The Walls of Air (Darwath #2)

The Walls of Air (Darwath #2) Page 8

Gil drifted slowly to consciousness, with the puzzled awareness that she had been asleep. The smell of incense clogged her nostrils, choking after the things she had smelled in a dream - if it had been a dream. Soft chanting, strophe and antistrophe, mingled in her ears. She was aware that she sat in a kind of octagonal anteroom, shadowed, dark, and empty. Fishing in her clouded recollections, she thought she must have come here to rest after the other members of the procession had returned from the sunset execution.

Or maybe the execution had been only a dream.

She didn't think so. The mud and snow on her boots were fresh and dripping as they melted on the smooth black stone of the floor. She remembered stumbling in the wake of every man, woman, and child in the Keep across the road to the knoll that faced the gates, hearing the wailing of wolves and wind in the forest and the solitary weeping of the three or four women who would mourn Bendle Stooft and Parscino Pral.

Like a counterpoint to that melody, she'd heard the muttering in the crowds all around. 'Good time, too. When we refugeed from Gae to Karst, the old skinflint charged me a penny for a loaf of bread - a whole penny! And me with six kids starving and no place to lay our heads!' 'Penny for bread?' A man laughed bitterly. 'Him and Pral charged me six coppers for a bit of space on the floor of a wash-house, to spend the night in shelter. I lost my wife that night. For all of me, that Guard could have taken his hands and head, as well as his sodding foot.'

Support your local Guards, Gil thought, exhausted, and raised her head to look around her. Memory came dearer now. She'd been with Janus and Melantrys. Alwir had asked to speak with them up in the Royal Sector. She'd followed them, her vision

greying, as far as the Church and then had fallen behind. Let Janus deal with him, she'd thought. I'm not going to climb the goddam steps on his say-so.

She saw now that the anteroom had been built like a turret against the back wall of the Aisle long after the Keep's original construction as an entrance-hall to the sanctuary itself. To Gil's historian's eye, this type of excrescence denoted some period of overcrowding in the Keep's history, the same overcrowding that had caused the original passageways and cells to proliferate and tangle so alarmingly. The anteroom contained little but a few carved stone benches and an ikonlike painting of an unfamiliar saint being nibbled to death by snakes. On the far wall, a doorway led into the sanctuary itself.

Somewhere a door opened. Chanting drifted from the sanctuary, winding echoes of the monks' voices praising God in an archaic tongue. To Gil it was weirdly familiar, a confusing mirror of her medieval studies, a bizarre reminder of the Void that she had crossed to come here, as perhaps others had also done. The Scriptures Govannin had read in the place of execution had been familiar, oppressing her with the sense of dealing on two planes of reality.

The image of Govannin returned to her, silhouetted against the yellow sunset sky. Like a dark, hard heelstone between the massive pylons of the pillars, she had stood in her billowing cloak; the pillars lay like a gun-sight between the gates of the Keep and the dark notch of Sarda Pass, and Govannin's cruciform arms had formed bony crosshairs, sighting on the small, baleful eye of the sinking sun. Parscino Pral had hung limply in his chains on one pillar, half-dead already with shock and loss of blood. Bendle Stooft had cried and whimpered and pleaded throughout the Bishop's prayers. All around them, the men and women of the Keep had stood like a dark lake of watching eyes. On the other side of the knoll, that silent company had been joined by a second, smaller group of refugees, some two thousand ragged men, women, and hungry children come in silence to observe the justice of the Keep.

Snow winds had whipped across the Vale. The chains had clanked on the pillars, and the keys had rattled in Janus' hands. Alwir read out the charges in his trained, powerful voice, and Govannin spoke her prayers, formally requesting the Lord to forgive these men their sin, but implying by her tone of voice that it was all the same to her if He did not. Then, as the sun vanished into the bruised darkness of the banks of clouds, they had all turned their backs on the doomed men and returned to the Keep as the swift winter twilight enfolded the land.

Gil had a hazy memory of Maia of Thran, leaning on his staff as he limped up the Keep steps between Alwir, Govannin, and Minalde. She did not think she had seen anyone take the muddy downward road back to the Tall Gates.

But that, too, might have been a dream.

Restless with fever, Gil got to her feet and walked to the sanctuary door. From its shadows, she looked into the enormous cell, double the normal height, with a floor space, if cleared, of possibly ten thousand square feet, although Gil's judgement of such things had never been very good. That whole shadowy vastness was lighted by only three candles, burning on the bare stone slab of the central altar; by their spare, small light, the monstrous chamber dissolved itself into a chaos of climbing latticework. Pillars, galleries, and balconies hung suspended one above the other like stone lace, with miniature chapels balanced in fantastic hanging turrets and irregularly shaped platforms winding upward in stair-step spirals; over all of it brooded inanimate armies of demons, saints, angels, animals, and monsters peering from jungles of carved tracery. In the intense shadows, not a soul was visible, but Gil could hear them chanting, chapel answering chapel, throughout that eerie gloom.

She had heard it before, on the road down from Karst -blessings and requiems, vespers and matins. Where did the roots feed across the Void, she wondered, and in which direction? What was the evolution of ideas? Straight transfer or the doubled branches of an archetypical Platonic root? Or something else, something wholly inconceivable? She

wondered about that saint in the anteroom, whose curiously elipsoid eyes held an expression of startlement rather than pain. Was there a Christian saint who had ended his days to give pagan vipers their elevenses?

It was all scholars' games, she knew, and would not alter one whit the threat of the Dark, or the inevitable clash between Alwir, Govannin, and the Archmage. But Gil was a scholar, and no amount of training with the Guards, no matter how many men she killed or what she felt about it, would change that. It was what no one, with the exception of Ingold, had ever understood about her - her delight in knowledge for its own sake, in the Holmesian reconstruction of long-vanished events, and her nosing quest for the uttermost roots of the world.

'Gil- Shalos.'

She swung around, startled. Through the haze of her delirium, backed by the lights of the antechamber, Bishop Govannin appeared like an angel in a fever drearn, sexless and pitiless in the blood-scarlet of her episcopal robes, a creature of inhuman beauty, intelligence, and loyalty to her God. But her voice was a dry, woman's voice. 'You are not well?' she asked slowly. 'At the tribunal you seemed ill, and now it looks not to be going better.'

The wound's a little feverish, is all,' Gil excused herself. 'I'll get over it in a day or so.'

The long, bony fingers indicated, without touching, the slings and strapping that bound Gil's shoulder. 'More than that, I fear,' she said. 'Shoulders can be a bad business.'

Beyond them in the holy place, a fresh wave of chanting rose - for the soul, Gil presumed, of Bendle Stooft. Beside her, the Bishop raised her head, listening with a critical ear. In the golden fog of the lamplight, Gil considered that face, the high, intelligent brow shadowing a deep fanatic's eyes, the stubbornness that scarred cheeks and lips like dueling cuts. Fine, small ears, dainty as shells, ornamented the smoothness of the bald pate where it ran into the old, wrinkled power of the

ropy neck muscles. It occurred to Gil that in her youth Govannin Narmenlion must have been a strikingly lovely woman, the toast of a regiment -except that women with that kind of cold and driving intelligence were very seldom the toast of anything.

'Your Grace? she asked softly, and the dark eyes returned to her as if from a reverie. 'How was the Keep built?'

The Bishop considered the matter carefully, not as Gil's friends among the Guards had. Finally she said, 'I do not know. Which in itself is strange,' she added, her long fingers moving to caress the black stone of the doorway at her side. 'For it is our shelter and our home.'

'Does anyone?'

Govannin shook her head. 'Not to my knowledge. I was considered grossly overeducated for an heiress, yet I can recall no word of that.'

Gil had to smile. 'Yeah, I was - grossly overeducated, too.'

A ghost of an answering smile touched those full ungiving lips. 'Were you?'

'Oh, yes. I was a scholar in my own lands. I suppose in a way that's what I will always be. Would the Church records have any mention of the building of the Keep? How it was done, or by whom?

The Bishop folded her arms, thinking. Past her, Gil saw movement in the sanctuary, grey-robed monks ascending narrow steps, dimly lighted by the amber glow of a censer. They vanished in shadows, but their voices remained, like the sound of winds in the rocks. 'Perhaps,' Govannin said finally. 'Most of the Scripture comes from the Times Before, but it contains teaching and wisdom, rather than engineering. The records that, no thanks to my lord Alwir, we brought here to the Keep go back to the time when the see was here at Renweth, but I do not think they extend into the Time of the Dark itself. But some

might.' She must have seen the brightening of Gil's face. 'Is this important to you?'

'It could be,' Gil said. 'Those records could contain in them some clue, some information, not only about the Keep but about the Dark. What they are - why they came -why they left.'

'Perhaps,' the Bishop said again, after a long moment's thought. 'But for the most part, I think you will find them simply tales of how much the harvest was, who was born and who was buried, and if the rains were light or heavy. As for the coming of the Dark to the Times Before...' She frowned, her dark, fine brows drawing together and the lines in that strong, crepy face hardening. 'I have heard that the civilizations of Before were wicked and debased. Amid their pride and their splendour, they practised abominations. It is my belief, now as then, that the Time of the Dark was just punishment, which lasted for the span allotted by God. The Book of lab tells us that God will let the Evil One have domination for a time, for the Lord's own purposes.' She shrugged. 'I have lived a long time and have learned never to question the motivations of God.'

'Maybe,' Gil said. 'But it seems like a lot of suffering and pain to go through, when perhaps it could be averted. If God didn't want us to learn from history, we wouldn't have hands to write with, nor eyes to read.'

'A wizard's sophistry,' the Bishop replied calmly. 'One by which they are all tempted and all fall. No, I do not criticize the argument, though I do know you are loyal to your wizard friends. But I doubt the utility of struggling against the intent of God. His ways are slow but as sure and inescapable as the coming of the ice in the north.'

'But who,' Gil insisted, 'can know the intent of God?'

'Not I, certainly. And I do not think it evil to learn from history. I am not yet one of those monks who preach the burning of all books and the telling of Scripture from memory alone. Knowledge is power, whether over the Dark Ones, over Kings who would usurp unto themselves what is rightfully

God's, or over sorcerers and mages who do not believe in God at all and whom the Devil uses for his own ends. We can combat knowledge with knowledge and their power with ours.'

'Like the Rune of the Chain? Gil countered a little bitterly. She got a dark, enigmatic look in return.

'The use of such devices is unlawful,' the Bishop said. The Rune of the Chain can be spelled to bind and cripple a wizard's power, and I have heard of its being so used. But using evil's work in any way defeats the good of the cause. Only evil can come of this quest for the Archmage of Quo."

'You don't think a wizard's power might be given to him by God?'

Her tone was perhaps more heated than she had intended. Govannin regarded her for a moment expres-sionlessly, seeming through the fog of fever and lamplight to be nothing more than a bodiless shadow and a fiery gleam of eyes. 'You rush to his defence,' she said at last, and her voice had only the calm interest of a python that watched the world and chose what prey it would. 'Beware of him, my child. He has great ability and much personal charm for a man who has traded his soul to Satan - which is what he has done, though he will not own it. Satan uses such men also, who from ignorance or pride will not see what they have done by giving in to the temptation to power. But I am old, Gil-Shalos. I have seen the other kind of wizard, evil wizards, renegades, headstrong, ambitious, and self-seeking. If you had ever met such a one, who worked for and openly welcomed the powers of Crookedness, you would never again think that the talents of a mage come from or have anything to do with God.'

'But he isn't like that!' Gil protested hotly. Images rushed to her mind and unwise words to her lips. She remembered Ingold standing in the brilliance of the magelight, holding blizzard and darkness at bay until the Guards could get Tir and Aide to the Keep, the old man walking into a tunnel of sounding blackness, surrounded by runes of power that no one else could see, and

the look in his eyes when he had handed her his glowing staff and asked her to guard his back. 'He would never bend to evil, never use his powers for ill. There can be good and bad wizards, the same way there are good and bad men...'

Govannin raised dark, elegant brows. Gil stumbled and broke off her words, her cheeks suddenly hotter than even fever could account for, glad of the veiling shadows. 'I'm sorry,' she stammered, confused. 'I spoke disrespectfully, and all you have done has been kindness to me.' It had doubtless been decades, Gil reflected, since any member of hoi polloi had so lashed out at Govannin Narmenlion.

But the Bishop was only silent for a time, a curious, considering light in her eyes. When she spoke, her dry, cracked voice was kind. 'I like you, my child,' she said. 'You are a warrior as you are a scholar, single-minded, and never without purpose. Your heart is very pure - pure in its scholarship, pure in its violence, and pure in its love. Such hearts can be hurt and can do measureless good and measureless evil, but they cannot be bought or cowed.' She put out her hand, her fingers ice-cold against Gil's cheek. 'I shall send you the Church records, if you desire it, and also someone to interpret the writing for you. The knowledge is my gift to you, with the consequences of what that knowledge shall bring.'

She held out her bony hand, and Gil dropped to one knee to kiss the dark bezel of the episcopal ring.

Later, waking in the barracks from feverish sleep, Gil wondered if this, too, had been a dream. But after supper, Minalde appeared in the barracks, bearing a heavy book which, she said, the lady Govannin had asked if she would take to Gil-Shalos.

'I was coming over anyway,' she explained, seating herself at the foot of Gil's bunk.

Through the doorway beyond her, Gil could hear the noises of the night watch going out, the creaking of leather, the faint clink

of buckles, and Melantrys' light, bantering chaff.

Minalde ran her fingers along the metal-clasped edge of the cover. 'What is it?'

Gil explained briefly her desire to probe the origins of the Keep to learn something of its secrets. 'I mean, hell,' she said, 'there's so much more to the Keep than meets the eye. Like -how come there's a flow of water in the latrines and fountains? Even if the Keep was built over an underground river, the stuff doesn't run uphill. Why is the air fresh in most places, not foul and stuffy? How was the Keep built in the first place? I know it was built three thousand years ago by Dare of Renweth, at the time of the first rising of the Dark,' she went on, 'but how long did it take? Where did everybody stay during construction, if they didn't start on it until after the Dark began appearing? Or were the Dark only down in the river valleys and the mountains safe?'

'No,' Aide answered simply. 'Because there's a Nest of the Dark not twenty miles from here, as you know.'

Gil remembered the tilted slab of black stone in the midst of those clinging woods and shuddered.

'And for the rest of it,' Aide went on, 'you've already told me more than I knew before. I have heard that the magic in Times Before was different from the magic now, but I don't know what that means. I do know that centuries ago there used to be magic places, sort of temples of wizardry, in many cities, not just at Quo - so maybe back then it was the same way. Rudy says that magic is fused into the walls of the Keep.'

At the mention of her lover's name, Aide's cheeks coloured faintly, and Gil hid a grin. In many ways this dark-haired girl reminded her of the freshmen she'd taught; she was sweet, shy, pretty, and very unsure of herself. At such times it was difficult to remember that this soft-voiced girl had passed through fire and darkness, had seen her husband die in the flaming ruin of the battle-broken Palace, and had gone against the forces of the night, armed only with a torch and her own wild courage. She

was the Queen of Darwath, the true ruler of the Keep, sitting at the foot of the disordered bunk with her legs crossed under her multicoloured peasant skirts.

'So anyway, the Bishop offered to lend me the books to look for the answers,' Gil said, edging herself up against her makeshift pillows. 'Gnift's already told me that training or walking patrol is out for at least three weeks... I suppose he's right,' she added regretfully, looking down at her strapped shoulder. 'I'll have to get someone to read them to me and teach me the language, though.'

'Oh, I can do that,' Aide said. 'Really, it would be no trouble. I know the Old Wath and the High Tongue of the Church, which is very different from the Wathe. It would be the first time, you know, that I've ever really used anything that I learned in school.'

Gil regarded her for a moment through the barracks gloom, fascinated. 'What did you learn in school?

Aide shrugged. 'Needlework,' she said. 'Songs, and how to write the different modes of poetry. I did an entire tapestry once of Shamilfar and Syriandis - they're famous lovers - but it nearly drove me crazy and I never did another. Dancing, and playing the harp and dulcimer. Something about the major parts of the Realm and a little history. I hated history,' she admitted, shamefaced.

'Most people do,' Gil said comfortingly.

'You don't.' Aide's slim, well-kept hands traced the curve of the leather cover's embossing.

'I always was a freak that way.' Rudy's teasing nickname of 'spook' was hardly a new one.

'Well, the way you talk about it, it's as if as if it has a point,' Aide said. 'As if you're looking for something. All they ever taught us about history was these little stories that were supposed to be morally uplifting, like the one about the man

who died in a valiant rearguard action for the sake of his comrades, or the story about all those old patriarchs who let the enemy slaughter them rather than be enslaved. That kind of thing. Things that I suspect never really happened.'

The image of a stiff little boy in a powdered wig confessing to his father about who axed the cherry tree floated through Gil's mind, and she laughed. 'Maybe.'

'But if you need someone to read to you, I'll be glad to do it.'

Gil studied Aide's face for a moment in silence. She herself had closed out the UCLA library, the way some people close out bars, far too many nights not to understand. And as for having a Queen as a research assistant - Alwir, Gil reflected, will hardly miss her. 'Sure,' she said quietly. 'Any time you can get away.'

They took over the little cubbyhole in the back of the barracks of the Guards, which Ingold had once used as his quarters. It was private, yet close to the centre of things, and, Gil noted to herself, at the opposite end of the Keep from the Royal Sector and its politics. Aide took to coming there every day, usually bringing Tir with her, to work laboriously through the ancient chronicles, while Gil scribbled notes on tablets of wood coated with beeswax that she'd found in an abandoned storeroom. In another storeroom she found a desk, spindle-legged and archaic, small enough to fit into the narrow confines of her study. She used a couple of firkins of dried apples for a seat.

Thus she entered into a period of quiet scholarship, her hours of transcribing and sorting notes alternating with long, solitary rambles through the back reaches of the Keep in search of some sign of the mysterious circular chamber Rudy had described before his departure. It was from one of these that she returned one day to find Aide sitting at her desk, studying one of the tablets in the dim light.

'Is this what you do?' the younger girl asked, touching the creamy surface with a doubtful finger. 'Is this all?*

Gil looked down over her shoulder. She habitually wrote with a silver hairpin as a stylus, in a combination of English and the runes of the Wathe. The tablet had written on it:

Swarl (?) s. of Tirwis, ss. Aldor, Bet, Urgwas -

famine, snows Pass 2, Tl Gts grsnd 4 (-) - no mtn Dk -

pop Kp 12000 + 3 stmts (Big Ring,??) buried gaenguo

(?) - Bp. Kardthe, Tracho

'Sure,' she replied cheerfully. That's from the chronicles you were reading to me yesterday. It's just a condensation - Swarl, whenever the hell he ruled Renweth, had three sons named Aldor, Bet, and Urgwas...'

'Bet's a woman's name,' Aide pointed out.

'Oh.' Gil made a notation. In the Wathe, pronouns had no gender. 'Anyhow, in the second year of his reign there was a famine, and snows heavy enough to close Sarda Pass. The population of the Keep at that time was estimated at twelve thousand, with three settlements in the valley, one of which was named the Big Ring - don't ask me why. There was no mention of the Dark in the chronicle, which isn't surprising, since we have yet to find any word of the Dark in any of these chronicles, and right around the fourth year of his reign there is a statement that the Tall Gates were garrisoned, though they might have been so for years. The Bishops during his reign were Kardthe and later a man or woman named Tracho -'

'That's the old spelling for Trago. It's a man's name.'

Thanks.' Gil made another notation. 'And in his reign they buried the gaenguo, which I meant to ask you about. Isn't gaenguo the old word for a - a lucky place, or a good place?'

'Well - not so much good as just I guess awesome would be the best word.' Aide reached out with her foot and gently rolled Tir's ball back toward him where he was playing happily on the floor. 'There were supposed to be places where certain powers

were concentrated, where people could see things far off or have visions.'

Gil considered, while Tir came crawling busily back across the crackly mat of straw and old rushes that strewed the floor. Aide bent down and let the infant catch her fingers, then lifted him to a standing position beside her knees. Tir threw back his head and crowed with delight.

'You know,' Gil said thoughtfully, 'I bet what they buried was the old Nest of the Dark.' She picked up the tablet and turned it idly over in her fingers, the touch of the wax as cold and smooth as marble. 'God knows, the place is creepy enough. But it's really sort of an opposite to a gaenguo. The atmosphere disrupts magic rather than channels it. Interesting,' she murmured.

'Interesting how?' Aide glanced curiously up at Gil, holding her son's hands in her own.

'Because it looks as if by that time they had completely disassociated the idea of the Dark from the Nests. Which is less surprising than it seems,' she went on, 'when you consider that the bonfire was the first line of defence against the Dark. Which, of course, is why we have no records at all from the Time of the Dark itself.'

Aide let Tir down, and the child crawled determinedly away in pursuit of his ball. 'How vexing,' she said, inadequately.

'Well, more than that.' Gil sat on the narrow bed of grain sacks and covered her cold feet with her cloak. 'It left everybody completely unprepared for it when it happened again. I mean, before last summer nobody had even heard of the Dark.'

'Oh, but we had,' Aide protested. 'That's what - In a way it worked against Ingold, you see. When I was a little girl, my nurse Medda used to tell me not to get out of bed and run about the house at night because the Dark Ones would eat me up. I think all nurses used to tell their children that.' Her voice

faltered - in the end it had been Medda who had been eaten up by the Dark. 'It was something you grew out of. Most little children believed in the Dark Ones. It was only their parents who didn't.'

Gil momentarily pictured the probable fate of any shabby and unlikely pilgrim who tried to convince the authorities that the bogeyman was really going to devour America. 'I'm surprised Eldor believed him,' she murmured.

'Eldor- ' Minalde paused. 'Eldor was very exceptional. And he trusted Ingold. Ingold was his tutor when he was a child.'

Gil glanced up quickly, hearing the sudden tension that choked off Aide's voice. The younger girl was looking determinedly away into the distance, fighting the film of tears that had appeared so abruptly in her eyes. Whatever her love for Rudy, Gil thought, there is a love there which can never be denied. In the strained silence which followed, Melantrys' voice could be heard, arguing with Seya about whether or not she should get rid of her cloak in a sword fight.

Then Aide forced a small rueful smile and brushed at her eyes with the back of her wrist. 'I'm sorry.'

'It's okay.'

'No,' Aide said. 'It's just that sometimes I don't understand what there was between me and - and Eldor. As if I never understood it. I thought I could make him love me if I loved him hard enough. Maybe I was just being stupid.' She wiped her eyes again. 'But it hurts, you know, when you give everything you have and the one you give it to just just looks at it and turns aside.' She glanced away again, unable to meet Gil's eyes. Gil, clumsy-tongued and unhandy with her own or anyone else's emotions, could find nothing to say.

But Aide seemed to take no offence at the silence. In fact, she seemed to find a kind of comfort in it. Tir, having reached the end of the room, came crawling back toward the girls with his usual single-minded determination, and Aide smiled as she bent

to help him stand once more. He was very much like Aide, Gil thought, watching mother and child together - small-boned and compact, with her wide morning-glory-blue eyes. Just as well, she added to herself, that there's so little of Eldor in his only child. When you're carrying on an affair with a man the Church says is a servant of Satan, it's no help to have the echo of his predecessor before your eyes every time you turn around.

Aide looked up suddenly, as if deliberately putting aside the pain and confusion of that first, hopeless love. 'So where were you?' she asked Gil. The Guards said you'd left right after breakfast.'

'Oh.' Gil shrugged. 'Exploring, looking for something, really... You've never run across any mention anywhere of a - a kind of observation room in the Keep, have you? A room with a black stone table in it, with a crystal kind of thing in the middle?'

'No.' Then Aide frowned, her black brows drawing down into two swooping wings. 'But that's funny - it sounds so familiar. A table - has it a crystal disc, set into the top of the table?'

'Yeah,' Gil said. 'It's part of the table. How did you know?*

'I don't know. I have the feeling I've seen something like that before, but - almost as if I dreamed about it, because I know I've never seen anything of the kind. That's funny,' Aide went on quietly, sitting back against the desk, her face troubled. Tir, whom she had lifted on to her knee, promptly reached for the jewelled clasp that held her hair, and she undid it and gave it to him, her dark hair falling in a river down over her shoulders and her child.

Gil propped the arm in the sling against her knees. 'Why is it funny?' she asked.

'Because - I've had that feeling a lot of times in the Keep,' Aide said in a worried voice. 'As if as if I remembered things, remembered being here before. Sometimes I'll be walking down a staircase or along a hall, and I'll have this feeling of having

been there before.'

'Like deja vu?' There was a technical term in the language of the Wathe for that - a circumstance which Gil found interesting.

'Not entirely.'

'Like the inherited memories that are passed on from parent to child in certain families?' Gil asked quietly. 'You did tell me your House was a collateral branch of the House of Dare.'

Aide looked over at her worriedly in the gloomy yellowish lamplight. 'But the memories only pass from father to son,' she said softly. 'And Eldor told me once that his memories of other lives were like memories of his own. Very clear, like visions. Mine are just - feelings.'

'Maybe women hold inherited memory differently,' Gil said. 'Maybe it's less concrete in women and therefore hasn't been called upon for centuries, because there was always a male heir of the House of Dare. Maybe you haven't remembered because you didn't need to.' Gil leaned forward, the grain in the sacks she sat on scrunching softly and giving off a faint musty odour into the tiny room. 'I remember a long time ago, Ingold said that Eldor's father Umar didn't have Dare's memories at all, because there was really no need - that the inherited memory will skip generations, one or three or sometimes more. But he said that they woke in Eldor because it was necessary.'

Minalde was silent, looking down at the child who played so obliviously in her lap. Her unbound hair hid her expression, but when she did speak, her voice was soft and filled with doubt. 'I don't know,' she said.

Gil stood up briskly. 'I think it's neat,' she announced.

'Do you?' Aide asked timidly.

'Hell, yes. Come on exploring with me. See what you can remember.'

As the winter deepened and the snows sealed the Vale into a

self- contained world of whiteness, Gil and Minalde conducted their own rather unsystematic exploration of the Keep of Dare. They wandered the upper reaches of the fourth and fifth levels, where Maia of Thran had established his headquarters. He greeted them amiably in his own church down near the western end, with his own armed troops about him. They explored the crowded slums that huddled around the stairheads on the fifth level, hearing nothing but the liquid southern drawl of the Penambrans in their ears, and probed the dark, empty halls that stretched beyond. Armed like Theseus with a ball of twine, they traversed miles of dark, abandoned halls that stank of mould and dry rot, with the dust of ages drifting like ground fog about their feet.

They found storerooms, chapels, and armouries filled with rusted weapons in the back halls of all levels. They found the remains of bridges that had once spanned the Aisle at the fourth and fifth levels, thin spiderwebs of cable heretofore hidden by the clustering shadows of the ceiling. They found cells stacked halfway to the ceiling with spiky mazes of piled furniture, carved in unfamiliar styles and painted with thin running lines of hearts and diamonds picked out in golf leaf. They passed locked cells scurrying with rats, food stores cached by unknown speculators. They discovered things they did not understand mouldering parchments overwritten in debased and unreadable bookhand, or what looked like puzzling little white polyhedrons made of milky glass, three-quarters the size of Gil's fist, their function unknown and unguessable.

'You should let Alwir know about the bundle of parchments we found,' Gil remarked at one point as they retraced their steps back from a remote corner of the fifth level. The puddle of yellow lamplight wavered around their feet. The air up here was warmer, the crowding walls of the empty warrens of cells pressing down on the girls in silence. Grotesque shadows lumbered along the wall, bending around the flame like pteranodon moths about a diminutive candle. Gil felt wryly envious of Rudy and Ingold's blithe, unthinking ability to summon light. Damn wizards probably never gave it a second

thought.

'I will,' Minalde agreed, holding the lamp up for better visibility. 'He and Bishop Govannin are already quarrelling about writing materials. Alwir wants to make a census of the Keep.'

'He should. And he should be keeping his own chronicles.'

'I know.' Aide had imbibed enough of Gil's historical sense to realize that the Church accounts of certain events differed radically from secular records. 'But because there's almost nothing to write on, nobody's keeping any kind of chronicles at all.'

'Great,' Gil said. 'So when in three thousand years all this happens again, everybody's going to be in as rotten a shape as we are now.'

'Oh, no!' Aide protested. 'It couldn't - I mean -'

Gil raised her eyebrows and paused in a shadowy doorway. 'Like hell it couldn't. This could all be part of a regular cycle. We don't know why the Dark came before or how many times it has happened. We know they have herds of some kind below the ground; we know they're taking prisoners. Are the herds descended from prisoners they took three thousand years ago? Did people drive them back underground, or did they just go away of their own accord?'

'But why would they?' Aide cried, much distressed.

'Beats the hell out of me.' Gil paused, catching a faceted glimpse of something in a deserted doorway. She picked up another one of those little white glass polyhedrons and turned its uncommunicative shape thoughtfully in her good hand. 'But that's what we've got to find out, Aide. We've got to get a handle on this somehow - and right now the Keep and the records are the only starting places I can think of.' She shrugged. 'Maybe we're wasting our time, and the Archmage will have all the answers when he comes back here with Rudy

and Ingold. And then again, maybe he won't.'

They continued on down the corridor, Gil caching the polyhedron in her sling for further investigation later. Echoes whispered at their passing, mocking footfall and shadow and breath. But the Keep hid its secrets well, furled tightly within the spiral and counterspiral of the winding halls, or revealed them in enigmatic or incomprehensible ways.

Early in their endeavours, they decided to ask Bektis about the observation room with its crystal table, on the off chance that his lore might have preserved some clue to its whereabouts.

The Court Wizard of the House of Dare, however, had little time to spend on the games of girls. He looked up with a frown as they came quietly into his room, a large cell tucked away in the warren of the Royal Sector. The light of the bluish witchfire that burned above his head shone on his high, bald pate and the bridge of his proud, hooked nose. Dutifully, he made a stiff little bow. 'All my pardons, my lady,' he said in his rather light, mellifluous voice. 'In such a gown as that, one might easily take you for a commoner.' Rigid disapproval seemed to have been rammed like a poker up his backbone.

Still he listened to Gil's description of what they sought, nodding his head wisely with his usual expression of grave thoughtfulness, which Gil suspected uncharitably that he practised daily before a mirror. As she spoke, Gil looked around the room, noting the few black-bound books lining the shelves in the little sitting-room area at the far end of the cell, and the richness of the single chest and carved bedstead. Unlike the table in her own minuscule study, the bedstead was newish, and the latest style current in Gae at the time of the coming of the Dark. It had clearly been brought down from Karst in pieces and reassembled, rather than scrounged from the old storerooms at the Keep. What sympathy she had once cherished for Lord Alwir's transport problems faded. He couldn't have been doing too badly if he could afford to cart along his Court Conjurer's bedroom set. In the cool brightness of the witchlight, Bektis' sleeves twinkled with scarlet embroidery, stitched into a pattern

Gil recognized as the signs of the Zodiac. She picked out her own symbol, the tailed M of Virgo, before it occurred to her that this was yet another unexplained transfer, in one direction or the other, across the Void.

Bektis coughed solemnly. 'The men of the ancient realms, my lady,' he intoned, 'had powers far exceeding our ken. Very little is known of them, or of their works.' Aide broke in hesitantly. 'My lady Bishop says that the people of the Times Before were evil and practised abominations.'

A gleam of spite flickered in the old man's dark eyes. 'So she says of all things of which she does not approve. In those times wizardry was a part of the life of the Realm, rather than a thing to be tampered with at risk. There were more wizards then, and their powers were much greater. Even in our own memory, my lady, wizardry has not been anathema, for did there not used to be citadels of wizardry, not only at Quo but in Penambra and in Gae itself, on the very spot where the Palace now stands? 'Did there?' Gil asked curiously. The dark eyes slid sideways at her. 'Indeed there did, Gil-Shalos. We had respect then, in the great days of wizardry; it was wizardry that helped to build the Realm. But the Church drove us out, playing upon the sentiments of the ignorant; and one by one, those citadels closed, and such wizards as were left them took to the road. It was centuries ago,' he continued, his words soft and light but suddenly fraught with impotent malice, 'but we do not forget.'

Gil shifted her arm uncomfortably in its grubby sling. 'And your learning preserves nothing of their deeds?"

'Nor does anyone's, my lady.' The old man looked down, his voice turned smooth again. The Archmage Lohiro made a study of some of the works of the Times Before, but even his knowledge is fragmentary.'

Probably because he didn't have a mechanized world-view to start with, Gil thought, rising from her chair. She caught Aide's eyes and signalled her away, and they left the Court Wizard carefully pestling pearls to mix with hogwort and fennel as a

charm against indigestion, the blue witchlight falling over the spiderlike movement of his hands.

They searched, not only through the dark halls of the Keep itself but, in Gil's patient, scholarly fashion, through all the ancient records they could lay their hands on. But matters that were of interest to contemporary chroniclers were not always the things that historians sought. Gil found herself wandering through a second maze of trivial information regarding the love lives of vanished monarchs, petty power duels with long-dead prelates, accounts of famines and crop failures, and how high the snow stood in Sarda Pass. Often her efforts took on a strangely surreal quality, as if she wandered back and forth through time as well as space, crossing and recrossing the myriad layerings of the universe on some curious quest whose meaning she only vaguely understood.

It was in this that she longed more than anything else for Ingold. She felt herself at sea, wrestling with facts and languages and concepts she barely comprehended. Aide's help was invaluable, but her breeding had been upperclass and her education orthodox; there was much about the history of the Church, the Realm, and wizardry that she simply did not know. As Gil patiently decoded the masses of filthy and overwritten palimpsests in her tiny study far into the watches of the night, she missed the old man's presence, if not for actual help, at least for moral support or for his company. At times when the voices of the deep-night watch could be heard in the distant corridors and weariness made the unfamiliar words swim before her eyes in the smutty yellow gleam of the lamp, she'd prop her injured arm on the slanted surface of the desk and wonder how she'd got where she was. How in a matter of six weeks or so had she gone from the lands of sunlight and blue jeans to a freezing and peril-circled citadel in the midst of alien mountains, digging through unreadable parchments for mention of something he had asked her to find? And she wondered if he watched her in that little magic crystal of his, or if he cared.

Between the two mazes of present and past lay a third maze, far less comprehensible but, she sensed, far more important than

the other two. It was a maze of memory, as elusive as a whiff of smoke or the faint sounds one might think one heard in the night - a maze only barely to be glimpsed by that inward remembering look in Minalde's eyes.

'That's interesting,' Gil said as she and Minalde emerged from the back entrance of a boarded-up cell crammed to the ceiling with old furniture and dozens of those useless, enigmatic white polyhedrons. Clouds of dust clung to their clothes; Aide sneezed in it, fanning it away from her face. Both of them were grey with it, like urchins playing in the construction yards. 'From the furniture we found in there, it looks as if this area was growing increasingly crowded at the same time the fifth level was being abandoned.'

'That doesn't make sense,' Aide said, puzzled, trying to wipe the dust from her arms and only succeeding in putting huge, blackish smudges on her white sleeves. 'If they were having such a space problem, why not move on to the fifth level?'

Gil shrugged and marked another arrow on the wall. 'It takes forever to get up and back there,' she said. The second level was just more popular. In cities of my homeland, people will live in worse crowding than this, just to be in a fashionable part of town.' She looked around. 'So where the hell are we?'

Aide held the lamp up high. A short neck of corridor dead-ended twenty feet away in a blank wall - by its composition, part of the Keep's original design. Shadows shifted around them with the movement of the lamp, and Gil shivered a little in the draught.

A warmer breath of air from somewhere nearby brought the voices of monks chanting. 'Close to the Royal Sector, I think,' she answered her own question. There should be a stair...'

'No, Gil, wait a minute.' Aide stood very still, pale and small in the impenetrable shadows. 'I know this place, I'm positive. I've been here before.' Gil was silent, watching the struggle on her face. Aide groped helplessly for a moment at the memory, then shook her head in despair. 'I can't bring it back,' she

whispered. 'But it's so close. I feel I've passed this way before, so many times. It was part of my life, going to do something... something I did so often I could go there with my eyes closed.'

Then close your eyes,' Gil suggested softly, 'and go there.'

Aide handed her the lamp and stood, eyes closed, with the darkness hemming her in. She took a hesitant step and another. Then abruptly she changed her direction, her stride lengthening smoothly as her thin blue and purple skirts brushed the ancient dust of the floor. For a moment Gil thought she was going to walk slap into the wall. But the angle thrown by shadow and lamplight was deceiving; just as Gil cried, 'Whoa! Watch it!' the shadow seemed to swallow Aide. She tripped and cursed in a mild and ladylike fashion. Coming to her side, Gil saw that, instead of the wall, she had met with a short flight of black steps that mounted to a dark door with a rusted and broken lock.

'Is this it?'

Gil looked up from angling the lamp, trying to see down into the cloudy crystal inset into the table. 'Of course,' she said. This is the observation room Rudy found the night before he left; this is what Ingold asked me to look for. And you found it.' She hesitated, seeing the puzzled doubt still on Aide's face. 'Isn't it what you were looking for?

Aide walked slowly along the workbench against the wall, running idle fingers over its smooth edge. She picked up a white polyhedron that perched there, the reflected lucency of the lamp making it glow faintly pink where her fingers touched. 'No,' she said quietly.

'Don't you recognize this?' Gil swivelled around, sitting on the edge of the dark table.

Aide looked up from the small faceted thing she was examining, her dusty hair hanging in tendrils around her face. 'Oh, yes,' she said matter-of-factly. 'But I have the impression of having walked through here on my way to -somewhere else.'

Gil glanced around the room. There was only the single door. Their eyes met again, and Aide shook her head helplessly. The silence lengthened between them, and Gil shivered with the sudden sense of coming close to the unknown. In that silence she became slowly conscious of something else, a faint, barely perceptible humming or throbbing that seemed to come from the dark stone of the walls themselves. Gil frowned as it gradually worked its way into her perceptions. It was familiar, as familiar to her as the beating of her own heart - something she ought to recognize, but had not heard since...

... When? Puzzled, she rose and went to the wall opposite the door, where the soft thrumming seemed the loudest. She reached across the narrow workbench to place her fingers against the stone.

'Oh, my God,' she whispered as the realization struck her. Vistas of possibility for which she had been unprepared seemed to gape like chasms before her startled feet.

Aide saw the look in her eyes, snatched up the lamp, and came hastily to her side. 'What is it?

Gil turned her head to look at Aide, the chill grey of her eyes kindled almost to blue in the wavery glow. 'Feel the wall,' she whispered.

Aide obeyed, hesitating, and at once a frown of puzzlement that was half-fear and half-recognition touched her brow. 'I - I don't understand.'

Gil's voice was barely a breath, as if she feared to drown out that almost unheard sound. 'It's machinery.'

The trapdoor was not hidden, as Gil had feared it would be. It was merely set out of the way. The workbench, built centuries later, had been laid right across it. The hollow tube, like a wormhole through the darkness of the Keep's black wall, seemed to go up forever.

As she emerged at last into the vast space of warmth, dust,

and the soft, steady throbbing of metal and air, it was borne upon Gil that she had, indeed, crossed a threshold and entered realms unknown to anyone else in this world -including, she was positive, Ingold himself. It came to her that the Keep of Dare, far from being a simple stronghold, was in itself a riddle, as black and impenetrable as the Dark.

She reached down the shaft and took the lamp that Aide carried. As she held up that single point of brightness, dark shapes limned themselves from the blackness around her-monstrous pipes, oily and black and shining, coils of twisting cable strung like vines from the low ceiling, and the gaping maws of enormous ducts that breathed warm air like the nostrils of some inconceivable beast. The noise, though not loud, drummed into her bones like the beat of a massive heart.

Aide emerged from the ladder shaft and stared around at the labyrinthine vista, barely to be seen in its cloak of shadows, with huge and frightened eyes. Gil suddenly realized that she was dealing with someone who had been brought up at approximately a fourteenth-century level of technology - and of the nobility, at that. A few minutes ago, she had felt no difference between them, as if they were contemporaries. Now the gulf of time and culture yawned like a canyon. She herself, theoretically acquainted with Boulder Dam and the wonders of Detroit, was silent before that endless progression of lifts and screws and pipes whose shapes the lamplight only hinted at. To Aide it must be like another world. 'What is it? Aide whispered. 'Where are we?'

'At a guess,' Gil replied in tones equally soft, as if she feared to break the silence that lay on those stygian metal jungles, 'I'd say we're at the top of the Keep, up above the fifth level. That ladder in the shaft seemed to go on forever. And as for what it is...' She held up the lamp and sniffed at the faint oily smell of the place. There was no dust here, she noticed, and no rats. Only darkness and the soft, steady beating of the Keep's secret heart. 'It's got to be the pumps.' 'The what?'

Gil stood up and walked along the perimeter of the little

clearing by the trapdoor. The light in her hand played over sleek, shining surfaces, and the warm drafts stirred her coarse, straggling hair. 'Pumps to circulate air and water,' she said thoughtfully. 'I knew they had to exist somewhere.'

'Why?' Aide asked, puzzled.

'As I said, the air and water don't move themselves.' She stopped and bent down to pick up another white glass polyhedron from where it lay half-hidden in the shadows of a braided mass of coils as big around as her waist.

'But why wasn't any of this mentioned in the records?' Aide asked, from her perch on the edge of the trapdoor. 'That, as a very great man of my own world would say, is the sixty-four-dollar question.' Gil slipped around a massive pipe of smooth, black, uncorrupted metal and passed her hand across the mouth of a huge duct. Deep within its shadows she could see a grid of fine-mesh wire. Evidently she wasn't the only person who'd worried about the Dark Ones getting into the air conditioning. 'And here's another one. What's the power source?' The what?'

'The power source, the - what makes it all move.' 'Maybe it just moves by itself because it is its nature to move.' Which, Gil reminded herself, was a perfectly rational explanation, given a medieval view of the universe.

'Nothing lower than the moon does that,' she explained, falling back on Aristotle and sublunary physics. 'Every thing else has to have something to cause it to move.'

'Oh,' Aide said, accepting this. The unseen walls picked up the murmur of their voices and repeated them over and over again, behind the sonorous whooshing of the pipes. 'Aide, do you realize...' Gil turned back, grubby and dusty in her black uniform, the lamplight glowing across her face. There could be other places in the Keep like this, other rooms, laboratories, defences, anything! Hidden away and forgotten. If we could find them... God, I wish Ingold were here. He'd be able to help us.'

Aide looked up abruptly. 'Yes,' she said. 'Yes, he would. Because - Gil, listen, tell me if this makes sense. Could the - the power source be magic?'

Gil paused, thinking about it, then nodded. 'It must be.' After three thousand years, she thought, // was an easier solution than a hidden nuclear reactor.

'Because that would explain why none of this was mentioned in the records.' Aide leaned forward, her dark braids falling over her shoulders, her eyes wide and, Gil thought, a little frightened. 'You say the Keep was built by - by wizards who were also engineers. But the Scriptures of the Church date from long before the Time of the Dark. The Church was very powerful even then.' Her voice was low and intense. 'It's so easy to fear wizards, Gil. If they held the secret of the Keep's building - once the secret was lost, there would be no finding it again. And that could happen so easily. A handful of people... If something -something happened to them - before they could train their successors -'

Gil was silent, remembering Ingold before the spell-woven doors of the Keep and the fanatic hatred in Govannin's serpent eyes.

Aide looked up, the lamplight shining in her eyes. 'I was raised all my life to distrust them and to fear them,' she went on. 'So I know how people feel about them. I know Rudy has power, Gil, but still I'm afraid for him. And he's out there somewhere, I don't know where. I love him, Gil,' she said quietly. 'It may be unlawful and it may be foolish and hopeless and all the rest of it, but I can't help it. There used to be a saying: A wizard's wife is a widow. I always thought it was because they were excommunicates.' She put her feet on the descending rungs of the long ladder back to the second level. Her eyes met Gil's. 'Now I see what it does mean. Any woman who falls in love with a wizard is only asking for heartache.'

Gil turned her face away, blinded by a sudden flood of self-realization and tears. 'You're telling me, sweetheart,' she

muttered. Aide, who had already started her descent, looked up. 'What?' 'Nothing,' Gil lied.