THE WALLS OF AIR

Book 2 of the Darwath Series

Barbara Hambly

Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1983

Copyright © Barbara Hambly 1983

Cover illustrations © Nakonechnyi Jaroslav

Cover design by Andrew Davis © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Barbara Hambly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008378714

Ebook Edition © February 2020 ISBN: 9780008378721

Version: 2020-02-18

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Maps

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

About the Author

Also by Barbara Hambly

About the Publisher

Maps

The Reaches of the Dark

The Vale of Renweth

PROLOGUE
_____________________

GIL PATTERSON THOUGHT HER vision of the strange city was all a dream – until the wizard Ingold Inglorion appeared one night in her kitchen, seeking a place to bring the infant Prince of Dare from the ancient horror that was attacking the city of Gae.

Rudy Solis didn’t believe in wizards and magic – even when he saw Ingold emerge, with an infant in his arms, beside the place where Rudy had stopped to fix his car.

But when one of the monstrous, evil Dark crossed the Void in Ingold’s wake, their only escape was back with the wizard to the embattled world from which he had fled.

It was a world where magic worked within a logic of its own. And it was a world where the loathsome Dark were again ravening, after they had lain almost forgotten in underground lairs for three thousand years. Gae had fallen, and the city of Karst was jammed with refugees. The King was dead, and proud, ambitious Alwir was now Regent for the infant Prince Tir, as brother to the young Queen Minalde – or Alde, as most called her.

Then the Dark struck in massive numbers at Karst. In the fighting, Gil discovered that even a graduate student of history could become a warrior. And Rudy found himself aiding the young Queen to save her child again from the Dark.

At Ingold’s urging, those who were left began the long, agonizing march toward the Keep of Renweth through trails choked with snow and buffeted by mountain winds. During that flight, dissension among the leaders was as much a danger as the trailing Dark and the White Raiders, who were coming from the plains to loot. Alwir and the fanatic lady Govannin, Bishop of the Church, were engaged in a struggle for power. And both feared Ingold – the Bishop because all wizardry was evil in her Faith.

To Gil and Rudy, unused to the hardships of freezing cold and day-after-day marching, the trip was hard. But Gil found herself accepted as one of the Guards, the elite fighting force of Gae. And Rudy found that Alde returned his love. His joy in this was equaled only by his discovery that he could call up fire – and by Ingold’s promise to teach him to be a wizard.

In the end, through the efforts of Ingold, some eight thousand people reached the monstrous, black Keep, built three thousand years before by wizardry as a defense against the previous scourge of the Dark. There, in its vast chaos of deserted aisles and chambers, they could make themselves a refuge for a time, though the perils before them were many and terrible.

Yet somehow Gil and Rudy discovered that they no longer had any desire to return across the Void to their own world.

ONE
_____________________

THE SETTING WAS THE Shamrock Bar in San Bernardino on a rainy Saturday night. Rain drummed softly on the plate glass window, and the tawdry gleam of lights shone on the wet pavement outside. Two bearded bikers and a sleazy blonde were playing pool in the back. Rudy Solis swigged off his second beer of the evening and watched the room. There was something he had lost, something that had been taken from him, but he no longer remembered what it had been. Only a numb ache was left.

He was out of money and not nearly drunk enough yet. Behind the bar, Billie May moved back and forth along the shelf of empty glasses and bottles of beer, her reflection trailing her in the flyspecked mirror, showing her black eye make-up and the red lace of her bra at the low neck of her sweater. The mirror revealed all the usual Saturday night crowd, people Rudy had known since high school – since childhood, some of them: Peach McClain, the fattest Hell’s Angel in the world, with his old lady; Crazy Red, the karate instructor; Big Bull; and the gang from the steel mill. But it was as if they were strangers. He made a gesture with one hand, and a beer bottle levitated from the shelf before the mirror and drifted across the intervening space to his hand. No one noticed. He poured the beer and drank, hardly tasting it. From the jukebox, the tinny whine of steel guitars backed a syrupy nasal voice hymning adultery. The hurt of the loss within him was unbearable.

He let go of the bottle in midair a foot above the surface of the bar and made it stay there. Still no one noticed, or no one cared, anyway. Rudy stared past it at his own reflection in the mirror – the sharp bone structure and backswept eyebrows in their frame of long, reddish-black hair. His fingers were stained with car paint and grease, and his name was tattooed across a flaming torch on his wrist. Behind him, the plate glass window had grown suddenly dark, as if all light had died outside.

He turned, chilled with a horror he could not define. No streetlights were visible outside, no sheen of neon, only darkness that seemed to press against the window, soft and living – darkness that stirred with a restless movement, as if creatures impossibly sinuous haunted its livid depths. He tried to cry out, and his voice was only a kind of feeble rattle in his throat. He tried to point, but the people in the bar ignored him, as if he were not there. A bolt of energy or power from outside struck the wall of the bar like a monster fist, caving it in amid an explosion of shattering bricks. Through the torn wall, darkness rolled like a wave.

“Rudy!” Cold hands caught his flailing wrist. “Rudy, wake up! What is it?”

He woke gasping, sweat icing him to the bone. In the darkness of the room, his wizard’s sight showed him Minalde, Queen of Darwath and mother of the heir, sitting up in bed beside him, the starred silk of the counterpane gleaming around her shoulders and the fear in her wide iris-dark eyes making her seem younger than her nineteen years. The warm, still blackness of the room smelled of beeswax and of the perfume of her tumbled hair. “What was it?” she asked him again, her voice very low. “Was it a dream?”

“Yeah.” Rudy lay back beside her, shivering, as if deathly cold. “Only a dream.”

In the lightless barracks of the Guards on the first level, Gil Patterson woke, her dreams of quiet scholarship in another universe called California broken by an unshakable sense of impending horror. She lay on her narrow bunk for a time, listening open-eyed to the small sounds of the fortress Keep of Dare, and to the hammering of her own heart. The Keep was safe, she told herself. The one place in the world where the Dark Ones could not break in. But the terror of the dreams grew rather than diminished in her heart.

At last she rose, soundless as a cat. The dim yellowish glow from the banked hearth in the main guardroom threw a feeble reflection into the cell shared by the women of the day watch. It touched anonymous shoulders, shut eyes, tangled hair, the black cloaks with the simple white quatrefoil emblem of the Guards, and the hard gleam of steel. By that faint suggestion of light, she pulled on a shirt and breeches, wrapped herself in her cloak, and slipped from the room. The floor was icy to her bare feet as she made her way between the bunks in the guardroom beyond. She guessed it to be midway through the deep-night watch, the watch between midnight and morning, but time was different in the windowless Keep.

She pushed aside the curtain at the far end of that room.

Ingold the wizard was not in his so-called quarters. Actually, the wizard slept in a sort of cubbyhole that the Guards used to store part of the food supplies they’d scrounged, salvaged, and defended against all comers in the wreck of the Realm. The feeble gleam of the light from the hearth showed Gil a hollow in the sacks of grain piled in the back of the closet, a couple of moth-eaten buffalo robes, and a very grubby patchwork quilt, but no wizard. His staff was gone, too.

She moved quickly back through the guardroom, through the outer chamber used for storing weapons and casks of Blue Ruin and bathtub gin, and out into the cavernous depths of the Aisle. The great central hall of the Keep stretched nearly a thousand feet from the double gates at the west end to the dark, turreted wall of the administrative headquarters at the east. She might almost have been outside, for the featureless black walls that bounded the Aisle on either side stretched up out of sight, supporting a ceiling whose shadows had never been dispelled. Across the broad floor murmured the deep, black water channels, spanned by their tiny bridges; around her the stillness was like the great silence of the snowbound mountains outside. But instead of moon or stars, the darkness was lighted by torches that flickered on either side of the dark steel of the gates. The dim orange flame defined a small double circle on the smooth blackness of the polished floor and touched fiery echoes in bolt, brace, and locking ring.

Where the two halos of red flame merged, a man stood, his rough white hair fringed by the fire in a line of burning gold.

She called out softly, “Ingold!”

He turned and lifted an inquiring eyebrow. Gil pulled her cloak more tightly around her shoulders and pattered up the broad steps to the gate. Since she had crossed the Void in his company, to come unwillingly to this other universe, she couldn’t remember a time when she had been warm.

“Yes, my dear?” he asked, in a voice like raw whiskey and velvet. The face revealed by the restless light had never been more than nondescript, but sixty-odd years of existence had given it an extremely lived-in look, seamed and wrinkled and mostly hidden behind a close-clipped, rather scrubby white beard. When she stood beside him, her eyes were level with his.

“What is it?” she asked him quietly.

He only said, “I think you know.”

She glanced nervously over her shoulder at the dark steel of the gates. Here the horror was stronger, a sense of brooding malevolence in the night. Here she felt the strange, chill terror, the irrational sensation of being watched from across unknowable gulfs of time by a malign and incomprehensible intelligence. “They’ve come,” she whispered, “haven’t they?”

Ingold rested a hand gently on her shoulder. “I think you had better go arm.”

Her eyes dark in the wan bluish witchlight, Minalde watched Rudy dress. “What’s wrong?” she whispered.

“I don’t know.” His voice was low, so as not to wake the royal infant who slept in his gilded cradle in the shadows on the opposite wall. “But I think I’d better be getting back.” After a month in this world, the alien clothing was more or less familiar to him, and he no longer felt self-conscious in the homespun breeches and full-sleeved shirt, tunic, knee-length boots, and gaily embroidered surcoat he’d scrounged off a dead nobleman after the great massacre by the Dark Ones at Karst. But he still mourned the simplicity of jeans and a T-shirt. He buckled on his sword and leaned across the tumble of variegated silks to kiss the girl who watched him so silently. “Will you be at the gate in the morning to see us off?”

His hands framed her face. She caught his wrists, as if to hold him to her for a few minutes longer. “No,” she said quietly. “I can’t, Rudy. It’s a long way to Quo and a dangerous road. Who knows if you’ll even find the Hidden City or the Archmage, once you reach the end?” Her blue eyes shimmered suddenly in the pale phosphorescence of the witchlight. “I never could stand good-byes.”

“Hey!” Rudy leaned over her again, his hands gripping her neck and shoulders, the dark hair spilling heavily down over his fingers as he drew her mouth to his. “Hey, Ingold’s gonna be with me. We’ll be okay. I can’t imagine anyone or anything crazy enough to take on that old geezer. It won’t be good-bye.”

She smiled crookedly up at him. “Then there’s no point in making much of it, is there?’ Their lips met again, gently this time, the loose strands of her hair tickling his face. “Go with God, Rudy, though the Bishop would die in her tracks if she heard me say that to a wizard.”

Through their next kiss Rudy mumbled something about the Bishop. “Which probably wouldn’t do her any harm,” he added as their mouths parted. He reached up tenderly and brushed the tear from her cheek. In all his twenty-five years, he couldn’t remember anyone, man or woman, who had ever been concerned about what he was going to do. Why did it have to be a girl in another universe? he wondered. Why did it have to be a Queen? Another tear stole down her cheek, so he whispered, “Hey, you look after Pugsley while I’m gone.” His way of referring to Prince Tir, the last heir of the House of Dare, made her laugh in spite of herself.

“All right.” She smiled shakily.

“We’ll find the Archmage and his Council,” Rudy whispered encouragingly. “See if we don’t.” He kissed her once more quickly and turned and fled, the bluish feather of light dying behind him.

In darkness he hurried through the mazes of the Royal Sector, misery in his heart.

She was afraid for him, and more than that, he was all she had – he and her baby son. In the past month she had lost the husband she had worshipped, the Realm she had ruled, and the world she had grown up in. Yet she had never said, “Don’t go.”

And what’s more, you selfish bastard, he cursed himself, it never crossed your mind not to go.

She had never questioned that his need to be a wizard took precedence over his love for her. Wretched as the truth made him, he understood it for what it was; he was first and foremost a wizard. Given a choice of what to do with the limited time remaining to him in this universe, he would rather seek the sources of his own power and the teachings that Ingold and the other wizards could give him than remain with the woman he sincerely loved.

Why did I have to find them both at the same time? he wondered miserably. Why did I have to choose?

Even her understanding of his choice was like gall in the raw wound of his guilt.

Yet there had been no possibility of another choice.

He stopped at the head of the main east stairway, leading down to the first level.

The sensation of wrongness, of unnamed horror lurking in the black mazes of the Keep, was stronger now, teasing at him like a half-heard sound. He shivered like a dog before the thunder, the hair at the nape of his neck prickling. All around him silence seemed to move through the branching corridors. Glancing nervously behind him, he started down the stairs.

Somewhere below him, a door must have been opened. Faint as a drift of incense, he caught the sound of chanting, the sweet murmurous richness of monks’ voices singing the offices of the deep-night. Rudy paused on the stairs, remembering that the Church headquarters lay directly below the Royal Sector and that, to the fanatic Bishop of Gae, wizards were anathema.

As far as he knew, his love for Alde was unknown to any, except perhaps his fellow exile Gil. He doubted anything serious could happen to Alde because of it – she was, after all, Queen of what was left of Darwath, and the King had perished in the holocaust of the burning Palace at Gae. But he knew too little of the mores and taboos of this place to want to risk discovery. And hell, he thought, maybe there’s some kind of noninterference directive in force, since I’m from another universe and really shouldn’t be here at all.

But if there was, he did not want to know.

At the moment it wasn’t critical – there were plenty of other stairways down. Some of them had been part of the original design of the Keep, built like the walls of black, massive, obsidian-hard stone. Others had evidently been rigged millennia ago by ancient inhabitants who had simply knocked holes in the floors of the corridors where it suited them and let down jerry-built steps of wood. The same process had clearly been in force with the walls and cells of the Keep, for in places the black walls marched into darkness in rigid rectilinear order, while in others makeshift chaos prevailed. Passages had been blocked to build cells across the right of way, access routes had subdivided other cells, and partitions of brick, stone, and wood had chopped the original plan into literally thousands of self-contained units whose forms had shifted with their functions, with a result, over three thousand years, that would have challenged the most worldly rat in all of B. F. Skinner’s laboratories.

Optimistically, Rudy set off into the maze.

“I feel nothing,” Janus of Weg said quietly. The big Commander of the Guards of Gae sat on the edge of a bunk near the guardroom hearth, his face grave in the loose frame of coppery-red hair that surrounded it. He glanced across the hearth at Ingold. “But I trust you. If you say the Dark are outside, I would believe you, even if the sun were high in the sky.”

There was a stirring among the other captains and a murmur of assent. The Icefalcon, like a foreigner among the Guards with his long white viking braids, said softly, “The very smell of the night is evil.” Melantrys, a diminutive girl with the eyes of a ninja, glanced nervously over her shoulder.

“Smell, hell,” rumbled Tomec Tirkenson, landchief of Gettlesand, a big craggy plainsman whose domains lay on the other side of the mountains. “It’s like the nights when the cattle stampede for no reason.”

The Icefalcon glanced coolly across at Ingold. “Can they break in?” he asked, as if it were a matter of no more moment than the outcome of a race on which he had bet only a small sum.

“I don’t know.” Ingold shifted his weight on his perch by the hearth and folded sword-scarred hands on his knee. “But we can be certain that they will try. Janus, Tomec – I suggest that the corridors be patrolled, on all levels, to every corner of the Keep. That way …”

“But we haven’t the men for it!” Melantrys protested.

“We’ve enough for a patrol of sorts,” Janus admitted. “But if the Dark effect an entrance, it’s sure we’ve not enough to fight at any one place, spread so thin.”

The Icefalcon cocked a pale eyebrow at the wizard. “Are we going to fight?”

“If we can,” Ingold said. “Your patrols can be eked out with volunteers, Janus. Get the Keep orphans as your scouts. They’re always into everything anyway; they might as well be put to use. We need to patrol the corridors, simply to know if and where the Dark break in. It isn’t likely that they can,” he went on gravely, “for the walls of the Keep have the most powerful spells of the ancient world woven into their fabric. But whether the spells have weakened, or whether the Dark have grown stronger in the intervening years, I do not know.” Despite the calm in that deep, scratchy voice, Gil thought he looked grim and driven in the uncertain flicker of the hearth-light. “But I do know that if the Dark Ones enter the Keep, we shall have to abandon it entirely, and then we will surely be lost.”

“Abandon the Keep!” Janus cried.

“It stands to reason,” the Icefalcon agreed, leaning back against the wall behind him. He had a light and rather breathless voice that sounded disinterested even when discussing the loss of the last sanctuary left to humankind. “All those little stairways, miles of empty corridors … We could never drive them out.” The captains looked at one another, knowing the truth of his words.

“It’s not only that,” Gil put in quietly. Their eyes turned to her, a quick glitter in the room’s shifting shadows. “What about the ventilating system?” she went on. “The air in here has to travel somehow. The whole Keep must be honeycombed with shafts too small for a man to fit through. But the Dark can change their size as well as their shape. They could fit through a hole no bigger than a rat’s, and, God knows, we have rats in the Keep. All it would need would be for one of them to get into the ventilation – the thing could attack at will, and we would never be able to find it.”

“Curse it,” Janus whispered, “that the Dark should rise at the start of the worst winter in human memory. If we quit the Keep, those as aren’t taken at first nightfall would freeze before they came to shelter. These mountains are buried in snow.”

“Rats …” Tirkenson said softly. “Ingold, how do we know the Dark aren’t lurking somewhere in the upper levels already? The Keep stood empty for nigh two thousand years.”

“We would have known,” the wizard said. “Believe me, we would have known by this time.”

“But their eggs?” Tirkenson went on. “How do the Dark Ones breed, Ingold? As Gil-Shalos said, it would need only one to go through the air tunnels, laying eggs like a salmon along the way. We could be sitting on top of a spawning ground of the Dark.” Though the Guards were not as a rule nervous people, a ripple of horror seemed to pass through the assembled captains. The instructor Gnift shuddered and exchanged a quick, worried look with Melantrys.

“You needn’t concern yourselves with that, at least,” Ingold said quietly. He picked a bit of straw from the frayed sleeve of his mantle and avoided all their eyes. “I have seen the breeding places of the Dark beneath the ground, and I assure you that they do not multiply in any fashion so – tidy – as that.” He looked up again, his face carefully calm. “But in any case, we cannot allow the Dark entrance under any circumstances. The corridors must be patrolled.”

“We can get Church troops,” Janus said, “and Alwir’s private guards.”

“I have my own men,” Tirkenson added, rising. “The lot of us can take the south side of the Aisle.”

“Good.” Ingold stood and lifted his head to search the faces of those crowded into the narrow barracks, seeking someone in the uncertain yellow light. “I doubt that the Dark will be able to breach the walls themselves, but if they do, we must know it.”

“Can we know?” Melantrys straightened her sword belt, glancing up at him with chill black eyes. “The Dark can swallow a man’s soul or blood or flesh between one heartbeat and the next, a yard from his fellows, before he can cry out.”

“A Guard?” Ingold inquired mildly.

She bridled. “Of course not.”

“There you are.” He picked up his staff, his shadow looming behind him like the echo of the darkness waiting beyond the gates of the Keep. Once more he scanned the room, the figures there fading into milling confusion of preparation and departure. It might have been a trick of the firelight, but the lines seemed deeper in that calm and nondescript face. Whether this was from weariness, apprehension, or sheer annoyance, Gil could not tell.

All around them men and women were slinging on swords and finding cloaks; voices called to one another through the dark, narrow doors of the barracks. The air seemed somehow heavier, the fear in it as palpable as electricity; if she had touched Ingold’s cloak, Gil thought, sparks would have jumped from the fabric. Janus remained for a moment at Ingold’s side, towering over him, his broken-nosed, pug face grave.

“That is for the corridors,” he said quietly. “What of the gates?”

“Yes,” Ingold said. “The gates. I feel that is where they will concentrate their attack. But with the height of the ceiling in the Aisle, once inside they can strike from above, and ground defense will be almost useless.”

“I know,” Janus said softly. “They’ll have to be fought in the gate tunnel itself, won’t they?”

“Maybe,” the wizard replied. “Gil – I shall need your help at the gates.” Then he frowned and cast a swift, raking glance over the remaining Guards. Bright azure eyes hooded like a falcon’s glittered in the shadows. “And where,” he asked grimly, “is Rudy?”

At the moment, it was the question uppermost in Rudy’s mind as well. He knew he was still somewhere on the second level, but that was about all he could be sure of. Having missed the turning for the stairway he sought, he had tried to double back along an allegedly parallel corridor, with disastrous results. A makeshift hall through what had once been a large cell beckoned, only to dead-end him in a black warren of crumbling brick and dry rot that spiraled him eventually into the center of the maze, a long-deserted outlet for the Keep’s indoor plumbing system. Cursing those who had designed the Keep and those who had felt called upon to improve it alike, he crossed through the dark, water-murmuring privy and out into the corridors beyond.

He walked in the darkness without light. This was another ability which had surprised him, like being able to call fire from cold wood, or light to the end of his staff. Ingold had told him that this wizard’s sight had been born in him, like his other talents, the seeds of a magedom that could bear no possible fruit in the warm, lazy world of Southern California.

And still he felt it – the building of tension, like water mounting behind a weakening dam, the brooding horror that seemed to fill the dark mazes through which he walked. His step quickened with his heartbeat. The conviction grew in him that the Dark were outside, focusing inhuman lusts and will upon the smooth, impenetrable walls of the Keep. Beyond human magic or even human comprehension, their numbers and power were so great that their presence could be felt through the ten-foot walls wrought of time and stone and magic. He had to find Ingold, had to find his way somehow out of this maze …

He found himself in a short neck of corridor that bore every sign of having been part of the original Keep. A flow of warmer air indicated a stairway somewhere nearby, leading down to the first level. Rudy paused, trying to get his bearings. Directly in front of him loomed the end of the passage, black and seamless, as if poured from a single sheet of dark glass. That would be the back wall, he realized in surprise, of the Keep itself.

Fantastic, he thought. I’ve come in a bloody circle and, after all that wandering around, I still get to come down in the middle of Church territory anyway. He shrugged. But it beats hell out of wandering around up here all night.

He did not go forward, however. A short stairway of a few steps branched up to his right, with a door at the top. The mirror-smooth blackness of the stone proclaimed steps and wall as part of the Keep’s original design, but the setting of the door caught his attention. It was so placed as to be absolutely shadowed, thrown into virtual invisibility, from any light carried in the corridor itself. Only a wizard, walking like Rudy without light, could have seen it at all.

Fascinated, Rudy moved forward. His sense of the mounting peril and terror of the Dark grew no less. They would strike, and strike soon – he felt that much in his bones. But he knew that, provided they survived the night, he and Ingold would be setting out on their journey in the morning, traveling hundreds of miles through the barren plains and desert to seek the City of Quo where it lay hidden on the Western Ocean. Concealed as this room was, he was not altogether sure that he’d be able to find it when he returned.

But above all, pure curiosity drew him as a string might draw a cat, the unslakable curiosity that was the leading trait of any wizard.

The door was shut, the ironwork of the lock so rusted as to be almost unworkable. But it was no worse than the oil pans of some cars Rudy had wrestled with in his time. The chamber within was circular, unlike the uniformly rectangular cells elsewhere in the Keep. A bare workbench ran halfway around the walls; under the bench, wooden boxes proved to contain miscellaneous rusted junk.

But in the center of the room stood a table, rising from the floor itself and built of the same hard, black, glassy stone. It was about four feet across, and inset in its center was a plug of heavy crystal, like the glass covering of a display case. But when Rudy perched himself on the table’s edge and called a ball of witchlight over his shoulder to look, the white gleam glared back into his eyes, for the crystal was cloudy, showing only a kind of angular glitter underneath. First with his nails and then with the tip of his dagger, he tried to pry the cover off, without results. But there was something under there, of that he was sure. Elusive glimpses of angles and surfaces whispered in those frosted depths. An observer, watching him as he examined the impenetrable stone, would have been reminded of a large and gaudy cat frustrated by a mirror.

To hell with it, he thought in disgust and made as if to rise. This is no time to be messing with toys.

But he was drawn back again. His shadow lay hard and dark over the gray glass, sharp-edged in the cool, steady light of the ball of phosphorous that hung behind his shoulder. After a moment’s thought, he dimmed and diffused the light, trying to peer past the flickering crystal, but the thing still denied his gaze. Gradually he let the witchlight die entirely and sat looking at the thing in the dark.

Around him the room had fallen utterly silent. He knew that he should go but did not. He sensed that the tiling was magic, of a deep and mechanistic sorcery far beyond his natural talents. Was this the magic, he wondered, that he would learn at the school at Quo?

His fingers probed at the crystal again, finding no seam between glass and rock.

Another thought came to him. Hesitantly, he projected a thin sliver of light into the crystal itself.

White and blue and lavender reflections blossomed forth around him like the three-dimensional tail of a celestial peacock. He shied back, shielding his eyes from that bursting fountain of light, then dimmed it, working awkwardly with the few light-spells he had been taught, like an artist’s child with his first crayons. He suffused the crystal with a dim light and leaned over again to look inside, to the glittering bed of colored rock salts that lay at the bottom of their crystal cylinder.

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 Archmage 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 sun-fire.

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 flecked 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.

TWO
_____________________

“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 its 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.

Rudy couldn’t hear what passed between them. Alwir’s shout was lost in the roaring fury from the passage beyond, and the Icefalcon did not raise his voice to reply. The cacophony was hardly so much sound anymore as an elemental force that blotted sound. In the sickly pallor reflected from the staff in Gil’s hands, the scene before the gates had an air of nightmare unreality blurred by the dirty redness of the torches. The two black-clothed men faced each other soundlessly, the one raven, the other pale as ice.

Though Gil, within the tunnel of the gates, must have known what was taking place, Rudy could not see that she so much as turned her head. The light of the staff she held was dying.

Looking beyond Alwir and the Icefalcon into the darkness, Rudy saw to his horror that the light of the runes had entirely died. Ingold stood alone in a dark hollow of sounding metal, the only marks visible on the shivering steel the silver tracing of his own spells. Still Rudy saw him moving in the darkness, tracing signs that flickered and were swallowed by the malice of the Dark. Over the furious hail of blows on the gates, Rudy heard Alwir yell, “Shut the gates! I order you to stand off and shut them!”

The Icefalcon only stood, regarding him with cold, colorless eyes. Behind him, the tunnel had grown utterly dark.

The Chancellor cried something in his great battle voice, and his hand went to the hilt of his sword. Metal flashed in the reddish shadows of the torches as it swept free of its scabbard …

… and the faint hiss-ching of the edge singing clear was as audible and distinct as a note of music.

The sudden, utter silence that fell upon the hall was like a roaring in the ears. It was like an outdoor silence in so huge a place, for the first second unbroken even by a drawn breath among the several hundreds of people who had come to take problematical refuge in the Aisle. So deep was the hush that lay over them all that Rudy could hear clearly the soft, light tread of Ingold’s returning feet.

The wizard stepped through the dark gate, with Gil moving quietly at his heels. The old man took the door edge from Alwir’s clench and pushed it gently to. The faint, hollow boom of its closing reverberated to the ends of that soundless hall.

“The gates will hold against the Dark now.” Like the sound of the gates, Ingold’s grainy voice was low, but it carried to the farthest corners. “It may be that they will try to break in elsewhere tonight, but … I think the main danger is past.”

“You – foolish – old – bastard!” Alwir’s resonant voice grated over the words like a file. “Opening the inner doors could have been the death of us all!”

“They would never have held if the Dark Ones had forced the spells on the outer,” the wizard returned mildly. His face was very white, and his hair was matted dark with sweat, but only Gil stood close enough to him to see that his hands were not altogether steady. Quietly, she returned his staff to him and stood close by his elbow.

Alwir spoke as cuttingly as a flaying whip. “And is that something else that you, as a wizard, speak of with sole authority? As the only wizard in the Keep, do you feel justified in every crackpot scheme you care to pursue?”

Ingold raised heavy-lidded blue eyes to meet Alwir’s. “Not the only wizard,” he replied softly. “Ask your court mage Bektis.”

Alwir swung around. “Bektis!”

The word was snapped in the way a dog-handler might crack a whip on his boot to bring his dog belly-down to heel. The court mage disengaged himself with great dignity from the crowd that had formed itself before the western doors and came forward, the jumping torchlight salting fire over the bullion embroidery of his velvet sleeves.

“Whether the gates would have broken or not,” he said, stroking his waist-length silvery beard with delicate fingers, “it would have been perhaps better, had you consulted with others before any course was decided upon.” He looked haughtily down his nose at Ingold. Rudy could see his high, domed forehead all pearled with sweat.

“Indeed it would have,” another voice purred suddenly, low and dry and as thin as wind through bone, “had you been here.”

Bektis turned as if bitten. Govannin Narmenlion, Bishop of Gae, moved up the steps toward them at the head of a small company of the Red Monks, the bald-shaved warriors of the Church. Above the gory crimson of the episcopal robes, the Bishop’s face was thin and bone-hard, a skeleton with living coals burning in the dark eye sockets. Only the fullness of her lips betrayed her sex. Her harsh voice rode easily over the court mage’s indignant reply. “I commend your courage, Ingold Inglorion. But it is said that the Devil guards his own.”

Ingold bowed to her. “As does the Straight God, my lady,” he replied. “You know better than I in whose hands rest the people of the Keep.” He looked ready to pass out on his feet, but he met the chill, fanatic eyes levelly, and it was Govannin who turned away.

“And he was not the only one conspicuous by his absence, my lady Bishop,” Alwir added with sweet malice.

“Indeed,” the Bishop replied calmly. “Many were absent from their appointed posts. Others remained – to guard their stores of food, lest those be looted while they were gone.”

The Chancellor’s brows shot up, then plunged, hooding eyes that were the same morning-glory blue as his sister Minalde’s, but hard as the sapphires he wore around his neck. “Looted?”

“Or inventoried,” the Bishop went on softly, “to be marked for future—” Alwir’s mouth hardened dangerously “—reference.”

He lashed out, “And you think that in the midst of an attack by the Dark Ones—”

“The Faith must protect itself as it can,” she shot back at him. “To preserve our independence, we must be beholden to no secular power for bread.”

“As Lord of the Keep, I have the right to control—”

“Lord of the Keep!” Govannin spat scornfully. “The brother of the Regent for the true King, my lord, and that only. A man who consorts with wizards, who seeks to bring the Archmage, the very left hand of Satan, here among us. If you expect the blessings of the Straight God upon your endeavors …”

“The Straight God works in many ways,” Alwir grated. “If our strike against the Dark in their Nests is to succeed, we shall need both the troops of the Empire of Alketch in the south and the wizards of the west.”

Like flint, his words struck fire from those steely eyes. “The Straight God has no truck with the tools of Satan,” she snapped, “nor with those who foul their hands with such tools.”

“We are beyond the time when a ruler can pick and choose his tools.”

“There is never a time when siding with the Crooked One is excusable.”

Quietly, Gil took Ingold’s arm, and they descended the steps to the main body of the shadowed Aisle. The old man moved slowly, stiffly, leaning on his staff. Those who had crowded around to see the confrontation between wizard and Chancellor fell back from him, murmuring and making the sign against evil. Rudy fell quietly into step with them. He nodded back to where the Chancellor and the Bishop were still squabbling and shook his head. “I don’t believe this.”

“Oh, come, Rudy,” Ingold said mildly. “They haven’t any proof that I did more than endanger the whole Keep by opening the inner gates.” He glanced sideways, sunken eyes amused.

“But I saw the motherloving runes!” Rudy exploded. “They disappeared, goddammit!”

“Did they?” Gil looked across at him curiously. “You know, I didn’t see anything at all. I could feel – things, forces, in the air. But it was just – darkness.”

Frustrated, Rudy turned to Ingold for support. “Of course they did,” the wizard said. “But you were the only person in the Keep capable of seeing – you and Bektis.”

“And it would be worth Bektis’ job to say so,” Gil added wryly.

She looked tired, Rudy thought, and no wonder. Coming down from Karst and training with the Guards, Gil had begun to have the look of a half-starved alley cat. He had never understood her, either as an intolerant, intellectual scholar in California or now as a warrior of the Keep. But having seen her standing behind Ingold as he faced down all the armies of the night, Rudy felt an awe of her that amounted almost to fear.

“That’s how we wizards get our reputation for eccentricity,” Ingold went on in his mild, scratchy voice. “We do things that people don’t understand, for we see things differently and act as we deem fit. Those who are not mageborn cannot comprehend us and perforce must mistrust us or, rarely, trust us implicitly. It’s no wonder wizards have few friends and that those few are mostly other wizards.” They crossed a footbridge, fragments of lamplight glinting on the silent spill of ebony below. “And then, too, horrible things have been known to happen to those who befriend mages.”

The groups of people, the huddled families and restless, prowling watchers, were slowly trickling from the Aisle to return to the black mazes of the Keep. From the doorways on the lower levels, voices could be heard as patrols called to one another. Alwir and Govannin, each surrounded by a separate retinue, were making their way back up the Aisle, the venom in their voices audible, though distance and echoes blurred the words. By the gates a line of guards had been set, their drawn swords flickering eerily in the red torchlight. The opposed terrors of both noise and silence no longer filled the Keep. Rudy wondered how long it was until dawn.

“I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like if you guys do bring the Archmage and the Council of Wizards here,” Gil went on as they approached the darkness of the barracks. “Alwir’s going to try to use them against the Bishop, even as he’ll use the troops of the Empire of Alketch, if he can get them.”

“I have no doubt that he will get them,” Ingold said quietly. “But since the Alketch is practically a theocracy, he will be lucky if his precious allies don’t take his power and hand it over to the Church. He’ll need Lohiro on his side to balance that threat if he hopes to invade the Nests of the Dark and still have any sort of kingdom to rule afterward.”

“Ingold,” Rudy said uneasily, “I think I’ve seen the Archmage.”

The old man’s attention narrowed and focused like the beam of a laser. “Where? How?”

“Here, in the Keep. In this crystal kind of thing. I – I got lost.” The wizard raised a quizzical eyebrow at that, but said nothing. Rudy hesitantly described the room, the table, the crystal, and the visions he had seen.

Ingold listened intently until Rudy was done and then asked him, “Where was this room?”

“I don’t know,” Rudy said helplessly. “Someplace on the second level is all I know.”

Ingold was silent long enough for Gil to wonder what arcane curses revolved through his mind. Finally he sighed. “That is Lohiro,” he said. “I have seen him walk so, down the beach at Quo. But the thing that you speak of I have never seen before.” They stopped before the doors of the barracks. Ingold glanced over his shoulder, back into the darkness of the Aisle. Flickering lights ran to and fro there on hurrying ghostly feet, like spooks on a deadly earnest Halloween. He turned back to them. “I have sought for some word, some contact with Lohiro for a month now, ever since the fall of Gae.”

“Could you put off your departure?” Gil asked. “Worst-case, it wouldn’t take more than two days to find that room.”

The old man hesitated, obviously torn. At last he shook his head. “In two days, the storms will have moved down from the high glaciers to bury the Pass again.” He sighed. “If we leave tomorrow, I shall be turning them back the last day down the foothills as it is. After that it will be weeks before we can get out.”

“Wouldn’t it be worth it?” She glanced around, as if at the bleak world beyond the windowless walls of the Keep. “If you could make contact with him, he could start on his way here tomorrow and you’d cut your time in half.”

“Maybe,” the wizard said quietly. “If we find the room again. And if the crystal there is actually a means of communication, rather than simply observation. And if the image that you saw, Rudy, was not merely the echo of events long gone, or part of the illusions that surround Quo. Divination by crystal is by no means sure. You remember the Nest of the Dark in the valley to the north of here, Gil. By fire and crystal, it is still shown as blocked up, when you and I have been there and have seen that it has been open for years. And after all that,” he continued somberly, “we may still have to set out on this journey, when deep winter has locked down upon the plains. But I will ask you this, Gil …”

Their eyes met, and he grinned suddenly, as rueful as a schoolboy. “It seems to be my night for asking things of you.”

She grinned back. “I’ll ask you something someday.”

The old impish expression flitted briefly across his tired eyes. “God help me.” He smiled. “When we are gone, as your duties with the Guards give you time – look for this room for me. Lohiro will certainly want to see it when he comes.”

“All right,” Gil agreed quietly.

“Yeah, but she’ll have a hell of a time finding the place,” Rudy argued. “I mean, since she isn’t mage-born …”

Ingold and Gil exchanged a glance, a quick glitter of eyes in the light of the staff that stood between them. Then Ingold smiled. “That’s never stopped her.”

There was a moment of silence, then the wizard turned abruptly and vanished through the barracks door.

Gil sighed and looked back out into the random flurries of dark and light in the Aisle. In repose, Rudy noticed, her face had acquired a network of fine-penned lines around the eyes that hadn’t belonged to the shy, gawky scholar in the red Volkswagen. It had been a long night, and was wearing on toward dawn. Outside, if the Dark Ones waited, they waited in silence.

Nothing like starting out on a walk of more than fifteen hundred miles with only two hours’ sleep, he thought tiredly and prepared to turn into the barracks to see to his packing. But another thought crossed his mind, and he stopped. “Hey, Gil?”

Her attention came back from other things. The pale schoolmarm eyes turned to him.

“What would you think of somebody who – who’d leave someone he loves, to go after something he wants?”

Gil was silent for a moment, considering. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “Maybe that’s because I don’t understand love very well. I see people act out of what they say is love, but it’s like watching someone act from a really deep religious conviction – it’s incomprehensible to me. My parents – my mother – wanted certain things for me and couldn’t understand that all I wanted was to be a scholar. Couldn’t see that I’d rather live in a crummy little office in the history department of UCLA than in the classiest hundred-thousand-dollar home in Orange County. And she said she loved me. Over and over and over. So I’m the wrong expert to ask about love, Rudy. But as for leaving someone to go after something you want … Leaving them for how long? How badly do they need you to stay? It’s all situational. Everything’s situational.”

Manlike, Rudy shied from the specific. “Well, like if you had only a short time together and had a choice of spending it with this person you loved or being separated from them because of – of something you wanted. Something you wanted more than anything in the world, except them.”

Gil shook her raveled braid back over her shoulder. “What makes you think you have a choice?”

Rudy gulped. “Hunh?”

Her voice was as chilly and neutral as her eyes. “Only a wizard can find the City of Quo, Rudy. Ingold’s got the Dark Ones on his trail, God only knows why. He needs another wizard to back him up. If you hadn’t volunteered to go looking for the Archmage with him, Rudy, you’d probably have been drafted.”

A long moment of silence followed, while Rudy digested that one. Love and the loneliness of exile fought in him against the burning memory of that first instant of the knowledge of his own power, the instant he had called forth fire from darkness. The double need in him for love and power seemed to rise over him like the tide, with a confusion of memories: Ingold standing in a shining web of runes; the darkness of Minalde’s watching eyes; and the sweep of pearlescent waves washing over a half-buried skull.

In the end it all meant very little. He would go because it was required of him that he go.

“You got a great way of putting things, spook,” he muttered tiredly.

Gil shrugged. “Booklearning,” she explained. “It rots the brain. Get some sleep, punk. You have a long walk in the morning.”

It was a small and very tired group that gathered on the steps of the Keep three hours later in the gray chill of dawn. Standing, shivering, beside Ingold in the misty snowlight, Rudy reflected to himself that in some cases it was better to have no sleep than too little. As far as he knew, Ingold hadn’t been to bed at all. Every time he’d waked up through the confused remainder of the night, he’d seen the old man sitting beside the fire with the demon-smoke of his foul-smelling tea in wreaths around his head, staring into the yellowed chip of crystal he carried, while Gil and the Icefalcon assembled provisions for the journey with their usual silent efficiency.

After three days of storms, the Vale of Renweth lay bleak and snowbound all around them, a white, rolling sea breaking against the black rocks of the surrounding cliffs. To the west, the shallow trace of the road climbed toward the dark notch of Sarda Pass, almost hidden in roiling gray cloud; to the east, it wound, descending through what a week ago had been sun-tinted meadows of long grass and a scattering of woods, on out of the Vale past the broken bridge of the Arrow Gorge and down to the Dark-haunted lowlands by the Arrow River. Northward the land rose, mile after forested mile, like a fjord between the high cliffs of the Rampart Range and the greater bulk of the Snowy Mountains, to meet the cold meadows of the timberline and the white walls where the glaciers began.

But around the Keep itself, the ground was clear. Hunks of snow mixed with chopped dirt had been ripped up by the violence of the Dark Ones’ assault and lay scattered, like the spew of a frozen volcano, hundreds of feet from the walls. The walls themselves were unmarked, the black gates that had roared like gongs under that power and fury unscratched.

Winds sneered down the Vale, roaring in the trees. Rudy shivered wretchedly in his damp cloak and wondered if he’d ever be warm again. Beside him, the Icefalcon was saying to Ingold, “I hope you packed shovels, unless you plan on turning yourselves into eagles and flying over the Pass. Winter’s hardly begun and they say Gettlesand across the mountains is buried deep in snow.”

Even as a rank novice in the arts of wizardry, Rudy knew that few mages would risk changing their being into the being of a beast, and then only under conditions of extreme emergency. But to nonwizards, magic was magic; and from the outside, shape-craftiness looked much the same as simple illusion. On the other hand, Rudy did think longingly of conjuring up a snowmobile.

The Icefalcon continued in the same light, uninflected tone. “I imagine my own journey will be easier – provided I don’t get my horse stolen.”

“Your journey?” Gil asked, surprised.

Pale eyebrows elevated fractionally. “Hadn’t you heard? I’m the one who has been chosen to ride south to the Alketch with my lord Alwir’s letters to the Emperor, asking his help with troops.”

Ingold laid a hand gently on Gil’s shoulder to stop her next angry words. “It was a logical choice,” he said smoothly. “Alwir picked the messenger with the best chance of survival.”

Who coincidentally happened to be the man who kept him from shutting the doors on you last night, Rudy added. But, like Gil, he held his peace.

Unruffled, Ingold searched through his voluminous robes and eventually located a small hand-worn token of carved wood that he gave to the pale captain. “I leave you with this,” he said. The Icefalcon took it and turned it over in curious fingers. It was dark and smoke-stained, obviously old. Rudy had the impression that it was shaped like some living thing, but it was neither human nor any animal that he recognized. “It is imbued with the Rune of the Veil,” Ingold explained, “the rune that turns aside the eyes and the mind. It will by no means make you invisible, but it may help you on your journey.”

The Icefalcon inclined his head in thanks, while Ingold pulled on his worn blue mittens and wound ten feet of knitted gray muffler around his neck, so that the ends fluttered like banners in the chilly winds. Around the corner of the Keep, a gaggle of the herdkids appeared, Keep orphans in charge of looking after the stock. Most of them were running aimlessly, shrieking with laughter and hurling snowballs as if they hadn’t been playing keep-away with death through the night. But a couple of them were leading a donkey, a scrawny miserable beast with the Earth Cross of the Faith branded on one bony hip. The donkey represented a major victory for Alwir and Ingold, since the Church owned most of the stock in the Keep. Rudy suspected Govannin had had the thing exorcised and blessed.

Other shadows appeared in the darkness of the gates. Alwir stepped forth into the wan light, dark and elegant and as unmarred as the walls, followed by Janus, Melantrys, Gnift of the Guards, and Tomec Tirkenson, who in a few days would himself be leaving with his troops, his stock, and his followers, to take the long road over the Pass to Gettlesand. Of Govannin the Bishop of Gae, there was no sign. True to her word, she would have no truck with the tools of Satan, nor lend her countenance to their endeavor.

Ingold left his friends and walked up the steps toward the Chancellor, Rudy heard the drift of words, Alwir’s voice deep and melodious, Ingold’s reply warm and grainy. He glanced sideways at Gil and saw her looking hard and strained, her eyes narrowed and cold. He felt the tension rising off her like smoke, misery and worry and fear. Well, hell, why not? he thought. If the old man buys it out on the plains, she’s in for a long stay.

We both are. The thought was frightening.

“Hey, spook?”

She glanced forbiddingly at him.

“Take care of yourself while we’re gone, okay?”

She evidently told herself to relax and did so, slightly. “I’m not the one who’s gonna need taking care of,” she said. “All I have to do is sit tight and keep the door shut.”

It was on the tip of Rudy’s tongue to ask Gil to look after Alde for him, but on second thought, he couldn’t imagine someone as tough and hard-hearted as Gil getting along with the shy, retiring Minalde.

Gil sighed. “Have a good trip, punk,” she added. “Don’t screw up and turn yourself into a frog.”

“At this point, I doubt he could manage even that,” Ingold said judiciously, coming back down to them. The rulers of the Keep were disappearing back into the shadows of the gates. After a moment the Icefalcon followed them, his dark cloak sweeping the loose powder snow that sprinkled the steps. “For the present he’s quite harmless.”

“Thanks loads,” Rudy grumbled.

“Enjoy it,” Ingold urged. “There’s a great deal to be said for being unable to destroy inadvertently those whom you love. And you surely will not be harmless by the time we return, if we return.”

“The pair of you,” Rudy sighed, “are the worst couple of pessimists I’ve ever met in my life. No wonder you get along so well.”

Gil and Ingold unconsciously closed ranks against the common foe. “Clear analysis of any situation,” Ingold declared, “is often mistaken for pessimism.”

“The two shouldn’t be confused,” Gil added. “I’ll explain the difference to you one day.”

“Thanks,” Rudy said glumly. “I’ll look forward to it.”

He turned and started down the steps. For a moment Ingold and Gil stood alone before the doors of the Keep, but Rudy was collecting the lead-rope of the burro from the head herdkid and did not see what, if anything, passed between them there. A moment later the wizard came down to join him, huddling deeper into his dark mantle against the stinging wind. As they plowed their way along the buried path toward the road that would take them through and over Sarda Pass, Rudy glanced back once, to see Gil standing on the steps, her bruised hands tucked into her sword belt, watching them go. An icy skiff of breeze dashed blown snow into his eyes; he thought he saw another shape, black-cloaked and small, standing in the vast shadows of the gates; but when he looked again, there was no sign.

THREE
_____________________

FOREVER AFTER, RUDY’S MEMORIES of the journey to Quo were memories of the wind. It never ceased, as integral a part of that flat, brown, featureless world as the endless ripple of the dried grasses or the bleak, unbroken line where the dark planes of ground and overcast sky met in an infinity of cold and emptiness. The wind blew from the north always, as bitterly cold as the frozen breath of outer space. It streamed down off the great ice fields where, Ingold said, the sun had not shone in a thousand years and where not even the wooliest mammoth could survive. It roared like a river in spate down eight hundred miles of unbroken flatlands, to bite the flesh to the bone. Ingold said that he could not remember a winter when it had blown so cold or so steadily, nor a time when the snows had fallen this far south. Neither in his memory, he said, nor in the memory of any that he had ever spoken to.

“If it’s usually even half this bad, it’s no surprise we haven’t met anybody,” Rudy commented, huddling as close to their wind-flattened fire as he could without the risk of self-immolation. They had made camp in a rolling depression of ground that Ingold identified as a beast wallow of some sort – bison or gelbu. “Even without the Dark Ones, this part of the country would be a hell of a place to try and make a living.”

“There are those who do,” the wizard replied without looking up. Wind twisted their fire into brief yellow ribbons that licked the dust. By the restless light, only the prominences of his curiously reticent face could be made out – the tip of his nose, the wide-set flattened triangles of the cheekbones, and the close, secretive mouth. “These lands are too hard for the plow and too dry for regular farming, but in the south and out in the deserts, there are colonies of silver miners; and here, close to the mountains, lie the cattle lands and the horse lands of the Realm. The plainsmen are a hardy breed,” he said, strong fingers twisting at the leaves of the fresh-water mallows he was braiding into a strand, “as well they have to be.”

Rudy watched him weaving the plants together and picked out by the leaping glow of the fire the shapes of the seeds, the petals, leaf and pod and stamen, identifying and fixing the plant in his mind and recalling what Ingold had told him about its curative properties. “Are we still in the Realm of Darwath?” he asked.

“Officially,” Ingold said. “The great landchiefs of the plains owed allegiance to the High King at Gae – in fact, as a legal entity, the Realm stretches to the Western Ocean, for the Prince-Bishop of Dele takes – took – his laws from Gae. But Gettlesand and the lands along the Alketch border have carried on a long battle with the Empire to the south, and I doubt that the breach will be healed, whatever Alwir’s policies may be.” He glanced up, a bright glint of crystal blue between the shadows of his hood and the muffler that wrapped the lower part of his face, the firelight reddish gold on his long, straight eyelashes. “But as you can see,” he went on, “the plains themselves are all but deserted.”

Rudy selected a long stick and poked at the tiny fire. “How come? I mean, I see all these animals, antelope and bison and jillions of different kinds of birds. You could make a pretty good living in this part of the country.”

“You could,” Ingold agreed mildly. “But it’s very easy to die in the plains. Have you ever seen an ice storm? You get them in the north. Once in the lands around the White Lakes I found the remains of a herd of mammoth, chunks of frozen flesh scattered in head-high snow. The beasts had been literally ripped to shreds by the inferno of the winds. I’ve heard stories that the cold in the center of those storms is such that grazing animals will be frozen solid so swiftly that they do not even fall, but stand, turned to ice and half-buried in snow, with the flowers they were eating frozen in their mouths. And the storms strike without warning, out of a clear sky.”

“That would sure kill the property values,” Rudy assented with a shiver. But something undefined stirred in his memory, something he had read, or had heard read to him … Wild David’s Body Shop in Fontana came back to him, with himself slouched in the erupted mess of split vinyl and filthy padding of David’s old swivel chair, leafing through decayed copies of the Reader’s Digest while a crowd of the local bikers argued profanely about what they wanted him to paint on the tank of somebody’s Harley …

“And if you haven’t seen the effects of an ice storm,” Ingold continued, “at least you have seen the work of the White Raiders.”

An almost physical memory returned to Rudy in a rush – the sweetness of the opalescent mist of the river valleys below Karst, and the sour tang of nausea in his throat. The drift of smoke in the foggy air, the bloody ruin of what had been a human being, the raucous laughter of the carrion crows, and Ingold, like a gray ghost in the pewter light, his robe beaded with dew and a tag of bloody leather in his hands, saying to Janus, “This is the work of the White Raiders …”

Rudy shivered. “Who are the White Raiders?” he asked.

The old man shrugged. “What can I tell you of them?” he replied. “They are the People of the Plains, the kings of the wind. They say that once upon a time their home was only in the far north, in the high meadows along the rim of the ice. But they haunt all the northern plains now and, as we have seen, have begun to invade the river valleys at the heart of the Realm.”

On the edge of the narrow circle of the firelight, the donkey Rudy had named Che Guevara snorted and stamped at some sound in the distant night, his long ears laid back along his head. Distantly, Rudy caught the howling of prairie wolves. “You know,” he said with forced casualness, “I don’t think the whole time we were on the road down from Karst I ever actually saw a White Raider. I knew they were following the train, but I never saw one.”

“Well, they’re most dangerous when you don’t see them.” Ingold smiled. “And you’re wrong, in any case. You did see one. The Icefalcon is a White Raider.”

Of course, Rudy thought, more surprised by the fact that the Raiders didn’t resemble the Huns or the Sioux than he was to learn that the Icefalcon was a foreigner among the dark-haired, blue-eyed people of the Wath. And now that he came to think if it, the Icefalcon wasn’t of Bishop Govannin’s Faith; at least he’d only sniffed in disdain at Gil’s question on the subject. Rudy remembered the farmhouse in the mists again and shuddered.

“That’s the chief reason Alwir sent him on the mission to Alketch,” Ingold continued, setting aside his herbs and rising. “Of anyone, a Raider would have the best chances of surviving the journey.” He picked up his staff, preparing to make his usual brief inspection of their campsite before settling down to guard duty.

“Yeah, but if he’s the enemy, how did he get to be a Guard?” Rudy protested uneasily, and Ingold paused in the act of turning away, a shapeless dark blur against the paler sand of the bank beyond.

“What is an enemy?” His scratchy voice seemed to come disembodied from the surrounding darkness. “A great variety of strange people find their way into the Guards. I’m sure if the Icefalcon wanted you to know, he would tell you.” And though Rudy could not see him move, the wizard seemed to fade from sight.

Rudy shook his head in a kind of amazement. Ingold could be the least visible man he had ever met, seen when he wanted to be seen and otherwise all but invisible. It wasn’t that he was shy, Rudy knew. The wizard observed the world like a hunter from an unseen blind; concealment appeared to be his second nature. Rudy wondered if all wizards were like that.

He huddled, shivering, next to the tiny fire. The cold of the night was so intense that he could feel only a little of the fire’s warmth, even at a distance of twelve inches. Already in the treeless plains, wood was scarce, and they were burning brushwood and buffalo chips. Unlike the more volatile wood fires, the chips gave off a steady, cherry-red glow, and the heart of the fire was like a rippling amber well of heat. In that well, images took shape under his idle attention – the jeweled darkness of Alde’s rooms at the Keep, with the single sphere of gold floating around the flame of the candle as pure and beautiful as a fruit of light or a single note of music, and Minalde’s face, bent over a book, the sudden gleam of a tear on her cheek.

Although he was fairly certain the tear was not for him, but for the fate of the heroine of her book, Rudy still ached to go to her, to be with her and comfort her. At first he had shied from seeking her image in the fire this way, not wanting to spy on her. But his longing to see her, to know that she was all right, had proved too much for him. He wondered if Ingold knew.

For that matter, had Ingold ever sought the image of a woman he loved in the fire?

Sudden wind lashed at the fire, tearing the image from its heart. Like ripped silk in a cyclone, the fire twisted first one way, then another … And Rudy realized that the wind was not from the north.

It came from no direction – thin, cold, twisting. He looked up, light-blinded, at the sky; but by the time his eyes adjusted, he could see only the chaos of darkness. He started to rise, and a voice said quietly behind him, “Stay where you are.”

Somewhere in the night, he saw the flutter of trailing muffler ends and the glint of eyes. Wind stirred at the fire once more, and the renewed light flashed in the burro’s glassy green stare and picked out the shape of Ingold’s cloak. Turning his eyes skyward again, Rudy saw them, black against the black of the churning sky, a sinuous ripple of movement and the glint of claws and wet, shining backs. The Dark Ones rode like a cloud, north against the wind.

Rudy realized his hand had gone to his sword hilt and slowly released it as they passed on by. His heart was hammering irregularly, his flesh cold. “We were lucky,” he whispered.

“Really, Rudy.” Ingold stepped from the darkness to join him. “Luck had nothing to do with it.”

“You mean you made us invisible?”

“Oh, not invisible.” The wizard settled down by the fire and set his staff within easy reach of his hand. “Merely persistently unnoticed.”

“Hunh?”

Ingold shrugged. “Surely you’ve had the experience of not noticing someone? Perhaps you turned your head, or were momentarily distracted by something else, or dropped your keys, or sneezed. It is very easy to arrange for that to happen.”

“To all of them at once?” There was something a little awesome in such a collective lapse of vigilance.

Ingold smiled. “Of course.”

Rudy shivered. “You know, those are the first Dark Ones we’ve seen on the plains?”

“Understandably.” The wizard fished in his many pockets and located the yellowed crystal in which he was wont to seek the images of things far away. “I have reason to believe those Dark Ones have followed us since we left the mountains, or at least have been patrolling the road across the plains.”

“You mean, looking for us?”

“I don’t know.” The wizard glanced at him across the dim glow of the fire. “Because if that were so, it would mean that they know that we have lost contact with the wizards at Quo.”

“But how could they?”

Ingold shrugged. “How do they know anything?” he asked. “How do they perceive? What is the nature of their knowledge? They are utterly alien intelligences, Rudy, strangers to the very pattern of human thought.”

Rudy was silent for a moment. Then he said, “But I’m thinking that the easiest way for them to know we’ve lost contact with Quo is if they know what happened to the wizards there.” He looked hesitantly across the fire. “You understand?”

“I understand,” the old man agreed, “and I would say so, too, but for one thing. I do not know what has befallen Quo, nor how the Dark Ones have contrived to hold the wizards under siege there. But if Lohiro were dead, I would know it. I would feel it.”

“Then what do you think has happened?” Rudy insisted.

But to that Ingold had no answer.

Neither had those they asked, the few straggling bands of refugees that they met upon the road, fleeing east through the searing iron wind. For days at a time the pilgrims would travel absolutely alone through a universe of brown, rippling grass and shallow sheets of water – water pocked like hammered silver by rains, or more often frozen in bleak and shining expanses of gray ice. But twice in those first few weeks, Ingold and Rudy encountered the decimated remains of clans or villages, fleeing cold and fear and darkness. The stories those men and women told were always the same: of small things that crawled down cold chimneys, or slipped between the window bars; of huge things that ripped doors from their hinges, or blasted down stone walls with the wrath of all the devils of the night; and of chill, directionless wind and the scatter of stripped bones upon the ground.

“And wizards?” Ingold asked of those circling the low glow of the dim campfire light.

“Wizards.” A fat, heavy-muscled woman with a face like a leathery potato spat scornfully into the fire. “Lot of good their wizardry did them or any of us. I talked to a student out of Quo. They’re all gone, hidden, locked up in a ring of spells, and they’ve left us to fend for ourselves. We won’t see them till the Dark have gone.”

“Indeed?” Ingold said, wrapping together and stowing away his packets of medicines. He had returned the band’s hospitality within the makeshift circle of guards by healing the wounds either incurred in battle against the Dark or the White Raiders, or the effects of exhaustion and exposure. “When was this?”

She shrugged. “Months gone,” she said. “He spent a night with us. We buried his bones and my husband’s in the morning. Never knew his name.”

“Fled, I say,” the big patriarch of the clan rumbled. In the firelight, his greenish eyes, so common in Gettlesand, regarded them askance, but he did not ask how they came to be traveling alone and westward in these bitter times. “Fled south, to the jungles and the Emperor of Alketch.”

Ingold paused in surprise. “Where did you hear this?”

The big man shook his head. “Stands to reason,” he said. Far out over the plains rose the thin silvery chorus of wolves crying the moon. The camp guards shifted, calculating their distance; nearby an ox lowed in fear and jingled its tether chain. “There are no Dark in the Alketch, they say. But I’d sooner die free than live there.”

“What do you mean, there are no Dark in the Alketch?” Rudy asked, startled.

“So they say,” the patriarch told him. “But to my mind, that’s just the kind of thing the Emperor would put around to get slaves cheap.”

The second band they met, many days later, was smaller, two men and a couple of skinny towheaded kids, all that was left of a village of silver miners from the south. The children watched them from wary eyes through tangles of fair hair and stole a hatchet and packet of cornmeal when Rudy’s back was turned, but to Ingold’s question of wizards, the older of them only said, “Dead, I reckon.”

“Why do you say that?” Ingold asked gently.

The boy looked at him with bleak scorn. “Ain’t everyone?”

“In a way it isn’t surprising,” Ingold said later as he and Rudy trudged on westward through that dry, silken sea of hissing grass. In the buffalo wallows and the ditches beside the road, last night’s snow drifted in cold, gritty mounds or blew like sand over the pavement. “Lohiro called all of the ranked wizards to him, to gather at Quo. I don’t wonder that nothing has been heard of them.”

Rudy was silent for a time, remembering the long road down from Karst and Ingold in darkness before the sounding doors of the belabored Keep. “You mean,” he said quietly, “that no one else has any kind of magic help at all?”

“Well – not necessarily.” The old man scanned the skyline for a moment; then his eyes returned to Rudy’s. “There are those who never went to Quo at all, village goodywives, or self-taught spellweavers, or the closet-mages who never developed their powers, as well as the small-time fortunetellers whose art and ambition were insufficient to take them through the mazes to Quo. And below them there is a third echelon of wizardry, people born with a single talent – firebringers, finders, goodwords; children who can light dry tinder just by looking at it, or who can find things that are lost; women who say, ‘Bless you,’ and it seems to stick; healers who pretend their power comes from their learning, rather than from the palms of their hands; people who generally suppress such powers in childhood and deny them in the confessional; and people whose powers are so slight as to deny them the dubious prestige of wizardry, who seek to avoid the social stigma of being mageborn. These are the only wielders of magic left to defend against the Dark.”

“And you,” Rudy said.

“And me,” the old man agreed.

As day followed day and the silver westward road dwindled out of existence under a black-clouded sky, Ingold spoke more of wizardry. He told Rudy of its long conflict with the Church, of its ancient strongholds, and of the great mages of past eras, Forn and Kedmesh and Pnak, who ran with the wild horse herds of the northern plains. Sometimes Ingold would point out animal signs, or identify the few creatures hardy enough to be abroad in the savage cold – huge, shaggy-coated bison, gelbu like short-necked, humpless camels, tabby-striped wild horses, or the many birds of the endless grasslands. He spoke of their ways and habits, not as a hunter would see them, but as the beasts saw themselves, with their narrow intelligence and their cautious world wisdom. In time Rudy found himself understanding even some of Che the burro’s thought processes and motivations, such as they were, though it didn’t make the balky and chicken-hearted animal any easier to live with. Now and then the old man would ask about something he had mentioned earlier. After the first few times Rudy was forced to admit he hadn’t been paying attention, he listened more closely. And as he listened, it made more sense, as with any branch of knowledge as more is learned of it.

Often in the course of that journey, Rudy wished he hadn’t been so successful in avoiding the efforts of a well-meaning school system to educate him. Most of what he learned seemed to him to be not magic at all, only a prerequisite course in knowledge he should have had but didn’t: how plants grow, and why; the shape of the land and the sky; the motions of the air, and why wind blows as it does; how to meditate, to still the restlessness of the mind and focus it on a star, or a flame, or a single wisp of grass twisting in the wind; how to listen; and how to see the subtle differences in the silence and emptiness of the plains, the variations in the shapes of pebbles, the subtle shifts of wind and color and the pitch of the ground. Besides being a wizard, Rudy figured, Ingold must be at least an Eagle Scout, for he understood survival, how to set up a camp unseen, how to find water in the dry places, and how to scrounge food from this most barren and unyielding of countrysides.

As they walked, Ingold would occasionally stop to pick a plant from the roadside or point one out where it grew in the arroyos that laced the land as they moved south. After he had pointed out such a plant and described its growth and uses if any, Rudy found he had damn well better be able to repeat back everything about that plant. As a sometime artist, he had learned to observe; and after studying eight or ten different plants, he found he knew what to look for when he came across new ones. After a time it got to be a game, and he would seek them out for himself, asking Ingold about the unfamiliar ones and coming to the sudden enlightenment that any biology major could have introduced to him years ago – namely that there are similarities of structure and function in different groups of living things. The orderliness of it amazed and delighted him, as if he had walked for twenty-five years in a world of black and white and, turning a corner, had discovered color.

“Wizardry is knowledge,” Ingold said one afternoon as they sat on the white boulders that lined the bottom of an arroyo where they had taken shelter from the wind. The land was growing higher and less grassy, the waving fields of long brown grasses giving way to short bunchgrass and huge, scraggy-barked sagebrush. Dry washes cut the land, scattering it with stone and gravel. At the bottom of this one, a thin trickle of water ran, edged with ice even at high noon. It burned Rudy’s fingers through his gloves as he filled the drinking bottles. Ingold sat on the rocks behind him, idly drawing the dry, yellowish blossoms of a dead stalk of kneestem through his fingers as he scanned, without seeming to, the banks of the gully against the pallid sky. “Even the most talented adept is useless without knowledge, without the awareness of every separate facet of the world within which he must work.”

“Yeah,” Rudy said, sitting back and stoppering the flask with stiff, clumsy fingers. “But a lot of what you’ve been teaching me sometimes seems kind of useless. Like that kneestem you’ve got – I mean, it doesn’t have anything to do with magic. It’s just a weed. You said yourself it’s worthless.”

“It is worthless to us and to animals, having no value either as medicine or as food,” Ingold agreed, turning the dry wisp in his mittened fingers. “But we ourselves are useless to other forms of life – except, I might point out, as sustenance to the Dark Ones. Kneestem, like you and me, exists for its own sake, and we must take that into account in all our dealings with the world that we hold in common with it.”

“I see your point,” Rudy said, after a moment’s consideration of how much of what he loved and valued was, objectively, pretty useless. “But I didn’t know jack about anything when I started magic. I called fire because I had to.”

“No,” the wizard contradicted. “You called fire because you knew it could be done.”

“But I didn’t know that.”

“Then why did you try? I think you knew in your heart that you could do it. I think you might even have done it as a child.”

Rudy was silent for some time, sitting on the bleached bones of the rock. The wind moaned faintly along the banks above them, and Che flicked his long ears at the sound. There was no wind in the gullies. It was so still he could hear the water clucking softly at the ice. “I don’t know,” he said finally, his voice small and a little frightened. “I dreamed about it, I think. I used to dream about a lot of stuff like that when I was a real little kid, like three or four years old, I remember dreaming – I think it was a dream – I picked up a dry branch in our back yard and, holding it in my hand, I knew I could make it flower. And I did. These white flowers budded out all over it, just from my holding it, just from my knowing they would. Then I ran and told my mother about it, and she hit me upside the head and told me not to imagine stuff.” The memory came back to him now, as clear as vision, but distant, as if it had happened to someone else. There was no sorrow in his voice, no anger, only wonderment at the memory itself.

Ingold shook his head. “What a thing to tell a child.”

Rudy shrugged it away. “But I was always interested in how stuff was put together. Like cars – or anyway, I think that’s why I was good with cars. How they work, and the sound and feel of whether they’re right or wrong. The human body’s the same way, I guess. And I think that’s why I drew. Just to know what it was and how it all fits.”

The wizard sighed and laid the dead plant stem among the rocks. “Perhaps it’s just as well,” he said finally. “You could never have gotten the proper teaching, you know. And there are few more dangerous things in the world than an untaught mage.” New winds threaded down the gully. Ingold stood up, shivering, and pulled his hood over his face once more, wrapping his long muffler over it so that all that showed of his face was the end of his nose and the deep-set glitter of bright azure eyes. Rudy got up also, hung the water bottles over the various projections of the pack-saddle, and led Che up the narrow trail that had taken them down into the draw. Ingold moved nimbly ahead of him.

“Ingold?”

They scrambled up the last few feet to level ground and made their way back toward the road. A covey of prairie hens went skittering away almost under their feet. Che flung up his head in panic. The skies had darkened perceptibly, and in the distance Rudy could see the rain sheeting down.

“Why is an untaught mage so dangerous?”

The wizard glanced back at him. “A mage will have magic,” he said quietly. “It’s like love, Rudy. You need it and you will find it. You will be driven to find it. And if you can’t find good love, you will have bad, or what passes in some circles for love. And it can hurt you and destroy everyone you touch. That is why there is a school at Quo,” he went on, “and a Council.

“The wizardry at Quo is the mainstream, the centerpoint of teaching. Since Forn the Old retired there and began to gather all the lore of wizardry in his black tower by the sea, the Archmage and the Council of Quo have been the teachers of all those who were capable of understanding what was taught. Its principles are the principles handed down from the old wizardry, the legacy of the empires that existed before the first coming of the Dark, three thousand years ago. They are older than any kingdom of the earth, older than the Church.”

“Is that why the Church has it in for us?”

Wind had begun to blow down rain upon them, mixed with hard, tiny spits of hail. Rudy pulled up his hood resignedly. He had long since gotten used to the idea that if it rained, he got wet. There was no shelter in the open plains.

“The Church finds us unbiddable,” Ingold said mildly. “They talk of the power as a manifestation of the illusions of the Devil, but it all comes down to the fact that we have the power to change the universe materially and we owe neither them nor their God allegiance. As you’ve already guessed, we are excommunicates, ranking with heretics, parricides, and doctors who poison wells to drum up business for themselves. If the Church wanted to press the point, they could give Alwir considerable trouble for employing Bektis or even associating with me. The Church will make no marriage when one of the parties is mage-born; and when we die, we are buried like criminals in unhallowed ground, if we aren’t simply burned like murrained beasts. Whatever happens, Rudy, remember that no law protects wizards.”

The darkness of the vaults beneath the palace at Karst came back to Rudy’s mind – the narrow doorless cell and the Rune of the Chain, spelled to hold Ingold there until he starved. No wonder, he thought, those with only a single power choose to lie about it. The surprising thing is that anyone becomes a wizard at all.

Rain drummed down around them, black and freezing, from a dark sky. It pooled in the ditches beside the road, sheeted the low ground, and ran in rivulets down Rudy’s cloak, slowly soaking him through. He tried to remember the last time he’d seen a clear sky and wondered wretchedly if he ever would see one again.

Ingold was still speaking, more to himself than to his companion. “This is why the bonds between us are so strong. We are the only ones who truly understand each other, as Lohiro and I know one another’s mind. It’s why he and I traveled together, bound as allies against all the world, why he was like a son to me, and why he picked me to be his father. We are all we have, Rudy – wizards, and those very few people who, not mageborn themselves, understand. Quo is more than the center of wizardry on earth; it is our heart-home. It is all we have.”

The cloudburst was slackening. Light and mists rolled in the lowering air, but no sign of sun or sky. It seemed as if all the world were blanketed in cloud and the sun would never break through again.

Rudy asked, “Do wizards – uh – marry among themselves? Or could a wizard, like, marry an ordinary person?”

Ingold shook his head. “Not legally. There is no legal marriage with excommunicates such as we, at least not anymore, though matters used to be different in times past.” He glanced sharply sideways at him, and Rudy had the uncomfortable feeling, as he often did with Ingold, that his mind was being read. “There used to be a saying, ‘A wizard’s wife is a widow.’ We are wanderers, Rudy. We make that choice in accepting the power, in admitting to ourselves what we are. There are those who are not mageborn who understand us, but mostly they also understand that we cannot be like them. It’s a rare person, woman or man, who can accept a long-term relationship on that basis. In a sense we are born damned, though not in the way the Church means it.”

“Do wizards love?”

A look of pain crossed behind the blue eyes, like a quick shiver in the wake of a draft. “God help us, yes.”

All of this strange miscellany of knowledge and information only served as a background to quiet Rudy’s mind and help him to focus and understand. The step between understanding the world and understanding magic was a very small one.

One night Ingold scratched the runes in the dust by their tiny campfire, and Rudy, who had guessed by this time that the wizard did not repeat himself, spent the evening studying their shape and sequence in the dim, ruddy light. After that he periodically drew them out for himself while he sat his guard watches, laboriously memorizing shapes, names, and attributes – the constellations of forces that centered on each separate symbol. Ingold sometimes talked about them as the two men ate supper or settled down for the night, explaining how they might be used for meditation or divination, telling where they came from, who had first drawn them, and why. Slowly their pattern came to make sense to Rudy, until he saw how a single rune, properly made with the appropriate words and thoughts, could draw its attributes to itself and surround itself with them. This was how Yad would protect and turn aside the gaze of a seeker from that on which it was drawn, how Traw would make invisible things visible, and how Pern would focus the thoughts of those who looked upon it for rationality, justice, and law.

Ingold never drew them all out for him again.

He taught Rudy other things as the plains country gave way entirely to the fringes of the cold sagebrush deserts. He showed simple tricks of illusion that could be woven around a wizard to make other people see things they did not really see. A mage could spot the illusion, but most people, who operated on surface impressions, could easily be led to think that they saw a person of different appearance, or a tree, or an animal, or a flaming whirlwind – or simply nothing there at all. It was less like magic, Rudy thought, than it was like acting, or storytelling, or drawing, but done differently. Rudy could already call fire and mold the white witchlight into a ball to illuminate without heat, like St. Elmo’s fire on the end of his staff. He had learned to use his ability better to see in darkness and, by experiment, to draw visible things in the air with his fingers. As they came into the true desert and water grew scarcer, Ingold showed him how to make a water compass by witching the twigs of a certain plant and how to tell by magic if a plant were poisonous.

One night they spoke of power, of the central key of each person or being or living thing – and Ingold’s definition of living things was very different from Rudy’s. He spoke of the focus of all being, the innermost truth that Plato had called the essence; the understanding of that was the key to the Great Magic, and the ability to see it was the mark of a mage. Watching those bright crystal eyes across the fire, Rudy saw reflected in them the vision of his own soul, lying, like the silver runes on the Keep doors, beneath the surface of the familiar body. He saw with calm and pitiless detachment his own feelings about himself, the interlocking of vanity and love and yearning and laziness, a kind of bright, glittering perpetual-motion machine of affection, cowardice, and sloth that drove his restless soul. He saw it with Ingold’s pure, unforbearing gaze, seeing faults and virtues alike, and was neither surprised nor ashamed. It only existed, being what it was. And in that timeless and bodiless trance, he became aware of that other essence beside him, like a lightning-riddled rock, lambent with power, fired within by a magic that permeated from its visible core. Ingold, he thought, startled and shocked, for the momentary vision of those scarred depths of love and grief and loneliness dwarfed his own bright, shallow emotions to insignificance. He felt an overwhelming awe of the wizard again, as he had before the ringing doors of the assaulted Keep and as he had one night in the valleys of the river, when Ingold had asked him why he wanted to be a mage. It was an awe that Rudy usually kept hidden, half-forgotten in the face of that shabby little old man with his scarred hands and mild, sarcastic humor. But the awe never fully left him; it increased as he came to understand this scruffy old pilgrim. He would now no longer question how Ingold knew whether Lohiro of Quo were alive or dead.

“Magic isn’t like I thought it would be,” Rudy said much later that same night as he gathered his blankets about him, while Ingold settled down by the fire to take first shift at guard. “I mean, I used to think it was like – oh, people turning themselves into wolves, or slaying dragons, or blasting walls down, or flying through the air, or walking on water – stuff like that. But it’s not.”

“But it is, really,” Ingold said easily, prodding at the ashes of their tiny fire. “You yourself know that one does not turn oneself into a wolf – for to transpose your personality into the heart and brain of a wolf, aside from being very dangerous in terms of the structure of the universe, might prove too great a temptation to you.”

Distantly, the wolves answered his words, their faint howling riding down the night wind. In the darkness of their arroyo camp, Rudy caught the bright, hard glitter of Ingold’s eyes and heard the dreamy edge to his voice.

“Wolves love what they are, Rudy. To be strong – to kill – to live with the wind and the pack – it would call to the wolf in your own soul. There would always be the danger, you see, that you would not want to come back. And as for slaying dragons,” he went on in a milder tone, “well, dragons are really rather timid creatures, tricky and dangerous, but only likely to attack humans if driven by hunger.”

“You mean – there are dragons? Real live dragons?”

The wizard looked startled at the question. “Oh, yes, I have actually even slain a dragon. Rather, I acted as decoy and Lohiro did the sword work. As for the rest of it – blasting down walls and walking on water …” He smiled. “Need has simply not arisen.”

“You mean,” Rudy said uneasily, “that – you could? If you had to?”

“Walk on water? I could probably find a boat.”

“But if there wasn’t a boat?” Rudy pursued.

Ingold shrugged. “I’m quite a good swimmer.”

Rudy was silent for a time, his head pillowed on his hands, staring up into the black and featureless sky, hearing the belling of the wolves on their hunting trail, sweet with distance and incredibly lonely, and remembering the men he had known who had chosen to live as human wolves on a hunting trail of steel and gasoline. To live with the wind and the pack … That he understood. That mind he knew.

Another thought came to him. “Ingold? When you said that the Dark Ones are – ‘alien intelligences’ – you meant that humans can’t understand their essence, didn’t you? And because of that, we can’t comprehend the source of their magic?”

“Exactly.”

“But if – if you took on the being of the Dark, if you took the form of a Dark One, then wouldn’t you understand them? Wouldn’t you know then what they are and how they think?”

Ingold was silent for such a long time that Rudy began to fear he had offended the old man. But the wizard only stared into the fire, drawing the stem of a dried stalk of grass through his restless fingers, the flame repeated a thousandfold in his eyes. When he spoke, his soft, scratchy voice was barely audible over the keening of the winds. “I could do that,” he said. “In fact, I have thought of it many times.” He glanced over at Rudy. Gleaming from the wizard’s eyes, Rudy could see the overwhelming temptation to knowledge, the curiosity that amounted in the mageborn to an almost unslakable lust. “But I won’t. Ever. The risk would be too great.” He dropped the grass stem he held into the fire and watched it idly as it curled and blackened in the veils of burning gold like a corpse upon a pyre. “For you see, Rudy – I might like being a Dark One.”

FOUR
_____________________

“I NEVER THOUGHT IT would come to this so soon.” Gil lobbed a hunk of snow down at the trampled muck of the valley road below.

Seya set down her bow and quiver, shook the powdered snow from her black cloak, and gave a perfunctory glance at the dark pine woods that rose behind the little watchpost. “Come to what?” she asked.

Gil got to her feet, cramped from her long watch in the icy afternoon. “Come to guarding the road against our own people.”

Seya said nothing.

“I’ve been watching the smoke of their campfires,” Gil went on casually, gathering up her own weapons, bow and sword and spear. “I figure they camped at the ruined watchtowers where the road comes into the Vale, the ones Janus called the Tall Gates. There were several thousand when they came up the road yesterday. By the fires, I don’t think there’s near that many today. The Dark must have come in the night.” She turned, prickled by the older Guard’s silence. “You know, we didn’t have to drive them on like beggars.”

Seya looked uncomfortable. She hadn’t cared for it, either. The newcomers had been nearly frozen, in rags and starving, when they’d trudged up the valley road. It hadn’t taken much of a show of force to send them on their way. But she only said, “When you put on the emblem of the Guards, Gil-Shalos, you gave up the right to have an opinion. We serve the King of Gae – in this case, Prince Altir. Or the Queen.”

Gil folded her arms, trying vainly to warm her hands under her dark, shabby cloak. In the distance she could still see the thin plumes of bluish woodsmoke rising in the clear, freezing air. It wasn’t the Queen who gave the orders, she thought. It was Alwir. But it might as well have been her Majesty, for all the difference it made.

She thought of the Queen, a shy, dark-haired girl standing in her brother’s elegant shadow. She saw the two now as they had been yesterday, standing in the dark gateway of the Keep with their guards ranged around them, the bullion on their embroidered robes flashing palely in the wan sunlight. We have neither food nor space to take you in, Alwir had said to the tall, ragged monk who had led the refugees up the Pass and who had stood at their head with his stained red robes as brown as old blood against the snow. What food we have will barely take us ’til spring.

There had been a stirring among Alwir’s guards and a leathery rattle, like a dragon’s scales, of fingered scabbards. The refugees had turned away, retracing their plowed tracks through the crusted snow.

“Look.” Seya’s voice broke Gil from her reverie, and she turned her head quickly, following the older Guard’s pointing finger. A single rider had appeared on the road, his tall, bony bay horse picking carefully through the slippery mess of ice-scummed potholes that was all that remained of the way. Even without the ivory braids that lay on the man’s dark shoulders, Gil would have recognized the tall, thin body and the easy way he sat a horse. The colorless eyes sought the women; a gloved hand was lifted in hail and farewell.

Gil raised her hand in answer, not certain whether to laugh or feel sadness. It was typical of the Icefalcon that he would set forth on a journey from which he might never return with no more than a wave at his closest friends. It would be a long journey and a slow one – he had only the single horse. Stock was precious in the Keep of Dare.

As the dark woods of the Pass swallowed him again, she glanced worriedly at the blur of campfire smoke veiling the black trees and said, “You think he’ll have trouble passing their camp?”

Seya raised one eyebrow. “Him?”

Given the Icefalcon’s coldblooded ferocity, Gil had to admit it wasn’t too likely.

Seya went on. “It’s more probable that Janus and the foragers will have trouble. When I left, Alwir and Govannin were still going at it hammer and tongs about how big a guard should go with the wagons and how many of them should be mounted. Alwir kept saying we can’t afford to strip the Keep of any more manpower than we can help – and he has a point, considering the attack the Dark Ones made on us last week – and Govannin’s on the verge of apoplexy because most of the wagons they’re sending with the foragers are hers.”

“I agree with Govannin,” Gil said. She set aside the weapons of guarding – the bow and spear – for Seya’s use and shook the snow from the blanket. “The refugees didn’t look as if they were in any shape to take on even a small band of armed men; but once Janus hits the river valleys, he may have to contend with the White Raiders. There’s supposed to be a band of them there.”

Seya scrambled down the rocks and settled herself into the one niche under the overhanging boulders that provided both a view of the road and shelter from the biting winds. Four hours of guard duty had given Gil ample time to scout it out. “It’s anybody’s guess what’s in the river valleys now,” she said quietly. “They’ll have enough problems with brigands and wolves and the Dark Ones.”

Gil resettled her sword belt around her waist. “Where are they heading, do you know?”

Seya shook her head. “Anywhere there was stored food. Deserted towns, well-known farms – anywhere they can find stored corn or straying stock.” She laughed suddenly, wrinkles stitching her lined face like the folds in wet silk. “That’s the other thing they’ve been warring about all morning. Tomec Tirkenson and his people finally got on their way over Sarda Pass for Gettlesand.”

“I knew they were planning on leaving as soon as the snows let up.” Gil shrugged into her damp cloak, drawing its dark, heavy, smoke-smelling folds about her. “Alwir should be pleased; it makes for fewer mouths to feed.”

“And fewer defenders.” Seya pulled the spare blanket over her feet. “But what really stuck in Govannin’s craw was that Tirkenson took all his own cattle with him. She forbade him to take them, since the people of the Keep had greater need; she threatened to excommunicate him if he did. He said she’d excommunicated him ten years ago, he was walking around damned anyway, the cattle were his, he’d bought them in Gae, and he’d break the neck of anyone who tried to stop him from taking them back to Gettlesand with him. He had all his cowpunchers lined up behind him, so there wasn’t much her Grace could say, and Alwir wasn’t about to start a fight with the only landchief still loyal to the Realm. When I left, the Bishop was burning candles in the pious hope that he fries in Hell.”

Gil laughed. She liked the landchief of Gettlesand. But if he had left, taking not only his cattle but his horses, it was no wonder Govannin was anxious about those that remained. Starved as the refugees encamped in the Pass were, they might try to kill the horses simply for meat.

The wind veered around the shoulder of the mountain, blowing a light skiff of snow down upon them from the rocks above. The cloud-cover lay high that day, just skimming the tips of the white-blanketed peaks; when it shifted, Gil thought she could see the cold flash of the glaciers. Growing or retreating? she wondered idly. Growing, I bet, if they’ve had many winters as cold and overcast as this one. Just what we need to add to our problems. A goddam ice age!

She looked back down the Pass at the churned, muddy slop of the frozen road, the spatchcocked landscape of sterile black and sterile white, and the gloom of the woods that even deer had deserted. In the distance, the camp smoke made a little white streak, like a finger smudge in the murky air. “Where were they from, do you know?” she asked Seya.

The Guard shrugged. “Penambra, maybe. The monk who talked to Alwir had a deep-south accent. Probably some of them had been wandering around in the valleys for weeks.”

Maybe Alwir was right, Gil thought as she climbed the muddy path and started back through the woods toward the Keep. The vast quantities of corn, wheat, and salt meat stored in the top two levels of the Keep, or secreted in the mazes of cells in Church territory, looked to be a lot, until one realized that they would have to last some eight thousand souls through the winter. It was only early October. Whatever forage Janus could find in the valleys below was an unknowable quantity. Perhaps it was necessary that she and the other Guards had been a party to denying food and shelter to emaciated children and to leaving them for the Dark. It was the other side of the warrior’s coin. The clean joys of warfare were part of a larger picture, and what to her was a way of life was to others above her simply an instrument of policy.

But, she reflected, she was hardly alone in that. In her light, tuneless voice she began singing “A Policeman’s Lot Is Not a Happy One,” and the Gilbert and Sullivan melody floated on the drift of an alien breeze through the dark, stony woods of another universe.

The road circled a stand of pines, and the smells of the Keep reached her from afar, the stinging woodsmoke, as women rendered used fat and ash into soap, and the warm reek of cattle. Children’s laughter mingled with the confused bleating of sheep and goats, with the ringing of an ax in the woods, and with the sound of a deep bass voice lifted, like Gil’s, in song. Half-frozen mud squished under her boots as she picked her way around that last turning of the path. And there it lay before her, its sleek walls sheened by the pallor of the dull sky.

It wasn’t as big, maybe, as the monster high-rises Gil was familiar with as a child of the twentieth century. But the Keep was well over half a mile in length, hundreds of feet in breadth, and close to a hundred feet in height. Enormous doors were dwarfed by the monolith in which they were set. Its teeming inhabitants swarmed the broad steps and trampled snow at its base. Black and enigmatic, the Keep of Dare guarded its secrets.

What secrets? Gil wondered. Who built it, and how? She was aware that it lay far beyond the technology of the present age, with its constant soft currents of air and dark, ever-flowing streams of water. Was it raised by magic or only by superb engineering?

And her infinitely distractible scholar’s mind scouted the thought: Who would know?

Eldor, maybe. In a long-ago dream she had overheard the dead King speak of the memories he had inherited from the House of Dare, whose founder, Dare of Renweth, had raised those midnight walls. But Eldor had perished in the destruction of Gae. His son, Altir? The memories had been passed to him, to make him the target for the malice of the Dark. But he was an infant, too young to speak. Lohiro? Maybe. But the archmage was hidden at Quo, and it would be weeks before he came to the Keep, if he ever did.

Gil considered. Ingold had said that records did not go back to the time of the building of the Keep. The chaos of the first incursion of the Dark into the realms of humankind had been followed by centuries of ignorance, social dislocation, famine, and violence. But how far back did they go? And did they carry in them some memory of an oral tradition, like Merlin and his dancing giants who reared Stonehenge? What was in the wagonloads of Church records that Bishop Govannin had risked civil war with Alwir for on the road down from Gae?

A flicker of movement caught her eye and drove that thought from her mind. Someone was slipping through the trees to her right – someone who was furtive without being particularly skillful about it. Gil got a brief glimpse of a peasant’s fluttering rainbow-colored skirts, all but hidden in the dark swirl of a cloak. She wondered if it was any of her business.

The shadow flitted from tree to tree, working through the woods above the road. Probably headed for the refugee camp, Gil guessed. That’s the only thing in that direction. At least somebody’s showing a little compassion, for all the good it’s likely to do.

In that case, it was her business. There was barely time to make it there and back before darkness fell. Gil paused in the road and, for the benefit of the fugitive, snapped her fingers and cursed as if she had forgotten something, then turned and hastened back. Once out of sight of the watcher’s probable course, she doubled back through the rocks at the road’s edge and scrambled her way to higher ground. She slipped between two shaggy-barked fir trees to wait, her dark cloak blending with the gloom of the shadowy afternoon, the white quatrefoil emblem of the Guards on her shoulder like a patch of snow on wet-darkened wood. In time she saw that cautious figure emerge from the trees, hurrying along the path above the road, keeping a wary eye on the backtrail, and huddling for warmth in the folds of a black fur cloak. The hood had fallen back. A great jeweled clasp glittered like stars in the raven knots of hair.

It was the cloak Gil recognized. Only one woman in the Keep had a cloak like that.

“My lady!” she called out, and Minalde stopped, eyes startled and wide. Gil stepped from between the trees.

“Please go on back,” Alde said hastily, brushing the stray ends of her hair away from her face. “I’m not going far, and …”

“You’ll never make it there and back by dark,” Gil said bluntly.

“I— I’m not going to the refugee camp.” The younger girl drew herself up, standing on her dignity. Her expression reminded Gil of her own younger sister when she lied.

“And you shouldn’t be going there alone,” Gil went on, as if she hadn’t heard.

Alde would never make the big leagues as a liar. “But I have to,” she protested. “Please don’t stop me. There’s plenty of time …”

“They’re camped outside the Vale, down at the Tall Gates,” Gil stated unequivocally. “It will be dark in a little over two hours. And besides …” She took a step toward Alde, and the girl fell back, like a deer on the edge of flight. Gil stopped herself and spoke more softly. “And besides,” she continued gently, “if they learned who you were, you might never make it back at all.”

“They won’t know,” Alde insisted, still keeping her distance. “I’ll be all right.”

Gil sighed. “You can’t know that.” She took another step, and Alde retreated warily.

Rudy had said once that Minalde’s crazy courage was equaled only by her stubbornness. Gil saw now what he meant. “At least don’t go alone,” she said.

Alde flushed a little and began contritely, “You don’t have to …”

“Christ knows, somebody should!” Gil turned on her heel and started back toward the entrance to the Vale, cutting through the snowy woods. “This way’s quicker, and we can circle to avoid being seen from the watchpost on the road.” Alde followed in her wake without a word.

It took the girls a little over an hour to reach the camp. As Gil had surmised, the newcomers had taken over the Tall Gates, ancient watchtowers that in former times had guarded the principality around the Keep from the smaller, less organized realms of the valleys below. As the Realm had spread, the towers had ceased to be a frontier and had been allowed to fall into ruin. As ruins they remained, vine-grown cliffs of mortared stone dominating the narrow neck of the muddy road, strongholds only of bird and beast.

The girls were met on the road by a thin, gray man – who had once been very fat indeed, to judge by the sacklike wrinkles of his deflated chins – carrying a spear and wearing over a scarecrow assortment of rags a soiled cloak of gold-frogged velvet. Alde gave their names as Alde and Gil-Shalos, from the Keep of Dare, and asked to speak with his lord.

Ankle-deep muck pulled at their feet as they crossed the square before the northern watchtower. The place smelled like a privy, wreathed in a perpetual haze of woodsmoke. The pitiful flotsam of flight littered the ground. Meager bundles of possessions, stray cook pots, and little heaps of firewood were scattered over the dirty snow. Men and women sat huddled miserably around their fires or moved among them slowly. The place seemed very quiet, except for the weak, persistent crying of a child. Gil felt ashamed of her cloak, her strength, and the marginal ration of food she’d wolfed down at noon. Beside her, Alde looked very white.

Their escort halted before a brush shelter. In the shadows at the back of it, Gil thought she could discern a small, stiff figure, lying completely covered by a ragged quilt; a man sat on a bed of cut pine boughs near the open end of the shelter, quietly holding the hands of two boys who with tear-blotched faces slept huddled at his side. He looked up inquiringly as the shadows of Gil and Minalde fell across the light.

“M’lord?”

The man got slowly to his feet, careful not to wake the boys, and limped from the shelter. Gil recognized him at once as the monk who had spoken for the refugees when Alwir had turned them away at the gates of the Keep. “Yes, Trago?” Dark eyes sunk into leathery hollows moved past him to Gil and Alde, then rested for a moment on Alde’s face. “Yes,” he said quietly.

“You may go, Trago. Get someone to stay with the boys, if you would.”

Trago saluted and moved away through the camp.

The man turned back to them, and Gil noticed how waxy his skin looked under the black tangle of unkempt beard. “I am Maia of Thran,” he introduced himself in that same quiet voice. “Bishop of Penambra.” Alde started to speak, startled, and he smiled suddenly, his teeth very white in his beard. “I believe my predecessor assisted at your wedding, my lady,” he said. Color flooded into Alde’s cheeks that no cold could account for. He continued gently. “I was captain of his Guards.” He inclined his head to her, a sign of reverence to her rank. There was no irony in his voice as he said, “Welcome to what is left of the city of Penambra.”

“I’m sorry,” Alde said quietly. “Please don’t think I came – idly, or – or—”

“I do not,” he replied reassuringly. “But I assume that, as you did come incognito and without retinue, your visit is less than official.”

Only a fool could have watched the interplay between Alwir and his compliant sister at the Keep gates yesterday and remained ignorant of how the land lay, Gil thought; and this tall, gaunt scarecrow in his ecclesiastical rags did not look like a fool. It was within a few percentage points of certainty that he knew that Alde had come here without the Chancellor’s approval or knowledge.

Alde raised her eyes to meet his. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “But I couldn’t not come.”

“I understand,” Maia said, “and I thank you for your compassion.” He glanced around them at the camp. Men in the muddy rags of uniforms were making arrows by the warmth of smoky fires; women were tending children as best they could. There was the ripe smell of carrion cooking, the bubbling of thin soups, and the grating, persistent wailing of a child. “Still and all, I don’t advise you to come again. As legal ruler, I can still hold most of us from turning bandit. But by your next visit I may be dead or ousted. Tomorrow you may find yourself dealing with anyone. The Dark have taken a very heavy toll.”

Alde’s voice was timid. “Is Penambra truly destroyed, then?”

“Truly,” the Bishop said quietly. “Close to nine thousand of us left the city with wagonloads of goods, food, and all that we could carry away. You know Penambra – a city of bridges, built on a hundred islets in the bay. Rains flooded the town and trapped us in the cellars; and the Dark haunt those cellars, even in daylight. Half our provisions were lost to floods and half our people to the Dark before we even got clear of the town. Through the delta it was the same. The lands are flooded by the unseasonable rains and by the Dark, who have broken the levees on the rivers. What used to be the richest part of the Realm is deserted or peopled by ghouls who live by plundering the houses of the dead. It lies under terror of the Dark. They carry off as many as they kill outright. Did you know that?”

“Yes,” Alde said. “I knew.”

He looked at her closely, then nodded. “If you know that, my lady, and are still among us, you are more fortunate than I had thought.”

He folded long, bony arms. A singularly gentle man, Gil thought, to have been commander of the Church troops. A group of ragged warriors passed them, changing the camp guards, lank, dirty men and women with bows and axes. They saluted him as they walked by.

Maia sighed. “So. People spoke of the Keep of Dare, the old hold up at Renweth. In some places, enclaves of farmers have made little Keeps, fortified buildings along the river. Your brother is not the first to turn us away. But even those don’t seem to be proof against the Dark. We’ve found their fortresses smashed like eggshells, the defenders dead or wandering mindlessly. We’ve been beset by wolf packs, or dog packs hundreds strong. There was even a rumor of White Raiders in the valley … At times on the march here I felt it was the end of the world.” White teeth gleamed briefly through the tangled beard. “In some ways I think the end of the world would be a simpler matter to deal with. If what the Scriptures tell is true, at least that would be quick.”

“Oh, but it has been quick.” Alde looked around her at the desolate camp, her jewels glittering in her hair as she moved her head. “This summer all of us were sitting on our terraces, watching the sun in the leaves and dreaming of sledding and parties at the Winter Feast. Now, before the night of the Winter Feast, we may all be dead. That’s quick.”

Something in the black humor of this amused him, for he chuckled. “Possibly. Possibly.” The gray sky darkened overhead; he drew the rags of his cloak a little tighter about him. “But to have come here and to be told that there is neither food nor space by one with that monolith of the Keep at his back and his fat merchants in their ermine cloaks all around him … I do not know what I expected, my lady. But not that.”

Alde said nothing, but Gil saw the fire of shame burn her face.

A girl came running through the mucky confusion of the camp to the shelter by which they stood, calling, “M’lord! M’lord Bishop!” He stepped toward her, and she said, “Troops, m’lord. From up the road.”

Maia cast one quick look at Alde, meeting her blank surprise. Then they all hastened to see.

Before they reached the road, Gil could hear the sounds of the troop clearly over the unnatural silence of the camp. Behind the clinking of brass scabbard buckles, the soft slurp of boots in half-frozen slush, and the light jingling of mail shirts, she heard the whuffing breath of overworked horses and the creak of harness-work and wheels. The land on which the watchtower stood overhung the road, and the brink of it was jammed with silent, ragged watchers, but they made way for the Bishop and the two girls. Down below, Gil could see the troops hastening through the twilight – Janus on his stocky bay gelding, his red hair hidden by mail coif and helm, his eyes darting to take in every possible danger of the camp and the crowding woods beyond, Alwir’s troops in their scarlet livery, leading the horses that drew the empty wagons, looking uncomfortable and ashamed as they passed before the hungry eyes of those to whom they had denied food and shelter, and the double file of Red Monks walking guard, faceless in their masking helmets. The men and women around Gil watched this show of force pass by in silence; only one child in the back of the crowd cried out, asking if those men were going to give them food.

Beside her, Maia said softly, “They are fools to set forth anywhere this late in the day.”

Alde shook her head. “They had planned to be gone at noon. I don’t know what delayed them.”

Gil did, but held her peace. The latest quarrel between Alwir and Govannin had left its marks; though the force around the empty forage-wagons looked formidable, she would have doubled it, had it been up to her. She, too, remembered the farms burned by the Raiders.

The Bishop of Penambra did not move until the last wagon and the last of the rear-guard had vanished into the obscurity of the snowy woods. Then he said, “So they do not only harvest – they glean also, so that those who follow after must make a meal off the chaff.”

Alde glanced up at his tall figure, her face flushed with shame. She stammered, “We – we have need of all we can find. Alwir is raising an army, sending to the Emperor of Alketch for troops. They will burn out the Nests of the Dark at Gae, and so establish a place of safety from which we can reconquer the earth from the Dark.”

The straggly eyebrows raised, sending a whole laddering of wrinkles up the high forehead. “On several occasions the Empire of Alketch has been likened to the Devil, my lady, and it is true in this regard: they say that the Devil cannot enter any man’s house unless he is first bidden, but afterward, no man may bid him to leave. I think your brother would profit to take in the seven hundred or so warriors left to me, who are loyal to the heir of the House of Dare, before he gives his bread to enemies.”

“My brother says …” Alde began. She stopped, too ashamed to go on.

“Your brother is a man who keeps his own counsel,” Maia finished gently. He reached out his big, bony hand with its two crippled fingers, to rest on the black, soft fur that fell over her shoulders. “I understand, my lady. But speak to him for us. Tell him he will need our swords. Tell him anything. We cannot hold out here long, and there is no place on the face of the earth left to which we can go.”

“I will tell him.” Alde looked up into the gaunt, waxy face towering above her own.

“Speak for us,” Maia said, “and if ever you should need them, my lady, you may count on our swords and our hearts.”

“We can’t just leave them to starve!” Alde said fiercely. The twilight of the lonely road had closed down around them. Evening lay like a veil over the dark trees.

“Alwir can,” Gil pointed out

“He wouldn’t!”

“He’s already done it. To bring in the Penambrans without starving our own people, Alwir would have to institute some kind of rationing system. Govannin will never stand for that.”

“But she’s the Bishop!” Minalde insisted passionately. “She’s the head of the Church!”

“Sure,” Gil agreed coldbloodedly. “You think she’s going to welcome another Bishop into her bailiwick? And a commoner at that?” Gil had learned enough of the name structures in the Wathe to recognize what that “of Thran” meant on the end of Maia’s name: farmboy; plow-tailer; sharecropper, maybe; someone to be looked down upon by those scions of the ancient Houses who could boast that semiroyal “-ion” tacked onto their titles.

Alde sighed dispiritedly. “I wish you wouldn’t say things like that.”

“I can’t help it.” Gil shrugged. “I’m a born devil’s advocate. I’m not saying it can’t be done.” Something rustled among the dark trees, and Gil swung her attention to the sound. An owl flitted silently from a branch. She turned back, trying to pretend her heart wasn’t doing double time. “Alwir has a point – you have to draw lines somewhere,” she went on. “But there’s room in the Keep, if the newcomers don’t mind living up in the back reaches of the fourth level or under the tiles on the fifth. And I’m not sure what the foragers Alwir’s sending out will find. If there’s plenty of forage stored in the valleys, it could make a lot of difference, and it’s something he isn’t taking into account. Okay, maybe he’s thinking worst-case.” She shrugged again. “But I know damn well all the food in the Keep hasn’t been reported and isn’t in the main depots. Walking patrol, I’ve come across dozens of deserted cells that are all locked up and barred, and I’d be willing to bet that, come spring when everybody’s starving, people like Alwir’s friends Bendle Stooft and Mongo Rabar are going to make a sudden bundle. But I’m not an expert.”

Alde frowned. “If the Penambrans do come, where can we store the food? They’ll need all that space to live in.”

“Easy,” Gil said. “Put it outside. That’s been talked of before – build a giant compound out past the cattle byres and wall it against deer and wolves. The Dark don’t eat dead meat or grain.”

“Do you think Alwir will?”

“Alwir would love it. He would be tickled to death to know where all the food in the Keep is. Govannin will block it, and they’ll start fighting over whether the Keep needs all those nonwarriors.”

Alde looked at her reproachfully. “Has anyone ever told you that your logic is appalling?”

Gil grinned in the dusk. “Why do you think I never got married?” She stopped, catching Alde’s arm to make her halt also. But the sound she’d heard had only been the sigh of wind, rubbing bare branches in the icy cold. She was aware that it was suddenly very dark. They went on, quickening their pace.

“There,” she said as they rounded a curve in the slushy road. Far off against the black flank of the mountains, a square of reddish light was visible. “They’ll have built fires around the doors and left them open.”

“They can’t do that!” Alde protested. “It’s against Keep Law! If the Dark came in force …”

“It means they know you’re gone,” Gil said quietly and glanced up at the leaden sky. On either side of the road, the trees had faded into misty darkness, forming a murky cathedral through whose endless mazes of dark pillars an occasional black-flecked beech shone like silver in the gloom. The last fading of the daylight would leave them walking almost blindly.

“But Tir’s in there,” Alde insisted. It was like her, Gil thought wryly, to think of her child before her own safety. “Alwir should have …”

“Oh, come on,” Gil said roughly. “Do you really think he would?” She stopped again, this time certain. She could feel it in her veins, a rush of electricity that had very little fear in it. Gooseflesh rose on her arms. Like the breath of agelong night, she felt the restless stirring of air on her cheek.

She sensed a movement in the air above; but looking up, she saw only the blackness of clouds. Yet she felt something in the shadows, haunting the snowy darkness with malignant watchfulness. In the utter silence, the faint ringing of her drawn sword seemed very loud.

“There!” Alde whispered. Gil swung around and saw the drift of darkness like a ghost above the snow. Sinuous, inhuman, it flickered into brief visibility and was gone. Without being certain why she did so, Gil turned and glimpsed something – the suggestion of anomalous motion, the flick of snow swirling against the drift of the breeze – to their right. But it faded, like a word whispered into darkness.

Then something dropped from the dark air above, something that splattered acid from a monstrous mouth to melt the snow in stinging rain, something that stank of blood and darkness. Gil’s sword whined faintly, a blur of razor-bright steel cleaving the sooty protoplasm and dousing them both in a stream of foul and gritty black water that gushed from the wound. She saw the creature now as it swung through the air, a formless darkness that grew as it moved, the catch of crustaceous pincers and the long, sudden slash of a spined tail, coiling like a whip and thicker than a man’s forearm. She hacked downward, severing six feet of that thrashing cable, which began at once to disintegrate. Like a howling storm of silence, the creature turned on her, the dripping tentacles of its mouth reaching out for her, an eldritch, all-swallowing cloud of night. She slashed into the darkness, stepping into the slimy welter of beating membranes and knowing, the instant before her sword cleaved the thing, that she had it and had it clean. Then the sticky remnants of the severed creature were streaming and folding messily around her like wet, dissolving sheets in the wind. The snow around them stank.

Alde started to get up from the ground, where she had very sensibly thrown herself to give Gil a clear field. Her face was dead white under the bloody slime, but calm.

“No,” Gil said softly, “stay down.” Without a word, Minalde obeyed. Nothing moved in the darkness, but Gil felt the chill presence of the Dark still. Above the foetor of the mucky snow around them, she smelled the sharper odor of the living creatures. In a single motion, she turned and slashed, her body reacting to cues before her mind registered them. The creature that loomed so suddenly from the darkness behind her split on the bright metal of a long, one-handed side-cut that Gnift had told her only that morning looked like an old granny beating a carpet …

To hell with Gnift and his granny, Gil thought, turning in the storm of slime to cut downward at the third Dark One, delighting, as she always did, in that clean and terrible precision. Her face and hands smeared now with charred muck, she swung around, scenting the night for further signs of attack.

The night was still. She reached down quickly and hauled Alde to her feet, running for that square of burning orange light that was the only thing visible in the blackness of the overcast night. “Are there more?” Alde whispered, glancing back over her shoulder at the massed, windy darkness of the trees and mountains beyond. “Can you …”

“I don’t know,” Gil panted. She stumbled, her feet slipping in the trampled goo of the road, her drawn sword in one hand and her other gripping Alde’s elbow. “There’s a Nest of them in the valley twenty miles to the north – they haven’t got far to come. I guess those three were strays from the main attack.” The light was nearer now, warm and amber on the snow, hard as glass reflected from the black sides of the Keep. Against an orange whirlwind of fire, forms were recognizable – Alwir, like Lucifer in his winged cloak, the Guards’ instructor Gnift with the firelight flashing off his bald head, Seya and the other Guards.

“Main attack?” Alde asked, horrified. “But where …”

“Can’t you guess where the rest of the Dark are? Why we were attacked by only two or three?” They reached the last slope of ground, coming into the glare of the fires. The ruddy light gilded Alde’s scratched, dirty face and shimmered like a live thing over the dark, rippling fur of her cloak. She shook her head, confused.

“They’re all down at the Tall Gates,” Gil said quietly.

Alde looked absolutely stricken. “Oh, no,” she whispered.

Dark figures massed within the slit of brightness that was the gate. Alwir came striding down the steps toward them, looking relieved and concerned and, Gil thought, just a trifle annoyed. It didn’t help that Alde immediately and automatically accepted the blame for herself and hung back like a schoolgirl caught out in a scrape. Her brother took her arm gently and led her up the steps.

In the gate passage, everyone was talking at once. The gates were closed – six inches of solid steel. The well-oiled locking mechanisms clicked softly as the rings were turned. There seemed to Gil to be hundreds of people in that ten-foot passageway – Guards and Alwir’s red-uniformed troopers, volunteers and herdkids, and people who were idle, curious, or ineffectually helpful. The narrow space rang with their chatter and was filled with crowding faces and flaring torches. Gil heard herself gabbling out what had happened, explaining it to Seya and Gnift. Strong hands rested on her shoulders and back; her friends were all around her. Before her, barely visible through the massed backs, the jumping shadows played crazily over Queen and Chancellor, grimy little sister and tall brother sharing the big man’s vast dark cape.

As they crowded out from the inner gates into the Aisle, Gil passed them. She could see Alde talking earnestly, her wet hair shaken around her face with the intensity of her speech. Alwir stopped, listening gravely to her.

Gil was close enough to hear him say, “Alde, I’m sorry. There is nothing I can do …”

“You can try!” Minalde cried passionately. “You can at least talk to him! Not turn them away like tramps!”

“You are a mother,” the Chancellor said quietly, “and easily touched by pity. I am a commander. Janus and his foraging party set out this afternoon for the river valleys, and it may be that we can reassess the situation when they return.”

“It will be too late by then!” she insisted, and her brother caught her by the shoulders, looking down at her white, intense face, her burning eyes.

“Alde, please understand,” he said softly. She turned her face away, her cheek resting against the soft beaded leather of his gauntleted wrist. He put a gentle hand to her cheek and brought her eyes back to his. “Alde, my sister – don’t undermine me, I beg of you. If you go against me, the Keep will dissolve into chaos, and we will all perish. Please. Don’t go behind my back again.”

She nodded wretchedly, and Alwir placed a comforting arm around her waist. Alde leaned against her brother as if exhausted, her black hair spilling down over the velvet of his shoulder, and he led her back toward the Royal Sector that was their home.

Standing among the Guards, Gil watched them, two dark figures silhouetted in the leaping warmth of the torchlight. Well, what the hell, she thought. Now that Rudy’s gone, he’s all she has. And I can even understand Alwir’s not wanting to take in men who will hate him for turning them away before.

But nevertheless, she felt as if she had just seen a death warrant signed for that gentle priest and his ragged congregation among the ruins of the Tall Gates.

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