Darwath 1 - The Time Of The Dark (31 page)

Ingold saw her looking and paused, flattened to the rock behind him. “Come up,” he called down to her, his voice echoing faintly among the rocks. “There's a trail.”

What the hell, Gil sighed. You only die once.

Gil had never liked heights. Scrambling over the treacherous footing, she envied the wizard his six-foot staff, for in places the ledges narrowed to inches, and in others cascades of vines sprawled over the trail and masked any hint of the footing underneath. She found herself backtracking a dozen times, scrupulously avoiding looking up or down or anywhere but at her own scratched hands when a promising ledge petered out or a slit between two huge rock faces became too narrow to be passed, or too choked with rotting foliage that could house any number of creatures less Lovecraftian, but certainly as deadly, as the Dark. She wondered if there were rattlesnakes in this world—or, for that matter, poisonous snakes without rattles.

She finally caught up with him in the mouth of a dark slit in the rocks, after a precipitous scramble around the convex face of a boulder on a ledge over a nightmare maw of tangled thorn and broken stone. She was sweating and gasping in the afternoon heat and fighting for balance on the sandy, crumbling ground. The shift of the sun over the backbone of the Rampart
Range had thrown the chasm into deep shadow. Ingold was barely visible but for the pale blur of face and beard and the bright glitter of his eyes.

“Very good, my dear,” he greeted her mildly. “We shall make a mountain climber of you yet.”

“The hell you will,” she gasped, and looked back down behind her. If there was any kind of trail she'd come up, she was damned if she could see it now.

“We should be able to follow this chasm up toward the top of that ridge there,” he went on, pointing. “Once over the ridge, we should be nearly to the snow line and, I believe, out of reach of the Dark for the time being. With luck, we should be able to pick up another trail on the other side that will lead us down to the Vale of Renweth, and hence to the Keep of Dare.”

Gil calculated the distance as well as she could in the deceptive clarity of the mountain air. They seemed to have climbed above the drifting haze of the valley; things seemed blindingly clear up here, and the slanting shadows altered the apparent positions of peak and ridge. “I don't think we'll make it by dark,” she stated doubtfully.

“Oh, I don't either,” Ingold agreed. “But we can hardly spend the night in the valley.”

Gil sighed resignedly. “You have a point there.”

The wizard jabbed his staff cautiously at the loose rock hiding the foot of the trail, and a boulder curtsied perilously, sending a little stream of gravel and sand down across their feet and over the edge of the trail. Muttering to himself about the advisability of taking along a rope next time, coupled with imprecations against the unseen Raiders in the valley below, he began to scout cautiously for an alternate route. While he did so, Gil turned to look back over the cliff, appalled anew at the suicidal ascent she'd just made. Her gaze wandered to the valley below them and was held there by a queer, cold feeling of shock.

“Ingold,” she called quietly. “Come and look at this.”

Something in the note of her voice brought him scrambling and sliding to her side. “What is it?”

She pointed. “Look. Look out there. What do you see?”

Viewed from above and behind, the land wore a different aspect, the angle of the sunlight westering on the mountains changing the perspective of that darkness-haunted place. From here the symmetry was obvious, the nuclei of the long-overgrown woods lying in some kind of pattern whose geometry was just beyond the range of human comprehension, the stream beds following courses that held the echoes of perverted regularity. The clinging mats of the ubiquitous vines took on a curious appearance from this angle, the shifts in their color and thickness disquietingly suggestive. Almost directly below them the great rectangle of pavement lay, and its position relative to the anomalous mounds of black stone that thrust through the foliage became suddenly, shockingly, clear to a woman trained in the rudiments of archaeology.

Ingold frowned, staring down at the distorted counterpane beneath them. “It's almost—almost as if there were a city here at one time. But there never was, not in human history.” His eye and finger traced the mathematical obscenity of a curved shadow in the weeds, the queerly obtuse angles faintly visible in the half-hinted relationships between stream and stone. “What causes that? It's as if the vines grow thinner in places… ”

“Buried foundations,” Gil softly replied. “From the looks of it, foundations so deeply buried that they leave barely a trace. The trees are more stunted on that line because their roots cannot go so deep. Look, see the line of that stream? And yet—” She paused, confused. “It looks so planned, so regular, but it's not like any city I've ever seen. There's a layout—you can see that in the angle of the sunlight—but the layout's all wrong.”

“Of course,” the wizard said mildly. “There are no streets.”

Their eyes met. The meaning of this came to her slowly, like a whisper from incomprehensible gulfs of time.

“Come,” Ingold said. “This is no place for us to remain once the sun has gone in.”

Once they were out of the valley, the winds began, searingly cold, ripping at their grip on the precarious handholds with active malice. At times they were far over the timberline, scrambling perilously over goat trails slippery with old snow, at others working their way through knots of vegetation, or clinging for support to the wind-flayed roots of twisted acrobat trees, trusting to their strength over a sightless abyss. Gil and Ingold moved through a world whose only elements were cold, rock, wind, and the distant roaring of water, where they could not have stopped if they had wanted to, for there was nowhere to rest. Without the threads of witchlight Ingold had thrown to outline the ledges, Gil was certain they would not have survived the climb; even so, looking back on it later, she felt only a land of dull astonishment that she had done it at all.

They slept, finally, in the crevices of the bare rock slopes, locked together for warmth; it was the first sleep Gil had had in close to forty hours. In the deeps of the night she felt the weather change and, in her dreams, smelled the far-off threat of snow.

In the morning the going was easier, not much worse than a rough backpacking trip. By noon Ingold found the ghost of a trail-head and followed it down the sheer, tree-covered western face of the Rampart
Range, to reach, by mid-afternoon, the cold, winding Vale of Renweth.

Gil shaded her eyes and squinted into the long, bright distance. “What the hell?” The cold winds that snaked down the valley tore her breath away in rags and rippled in patterns like swift-pouring water over the knee-deep fjord of colorless grass. “What is it?”

“It's the Keep of Dare.” Ingold smiled, folding his arms to keep warm and shivering slightly in spite of it. “What did you expect?”

Gil wasn't sure what she'd expected. Something smaller, anyway. Something more medieval. Not that trapezoidal monolith of black stone that rose, bone of the mountain's bone, on the great knoll at the foot of those distant dark-browed cliffs. Its roof was taller than the pine trees that grew on the ridge behind. Thin, powdery snow blew in clouds from the Keep's flat roof, but none lodged anywhere on its sides, which were as bare and smooth as unflawed glass.

“Who the hell built that thing?” Gil whispered, awed. “How big is it?” She could believe, now, that in it humankind had withstood the Dark. The might of the Dark Ones, which could shatter stone and iron, would find this fortress impregnable. With a sense of surprise, she realized that there was, after all, a place of refuge in this dark and cold and terrible world into which she had been unwillingly cast.

“Dare of Renweth built it,” Ingold's voice said at her side, “using the last of the technology and power of the ancient Realms, power which is far beyond our means today. In it he sheltered those of his people who survived the first onslaught of the Dark, and from it he and his line ruled this valley and Sarda Pass and all that was left of an empire whose name, bounds, and nature have been utterly lost to human memory. As to how big it is—” He gazed into the distance, surveying the black monolith that guarded the twisting expanses of the valley beyond. “It is small. It can hold some eight thousand souls in some sort of comfort, and the valley can be cultivated to support almost twice that many. The records no longer exist, if they ever existed, as to how many it has actually sheltered at any one time.”

As they waded toward it through the champagne grass of the Vale, the thing seemed to grow in size, shadowless in the cold overcast of the day. Gil looked around her at the Vale as well, a walled series of upland meadows scattered with stands of aspen, birch, and cottonwood, their leaves glittering restlessly in the winds that whined down from the peaks above. There was a hard, bright beauty to the place, first heartland of the Realm and last, cradle and grave. Her bones ached, even muscles trained to the endurance of swordsmanship burning with the lingering effects of that tortuous climb.

As a place to be cooped up in for years on end, she thought, it isn't bad. Still, familiar as she had been with petty neighborhood bitchery, she had recognized its seeds already in the gossip that even a twenty-four-hour state of crisis hadn't eliminated from the refugee train, and she saw where it would lead—a small town, cramped in an impenetrable fort with the same people, bound together year in and year out, and nowhere to go.

“The Keep has stood a long time,” Ingold said as they came at last to the roadway that led up past the Keep toward Sarda
Pass, the same road where, miles below, Alwir led his people along in their quest for semi-mythical safety. “Yet the Runes of Power are still on the Keep doors, marked there by the wizards who helped in the building of the place—Yad on the left, and Pern on the right, the Runes of Guarding and Law. Only a wizard can see them, like a gleaming tracery of silver in the shadows. But after all this time, the spells of the builders still hold power.”

Gil turned her eyes from the towering masses of the mountains that rose, wall on wall of black, tree-enshrouded gorges cut with the distinct, shallow notch of Sarda
Pass, to view again the looming shadow of the Keep. She could see nothing of the Runes, only great panels of iron, hinged and strapped in steel, and untouched for centuries.

The great gates stood open. Waiting in their shade were the assembled members of the small garrison Eldor had sent down years before to ready the place as an eventual refuge, when Ingold had first spoken of the possibility of the rising of the Dark. The captain of the garrison, a petite blonde woman with the meanest eyes Gil had ever seen, greeted Ingold with deference and seemed unsurprised at the news that Gae had fallen and its refugees were but a few days off.

“I feared it,” she said, looking up at the wizard, her gloved fingers idling on the hilt of her sword. “We've had no messages from anywhere in over a week, and my boys report seeing the Dark Ones drifting along the head of the valley almost every night.” She pursed her lips into a wry expression. “I'm only glad so many as you say got clear. I remember, when I was in Gae, people were laughing at you in the streets about your warnings, calling you an alarmist crackpot and making up little songs.”

Gil made a noise of indignation in her throat, but Ingold laughed. “I remember that. All my life I wanted to be immortalized in ballads, but the poetry of the things was so bad that they were completely unmemorable.”

“And,” the captain said cynically, “most of the people who made them up are dead.”

Ingold sighed. “I'd rather they were still alive to go on singing about what a fool I am, every day of my life,” he said. “We'll be here the night. Can you feed us?”

The captain shrugged. “Sure. We have stock… ” She gestured to mazes of cottonwood-pole corrals that stretched out beyond the knoll, where a gaggle of horses and half a dozen milk cows stood rubbing their chins on the top rail of the fences, staring at the strangers with mild, stupid eyes. “We even have a still over in the grove there; some of the boys brew Blue Ruin out of gaddin bark and potatoes.”

Ingold shuddered delicately. “At tunes I see Alwir's point about the horrors of uncivilized existence.” And he followed her up the worn steps to the gates.

“By the way,” the captain said as the other warriors of the garrison grouped up behind them, “we have Keep Law here.”

Ingold nodded. “I understand.”

They entered the Keep of Dare, and Gil was struck silent with awe.

Outside, the Keep had been intimidating enough. Inside, it was crushing, frightening, dark, monstrous, and unbelievably huge; the footfalls of the Guards echoed in its giant sounding-chamber like the far-off drip of distant water, the torches they bore dwindling to fireflies. The monstrous architecture with its blending of naked planes had nothing to do with the gothic liveliness of Karst—nothing to do with human scale at all. The technology that had wrought this place out of stone and air was clearly far beyond anything else in this world or, Gil guessed, in her own. She gazed down the length of that endless central cavern, where the small bobbing candles of torchlight were reflected in the smooth black of the water channels in the floor, and shivered at the cold, the size, and the emptiness.

“How was this place built?” she whispered, and the chamber picked up her voice and sighed her words to every corner of that towering hall. “What a shame it couldn't have been the chief architect's memory that got passed on, as well as the Kings”."

“It is,” Ingold said, his voice, too, ringing family in the unseen vaults of the ceiling. “But heritable memory is not governed by choice—indeed, we have no idea what does govern it.” He moved like a shadow at Gil's side, following the diminishing torches. Gazing around her, Gil could see, as far as the torchlight reached, that the towering walls of the central hall were honeycombed with dark little doorways, rank on rank of them, joined sometimes by stone balconies, sometimes by rickety catwalks that threaded the wall like the webs of drunken or insane spiders. Those dark little doors admitted onto a maze of cells, stairways, and corridors, whose haphazard windings were as dark as the labyrinths below the earth.