Tides of Darkness (28 page)

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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Tides of Darkness
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It seemed they were to be soldiers in the guard of the dark realm. They were taken to barracks less vast than those in the city; these were like enough to guardhalls in castles of Daros' own world. A hearth in the center radiated heat without light; bed-niches lined the walls. A second hall past that boasted long rows of tables, and benches on which the ranks of slaves all blindly sat.
Here at last was food and drink: harsh dry bread, salt meat, flagons of clear liquid with a distinct, astringent taste. Except for that strangeness, he would have said that it was water.
It restored his strength considerably. Menkare next to him, and Khafre and Nefret beyond, sat somewhat straighter and seemed less grey about the face.
They dared not speak, even mind to mind. Blinded slaves crowded close. Most of those nearby were men and women of Menkare's world, but round about them Daros saw casts of face that he had not seen before. There were perhaps people of half a dozen worlds, all human in some fashion, but none was of his own kind. Nor was any a mage, even
to the minute degree that he had found in the country of the river. Magic was a rarity in the worlds, it seemed.
That, even apart from the shadow that had cut off world after world, would explain why Gate-mages did not meet their own kind wandering the worldroads. If there were others, they were vanishingly few. People of the worlds shunned Gates, out of lack of understanding or, if they knew of the dark armies, out of fear.
He fought down the surge of despair. This army of slaves was a single night's harvest. There would be myriads more in this citadel alone, and more to come as each band of raiders returned through Gates. Merian's mages would come. She had promised; he could trust that she would fulfill it.
 
There was no reckoning night or day in this place. It was always dark, unlit by moon or star. They were fed at what must be regular intervals. They were taken to the barracks and expected to sleep after every second meal. In between, they served as menials in the citadel.
Others like them, who Daros suspected had been there longer, stood guard at doors and gates, or accompanied various of the lords both within and outside of the citadel. Yet others were taught to ride the scaled beasts with their vicious jaws, and to fight with weapons both familiar and alien.
The lords had eyes, all of them. The slave-soldiers did not, but they were not truly blind. Daros, finding occasion to sweep a corridor that led to one of the practice-courts, marked how lethally swift they were, and how faultlessly the best of them struck targets with throwing-spears and darts and, most fascinating of all, the weapons that hurled the dark fire.
Both teachers and overseers were blinded slaves, but they seemed to have more will than the ranks they commanded. The ranks were mute, but the overseers could speak; they gave instruction and issued orders, speaking a language that must be that of the lords; but it addressed itself to each slave in his own tongue. Daros heard it in the tongue of Shurakan,
which was rather strange; his mother had spoken it to him when he was small, but once he was grown, he had spoken chiefly the common speech of Keruvarion.
Daros had not yet managed to approach the lords. They kept to themselves in the upper reaches of the citadel; if they had servants, none was of Daros' company. Newcomers were not permitted in the lords' halls; the doors between were heavily guarded.
He wondered what they feared. Their slaves? All of those seemed utterly subjugated, except his tiny band of mages. The Mage was not on this world; it dwelt apart in its prison. If he turned his thought toward the feather on its cord, he could sense that potent presence, and see, if briefly, that strange face with its eyes bent upon him.
The Mage was aware of him. He took a little comfort from that in this darkest of places. What good it would do, what help it could be, he did not know, but any hope was better than none.
D
AROS COUNTED DAYS BY THE NUMBER OF TIMES THAT HE LAY down to sleep in that lightless place. His sleep was dark, his dreams unformed. After the second—night, he supposed he could call it, though the night here was perpetual—his magelings had begun to lose their courage. They had managed to stay together through the times of labor, and had claimed bed-niches side by side. They gave each other strength. But night unbroken, even with mage-sight, was a terrible burden on the spirit.
On the third night, Daros woke from a restless half-doze to the sound of weeping. It was silent; it sounded within his mind, with a flavor of the guardsman Khafre. He had seemed the strongest of all, but the soul that opened itself to Daros was deeply horrified by the dark and the eyeless slaves and the strangeness of this bleak world. He, like all his
people, was a creature of sunlight. Even in death they sought the light.
“That is your strength,” Daros said to him. Daros had brought sunlight into his dream, setting them both in Khafre's own world, standing in a field beside the river, under the pure clean blue of the sky. Menkare was there, and Nefret, and Kaptah looking somewhat shocked. Huy—
“Gone,” Kaptah said heavily. “He broke. They killed him.”
Daros had not known. He had been shielded too closely. His fault; his folly.
He must not let it crush him. “And you?” he asked Kaptah. “Can you hold on?”
The priest spread his hands. “Have I a choice?”
“Keep this place in your heart,” Daros said. “It will strengthen you when nothing else will.”
Kaptah bowed.
“Light is strength,” Daros said to them all. “The enemy has a horror of it, is even destroyed by it. In light you can take refuge.”
“Sometimes I think I'll forget what light even is,” Nefret said. “We can't last very long, my lord. This place is too alien to anything we know, except the darkest of dark dreams. If we had a plan—anything to do except wait for the rest of your gods—it would help immensely.”
“I had thought of that,” Daros said. “You keep the bond with Kaptah—don't lose it. You others, explore as you can; if you can discover the secrets of this place, we may be able to use them.”
“And you?” she asked.
“I will penetrate the lords' towers, and learn what I can. There may be a way—did you notice the other slaves? Some are warriors. And some, who are closest to the lords, have will, or something like it. If I can find my way among them, gain their trust, learn their secrets—”
“Alone?”
“Until my brother mages come,” Daros said, “yes. It won't be long now.”
“And then?”
She was asking all the hard questions. “Then we bring light to the dark land,” he answered her.
She did not ask him how. Maybe she had had enough of questions.
Anger made her stronger. Anything that did that, Daros reckoned was worth the price.
 
The sixth night promised to be no better than the rest. His magelings gathered in the place of brightness as they had done every night. They fed on sunlight and spoke of small things, things that had nothing to do with the dark world.
Daros left them to it. He had tried, the past few nights, to dreamwalk into Merian's presence, but the shadow on this world was too strong. This was the heart of it. It was born in this place, and rolled forth in waves to drown the worlds.
Khafre and Menkare had explored the citadel as best they could. They had found a warren of guardrooms and slaves' quarters, and a maze of deep storerooms under armed guard, and stables for the scaled beasts. They had come across nothing of great use. The armories were heavily guarded. The troops in training either fought with blunted or feigned weapons, or performed their exercises under heavy guard and surrendered those weapons when they were done, to be locked away in the armories.
Daros had yet to penetrate the defenses of the lords' towers. There were wards as well as guards. Both were vigilant. Once he came close to slipping in behind a lord who was coming out, but the lord's guards closed in too quickly. Daros barely escaped into a side passage before he was caught.
That night, the sixth night, he left his magelings to rest in their illusion of light, and went dreamwalking, however futile it might be. The beacon he had set in the Gate was still there; no one had found it, nor had the mages passed it. Time that passed so differently from world to world was not serving him now. Even with the expedients that he had given them, his magelings could not hold for much longer.
The ways of dream were dark and strange. He wandered through dim and twisting corridors, across landscapes of torment, through a chamber of echoes and weird howling. He dared not venture too far: he could lose his waking self in the darkness, and never return to his body.
Just before he would have turned back, the faintest of grey glimmers caught the corner of his eye. He drifted toward it. It grew no brighter, but it grew larger. In a little while he saw the Mage's prison. It was the same as he remembered, round like one of the towers of the dark citadel, and each of its many windows a Gate, but the Mage could pass through none of them.
Daros stepped through one of the windows onto the dark stone floor. The feather on his breast stirred. It drew him toward the shadowed center.
The Mage lay there. Its eyes were open, but perhaps they could not close. Its long strange body seemed to have fallen in on itself. Bonds of shadow confined it; it breathed shallowly, its lipless mouth open.
It was conscious, but that consciousness had retreated far within. Its power raged and surged, bound as it was, compelled by a will outside of its own.
That will led back in direct line from the prison to the citadel in which Daros' body lay. It stretched like a cord across the roads of dream, to one of the towers of the citadel, the highest and grimmest and most heavily guarded of them all.
Because Daros was in dream and not in flesh, he could swim along that cord as if the dark had been water and not lightless air. It undulated a little in the currents of worlds; magic pulsed through it, seeping into him, making him subtly stronger.
It slid through a high slitted window of the tower. Windows, thought Daros, in that place without light: everywhere else in the citadel were shafts to let in air, but no windows. Only here.
He made himself as invisible as he could, mingling his awareness with that of the Mage and letting the cord draw him through the window into …
Light?
It was dim. In any world lit by a sun, it would have been the deepest of twilight. But here it was dazzlingly bright. It bathed the body of a man who sat upright in a tall chair. The room about him was full of a myriad things: a great thick-legged table, smaller chairs, stools, boxes and shelves and bins of books in numerous shapes and forms—startling in the dark; proof indeed that these lords could see. Directly in front of the man, on the table, whirred and spun a thing of metal.
The light came from this, and so did the darkness. It spun them both out of the cord that came from the Mage. The light dissipated here. The darkness spread. Some of it streamed back down the cord to bind the Mage ever more tightly. The rest spread like black water through all the worlds.
The man looked like the other lords that Daros had seen. He was older, perhaps; his beard was shot with white. He had an air about him that Daros had seen in men of great power: the surety that when he commanded, men obeyed.
As Daros drifted, insubstantial, in the air, another man entered the room. He shielded his eyes with a dark cloth, which concealed most of his face, but he also was of the kin and kind of the lords of this citadel.
The man in the chair rose. The spinning thing faltered. The other man slid into the chair, and the whirring resumed, spinning darkness, dissipating light.
Daros followed the first man as he made his way slowly, stumbling with weariness, out of that enigmatic place. He recovered a little strength as he went. His steps steadied; his shoulders straightened. He descended a long stair with no nobler purpose, maybe, than to find a bed and fall into it.
But when he reached the landing, a man met him. “Trouble?” said the lord from the tower.
“Yes,” said the other.
The first man sighed gustily. “Lead me,” he said.
 
 
Daros knew that hall. He had seen it before, where the dark lords gathered. There were only three there now, waiting for the lord from the tower. A small figure knelt before them.
Daros nearly shocked himself out of the dream. It was Kaptah. He had been stripped of the dark robe that all slaves wore. There were bruises on his body, and his eyes were blackened and swollen—he still had them, for what good they would do in the dark.
The lord from the tower circled him slowly. He was tightly bound, his arms drawn cruelly behind his back, and his spine arched just short of breaking. He could not move, but he managed to radiate defiance.
“He was found among the least of the slaves,” one of the lords said, “caught wandering apart from his company, spying near the storehouses in the city of the newest slaves.”
The lord from the tower brushed a hand over Kaptah's eyes. “He has not been rendered fit to serve us. How is that? Who allowed it?”
“He was found,” the other replied. “He came in from one of the worlds that we harvest. The rest who came with him are as fit as any other. It's only this one.”
“Make him fit,” said the lord from the tower, “and then feed him to the nightwalkers. Unless there is a reason why you trouble me with this?”
“There is a reason,” said one of the two who had been silent. He aimed a blow at Kaptah's head.
Kaptah did not mean to respond as he did: Daros could see that. But his shields had been wrought too well. The blow did not strike flesh. There was a flash of sudden light and a sharp scent of lightning. The lords recoiled. Kaptah's captors were less dismayed than the lord from the tower, and swifter to cover their eyes.
The lord from the tower hissed. His eyes had squeezed shut; tears of pain ran down his cheeks. “Another one of
those?
But that world is free of them. We were assured of that.”
“It seems the assurances were false,” said the man who had struck Kaptah. His face was tight with pain; his hand trembled in spasms.
“Pity,” said the lord from the tower. “That world was useful. Now we
have no choice but to offer it in sacrifice to the dark, and find another both rich and untainted.”
“That … is another matter,” said the man who had struck Kaptah. “Our advance has halted.”
The lord from the tower rounded on him. “It has done what?”
“We are halted,” the other said with a goodly degree of courage.
“And how may that be?”
“There is a world,” the first of Kaptah's captors said. “All Gates lead there—even those we would divert elsewhere, when we pass through them, we find ourselves there. It's foul with lightmagic; reeks of it. Our warriors need cleansing after every raid.”
“Then,” said the lord from the tower with a snap of impatience, “why have you not destroyed it?”
“We can't,” said the lord who had struck Kaptah. “We have tried. It's walled and guarded. We can pierce it; strip storehouses, take slaves. But no Gate will open beyond it.”
“Maybe it's the end,” said the first lord: “the last world, the world that the gods will take, and so swallow all that is.”
“It is not,” the lord from the tower said. “That end is still far away. I have a suspicion …” But he did not go on. He bent over Kaptah. Quite without warning, and quite without mercy, he snapped the priest's neck.
Kaptah's shields had risen, but not fast enough. They crackled about the lord's hands. He hissed but held his ground. Kaptah dropped, limp. He was dead before he struck the floor.
“Watch for others like this one,” the lord said. “Destroy them when you find them. As for this other trouble, let me rest a little. Then call the conclave.”
The other three bowed. Two of them took up Kaptah's body to dispose of it. The third ran the errand that the greater lord had commanded of him.
 
Daros hung in the air of that hall, with no more substance to him than if he had been air itself. He had had no strength, no capacity to act,
when the third of his magelings died through his fault—because he had brought them here, and they were not strong enough, and so they broke and were betrayed. Only three were left, and no sign of the mages from his own world.
He saw the darkness beneath him, the depths of despair. The light he had given his magelings was not enough. He was a greater mage than any of them, and because of that, his weakness as well as his strength was greater.

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