Darwath 3 - The Armies Of Daylight (31 page)

The steady, saffron glow showed Rudy the face of the left-hand man with the candle—the tortured, hagridden face of Brother Wend. As the two cowled inquisitors moved past the tiny flames. Inquisitor Pinard was seen to wear the expression of a man regretfully doing a distasteful duty; but Govannin's lips curled with a demon triumph.

They stood ranged before the doors with their light-bearers behind them, so that their faces were hidden in darkness. Only an occasional gleam of a shifting eye or the red-purple glint of the Bishop's ring as she moved those white, skeletal fingers betrayed them as living creatures, and not simply embodied voices from a nightmare of despair.

The Inquisitor spoke, his hands in their white sleeves folded, composed as those of a statue, his voice deep and rather low. “You stand convicted of heresy, of the willing sale of your souls to the Devil in trade for the Devil's powers of illusion. You stand convicted of causing the death of hundreds of good men, by weapons of evil and by the evil counsel that caused them to be used against the Dark. You stand convicted—”

“Convicted?” Rudy gasped indignantly. “Who in the hell convicted us? We haven't had a goddam trial!”

“Your life has been a trial,” Govannin's dry, spiteful voice snarled, “and you convicted yourself the first day you went to the mage Ingold Inglorion and asked him to teach you the ways of power. Your trial began the day you were born, with the Devil's shadow upon your face.”

“The hell it did!” Rudy surged to his feet, shaking off Kara's urgent, snatching fingers from his sleeve. “I no more had a choice about that than I did about the color of my eyes!”

The Bishop's thin voice bit across his. “Be silent.”

“You know as well as I do that the invasion was doomed to failure from the beginning!” he stormed on heedlessly. “It was Alwir who wanted it, Alwir and Vair—”

“Be silent!”

“And you know yourself that it's no more against civil law to be a wizard than it is to be an actor…”

He barely saw the finger that Govannin lifted. But he heard the heavy stride of the Red Monk behind him and whirled to take the stunning blow from a leaded spear butt across the side of his jaw and neck instead of on the back of his skull. He was only vaguely aware of falling through oceans of roaring blackness to the floor.

For a long moment, the uproar in the room seemed to come to his ears from some vast distance, blurred by the buzzing murk that appeared to surround him. Distantly, he saw Brother Wend's face behind Govannin's shoulder, rigid and white, as if he were going to be sick. Dame Nan's screeching voice rose, screaming accusations of perversions that he had never imagined possible. Then he heard the sound of booted feet scuffling, and blows, and Kara's voice crying, “Don't! Please, she's only an old woman!” Bektis' whining and other sounds faded unidentifiably back along an endless corridor of muzzy pain.

Sometime later he heard Govannin's voice, spitefully triumphant, reading the formal sentence into a silence broken by Kara's muffled sobs. He felt the stickiness of blood all along the side of his face and tasted dust on his lips. As the Bishop droned on, he wondered why she bothered, unless it was to get back at someone who wasn't even there—someone who was perhaps long dead. Through the ache in his head and the growing nausea, he thought he heard the words “sentence of death” pronounced, but could not be sure. His consciousness was beginning to fade again.

Other footsteps approached from outside the door. Rudy heard the soft, measured tread of scores of feet and the muted clink of chain mail. The heightened senses of a wizard that operated to a degree even in the null spaces of that terrible room told him that there roust have been over twenty of them, and he wondered with a weary disinterest why they thought they would need so many. Then the door was thrown open, and the torchlight from outside was mingled with the white brightness of the glows tones carried by the Guards of Gae.

Eldor Andarion, High King of Darwath and Lord of the Keep of Dare, stood silhouetted in the doorway.

A sudden, hideous silence fell upon the room. Though the movement brought the sour taste of sickness to his mouth, Rudy crawled to a sitting position, and his heart quickened with fear at the sight of the King.

“My lady.” The King's voice was shrill, edged by the cracked suggestion of suppressed screams.

The white light pouring into the shadows of the Bishop's cowl outlined high, hard cheekbones and threw into prominence the sudden blackness of the grooves that bracketed the full, ungiving lips. “My lord King,” she greeted him stiffly.

Eldor turned his head, scanning the room, taking in every detail of that chill, hushed tribunal. The light of the glow-stones caught the sheen of the black leather mask, puckered grotesquely with the draw of his breath. Behind the eye slits lay only a horrible, enigmatic darkness.

“My lady Queen tells me that you hold court.”

Rudy bowed his head, weak with sudden relief. Trust Gil, he thought, to know to whom to go and what to say.

The rasping voice went on. “It seems that the invitation that you must surely have sent to do capital justice in my own Realm has miscarried, for I received none.”

Govannin raised her head, her words bitter and harsh. “Since the days of your grandfather Dorilagos, it has been given to the Church to do its own justice.”

Eldor linked his hands behind his back, the scarred mess of the left winding like some red, knobby growth around the strong, slender whiteness of the right. The mask rippled as his head turned, pulsing slightly as he spoke again. “Are these, then, the Church's own?”

“They are heretics,” Pinard's deep voice replied, “as you know, my lord. They are seducers of innocence. To have truck with them is to share their crime.”

Rudy guessed dizzily that the words probably referred to Ingold's metaphysical seduction of Brother Wend, but he could see the King's broad, flat shoulders stiffen and he felt the mad gaze brush him like the tip of a soldering iron.

Govannin went on slowly. “This is a new age, my lord King. The hope of salvation through wizardry has perished, and with it many good warriors of this Keep. The might of the Church shall work for the salvation of those who are left, whether they will it or no. We will not be stopped from this.”

The shrill edge of Eldor's voice cut the air like a flint knife. “Nor will I have the Church passing sentence of death or of anything else without my knowledge, my lady Bishop. However many warriors you may have been lent by the Emperor of Alketch, however much he would like to establish his rule and his pet Inquisition in the North, I am still the Lord of the Keep of Dare, and justice and the power of life and death are mine and mine only. Whoso does not recognize that power in me is a traitor to me, to the Keep, and to humankind. Do you understand?”

Within her cowl, the Bishop's face was white and rigid with fury. She spat the words at him. “Do you, then, ally yourself with these—traitors? Traitors to God and to humankind, whose defenses they have murdered—and to you?”

“My lady,” Eldor said softly, “to whom I ally myself and why I choose to do the justice that I do are none of your concern.”

“They are my concern where they touch the Church!” she shrieked.

“But as these are all excommunicates, they are outside the realm of the Church entirely, are they not?”

He
might be mad, Rudy thought, but you get him into the kind of Church-State hassle that Gil seems to understand so well, and he can handle himself better than a sane Alwir ever did.

“Don't chop logic with me, my lord!” She strode forward, and for all her small size, against the gold haze of the torches, she seemed suddenly taller, a dark, thin spider in an aura of flame, holding the center of a steel web of Faith that stretched throughout the Keep. “You are master of their bodies and their lives, but I am the master of their souls. I have said that these here are damned and have passed sentence of death upon them. Will you go against that and let them free to do what evil they will? It is because of their doing, my lord, that you wear a mask today.”

The silence that followed these words was so long, so intense, that Rudy could have sworn that everyone in the room could hear the hammering of his heart. He sensed Eldor's gaze upon him again and his soul twisted, like a beetle trapped under the concentrated glare of a burning glass. He felt that his guilt stood out all over him, like the sweat that trickled down his face. The other mages watched them from the shadows as if frozen, knowing that whatever happened, their fate would be tangled with his.

The shifting of Eldor's eyes was like the removal of a heated needle from a nerve point.

“You have passed sentence upon them, my lady,” the King said, and the jewels on his sword hilt and the gold embroidery on his breast glittered like fire in his sudden movement. “But because of their healing, which has enabled me to be upon my feet today, I commute that sentence to banishment. Let the Guards take them to the head of the Pass at sunset tomorrow; and after that, let them go where they will, as long as none return ever to the Keep of Dare, under penalty of death. I have spoken.”

He turned to go.

Govannin's voice jeered at him. “You mean because your lady wife pleaded for the lives of—wizards?”

The faceless head swung back. The hard, white gleam of a glowstone caught an answering glint from within the eyeholes. “Even so.” He strode from the room.

Rudy felt blackness closing over him again and groped for the solidness of the floor to lean on. Instead, someone took his arm and helped him to his feet, and he briefly felt hard, bony hands gripping his elbow like claws. Blinking through a thickening haze, he recognized Gil—that cold, impersonal, frightening Gil, her black hair braided back from a face as thin as bone and as closed and forbidding as a sealed door. He tried to get his feet under him and couldn't feel the floor; his head throbbed with every jolt of his body as she half-dragged, half-carried him toward the dark arch of the door. As they passed over the threshold, he stumbled, as he had done when the Alketch troops had shoved him in. This time he could look down and see what had tripped him.

It was a pile of bricks. There were enough there, stacked to one side of the doorway, to fill it in three or four layers thick. Beside them, mortar glittered fresh and wet in the white light of the glowstones carried by the Guards.

The dream returned to Rudy, as it had haunted him time and again. But his fever gave it the clarity of hallucination, and he could not, as he had so often done, waken himself by screaming. His cries stifled as stillborn moans in his throat.

His dream was of darkness, thick as smoke, hot, damp, and clinging. He knew he dreamed of the Nest, for he could smell the wet, black moss and taste the powdery choke that came from the disintegrating patches of brown that spotted the leprous walls. He was deep, deeper than he had ever gone in waking exploration, and the black weight of the earth crushed down on his consciousness like a burden of hopeless grief with the knowledge that there was no escape.

No herds came here. Only the Dark covered the walls, ceiling, and floor in a squirming swarm of blackness. The cluttering scratch of their claws was like the faint, steady gnawing of rats at his nerves. He could see them, though there was no light to throw even the smallest gleam from those pulsing backs. And he could see what it was, stretched upon the rocks, that they swarmed over. Horribly, he could not see the man's face. But he recognized the hand, thick, and strong, and blunt-fingered, nicked with the old scars of swordsmanship, and he saw it grip the rocks as if in sudden agony.

He woke sobbing, drenched with terror-sweat. The room around him was pitch-black, but the darkness was familiar; the weight above him was only the weight of the Keep. His wizard's sight showed him his own cell in the Corps complex. He had a vague sense that he should not be there, but could not, for the moment, recall why. He could only lie there, crushed by the memory of an unspeakable horror, telling himself over and over again, Ingold is dead. He's dead. He's got to be dead.

And, like an answer, he heard the echo of that calm, scratchy voice, above the memory of the grasslands wind. I would know it if Lohiro were dead.

Rudy rolled his head back and forth on the pillow, trying to clear it of the sticky cobwebs of the dream. Ingold is dead, he told himself again, sweating, frightened, and desperately fighting a growing conviction that this was not entirely true.

Vaguely, he knew he had slept for a long time—days, by the weak hunger he felt and the scratchy growth of his beard. Cloudy images of voices and of people sitting near him swam like specters to his mind, then swirled away again like mist. He wondered if Eldor had changed his mind and if, when he got to his feet and tried to open the door, he would find nothing but a brick wall.

But that's stupid, he told himself tiredly. The walls of this cell are so thin I could damn near kick my way out.

He wondered what Eldor had said to Alde when she'd told him that the Inquisition was trying the wizards for heresy.

A dim, white gleam appeared under the door, and he recognized Gil's light, cautious tread. The gleam shifted; he heard the quick spatter of spilled water and realized that he was parched with thirst. He managed to sit up when she came in and took the cup she gave him. His head still ached, but the sickening dizziness had passed. The water tasted very cold to his dry mouth.

Gil regarded him with pale, disinterested eyes. “Think you'll live?”

“Are they placing bets in the barracks?”

“Five to seven against.”

He fished clumsily in the pocket of his painted vest and found a few coppers. “Put these against.” He sank back onto the rumpled pillow. “Where are the others?”

She seated herself casually at the foot of the bed. “About fifteen miles the far side of the Pass.”

He sat up with a jerk, so quickly that the motion almost made him sick. “What?”

Cold as ice, her bony hand pressed him back. “You had a long nap, punk. Kara sat up with you most of yesterday, but she had to hit the road with the rest of them at sunset last night. You were in no shape to go anywhere. Neither Elder nor Alwir nor Govannin bothered to see the mages off, and if they were one short, Janus wasn't going to say anything about it.”