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“I think so,” Rudy said. “The drawback is that there would be no way of getting the human prisoners of the Dark out of there. Unless they fled in the army’s wake …”
“It is regrettable.” Alwir sighed. “But indeed, it might be better thus. After so long in the realms of the Dark, they can hardly be said to be sane.”
“You’re very sure of that for a man who has never seen them,” Ingold commented, raising his eyes from the gold-bossed rim of his cup. “For myself, I would not even inflict such a death upon the herds of the Dark, who are likewise innocent.”
“T’cha!” The Chancellor wrinkled his lip in disgust.
“Beyond that, you might give a thought to what would befall the Keep, should the invasion fail and the army that you send to destroy the Nest of the Dark perish in it. On our way up the road from the valleys, we found the remains of propitiation-sacrifices offered by the White Raiders, not two miles below the old watchtowers at the Tall Gates. And there are those in the valleys who would lay siege to the Keep if they were assured that its defenders were gone – not only brigands, but families banded together, embattled tribes, who would take shelter by force if they had to.”
“That,” Alwir returned, with a nasty sideways glance at the Bishop of Penambra, “we already know.”
“I will not argue with you, Alwir, for you will believe what you choose and act as you will,” the wizard said. As he raised his head, the firelight showed his face hollowed with exhaustion and his blue eyes glittering with anger. “I am tired, tired to death – we have fought the Dark for two nights running and I am all but perished with cold. If it is your will to invade the Nest of the Dark, the wizards will aid you, up to and including our lives, so that we may save what survivors we can from the wreck. But I feel in my bones that your plan is death – death for most, and worse than that for some.”
With an impatient gesture, he threw what remained of the Blue Ruin in his cup into the fire, and the alcohol exploded in a swift thunderclap of flame as it hit the hearth.
Then he was gone, his footsteps fading down the hall toward the Wizards’ Corps common room almost before anyone was aware that he had risen.
Alwir said softly, “The old fool.”
There was an uncomfortable silence. Everyone, from the card players to Bishop Govannin, looked uneasily at one another and then at the Chancellor, who stood with his arms folded beside the hearth.
Rudy sighed and rose to go. “He’s not a fool, though,” he said tiredly. He picked up his pronged staff from where he had rested it against the doorpost and turned back, all his movements stiff and weary. “Yeah, I think you can retake Gae. But what the hell are you going to do with it when you’ve got it? Most of the town’s under a couple of feet of water, and what isn’t is crawling with rats, ghouls, and the dooic slaves that got left behind and turned wild. With the Raiders in the valley and the Dark Ones by night, you’d never be able to keep up lines of communication with the Keep, let alone the rest of the Realm.”
Alwir’s eyes turned suddenly ugly, though his voice remained suave. “Let that be my affair,” he remonstrated. “Since you will, after all, be leaving to return to your own world after the initial invasion of the Nest, the matter hardly concerns you, does it?”
Rudy saw Alde’s sudden movement in the shadows; her face had gone white within its frame of crow-black hair. Sour, weary anger filled him as he realized that the blow had been deliberate, to punish him for speaking against the Chancellor’s plans.
In a toneless voice, he said, “No, it doesn’t.” Turning on his heel, he strode away into darkness.
“Rudy!” The desperation in Alde’s voice stopped him as he crossed the common room. Looking back, he saw that she had run after him, down shortcuts that only she and Gil could have found. Tears gleamed on her face, and the sight of them broke and drained the anger in him, leaving only grief and pity for her sake. He held out his arms to her without a word.
For a moment they could only hold each other in silence, her face buried in the damp, rough wool of his coatcollar, her scented hair tickling against his lips. Then they kissed, feverishly, as if trying to deny what they both knew to be true. The hot saltiness of her tears burned where they touched his chin.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Alde, I’m sorry.”
He felt her arms lock tighter about his body, felt through his grip the shuddering draw of her breath. He had not known her long, but already it seemed strange to him that he had ever known the feel of any other woman’s body in his arms.
She shook her head. “No,” she murmured. “Don’t be sorry, Rudy – not for this.” Her words were muffled against his chest.
In the hearth a log broke, and the sudden spurt of gold threw their shadows leaping on the opposite wall.
“It was always going to be temporary, wasn’t it? And then it seemed as if we both forgot it. But I wanted to forget. It seemed that you’d been here forever – and would be—” She stopped, and against his chest he felt the determined tightening of her jaw and the stifled trembling of her ribs. Then she shook her head again, the red flickering of the ember light tipping her hair with carnelian. She swallowed hard. “This world was never your own. You have no choice, have you?”
“No,” Rudy whispered bitterly. “No, I have no choice.”
She let out her breath in a long, thick sigh and rested her forehead against his shoulder. “Then there’s not much we can say, is there?” she murmured. “Sometimes I think we never have the choice. That no one has the choice. How long do we have?”
His voice was almost inaudible against the fragrance of her hair. “Until the Winter Feast. After the Feast, the army will leave for Gae. And after …”
She shook her head, the soft skin of her temple gritting on his unshaven jaw. “There won’t be any after,” she said. “It was all fate, wasn’t it? Fate that you came here, so you could discover how to make the flame throwers to use against the Dark. And after fate is done with you, you must return to your own world. Isn’t that how the universe works?”
His arms tightened around her body, feeling the smallness of her bones through gauze and velvet and soft flesh. “Ingold’s always saying there’s no such thing as chance. But for Chrissake, why did fate decide it had to work out this way?”
She looked up at him, shaking back her hair; the front part was braided, the back fell in a loose cascade over his hands where they rested upon her waist. “It worked out this way because I would have begged it to,” she whispered. “Rudy – better this little than nothing at all. I’ve been happier with you than I have ever been in my life. Do you know, you have spent more time with me between your journeyings with Ingold than Eldor ever did in the thirty months we were husband and wife? And I have never feared you, never felt helpless or stupid or like some gauche, stammering child in your presence. You’ve never expected me to be other than what I am …”
“What did Eldor expect you to be?”
“I don’t know!” she cried. The words broke from her like long-pent floodwaters. “But it was in his eyes when he’d look at me and then look away. I gave him all that I was, but since it wasn’t what he wanted, it was as if he didn’t know, or didn’t care, that it was everything. I was sixteen. I loved him. I worshipped him. If I had known you then …” She stumbled to a halt, her lashes beaded with tears like diamonds in the firelight.
Rudy bent his lips, kissing the glittering droplets. “Nah,” he said softly, “they wouldn’t have let you marry some old wizard’s apprentice anyway. And besides, when you were sixteen, I bet you were flat-chested and pimply.”
“I never had pimples,” she argued, choking on tears and unexpected laughter. “Stop it! You make me laugh.”
“That’s not all I’ll make you,” he murmured through her lips.
“You all right?”
Ingold nodded without opening his eyes. Against the black fur of the very grubby bearskins on which he lay – the only blankets his narrow cot boasted – his face looked suddenly white under the weatherburning. Gil paused, irresolute, a cupful of smoking tea in her hands. Then she stooped to set it on the floor where he could reach it and turned to go. “You’ll have a helluva time falling asleep,” she remarked over her shoulder at him, “unless you take off your sword belt and your boots.”
Still the wizard did not open his eyes. He merely murmured, “You’re wrong about that.”
But a flicker of witchlight glimmered into existence over his head and slowly spread and strengthened through the room. It picked out the delicate marquetry of the desk that she and Alde had scrounged for him from a distant storeroom on the fifth level, its pearl and pearwood surface invisible under piles of old parchment scrolls, dingy with smudged ink and greasy with lanolin. Jewel-clasped books salvaged from the ruin of Quo lay with their open pages a counterpane of red and blue and shimmering gold leaf. Among and between everything lay wax note tablets, like the tiles of a Brobdingnagian Scrabble game. The mess overflowed the desk to litter the floor; the heaped books, scattered tablets, and twinkling gray glass of those enigmatic crystal polyhedrons surrounded the desk like a pool that spread itself along the wall almost to the foot of the hard, narrow cot. Gil paused, then came back and began to pull off the wizard’s boots.
“The other mages will be in for dinner soon,” she told him as she did so. “If I wanted to risk an amphibian future, I’d try to talk Kara’s mother out of something for you now.”
Outside in the common room, the harsh, screechy voice of the little witchwife Dame Nan could be heard, accusing someone – probably Dakis the Minstrel – of being a pestilent food thief, deserving of every ailment from cold sores to piles, and threatening to inflict him with the same if he dared to violate her kitchen again. Kara’s reproving “Mother!” sounded faintly from another room.
Ingold smiled and shook his head. “Thank you, child,” he said softly as Gil dumped the sodden boots beside the door. Then she thought he had fallen asleep, for he lay unmoving, his eyes closed and his hands resting limply at his sides. But oddly enough, Gil did not leave. She stood in the doorway looking down at him, her wide, chill gray eyes curiously blue in the fading glow of the witchlight.
“Ingold?” Her voice was barely audible against the rising chatter in the common room behind her.
“Yes, child?”
“Did you mean what you said? About its being hopeless?”
His eyes opened. For a moment, he considered her, thin and gawky, like a teenage boy in her outsize surcoat. “Hopeless or not,” he murmured, “you at least will have returned to the safety of your own world by the time the army marches. But no,” he added, seeing the look of grief that crossed her face, “there is always hope.”
“But you don’t think that in this case it lies with Rudy’s flame throwers,” Gil finished for him. “But, dammit, Ingold, the Dark were defeated once and driven back underground. The forces that did it can’t have been much more numerous than we are here. And the Dark seem to think that you know the answer.”
His eyelids drooped closed again, and he gave a faint, tired chuckle. “The answer to what question?” He sighed. “If the memory of how the Dark Ones were defeated has come down to Tir, it may very well be useless by the time he gets old enough to understand it. The Dark Ones’ fear is that I will remember sooner, or that I already know.”
He laughed again, a dry, weary sound. “The irony of it all is that I haven’t the slightest idea what it is that they believe I know.
“I thought that, like Minalde, I might recognize what I could not remember independently. The memories that she inherited through the House of Bes could only be triggered by something she had seen before, but they were no less true. I have meditated on it; I have cudgeled my brains and combed the records of all things touching upon my research and Lohiro’s that I could bring from the library at Quo …” His scarred fingers moved toward the heaped books that strewed the desk at Gil’s elbow. “And there is nothing. No reason at all for the Dark Ones to fear me.”
“If they don’t fear you,” Gil asked, “why do they want you?”
He lay silent for a long time, and again Gil wondered if he might have fallen asleep. But in the dark, heavy fur of the blankets, his hand clenched suddenly, and for an instant his brow furrowed, as if with pain. Then, just as suddenly, his expression smoothed again, and he said, “I haven’t the foggiest idea. Tell me why that one party of mages returned prematurely from exploring the Nest in the Vale of the Dark.”
Gil did a mild double take at the swift change of subject. “How did you know about that?”
His mouth moved a little under his beard – he might have been smiling. “I should be a poor mage indeed if I couldn’t follow the doings of my colleagues in my crystal,” he said. “Shadow of the Moon – the Raider shaman – was in charge of that party. I expected they should be the first to return to the Keep, since the Vale of the Dark is only a day’s journey away, but they returned so quickly that I think they never went down that Nest at all.”
“They didn’t,” Gil said, leaning her bony shoulders against the stone of the doorframe. “But then, I expected they wouldn’t be able to. When you look down on the Vale from above, you can see how the outlines of the old city of the Dark there have been changed by the gradual movement of the earth. The pavement in which the stairway is located is so badly displaced that I’m not surprised the stairs themselves will no longer admit humans.”
“Indeed?” The blue eyes opened, suddenly sharp and alert. “You guessed that?”
Gil nodded and folded her arms. “It would stand to reason, if these mountains are geologically active enough to have displaced the pavement. Those ruins are old – older than our conceptions of time. The Dark formed and shaped that Vale among the older rocks of the foothills, but they couldn’t stop the subsequent lift of the earth enough to keep their stair open.”
The wizard considered this for a moment, looking intently into the shadows of the ceiling over his head. Then he rolled painfully up onto one elbow and reached for his cup of tea.
“Interesting,” he said quietly. In the half-darkness of the alcove, the witchlight falling on his white hair was like strong moonlight on mountain snow; his face, below it, was plunged in shadow. “You once asked me, child, why you were here – why it had been you, and not someone else, whom circumstances had thrust into exile from all you knew and wanted.”
Gil looked down at her knobbed and bony hands, lying on the frayed black homespun of her sleeves, and said nothing, but her lips tightened.
“What do you know about the moss in the Nests?”
She jerked her head up, thoroughly startled by what seemed like a whole new topic of conversation, to meet the old man’s intent, curious gaze. “Nothing,” she said.
“But you guess something about it,” Ingold pursued. “You said as much back in the guardroom.”
Ruefully, she chuckled. “Oh, that. It isn’t important. It’s just that I flashed onto something from my college biology course that would explain why the moss is flammable, that’s all. It’s nothing that has anything to do with the Dark.”
“Isn’t it?” the wizard murmured. “I wonder. Do you remember, Gil, when you and I visited the Vale of the Dark, how you looked back from the mountain above and saw by the slant of the evening light the pattern of the ancient walls that told you there had once been a city there? I would never have taken those changes in the colors and thickness of vegetation for anything but a rather curious pattern in the valley floor.”
“Well, of course.” Gill shrugged. “You didn’t sit through three Historiography 10-B lectures on the subject of aerial photography, either.”
Ingold smiled. “No. Instead, I devoted a considerable portion of my brilliantly misspent life learning how to cast horoscopes – an interesting pastime, but not much to the point. What I am getting at is this: The answer to the question of how the Dark were defeated – how they might be defeated again – may require, not a wizard, but a scholar. And that could be why you are here.”
“Maybe,” she agreed wryly. “But the fact remains that no record I’ve seen – either Govannin’s chronicles, the old books you salvaged from Quo, or what Alde and I found here in the storerooms – goes back to the Time of the Dark. Nothing gets within a thousand years of it.”
Ingold set his tea down and leaned gingerly back against his blankets. His white brows pulled together in a frown. “Why not?” he asked.
Gil started to reply, then left the words unsaid. The dog did nothing in the nighttime … and that, as Sherlock Holmes had once remarked, was the curious incident.
She returned to the barracks in a meditative mood.
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