Darwath 3 - The Armies Of Daylight (22 page)

“It is to tell you of it that we asked you here tonight,” Ingold said, folding his hands upon the table before him. Behind his head, against the blotched brick and soot-stained plaster of the wall, Thoth's mathematical and astrological charts formed a kind of tapestry, half-obscured by braids of drying herbs. On the hearth, the marmalade torn, the biggest of the Corps cats, was licking his paws and studiously ignoring the pans of bread which Kara had set to rise among the warm ashes.

Gil could see Alwir's gaze travel over that homey and unprepossessing room and over the faces of those who sat around the table—old men, young girls, foreigners, heathens, and vagabonds—before coming to rest on his sister. His nostrils flared with contempt.

“Then you have a damned queer way of going about it. But after yesterday, I don't suppose I have a right to be surprised by anything you choose to do.” He did not trouble to hide the bitterness in his voice. "Suppose you tell me.

then, since you are my Chief of Intelligence. How did humankind defeat the Dark? Or is that going to stay one of the things that only you know?"

Ingold sighed. “Often, my lord,” he said after a moment's pause, “when an answer seems impossible to find, the best thing to do is to see if the proper question was asked. In this case, the question should not have been: How did humankind defeat the Dark? It should have been simply: Did humankind defeat the Dark?”

Alwir seemed to rear in his seat. “Of course it did! Else why did the Dark depart?”

“Another very good question, my lord—and one closer to the heart of the matter. Perhaps the real question should be, not why they departed, but why they rose.”

Ill-concealed anger grated in Alwir's words. “Of what earthly good would it be to know that? It doesn't matter why they rose! If that was all you asked me here to tell me—”

“That,” the wizard said quietly, “and other things. I believe I was the first human to see the Dark Ones begin to hunt on the surface of the earth, the year I was hiding in the deserts of Gettlesand, playing spellweaver and astrologer in a little farming village, with the High King's price on my head. I followed the Dark One back to its city—not a paltry hive of a defeated remnant, but a teeming metropolis of creatures to whom humankind was of no more moment that wild cattle.”

Gil shivered as Ingold told of it, his voice casting its spell over those who listened. His words dislimned the shabby common room around them and drew them into the frozen blueness of that starlit desert night and to the smothering blackness of underground. Even the mulish look about Alwir's mouth faded somewhat as the old man drove home to them the horror of what he had first realized then—that the Dark did not live in that fashion because they had been driven to it, but because they had chosen it for their own.

“I had lived for five years in Gae,” Ingold went on, "for three of them in the Palace, as tutor to Prince Eldor, the High King's son. I knew of the stairway in the lower vaults—more than one, some said. They were thought to be part of the old Citadel of Wizards that once stood upon the spot or part of some heathen temple out of bygone years. All that the Masters at Quo could tell me was that there were other stairways in various parts of the world, that they had the property of distorting magic, so that no mage who had ever descended one could communicate with others after he was out of sight, and that no one who had ever gone down had returned. They were thought to be curiosities, like the gray lands in certain parts of the world where time is unaccountably distorted or like those spots in the mountains where you can stand and hear voices speaking in tongues unknown to the West of the World. But no more than that.

“Yet after I had seen that unspeakable city, I was frightened; and in the years that followed, years in which I learned and read and traveled, I heard an occasional tale that frightened me still more. A chieftain of the White Raiders told me of a man who had vanished in open country on a moonless night. In a village close to the ice, there had lately been a wave of superstitious dread of the night—people could not be induced to leave their houses after dark, though they would not say why this was. I began to investigate any story that came my way of mysterious disappearances or of certain things seen or felt.”

Alwir said bitterly, “So you always knew of the Dark.”

“Indeed I did,” Ingold replied mildly. “And I told anyone who would listen, with the result that King Umar had me imprisoned, publicly flogged, and exiled from the Realm, ostensibly for treasonously alienating the loyalties of his only son. Prince Eldor hardly needed my aid in despising his father—and he had inherited the memories of the House of Dare. He remembered the Time of the Dark. To him, my warning came like the fulfillment of some dreadful prophecy. He trusted me,” Ingold finished simply—an epitaph, Gil thought, for the man who had given him his son and sent him from the final battle. “Without that trust and the preparations he made because of it, we would have been utterly lost.”

Across the table from her, Gil saw Alde suddenly bow her head, staring down at her tight-clenched hands as if taken unawares by the memories of those last days.

Ingold went on. “Even then—and it was twenty years ago that the stories were first circulated—it struck me that most of them came from a small area around Shilgae in the far North, and a few from the lands of Harl Kinghead, near Weg. But even though I knew this, I did not understand what it meant until a few weeks ago, when I spoke of it with Gil-Shalos. Since that time, she has searched far and wide for knowledge of the Dark. In her own country she is a scholar and a teacher. I believe that the answer that she has found to this riddle is the true one, though she has read it, not from any man's writing, but as a hunter does, from the tracks of the game that he seeks.”

He held out his hand to Gil. She took a deep breath, glanced automatically behind her for a nonexistent blackboard, and stood up. In the clear, rosy brightness of that long room, she was conscious of nothing but watching eyes and silence.

“Any historian can tell you,” she began, in her best doctoral orals voice, "that why is probably the most slippery of all questions to answer, so for the moment I'll start with the things that we do know for sure—when and where the Dark rose.

“Ingold is our first source on when—which puts it twenty years ago in Gettlesand. Tomec Tirkenson tells me that there have always been stories about haunted caves in the Flatiron Mountains in that part of the country, of the 'way back in the days' variety, but when he was younger he said there was at least one incident of a child who disappeared in that part of the hills at night. It was put down by her family to dooic— but as he remembers it, there were no dooic around the Flatirons for a stretch of several years. Three of his rangers who come from that part of the country bear him out on this. This was when Tirkenson was twenty-seven or twenty-eight, just before he succeeded to rulership of the lands…” She consulted her notes. "That puts it around eighteen years ago. This was at the same time Ingold was in the North, investigating other rumors of disappearances around Shilgae.

"Now, as close as I can date them, all these disappearance stories seem to center, not only physically around Shilgae, but chronologically in a span of three or four years. Coincidentally, that time period is better known for the failure of the wheat crop three years running, for the 'drowned summer' of the seventeenth year of Umar's reign, and for the failure of the sugar crop in Kildrayne, According to Maia, sugar has never been grown north of Penambra since. Maia knows, because his father was a sharecropper in the cane fields near Kildrayne and had to remove to the deep south because of it.

“After that four-year span, there were no disappearance stories until—” She checked her notes again. “—the winter before last. And those never reached anyone because they were in the country of the White Raiders. I've only heard of them recently, from Shadow of the Moon.”

The Raider shaman inclined her head, and the strings of bleached, ancient bones twined in her snowy braids rattled faintly with the movement.

"Last winter there was a disturbance among the dooic of the Northern Plains, rumors of Night Ghosts that ate stragglers. Kta says several bands left their traditional runs near the hills. At the same time, several bands of the Raiders started shifting away from their old hunting grounds. According to some of the Gettlesand rangers I've talked to, there was a lot of trouble with them that year. Disappearances of men riding night-herd were put down to the Raiders… and maybe they were.

“But there seems to be a pattern appearing. First in the plains and high desert and in the far North; gradually moving south to more thickly inhabited lands.”

Alwir raised his head suddenly, points of fire glinting in his eyes, like the stars at the heart of a sapphire.

“Most curious of all,” Gil continued, “is what appears to be a pattern of abandonment of Nests, following the same course. According to the Raiders who remain on the plains. Nests in the far Northern Plains were abandoned early this autumn; Ingold and Rudy saw such a Nest, not more than a few days' journey north of the Westward Road. Before he died, Lohiro of Quo told them that the Dark Ones of the plains had deserted their Nests to join the assault on Gae and, I would guess, the breaking of the cities to the south of them as well—Dele and the towns along the Flat
River, Ippit, Skrooch, Ploduck, and others. At the same time, Quo was broken by an unsuspected and deeply buried Nest beneath that town. In effect, at that time the Dark Ones destroyed all organized resistance in the Realm, struck at the one place where large amounts of information could be gathered and organized, and left us as we are now—fugitives in the grip of the worst winter in human memory.”

Up and down the table, soft-voiced talk eddied, those who counted themselves scholars—and there were half a dozen of them—casting curious glances at one another, for this jigsaw puzzle of hearsay had little in common with the separate chronicles over which they customarily pored. Only Thoth the Scribe, once the Recorder of Quo, did not speak; his cold, amber-colored eyes brightened with interest as much in her methods as in her findings.

Alwir laced his fingers together, suspended midway between the dragon-head arms of his ebony chair. “So you believe that the Dark Ones have abandoned these northern Nests for good?”

“For a considerable time to come,” Gil said.

“Why?”

“The White Raiders who captured Ingold and Rudy on the plains believed that the Dark Ones had been driven forth— or destroyed—by a ghost or spirit mightier than they,” she said after a moment's thought. "But when Rudy and Ingold descended into the Nest, they found nothing—only the bodies of the herds, all dating from a single time, as if they had all perished together. Yet I think that—that ghost—was in the Nest with them all the time they were down there.

“The ghost's name is Cold.”

“Cold?” the Chancellor snapped. “Be serious, girl. The Dark have attacked on nights colder than what a man could survive.”

“The Dark can deal with the cold,” Gil agreed. “Maybe they don't like it—there doesn't seem to be any way of finding out.” She rolled up her parchment and set it on the table before her. “But I am virtually certain that their herds can't.”

“Their herds?” Alwir demanded incredulously. “What in the name of the ice in the north do those wretched creatures have to do with anything?”

“Everything,” she responded quietly. “Their herds—and the moss in the Nests.”

Rudy's head jerked up, as if her words had triggered memory and realization within him. She saw the wordless question that he flung to Ingold and the old man's silence that was only the echo of the answer that Rudy already knew in his heart.

“I think,” Gil said, picking her way carefully over a morass that even her own world had not yet sorted out, “that the ancestors of humankind, the ancestors of the herds, and the ancestors of the dooic roamed together over this part of the world eons ago, countless ages. The similarity in their shape indicates they had a common way of living, common feeding grounds…”

“Common grandparents,” Rudy added in English.

“Let's not broaden the Scopes of this investigation any more than we have to,” Gil replied in the same language. Switching back to the language of the Wathe, she continued. "And I think that all three races alike were the prey of the Dark Ones.

"Now, at that time, hundreds of thousands of years in the past, the Dark Ones lived on the surface of the earth. If you climb the cliffs behind the Vale of the Dark twenty miles north of here, in the right slant of the light you can see the marks of buried walls, the patterns of a city that vanished so long ago that not even ruins remain; there are not even records of ruins ever having been there. The Dark tended to build in relatively stable, accessible places. You yourself have commented, my lord, on how they seem to shun high or geologically unstable ground. The Vale of the Dark is one of the few sites that hasn't been built over in the intervening millennia, and of course it is impossible to get high enough above the Nests on the plains to see whether this pattern can be detected in the country surrounding them or not.

“I think,” Gil continued slowly, “that it was during this epoch that the powers of the mageborn first began to appear in humankind. It was a matter of survival. The lowest powers of the mages, the commonest even of the third echelon powers, is the calling of fire. Light, illusion, the command of the winds and storms, heightened senses, and the ability to see in the dark.”

“This is all very well,” Alwir said, his voice edged with suspicion, “but if what you say is so—and I am not yet convinced that it is—why did the Dark Ones abandon the surface? Why did they retreat belowground in the first place?”

For an answer, Gil searched among her things for the small leather pouch and took from it an irregularly shaped gray rock about a third the size of her fist. She rose and carried it down the length of the table to hand it to him.

He sat in silence for a time, examining the stone, turning it over thoughtfully in his gloved fingers. Without glancing at her, he asked, “And what is this?”