Darwath 2 - The Walls Of The Air (3 page)

A toy? A trip-light? An enchanted kaleidoscope?

Or the magic tool to further magics?

Staring down into those bright depths, he relaxed his mind, slowly emptying his soul of all concerns for the Dark, for Ingold, for Alde , and for the answer to this riddle itself. He let the soft, bright glitter of the gems below have its way with him, to do whatever it did.

For a time the images confused him. He did not understand what they were—incoherent scenes of blowing sand, rock hills on which nothing grew, rolling seas of brown grass invisible in the overcast night. He sensed rather than saw a dark place take shape, roofed with clouds and drifted deep in snow, walled in by high cliffs of black rock crowned with twisted pines. Beyond the black clouds he sensed gorge-riven peaks, knife-edged heights, and the endless miles of glaciers where the ice winds skated, screaming… Sarda
Pass
? he wondered. Tomorrow's road? The images grew clearer—ragged foothills and then an endless brown plain, with tawny grasses waving under the lash of the wind. A black sky was sheeted with cloud. A pale thread of road stretched out of sight into pitiless distance.

Frozen and bitter vastness swallowed his soul.

And, as if the images moved with his heart, he saw the soft glow of reflected candlelight and the starred embroidery on the changeable colors of a silken quilt. The colors shifted, aqua to teal to river-reed green, as they were shaken by the sobbing of the woman who lay there, her black hair thrown about her like scattered silk.

I can't leave her, he thought in despair. I've known her such a short time.

And miss Quo? the other half of his mind asked. And not speak with the Archmage? Not have Ingold teach you the ways of power?

He closed his eyes. Like a tingling through his skin, he became aware again of the Dark and the building fury of them, riddling the night like the coming of an electrical storm. I have to go, he thought, with a sudden chill of panic. But still he stayed, paralyzed between his choices—Minalde on the one hand, Ingold and the Arch-mage Lohiro on the other.

He opened his eyes, and the image in the crystal changed again. »

Small and distant, the stars were visible—more stars than he had ever imagined, filling a luminous sky that hung low and glittering over the endless roll of the blue-black sea. Their piercing brightness touched the curl of foam on the silver curve of the beach. Outlined against that burning sky, he thought he could make out the shape of a tower, looming storey on turreted storey from the trees that crowded an angular point of land thrusting out into the ocean. But the tower seemed strangely elusive, slipping his eyes past it, turning them again to the stars. He tried to look inland, but found his gaze eluded there, too. Half-guessed shapes of buildings clustered there, twining patterns of color on stone columns muted by darkness, briefly visible and then swallowed by mists. Try as he would to focus on the land, he found his eyes coming back to the sand, the sea, and the midnight sky, as if in a gentle refusal to answer his questioning.

Against the dark bulk of that square knoll and half-seen tower, he glimpsed the sudden flash of starlight on metal, winking momentarily and then gone. He looked again, releasing all thoughts of striving from his soul. The metal twinkled once more, and he caught the long swirl of a cape brushing sand, the scuff of a foot above the tide line. Like a sudden wash of spilling opals, the stroke of a wave eradicated footsteps from the sand. The man whose prints they were walked slowly on, and Rudy could see the starlight now on his bright gold hair—hair the color of sunfire.

It surprised him, for he had expected the Archmage Lohiro to be old.

But this man wasn't. He was surely less than forty, with a young, clean-shaven face. Only the firm lines of the mouth and the creases in the corners of eyes that were a necked and changeable kaleidoscope blue betrayed the harshness of experience. His hand around the hard, gleaming wood of his staff reminded Rudy of Ingold's hand, nicked with the scars of sword practice, very deft and strong. The staff itself was tipped with a metal crescent some five inches across, whose inner edge glinted razor-bright. The starlight caught in it, as it caught in those wide blue eyes and on the spun-glass glimmer of foam that washed the beach in a surge of lace and dragged at something half-buried in the sand.

Looking down, Rudy saw that it was a skeleton, old blood still staining the raw bones, crabs crawling gruesomely through the wet, gleaming eyes of the skull. The Archmage barely turned his steps aside from it The hem of his dark cloak brushed over it as he passed and swept the sand as he went on down the beach.

Rudy sat back, cold with sweat and suddenly terrified. The light died out of the crystal below him, leaving the room pitch-dark but for the bluish echo in its heart Then he heard a sound, faint and distantly booming, a vibration that seemed to shake the Keep to the dark, ancient bones of its agelong foundations.

Thunder
, Rudy thought.

Thunder? Through ten-foot walls?

His stomach seemed to close in on itself. He got up and headed quickly for the door. A second booming reverberated through the Keep, setting up a faint, sinister ringing in the metal junk heaped in the corners and shivering in the mighty walls.

Rudy began to run.

“Damn the boy,” Ingold whispered, and Gil thought that he looked very white in the wild jumping of shadows. The first blow of that incredible power smashing at the outer gates had jarred the torches in their sockets, and they guttered nervously, as if the light itself trembled before the coming of the Dark. Behind her in the Aisle, utter chaos prevailed.

Men with torches ran to and fro, calling mutually contradictory rumors to one another and brandishing makeshift weapons in frightened hands. Little flocks of children and old people, the nuclei of small families, huddled like frightened birds along the watercourses, as close to the center of the great space as they could get, having fled their cells in terror when the pounding started. Others, mothers and fathers who had left their dependents back in the close darkness of their cells, crowded around Janus and the small knot of Guards who had remained in the Aisle, waving their arms, demanding what was being done, pleading for even lying assurances of safety. Janus towered above these lesser people in the torchlight, his voice deep and intense, allaying fears and recruiting patrols as best he could in that whirling chaos of noise and lamplight.

It was a scene out of Dante's Hell, Gil thought, with darkness like velvet and a random frenzy of flickering light. Thank God, the Keep is solid stone. Maybe we can get out of this without immolating ourselves by morning.

If the Dark don't get us first, she added.

But Ingold was there, and Gil had never found it possible to be truly afraid when she was at the wizard's side.

So she felt only a kind of cold detachment, though her blood rushed violently through her veins and her body tingled with a cold excitement. The separation was physical as well as emotional, for she and Ingold stood together on the steps before the gates, with the pounding, sounding roar of the beaten steel at their backs; none would come near them there.

The noise in the Aisle was tremendous, the repeated bellowing clang mingling with the wild keening of voices, to rise and ring in the huge ceiling vaults until the whole Aisle was one vast sounding chamber. Men and women rushed wildly about, purposeful or aimless, the bobbing of the torches and lamps in their hands like the storming of fireflies on a summer night. Behind Gil, the pounding of the Dark upon the gates was a bass vibration that sounded in her bones.

Ingold turned to her and asked quietly, “Is Bektis here?” He named the Court Wizard of the Chancellor Alwir, the only other mage in the Keep.

“Surely you jest,” Gil murmured, for Bektis had a most solicitous concern for his own health. Ingold did not smile, but the quick flicker of amusement that lightened his eyes turned his whole face briefly, elusively young. It was gone as quickly as it came, the lines of strain settling back again.

“Then I fear that I shall have no choice,” the wizard said softly. The blue-white glow from the end of his staff touched his face in shadow; the flicker of the torches beyond might have been responsible for the illusion Gil had of bitter self-reproach in the old man's expression, but she could not be sure. “Gil, I had not wanted to ask this of you, for you are not mageborn, and the danger is very great.”

“That doesn't matter,” Gil said quietly.

“No.” Ingold regarded her for a moment, and a curious expression that she could not read overlay the serenity of his face. “No, to you it would not.” Taking her hands, he placed his staff in them. The wan white glow remained at Hs tip, though she felt no sense of power or vibration in the staff itself. It was only wood, grip-smoothed over decades of use, and now warmed from his hand. “The light may fade if the spells of the Dark draw off too much of my power,” he warned her. “But don't desert me.”

“No,” Gil said, surprised that he should even mention the possibility.

Ingold smiled at the self-evident tone in her voice. “I am not saying that either of us will survive this,” he went on. “But if the outer gates go, the inner ones will crumple like thin tin. Icefalcon!” he called, and the thin young captain ran to them from where he had been among Janus' Guards.

It was thus that Rudy saw them as he dropped the last few feet down a makeshift ladder from a rickety second-level balcony. They looked like scouts in enemy territory, framed in the sooty jumping shadows of the gate torches, their faces revealed by the white light of the staff. The clamor of the gates redoubled, the separate blows merging into one continuous assault, roaring like an earsplitting cannonade that set the inner gates visibly vibrating and stopped Rudy's breath with horror.

Someone close to him screamed. The Icefalcon mounted the steps at a light-footed run, braids white in the shadows against his black surcoat, and began to turn the locking rings that closed the inner gates. The thought of the pounding fury in the night outside made Rudy's blood run cold, but he would not for any reason whatever have gone close enough to the gates to stop them. The gates moved open, inward on their soundless hinges; the bellowing roar of the assault on the outer gates rolled from the ten-foot passage between, a howling tidal wave of sound. The black square gaped, a clanging maw of darkness and roaring horror.

In the white circle of the magelight, Ingold and Gil stood like lovers, wizard and warrior, their nicked, bruised swordsman's hands joined on the wood of the staff. Then Rudy, his soul cringing, saw Ingold turn away and mount the steps. Gil followed with the glowing staff upraised like a lantern in her hand.

She can't be doing that! Rudy thought desperately, running to the foremost edge of the scattered and horror-struck groups that stood in the Aisle. She hasn't got any magic of her own. If the Dark break through the gates and swamp Ingold's power, she has nothing!

But he could not go toward them. He stood helplessly on the edge of the darkness.

The blackness of the passage framed the old man in his stained and rusty brown mantle and the girl in faded black with the white emblem on her shoulder and the wan light glowing above her head. The bawling roar of the power of the Dark surrounded them in the midnight of that enclosed space, but neither Gil nor Ingold looked around. Ingold's eyes were on the gates, Gil's, unquestioningly calm in the midst of that unearthly roaring, on Ingold's back.

She's crazy, Rudy thought in horror. Never, never, never…

Ingold had reached the end of the narrow tunnel. By the swift-waning glow of the witchlight, Rudy saw him put out his hands, touching the shaking steel of the outer gates. Only inches of metal separated him from the wild blood-hunger that haunted the night outside—separated everyone in the Keep from instant and hideous destruction. The witchlight flickered, fading…

And like fire, spreading from Ingold's fingertips, Rudy could see the runes that spelled the gates. They seemed at first to be only a faint reflection, swimming within the metal like schools of fish below the surface of clear water, visible only to his wizard's sight. But under Ingold's touch they brightened, flickering into life in a webwork of shining graffiti, spread over the gates from top to bottom and across the walls beside them. They were incomprehensible in their complexity, meshing tighter and tighter as more of those faint silver threads glimmered into view. The light from them outlined the old man in silver and bathed his scarred hands in a quivering foxfire glow. Silenced by the beauty of it, Rudy forgot the danger and the wrath of the Dark outside. He watched Ingold's hands move across the surface of that phosphorescent galaxy, his touch calling forth the woven names of ancient mages, tracing his own name among those lattices of light.

Impossibly, under the harsh, wild roar, Rudy could hear him speaking, his scratchy, velvet voice weaving his own spells of ward and guard there, placing his power on the doors. As he had felt it on the road down from Karst, Rudy felt again the force of the power filling and surrounding that nondescript little man.

“What the hell does that old fool think he's doing?”

The words were screamed out a foot from Rudy's ear. He could barely make them out above the din of the gates. His concentration broke. For an instant he saw Ingold as nonwizards would see him, an old man in a patched brown robe, standing alone in the darkness, tracing imaginary patterns on the door with his fingers. Then Rudy swung around to see the Chancellor Alwir at his side, the man's face dark and clotted with anger.

“He's spelling the doors!” Rudy shouted back.

The Chancellor brushed past him, striding forward up the steps. “He'll have us all killed!” Alwir strode through the darkness and the roar of sound like a man facing blinding rain, to seize the edge of the great door in order to shove it to. The counterweighted steel moved easily, swinging smoothly before another hand stayed it. Cool and arrogant, the Icefalcon looked across into the Chancellor's jewel-blue eyes.