchlight had been quenched and that the only illumination in the room was that which burned like searing ball lightning above Ingold's uncut, silky white hair. He found his hands were unsteady, his face drenched in sudden, icy sweat.

“Master-spells,” the old man explained gently.

“Ingold.” Alde straightened up from retrieving a dust-blackened Tir from beneath the workbench. “Could you work this—this gnodyrr—on me?” Her voice was halting, as if her own audacity terrified her. "I have no—no Master-spells. But I am descended from the House of Dare.

“We have all talked of the heritable memories of the House of Dare,” she went on hesitantly, clasping the grimy and repulsively dirty scion of that House in her arms. “Eldor had them. Maybe Tir has them. My grandfather had them. And I can recognize things that my ancestors must have seen, here in the Keep, though I can't remember independently, as—as Eldor used to. But—why do we remember at all?”

Gil's head came up, her gray eyes suddenly sharp and hard.

“You see,” Alde continued, her fingers plucking nervously at the cobwebs trailing from Tir's dress, “Gil and looked all over the Keep for records. Anything, to tell us how the Dark Ones may have been defeated. And there's nothing, nothing at all. But—but maybe the old wizards, the engineers who raised the Keep, knew that records do get lost, especially when, as you said, fire is the principal weapon.”

Gil's finger stabbed out like a sword. “They tied the memory to the bloodline, and that was their record! A record that wouldn't get lost and couldn't be destroyed!”

“Could they do that?” Rudy asked doubtfully.

“I wouldn't put it past them.”

Rudy glanced through the half-open door of the laboratory, past the blue-white bar of light with its diamond mist of dust motes, and out to the blackness of the hidden levels of the Keep beyond where lay hundreds of thousands of square feet of sunken hydroponics tanks filmed with dust, sealed labs and enigmatic storerooms, and pumps which had operated for a score of centuries on power sources that were still unknown.

When he thought about it, he wouldn't put much of anything past them.

“It seems that women remember these things differently from men,” Alde said, gently thwarting Tir's attempts to escape her arms and investigate the frost-gray crystals that twinkled so invitingly on the workbench beside him. “But could what I half-remember be brought to the surface by— by gnodyrr?”

“It could,” the wizard said slowly, his voice low and very grave. “But at what cost to yourself, my lady? Gnodyrr is black magic. But more than that, in certain places, local Church rulings have condemned the subject of the spell as well to imprisonment, banishment, or death.”

Aide's eyes seemed to get huge in her pale face.

Indignant, Rudy cried, “How come?”

“Don't speak of it so loudly,” Ingold said. He leaned upon the workbench, his blunt, thick hands folded on the dark metal of its shining surface. The witchlight threw a curiously sinister glitter into his eyes. “Suppose I were to use gnodyrr on Minalde and instruct her to—oh, three years hence—put ground glass into her brother's food. Then I go away and don't return until Alde has been executed for murdering her brother, leaving the Regency open…”