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“We shall come out with the others, when the sun is in the sky, to burn what remains,” Ingold said quietly. “To do so now would only bring the Dark Ones once more upon us.”
He dropped what he held in his hand back onto the fetid little heap. Round, discolored lenses flashed in the starlight in their twisted frames. Ingold said, “It seems that I shall be visiting the Dark Ones at Gae, after all.”
Dawn was just thinning the stygian overcast of the night when Rudy and Ingold again reached the gates of the Keep. Against a charcoal sky, the ebony mass reared like a small mountain, close to a hundred feet from the top of the rock knoll on which it stood to its flat, snow-powdered roof and nearly half a mile in length. Its black, windowless walls faintly mirrored the trampled snow and dark trees that lay below it. Only its western face was broken by a gate and a short flight of broad steps. From a distance, the torchlight flickering in the square opening gave it the appearance of a single, small, baleful eye in the midst of an otherwise utterly featureless face.
As Rudy climbed the muddy path past the goat pens and ramshackle workshops that surrounded the Keep in a vast zone of trash, he could see most of the Wizards’ Corps assembled on the icy steps. He could pick out those who, like himself, had spent the night outside. Kara of Ippit, tall and homely, in her threadbare mantle and the two cardigans her mother had recently knitted for her. Thoth the Scribe, called the serpentmage, sole survivor of the massacre at Quo, austere as a bald vulture-god of antiquity, his topaz eyes illuminating his narrow white face like a jack-o-lantern’s. Dakis the Minstrel. A little fourteen-year-old witch-child from the north called Ilae, her dark eyes peering from behind a mane of red tangles. Others, a pitiful few, it seemed, huddling in the shadows like refugees in an old photograph of Ellis Island. And behind them stood those survivors of the massacre by the Dark who had been judged too lacking in power to participate in this trial of spells: itinerant conjurers, spellweavers, weatherwitches, and goody wives, the lower end of the spectrum of power that had not answered the dead Archmage’s fatal summons to the City of Quo.
Rudy’s heart sank at the sight of them. So few, he thought. And what the hell can we do, anyway, against the might of the Dark?
Other shadows appeared in the firelit tunnel that pierced the wall, leading from the outer gates to the inner, their forms ghostlike in the steam where the warmer air within came in contact with the outer cold – the day watch of the Guards, rubbing their bruises from the morning’s weapons practice and cursing one another and their deceptively elfin instructor good-naturedly. The Keep herdkids went tearing out in an enthusiastic boiling of infant energy to throw snowballs and milk goats. Soap boilers, hunters, woodcutters, and tanners emerged, men and women plying what trades they could from the scanty resources of this bitter and isolated valley.
And among them were a dark-haired girl in a black fur cloak and a peasant woman’s rainbow skirts and a tall, rather gawky woman some five years older, dressed in an outsize black uniform and white quatrefoil emblem of the Guards.
Minalde brushed the sable hood from her dark hair as she ran down the steps to meet Rudy, the rich fur of her cloak rippling glossily in the gray light. In sunlight, her eyes were the unearthly blue of a volcanic lake on a midsummer afternoon; shadowed as they were now, they were velvet-blue, almost black, and wide with anxiety. She caught Rudy’s hands. “They told me they’d heard a scream,” she said.
Rudy fought the urge to put a comforting arm around her shoulders, as he would have done had they met alone. She’s the Queen, he told himself, the Regent and the mother of the heir, for all she’s nineteen years old and scared. There are too many people watching.
“Glad to see it wasn’t you, punk,” Gil Patterson added, bringing up the rear, her long sword tapping at her ankles as she walked. Since she had joined the Guards of Gae, her former shy defensiveness had been gradually replaced by a toughness that, Rudy reflected, wasn’t any easier to see through. Those pale schoolmarm’s eyes still forbade any inquiries into the true state of her feelings, but she did look pleased that he’d survived.
At his side, Alde whispered, “Who was it?”
“Saerlinn. I don’t know if you knew him.”
She nodded, tears starting in her eyes. Alde knew, and was friends with, almost everyone in the Keep. Again Rudy struggled with his instinct to hold her, to offer her silent reassurance. “It puts us in a bad place,” he admitted quietly. “When we go to scout the Nest at Gae …”
“You?” Fear widened her eyes. “But you can’t—” She bit off her words, and a slow flush rose to her cheeks. “That is – it isn’t just for that,” she added with a soft-voiced dignity that made Rudy smile. “What about your experiments with the flame throwers, Rudy? You said you’d be able to create weapons to hurl fire from the things that Gil and I found in the old laboratories. You can’t …”
“They’ll just have to wait,” Rudy said quietly. “I’ll put one together for myself to take to Gae; the rest can wait till I return.” He put his hands on her shoulders and smiled at her frightened, woebegone face. “And I will return,” he promised her.
She looked down, her eyes veiled, and she nodded.
Gil’s voice cut sharply into the silence between them. “You think you’ll really be able to put working flame throwers together, then?”
He looked up, startled at her tactlessness, and saw what she had seen – the tall form of the Chancellor of the Realm, Alwir, Minalde’s brother, standing watching them in the mist and firelight of the gates. Rudy backed quickly away from Alde and took a few steps up the path toward the Keep.
“You bet,” he bragged in his best Madison Avenue voice. “Hell, in a month we’ll make swords obsolete.”
“That would be to your advantage,” Gil commented, “since you can’t pick one up without cutting yourself.”
But in spite of the banter, Rudy was acutely conscious of Alwir’s cold gaze on him as he rejoined Ingold among the mages at the foot of the Keep steps.
Alwir came down toward them, “a gleaming edifice of sartorial splendor,” as Alde had once joked, dominating those around him with his size, his elegance, and his haughty, unbending will. Like his sister, he was cloaked in black, a velvet mantle that billowed like wings behind him. The chain of sapphires that lay over his broad shoulders and breast were not bluer or harder than his eyes. He was trailed by the obsequious Bektis, his Court Mage, who alternately rubbed his long white hands together or stroked his waist-length, blue-silver beard as if in a self-congratulatory caress.
The Chancellor came to a halt on the lowest step and looked down at Ingold with an impassive face. “So your information was correct,” he said, in his rich, well-modulated voice. “The thing can be done.”
“By those with the strength,” Ingold returned quietly. “Yes.”
“And the reconnaissance?”
“We shall leave this time tomorrow morning.”
Alwir gave a satisfied little nod. Beyond them, the rising of the cloud-veiled sun had cast a kind of sickly, diffuse light upon the snowy wastes of the Vale, bringing forth from shadows the tangled grubbiness of the barricaded food compounds and the chain-hung pillars on the hill of execution across the road from the Keep.
“And these?” The Chancellor’s careless gesture took in the other mages – old women, young men, solemn black Southerners, and ice-white shamans from the plains.
“Believe me, my lord,” Ingold said, and there was a flicker of anger in his shadowed eyes, “whether or not it is decided to undertake this invasion, these people constitute your chief defense against the Dark Ones. Do not treat them lightly.”
Alwir’s eyebrows went up. “An unprepossessing lot,” he commented, scanning them, and Rudy felt that those enigmatic, speedwell-blue eyes lingered for a moment on where he had returned again to Alde’s side. “But perhaps more dangerous than they look.”
“Far more dangerous, my lord.” The new voice drew Rudy’s eyes and, half against his will, Alwir’s as well. In the suffused pallor of the dawn, the Guards on the steps had doused their torches in the snow, but within the gate passage above them fires still reflected redly on the polished walls. Against that reflection stood the red-robed shape of the Bishop of Gae, Govannin Narmenlion, her bald head and narrow, delicately jointed hands giving her the appearance of a skeleton wrapped in a crimson billow of flame.
“If you undertake your invasion using the Devil’s tools, my lord,” she warned, in a voice as dry and deadly as famine winds, “they will be its downfall. They are excommunicates, who have traded their souls to Evil for the powers they possess.”
Anger stained the big man’s cheeks, but he kept the melodious calm of his voice. “Perhaps if the Straight Faith were as dependent upon a centralized government as the Realm is, you would be even at this moment showering them with blessings,” he commented sardonically.
The fine-chiseled nostrils flared in amused scorn. “Such words tell more about the speaker than they do about their subject,” she remarked, and Alwir’s flushed face reddened further. “Better your precious invasion should fail than that you should bring yourself under the wrath of the Church by harboring such as these. Having commerce with the mageborn – the magedamned! – fouls the soul like clinging mud, until all the Faithful can see it, and cast you out. Even to converse with them taints you.”
Rudy felt Alde’s icy fingers close over his and, glancing sidelong at her, he saw the shame struggling in her taut face. She had been a good daughter of the Faith until the rainy night on the road from Karst when he had found his power – and they had become lovers.
Alwir grated, “That didn’t prevent you from coming out to see how they had fared!”
The Bishop’s dry voice was silky with menace. “It pays to count one’s enemies, my lord Alwir.”
There was silence on the steps, save for the rising whine of the icy wind in the trees. The Guards watched this confrontation uneasily. They had long grown used to the swift, vicious arguments between Bishop and Chancellor, but there was never any telling when one might suddenly escalate into civil war.
Then Alwir’s eyebrow canted mockingly. “And do you count me so, my lady?”
“You?” The gray light slipped along the curve of her shaven skull as she looked him up and down, austere scorn in the curve of her delicate lips. “You care not whether you are numbered among the godly or the wicked, my lord, as long as you can command what you call your niceties of life. You would sup in Hell with the Devil, were the food good.”
So saying, she turned in a swirl of scarlet and vanished into the darkness of the gate passage, her ringing footfalls dying away across the vast, empty spaces of the Aisle beyond toward the dark mazes where the Church kept unsleeping domain.
Alde whispered, “Rudy, I’m afraid of her.”
Hidden by the folds of her heavy cloak, his hand pressed hers. Talk had surged up again around them. Two of the junior weatherwitches had been offering to send the coming snowstorm elsewhere until Saerlinn’s body could be burned, and Thoth’s harsh, academic voice was saying, “To do so is to presume upon the laws of the Cosmos that bid the winds blow where they will.” There was some argument, but all of them, with the exception of Ingold and a withered little hermit named Kta, were terrified of the Scribe of Quo.
Under cover of the talk, Rudy said softly, “What can she do, babe? You’re the Queen. Even if she knew about us – which she doesn’t – we aren’t doing anyone any harm.”
“No,” she murmured. But her fingers trembled in his.
TWO
“INGOLD?”
Gil paused in the narrow doorway, all but invisible in the harlequin shadows that spangled the room. One of the other mages, the wizened little guru Kta, had told her that he was here, in a tiny chamber hidden deep within the secret levels of the Keep – the subterranean levels of whose very existence nine Keep dwellers out of ten were ignorant. Looking into the room, Gil saw that it was a miniature version of the “observation chamber” up on the second level, in whose stone and crystal table Rudy had once seen the possessed Archmage from afar.
Ingold was sitting on the edge of the circular, black stone table, looking into the changeable brightness that flowed upward from its heart. He raised his head at the sound of her voice, his face checkered with light and shadow; then he held out his hand to her, and the white light faded.
“I was on the point of sending for you,” he said quietly as she took a seat on the table’s edge beside him. Then, seeing the tautness of her mouth and the way her long, hilt-blistered fingers fidgeted with the buckle of her sword belt, he asked, “What is it, my dear?”
“Is it true what Rudy said?” she demanded. “That you’re going to lead the reconnaissance to Gae?”
For a moment he studied her in silence. It seemed to Gil that, as the cold brightness of the light faded, the lines of his battered face deepened momentarily. “After Saerlinn’s death, I am the only one who can lead it,” he replied.
She cried in despair, “You’re going to be killed!”
At that the blue eyes lightened. Ingold’s smile was a curious thing, for it transformed him as sunlight could transform a Highland landscape, making what was grim and angular suddenly young and wild. “You wound me, Gil,” he chided. “My very own cloaking-spell …”
“This isn’t a joking matter.” In Gil, concern for others had always taken the form of anger. Her voice was rough and harsh as she spoke. “The Dark Ones took Lohiro, and he was the goddam Archmage.”
“Lohiro went to them willingly,” pointed out the man who had loved the Archmage as a son. Against the chill, shifting luminosity of the crystal’s light, the scar he’d taken in killing Lohiro stood out jaggedly raw on the flattened corner of his cheekbone.
“Well, if they could hold him as their prisoner,” Gil snapped, “they sure as hell won’t have any problems killing you.”
An echo of that wild lightness still lingered in his eyes. “They’ll have to catch me first.”
Gil looked across the flickering fountain of light at him for a moment, struggling with anger and caring. Then she sighed, disarmed. “Well, all I’ve got to say is, you have the flakiest way of hiding out from them that I’ve ever seen, but that isn’t any of my business.”
“Ah.” Ingold smiled regretfully. “But it is your business, Gil. I have rather effectively made it your business, by bringing you to this world against your will and by getting you trapped here.”
Gil shook her head. “That wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known the Dark Ones would try to get through the gap in the Void.”
“It’s kind of you to say so. But I should have reasoned it out earlier than I did.” Amid the darkness of the wall, his huge shadow stooped forward like a giant as he took her hand and drew her to his side. “I knew of the possibility. But at the time I rescued Prince Tir, flight into your world seemed to be my only recourse, and I needed a confederate on the other side of the Void. And believe me, it has been a grim lesson to me about the inadvisability of tampering with worlds beyond my own.”
Gil shrugged. “If you hadn’t tampered, Rudy would still be painting bikes for the Hell’s Angels. You can’t say that was just coincidence.”
“I don’t believe that there is such a thing as coincidence,” Ingold said, and for a moment their eyes met. “And in any case,” he went on, “if I had not tampered, you would not have been dragged from the life you were working to build for yourself at the university, your research, and your friends. If it had not been for the danger that the Dark could follow you back across the Void and devastate your world as it has destroyed ours, you would have returned to all that long ago. And that, my dear,” he concluded quietly, “is why I came here tonight.” He drew her forward. Light pulsed suddenly in the crystal inset in the table’s center, bathing them in a white kaleidoscope of brightness. “Look into the crystal, Gil.”
She obeyed him, bending over it and blinking against that coruscating glare. “I – I don’t understand,” she stammered.
The brightness drew her sight, blinding her to the room, the shadows, and the robed figure at her side. Though there was a silence, she felt as if she were looking at music; only the faint buzzing throb of the machinery in the nearby pump rooms broke the utter stillness of the vision in which she was caught.
“It is – not easy to explain,” that deep, grainy voice at her side said. “This observation chamber, like the one up on the second level, was originally built to monitor the defenses of the Keep – a logical expedient, considering the miles of corridor involved. But, as Rudy learned, magic crystals have many uses. What you are seeing now is a construct, a simple visible expression of ideas too vast to be comprehended by ordinary means.”
Gil frowned, as her eyes slowly adjusted to the brilliance of that river of light that seemed to pour up around her.
For a time she was not certain that she even saw what she thought she saw, for she had no consciousness of the crystal itself. She thought that she looked down through an infinity of space, bathed in burning whiteness, and that, like bubbles in shining solution, gold spheres were moving, circling one another in the slow patterns of an unknowable dance. Their opalescent surfaces swam with colors that she neither recognized nor comprehended, revealing stars, galaxies, ages – cosmic vistas of something that was neither space nor time. The spheres grew infinitely smaller with distance, though there was neither horizon nor wall to break her line of sight; as far as she could see in that blazing ether, they were moving, merging, parting, and drifting around one another in endless patterns whose meaning whispered at the verges of her understanding. They shimmered like oiled gold as they touched, pressed together like the hands of joining dancers in those veils of light, and then, with infinite slowness, parted.
Ingold spoke again, his words seeming to her to come from some great distance. “What you see is the Void, Gil, the Void between universes – the Void that you crossed to come here. The spheres are worlds – universes – eons of time – each one a limitless cosmos of matter and energy, entropy and life. This is the closest I can come to explaining it to you, and it bears about as much relationship to reality as a child’s five-point drawing bears to the wonder and complexity that is an actual star. Do you see the joined spheres that lie closest to us?”
She nodded. “Are they—? They look as if they’re moving apart.”
“So they are,” he murmured. “They are your world and mine, Gil. Last summer they had been drifting together, until they lay so close that the curtain between them thinned. It is possible for one who understands the nature of the Void as I do to travel from this world to any other. But on the night that I first spoke to you, in the courtyards of Gae at the first quarter moon of autumn, they lay so close that a sleeper, a dreamer, could be drawn across unknowingly, as you were. It is this closeness that has prevented me from sending you back, for any rent in the tenuous fabric that divides your world from mine would set off a series of gaps through which the Dark Ones could find their way – as, in fact, one did.
“But our worlds are parting, drifting out of their cosmic conjunction. In six weeks or so, at the time of the Winter Feast, it will be safe for me to open the gate in the Void and return you to your world, without endangering the civilization that gave you birth.”
When he spoke of her return, she looked quickly up from that shining well to meet his eyes.
“And that, my dear, is why I am here tonight,” he repeated, as gently as he could. “For you are right. I do not know what awaits me in Gae. Danger, certainly, and perhaps my death. I had hoped to return you to your own world tonight, lest you should be trapped here forever.”
Gil whispered, “Tonight?” She was shocked at the suddenness of it, the fact that she might eat her dinner in the bleak Vale of Renweth and finish the evening with a midnight snack at a cafe on Westwood Boulevard. Indefinable emotions beat upon her, and she could only stare at him with blank, startled, stinging eyes.
Ingold took her hands gently and said, “I am sorry, Gil. Was that why you sought me out?”
She could not reply. Beside her, his voice went on. “Since the night the Dark Ones tried and failed to break the gates of the Keep, you know that they have haunted the Vale of Renweth. It may be that they are waiting for our guard to slacken or that they look for the opportunity to trap me outside the walls. But it could be that they are waiting for me to tamper again with the fabric of the universe, to open a gate through the Void. And that I dare not do.”
Still she remained silent. Below her, the crystal had gone dark, and the room was drowned in shadow. But it seemed to her that she still could see vague infinities of dark spheres and the suggestion of slow, turning movement through blackness. Quietly, she said, “It’s all right.”
His hands rested upon her shoulders, warm and comforting, banishing fear as they always had the power to do. “I am sorry,” he said again.
“It isn’t that.”
Out of the darkness that surrounded them, a faint thread of bluish light flickered into being. As Ingold helped her to her feet, the gleam widened and strengthened, showing the room small, black, and Spartan, the crystal plug set in the center of the table opaque and sparkling, a faint and frosted gray. The light drifted along above Ingold’s head, and their shadows lumbered, black and sprawling, about their feet as they went through the narrow door. It illuminated the gray fog of dust stirred by their feet as they passed through the deserted corridors of the empty hydroponics chambers. It winked on the disassembled components of flame throwers beyond the shadowed doorway of Rudy’s laboratory. Like a vagrant ball of foxfire, it preceded them up the narrow stair to the inhabited levels of the Keep and through the dark succession of closets, doorways, and interconnecting halls that made up the headquarters of the Wizards’ Corps.
The Corps common room was deserted, its only light the dim apricot glow that pulsed from the embers that lay, like a heap of jewels, on the wide hearth. Their two shadows moved clumsily through the greater darkness of that long room, passing, like the shadows of clouds, over the paraphernalia of habitation there: the jewel-bound books, salvaged from the wreck of Quo or shamelessly stolen from the archives of the Church; Kara of Ippit’s satin pincushion, sparkling like a diamond hedgehog among a great tumble of homespun cloth; the knuckly, knobby braids of herbs and onions hanging above the hearth; and the silver rainfall that was the strings of Rudy’s harp. The round, gold eyes of the headquarters cats flashed at them from every gloomy corner.
Ingold sighed, breaking his bitter silence, and there was a note in his voice that she had never heard before. “I had never meant to put you in such peril, Gil. It is said that wizards, among their many faults, have a horrible way of endangering their friends. I only hope to get you safely away from here, back to your own world, before disaster strikes. Those who are close to me seem to have a shocking rate of mortality.”
The beaten regret in his voice shocked her. “That isn’t true,” she said.
In the darkness he was only a darker shape, edged with the tawny colors of the fire. “You think not?” With his face hidden, the pain and irony of his words sounded all the clearer. “Rudy has inherited the staff of one of my dearest friends, child, and the widow of another.”