03 The Armies of Daylight d-3, page 19
part #3 of Darwath Series
His eyes traveled slowly over them, fraught with a rage-blistered menace that silenced even Kara's mother. Then he looked back at Ingold. "And as for you and this besotted chit of a girl-" He broke off, the words sticking in his throat.
Gil felt Ingold's reaction, like a sudden wave of smoking heat, though she would have been at a loss to describe any change that took place in the old man at her side. But the power that blazed forth from him was like a vortex offered, an Archmage's wrath like the unveiled core of some terrible energy. She saw Alwir fall back a step before it, his face yellow with shock.
"My lord Alwir," that soft, scratchy voice said, "none of these my children are your servants, nor shall you do anything against them or against this girl."
Alwir licked his dry lips, but his throat seemed unable to produce a sound. Terror-sweat stood out on his brow and cheeks, glittering in the crystalline light. Like Gil, he had known that Ingold was Archmage of the West without truly realizing what that meant.
In the utter silence that gripped the room, Ingold's low voice was the only sound. "You will act like a fool if you choose, my lord. But do not deceive yourself that I act out of any fear or regard for you or your policies. I do what I do for the good of what is left of humankind. If your quarrel is with me, then speak to me of it; for if you harm any one of these in this room, it shall be the worse for you. Now leave us."
"You..." the Chancellor gasped hoarsely, but his breath dried in his mouth. His face was ghastly, a grotesque contortion of fear.
"Get out."
The bigger man flinched, as if from a sword thrust. He backed slowly to the door; but in the shocked stillness of the common room, all could hear when his footfalls broke into a run in the darkness of the halls.
Like the slow fading of sunset, the power that had scorched the air in the room waned, and with it the soft brilliance of the light. Gil had not moved, frozen in awe of the man who stood beside her; now she turned to him and saw how the lengthening shadows deepened the crags of his face. A last fragment of the torn parchment in the fireplace caught, and the sudden flare of light stippled his white hair in gold.
Kta's piping voice was the first to break the silence. "He will never forgive you that."
Ingold sighed and closed his eyes. "He would never have forgiven me in any case."
Gil put a hand under his arm and steered him to the thronelike seat so recently vacated by Alwir. Thoth came around the end of the table to join them and laid a slender, ink-stained hand on his shoulder.
"You are weary," the serpentmage said in his dry old voice. "You should sleep."
The other mages were drifting from the room, talking in low, frightened voices of what had passed or debating what was to be done. At one end of the table, Rudy still sat, his bulky flame thrower in his hand, turning it this way and that in the light of the fire, with Alde silent and anxious at his side. The last glow of the magelight had been superseded by the rosy colors of the fire.
Ingold raised his head finally to look at Gil. "I am sorry, child," he said quietly. "You worked hard. More than that, I'm convinced that your answer to the problem of the Dark is the true one." He reached up and took her hands. "Thank you."
There was silence, fraught with unspoken words. Looking down into his face, Gil was overwhelmed by fear for him and by the sense of shadows closing and thickening around him. Where, after all, could he go? Within the sanctuary of the Keep was Alwir; without it, the Dark.
"And in any case, tomorrow it will no longer be your concern," the wizard murmured. "It is the Winter Feast. You are free to return to your own world, without putting it in danger of invasion by the Dark. I shall send you back through the gap in the Void at sunrise-unless you stay long enough to keep the Feast with me."
His voice was pitched low, excluding the few who remained in the shadowy common room. His mouth had a set look under the tangled forest of white beard, as if braced against some bitter emotion; Gil fought her own urge to reach out and touch his rough, silky hair.
Instead, in a brisk voice, she said, "In spite of all this-in spite of the fact that you know that the Dark are seeking you-will you still march north with the army?"
"Of course..." he began, and then looked more sharply up at her, catching some inflection in her voice. "... not," he finished. "Of course not."
Thoth's honey-colored glance flicked sideways, startled, but Ingold cut off his words. "No, I shall remain here at the Keep. Alwir has my permission to perish in his own chosen fashion, but after tonight, I see no reason to oblige the Dark by letting them strip my bones. Don't worry about me, my child. I shall be quite safe."
Gil nodded. "I'm glad to hear it," she said. "Even though it will make things rougher for the rest of us when we march on the Nest."
"There's no need for you to endanger your life!" he retorted sharply.
"Oh, come on, Ingold, you can't expect me to leave on the eve of an invasion without knowing how it will turn out."
"I certainly can, particularly when you know better than anyone else that it is most likely to turn out, as you say, with you dead. You know how little chance there is..."
"I know how little chance there is," she told him maliciously, "if you're staying at the Keep. The Guards will need every sword."
She intercepted a startled look from Rudy, to whom this plan was news. It was, in fact, news to her.
A dangerous glitter of annoyance shone in Ingold's eyes, which Gil met with an air of mild defiance, daring him to contradict his own lie.
More quietly, she went on. "It was you who taught me not to forsake those I love, even though their cause might be lost."
He regarded her for a long moment, at a loss for once in his life for a retort. His hands, still closed around hers, tightened slightly; had it not been both their lives at stake in this joust of wills, she could almost have laughed at the emotions warring in his face.
Then he said, "Has anyone ever told you how unbecoming it is for the young to outwit their elders?"
Gil shook her head, her eyes wide, as innocent of guile as a schoolgirl's. "No, sir."
He snorted. "Consider yourself told."
"Yes, sir."
"Now go to bed. And, Gil..."
She paused in the doorway, turning to see him half-risen from his chair, edged in the reflected amber of the hearthlight as if with a lingering of his earlier searing power. Behind him, all was darkness, but for the oily sparkle of Rudy's flame thrower on the table and the shimmering twinkle of the harp strings in the corner of the hearth.
"You never needed me to teach you that kind of loyalty, Gil."
"I needed you in order to understand it."
She turned and strode quickly into the darkness, feeling exhausted, lightheaded, and yet curiously at peace.
"Did Gil really mean it?" Alde hugged her black fur cloak more tightly about her; though the sun shone, pale and distant, for the first time in many weeks, the air was icy cold. She and Rudy came out of the gate passage into the open and moved down the steps, jostled by the crowds around them. From the jumbled warren of booths made of pine boughs and ragged, colored awnings that stretched along two sides of the meadow, a skiff of freezing wind carried voices and music.
"Of course she meant it." Rudy looked over at Alde in surprise.
"But she might be killed."
The path leading down to the meadow was slushy, trampled already by the crowds that had been taking that way since dawn. Rudy put a steadying arm around Aide's shoulders. Tir, wrapped up like a little black and white cabbage and tucked within her cloak, blinked about him with wide, jewel-blue eyes and gurgled happily at the noise and confusion below.
"I didn't understand all of what she said last night," Rudy went on, "but she's right about one thing. She couldn't leave without knowing if her friends were going to live or die."
"No," Alde agreed quietly. "But she's the one who wrote that report. She knows better than anyone that humankind never defeated the Dark. She knows how hopeless it is."
"That's a helluva thing to say to the man who invented our side's secret weapon," Rudy declared in mock indignation.
The path was narrow; they brushed elbows with others descending around them: Guards in threadbare black uniforms and Tirkenson's rangers in sheepskin boots; women in rainbow skirts like those of peasants, their hair twined with jewels they'd picked out of the mud of Karst; and children, scorning the careful steps of their elders, sliding down the muddy snow, waving precious bits of honey candy in sticky fingers and shrieking like little birds.
On the edge of the warren of booths. Alde put a hand on Rudy's arm, halting him; the breath of the Feast, of honey and snow and pine and music, swirled over them from the meadow in a disturbing backwash of sound and smell. "Do you still believe that Dare of Renweth defeated the Dark with flame throwers?"
"Babe, I don't," Rudy said gently. "I've never really believed it, mostly because, while you recognized this, that, and the other thing around the Keep, you never recognized a flame thrower. I think the wizard-engineers were working on them as a defensive weapon when they disappeared and the labs were sealed up. But that doesn't mean that Alwir's plan won't succeed. If we can burn out the Nest- if we can cauterize the nurseries at its bottom-it will be enough for me and a damnsight more than Dare ever did."
"You're very serious about destroying the nurseries," she murmured, her eyes searching his, sober and worried.
"I was down there," Rudy said. "Yeah, I am."
The tug of the Feast overwhelmed Tir. He struggled in his mother's arms and declared insistently, "Andy! Andy!"
Aide caught the flailing little hand that grabbed her hair. "All right, you little wretch, I'll get you some candy." She looked back at Rudy, her face grave. "Why did the wizard-engineers vanish?" she asked softly. "What happened to them?"
Tir tugged impatiently at his mother's hair and cried, "Ad!" He pointed, as Tad the herdkid and a vast gaggle of the Keep orphans went skipping past. Since Tir's concealment among them, the orphans had accepted the heir of the Realm as one of themselves; even Winna, their guardian, had knitted Tir a little stocking cap, such as she had given to all the others as their gifts at the Feast. For his part, Tir was quite happy to be included in that mongrel gang, and Alde turned him over to them. A few moments later, they could be seen out on the meadow, engaged in a wild game of frisbee... It was shocking, Gil had once remarked, how much cultural pollution had been going on lately.
Hand in hand, Rudy and Alde plunged into the confusion of the Feast.
The joy of the Winter Feast was the renewal of life; even the terror of the Dark and the crumbling of civilization could not wholly eradicate the celebrations of the return of the midwinter sun. In the meadow that lay between the arms of the vast V of booths, a makeshift band was playing, surrounded by eternally shifting patterns of dancers moving ankle-deep in half-frozen slush. The air was bright with the voices of children and rank with smoke; Gil would have recognized the colorful medley as a scene straight from Breughel, but Rudy felt merely a kind of awed delight in such gay chaos. Among the booths themselves, a tangled latticework of shadows lay over the faces of those who wandered there, and a babble of voices cried whatever wares could be sold for whatever the market would bear.
Resources at the Keep were slim, but with forage parties making regular raids on all the ruined settlements of the flooded river valleys, some surprising articles had turned up. There was honey enough to make sufficient candy to sicken every child in the Keep; some dried fruits had been unearthed and small quantities of sweets. There was little wine, but Melantrys and her company of Guards had been stationed at the Keep for almost a year before the Dark had risen-enough time to make enormous amounts of Blue Ruin gin, which they were hawking in their own booth. The tangled warren of pine-bough booths boasted other entertainments as well; such as a wheel of fortune, under the auspices of Impie Stooft, the stout blond widow of the late unlamented Bendle Stooft. Blid, the Penambran Soothsayer, was telling fortunes, and Dakis the Minstrel was playing his lute.
Everyone in the Keep seemed to have turned out for the festivities- Penambrans, outlanders, and refugees from Gae and Karst. The Alketch soldiery kept to their own camp, by order of Commander Vair. Rudy had the suspicion that the disappearance of Ambassador Stiarth was more responsible for this than any consideration of peace between the allies. No sign of the missing Imperial Nephew had yet turned up, and Alwir, following his rather trying evening in the Corps common room, had evidently spent the rest of the night trying to soothe and resist Vair's outraged demands that the Keep doors be opened and a search party be sent. This, of course, was impossible. Even had Keep Law been broached, which Alde would never have allowed, there were precious few men in the Keep who would have risked their lives to look for the svelte, young Ambassador's bones.
It had done nothing for relations between the allies, but Rudy was just as glad not to have to worry about a riot breaking out between Keep and southern troops.
The day was too beautiful, the last afternoon of peace too precious, to allow that.
So Rudy and Alde wandered at peace through this winter chaos, drinking hot gin and water and eating honey candy like a couple of greedy youngsters. It was the custom to give gifts to children at the Feast, and Alde was forever being stopped by small acquaintances showing off their new toys. Even among the Penambrans, who had escaped the Dark with no more than the rags on their backs, the custom had been kept, with gifts as small as painted walnuts or rag-and-root dolls. After considerable deliberation, Rudy had presented Tir with his motorcycle keys to the child's blissful delight. Rudy knew that he would never use them again.
They wandered down to the frozen stream to watch the footraces held on its surface and laughed as heartily as the rest of the crowd at the slithering antics of the contestants. Blid told Aide's fortune, amid a crowd of interested onlookers- that she would be twice wedded, the second time to a foreign man, and that she would pass through fire and peril to win both love and power. A. respectable and unsurprising fortune , Rudy thought, considering what everybody in the Keep must know .
The sight of the cards troubled him, for he knew a little of their meaning: the Tower crossed by the Rose of Death; the austere sneer of the King of Swords; and the chancy promise of the impetuous Knight of Wands. But by that time both of them had imbibed enough alcohol to find deep significance in the tiniest of matters.
He could not remember ever having seen Alde so beautiful, with her dark hair escaping from its heavy braid to tumble about her face in wisps like the wings of butterflies, and the blue depths of her eyes, like the endless promise of summer pleasures, laughing into his. She had left her cloak somewhere, and the brilliant colors of the eagle on her painted vest flamed against the cherry-red velvet of her skirt.
In the meadow, the band skirled into a wild romp, and the dancers of a crazy quadrille swung back into the arms of their original partners, while all those who watched yelled, "Kiss 'em! Kiss your partners!" The men claimed this customary forfeit from tousled and blushing women.
Rudy saw Gil standing on the sidelines, watching with amusement in her eyes, and he saw the Icefalcon pause to exchange insults with her. It occurred to him that the Icefalcon had added to his collection of bones. They were all braided into the white-blond hair, Raider-style; there seemed to be about twice as many as there had been when the man had returned to the Keep. Some of them, Rudy thought uneasily, although boiled and cleaned, looked pretty fresh.
Bok the carpenter scraped experimentally on his fiddle and tightened a peg; Janus, his Guard's uniform brightened with a woman's gauze scarf knotted over his sword hilt, tortured another gargling moan out of his bagpipes. Alde tugged, laughing, at Rudy's arm. "Let's dance!"
"I can't dance!" he protested.
"Of course you can!" she replied, her cheeks bright with punch and cold. "Listen, they're going to play my favorite..."
All around the slushy dancing ground, men and women were forming groups of twelve, here and there yelling, "Set! Set! We need more couples!"
Rudy saw Ingold come up beside Gil, who shook her head, her sharp cheekbones reddening. He caught the drift of that mild, scratchy voice inquiring, "You aren't going to turn down my first proposal to dance with anyone in fifteen years, are you?"
She burst into unexpected giggles. It was astonishing, Rudy thought, how Gil could shift from a mean and steel-hard combination of violence and intellect to the gawkiness and fragility of a girl. Ingold draped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her, blushing, into the circle of the dance floor. Alde put her arm through Rudy's. "Come on!"
The Icefalcon led one of his numerous girlfriends into the set; a moment later, they were joined by Maia of Penambra, leading the silent, red-haired witchchild Ilea by the hand.
"Come on!" Alde insisted, and Rudy allowed himself to be dragged into the line. She waved her hand and called out, "One more couple!" Tomec Tirkenson, looming suddenly out of the crowd like Godzilla emerging from Tokyo Bay, put an arm around Kara of Ippit's waist and drew her, startled and stammering, into position.
Rudy sighed. "What the hell. You'll have to tell me what to do."
"Oh, don't be such a wet goose. It's easy."
It was not easy.
Rudy yelled over his shoulder, "You lied to me!" But he was swept through stars and figures of eight while Aide, swinging in the crook of Ingold's powerful arm, laughed at him with her eyes.
"I'm sorry!" she gasped as he released Gil and caught her hand in one flashing figure, and then she was gone.
People were yelling to him, "Right hand! Right hand! Your other right hand!" He went flinging off through a grand right-and-left that reminded him vaguely of a Marx Brothers movie, with the women weaving like a chain of bright ribbon among the laughing men. The music, or maybe the gin, flamed around and through him, sharpening his awareness and altering his time sense; he found himself half in love with all the women-with Kara, who moved with such surprising grace in the brief circle of his arm, and with this startlingly pink-cheeked and giggling Gil. Brief, confused visual impressions tangled in the springing flood of the music. The Icefalcon reminded him of a cheetah, cold and precise; Ingold plunged through the mazes of the game with an agility and an abandon that were alike surprising; and Tomec Tirkenson swung the tall Kara effortlessly off her feet in a frothing skirl of tattered petticoats.
