Darwath 3 - The Armies Of Daylight (14 page)

A black hole stared at them, like the eye-pit of Hell. But nothing emerged, neither darkness nor beast not even the cloud of bats that Gil had half-expected. The wizard bent his head to pass the low doorsill and vanished into the room beyond.

They saw his shadow, moving against the streaming brightness of his staff. Then he called out, “Come and see this, my children.”

“They lived here?” Alde straightened up as she came through the low door and gazed around the wide, smooth-floored chamber. The twofold glare of the lights had scattered the ancient darkness. Eight monstrous shadow shapes lurched and reeled across the frost-crusted walls as the lights of the wizards' staffs moved. Aide's voice, quieter than was even her usual soft-spoken wont, echoed queerly against the walls of that huge, hollow place.

“Evidently.” Gil bent down to touch with cautious fingers what looked like a bundle of grayed, dust-covered rags heaped near the wall. They crumbled to powder, but she said, “See underneath here? Broken dishes. And bones of some kind—rabbit or chicken…”

“Rabbit,” Rudy said, looking over her shoulder. He had spent a good portion of his time crossing the desert in learning to identify bones. He moved off, the glowing crescent of his staff throwing a bobbing black shadow close around his feet. “Look, here's a niche where somebody stored something—old bottles, I think.” He dropped to one knee and carefully ran the lighted end of the staff into a water-scooped hollow in the wall near the floor. “Yeah, there's broken glass at the back, under a lot of dust and leaves. You notice there are no signs of animals having lived here?”

“It would be more surprising if we did find such signs,” Ingold commented from the far end of the cave. He was standing next to what had been a long fissure in the stone, a fissure that had been sealed with a wall of the same black, glassy material that formed the Keep. The wall was pierced by a single locked metal door. “From the looks of this cave, it was carved by the action of an ancient river. These caves lie in a series, walled and locked from one another—a sensible precaution, if there was no telling where and when the Dark Ones might break in. Any crack to the outside, or even to another cave, must of necessity have been sealed off.” He came back to where they knelt, his hair shining like sunlit snow in the white dazzle of his staff.

“They sure didn't leave much,” Rudy muttered. He moved a few feet off and looked down at the floor, his forehead creased in a sudden frown. “Is that—oil stains?”

“Sure looks like the floor of my mechanic's,” Gil observed, following him to where the floor was blotched with round, dark smears. “Look, there are scratches on the floor, and on the wall as well. They stored some kind of machinery here.”

“Yeah, but I thought they lived here…”

“They were very crowded,” Alde pointed out, tucking her hands for warmth into the rippling black fur of her cloak. Beneath the curve of her braided hair, her eyes had that disquieting remoteness of expression. Rudy felt almost that she might have said, “We were very crowded.” She went on. “Thousands made their way up here from the river valleys. There was barely space for them, or food. They lived wherever they could.”

“And stored things wherever they could,” Gil added thoughtfully, kneeling by another dusty old cache that proved to contain nothing more than crumbling, unrecognizable rags and the broken fragments of several glowstones. “From where the scratches are on the floor, I'd guess this stuff was shoved under a piece of machinery. Look!” she said, turning as she sat on her heels and pointing. “They had something bolted to the ceilings as well.” She went back to investigating her dusty midden, clotted with hardened oil and resins, brittle and falling to pieces even under her delicate touch. Ingold came back, holding his staff aloft to illuminate the intermittent double line of bolt-holes in the rock above. Gil went on digging, unearthing stiffened and decayed rags, more broken glowstones, tiny bones, a kettle with holes in its corroded bottom, and, rather surprisingly, two of the frosted gray glass polyhedrons like those they had found in such baffling numbers in the Keep, almost buried under a drift of nameless dust and the mummified sole of a broken sandal.

Rudy traced the stains and scratches along the wall. It was clear that quite a bit of machinery had been stored here. “You know what's funny?” he remarked, turning back to where Ingold. Aide, and Gil remained grouped around Gil's cache. “There's not so much as a scrap of paper.”

“Hardly funny,” Ingold commented. “It would have taken them a while to get the door built. There was smoke blackening in the fissures of that first cave's roof.”

“And what wasn't burned for protection,” Minalde added diffidently, “would have been burned later in the winter for warmth.”

“With people crowded together like cows in a byre?”

“And besides,” Gil tossed out over her shoulder, “didn't you say. Aide, that the records were taken to some kind of Central Library? That means that they weren't all destroyed.”

“Not then,” Rudy agreed. “But even your toughest paper isn't going to last three thousand years without special treatment, or spells, or something.”

Gil sat back on her heels suddenly, speculation sharpening in those frost-gray, crystalline eyes. “Are we talking about paper?”

Rudy paused, frowning, his hands hooked loosely through his gun belt. “What, then? Parchment? Cloth? Plastic?”

“Videotape?” Gil queried softly.

“Videotape?”

“What's videotape?” Alde asked.

Ingold said suddenly, his voice charged with excitement, “Isn't that the—the substance your people record things on and which you put into another machine that calls forth the images from it? You told me about that, Rudy…”

Gil turned, still folded together on her heels, holding the gray glass polyhedrons balanced in the palm of her outstretched hand. Her voice was careless, but in the witchlight her face flamed with the brightening ecstasy of purely intellectual delight. “Yeah,” she said casually. “Videotape.”

Ingold let out a very un-Archmagelike whoop of delight and fell upon her, folding her, polyhedrons and all, into his arms. Rudy said, “Hunh?” Then, as his mind tardily made the connection, he nodded. “Sweet Holy Mother!”

The wizard hauled Gil to her feet. They were hugging each other and laughing like idiots with delight and scholarly triumph. Gil jabbed a gloved and bony finger at Rudy. “And that's why there are those little crystal tables in those observation rooms near where there are labs or machinery. They put them there so they could read the manuals!”

“You're right!” Rudy yelled, swept away by the blaze of their enthusiasm. “Christ, Gil, you're a genius!” He threw his arms around her and kissed her heartily on the mouth. Carried away by delight, he repeated the process on the mystified Aide. “Hell, with all the wizards in the Keep, there's got to be somebody who can figure out how to get them working!”

Then they were all talking at once, as if a time limit had been placed upon their words. In gabbling chorus, Rudy and Gil explained the theory behind videotape to Minalde, Ingold speculated upon the connection between the tables and the crystals, and Gil cursed her own stupidity for not having come to her conclusions sooner. In the dual radiance of the wizards' staffs, her sharp, sensitive face seemed to glow, the glacial reserve breaking to reveal the curious, eager beauty that lurked beneath its deceptive surface. Minalde, catching the fever from the others, was already drawing up plans for assembling and sorting the crystals from the far corners of the Keep and for categorizing them, her white, slender hands sweeping the air as if she would summon them all before her by gesture alone. For a moment it was as if the future's darkness had been wiped away, as if no parting, no danger, no loss, existed beside the triumph and hope they shared. Arms linked around one another's necks in a kind of mutual hug, they trooped, laughing, into the pale grayness of the outer cave.

Then they stopped short, as if they had been stunned. Silhouetted against the latticed light in the cave's mouth, silent as the shadow that, for the moment, was all he seemed, was a White Raider.

Ingold's staff moved to check Gil's sword arm in the same instant that his other hand closed on Rudy's wrist. “No,” he told them softly. “If the Raiders had wanted us dead, we would never have seen them.”

For a long moment the Raider did not move, an enigmatic blue shape against the matte brightness beyond. The shadows hid his expression, but a cold gleam of reflected daylight slid along the ivory braids as he tilted his head, like a leopard at leisure on a branch, making up its mind about an approaching deer. A little knife of wind rattled the tangled trees outside and ruffled at the wolf pelts he wore.

Then he said, “My people are right,” in a light, breathless voice that shocked Gil by its familiarity. “They say that it takes a brave man to befriend a Wise Man; and so it seems.”

Gil cried, “Icefalcon!”

“Your people are right,” Ingold said formally, though a deep delight had begun to dance in his eyes. “It seems that the talisman I gave you, the Rune of the Veil, brought danger rather than safety with it, since Stiarth of Alketch contrived to murder you for it. I am pleased to see that his efforts were attended by the usual degree of success that one has in trying to kill Raiders.”

The Icefalcon stepped into the cave. He was as thin as a starved wolf, wind-bronzed, yet that same aloof, faintly arrogant captain of the Guards whom Alwir had sent to bear the messages to the Empire of Alketch.

He looked down his cool nose at Gil. “Do I take this delight to mean that there was money in the barracks on my survival?” he inquired.

She grinned. “Not a copper. We'd given you up.”

Feigned concern widened the colorless eyes. “Not reassigned my bunk to someone else?”

Gil shook her head regretfully. “No one would take it. Even after Janus swore by all that's holy that it had been fumigated.”

Anyone less haughty would have grinned, but Gil could tell by his eyes that he was pleased to see her. “And what is this thing?” he asked, indicating the flame thrower with a flick of his fingers.

With a flourish, Rudy drew, aimed at the far wall, and let loose a leaping column of fire that splattered from the stone and left a great charred patch.

“Random,” was all the Icefalcon said. He turned back to Ingold, leaving Rudy stuttering with indignation.

The wind had turned icy when they emerged from the cave, stinging their faces and blowing brief, hard flurries of sleet down from the darkening sky. It clattered in the small bones that the Icefalcon had braided into his long hair. Boiled and picked clean, Gil thought, but disconcertingly like…

“Are those human handbones?”

His enigmatic eyes looked almost silver against the gold windburn of his face. “When I became a Guard,” he said inconsequentially, “I vowed that I would become a civilized person and learn to fight honorably in a civilized fashion. These are the bones of a man who came upon me when I lay near death, after our civilized friend Stiarth of Alketch— parted company from me, I begged this man for water and he stole my boots and my cloak.” The Icefalcon shrugged. 'Later my sisters and brothers, the barbarians of the White Lakes People, found me and healed me, and I rode with them for a time, though their people and mine were enemies in the plains. They helped me to—recover my cloak and boots."

A sleety gust of wind rattled the bones in his hair.

Gil stopped and raised her head to listen, having caught some sound over the growing cry of the wind. The straggling ends of her braided black hair fluttered around her face in the streaming currents of cold air that some trick of the cliffs' geology funneled through the gap between that oddly broken rock spur and the knoll. From here the Keep was visible, stabbing like a fractured bone end through the mucky wound of turned-up dirt, mud, fences, and trash that surrounded it.

“Is that—thunder?” she asked.

The others were also listening now to that faint, deep roar that underlay the keening of the wind like a bass note. The high shriek of the coming storm drowned it; then it sounded again, a throbbing in the air, more felt than heard.

Ingold drew his hood over his head. “At a guess,” he said quietly, “it is the drums of the Army of Alketch. They should be on the road up the mountains now, and they will be at the Keep itself tomorrow.”

The party in the barracks was long over. Gill wasn't certain how late the Icefalcon's welcome-home festivities had broken up, or even whether it was still last night or this morning. In the darkness of the Keep, time had little meaning, and here, in the hidden lower levels, there was not even the solitary tread of a patrolling Guard to mark the watches of day and night.

On the black stone table before her lay two heaps of crystals—frost-gray polyhedrons the size and shape of the glowstones, of a material identical to that of the table's circular central inset. She wondered why that had never occurred to her before.

From the larger pile she took a crystal at random, sighed, and automatically scratched the number 14 on the wax note tablet that lay at her elbow. Then she set the crystal before her, covering it with both her hands, and repeated in a clear, painstaking voice the words that Minalde had spoken in her trance, the words of unlocking. The sharp edges of the polygon pressed into her palms as she leaned forward to look into the table's faintly glowing core.

For a moment she saw nothing but the edge of her own huge shadow lying across the table and the dim reflected gleam of the light of the single glowstone she'd brought here with her. Around her, the black walls of the observation chamber formed a narrow circle of darkness. The silence was absolute. She cleared her mind, as Ingold had instructed her, stared into the angles of the crystal's heart, and waited.

Then something glittered deep below her, a flash of brightness that resolved itself into the blinding flicker of sunlight on water. Like dark knife blades, oars broke the blazing wake, and she saw a barge, carved over every inch of its surface and riding low in the smooth water under the weight of its own gilding. The oars stroked again, and the sun smote Gil's eyes. The colors seemed to intensify. Bright-hued birds flew up in startled explosions from the lotus patches that grew thick on the marshy shores. The barge put about, banking neatly before water-stairs of black-veined pink marble.