Darwath 3 - The Armies Of Daylight (18 page)

The only other light in the room was the marshfire flicker of bluish light that outlined the curtain of Ingold's cubicle. As she approached it, she could hear the soft scratching of his pen.

“My dear.” He held out his hands to her as she came in, the frayed brown mantle that he had draped shawlwise about his shoulders sliding down over the back of his intricately carved and much-mended chair. As always, his hands were warm; and as always, his touch seemed to transmit to her some of his buoyant strength. For a moment, he studied the marks of fatigue on her face, the bruised look to the eyelids, and the sharpness of that hard, delicate bone structure, but said nothing; he was too much a night owl himself to comment. But he cleared a place for her to sit in the confusion of the corner of his desk top and went to the narrow hearth to pour her some tea.

Gil looked down at the parchment upon which he was working. Spaghettilike in their intricacy, the tunnels and caverns of a map of the Nest writhed over the page. She looked up at the old man kneeling beside the hearth, the warm light seeming to shine through his extended hands. “You don't think Alwir's going to buy it, do you?”

Ingold glanced up. “Do you?”

Gil was shocked. “He has to,” she protested. “I have proof—dammit, I have a truckload of proof! He can't just disregard it!”

The wizard got stiffly to his feet and came back to her, wraiths of steam curling around his face like mephitic smoke. “Perhaps not,” he assented. “I hope not. You see, I was not deceived by the Icefalcon's glib nonanswers. He was brought here by a band of White Raiders, and I suspect that band is still somewhere in the Vale. They'll know how many men depart for the Nest at Gae and they'll know how many return.”

Gil sat looking up into his face for a moment—the flat, curiously shaped cheekbones and the determined chin outlined by the glow from the hearth. She felt, as she had often felt, that she had known that face forever.

“Ingold,” she asked quietly, “why are the Dark Ones after you? I asked you that once before, when you left for Quo last autumn. I think you've found out the answer since then.”

He evaded her eyes. “I don't know,” he replied, his voice almost inaudible. “I used to think it was because of something that I knew. Now I fear it is because of what I am.”

“And what's that?”

“The Archmage,” he said in a colorless tone. “The holder of the Master-spells over the others.”

Gil frowned, puzzled at the sudden wretchedness in his voice. “I don't understand.”

“Good.” Ingold smiled suddenly and laid a hand comfortingly over hers. “Good. And in any case, if it did come to an invasion, as a mage I would have a better chance than most to survive it. Moreover, if I did not accompany the army, my alternative would be to remain here at the Keep with the civilians, Govannin, and Inquisitor Pinard.”

And to that, Gil realized, there was no reply.

“The Church in the South is different from what it has been in the Realm of Darwath,” he continued. “Here the Church has always observed the bounds of laws. But in the South, it in the law. It crowns their kings as well as blesses them; in some cases, it has selected them as well. Govannin recognizes the spiritual authority of the Inquisition.”

“You mean she'd take orders from Pinard?”

He chuckled. “Govannin Narmenlion has never taken orders from anyone in her life. But she listens to him when he tells her that God's ends justify whatever means His servants choose to employ. And she has never gotten over her anger at me for taking Brother Wend away from the Church. I suppose you could say that Pinard has corrupted her, though both of them feel nothing but the highest of intentions. And because Maia of Penambra will have none of it, he runs the risk of being charged as a schismatic himself.”

“Whereas he's nothing but a simple Episcopalian.” Gil smiled ironically and then said abruptly, “Did you really whack off Vair's hand in an unfair fight?”

“Of course.” The old impishness twinkled suddenly in his eyes. “Considering that he was mounted and armed with a long sword, while all I had was a two-foot short sword and a chain that held me by one wrist to a post—yes, I suppose you could call it unfair. This was, as you may have gathered, back in my days as a slave in the cavalry barracks at Khirsrit. I had no idea that Vair had lost his hand as a result of that fight—I did not wound him that badly, though of course, without magic, the state of the healing arts in Alketch is notorious. In fact, I scarcely gave the matter any thought, once my own wounds were healed, and I did not see Vair again. Looking back on it, I suppose it was he who tried to have me killed shortly afterward, forcing me to escape.” The wizard was silent for a moment, his eyes focused on that distant vision of another self.

“Vair was never much of a swordsman,” he added, glancing over at Gil. “Despite what he claims. As I remember it, I knocked the sword out of his hand at exercises or did something which earned him a bad mark from his instructor, and against all rules of the arena, he lost his temper and came back to finish the job.”

“Crowning the sin of wrath with the penultimate sin of stupidity,” Gil grinned suddenly. And then, with a slight frown, she asked, “Were you a mage then?”

“Do you think that I could have been?”

She shook her head. “But if you were a grown man…”

The wizard sighed. “I was twenty-two. And old enough, as our left-handed friend has pointed out, to have come to my powers, which most mages find between the ages of nine and fourteen.” He settled back in his chair and drew the mantle once more around his shoulders, as if to ward against a chill.

“But there was a war, you see, after I returned from Quo. My people were borderlords in Gettlesand; my father was the Lord of Gyrfire, a principality near Dele. In the last battle before the doors of my parents' fortress, I took a head blow which all but killed me. When I woke in the slave pens of Alketch, I had no recollection of my name, my powers, or—mercifully—my role in starting the war.”

She regarded him in silence for a time, seeing with sudden clarity that brilliant, arrogant, ginger-haired young man who had been Ingold Inglorion at twenty-two. “And when did you remember?” she asked softly.

“After I escaped from Khirsrit. Out in the desert. I had a fever; I nearly died then. Kta found me.” Ingold paused, staring into the fire as if through the flames he could contemplate that very distant young man. "After that, I was a hermit for many years. I remembered my power and who I was. But I also remembered that it was I who had started the war, between my use of black magic and my damned meddling in what was essentially none of my business.

“It was a long time before I had the courage so much as to light a fire without flint and steel. I got over their deaths—my parents', my younger brother's—Liardin…” He shook his head, as if clearing from it the echoes of half-forgotten voices. “But Gyrfire was never rebuilt. I am probably the only man living who remembers where it stood. We wizards are a dangerous people, Gil,” he finished, reaching to take her hand again. “We are hardly safe to know. The Icefalcon was right. Only the brave should befriend the wise.”

She dismissed the Icefalcon with a shrug. “I don't believe that.”

“Being brave, you wouldn't.” He smiled at her.

“So that's why…” she began and stopped herself. “There are times when I wonder if you're as wise as you think.” To her own surprise as well as his, she bent down and kissed him lightly on the forehead before she turned and hurried from the room.

After the dim firelight of Ingold's quarters, the dark in the common room was like being struck blind. With an automatic caution she had learned from the Icefalcon, Gil did not pause before the curtain to let her eyes adjust, but stepped to the side, her back to the wall, where even the little light that leaked through the weave would not show her up. Thus, when a dark form emerged from the blackness of one of the many hallways that led into the room Gil had only to press back against the wall and freeze to remain unseen.

She knew at once that this intruder was no wizard—a thin, white hand caught at the back of the same chair that she herself had stumbled over in the dark. A shadow passed in front of the winking embers; a cloak whispered against a tableleg. As the form turned, Gil had a vague impression of a white, beardless face and a shaven head showing up briefly against the thicker darkness of the door to the corridors beyond. The skeletal hand groped for the doorframe. For a moment it rested there, and a vagrant glint of a sparking ember called, like a candle in darkness, the answering gleam of purple from an amethyst ring.

The tensions built within the Keep until one night Minalde failed to come to Rudy's cell, as had been her custom.

He lay awake for hours in the darkness, listening for the sound of her step, the touch of slippered feet on the damp stone of the winding corridors whose mazes she knew so well, and the slurring whisper of the heavy fur of her cloak— sounds that only a wizard could hear. Some two hours had passed since he had heard the far-off, muffled commotion of the deep-night watch leaving the barracks on its rounds.

She had never been so late before.

And yet he knew—he knew—that she had planned to come to him.

The firesquad demonstration had taken place that afternoon. Most of the population of the Keep—with the exception of Gil, who, Rudy surmised, was so wound up in the pursuit of her mysterious research that she'd forgotten the day—and virtually all of the Alketch troops had been there. The frozen mud of the drilling ground in the meadow below the Keep walls had been darkened with a lake of humanity, crowding to see this weapon with which, rumor had it, Dare of Renweth had defeated the Dark Ones. A dais had been erected at the south corner of the meadow near the road, and on it the somber black and bloody crimson pennants of Realm and Church alternated with the gaudy, gold-stitched banners of the South.

Lying in the darkness of his cell, Rudy picked over the memories of the day, sorting them like jewel-bright photographs. He remembered how straight the ranks of the fire-squad had been, despite the wide range in their ages and origins—boys of ten or twelve on up to one old lady of eighty; the orange oriflamme that was their emblem had blazed brightly on the pale homespun of their uniforms. He remembered the gleam of sun on the looping rigs of their glass and gold weapons and the sharp bark of Melantrys' commands.

Other images came back to him: Vair and Stiarth, like a couple of refulgent tiger lilies in slashed doublets of orange and magenta, jewels twinkling among the extravagant ruffles of their sleeves; Bektis, at the foot of the dais among the other mages, sulking because he had not been given a place with the notables of the Realm—although Govannin would have excommunicated the entire government at the mere suggestion that she and Inquisitor Pinard be asked to share the platform with one who was mageborn; and Alwir's face, and the mingled glitter of wariness and contempt beneath his half-shut eyelids.

Especially, he remembered Minalde, with Tir in her arms.

Ingold had stood at the far end of the meadow, with the heavy folds of his mantle thrown back to reveal the shabby homespun robes and beat-up sword belt underneath, picking little, brightly colored bubbles of illusion from the air with the sweeping gestures of a side-show magician.

Since Rudy was familiar with the rainy-day pastimes of younger wizards, this was nothing much to his eyes. But he heard the uneasy murmur of the crowd as Ingold tossed the small and gleaming colored spheres out into the air, and they grew in a twinkling to some two feet across and bobbed about him, green and purple and electric blue, like monster catfish trawling for garbage in the snow.

The firesquad had moved forward. At Ingold's wave of command, the bubbles had swirled upward like a torrent of blown leaves in autumn. Someone in the crowd gasped in horror; from the dais behind him, Rudy heard Vair whisper, “Devil!” The ludicrous rainbow toys moved in a precise imitation of the gliding, sinuous flight of the Dark Ones.

There was not a person in the meadow who had not seen at firsthand how the Dark attacked. When Melantrys whirled in mid-stride to pick off a quivering globe of scarlet that swooped down upon her from behind and above, there was a gust of applause, which quickly rose to a roar as more targets were hit. Against the drabness of the wintry afternoon, the leaping streaks of fire looked chill and rather pale. The moving targets flashed out of existence as soon as the flames touched them, and the cheering mounted to a thunderous shout, as if it were actually the Dark being destroyed. Up on the dais, Alwir and the peacock lords of Alketch were nodding to one another in grim satisfaction; down below, mages and Guards pounded one another on the back with tooth-jarring verve. Rudy found himself jostled, grabbed, patted, and congratulated by friends and total strangers. Even Thoth unbent enough to admit, “Impressive.”

But it was the pride on Aide's face that stayed in Rudy's mind. In all his life, he could never recall anyone who had ever been proud of him.

Why doesn't she come?

There had been that look, that promise, in her eyes as their gazes had crossed, and for a moment they had been alone together in the midst of that ebullient crowd.

And time is so short, Rudy thought despairingly. The Winter Feast is three days from now! And after that…

He pushed the thought from his mind, as he had resolutely kept it at bay these past weeks, so as not to cloud the halcyon days that they had. In a forlorn hope, he extended his awareness far into the mazes of the Keep, seeking for some sound of her coming in all that damp, inhabited darkness. He heard nothing—nothing but the slumberous murmur of a father soothing a crying child and the drip and trickle of water coursing through the Keep's stone veins.

Rudy was an old friend to the night sounds of the Keep. If nothing else, the Nest had cost him that. In dreams he wandered again in that dark, hideous world where staring, white-faced herds shuffled pathetically through the rotting mosses of endless caverns. He felt the clammy, hairless bodies and the touch of dark winds on his face; he saw the slimy, oozing things that infested the ceilings above. Sometimes he saw the tall, gray-haired prisoner again, running and gasping through that vibrating darkness, running nowhere…