Darwath 3 - The Armies Of Daylight (36 page)

Rudy slung the covers back where they had been. Outside the closed door, the Icefalcon's cool voice could be heard, turning away servants, clerks, and Guards who had been drawn by the commotion. Rudy tried to think, his mind clouded by the long exhaustion of that horrible night. “I think you'd better stay with Eldor, Gil,” he said at last. “I'll see what kind of purgatives I can find in the commons and stop by the barracks on my way back here.” He shivered, realizing for the first time how damp his own clothes were. He couldn't look much better than Gil did.

From the darkness of the hall came the sudden, muffled tread of many feet and the Icefalcon's light, warning voice. “It's Govannin!” he called, and Rudy groaned.

“Christ, that's all we need,” he said. A hoarse, dry voice rapped out an order, and he heard the rattling of scabbards and mail. A moment later the door opened, and the Bishop of Gae stepped into the room.

Bitter, dark eyes under those graceful, curving brows studied him, like a gardener contemplating a snail. “So you returned, mage.”

He stood up, conscious of the smarting of his bruises, the ache in his shoulders, and the sting of the life returning to his frostbitten fingers. The weariness of the eternal night seemed to be grained into the flesh of his body, but anger stirred in him, like a swig of fiery brandy. In a shaking voice he said, “I was told there was a man sick here, my lady.”

She gave a single dry sniff of contemptuous laughter. “I should think he is the last man you would aid.”

“Yeah, you would think so,” Rudy said tiredly. “And considering he's tried to break your power over the people of the Keep, he might be the last man you would aid. But whatever else I am, I'm a wizard; and though we don't make any vows and we don't preach about what people ought to do, there's an understanding among wizards that we hold our power as a trust and we help whoever needs it, whether that person has just got done cursing us, or whether it would be more convenient for our love lives if he died, or whatever. Now, if you're not going to help me, lady, you get the hell out of my way.”

Govannin glanced over her shoulder at the Red Monks who filled the doorway at her back. “Arrest him.”

There was a thin metallic whine as Gil pulled her blade free of its scabbard, and the light of the glowstones sang along its edge. The Red Monks hesitated visibly.

Govannin's vulture eyes never shifted. “Arrest them both. Eldor's illness is a judgment upon a man who would choose to deal with magic and the work of wizards.”

Rudy shouted, “For a lady who'd use the Rune of the Chain, you talk mighty big about magic!”

The monks, startled, looked curiously at their Bishop, and her flat black eyes narrowed dangerously. “Silence me this liar.”

“Is he a liar?” a soft voice inquired from the corridor. The warm white light of the room reflected off a shaved skull in the darkness, and Govannin swung around, her lips growing tight with anger.

“What affair of yours is this, you peasant upstart?”

“Peasant or not,” that gentle voice replied, “I am duly ordained and chosen Bishop of Penambra, and if you, my lady, have indeed tampered with a thing as God-cursed as the Rune of the Chain, it is fully within my powers, both sacerdotal and actual, to place you under arrest for heresy.”

Maia of Penambra, followed by half a dozen of his ragged warriors, limped into the brightness of the room. In his shadow walked two others who were not warriors: a slender, dark-haired woman, the black smudges of exhaustion like bruises beneath her eyes; and a stocky young man, barefoot and shivering in a dust-streaked hair shirt, carrying a little bundle of medicines under his arm.

Even a few days ago, Rudy knew he would probably have thrown his arms around Alde and kissed her—not only for locating Brother Wend but for having learned enough of Gil's political savvy to get a military backup first. But now their eyes only met, and she turned hers away. Though he was bruised and aching in spirit as well as in body, Rudy understood. She had made up her mind, and there was far too much at stake now to confuse the issue. They each had a clear duty, though it would destroy forever whatever chance they might have had to rejoin their love.

Govannin's eyes flickered from one to the other in baffled hate, then to Brother Wend, who bent over Eldor's bed. “Heresy!” she jeered. “You talk of heresy to me, you ignorant butcher! What shall we say of a prelate who deals with mages? Or of a monk who has sworn himself to lifelong solitude, but who cannot wait three days before violating his vows?”

Brother Wend flinched at that, as if at the flick of a whip, but he did not look up from the sick man.

Maia turned back from helping Alde to a chair in the shadows of the hearth and replied calmly. “We shall say, my lady, that neither the prelate nor the monk can be proven to have tampered with black magic—as the Rune of the Chain, according to the unanimous ruling of the Bishops at the Council of Gae, undoubtedly is.”

“All magic is the same!” she snarled at him furiously. “It is all the dealings of the Devil!”

“Not,” the Bishop of Penambra said, “according to the Ecumenical Councils.”

“Solipsistic hairsplitting!” she cried. Looking at her eyes, Rudy was reminded of a rattlesnake about to strike.

Brother Wend glanced up, his sick, dark eyes filled with misery. “It was not she who drew the Rune on the door,” he said wretchedly. “It was I. She isn't mageborn; she could not have drawn and spelled the Rune of the Chain…”

Govannin whirled on him. “Be silent, you filthy heretic!”

“What door?” Gil asked suddenly. “The Rune of the Chain was on a seal. It was hundreds of years old, by the look of it.”

“Be silent, on penalty of eternal hellfire!”

Gil gripped the young monk's sleeve, and there was desperate urgency in her voice. “What door did you draw the Rune on?”

But Wend was looking up at Govannin, confused. “Seal? What seal?”

Rudy supplied the answer. “Govannin had the Rune drawn on a seal—and it wasn't the first time she'd used it, either. Alde can testify to that. Your Bishop gave it to Alwir at the place of execution tonight.”

Wend's eyes grew huge, staring up at his terrible preceptress, the sick man on the bed before him momentarily forgotten. “You used it yourself, then,” he whispered. “The door that Bektis and I sealed— It wasn't the first time that you tampered in black magic.”

“What door was this?” Gil demanded. “Where?”

“If you speak,” Govannin whispered, and her eyes held Wend's like a snake's, “I swear to you, by my power as Bishop of Gae…”

“Get her out of here,” Maia said. There was not a Red Monk who moved in protest as the Penambran soldiers surrounded the enraged Govannin. “Where is this door, Wend? What cell did you seal? It could be Eldor's life or death.”

Wend shook his head helplessly. “I don't know. It was on the first level, in the Church territory. We were blindfolded and taken there. The cell had been spelled before. It was a small one, but no magic could be used therein. Bektis and I only renewed things that were already there.”

Maia glanced over at Gil. “Gil-Shalos? You know the back corners of the Keep. Will you take my men and search?”

Gil nodded briefly and stood up. Though it was hot in the royal bedroom, with its fur rugs and braziers of coals that burned redly in the shadows about the bed, the door let in a draft of icy air from the hall. Rudy stripped off the shabby black surcoat Gil had lent him and threw it to her. She pulled it on loosely over the slashed and blood-smutched shirt and headed for the door.

“Gil-Shalos?” Maia stayed her and turned her face gently to the light with one crippled hand. “Are you all right?”

“I'll be fine,” she said. Most of the wounds Alwir had dealt her had stopped bleeding, probably including the biggest one, which was in her right side and which Rudy had patched crudely before starting to examine Eldor. It had surprised him a little that Gil literally could not remember receiving most of the wounds—only the first one, which was on her cheek. By the look of it, Rudy could tell already that she'd be scarred for life.

The few Penambrans who had remained after Govannin's removal followed Gil silently into the dark hall, accompanied by the Bishop's confused and whispering monks. Brother Wend looked up from his patient, his hollow eyes tortured by doubt.

“Who is it?” he whispered. “Whom do you seek?”

“Yeah,” Rudy said, confused. “Who do they have sealed up?”

The Bishop of Penambra raised an eyebrow, and wrinkles laddered all the way up his high, narrow forehead. “You have not guessed?”

The sensitive hands resting on Elder's wrist trembled. In a shaken voice, Wend murmured, “She told me that he was dead. I killed him. I…” He bowed his head, unable to go on.

“I sincerely doubt,” Maia said, bending down to touch the priest's shoulder in a faint rustling of patched brocade, “that with your small skill you would be capable of concocting a poison strong enough to kill Thoth the Scribe. Nor do I believe that my lady Govannin would permit any wizard simply to die painlessly— It was painless, wasn't it?”

Wend nodded wretchedly.

“To die painlessly or quickly, if it were in her power to make it otherwise. So take courage, Brother—her spite may well have been her undoing in this.” He straightened up and moved back toward the door as Wend returned shakily to his task. Only to Rudy did Maia turn a worried face, in the shadows that shrouded the doorway. “By the look of my lord Eldor,” he said in a low voice, “it will take all Thoth's great skill to save him. I pray that he can be found.”

But the night hours wore into morning, and Gil and her squad did not reappear. Rudy and Brother Wend did what they could, using Wend's stock of herbs and Ingold's medicines and working with their combined magic to hold soul and body together, but Rudy could feel Eldor's life slipping away.

His own mind and body were numb, and his hands fumbled at their tasks. He was barely cognizant of the passage of time or of his surroundings, scarcely aware of hunger or thirst. All he knew was the task before him and a weariness that became a dull torture. The golden flicker of the fire on the embroidered hangings around the bed began to swim before his tired eyes, and his occasional speech with Wend grew less and less connected. He wondered that it had been only yesterday morning that the messenger had ridden to the steps of the Keep—a little over twenty-four hours since the Army of Alketch had departed.

Alwir must have begun to plan it then
, Rudy thought, and he had been mere bait, the ostensible trigger for the larger trap. With what feeling remained to him, he felt a dull anger at Alwir, lying stiff with cold and rigor mortis in puddles of frozen blood on the hill. He would have stamped me out like a cockroach, disgraced—maybe killed—his own sister, and slain Gil more or less in passing—all as a cover-up for the real thing.

And yet, beside the silent passing of the Dark Ones toward Gae, Alwir, Eldor, and even he had already begun to seem very small and insignificant. His suspicion had strengthened to virtual certainty; he knew in his heart what was awaiting the Dark there. And he knew what would have to be done.

He sank, exhausted, down on a bench and leaned his head against the mingled colors of the tapestry behind him. The bullion stitching of it scratched his cheek; distantly, dark against the shaded glow of the banked white lamps, he saw Brother Wend wiping his hands, his dark eyes weary and defeated. Eldor had ceased to toss and rave. Exhausted and broken from repeated purgings, he lay with his half-open eyes sunk into skull-like sockets, staring blindly at the ceiling above him. Rudy's glance crossed Wend's, and the little priest shook his head.

Rudy sighed, mumbled a curse, and tried to find the energy to stand. “Maybe if we…”

“No,” Wend said. “I do not think there is anything we can do for him now.” His head and face had been shaved anew for his return to grace, and the razor burns stood out red and ugly against his pallor.

“There's got to be,” Rudy said doggedly. “Where the hell is Gil?”

“Perhaps she could not find the sealed door.” Wend moved stiffly to a carved chair and slumped down on its yellow silk cushions. The coarse burlap of his sleeves had been rolled up over his elbows; he continued to wipe his hands, slowly and mechanically, as he spoke. “Perhaps Thoth is dead, as my lady said. The poison—I—I did not mean ...”

“Hell, I know Govannin.” Rudy sighed. “I'd hate like hell to try and stand against her will on something I was sure of, let alone something I wasn't.” He tried to remember how long it had been since the arrest of the wizards, but the days slipped from his mind as the pestles and tubes and herbs had slithered from his nerveless fingers. He ran his hands through his long hair, as if trying to clear cobwebs from his brain. “There's got to be something…”

Wend shook his head. “We have done what we can,” he said quietly. “Elder has been weakened by his wounds and by the long debilitation and undernourishment in the Nest.”

“And it may be,” a woman's soft voice added, making both men turn in surprise, “that he has no further desire to live.”

Aide rose quietly from the corner where she had been sitting so silently that neither of the mages had remembered her presence in the room. She still wore the dark red velvet dress that she had worn when she had come to Rudy the night before. Within the frame of her dark hair, her face looked haggard. Rudy tried to recall what he had been saying to Wend at intervals during the last few hours. He knew he had described Alwir's death, and, although Alde had long since ceased to believe in her brother's love, she need not have heard of his death so callously. Her eyes and nose looked raw from weeping, but he could not remember having heard a sound.

As she came into the brighter light and sat on the edge of Eldor's bed, Rudy could see the glisten of two white threads among the unbound blackness of her hair. She took the King's good hand, his unburned one, in hers. When she spoke, her voice was low and tired. “They are much alike, you know—Gil and Eldor. Having lost everything, they are too stubborn to die. And they are both the kind of person who would rather die under torture than admit their true feelings or ask anyone for anything.” She turned Eldor's hand over in hers, stroking the fine shape of the fingers, the split and bitten nails, and the scars left by the hard mastery of the sword. “I never knew what he did feel for me,” she went on quietly. “Maybe it was that he didn't trust Alwir and feared I would be his pawn. Maybe he just did not trust himself.”