03 The Armies of Daylight d-3, page 23
part #3 of Darwath Series
At the turn of the stairway, Alwir still watched, unmoving, looking down into the pit of the deeper shaft at the trapped figure against the wall. Then he glanced back at the guard of his own red-clad troopers who stood around him and said, "There are too many. Pull back."
Sobbing, Rudy fought against the tide. Hands gripped his elbows. Someone said something to him about being off his head with shock; he was dragged back by an iron grip. Through a momentary gap in the ranks, he could see the light of Ingold's blade like a misty white fire; by its reflected brilliance, he glimpsed the wizard's face, cool and filled with determination to sell the flesh off his bones at the highest possible price.
Rudy saw before Ingold did the sinuous whip of tentacle that lashed from the shadows, wrapping the wizard's two wrists where he held the sword. Ingold made a desperate attempt to pull free; another whiplike tail snagged his ankle and pulled him off his feet and away from the wall. The gleaming sword rang on the stairs as it fell, and the light of it died.
The picture was retreating, dreamlike, as Rudy was pulled back up the stairs and the darkness below him thickened. He saw Ingold twist in another futile effort to break free of the things that caught at him now from all sides. Like a half-heard, strangled cry, he felt the wizard's last, desperate attempt to call light.
A spark flickered in the darkness and died. In the daylight at the top of the stairs, Alwir, in his dark velvet cloak, looked down and watched as Ingold was dragged out of sight into the darkness.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
"Gil?"
Rudy let the tent flap fall, shutting out the whining howl of the wind. He spoke softly, his voice barely audible over the rattle of the rain on the leather roof of the hospital-tent, so as not to wake the others lying there. He knew that Gil would not be sleeping.
He saw the gleam of her open eyes. She was regarding the tent ceiling dispassionately, as she had done all of yesterday, after she had wakened there and Brother Wend had told her as gently as he could that Ingold was dead.
Then the gray eyes shifted and met his. "Hi, punk," she said in a perfectly normal tone, as if she were meeting him by chance in a parking lot, and Rudy's heart sank within him.
"You okay?"
She shrugged. "Compared with about half the people who went down that hole, I'm fantastic." She folded her arms across her chest, and the little light that leaked from under the shade of the glowstone showed him the side of her face all streaked with rock-splinter cuts and a grimy black bandage torn from somebody's surcoat covering the abraded wound on her temple. By the look of her eyes, he could not see that she had shed any tears-which was more than could have been said of him.
After a moment she returned that flat, cool gaze to the ceiling. "They say Eldor will make it, too," she added conversationally. "Which is damn ironic, when you think of it."
Rudy shut his eyes against the burn of tears and looked away. The shattered chain of bodies across the floor of the gas trap seemed to be etched into the backside of his eyelids. "Gil, what are we gonna do?" he whispered.
"Depends on your priorities," she said, her light voice half-drowned by the torrential roar of the rain. "I'd say the smartest thing to do is send an expedition to the Nest in the Vale of the Dark for moss and make some kind of nitroglycerine-based defensive weapons against the White Raiders. You could probably also use the nitrogen base for fertilizer for the hydroponics gardens-"
"Goddam it, Gil!" he sobbed out of a blinding vortex of grief. "How can you just sit there and-and talk about defensive weapons and-and fertilizer...?" The light, sexless, reasonable voice sickened him. "I always knew you were the most heartless woman I'd ever met, but... He's dead, Gil! Can't you understand that?"
"Sure," Gil said cheerfully. "Just because I don't shove my pain off onto you doesn't mean I don't feel any."
He was silent, his face burning with shame.
She moved her head a little on the bundled cloak that served her for a pillow. In the reflection of the half-drowned torches outside the tent, her eyes looked as gray as weathered ice and about as feeling. "You asked me what we're gonna do," she pointed out in a milder voice. "I'd say, just offhand, what we better do is settle ourselves down for a nice, long stay."
It was the beginning of the most hideous time that Rudy had ever endured.
The weeks that followed the decimated army's return to the Keep of Dare ran together in his mind into a single, endless hell of misery, grief, and fear. Rudy kept for the most part to his own cell or to the desolate Corps commons, and the surviving mages knew enough to let him be. Gil occasionally brought him news of what passed in the rest of the Keep-of Eldor's slow recovery, of the Alketch troops that occupied most of the second level, of the bitter infighting between the King and the Church-but Rudy heard it all without caring.
Gil had changed. Rudy often wondered what had happened to her when Ingold died. The gawky shyness, the scholarliness, the sensitivity, were gone. Now and then he heard her refer to the old man's death in passing without so much as a change of inflection in her light, sarcastic voice. But there was a fey quality lurking in those frozen eyes that frightened him.
Aide he saw only once.
Gil said that she never left the Royal Sector, though whether by her own choice or Eldor's compulsion, Gil did not know. Kara, who helped Thoth and Brother Wend nurse the King in the days after his shrouded litter was brought back from Gae, said that Alde kept much to her room after her first interview with Eldor when he regained consciousness. Kara said that Alwir and Bektis-the only mage who did not participate in the invasion of the Nest-were much with the King.
Even had Alde been free to go about the Keep, Rudy would seldom have seen her, but the lethargy that had settled around his heart alternated with a longing for her of a desperate intensity that nothing would allay. It was a desire he fought against, knowing the depths of Eldor's jealousy. Even to be caught trying to see her might trigger retaliation upon them both. Yet the longing grew on him, like a junkie's cravings for a drug, to the point where he was toying with the notion of slipping past the Alketch troops by means of a cloaking-spell and chancing a meeting when Eldor, who Gil said was able to get about now, was gone.
That night he waited until the start of the deep-night watch and called her image in the crystal.
The filtered pink glow of the night light showed him the room they had shared so many nights, the tumbled shadows of the bed, with her dark braids lying like tasseled black ropes against the iridescent gleam of the starry quilt, the soft, waxy sheen of the table, and the thin edge of gilt on the strapwork of her jewel box. The spindle-carved foot of Tir's bed had its heavy curtains looped back to reveal the downy, dark head on the pillow within.
Rudy's mind traced the murky ways of the Keep and considered how he could reach that perfumed, sleeping sanctuary in peace.
Then a thin sliver of light stabbed into the image as the door of the room was pushed slowly ajar. A tall shape blotted the dim glow from the hall, a momentary shadow of a man who pushed the door quickly to behind him- soundlessly, Rudy thought, for on the bed Alde did not stir. I he intruder stepped carefully forward, a cautious movement marred by the man's horribly staggering gait, like that of a badly wielded marionette. The roseate light slithered across the soft black leather of the mask that covered his whole head and glinted on the gold eagle embroidered on his breast.
Rudy felt his breath stifle in his lungs.
Yet Eldor made no move toward his wife's bed. Instead, he stole, with that limping, awkward hobble, to the shadows that flanked Tir's cradle and stood for a time looking down at the child within. The silence of it, the clarity of those tiny images prisoned in the crystal, sent a prickle of horror down Rudy's back. The fact that this was occurring now, close to half a mile away at the far end of the Keep, and that he would be a helpless witness to whatever happened exerted a kind of terrifying fascination over him, so that he could not turn his eyes away.
At length, the King moved away; with that same stealthy limp, he returned to the door and was gone. As the door closed quietly behind him, Rudy saw the silken bedclothes stir, and Alde raised her head to look at the fading crack of light that marked where Eldor had gone. Her eyes were wide, plum-colored in the darkness -and wholly awake.
His hands shaking, Rudy laid the crystal aside. In time he tell into a fitful sleep, prey to other visions more terrible than that-and to one in particular, a recurring horror that he had begun already to pray was only a dream.
In all that wretchedness and despair, the one thing that he clung to was the music of the harp Tiannin. He had salvaged the instrument from the ruins of Quo, the city that he had felt instinctively should have been his home; Dakis the Minstrel and Minalde had both taught him the rudiments of Tiannin's art.
Now, through the dark winter days, it was his only company, the magic of its music the only outlet for his longing and grief. For hours on end he played, sometimes straight through the long nights, his hands clumsily shaping the songs he had learned, or following their own inclinations into long, melancholy improvisations. He sensed, as he had always sensed, the presence of a crystalline beauty within the harp that lay far beyond his striving. The notes seemed to rise toward it, as flocks of marsh birds rose toward the sun at dawn. But because Ingold had once teased him about how badly he played, he was not aware of how close to that beauty he came. The other mages, some of the Guards, and those in the Keep who had their own losses to mourn in that bleak dead of winter often came to sit in some room of that thin-walled, half-deserted complex to hear those clean and shining strains.
It was thus that Gil found him, the night that the Church finally struck.
So engrossed was he in the shimmering sounds that he did not hear her swift feet in the hall. The first he knew of her presence was when the door was flung open, and she strode with light and terrible urgency into the room.
She paused, blinking in the darkness, but she was moving toward the bed where he sat by the time he had called a feather of light to the air above his head.
"What the-" he began.
She removed the harp from his startled hands. In the pale glow of the witchlight, her brows were two black slashes above eyes that were coolly impersonal. "I just got word," she informed him briefly. "All the Alketch troops up on the second level are being sent down here. Their orders are to put all the wizards under arrest."
Rudy gasped. " What ?" And then, rather incoherently, he protested, "It's the middle of the goddam night!"
She paused on her way back out the door, the harp tucked under her arm, its strings glimmering like quicksilver against the darkness of her voluminous surcoat. With cool scorn, she asked, "You think they'd pull a bust like this if there were likely to be witnesses?"
"But..."
She was gone, her black clothes mingling with the shadows. Rudy was still standing in the doorway of the cell when torchlight flooded the corridors, followed by voices, curses, and the clatter of boots. A squad of Alketch troopers turned the corner and barged toward the cell door-flat-faced, mahogany-dark men in scaled armor that glittered like an oiled rainbow in the light.
Confusion had slowed Rudy's reflexes. He slammed the door instants before they reached it and made a dash across the room for the flame thrower that was holstered beside the bed. The door was kicked open and men poured in, surrounding him before he reached his weapon; it occurred to him, as heavy hands slammed him against the wall, that he could have used a cloaking-spell instead.
His arms were twisted behind him, and he was searched, not gently; it came to him for the first time how civil and pleasant the San Bernardino cops had been.
"Listen..." he gasped-and collected a slap from a mailed hand that took his breath away.
He was jerked away from the wall, stifling a cry as his arms were all but wrenched from their sockets. Something sharp pricked his ribs, and someone said, "You make a noise, mage, and it will be the last one you ever make." A hot thread of blood trickled down his side.
They dragged him into the corridor, past the door of the commons. Dark figures passed back and forth across the flaring light of the hearth, their shadows huge on the walls. Firelight glittered on armor; the soldiers were smashing glowstones and record crystals, ripping to pieces Thoth's mathematical notes, and dumping books and phials of medicinal powders into the fire. He heard a groaning crash as one of them stamped his boot through Dakis the Minstrel's lute and realized belatedly why Gil had taken his harp. Then he was shoved on into the darkness and cuffed when he stumbled, his arms aching and the knife point grating against his ribs. They passed the main stairway that led up to the second level and turned aside.
It was only then that he grasped fully what was happening. Gal had known it, when she said there would be no witnesses-her mind must have leaped to the truth in
NOTE:
Royal administrative and residential quarters occupy roughly 1/2 the area of Church Territory, directly above it on the 2nd level.
The Penambran refugees occupy most of the 4th, and all of the 5th,
levels.
The Keep of Dare
the first moment she had seen that the arresting troops were from Alketch. The wizards would not be tried by the High King; very likely. Elder was not even aware of their arrest.
They were to be tried by the Inquisition.
Torches gleamed redly on the breastplates of the soldiers around Rudy and threw huge shadows that stalked in lumbering procession at their heels down the shadowy passageway. From dark doors, he caught the scent of incense as the passage narrowed, winding its way into the territory of the Church. He was conscious of others joining them, though the troopers behind him and the angle at which his arms were twisted made it impossible for him to see. But he heard the weighted rustle of robes and the murmur of chanting. The flaring light touched darker corridors of the Church mazes-cells where the Red Monks bivouacked, aisles where the dust lay undisturbed but for a single threaded line of bare footprints, and guardrooms that defended locked doors watched by the red-robed warriors of the Faith. And all that shadowy domain, lighted by the dim flicker of grease lamps and candles and thick with layer after layer of incense-laden gloom, whispered with the soft chanting of nightlong prayers.
They passed through a long corridor without light. Footfalls echoed in the closing walls. Panic and terror seized him, but he could not struggle and he knew in his heart that, if he cried out, no one would come. He remembered Ingold, imprisoned in the doorless cell beneath the villa at Karst. There was a smell, a feel, to this place that was half-familiar. They were somewhere deep in the Church's maze, far from any inhabited section of the Keep at all. Dust rose about their feet, glimmering in the fitful glare of the torches. The smell of the place was vile, disused, and damp.
Someone pushed open a door in the dark wall. Rudy stumbled over something on the threshold and was thrust through, his cramped arms failing to break his fall. He landed hard and lay for a moment, breathless, aching, and terrified, listening to the inhabited silence in the room.
In the darkness, a bell rang. Rudy rolled painfully over, feeling the cold scratchiness of a floor long given over to dust and dirt beneath his palms. He half sat up, his wizard's sight showing him dim shapes: the weatherwitches Grey and Nila, holding hands, their voices soft and fearful; Dakis the Minstrel, unconscious, his bleeding head pillowed on Ilea's lap; Ungolard, his face bowed despairingly on his hands; and Kara, her black hair rumpled down her back, flushed with anger and working at untying and ungagging her mother.
He looked around him, frowning into the darkness. He had found that in certain times and places-in the Nest of the Dark or among the twisting Walls of Air that circled Quo-his dark-sight was less clear, and so it seemed here. He could make out the shape of a double cell, black-walled and cold, some twenty feet by forty. Its ceiling he could not see, hidden as it was in shadows. He could see only one door. The place had a fusty smell to it, sterile and somehow at once disgusting and frightening. He shivered at the half-forgotten memory that it stirred and called a sliver of witchlight...
... and nothing came. It was as if he had dropped his spell of summoning into a dark well and had seen the water swallow it.
This was a cell where no magic would work.
Dame Nan's shrill voice slashed into the terrible silence of that leaden room. "Filthy, rotten, fish-eating Southerners, to manhandle an old woman!"
"Mother!" Kara whispered, frightened, and the old witch-wife scrambled to a sitting position, rubbing her skinny wrists.
"Don't you 'mother' me, my girl! If they're listening, so much the better! Curses of itches on them, from that yellow-bellied lefty on down to the last drab's bastard of a foot soldier's catamite of 'em! May piles like the warts on a drunkard's nose decorate their-"
" Mother ?"
And in the darkness, someone gave a cracked, hysterical laugh.
Half- crouched, as if he feared to be seen by some unknown watcher, Rudy made his way to the scar-faced spellweaver's side. "Where's Thoth?" he whispered, and she shook her head.
Rudy looked around him. There was no sign of Brother Wend or of Kta. Knowing Kta, Rudy figured that the old guru had probably been in his usual seat by the common room fire when the Alketch troops had sacked the place, and they simply had not noticed him. That was two free... maybe three.
Free for what ? he wondered. To rescue us? From the middle of Church territory? And where the hell will we go if we are rescued? Away from the Keep? To the Dark ?
