Darwath 2 - The Walls Of The Air (34 page)

Can it see in the dark
? she wondered as she sprinted up the steps and hurled herself into the darkness at his heels. But with the inner gate wedged open, there was time for neither speculation nor delay.

She knew where the locking rings were on the outer gates, and her hands grabbed flesh there. She'd felt his strength before, and now in the utter blackness it was terrifying, overwhelming. Hands ripped at her, pushing and tearing; she felt the ax scrape her leg as she scrambled to catch hold of his arms and body. She was yelling, shouting wildly in the darkness, praying the other Guards would show up before she was overpowered. The heavy body thrashed against hers, breath rasping hoarsely in her ears, the stink of his unwashed jerkin filling her nostrils. For a moment, they were locked in unequal combat; then she felt herself falling; the breath was driven from her, and an avalanche of flaming stars seemed to roar before her eyes. As if those blinding constellations actually gave light, she could see Snelgrin's face twitching, piglike, above her own, the eyes popping with surprise. There was an arrow driven through his Adam's apple. He choked, pawed at it, and made soundless gobbling motions, sweat gleaming on his face. He staggered a step or two to maul at the locking mechanisms of the shut outer gates, and another arrow appeared as if by magic through his temple as he turned his head.

Ten points for somebody
, Gil thought and fainted.

Everyone in the Keep seemed to be around her when she came to. The roaring of voices was like the sea in a narrow place, pouring through the bare bones of her aching skull. The torchlight was blinding. She shut her eyes again and tried to turn her face away.

A wet towel was laid over her forehead. Annoyed, Gil tried to strike it aside, and a bony hand grasped her wrist. “Easy, child,” the paper-dry voice of Bishop Govannin whispered. Gil tried to rise, rolled over, and promptly vomited. The hard hands caught her shoulders and steadied her without a word.

“What happened?” Gil asked when she finally could speak. Her head felt light, her body ached. Her face, she found, was covered with the scratches from Snelgrin's fingernails where he'd clawed her. She hadn't even felt that during the fight.

“Snelgrin is dead.” The skeletal fingers pushed aside the clammy straggle of hair from Gil's forehead. “As we all would be by this time, had you not followed him.”

Beyond the Bishop's grave, narrow face, Maia of Thran swam into being in the torchlight, his longbow still strung in his crippled hand. “Snel vanished through the gates just as I emerged from the Church,” he said. “I was afraid I would not get in range in time.”

“Yeah, so was I.” Gil looked around. It wasn't everyone in the Keep, just most of them, who crowded around her. All the watches of the Guards were there, it seemed, with most of the Red Monks, Alwir's whole private army, and most of Maia's. Melantrys' face was cut, and a lump the size of a walnut was forming on her left temple. Stiarth of Alketch now wore a kind of flowered sarong, and Alwir had his velvet cloak over his nightshirt, looking rather crumpled and human in his bare feet with their well-kept toenails. And apparently three-quarters of the men, women, and children of the Keep had all turned out in nightshirts if they had them and scantly draped in bedding if they didn't. Gil saw Tad, Bendle Stooft's rotund widow, and Winna with her yellow hair hanging in plaits over her back. And all were talking.

Janus came back from the gate. Caldern and Bok the carpenter were still trying to hammer the wedge free with a counterwedge driven in from the other side. Snelgrin's body had been hauled out of the passage. His face lay where the torchlight could fall on it, but its expression was nothing human. Gil turned away, feeling she would be sick again.

She heard Bektis' voice, speaking low and swiftly. “I am sure of it, my lord. The Dark are gathered outside in force. The emanations of their wrath must have driven him mad…” She turned her head and saw him standing with Alwir. Bektis was immaculate in his gray velvet gown, with every hair of his waist-length silken beard in place. Interesting, she thought. Alwir came pelting to the battle, even if he did have to do it in his nightie, while Bektis hung tight in the Royal Sector until the all-clear sounded. Probably with a bed across the door. Well, well.

“No,” a soft voice said behind her, and she looked up, to meet Maia's eyes. The Bishop of Penambra sat back on his heels, watching Alwir, Bektis, and Govannin begin to squabble in the orange circle of the torchlight. “Snel never recovered from the night he spent outside the gates, did he, Gil-Shalos?”

Gil shook her head. “His wife spoke to us.”

“She spoke to me as well,” the Bishop said. He glanced over at Lolli, his dark eyes gleaming in the shadows. When he and his people had come to the Keep, he had resumed the Church fashion of shaving his face and head; Gil had only recently become used to seeing that long, narrow, hollow-cheeked face without its tangled black beard. “She is a Penambran and, like me, knows what it is to sleep outside and await the coming of the Dark. I thought it might have been because he was alone… but I knew Snel, a little. He was a man absolutely without imagination. It takes a degree of sensitivity to be driven mad. But I did not know.” He folded his crippled hands on his knees and rested his chin upon them, his long body rolled into an ungainly ball of bones as he sat on his heels. Gil leaned back against the wall behind her, her head aching, her whole body shivering with reaction.

The Bishop of Penambra went on in a lower voice. “Bektis, of course, is useless as a healer of minds. But I have heard that Ingold Inglorion is good at such things. It is heresy for me to say so.” He grinned with his white teeth. “But I regret his absence.”

“You and me both, friend.” Gil sighed.

He looked at her curiously for a moment, then turned his eyes again to the sprawled body with its puckered, elongated expression and vacant eyes. “It is well known that the Dark devour the mind,” he said softly. “But this is the first time that I have heard that they can put something else in its place.”

Rudy Solis and Ingold Inglorion entered the City of Wizards just after noon of the following day. From the hills above, they saw the sea mists roll back, revealing that small town—a village, really, grouped around its famous school—as it slowly emerged from veils of pewter, pearl, and white.

Even from the hills, Rudy did not think he had ever seen a place so completely destroyed by the Dark.

In Gae, the houses had been crumpled, smoke-blackened, or had had holes blown in roofs and walls. Here he could not find a single dwelling that had been left standing, not a roof that had not been ripped from its walls and thrown with blinding violence into the rubble-strewn streets. In the damp sea climate, weeds were already rank among the broken stone.

He and Ingold stood for a long time on the last rolling summit of the hill. Silvery grass rippled around their feet, but there was no sound here but the mewing of the sea birds and the boom of breakers. The air smelled of salt. A drift of mist obscured the town, then blew clear, as if unveiling the bare bones with a mocking flourish. Screeching whirlwinds of gulls rose from the ruins, to settle back a few moments later. Other gulls, wailing in their thin piping voices, hung motionless on stretched white wings against a featureless sky. Rudy wondered what the place had looked like the day after the attack had happened. Had the gulls blanketed the town like a visitation of death angels to pick the corpses, or had the rats been there first?

He hardly dared look at Ingold.

The old man stood beside him like something that had been carved from stone. The gray of the sky seemed to bleed the color out of everything, leaving only the blue of his eyes under their short reddish lashes. There was no expression on his face, but not for anything in the world would Rudy have spoken to him then. After a time, Ingold moved off, taking the downward path without a word.

Bodies were scattered throughout the city. From the way the bones lay, it was clear that scavengers had fought over them, worrying them to pieces. Mechanically, Rudy identified tracks—fox, rat, coyote, and crow. After this long in the open, there was little stink and few flies. He could see Ingold checking the signs as unemotionally as an insurance inspector, studying how the fire blackening striped the walls where it had been thrown or swept from a staff, instead of crawling up them in a regular pattern to concentrate on the roof beams, as it did in other places where the inhabitants had simply set everything they owned alight, and how the bones lay in groups of two or three at most, where they had not fallen singly. The wizards, it seemed, had not even had time to band together to make a stand.

It surprised Rudy a little how small Quo was. At no time could the City of Wizards have housed more than a couple thousand, of whom, according to Ingold, about a third were wizards or students. Small, fanciful stone houses had grouped around a main square or bordered the crooked lanes that trailed on out of the town. Only in the center of Quo were there large buildings, whose splintered frames loomed before the belated pilgrims as they made their way through the overgrown rubble of the streets. There the school proper rambled along the edge of the cove, buildings alternating with a long colonnade, through whose tinted pillars could be glimpsed the iron-edged sea. At the far left, the gatehouse slumped like a smashed sand castle, flanked by the kicked-in ruin of some mighty building of many storeys and turrets, all but buried now under the trailing vines of its feral roof gardens. To the right, at the end of the long curve of the bay, the black stump of a truncated tower stood alone on the farthest point of land.

It was for this tower that Ingold unhesitatingly made.

Since they had entered Quo, he had not spoken, and his face was still and very calm, as if this ruin had belonged to strangers and had not been the only home his heart bad known for most of his adulthood. The torn hem of his mantle, stained with the dragon's blood, brushed passingly over a picked skull and broken staff that lay half-buried in nibble and weeds. Behind him, Rudy shivered with a frightened sense of deja vu.

Forn's Tower was also smaller than Rudy had thought The buildings surrounding it were little more extensive than a couple of good-sized houses put together, built on the big square knoll that jutted out into the sea. The tower itself, or what was left of it, looked no larger than one fair-sized room stacked on top of another. The black, curved shell of its walls extended thirty feet into the air. From the square below, Rudy could trace the broken stairs winding up its side. As he climbed behind Ingold through the ruins, he looked out over the half-moon beach and saw the steps leading down from the school with their twining patterns of inlaid stone and, half-buried at the tide line, the remains of a crab-eaten skeleton.

The two men reached the top of the knoll. The tower and the buildings surrounding it had been blasted and gutted, and the black stone spew of it lay scattered everywhere. Granted, the place was built later than the Keep, and by another technology entirely, Rudy thought, stooping to pick up a splinter of rock and then hurrying his steps to catch up with Ingold again. But it might have been thought that the spells of the Archmage could have kept the Dark out, as the spells Ingold set closed the doors to them.

Ahead of him, Ingold walked through the ruins, following the line of corridors he had traversed in other years with the light, unthinking tread of a man in a hurry to do something else, passing doors he had knocked at casually, back in the days when those rooms had housed people he knew. He barely glanced at the open ruins and the cracked walls.

He's like a man with a mortal wound, Rudy thought, frightened. He's still numb from the shock. The nerve ends are still cauterized. God help him when he starts to hurt.

In front of them the floor fell away.

It had been blasted upward, the torn beam ends clearly indicating that the explosion had come from below. Standing on the crumbling lip of the pit, Rudy could look down into the labyrinths of the lower vaults and see squat pillars and worn red tile floors, the dust of ages that had accumulated since the tower's founding, muddied by the sea rains. Below them the torn flooring revealed a second vault, founded on the ancient heart of the knoll. But instead of the gray of buried rock, smooth black basalt reflected the distant sky. From deep below, a draft of warmer air blew upward onto Rudy's face, bringing with it the smell of a yet deeper darkness.

Beside him, Ingold said, “I should have guessed.”

Rudy turned his head quickly. The wizard looked calm and rather detached, with the rising breath from below stirring at his ragged white hair. Rudy said hastily, “There's no way you could have known.”

“Oh, I don't know,” the wizard said absently. “I certainly got myself into enough trouble for warning everyone else of the possibility. I don't know why it shouldn't have occurred to me that all of the old schools of wizardry were built in cities that were later destroyed by the Dark.”

“Yeah, but a lot of cities were destroyed by the Dark,” Rudy argued quickly, hearing, under the deep calm of that scratchy voice, a note he didn't like, like the first fissure of an earthquake. “They knew the direction your research took. Any one of them…”

Ingold sighed and shut his eyes. Very quietly, he said, “Go away, Rudy.”

“Look…” Rudy began, and the eyes opened. In them was a black depth of pain that amounted almost to madness.

Gently the rusty voice repeated, “Go away.”

Rudy fled, terrified, as if an idly lifted pebble had turned into an H-bomb in his hand. When he reached the bottom of the knoll and looked back, he could not see that the old man had moved.

For a long time, it seemed, Rudy wandered the empty spaces of the ruined City of Wizards, listening to the booming of the sea. The crash of the breakers was somehow comforting, an echo of California winters. Whether it was because of the familiar damp cold of the seashore, the salt smell, or the magic that still lay over the town like an enormous silence, he felt at peace, as if he had come home. Home, he thought, his boots making barely a sound on the colored marble marquetry of the pavement. To find home in ruins, and family—the family I should have known and never did—dead! He looked back at the solitary figure on the knoll, very dark against the white of the empty sky.