Darwath 3 - The Armies Of Daylight (33 page)

“My lord…” the Guard repeated worriedly, and Alwir seized Eldor's other arm and shook him angrily.

“Is that all you can do?” Alwir demanded, his face livid. “The only Realm remaining whole and stable, the only seat of true civilization, falls to the Dark, and you laugh?”

Eldor was cackling to himself again; but, from his unseen post in the shadow of the dark walls, Rudy saw how the long white fingers of his good hand dug to the knuckles in the flesh of Janus' arm. “Civilization?” he gasped, fairly rocking with unholy mirth. “You call that bloody welter of intolerance and slavery in the South civilization? I laugh, my dear lord Chancellor, because our friend here—” He waved his twisted red claw at the rapidly purpling Vair. “—has been strutting about the Keep like a dunghill cock, for pride that the Dark did his conquering here for him. Fate seems to spread her favors with an even hand, my friend,” he said, inclining his head to address the hook-handed Commander. The quickened draw of his breath flattened the soft leather into weird and terrible patterns over the disarranged points of his features. “Who knows what you will find upon your return?”

Alwir's gaze whipped from the rage-engorged face of the Alketch Commander to the invisible one of the King. “The treaty stated that a garrison would be left us for defense until such time—”

Vair opened his mouth to disagree, but Eldor cut him off with a kind of unbalanced delight. “Not when the scramble starts, my lord Alwir. Not when our left-handed friend here has the only stable, standing force in the land and when all Alketch is stricken in panic, with wealth and power there—” He held out one strong white hand, the fingers crooking and curling like claws. “—for the seizing.” The face was gone, but the whippy restlessness of that agile body was like the lift of an eyebrow, the quirk of sardonic lips. “Going to take your chances at becoming Emperor is a lot more entertaining than helping the Inquisition slaughter poor little wizard-lings—isn't it, my lord Commander?”

Vair said stiffly, “The question does not arise.” The ice winds ruffled in the ribbons of his gorgeous costume, its gay embroideries flashing like a rainbow against the drab obsidian wall of the Keep. “We have been ordered back to our homeland with all speed. The Dark rose in all places at once, on a night some three weeks ago. I do not know what has happened by this time, but my lord the Emperor has said that he needs every sword.”

He turned again to Eldor, who stood rocking a little on his heels with a swaying motion like a serpent's, the scarred root of his left hand stuck loosely in the jeweled buckle of his sword belt. “Our undoing amuses you, my lord,” he said bitterly. “But what you see is the ruin of humankind—the death knell, not only of our civilization, but of all hope for refounding your own.”

“Indeed,” Eldor said, shrill mockery edging his voice. “That is what amuses me.”

“You're mad,” Alwir said quietly, and there was no question now in his tone.

“No, no, my darling,” Eldor crooned, laying a .long, soothing hand upon Alwir's quilted velvet shoulder. “Not mad. Hell has merely altered my sense of humor. There was once a man, they say, who could raise the dead—he was killed out of hand.”

Alwir jerked his arm free of that mocking caress. “You're mad,” he repeated, and Eldor laughed.

“Not as mad as you are, my friend, to lose your foreign troops.” The King turned on his heel and went striding off into the Keep, his wild, metallic voice echoing into the dark vaults with the news that Alketch had fallen and the Dark Ones had overrun the face of the world.

Vair started to follow him, but Alwir reached out to stay the Commander, grasping the puffed and pearl-embroidered blue sleeve. A glance passed between them in the bruised dawnlight. Then they both went after the mad King, into the rising chaos of the Keep.

The day was one of utter confusion, as if the Keep, like a scientist's nest of ants, had been upended and shaken. As Rudy flitted here and there, hidden by his cloaking-spell and collecting provisions for his own departure, he was conscious as he never had been before of the perils of any sudden change to such a small and precariously balanced community.

The departure of the surviving troops of Alketch meant more than just two thousand fewer mouths to feed. It meant the collapse of power structures and the hasty rebuilding of provisional alliances; it meant fights over foodstuffs, and the Guards ranged en masse with hundreds of armed volunteers around the gates of the food compounds, forbidding the departing soldiers to take so much as a stale piece of barley bread for the road home.

“You've fed off us long enough!” yelled Melantrys, who had appointed herself captain of the defenders. “You can forage for yourselves when you get to the river valleys, as we did!” She brandished one of the handful of remaining flame throwers left in the Keep.

There were other fights, wicked, dirty scuffles with the Alketch troops in the passageways of the Keep over possessions stolen or alleged stolen and over old grudges. Vair was furious over the reports from his captains of men ambushed and murdered in the back corridors, but he could do nothing. Any soldier of Alketch who left the Keep doors was pelted with snow and garbage by the growing mob on the steps and refused readmittance.

Once, late in the afternoon, Rudy thought that he glimpsed from the Keep gates the shadowy, wolf-colored forms of White Raiders, watching the preparations with unconcealed interest from the hill of execution across the road.

The Army of Alketch marched away through the stinging swirls of snow about two hours before sunset, the cursory notes of their horns a brief echo of the brave fanfares that had heralded their coming. Rudy could have told them they would be bogged down by snow in the lower Pass and lose many more men to the cold that night, had anyone known he was there to be asked. Even Bektis could have told them that. But Bektis had begun to serve his penance and was absent from the steps where the crowds watched the Southerners on their way.

Bektis was one of very few to miss the sorry spectacle. All the Guards were there and all the Red Monks, ranged with Govannin, steel-eyed and disapproving, at their head. Maia stood there with all his Penambrans, Rudy himself took the risk—a small one—of being seen and recognized despite his cloaking-spell, in order to stand like a ghost on the fringes of the crowd, picking out faces that he knew he would never see again after he left the Keep at tomorrow's dawn: Winna and the Keep orphans; Bok the carpenter; that skinny little old man who kept chickens in his cell despite all Alwir's injunctions about livestock in the Keep; Gil, standing between Gnift and the Icefalcon; Alwir, the black velvet wings of his cloak stirring in the bitter winds; and Eldor, faceless, somber, his thrawn body taut with barely contained amusement.

There was no sign either of Minalde or of Tir.

She would be back in her room, Rudy thought, alone.

Unguarded.

The thought of her seemed to kindle all his flesh, like fire in dry wood. Between his fear for her and the longing that had tormented him for these aching weeks, he scarcely stopped to think; it seemed impossible to him that he would leave the Keep forever without once more hearing her voice. For months, in good times and bad, he had lived with the reality of her love, the comfort of her presence, her sweet seriousness and good-natured teasing, and her boundless capacity for affection. It seemed to him that no matter how painful their parting would be, he could not forgo speaking to her one more time.

It was tricky to pass through the crowd—tricky to go within a few feet of Eldor, who, he devoutly hoped, had no idea that he had remained at the Keep, contrary to the order of banishment. He pulled the illusion of-a kind of gray facelessness about him. If asked, any one of those Rudy jostled would have been reasonably certain that he had been brushed against by someone he knew, only he could not quite recall by whom, in any case, everyone was far too preoccupied with watching the troops of the South to care.

The corridors of the Keep were empty, echoing eerily with his hurrying feet. Rats scurried out of his way; cats paused in the darkness, turning flat, feral heads to observe him with their insolent eyes. Only when he passed the hallways that led into the mazes of the Church did he sense movement in the vast, dark hollowness around him—a dim suggestion of chanting somewhere far off and a vagrant breath of incense.

The corridor outside Aide's room was dark and empty. A thin line of candlelight showed beneath her door. His hand brushed over the door bolts as lightly as a passing breeze.

He paused, listening, extending his senses and stilling his mind, as if he could see into the room through the shut and bolted door. The soft creak of the carved chair came to his ears, the tiny sibilance of skirts sliding over a shifted knee. A breath of beeswax mixed with a hint of new bread and butter. Aide's soft voice was singing, as she did to herself when she was alone.

"You were the love that I should have met,

Had the roads we walked on crossed—

But time and the stars forbade it then

And the days of the summer were lost.

Now the white snow covers the hillside.

The wedding chimes are rung,

And my harp strings mourn the music

Of a song that was never sung."

He heard her voice crack a little. There was a long, desperate silence, her breath fighting sobs. Then she whispered to herself, “Don't do this. He's gone, it's over. Don't torture yourself. He's safe, and that's all that matters.”

Tir's voice spoke, babbling and unintelligible, and Alde replied with a forced and broken lilt. Rudy turned away from the door, feeling as if nails were being pulled from his flesh.

If she thinks I left with the wizards, he thought, so much the better. She's taken the worst impact of the hurt already. It would be senseless cruelty to make her go through another farewell.

He stumbled down the black hallways with an ache in him that he had never dreamed possible. You wanted to hear her voice, he told himself bitterly, and you did. It was the last time he would hear it, the last time he would walk these halls. And Alde would remain, virtually a prisoner of a mad, twisted husband— He shoved the images from his mind, as he had shoved those other dreams of the crushing weight of stone and darkness. There was nothing that he could do. Tomorrow he would slip quietly from the Keep and take the long road for…

Where?

Gettlesand was the logical choice.

People had begun to drift back into the Keep; he heard the footsteps of patrolling Guards and drew around himself the protective veils of illusion long before they came into sight. Against his will, other possibilities formed within his brain of where he might go when he took the road.

Quo
? He saw Ingold's hands again as they passed reverently across the gilded bindings of the books in the ruined library. Like the harp Tiannin, they would lie sleeping, sunk in a lake of timeless stasis, until they could be brought to safety. The thought of braving the Walls of Air again chilled him, but he realized that only he and Kara of Ippit, in all the world, had ever been through those terrible roads. All the others were…

Dead?

There was another choice, and he turned his mind from it, shivering as if with fever. He hastened his steps down the murky corridors, passing an occasional servant like a ghost in his cloak of illusion. He barely noticed the old man he walked by, a thin old creature in a grubby burlap tunic lugging water in a pail. He certainly did not see the smoldering resentment in the dark eyes that followed him down the thick gloom of the hall or the spiteful curl of the lips in the hacked-off remains of what had once been a very splendid, white, silken beard.

In spite of—or perhaps because of—the unnatural silence of the Keep, Rudy's sleep was fitful, tortured by feverish dreams. He had searched for Gil since the closing of the great gates, but had not glimpsed her among the Guards, and had not liked to reveal himself to anyone by asking. He had an idea that some of them knew that he had not left the Keep—those who had gone up the Pass with the other wizards certainly knew—but he did not know whom he could trust. The sensation of being there and not there was beginning to prey upon his nerves. To walk unseen in the Nest of the Dark was one thing; to walk unseen among people who had been his friends was quite another.

He had returned to his cell in the deserted complex, made his final preparations for tomorrow's departure, and fallen into a restless sleep in which his terrible dream of darkness alternated with the vision of the rain-slashed ruins of Quo, the mewing sea birds, and the possessed Archmage's empty, soulless eyes.

It was from this sleep that he woke in the hour before midnight, to feel the sudden warmth of a woman's body pressed to his, a silken river of unbound hair across his cheek, and warm lips clinging frantically to his. He caught Aide's body in his arms and crushed her to him, half-awake, feeling her sobbing against him in the dark.

“My love, my love, you're all right? Rudy, tell me you're all right. They said you'd gone—all the wizards had gone— that you'd be killed if you stayed. Then they said…”

“I'm fine, babe,” he whispered back and pressed his lips to hers to stop the flow of her muffled, half-hysterical words. “Christ, I thought I'd never see you again. I wanted to come to you…”

Her arms clung more fiercely around his neck. “I was so afraid,” she moaned.

“Here…” His hands stroked her hair and her shoulders, trying to soothe the violence of her tears. She turned her face against his shoulder; in the darkness, his wizard's sight showed it white, tear-blotched, and thin, as if she had not eaten in days. He clutched her to him again and wondered how he could possibly have thought of going without speaking to her one more time. “Babe, I'm all right,” he murmured. “I'm fine, I'm safe. It's you I was worried about. Are you okay?”

She moved back a little from him, her midnight-blue eyes enormous in the gloom of the cell. She nodded, the tendrils of her hair swinging down over her face. Her voice was trembling as she lied, “I'll be all right.”

Rudy felt his heart contract in his chest. “Does Eldor—” He broke off, knowing that he had no right to ask it of her. She looked away, and he saw the tears glittering on her face.