Darwath 1 - The Time Of The Dark (20 page)

The Guards' Court at the back of the town had once been the stableyard of some great villa. To Gil's trained eye, the overly intricate coats of arms over gatehouse and window-embrasure whispered of new money and the vast inferiority complex of the parvenu. In the cold afternoon light, most of the court was visible from where she lay on a scratchy bed of hay and borrowed cloaks, aching with weariness and the aftermath of pain, looking out from the dim blue shadows of the makeshift barracks.

Daylight wasn't kind to the place. The lean-to that ran around three sides of the stone courtyard wall had been roughly converted into barracks, and the mail, weapons, and bedrolls of some seventy Guards were heaped haphazardly among the bales of fodder. The mud in the center of the court was slippery and rank. In a corner by a fountain, someone was cooking oatmeal, and the drift of smoke on the wind cut at Gil's eyes. In the mucky space of open ground, thirty or so Guards were engaged in practice, muddy to the eyebrows.

But they were good. Even to Gil's inexperienced eye, their quickness and balance were obvious; they were professional warriors, an elite corps. Lying here, as she had lain most of the day, she had seen them come in from duty; she knew that all of them had fought last night and, like her, bore the wounds of it. She had noticed in the confusion of last night that very few of the dead were Guards, and now she saw why; the speed, stamina, and unthinking reactions were trained into them until the downward slash-duck-parry motion of attack and defense was as automatic as jerking a burned finger from flame. They trained with split wood blades like the Japanese shinai, weapons that would neither cut nor maim but which left appalling bruises—nobody was armored and there wasn't a shield in the place. Gil watched them with an awe that came from the glimmerings of understanding.

“What do you think?” a cool voice asked. Looking up, she saw the Icefalcon standing beside her, indistinct in the murky shade.

“About that?” She gestured toward the moving figures and the distant clacking of wooden blade on blade. He nodded, pale eyes aloof. “You need it, don't you, to be perfect,” she said, watching the quick grace of the warriors that was almost a dance. “And that's what it is. Perfect.”

The Icefalcon shrugged, but his eyes had a speculative gleam in their silvery depths. “If you have only one blow,” he remarked, “it had better be perfect. How's your arm?”

She shook her head wearily, not wanting to think about the pain. “It was stupid,” she said. The bandages showed a kind of grubby brown through the torn, ruined sleeve of the shirt that had been part of a corpse's gown. “I was tired; it shouldn't have happened.”

The tall young man leaned against the wall and hooked his thumbs in his swordbelt in a gesture common to the Guards. “You didn't do badly,” he told her. “You have a knack, a talent that way. I personally didn't think you'd make it past the first fight. Novices don't. You have the instinct to kill.”

“What?” she exclaimed, more startled than horrified, though on reflection she supposed she should have been more horrified than she was.

“I mean it,” the Icefalcon said in that colorless, breathy voice. “Among my people that is a compliment. To kill is to survive the fight. To kill is to want very much to live.” He glanced out into the gray afternoon, his long, thin hands folding over his propped knee. “In the Realm they consider that such ideas are crazy. Perhaps your people do, too. So they say that the Guards are crazy; and by their lights, perhaps they are right.”

Perhaps, Gil thought. Perhaps.

It would look that way from the outside, certainly. That striving, that need, was seldom understood, any more than Rudy had understood why she would turn away from her home and family for the sake of the terrible and abstract joys of scholarship. In its way, it was the same kind of craziness.

A little, bald-headed man was moving through the mazes of the combatants, watching everything with beady, elfbright brown eyes. He stopped just behind Seya, scratching his close-clipped brown beard and observing her efforts against another Guard of about her size and weight. She cut and parried; as she moved forward for another blow, he stepped in lightly and hooked both her legs from under her, dumping her unceremoniously in the mud. “Stronger stance,” he cautioned her, then turned and walked away. Seya climbed slowly to her feet, wiped the goop from her face, and went back to her bout.

“There are very few,” the Icefalcon's soft voice went on, “who understand this. Very few who have this instinct for life, this understanding for the fire of perfection. Perhaps that is why there have always been very few Guards.” He glanced down at her, the light shifting across the narrow bones of his face. “Would you be a Guard?”

Gil felt the slow flush of blood rise to her face and the quickening of her pulse. She waited a long time before she answered him. “You mean, stay here and be a Guard?”

“We are very short of Guards.”

She was silent again, though a kind of eager tension wired its way into her muscles and a confusion into her heart. She watched the little, bearded, bald man in the square step unconcernedly between swinging blades to double up a tall Guard with a blow in mid-stroke, step lightly back with almost preternatural timing, and go on to correct his next victim. Finally she said, “I can't.”

“Indeed,” was all the Icefalcon said.

“I'm going back. To my own land.”

He looked down at her and raised one colorless brow.

“I'm sorry,” she muttered.

“Gnift will also be sorry, to hear that,” the Icefalcon said.

“Gnift?”

He gestured toward the bald man in the square. “He is the instructor of the Guards. He watched you in the vaults at Gae and last night. He says you could be good.”

She shook her head. “If I stayed,” she said, “it would only be a matter of time until I died.”

“It is always,” the Icefalcon remarked, “only a matter of time. But you are right.” He looked up as another shadow loomed beneath the low, shingled roof.

“Hey, Gil.” Rudy took a seat on the hay bale beside her. “They said you were hurt. Are you okay?”

She shrugged, the movement making her wince in spite of herself. “I'll live.” In the dimness Rudy looked shabby and seedy, his painted jacket a ruin of mud and charred slime, his long hair grubby with sweat, though he'd managed to come up with a razor from someplace and was no longer as unshaven as he'd been yesterday. Still, she reflected, she couldn't look much better.

“Their council meeting's broken up,” he informed her, scanning the wet, dreary court before him with interested eyes. “I figure Ingold should be around someplace, and it's high time we talked to him about going back.”

Across the court a small group emerged from the shadows of the tall gatehouse. Alwir, Govannin of Gae, Janus of the Guards, and the big, scarred landchief someone had said was Tomec Tirkenson, landchief of Gettlesand in the southwest. The Chancellor's cloak made a great bloody smear of crimson against the grayness of the murky day, and his rich voice carried clearly to the three in the shadows of the barracks: “… woman will believe anything, rather than that she left her own child to die. I am not saying that he did substitute another child for the Prince, if the Prince were killed by the Dark—only that he could have done so easily.”

“To what end?” the Bishop asked, in that voice like the bones of some animal, bleached by desert sun. Under the white of the bandage, Janus' face reddened. Even at that distance, Gil could catch the dangerous gleam in that rufous bear-man's eyes.

Alwir shrugged. “What end indeed?” he said casually. “But the man who saved the Prince would have far greater prestige than the man who failed to save him, especially since it is becoming obvious that his magic has little effect upon the Dark. A Queen's gratitude can go far in establishing a man's position in a new government. Counselor of the Realm is quite a step for a man who started life as a slave in Alketch.”

Anger flaring clearly in his face, Janus began to speak, but at that instant the Icefalcon, who had detached himself from the shed and made his way unhurriedly over to the group, touched the Commander's sleeve and turned his attention from what could have been a dangerous moment. They spoke quietly, Alwir and Govannin listening with mild curiosity. Gil saw the Icefalcon's long, thin hand move in her direction.

Alwir raised graceful eyebrows. “Going back?” he asked, surprised, his deep, melodious voice carrying clearly across the open court. “This is not what I have been told.”

There was no need to ask of whom they spoke. Gil felt herself grow cold with shock. She threw off the cloaks under which she lay and got to her feet, crossing the court to them stiffly, her arm throbbing at every step. Alwir saw her and waited, a look of thoughtful calculation in the cornflower depths of his eyes.

“What have you been told?” Gil asked.

The eyebrows lifted again, and the cool gaze took her in, shabby and dirty and bedraggled beside his immaculate height, wordlessly expressing regret at the type of people Ingold chose as friends. “That Ingold cannot, or will not, let you return to your own land. Surely he spoke to you of it.”

“Why not?” Rudy demanded. He had come hurrying, unnoticed, in Gil's wake.

Alwir shrugged. “Ask him. If he is still in Karst, that is—sudden arrivals and departures are his specialty. I have seen nothing of him since he left the meeting, quite some tune ago.”

“Where is he?” Gil asked quietly. It was the first time she had spoken with Alwir, the first time, in fact, that she could remember the tall Chancellor taking even a passing notice of her, though there was an uneasiness in her mind associated with him, quite apart from her suspicions about who had ordered Ingold's arrest.

“My child, I haven't the slightest idea.”

“He's been staying in the gatehouse,” landchief Tirkenson grunted, his big, grimy hand gesturing toward the narrow fortification that overspanned the court gate. “I haven't heard he's left town yet.”

Gil turned on her heel, making for the tiny door of the gatehouse stair without a word.

“Gilshalos!” Alwir's voice called her back. In spite of herself, she stopped, compelled by the command in his tone. She found she was breathing fast, as if she had been running. Wind stirred the tall man's cloak, and the blood rubies glittered on his hands. “No doubt he will have good reasons for what he does—he always does, my child. But beware of him. What he does, he does for his own purposes.”

Gil met Alwir's eyes for the first time, as if she had never before seen his face clearly, studying the proud, sensual features as if she would memorize them, the droop of the carved lips that showed his disdain for those beneath him, the arrogance in the set of the jaw, and the ruthless selfishness in the glint of the eyes. She found herself shivering with a pent-up rage, and her hands remembered their grip on the hilt of a sword. “All men have their purposes, my lord Alwir,” she said quietly. She swung about and left him, with Rudy following.

Alwir watched them go, vanishing into the black slit of the gatehouse door. He recognized Gil's hatred for what it was, but he was used to the hatred of his inferiors. He shook his head sadly and dismissed her from his mind.

Neither Gil nor Rudy spoke as they climbed the black, twisting stair. It led them to a room, hardly wider than a hallway, situated over the gate itself; warped windows of bull's-eye glass admitted only the cool whiteness of the light and blurred swimming impressions of color and shape. The place had been built as the quarters for the gate porter, but was now used for the storage of the Guards' food. Sacks of flour and oatmeal lined the walls like sandbags on a levee, alternating with wax-covered wheels of scarlet cheese. Over a low pile of such provisions at the far end of the room a blanket and a fur rug had been thrown; a small bundle of oddments, including a clean robe, a book, and a pair of knitted blue mittens, was rolled up at the foot of this crude bed. Ingold sat in the room's single chair next to the south window, as unmoving as stone. The cold white window-light made him look like a black and white photograph, etched mercilessly the deep lines of age and wear that ran back from the corners of his heavy-lidded eyes to his shaggy temples, and marked with little nicks of shadow the scars on his hands.

Gil started to speak, then saw that he was looking into a jewel that he had set down on the windowsill, staring into the gem's central facet as if seeking some image in the heart of the crystal.

He looked up at them and smiled. “Come in,” he invited.

They picked their way cautiously through the clutter of the room to the small patch of clear floor space by the wizard's bed. They found seats on sacks and firkins.

Gil said, “Alwir tells me you're not sending us back.”

Ingold sighed but did not look away from the bitter challenge in her face. “I'm afraid he's right.”

She drew in a deep breath, pain, fear, and dread twisting together within her. Crushing emotion under an inner silence that she could not afford to break, she asked quietly, “Ever?”

“Not for some months,” the wizard said.

Her breath leaked out again, the slow release of it easing nothing. “Okay.” She rose to go.

His hand closed over her wrist like a snake striking. “Sit down,” he said softly. She tried to pull her arm away, without replying, but his hand was very strong. “Please.” She turned back, cold and angry; then looking down she saw something in his blue eyes that she'd never expected to see—that he was hurt by her anger. It shook her to the heart. “Please, Gil.”

She stood apart from him for a moment, drawn back to the length of her arm. His fingers were locked around her wrist as if he feared that if he released her, he might never see her again. And maybe, Gil thought, he'd be right. She saw again the vision of her delirium: warm, bright images of some other life, another world, friends and the scholarship she had hoped to make her life, distant from her and guarded by some dark, terrible form that might have been the Dark and might have been Ingold; she saw projects, plans, research, and relationships falling into a chasm of absence, beyond her power to repair. Rage filled her like dry, silent heat.