The Walls of Air (Darwath #2)

The Walls of Air (Darwath #2) Page 17

Unlike the messenger of Alketch, Rudy and Ingold did not merit formal reception. But from the crowd that stood in the streaming light of the gates, two figures detached themselves, hurrying down the dark steps to halt, suddenly shy and confused, at the bottom.

Rudy's eyes met Aide's, and his whole soul felt as if it were trying to leap from his body and carry him, weightless, up the snowy path. Somehow he was holding her hands, the torchlight edging her braided black hair in fire, his heart hammering so loudly in his breast he wondered if everyone in the Keep could hear it, and desperately telling himself, It's a secret. Our love is a secret that no one must know. He felt he would stifle if he spoke, so he only stood, gazing into the cornflower deeps of her eyes.

He was broken from this reverie by Gil's little squeak of delight as Ingold flung one arm around her neck and took from her a resounding kiss of welcome, to the cheers of the Guards assembled on the top step. Looking up, Rudy recognized them -Janus, Seya, Melantrys, Gnift - along with a sizeable bunch of civilians who had quite probably defied a specific Church directive and turned out to welcome the pilgrim wizards home. It was a nice gesture, but he earnestly wished them all in Hell and the steps vacant but for himself and the woman before him.

'Alwir's inside,' Aide said, stepping back from him. The touch of her fingertips had kindled a fire of hunger through his body, and the light of it was echoed in her eyes. But, mingled with her joy and desire, he could see something else in her face that curious sense of security of a woman who had felt all along that her man would return.

'He's been shut up with Stiarth of Alketch all day,' Gil said,

still pink with confusion. 'You guys don't rate.' She disengaged herself from Ingold's arm and came over to give Rudy a chaste, sisterly peck on the cheek. 'But I'm damn glad to see you home, punk.'

Home, Rudy thought, fve been home, by the Western Ocean, and found it a haunted ruin. He glanced down at her unsurprised eyes and said, 'I guess you know, hunh?'

She nodded and glanced back at where Ingold stood, Kta still in tow, talking a mile a minute with Thoth and Kara and that chattering group of others. To half of them, Rudy had discovered, Ingold Inglorion was a legend - he could still see it in their eyes. They were a ragtag and bobtail crew, gathered around those three. Rudy recognized Kara's mother - Nan, somebody said her name was -a withered little white-haired woman with a bent back and a cackling voice, one of the very few who didn't seem to be particularly impressed by Ingold. Kta was another - he was beaming toothlessly at all and sundry and Thoth was the third. But the others, from the fat little man in a brocade turban and overembroidered surcoat and the fey, red-haired girl-child in castoff rags to the scholarly black gentleman in an outlandish white and silver toga and the gaudy minstrel boy, were looking at Ingold with an awe that bordered on worship.

'And, Ingold Ingold, listen!' Minalde cried suddenly. Her dark-blue eyes were wide with enthusiasm, and she had evidently forgotten that she had ever been terrified of the old man. She slipped through the crowd of wizards and caught his sleeve eagerly, her face like a child's at Christmas. 'We've found things here, wonderful things!'

'The old laboratories are here, intact,' Gil added, carried away, and Rudy was drawn with them into the general group as the girls plunged into an excited duet, accompanied by much repetition and gesture. 'Things we don't understand...' 'And Gil's been digging up the records...' 'Air ducts and water pumps, and the old observation rooms...'

Like schoolgirls, Rudy thought, amused. Schoolgirls who've turned the place inside out and maybe found the keys to the defeat of the Dark that Ingold and I traipsed all the way to Quo and did not find at all.

'... and Aide has the inherited memories of the House of Dare,' Gil finished in triumph, 'which is how we found any of it to begin with.'

Ingold looked curiously at the younger girl, so like a flushed, eager schoolgirl with her braided hair and thin, gaudy skirts. 'Do you?'

Aide nodded, suddenly shy. 'I think so. I recall things that I see, but they aren't - they aren't visions, like - like Eldor had.'

There was the slightest break in her voice, and Ingold passed over it without giving a sign that he had noticed. 'A woman's memories, or a man's?

She hesitated, not having thought of that aspect before. 'I don't know. A man's, I suppose, if they come from Dare of Renweth. And they're less memories than a sense of recognition, of having been somewhere before. It was Gil's scholarship that helped us more, and her maps.'

'Interesting,' the wizard said softly. 'Interesting.' He looked for a moment longer at the girl, the child-wife of his dead friend, shoulder to shoulder with Rudy now, her hand seeking his, half-hidden by the folds of her skirts. Ingold's brow kinked swiftly, as if with passing pain, but it smoothed again; he turned back to Gil and put his arm across her angular shoulders. 'And where have you put all this?

By this time, Janus and the Guards had come down the steps to join them, and it was Janus who replied. They've taken over the rooms, at the back of the barracks. It started out as Gil-Shalos' study when she outgrew the storeroom; it's quite a complex now.'

'The wizards started arriving only last week,' Gil informed

them as the whole group trooped in a body up the steps and through the dark, echoing passage of the gates. 'Dakis the Minstrel was the first, then Grey and Nila the weather-witches...'

'And Bektis was absolutely livid,' the minstrel declared, pirouetting delightedly over the narrow span of a bridged watercourse. 'I thought we should surely lose him toapoplexy.'

Eyes followed them as they crossed the dim reaches of the Aisle, idle or curious, hostile or sympathetic, noting, perhaps, the number of Guards that walked with them, or who were the civilians in the crowd. They moved inashifting blur of witchlight, the glow of it stirring around them like a luminous fog.

Ingold stopped, startled at the chaos that prevailed in the wizards' complex. 'We haven't had time to get things straightened out yet,' Gil apologized.

'It comforts me to hear that,' the old man said, surveying the long, narrow room. Fleeces, skins, and crates seemed to make up most of the furnishings; staffs leaned in corners like rifles in an armoury; makeshift shelves had been set up, stacked with dilapidated books. The bluish witchlight slid like silk over the round body of a pearwood lute and winked on the angles of white and grey glass polyhedrons that were scattered across the table, the floor, and everywhere else. Parchments, wax tablets, dusty chronicles, and scrolls of yellowed paper littered every horizontal surface in sight, and over one of the room's fewchairs lay a great pile of homespun brown cloth, and with it a tiny satin pincushion sparkling like a miniature hedgehog.

The wizards had evidently made themselves very much at home.

'And we have to show you -' Aide began.

But Thoth broke in. 'Let them rest, child, and eat.' His voice was as harsh as a vulture's, slow and heavy. He glanced once at the crescent-tipped staff that Rudy leaned in a corner and looked

back down at Ingold. 'You found Quo, then?

Ingold shut his eyes and nodded tiredly. 'Yes,' he said.

'And Lohiro?'

'Dead.'

Thoth's eyes flickered to the staff, to the bundles of books that Rudy and several volunteer helpers were placing on a small cleared corner of the table, and back to the ravaged face of his friend. 'So,' he said.

Ingold's eyes opened. He studied the other man's narrow face. 'What happened, Thoth? Lohiro said you had been killed.'

'No.' The Recorder of Quo laid a long, bony hand on Ingold's shoulder. 'The others... yes. Your girls have been telling me,' he went on slowly, 'of their - findings - regarding the fortunate places of ancient times. These were similar to your own discoveries, I am sure.'

Ingold nodded wretchedly.

'But deeper, since they had access to things to which you did not.'

Only those who stood nearest heard Ingold whisper, 'I should have guessed.'

'Perhaps,' the tall wizard said evenly. 'But you are wrong if you suppose that Lohiro did not have such knowledge.'

Ingold looked up quickly; though all reason for fear was past now, the reflection of it suddenly aged his sunken eyes.

'From the outset, as you know, I sought the oldest of the records for reference to the Dark - largely without result,' Thoth continued. 'The records there did not go much farther back than Forn's time, but your mention of Nests at Gae, Penambra, and Dele - all the great centres of the wizardry of old - seemed to fit into a disquieting pattern. Shortly after Lohiro and the Council closed Quo to all, I went to him with my suppositions, and he,

Anamara, and I searched the town and the Seaward Mountains for miles. We suspected that a Nest lay under the tower itself, under the subfloors of the old vaults, though we could find no sign of it. Still we three spelled and respelled the foundations of the tower. Believe me, Ingold, not even the winds of the Dark could have risen through the cracks in the floor, had we not been betrayed.'

Those strange eyes rested for a moment on the old man's haggard face. 'It was when we were spelling the mountains, I think, that Lohiro first spoke of the Dark as being of asingle essence. We found little concerning them in the books, though my students turned the libraries inside out, breaking spells of opening on volumes whose very languages had been long forgotten and combing for something, anything - to little avail. But Lohiro watched in Anamara's mirror and saw the Dark Ones fight at Penambra and Gae. He said that their strength lay in their numbers and in their movements. He said that what one of them learned, they all then knew. He said this was clear when they left their northern Nests in the plains to join the assault on Gae.

'At first, he spoke of it only in terms of the maze - that we could not afford to let so much as a single Dark One slip through its windings. But later, as cities and towns fell to the Dark and we found ourselves no nearer to an understanding of them that would enable our magic to work against them, he said that we must, at all costs, learn what their nature, their essence, was. He said that until one of us studied them by transformation, we could hold no hope for their defeat.'

Ingold's face went white. That was madness.'

'So I told him,' the Recorder said drily. 'But remember also that our backs were to the wall. There had been talk of going forth from Quo willy-nilly, to battle them without plan and ultimately without hope. Lohiro said that it would be madness for a weak man to take on a strong one, but he did not feel himself to be that much overmatched. He was proud, Ingold. Proud and desperate. You know he was ever one to throw his

whole strength into a battle. Perhaps he thought that his own death was the worst that could befall.

'Then Gae fell. We watched it in Anamara's mirror; we saw you and Eldor and all the others cornered in the flaming Palace and we looked no more. It was deep night, close on to dawn. Lohiro left us sitting in the library, and my heart was so heavy I did not mark whether he went upstairs to his own study or down. I think it makes no difference.

That day was bitter for us, Ingold. We sought you in the crystals throughout the daylight hours, Anamara and Hasrid and I, and we could find no sign of you. We mourned you for dead.'

'I might as well have been dead.' Ingold sighed. 'I had passed the Void I was in another universe entirely, I and Prince Tir. Did Lohiro seek me?'

Thoth shook his head. That I do not know. None of us saw him that day. Toward evening, there was talkofgoingto Karst, where we saw the refugees gathering. We knew the Dark would strike there and that the only wizard within hundreds of miles was Bektis. We were still speaking of this when darkness fell.'

The old Recorder fell silent again, his queer yellow eyes grown distant and pale. In the flickering witchlight, others had gathered around, silent, hardly breathing. Ingold's mouth was taut, his face drained of blood as if from some internal wound. Through him, Rudy saw again the ruin of that small and peaceful city, smelt the autumn sweetness of the vines grown wild over coloured stones, and heard the hushed rumbling of the sea.

'I do not know at what time that day Lohiro took the form of the Dark,' Thoth went on quietly. 'I only know that in the deeps of the night we were still gathered in the tower, talking of what was best to do. Then the walls shook with the echoes of a blast that sounded as if the foundations of the tower itself were ripping asunder, as if the earth beneath us were exploding. I think I rose, but no one else had time to move. The doors of the library were flung open, and I saw Lohiro framed in them, his

eyes blank and empty, like blue-green glass; behind him lay such a storm of the Dark as I have never seen. He was the Archmage - he held the Master-Spells over us all.' He shook his head. 'And it was over.

'I think Anamara tried to fight him. I saw her face outlined for an instant in a burst of light against the darkness. But I knew there was no hope if Lohiro had taken into himself the essence of the Dark. So, as that terrible whirlwind of power fell upon the room, I turned myself into a grass snake, the lowliest and swiftest creature I could think of. My perceptions of what happened after that are not human perceptions. I knew only darkness and cries, fire and bursting lights. The tower crumbled around us. Lohiro faded into one of the Dark and whirled away into the night. From the rubble, I saw darkness covering the town and great columns of fire, smothered and sapped by blackness and magic. Hasrid was a dragon. Others took different forms to fight, but Lohiro's power and the Dark confounded them all. But none of that was important to me then. I was a serpent, with only a serpent's fears and hungers. I was cold and I hid in the rubble until dawn.'

There was silence again. In the dim bluish shadows, Rudy could see several of the other mages in tears - for the Archmage, for the world whose fringes they had been on, and for the dream of that vanished city to which they had once all aspired. But Ingold's tears had been shed in the Seaward Mountains, and he looked only empty and exhausted, as he had looked in the desert.

Thoth's golden eyes returned to an awareness of the present. 'Have you ever spent time in another being, Ingold!'

Ingold nodded. No one else moved.

Then you will understand that, after that, time meant very little to me. How long it took me to leave the Seaward Mountains, I do not know. The eaters of little insects do not count days. In part of my mind, I knew I was a man and a wizard, but there was very little in me that cared. Perhaps it was

only mourning. I hid in the rocks and moved alone through wet grasses and rain. I was nothing... nothing. But I must have known I was a man, for I travelled slowly east, and I was far out in the desert when the yearning came to me to seek the Keep of Dare in Renweth at Sarda Pass. It was a man's yearning, far beyond what a snake could feel or accomplish. Yet such was its force that I knew that I could go there only as a man. So a man I became.

'I did not know,' he finished quietly, 'that the call came from you, my friend.'

Ingold sighed. 'Perhaps it were better had you kept your belly to the ground, serpentmage.'

A single line, as fine as a pen-scratch in the corner of the long, wry mouth, briefly indicated a smile. 'It is easier to live off the land so,' Thoth replied, 'but the company becomes boring. Nevertheless, I shall carry to my grave a horror of the road runner bird.'

'Yes,' Ingold agreed reminiscently. 'I recall I had nightmares about dogs for many years.'

'Eh,'a thin voice creaked, Nan the witchwife appeared suddenly in the circle, her pale eyes sparking with malice. 'So, shall I get you some nice cricket soup, serpentmage? Or you some fat mice, Sir Tomcat? Or will you stand here talking until you fall down from hunger?

'Mother!' Kara said, shocked. 'That's -*

'I know who it is, girl,' the old lady snapped sharply. 'And I'm saying, let thepoor men eat, beforethey goto tradingwar stories about how brave they all were.' Her bent back forced her to twist her neck to look up at them, and Rudy found himself thinking that all she needed was a peaked black hat and a broomstick.

'Thank you,' Ingold said gravely. 'Your care for our comfort touches my heart.'

'Huh!' she grumbled and bustled away toward the cubbyhole that Rudy guessed must be the communal kitchen. In the doorway she swung around again, shaking her wooden spoon at them, her thick cobwebs of greyish-white hair falling down over her bony shoulders and her eyes glittering in her haglike face. 'Heart indeed!' she cackled. 'Wizards have no heart. And I tell you true, for I'm one and I haven't any more heart than a shrike.' With that she flounced out of sight.

'She's right,' Ingold said mildly. Thoth looked shocked, but Kta laughed.

'Alwir subsidizes the Wizards' Corps, the same way he does the Guards,' Gil explained as Kara, her mother, and a thin little red-haired girl served them oatbread and stewfrom a common pot. 'Bektis still dines up at the high table - I suppose because the food's better - but I expect both he and Alwir will be along later.' She grinned across the room at Aide, who sat cross-legged on a pile of bison and mammoth hides between Rudy and the sleeping Prince Tir, sharing the wizards' rough-and-ready feast. Fire flickered onthehearth, the room's only illumination, brightening over the assorted features of the very odd crew assembled there.

At Aide's side, Rudy felt that, with very little more provocation, he'd start purring like a cat. It was the first time in over two months that he'd faced the prospect of a night's sleep without four hours of guard duty first; he was bathed, shaved, and stationary, and the novelty of that was pleasant enough. He was with the woman he loved and among his own kind at last, after a journey he had never thought he'd survive. It would be odd, he mused, to sleep under a roof.

His hand sought Aide's under the furs. She glanced sideways at him and smiled.

Profiled against the dim light, Aide looked different, more sure of herself - less pretty but more beautiful, Rudy thought illogically. Gil had changed, too,hedecided,glancingoverat the thin girl sitting like some scrawny teenage boy on the floor

beside Ingold's chair. She was softer, somehow, though physically she was like a leather strap. Her eyes were gentler, but there was a firm line to her mouth that spoke of bitter experience and knowledge that she could never unknow.

Well, what the hell, he thought. We've all changed. Even old Ingold.

Maybe one day the old man would regain the amused serenity with which he had once viewed the world. Quo had broken something inside him that Rudy sensed was only partially healed. After his first flood of greetings and information, Ingold had relapsed into silence; throughout supper, he had spoken very little. This was not to say the room was quiet; once the initial chorus of chomping noises had died down, there had been news to exchange, stories to tell, and adventures to recount, most of these among Rudy, Gil, and Aide.

Now and then the old man's eyes travelled from face to face -not judging what this strange rabble was good for, though that would come. Now Ingold was only getting to know them - the goody wives and tea leaf readers, the two-and-thirty second-raters who had happened to miss the destruction of Quo, plus its single austere survivor, one wizened old hermit, and one punk airbrush-jockey who'd stumbled into the middle of his destiny by mistake. This was all the force Ingold would have to work with, all the magic left in the world for his command.

No wonder he looks like death warmed over, Rudy thought.

'Now,' Ingold said finally, in the meal's comfortable afterglow, tightening his hand, which had come to rest easily on Gil's shoulder. 'Show me these marvels you have found.'

As if on cue, Gil and Aide leaped to their feet. 'We've got them in the back here,' Gil said, showing the way. 'That door there leads into the room where we found the stairway down to the labs; we usually keep it bolted. We put our things in here...' Most of the other wizards had already seen their trawlings from the laboratories and storerooms and so remained in the common room. Some of them - Thoth, Kta, and Kara - followed

Rudy, Ingold, and the girls through a dusty little cubbyhole scarcely wider than a hallway and into a kind of storeroom, where a plank table had been set up, laden with the mysteries from below. As they entered, a bluish drift of witchlight bloomed around them - the rooms of the Wizards' Corps were the only ones in the Keep to have decent lighting. Scattered across the table were vessels, boxes, chains of bubbled glass, apparatus of glass balls and gold rods, twining knots of metal tubes, sinuous pieces of meaningless sculpture, and slick, unexplainable polyhedrons, white and smoked.

'These were what blew us away the most,' Gil said, picking up one of the white shapes and tossing it to Ingold. 'They were everywhere under the machinery in the pump rooms, in piles in the storerooms, and strung in nets over the tanks in the hydroponic gardens. So far, the only thing they're good for is that Tir likes to play with them.'

'Indeed.' Ingold turned the polyhedron in his fingers for a moment, as if testing its weight or proportions. Then, quite suddenly, it glowed to life in his hands, the soft, white radiance of it warming the angles of his wind-darkened face. He tossed it to Gil, who caught it ineptly on cringingpalms. It was quite cool.

'Lamps,' he said.

'Oh...' Gil breathed, entranced. 'Oh, how beautiful! But how did the ancients turn them on and off? How do the things work?' She looked up at him, the light glowing brightly out of her cupped hands, illuminating her thin face.

'I should imagine they simply covered them when they wanted darkness,' Ingold said. The material itself is spelled to hold the light for a long time and can be kindled by a very simple means. Someone on the lowest echelons of wizardry, like a firebringer or a finder, could do it.'

'Hmmm.' Rudy picked up one of the white crystals on the table and studied the bottom facet. 'You should have figured

that out, Gil. It says "one hundred watts" right here.'

'Hit him for me, Aide. But I really should have figured it out, because I always did wonder about how the Keep was originally lighted. And there are hydroponic gardens down in the subvaults, room after room of them, with no light source at all -'

'You ever grow marijuana in a closet?' Rudy inquired, apropos of nothing.

'Hey, around my place the only things that grew in closets were mushrooms. But, Ingold, with this kind of light we could get the gardens going again. With hydroponics, we could grow carloads of stuff in almost no space; and down there it's warm enough to do it.'

'You could draw off power from the pumps to heat the tanks,' Rudy added. 'And to heat water, for that matter.'

'Yes, but we never did manage to find the main power source.'

'It would have been magically hidden and sealed,' Ingold said, interrupting a discussion that threatened to become increasingly technical. 'At a guess, the pumps operate on the same principle as the lamps. The wizards of old times could probably alter the essence of materials and enable them to hold something - light, or some other force for incredible periods of time.'

Gil looked thoughtful. 'You mean this whole Keep operates on the principle of a giant footwarmer?

'Essentially.'

'Fantastic,' Rudy said, turning away from them to investigate the bits and pieces of glass and metalwork that strewed the table behind him. Aide reached tentatively around Gil's arm to remove the glowing polyhedron from her hands.

'Do you know what this really means? she asked softly. 'It means no more wandering around the corridors in the dark... or

worry about setting the place on fire...'

'It means I won't have to go blind from reading those goddam books by the light of aspoonful of burning Crisco, is what it means.' Gil was about to take another crystal polyhedron from the table when she froze, her movement arrested halfway. 'What the hell...?'

Rudy turned from the table, his face glowing with pride. Hefted in his hands were four or five of the miscellaneous objects Aide had brought up from the lab, now fitted together, ends and pieces mating to form something very similar to a huge and clumsy rifle.

'What is it? Aide walked around the thing, passing in front of the muzzle with the unconcern of one who had never entertained the concept of a gun in her life. Rudy instinctively raised the muzzle to avoid pointing it at her.

'It's a - a -' There was no word for it in the Wathe. 'It shoots things out of the hole at the end there.'

'Shoots what? Gil demanded, coming over to look. She touched the large glass bubble that fitted into the fluid curve of the stock. 'What kind of firing chamber does it have?

Rudy peered down the hoselike barrel. 'I don't know,' he said, 'but I can guess.' He set the gun upright at his side, like a rifleman on parade. 'My guess is that it shoots fire. What other kind of gun would you use on the Dark?

'It's a flame thrower.' There were words in the Wathe for that.

'Yeah. And my guess is that it worked on magic.'

'You mean,' Aide broke in excitedly, 'that this - flame thrower - could spurt fire out of the end?

'With the barrel to channel it,' Ingold mused, taking the gun and sighting awkwardly along the barrel, his hands competent on the smooth, triggerless stock. 'The flame could go much

farther than a wizard could throw it. But what would fuel such a flame?

'I don't know,' Rudy said eagerly, his voice rising with excitement, 'but if there's a laboratory downstairs, I'm sure as hell gonna find out. Ingold, think about it! You've been telling me all along about a - a third echelon of the mageborn, about people who don't have but maybe one little bit of power. The firebringers and goodwords and finders, people who never developed their skill because the Church frowned on it and there were either trained wizards or just ordinary human civilization to cover for them. But it isn't like that anymore. I bet we could get up a flame thrower corps between the wizards we have here and the firebringers we could round up in the Keep! Ingold, this is it! We didn't have to trek out to Quo at all! The answer was right here all the time!'

'If this is the answer,' Thoth said in his driest voice, Vhy was it not used upon the Dark three thousand years ago?

Brought up short, Rudy looked uncertain and deflated.

The Recorder of Quo folded bony arms, his yellow eyes glittering in the gloom. 'In all of our researches at Quo, I found no mention of such a thing being used against the Dark. It is my belief that you hold in your hands an experiment that failed.'

'Or that was never performed,' Aide said suddenly. 'Because - well, Gil and I have found lots of places here, the labs downstairs especially, but the pump rooms, too, that look as if they were abandoned very quickly. They didn't get taken over by other things. They were just locked up and left.'

'But why?'asked Kara, who had been standing quietly all this time, watching Kta pick through the smaller jewels in their boxes on the table.

'I don't know,' Aide replied, 'but I think something happened to the the engineer-wizards who built the Keep. I think the Church had them exiled or killed. If it happened suddenly, they might have left the flame throwers downstairs and never

returned to finish them.'

'That's hardly intelligent,' Kara protested.

'Neither was imprisoning me in the vaults beneath Karst on the eve of an attack by the Dark,' Ingold pointed out acidly. 'But we are dealing with fanatics... or with a fanatic, in this case.'

There was an uncomfortable silence. Rudy cleared his throat. 'Uh - how much chance would you say there is of that happening again?

Ingold's eyes glinted with mischief. 'Worried?

'No - I mean, yes. I mean...'

'Don't be - yet. We have convinced Alwir that we have our uses, without which his invasion of the Nests must come to a standstill.'

'What? Rudy asked bluntly. 'We're all the magic he's got and, present company excepted, it ain't much.'

'Really, Rudy,' Ingold said, and there was an echo of the old serenity, the old control, in the droop of his heavy eyelids. 'What else would a Wizards' Corps be for? Military intelligence, of course.'

'Holy hell,' Rudy whispered.

'Ingold!' Dakis the Minstrel's voice called down the short passageway. Others joined it. 'My lord Ingold?

There was a quick flurry of skirts, and the red-haired witchchild appeared in the doorway, her dark eyes huge. 'Me lord Alwir's here,' she breathed. 'Be askin' also for me lady Minalde.'

Aide sighed, and Rudy thought she braced herself just slightly; a tiny fold of tiredness manifested at the corner of her eye.

He smiled wryly. 'Sure is nice to be home.' As he had hoped, it made her laugh.

'Catch,' Ingold said. He lighted and threw a polyhedron of milky light to Rudy, ignited another and tossed it to Aide, then passed a third to the red-haired girl. A dazzling halo ringed them as they passed through the door, with Kara, Kta, and Thoth following, theirshadowsstreaminglongand black behind them. From beyond in the common room, a mingling of voices could be heard. Laughter blended with Nan 's scolding and the light, dancing runs of Dakis' lute. Ingold went to the table, kindled a fourth lamp, and held it out to Gil.

Thank you,' he said softly. 'You have done very well.'

She took it, as she had once taken his glowing staff, and the soft brilliance of it poured out between the shadowed bones of her fingers. 'Ingold?'

'Yes, child?

'One thing I've always wanted to ask you.'

'What is it?

She started to speak, then stopped, confused and unable to go on, her pale, intolerant eyes unusually blue in the radiance of the lamp. What she did say might or might not have been her originalintention. 'Was there some reason you asked me to back you up, the night the Dark attacked the Keep? I know it was you who kept the light on the staff alive, but was there a reason you had me hold it?'

Ingold was silent for some time and did not meet her gaze. 'Yes,' he said finally, 'and it was inexcusable of me to ask you to back me, for it was my doing in the first place that brought you here, and I had no right to place you in peril.'

She shrugged. 'It doesn't matter.'

'No,' he said bitterly. 'God knows, I've done it often enough.'

The bleak guilt in his voice and the self-hatred troubled and frightened her. She caught his hand in her free one, to draw his eyes to hers. 'You do what you have to do,' she told him gently. 'You know I'd follow you anywhere.'

'And that,' Ingold said, his scratchy voice suddenly taut, 'is precisely why I asked you.' But the tension was caused by something in himself, and his tone softened again. 'You were the only one I could trust, Gil, not to flee.'

That's a lot of trust,' Gil said quietly, for somebody you'd known only a month.'

Ingold nodded. 'But there are times, my dear, when I feel that I have known you all my life.'

They stood thus for a moment longer, wizard and warrior, with Ingold holding Gil's fingers gently against the tips of his own. In his eyes she could read the tracks of the journey -pain and loneliness, and only the ghost of the old serenity which had once characterized him. A hint of another emotion was strange to her.

What he read in her eyes she did not know, but it made him look away quickly and drape his arm across her shoulders. He led her out through the maze to the voices and the lights.