Darwath 3 - The Armies Of Daylight (37 page)

Rudy sagged back against the embroidered hangings and looked up into her still, ravaged face. “Maybe he just didn't know how to show love. There are people like that, too. It's hard to tell the truth, even when you want to very badly.”

The long white fingers clenched suddenly over Aide's. Looking down, she saw the gun-metal eyes blinking up at her, heavy and sardonic and half-asleep. “Aide?” the King whispered.

It was the first time that Rudy had heard Eldor address his wife by her name.

“I'm here,” she said.

“Are you well?”

She touched the tops of his protruding knuckles with gentle fingertips. “Yes,” she murmured. “Yes, I'm well.”

“It is true, as they said?” he whispered. “Alwir is dead?”

“Yes,” Alde replied softly. “The girl Gil-Shalos killed him in a duel.”

There was silence, and then the faint, creaking breath of a laugh. A sliver of the old, amused malice gleamed in the sunken eyes. “He must have been surprised.”

The corners of Aide's mouth tucked in, very slightly. “Perhaps,” she said and transferred her light touch to his forehead. “No one else was. Rest yourself, my lord. Later…”

“Rest.” The hideous features twitched in a grimace. “Rest indeed.” His breath was coming in thick wheezes through half-uncovered teeth. “No later,” he whispered, “no light. Only dreams. Tir?”

“Tir's asleep.” In the grate, the log broke and crumbled, the sudden spurt of golden light showing Aide's lashes beaded with amber tears. “I'll send someone to Maia's church to fetch him if you want.”

The King moved his head slightly, dissenting. “No. Look after him. Ingold promised me he would.”

“And so he did,” she murmured.

His hands moved restlessly, then stilled again in hers. “Ingold—where is he?” he muttered.

She hesitated and cast an agonized glance at Rudy.

“He's at Gae,” Rudy said softly.

“Ah.” Eldor frowned suddenly, as if at something forgotten. The effect on the rucked, scarlet flesh was horrible. “I struck him,” he murmured finally. “Tell him—I am sorry.”

“He knows.”

Eldor sighed and shut his eyes. “You spoke of love,” he said at length, “and of truth. A man may love a kitten, or a child, or a woman. My kitten, do you love this boy?”

“I love you,” Alde whispered, and the burned, red fingers twitched, waving her back from him.

“You need not kiss this face to prove it.”

“A woman never loves a man's face, Eldor.” She leaned forward and touched his lips with hers.

They twisted into the ghastly mockery of a grin. “A brave kitten. A brave woman, maybe… Do you love this boy?”

Aide was silent for a long time, holding his hand, listening to the slow drag of his laboring breath. She finally said, “Yes. I do. I don't know how it's different, but—I love you both.”

“A woman may worship a hero,” the King whispered, “and love the man whom she was born to love. I was fond of the kitten and I might have loved the woman. But I never met her. I wronged her—and perhaps myself as well.”

“There is time,” Alde said softly and bent to kiss his lips again.

The door opened quietly, and Gil entered, the wizard Thoth leaning on her shoulder. The old man looked weary and ill, his hairless face and head as white as a skull's above the black folds of his grimy robes, but the gold eyes had lost none of their haughtiness. Silently, Wend bowed his head. The Scribe of Quo had a bitter turn of invective when he chose.

But Thoth only shook off Gil's supporting arm and moved to the side of the bed. His light fingers searched Eldor's wrist, then his forehead, the deep-sunk eyes narrowing to slits, as if the old man listened to the King's dreams. Then he said, “Leave us. No—” He shook his head as Wend rose thankfully to go. “I'll need—” He paused. The chilly amber eyes widened, resting for a long moment on his betrayer's white face. Then, without change of inflection in his harsh voice, he said, “I would like your help, little Brother. But not,” he added acidly, “if it means an unseemly display of redundant contrition.”

Wend blushed hotly and wiped his eyes.

Thoth turned his enigmatic gaze on Minalde, who had risen likewise. “Perhaps, my lady, you had best stay as well.”

The Icefalcon was waiting for Gil and Rudy in the hall. “If he dies,” the Raider commented callously as the door was closed behind them, “he shall have none to thank but himself.” His glance rested briefly upon Gil's scabbed, discoloring face, filthy tunic, and crusted boots. “Good work,” he added. “You have bones to braid in your own hair now, my sister.”

“He was out of training,” Gil commented, and winced as the bandages on her side pulled when she moved her arm. “Christ, I'm tired.”

The Icefalcon moved her gently into the light of a solitary glowstone in a niche and looked critically at the cut in her arm. “That should be seen to,” he said, and she nodded.

“Gil—” Rudy caught at her sleeve as she turned to follow the Raider back to the barracks. She looked back at him, and he saw again how bad she looked, cut up and exhausted from the fight and from the long night of searching through the Keep. It's a helluva thing to do, he thought, to somebody who's just about running on empty; and poor thanks to her for saving my life.

“Gil,” he said, “I have to talk to you.”

“If it's to thank me, don't worry about it,” she said fretfully as he drew her into a deserted cell near Elder's chambers. “He sure as hell had it coming.”

Rudy shook his head. “I can't thank you enough,” he said simply, “so it would be stupid to try. If I knew what to say, I would. It's—Gil, I'm leaving the Keep tomorrow morning.”

She shrugged tiredly. “I don't think you'll have to.”

“Not because of Eldor.”

She frowned, brushing the hair out of her eyes, wincing again at the pain. “The Dark,” she said, picking that single memory from the tangled events of the night. In the faint, grubby light that leaked into the room from the passage, Rudy thought she looked like a couple of teaspoons of warmed-over death. “You said they were headed for Gae. You know why, don't you?”

Rudy swallowed. Absurdly, he remembered a cartoon he'd once seen of a wife removing a Band-Aid from her husband's hairy arm and asking, “Do you want it in one agonizing rip or in a series of excruciating jerks?”

He knew that Gil was of the one-agonizing-rip school.

“I think Ingold's still alive.”

Gil closed her eyes, took a deep breath, then opened them again and asked conversationally, “What makes you think that?” Only her worn, sharp face got whiter, and her mouth tensed, as if against the agony of a wound.

He went on, stumbling painfully over words. "I told you about what happened at Quo—about Lohiro. Well, all the way across the plains to Quo, Ingold kept saying that he didn't think Lohiro was dead. He said he'd know it. Partly because of the Master-spells and partly because there's a—a link between student and teacher. I think it's a link that works both ways.

“Ingold made me a wizard, Gil, and I love that old man like a father—more than any father I ever remember. I know he's alive. But the Dark have had him for weeks now. When he comes back—if he comes back—it won't be him.”

She was crying without sobs, the tears sliding like ice water down her still face. She started straight ahead of her for a long time, only the rigidness of her mouth betraying the wrenching grief within. When she finally spoke, her voice was even, detached. “But he still has the Master-spells over you, doesn't he? And over every other wizard in the world. And his are the spells that bind the Keep gates against the Dark.”

Rudy nodded miserably, thanking God for Gil's brutal quickness of mind that made it unnecessary for him to explain what had to be done or why.

“And what's more,” she went on, as if she were speaking of a stranger, “you and I are probably the only people who would be able to detect anything wrong.”

“Yeah,” he agreed in a strangled voice.

Gil pressed her hands briefly to her face, so that her scarred fingers covered her mouth. From behind them, her voice was muffled and thin. “Oh, Rudy,” she whispered, and was silent then, gray eyes gazing blindly into space.

“I'm sorry, spook.”

She shook her head. “He was afraid of it all along, you know,” she told him quietly. “He said something about it to me once, but I didn't understand. He said that they didn't want him because of something he knew, but because of what he was. With him on our side, we could fight a defensive war. With him on their side—we're gone.”

Rudy said nothing. Outside in the hall, the day's traffic bustled back and forth, voices of the people calling anxious rumors to one another, feet hurrying on errands, far-off children's voices crying. With all its smoky air and endless, lightless mazes, its bleak, grimy cells and inescapable odors of unwashed clothes and cooked cabbage, the Keep of Dare was the last sure sanctuary humankind had.

“You think they're mustering for an attack, then?”

He looked back at Gil. Her hands were hooked in her sword belt again, her face like rain-streaked bone. “I think so.” He paused, then said, “He's a helluva wizard, Gil. I'll need someone who can handle a blade.”

She nodded as if it were something long agreed upon between them. Then she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and tossed the end of her braid over her shoulder. “I have to go get patched up,” she said, still in that flat, calm voice. “I'll see you in the morning, punk.”

Rudy followed her out into the corridor, wanting to offer some comfort, some apology, some mitigation to the hurt of her grief. But she brushed him off and strode away without a word. The white emblem of the Guards on her shoulders bobbed out of sight in the shadows, passing the black-robed figure of Thoth, on his way to give Rudy the news that Eldor was dead.

They were not able to leave the Keep until some forty-odd hours had passed.

Eldor's body was burned at sunset the following day, on the great meadowland where the dancing had been held for the Winter Feast and where he had first seen Alde in Rudy's arms. Supplies in the Keep did not permit much extravagance in the way of grave-goods—the embroidered coverlet that had been drawn over his body for his lying in state was removed before Thoth called the flames to life within the pyre. Burned at his feet upon the same pyre was Alwir's body, still crumpled together as Gil had left him. With the cold, the rigor had stayed in the corpse. As the flames rushed over both bodies, it was almost as if the Chancellor had prostrated himself to the ground at the feet of the man he had murdered.

Standing in the crowd between Thoth and Brother Wend, Rudy glanced up at the makeshift dais that had been built for the flame thrower demonstration and saw how composed Aide's features were in the scarlet light. Her son was weeping softly in her arms, more from cold or fear of the fire or from the solemnity of the occasion than from any real understanding of what took place. Watching her, Rudy saw something that he had observed with his many sisters: there was a moment when a girl's face changed, took on the indefinable quality of a woman's, and was a girl's no more.

The woman with whom Eldor had barely become acquainted turned from the ashes of his pyre and walked back to the Keep in the deepening gloom. Bishop Maia walked at her side—he had traded his grubby conglomerate of salvaged brocades for the blood-crimson of the official Church and looked for the first time like a Bishop of the Straight Faith instead of a refugee from the Haight-Ashbury. Between them her son toddled, an unrecognizable bundle of furs, and her people walked in solemn silence behind.

Govannin Narmenlion had gone. She had slipped out, some said, at sunrise and made off with a few retainers after the troops of Alketch. Bektis was gone, too, and Rudy suspected that the Bishop had coerced the mage with visions of a double trial for conspiracy and black magic and had gotten him to throw a cloaking-spell over them both.

Politics makes strange bedfellows, and conspiracy even stranger ones
. He wondered what the Bishop and the Court Mage would find to talk about on the long road south.

That evening he went to bid Alde goodby.

She was in her cell, sitting at the table which she'd cleared as a kind of work space, surrounded by wax tablets, glow-stones, rolls of scribbled palimpsests, and an abacus. She'd tied her hair back in a thick bun at the nape of her neck, and wore the gaudy ski vest he'd made for her over the worn white gown that she'd first had on when he'd met her in Karst and mistaken her for her son's baby-sitter. He paused in the doorway, watching how the lamplight flickered on the jeweled stylus, on the splinter of silver that gleamed in her hair, and on the little worry wrinkle between her brows that, like Gil's scar, would forever mark her face. He did not know quite how to speak to her, for there was no mistaking her for anything but a Queen now.

Then she looked up and saw him, and happiness kindled in her eyes like the coming of spring. She held out her hands to him, hesitantly, as if she, too, were uncertain of where and how they stood.

“I wasn't sure I'd recognize you,” he said.

She smiled. “I'm not sure that I recognize myself.”

Gently he drew her to her feet and kissed her lips. It was the kiss of a friend, but she held him from parting from her and returned the kiss of longtime lovers whose love had gone deeper than passion or change or grief. There was tightness and magic in it, like coming home to warm firelight after a sleet-ridden night journey. The sheer joy of being with her again mingled with and magnified the knowledge that whatever happened, he would always have a loyal partner in this odd, quiet woman who ruled the Keep of Dare.

“I've come to tell you I'll be leaving in the morning.”

Her hands tightened where they locked behind his back, but she only nodded, accepting, as women who loved wizards must do.

“We should be gone three weeks, maybe a little more.”

“We?”

“There's something that Gil and I have to take care of in Gae.”

She nodded, her brows deepening slightly over eyes that had grown suddenly grave. “You would not be going all that way,” she said softly, “if the cause were not urgent. Is there anything you'll need?”