Darwath 3 - The Armies Of Daylight (13 page)

“Well,” Rudy said gloomily, “mine was organic… and we found it eventually.”

“They said—they said that the records might be lost,” Minalde whispered, her forehead suddenly tightening, as if with pain. “Or that the secret of them would be hidden. That was why Dare said that we must remember.”

“Dare said?” Ingold's white eyebrows went up. “Is it not from Dare, then, that you have these memories?”

She shook her head, and her hands tightened over his. “There were twenty of us. They—the wizards—did not want women to bear the memories. They said that women carry griefs enough of their own; that they bear too many losses, of husbands, of children. My baby died, that first winter. So cold,” she whispered hopelessly. “So cold. But many of the men who could have done it refused. Some called it evil; others said only that it was too heavy a thing to bind to the shoulders of their children. But it was a chancy thing, and there were so few of us whose bloodlines the wizards could tie this to.” Her voice had changed, stammering, as if seeking words, blurred with an accent at times, like the soft, rolling lilt of the spell that would unlock the vanished records of the Keep.

“Time is so deep,” she murmured. “So many things are lost in its well. Dare said that we must remember.” The pallid chill of the magelight glinted on a tear that trickled down, for griefs not her own. Ingold's scarred finger brushed it gently aside.

“What must you remember?” he asked gently.

She began to speak, hesitantly at first, then gaining strength and sureness as grief, fear, and wonderment colored her stammering voice. Now and then she stopped, struggling with concepts and memories that she did not understand—machines that operated by magic and spells that drew the lightning from the sky and ground to fuse the separate stones of the Keep's mighty walls. She spoke of battles fought by the mages against the Dark, who would come sweeping down from the Nest in the Vale to the north, of freezing nights torn by the fire and lightning of these combats, of hopelessness and terror, and of cold.

“The Keep had to be built,” she said quietly, staring into the darkness of that shadowy room hidden at the heart of the ancient fortress. “Everything was sacrificed to it—fuel, power, energy, magic. It was a cold and bitter winter. The Dark attacked us, night after night, killing or carrying off prisoners alive.” She paused, her lips pressed tight to keep them from trembling and her eyes wide with remembered horrors.

“And then?” Ingold's voice was little more than a breath in that still, dark room. The cold light fragmented his lined face into chips of brightness and darkness. As he leaned forward, his moving shadow woke a single blink of brightness from the gray crystal set in the heart of the stone table. “Tell me, Minalde. What means, what weapon, did Dare of Renweth use to combat the Dark? How did he go against them?”

She sat still for a moment, staring into the darkness. Then her eyes widened, until it seemed that only the black pupils showed, dilated within a thin ring of indigo. She shut her eyes and began to weep, deep, heaving sobs that racked her body like the pains of childbirth.

Rudy sprang to his feet with a startled cry. Ingold waved him back and gathered the weeping girl into his arms, stroking the dark, braided head that he held pressed to his shoulder and murmuring words of comfort. Her sobbing quieted but did not stop. The wizard continued to murmur to her, rocking her like a child, and Rudy sensed the slow withdrawal of the spells that had filled the room. The air seemed to change. The scent, the feel, of power dissipated and the dark aura slipped away until Ingold was nothing but a ragged old vagabond, comforting a frightened girl.

Finally Alde sat up a little, her face blotched and swollen. From somewhere about his person, Ingold produced a clean handkerchief to give her.

“Are you all right?” he asked her kindly.

She nodded, her hands still shaking from the violence of her tears, and blew her nose comprehensively. “Why was I crying?” she whispered.

He brushed the wet tendrils of hair back from her face, a father's gesture. “You don't remember?”

She shook her head. Rudy put a gentle hand on her shoulder; her fingers slid around his, and she looked up at him with a wan smile. “Did you—did you learn what you were looking for?”

“We have learned some things of value,” the wizard replied after a moment. “Something of the founding of the Keep.” He frowned and got to his feet, helping Alde up with a strong, gentle hand. The soft glimmer of the witchlight in the room coalesced into a floating shred of ball lightning, which drifted out the door before them, showing their dusty route through the whispering darkness of the dry gardens.

“But nothing of how humankind defeated the Dark?”

In the bobbing blue light, Ingold's face seemed suddenly harsh. He said quietly, “Perhaps more than we know.”

Minalde's experience with forbidden magic yielded other fruits than that ambiguous dread. In her trance she had spoken of caves, where the refugees from the realms in the valleys had lived through that first brutal winter, during the construction of the Keep itself. “And whereas we cannot, of course, tell Alwir how we came to learn of their existence,” Ingold said as they returned to the Corps common room, “considering the border war that has been carried on for generations between Gettlesand and Alketch, were Rudy and I to 'discover' these caves, I think things could be much more peaceable in the Keep when the Army of the South arrives.”

“The caves would have to be fortified, wouldn't they?” Gil mused, stirring the fire to life and prowling into the dark kitchen in quest of bread and cheese.

“They must have been, if the refugees survived in them until spring.” Ingold held out his hands to the warmth of the blaze, the saffron light winking off the brass of his belt buckle and the hilts of sword and dagger. “They would provide a protected camp for our allies—protected not only from the Dark Ones but, I think, from the White Raiders as well.”

Rudy shivered. The idle threnody that he had begun to pluck from the strings of his harp fell silent. He had seen too many of the hideous sacrifices that the plains barbarians offered to their ghosts. One would have been too many.

“When Rudy and I go in search of the caves…”

“Rudy and you?” Gil re-emerged from the kitchen and tossed a bannock lightly across the room that the wizard fielded without getting up. “If you plan on meeting the White Raiders, you're going to need me there as well as Rudy. Unless you want another forest fire,” she added uncharitably.

“And you aren't leaving me behind.” Alde spoke up unexpectedly from the hearth rug, where she had seated herself at Rudy's feet.

Ingold sighed. “This is not a primrosing expedition…”

“Do you really think you could find the place without me?”

So it was that the four of them set out in the morning, searching for a place whose appearance might have shifted radically in the last three thousand years. Ingold chose the cliffs that stretched north of the Keep, on the grounds that the caves that Alde had spoken of seemed to be higher than the rest of the Vale, and both Gil and Alde backed him up. Rudy, who had no opinion on the subject, brought up the rear, his holstered flame thrower slapping at his side, scanning the gloomy woods for any sign of the White Raiders.

Though there was nothing resembling a road from the Keep along the north cliffs, the woods there were not too thick to penetrate, and in places deer trails skirted up the benches and broken ground at the feet of those towering ramparts. The winter woods were silent under the gray, lowering sky. Once Ingold found wolf tracks, several days old; it was the only sign of life, human or animal, that they encountered.

But about a mile from the Keep, Alde stopped and looked through narrowed eyes at a spur of the mountain wall that ended too abruptly and at an irregular rock knoll just beyond. The way they were taking passed between the end of the spur and the knoll, and Rudy searched both in vain for some sign of artificial cutting. He did not have Gil's archaeological training or Minalde's memories—all he saw was trees.

A short way beyond that, Alde stopped again, looking around her. Below the bench on which they stood, a pool was set in a cuplike bay amid the rocks, all but hidden by the gray, tangling branches of a thicket of trees. The cliffs above were low and broken-looking at this point; the bench itself was strewn with boulders and talus spills, dotted with stands of dark-browed pines. It was a desolate-looking place, bleak and sinister, with the black trees of the forest sloping away below them and the beetling rocks shouldering one another above. But Alde looked around her, a slight, puzzled frown on her brow.

“I don't know,” she murmured, her breath a faint drift of smoke in the icy air. “But—somehow I think we're here.”

“Stands to reason,” Gil remarked, tucking her gloved hands into her sword belt and scanning the dreary slopes around them. “There's water here and a break in the geological formation of the cliff that could mean caves underneath.”

Minalde's frown deepened and she hugged the thick fur of her cloak more closely around her shoulders. There was a curious expression, both distant and inward, in her cornflower-blue eyes as she followed Gil's gaze along the snow and rock of the jumbled land above them, as if she were comparing what she saw with some inner picture that had been carried for generations in her heart. “There should be a stair…”

The Vale of Renweth

Rudy poked with the iron-shod foot of his staff at the mess of snow and dirt that half-covered the bench. “One good landslide would have taken care of that,” he pointed out. “Hell, the cave itself could be buried.”

“I don't think so.” She turned, her eyes half-shut, tracing the formations of tumbled boulders and jutting, broken cliffs. Then, with sudden decision, she hitched up her heavy cloak and thick skirts and began to climb.

The cave had not been buried, though its single entrance was hidden in a tangled grove of scrub oak and wind-twisted, hoary crabapple trees. “You can see there was a sizable ledge here at one time,” Ingold observed as they paused in the low, rounded arch behind the screening trees. “The earthquake that broke it must have carried away the stair.” He took his staff by the end and extended it into the darkness of the chamber beyond. Pale light burned off its tip, illuminating curving, water-worn walls and a sandy floor strewn with dead leaves and the frosted bones of some small animal, mauled by foxes. At the far end, the light flashed on the metalwork of a small door, locked as the Keep doors were locked with inner bolts and a ring. The hinges were deep-sunk into the living rock of the walls; the metal was black, hard, and unrusted.

For a moment there was nothing anyone could say. Rudy looked sideways and saw by the wan reflection of the daylight that Aide's eyes were filled with sudden tears.

Then he looked back to that dark door whose memory had faded from all minds but one. The light of Ingold's staff slid coldly over the locking ring as the wizard advanced cautiously into the room and touched the thread-fine runes marked on the black steel that only a wizard could see.

“Well, I'll be damned.”

“Govannin certainly thinks so,” Gil remarked, following Ingold into the deep, shifting gloom. Alde quickly wiped her eyes and crossed the shadowy threshold, with Rudy bringing up the rear, staff in one hand and flame thrower in the other. Their voices echoed eerily against the low ceiling.

“Sure is lucky for our side,” Gil added judiciously, poking at the fox mess in a corner of the cave, “that we didn't find a grizzly holed up here for the winter.”

Rudy sniffed scornfully. “If we had, Ida slayed it with mah bowie knife. Then you wimmenfolk coulda skinned it.”

“Aaah, you lie like a rug, white man.”

“Hey!” he protested, turning. “I'll have you remember I slayed a dragon. Not bad,” he added, “for a poor boy who was borned on a mountaintop in Tennessee.”

Gil paused in her investigation of the smoke-blackened ceiling and looked at him with new respect. “Even if it is the greenest state in the land of the free,” she agreed, nodding gravely. “Was you raised in the woods, then?”

“Gil I knew every tree,” Rudy asserted proudly.

“Do you know what they're talking about?” Alde asked quietly of Ingold, who was listening to this interchange in mystified astonishment.

Bemused, the wizard shook his head.

“It's the ancient lore of our people,” Gil explained and came to join them beside the locked door, her feet scuffing in the thin sand of the cave floor. “Is the door spelled shut?”

Ingold's mittened hand caressed the smooth steel ring. “Not unbreakably so.” In the half-light his face was grave, the ice crystals glittering in his frosted beard. “But these caves have been sealed for centuries. At the time they were in use, they were presumably proof against entrance by the Dark Ones. But that is no guarantee that they have not been entered since.”

Gil glanced nervously around her at the murky twilight of the cave. The light at the tip of Ingold's staff began to burn with a stronger, fiercer glow, throwing their shadows black and harsh against the gleaming door.

“You and Alde go back and stand in the light from the cave mouth. Rudy…”

Rudy shook back his long hair from around his face, then bowed his head, standing silently, like something carved of weathered oak, the snow like chips of glass on the bison fur of his collar and cuffs. He had holstered his flame thrower; in his other hand, the razor-edged crescent that tipped his staff began to burn with a white, clear radiance. The brightness drowned the pale daylight, threw sharp blue shadows that outlined Rudy's high cheekbones and broken nose, and cast into prominence the scars and lines that scrawled over Ingold's face like a map of his endless journeyings. In the doubled light of the two staffs, everything had two shadows, darker blue and lighter, midnight and cobalt, and the white glare that beat on those two faces stamped them with sudden, uncanny resemblance.

Ingold reached forward and touched the metal of the door. His blue eyes were half-shut as his hands passed over the shining surface. In the cave's icy cold, the breaths of the two wizards mingled like a dust of diamonds in the searing light. Then with a sudden movement, Ingold's mittened hand closed over the locking ring, twisted it with visible effort, and thrust the door open and inward.