Darwath 1 - The Time Of The Dark (37 page)

“Look,” Rudy began. “About your going to Quo… ”

But before he could finish, the muted voices outside rose to a quick babble, followed by the hasty scuffle of too many people all trying at once to get respectfully to their feet in too small a space. The ragged curtain was thrust aside, and a towering shadow blotted the infalling light. Alwir, Lord of the Keep of Dare, stepped through. At his side, dark and slender as a young apple tree newly come to blossom, was the Lady Minalde.

The Chancellor stood silent for a moment, gravely regarding the old man lying on his bed of sacks. When he spoke, his melodious voice was quiet. “They told me that you were dead.”

“Not much of an exaggeration,” Ingold said pleasantly, “but not strictly accurate, as you see.”

“You could have been,” the Chancellor said. “Without you, we might all have been, back by the river. I have come—” The words seemed to stick in his throat like dry bread. “I have come to say that I have wronged you, and to offer you my hand in friendship again.” He held out his hand, the jewels of his many rings flaming in the shadows.

Ingold stretched out a grubby, bandaged hand to accept, a king's gesture to an equal. “I only did as I promised Eldor I would,” he said. “I have taken his son and seen him to safety. My promise is fulfilled. As soon as the weather permits, I shall be leaving to seek the Hidden City of Quo.”

“Do you think, then, that it can be found?” Alwir's frown was one of troubled concern, but his eyes were calculating.

“I can't know that until I seek it. But the aid of the Council of Wizards is imperative: to your invasion, to the Keep, to all of humankind. Lohiro's silence troubles me. It has been over a month, without word from him or from any member of the Council. Yet it is impossible that they cannot know what has happened.”

“But you still think Lohiro isn't dead?”

Ingold shook his head decisively. “I would know it,” he said. “I would feel it. Even with the spells that surround the city like a ring of fire, I would know.”

Minalde spoke for the first tune, her eyes dark with concern. “What do you think has happened, then?”

Ingold shook his head and said simply, “I don't know.”

She looked down at him for a moment, hearing, as no one else in the room did, the undercurrent in his voice of helplessness and fear—not fear for the world's wizardry, but for his friends in Quo, the only people in the world to whom the old man truly belonged. She had seen him before only in his strength and command, and sudden sympathy clouded her face. She said, “You would have sought them weeks ago, but for your promise. I'm sorry.”

Ingold smiled at her. “The promise had nothing to do with it, my child.”

She stepped quickly forward and bent to kiss the top of his rough, silvery hair. “God be with you,” she whispered. She turned and fled the room, leaving lover and brother staring after her in bemused surprise.

“You seem to have made a conquest,” Alwir chuckled, though, Rudy thought, he didn't sound a hundred percent pleased about it. “But she is justified. Your service to the Realm goes beyond any payment we can possibly make.” He looked around him at the grimy, low-ceilinged room with its dirty walls, the smells and steam from the guardroom outside drifting in, along with Gnift's cracked, tuneless voice singing of love in cornfields. “It certainly deserves better than a back room in the barracks. The Royal Household is a regular warren—we can put you up there in the comfort that befits your state, my lord.”

The wizard smiled and shook his head. “Others could use the space there better than I,” he excused himself. “And in any case, I shall be departing soon. As long as there is a spare bunk in the Guards' quarters, I shall have a home.”

The Chancellor studied him curiously for a long moment. “You're an odd bird,” he said finally, without resentment. “But have it as you will. And if you ever get tired of your gypsy existence, the offer will always stand. The quarrel between us has wasted your talents, my lord. I can only ask your leave to make restitution.”

“There is no leave,” Ingold said, “nor restitution. The quarrel is forgotten.”

Chancellor Alwir, Regent of the Realm and Lord of the Keep of Dare, bowed himself from the room.

A moment later the Icefalcon slipped in to give Ingold a cup of the tea he had been brewing. The steam had a curious smell, but it was supposed to prevent colds. It occurred obliquely to Rudy that, although he'd been frozen, wet, half-starved, and nearly dead of exhaustion, at no time had he felt even mildly ill. Probably there was no time for it, he decided. And what I've been through would scare any self-respecting bacteria into extinction.

“Ingold,” Gil said quietly after the Guard had left. “About your going to Quo… ”

“Yes,” the wizard said. “Yes, we shall have to talk about that.”

Rudy shifted his position at the foot of the bed. “I don't think you should go alone.”

“No?”

“You say it's dangerous as hell—okay. But I think you should take me, or Gil, or one of the Guards, or somebody.”

The old man folded his arms and asked detachedly, “You don't believe I can look after myself?”

“After that stunt you pulled last night?”

“Are you volunteering?”

Rudy stopped short, with a quick intake of breath. “You mean—you'd take me?” He couldn't keep the eagerness out of his voice or, to judge by Ingold's expression, off his face. The prospect of going with the old man, no matter what the dangers—of learning from him even the rudiments of wizardry—overshadowed and indeed momentarily obliterated everything he had ever heard or feared regarding White Raiders, ice storms, and the perils of the plains in whiter. “You mean I can go with you?”

“I had already considered asking you,” Ingold said. “Partly because you are my student and partly due to… other considerations. Gil is a Guard—” He reached out to touch her hair in a wordless gesture of affection. “—and the Keep can ill spare any Guard in the months ahead. But you see, Rudy, at the moment you are the only other wizard whom I can trust. Only a wizard can find his way into Quo. If, for some reason, I do not make it as far as Quo, it will be up to you.”

Rudy hesitated, shocked. “You mean—I may end up having to find the Archmage?”

“There is that possibility,” Ingold admitted. “Especially after what I learned last night.”

“But—” He stammered, suddenly awed by that responsibility. The responsibility, he realized, was part of the privilege of being a mage; but still… “Look,” he said quietly. “I do want to go, Ingold, really. But Gil's right. I am a coward and I am a quitter and if I didn't screw you up or get you into trouble on the way—if I had to find the Council by myself, I might blow it.”

Ingold smiled pleasantly. “Not as badly as I would already have blown it by getting myself killed. Don't worry, Rudy. We all do what we must.” He took a sip of his tea. “I take it that's settled, then. We shall be leaving as soon as the weather breaks, probably within three days.”

Three days, Rudy thought, caught between qualms and excitement. And then, to his horror, he realized that, faced with the chance of continuing his education as a wizard, he had forgotten almost entirely about Minalde.

I can't leave her
! he thought, aghast. Not for the five or six weeks the journey will take! And yet he knew that there had never been any consciousness of a choice. To go with Ingold, to study wizardry under the old man, was what he wanted—in some ways the only thing he wanted. He had known, far down the road when he had first brought fire to his bidding, that it might lose him the woman he loved; even then he had known that there was no possibility of an alternative course. And yet—how could he explain?

Long ago and in another life, he remembered driving through the night with a scholar in a red Volkswagen, speaking of the only thing that someone wanted to have or be or do. He looked across at her now, at the thin, scarred face with pale schoolmarm eyes, the witchlike straggle of sloppily braided hair. It had been hard for her to leave something she disliked for something she loved. Harder still, he thought, was it to leave something you loved for something you loved more.

Sorely trouble in his mind, he returned his thoughts to what Gil was saying. “So you'll be bunking here until then?”

“I don't take up much room,” Ingold remarked, “and I far prefer the company. Besides,” he added, picking up his teacup again, “I never have found out who ordered my arrest in Karst. While I don't believe Alwir would put me out of the way as long as he had a use for me, there are cells deep in the bowels of this Keep that are woven with a magic far deeper and stronger and far, far older than my own, cells that I could never escape. The Rune of the Chain is still somewhere in this Keep—in whose possession I cannot tell. As long as I remain in the Keep of Dare, I would really prefer to sleep among my friends.”

Rudy's fingers traced idly at the moldy nap of the blanket. “You think it's like that?”

“I don't know,” the wizard admitted equably. “And I should hate to find out. The wise man defends himself by never being attacked.”

“You call that business last night not being attacked?”

Ingold smiled ruefully. “That was an exception,” he apologized, “and unavoidable. I knew that I could draw the Dark away from Tir and hold them off long enough to let you get close to the gates. There weren't very many of them left by that time, too few to split up and still have enough power among themselves to work counterspells against me.”

“I don't understand,” Gil said, tossing the end of her braid back over her shoulder. “I know there weren't a lot of them—but why did they let us go? They've been following Tir clear the hell down from Karst. They know what the Keep is and they knew last night was their last chance to get at him. But they turned back and went after you. Why?”

He didn't answer at once. He lay watching the curl of the steam rising from the cup in his bandaged hands, his face in repose suddenly old and tired. Then his dark-circled eyes shifted to meet hers. “Do you remember,” he said slowly, “when I almost became—lost—in the vaults at Gae? When you called me back from the stairways of the Dark?”

Gil nodded soundlessly; it had been the first day, she remembered, that she had held a sword in her hand. The darkness came back to her, the stealthy sense of lurking fear, the old man standing alone on the steps far below her, listening to a sound that she could not hear, the white radiance of his staff illuminating the shadows all around him. It had been the last day she had been a scholar, an outworlder, the person she had once been. The memory of that distant girl, alone and armed with a borrowed sword and a guttering torch against all the armies of the Dark, brought a lump to her throat that she thought would choke her.

He went on. "I guessed, then, what I know now—that Prince Tir is not their first target. Oh, they'll take him if they can get him—but, given a choice, as I gave them a choice last night, it isn't Tir they want.

“It's me.”

“You?” Rudy gasped.

“Yes.” The wizard sipped his tea, then set it aside. From beyond the curtain, Gnift's voice bitingly informed someone that he had less stance than a wooden-legged ice skater. “I can evidently be of more ultimate harm to them than Tir can. I suspected it before, and after last night there can be no other explanation.”

“But how—I mean—your magic can't touch them,” Rudy said uneasily. “To them you're just another guy with a sword. You don't know any more about the Time of the Dark than anybody else. I mean, Tir's the one who'll remember.”

“I've wondered about that myself,” Ingold said calmly. “And I can only conclude that I know something that I'm not yet aware that I know—some clue that hasn't fallen into place. They know what it is, and they're concerned lest I remember.”

Rudy shuddered wholeheartedly. “So what are you going to do?”

The wizard shrugged. “What can I do? Take elementary precautions. But it might be well for you to reconsider your offer to accompany me to Quo.”

“To hell with that,” Rudy reconsidered. “You're the one who should reconsider.”

“Who else can go?” Ingold reasoned. “And if I were afraid of getting myself killed, I should never have taken up this business in the first place. I should have stayed in Gettlesand and grown roses and cast horoscopes. No—all that I can do now is stay a few steps ahead of them and hope that I realize what the answer is before they catch me.”

“You're crazy,” Rudy stated unequivocally.

Ingold smiled. “Really, Rudy, I thought we'd long settled the question of my sanity.”

“You're all crazy!” Rudy insisted. “You and Gil and Alde and the Guards… How the hell come I always end up completely surrounded by lunatics?”

The old man settled comfortably back among the blankets and picked up his tea again, the steam wreathing his face like smoke from the altar of a battered idol. “The question is the answer, Rudy—always provided you want an answer that badly.”

Considering it in that light, Rudy was not entirely sure that he did.

Alde was waiting for him in the outer room. Most of the Guards had gone. Beyond the black, narrow arch of the doorway, Janus' voice could be heard in the next room, still arguing with the same merchants. In a corner, the Icefalcon had fallen asleep, relaxed and self-absorbed as a cat. But for him, they were alone.

“Alde… ” Rudy began, and she stood up from the bunk where she had been sitting and put a finger to his lips.

“I heard,” she said softly.

“Listen… ” he tried to explain.

Again she shushed him. “Of course you should go with him.” Her fingers closed, cool and light, over his. “Was there any question of your not going?”

He laughed softly, remembering his own apprehensions. “I guess—not to me. But I sure didn't think you'd understand.” They stood together, as close as they had on the road when they'd been accustomed to share a cloak on watch at night. The ebbing yellow glow of the fire masked them in dun, pulsing shadow, and he could smell the sweetgrass braided into her hair. “I didn't think anybody would understand or could understand. Because I sure as hell don't.”

She chuckled with soft laughter. “He's your master, Rudy,” she said. “And your need is to learn. Even if I wanted to, I could never stop you from it.” But she moved closer to him in the shadows, belying her own words.