The Walls of Air

by Barbara Hambly

Chapter 11

  The messenger from the Emperor of Alketch came riding up the valley on a rare sunny afternoon, after a week of snows. Most of the Keep was out of doors, working on repairing the mazes of corrals or building new fences for the food compounds, chopping wood or hauling rocks for the projected forge. The cohorts of warriors at exercise under various of the company captains ran, jumped, and swung weighted weapons with sweaty goodwill. Children of all ages scattered through the Vale, sledding, skating, or sit-down tobogganing on the frozen stream, their shrieks of delight like the piping of summer birds.

  Gil had picked that afternoon to experiment with one of the little white polyhedrons that she and Aide had found in such numbers throughout the old storerooms and shafts of the Keep. These had remained a puzzle to them, turning up with ubiquitous regularity, businesslike and yet to all intents and purposes useless. Like the Keep, they were smooth and shining enigmas.

  At first she had theorized to Aide that they might be toys. 'They'd break if they were dropped, surely,' Aide objected. The girls were walking along the new-dug path back to the clearing in the woods where the Guards had spent the morning in practice. Gil had recently returned to regular training and was black-and-blue. 'Votives?' she suggested.

  'For what?' Aide asked reasonably. 'Votives are gifts of light, candles, scent, incense, or of wealth given to the Church, in which case you present little bronze or lead models of what you've given. '

  'Maybe they were toys,' Gil remarked. 'They do stack together. ' And they did, fitting facet against facet, like a cellular structure or a three-dimensional honeycomb. 'Do they really

  break?'

  But, from an oblique sense of uneasiness at what she did not understand, or merely from an overdose of science fiction films in her own universe, Gil had elected to wait for clear weather to perform the experiment outdoors. She and Aide found Seya and Melantrys at the clearing, sparring with wooden training swords, and warned the two Guards of their intentions. There was a flat rock in the centre of the clearing, and Gil set one of the white glass polyhedrons on this, threw a piece of sacking over it, and hit it with a hammer. The result was unspectacular. The polyhedron shattered into six or seven pieces, releasing neither poisonous gas nor embryonic alien beings. Gil felt embarrassed over her own apprehensions, but she noticed that Aide, Seya, and Melantrys had all stayed a respectful distance away.

  The pieces appeared to be nothing more than glass of some kind, heavy and slick, like white obsidian. They were vaguely translucent when held to the wan sunlight, but otherwise unremarkable.

  'You have me beat,' Melantrys remarked, taking one of them between her small, scarred fingers. 'It's nothing I've even heard of. '

  'I know,' Gil said. 'The records make no mention of them. But we're finding them all over the Keep. '

  'Maybe you're right about their being toys,' Seya said. Tir certainly likes to play with them. '

  And indeed Tir, who was bundled up in black quilting and furs, so that he looked less like a baby than like a stubby-limbed cabbage, was solemnly rolling another one of the milky prisms back and forth across the side of the rock. Aide sat next to him, sending the thing back at him every time he pushed it toward her. She glanced up at Seya's words. 'But the Keep was built by people fleeing a holocaust,' she argued suddenly. 'Would they have brought toys?'

  'We can't know that these things are as old as the Keep,' Seya pointed out.

  'No,' Gil said. 'But on the other hand, we've found nothing to show how they were made. '

  Aide turned back just in time to keep her son from crawling over the edge of the rock and tumbling into the snow beneath. Tir was growing into a quiet, compact infant whose calm demeanour and lack of fussingdisguised an appalling capacity for mischief. He could crawl unnoticed for long distances, making his silent and efficient way toward any danger, gravely consuming whatever mouth-sized morsels fate placed in his path and his mother wasn't quick enough to get away from him. Sometimes he seemed preoccupied with the white polyhedrons, stacking and unstacking the dozen or so Aide kept in her room, examining them for hours in fascination. Gil wondered if this was simply a baby's marvelling at the world or if he remembered something about them from some long-forgotten ancestor in the Keep.

  'If the people who built the Keep came here in as bad a shape as we did,' Melantrys commented, pulling the rawhide thong loose from her hair and shaking down the thick barley-coloured waves over her shoulders, 'it would stand to reason that the things were pretty important. Maia says that when his people came up the Pass, they found thousands of crowns' worth of jewelery that people had chucked away in the snow. '

  Voices came faintly to them through the trees. Looking up, Gil saw Alwir pass, his fine hands gesturing to the melody of his speaking voice. At his side, Maia of Thran was nodding, a seven-foot longbow held unstrung in his hand. The Chancellor glanced up through the thin screen of bare birches and saw the three Guards in their black, shabby uniforms and the young Queen with her son. He passed them by without a word. Gil heard the swift, ragged draw of Aide's breath; turning, she saw the quick misery that had crossed the girl's face.

  A voice called out, young and shrill, and Tad the herdkid

  came running up the path toward the Chancellor with a string of the Keep orphans at his heels. Alwir looked down his nose at the boy until he heard what Tad had to say; then Gil saw him bend forward, suddenly attentive. She didn't hear what Tad had said, but she saw the look that flashed between the Bishop and the Lord of the Keep. Then Tad and his little band were running toward the clearing, Tad calling out, 'My lady! My lady!' Aide got quickly to her feet. 'What is it, Tad?' The children roiled to a stop, red-faced and snow-flecked, in the steaming cloud of their breath. 'It's the messenger from Alketch, my lady,' the boy gasped. 'Lyddie here saw him coming up the road from the valley. '

  What seemed like the whole of the Keep had assembled on the steps to watch the coming of the messenger from Alketch. But whether they were ones who had come from Gae or from Penambra, they were silent, a sea of watching faces. From her position among the ranks of the Guards, Gil could see that the messenger rode alone. The Icefalcon had not returned with him.

  For a time, grief clouded her vision, and she saw nothing. The Icefalcon had been her friend, the first of her friends among the Guards. Cool, aloof, and self-contained, he had only once paid her a dubious compliment - if she wanted to take being told she was a born killer as a compliment; in the course of training with her as a Guard, he had given her welts and bruises enough to qualify in most circles as a deadly enemy. But they had both been foreigners among the people of the Wath, and that had been a bond. And they had both stood behind Ingold, the night the Dark had come to the Keep.

  For that, Alwir had sent him south. And he had not returned.

  The messenger was dismounting. The murmuring among the vast, dark crowd around the doors of the Keep was like the lapping of the distant sea. He was a youngish man, black-skinned, with haughty, aquiline features and great masses of curly raven hair. Under a patched scarlet travelling cloak, he wore a knee-length tunic stamped with gold, its pattern picked up again on his close-fitting, high-heeled, crimson boots. A

  small horn recurved bow hung at his back; on the saddlebow rested a spiked helmet of gilded steel, and a slim, two-handed killing sword was scab-barded below. In his dark face, his eyes shone a bright, pale grey.

  He made a profound salaam. 'My lord Alwir. '

  Standing above him on the lowest step, Alwir gestured him to rise.

  'I am called Stiarth na-Salligos, nephew and messenger of his Imperial Majesty, Lirkwis Fardah Ezrikos, Lord of Alketch and Prince of the Seven Isles. ' He straightened up, diamond studs glittering in his earlobes.

  'In the name of the Realm of Darwath, I greet you,' Alwir said in his deep, melodious voice. 'And through you, your master, the Emperor of the South. I bid you both welcome in t
he Keep of Dare. '

  Gil heard the murmuring behind her rise at that, and a man's angry voice grumbled, 'Yeah? And all his bloody damn troops as well?'

  'Ration our bread to feed the damn southerners,' someone else growled, the sound of it almost lost among the general whispering, and a third voice replied, 'Murdering fags. '

  With this in her ears, Gil watched Minalde come down the steps to greet Stiarth na-Salligos, her head high and her face very pale. The graceful young man bent over her hand and murmured formal courtesies. She asked him something; Gil heard only his reply.

  'Your messenger?' Those elegant brows deepened in an expression of concerned regret. 'Alas. Our road here was fraught with perils. He was struck down by bandits in the delta country below Penambra. The land is rife with them, hiding by night to haunt the roads by day, stealing and killing whatever they find. Barely did I escape with my life. Your messenger was a brave man, my lady. A worthy representative of the Realm. '

  He bowed again, deeper this time. And as he did so, he swept his scarlet cloak back like a mating bird, its scalloped edges like blood against the snow. Gil had a brief glimpse of the token that hung on his gilded belt - small, oak, shaped to a man's hand. Hot rage swept her, more Winding than her former grief. She stood motionless as Alwir offered Minalde his arm, the massed troops and the populace of the Keep parting before them, and led her upward to the dark gates, Stiarth of Alketch trailing elegantly at their heels.

  What the messenger wore at his belt was the token of the Rune of the Veil that Ingold had given to the Ice falcon for his protection before the man rode away.

  'He murdered him. ' The tapping of Gil's boot heels sounded very loud in the arched roof of the great west stairway. The Icefalcon would never have given up that token. '

  'Not even to someone who was empowered to negotiate for the troops we'll need?' Minalde asked quietly. She and Gil reached the landing, where an old man from Gae seemed to have homesteaded with two unofficial wives and large numbers of caged chickens. 'Not even in the case of an emergency? If it was a choice between one or the other of them? He'd fulfilled his own mission in summoning the messenger. '

  'The Icefalcon?' Gil sidestepped two chicken crates and a cat and continued down the steps. From the corridor below, dim yellow light shone up, marking the back door of the Guards' barracks; with it came a whiff of cooking odours and steam. 'Believe me, there was no one he valued as much as he did himself. Least of all some- some scented Imperial Nephew whom he could have broken in half on his knee. ' They turned right at the foot of the steps, went down a short stretch of corridor whose walls looked to be of the original design, and then passed through a makeshift side door and into a jumble of rough-partitioned cells to the right again. 'He never went in for that kind of altruism, Aide. The only way Stiarth could have gotten that amulet of Ingold's was by force, in which case he'd have had to kill him, probably by trickery. Stealing it from the

  Icefalcon would have been tantamount to murder; that was his first line of defence against the Dark. '

  Gil spoke quietly, but her anger was still hot in her breast. Maybe it was the memory of the messenger's creamy smirk, or the fact that the negotiations were first and last with Alwir, with Aide being used merely as his rubber stamp. Maybe it was only the memory of waking up in the rain-dripping dimness of that stable back at Karst, when the Icefalcon had come to check in his cool, impersonal fashion whether she was well. But something of it must have carried into her voice, for Aide touched her sleeve, bidding her to halt.

  'Gil,' she said, 'whether the Icefalcon would have given it to him of his own free will or not - let it be. '

  'What?' Gil's voice had an edge, sounding sharp in the gloomy half-darkness of these deserted corridors.

  'I mean - Gil, you're the only one here who knew about that token. But you're not the only one who thinks that -that Stiarth na-Salligos might have had something to do with the Icefalcon's not coming back. And, Gil, please. . . ' Her low voice was suddenly urgent, almost frightened, her eyes plum-coloured in the grubby and flickering light. '. . . Alwir says we can't afford to let negotiations fall through. Not for that. '

  Gil bit back a cruel reply. She stood for a moment, struggling with her sullen rage, knowing that Aide was, in a sense, right. What's done is done. The murder by treachery of one of the few friends I had is done. Past.

  'Maybe,' she said slowly. 'But if that kind of treachery is common coin, do we really want negotiations to continue?'

  Aide turned her face away. 'We don't know that. '

  'Like hell we don't! Aide, you've been reading those old histories and records as much as I have. Compared with some of the crap they've pulled on settling the Gettlesand border question, murdering the Icefalcon would be Scout's Honour. '

  Aide looked back at Gil, her face imploring. 'We don't know that he murdered the Icefalcon. '

  'Don't we?' Gil asked. 'He sure as hell lied about it. If bandits had killed him, they would have looted the body, and Stiarth never would have gotten that amulet. ' Minalde was silent.

  'All right,' Gil said softly. 'I won't talk it up with the other Guards, though Melantrys is as convinced as I am about it. And I won't take any kind of revenge that would wreck negotiations. But I can't answer for anyone else. ' Silence and shadow lay between them for a moment, broken only by the distant random talk in corridors closer to the Aisle than this one. The great gates would soon be shut for the night; the Church had tolled its bells throughout the Keep, and no few participants had made their way to the nightly services in the great cell beneath the Royal Sector where the Bishop Govannin centred her scarlet domain. Among them, Gil knew, would be Stiarth of Alketch, like all the dark southerners, a fanatic son of the Church. Someone Bok the carpenter, she thought had told her the Imperial Nephew had supped with the old prelate and had been closeted with her for some hours before the Council meeting with Alwir, Minalde, and the other notables of the Keep. Now Aide looked strained and worn in the dim light of her clay lamp, her loosely bound hair kinked and wrinkled from her formal coronet. She was a royal princess and the source of her brother's power, Gil thought, looking at that white, withdrawn face. And she was as much a pawn as any one of the Guards. 'Thank you,' Aide said quietly. Gil shrugged. 'I hope it's worth it. ' 'To establish a bridgehead for humankind at Gae?' Aide blinked up at her, startled. 'Once the Nest there is burned out. . . '

  'But will it be? With Govannin and the troops of the Alketch trying to get rid of the wizards, and the Archmage, whenever he shows up, and Ingold, and with all the other leaders fighting Alwir for power? With the old-timers in the Keep resenting Maia's Penambrans and the common people accusing the

  merchants of stealing grain? Aide, you have a gunnysack full of cats here, not a team of mules that's going to pull together. '

  'I know,' the Queen said softly. 'And that's why I thank you for not - not making the situation worse. '

  Gil paused in her steps, looking curiously over at the sweet, sensitive face on the other side of the lampflame, seeing a girl who in Gil's world would be barely out of high school, yet with all the experience of ruin, horror, and death, of judgement and the soiled meshes of political expediency, behind those tired dark-blue eyes. Gil's grievance against the Imperial Nephew seemed suddenly very personal and rather petty. 'Better thee than me, honey. ' She sighed. 'But you know I'll back you all the way. ' 'Thank you,' Aide said again. Their footsteps chimed together as they turned down the black hallways toward the barracks. In the dark weeks of winter, the friendship between them had grown, a friendship born of loneliness and mutual respect. Aide stood a little in awe of Gil's learning and her quick, cold intelligence; Gil envied Aide's patience and compassion, knowing them as qualities which she herself lacked. The two women recognized each other's courage, and Gil, from her own disastrous family life, understood Aide's misery and confusion at
her increasing isolation from her brother in the welter of Keep politics. But if Aide understood the trouble that Gil had found growing in her own heart these dark, snowbound days, she never spoke of it.

  After a time Aide asked, 'Were you going back to your research tonight?'

  Gil shrugged. 'I don't think so. I've decoded most of that last chronicle, and there isn't a whole lot in it. It's late - I think Drago the Third was the last King to rule from Renweth, and that was centuries after the Time of the Dark. When he disappeared, they moved the capital back up to Gae, where the big citadel of wizards was in those days. '

  'He disappeared?' Aide asked, startled. 'Well - he took off with somebody named Pnak for some place called Maijan Gian

  Ko, and there was this huge fuss about it, and he never came back. Where's Maijan Gian Ko, I wonder?'

  'That was the old name for Quo,' Minalde said. 'The greatest fortunate place or Great Magic place - the centre-point of magic on earth. If Drago took off for Quo, no wonder everyone was upset. Was Drago a wizard, then?'

  Gil shrugged. 'Beats me. But his son was the one who started the campaign against the mages of Gae, which eventually got them kicked out of the city. Why do you ask?'

  'Well,' Aide said, 'I've often thought about how we found the observation room - just by closing my eyes and walking. Sometimes at night I'll lie in bed and do that, just remember walking down halls, seeing things around me. Most of the time it's nothing. But once or twice I've had the feeling that there ought to be more levels in the Keep. Do you think there might be levels beneath this one, dug out in the rock of the knoll itself?'

  'It makes sense,' Gil agreed. 'Even if the power source for the pumps was magic, they had to put the machinery for it somewhere, and we haven't found it yet. But as to how we'd find the entrances you've got me there. '

  They stepped through the wide, dark archway into the Aisle, where the gates were being shut for the night. The warriors of the day and evening watches were grouped around them, the soft run of their talk carrying over the general noise of that great central cavern. Melantrys was making her dispositions for the night, sharp, small, and arrogant next to Janus and the head of Alwir's troops. In the shadows of the gates, the white quatrefoils of the Guards shone like a ghostly meadow of asphodel on the faded black of their massed shoulders; black stars strewed the scarlet heavens of the uniforms of the House of Bes like an LSD vision of the Milky Way; the ranks of the Church wore deeper crimson, sombre and unrelieved.

  Aide frowned in thought. The best way to explore this, I think, is for you to get the tablets on which you're making the Keep map and for us to go back to the observation room. We can start from there and go. . . '

  'Wherever,' Gil finished. They headed for the barracks door, almost tripping over a woman who loitered in its shadow. She hurried away from them as soon as they came near, a tall, red-haired woman whom Gil found vaguely familiar, clutching a threadbare brown cloak around her broad shoulders. A few moments later, when they emerged from the barracks with Gil's maps, they saw her again, hanging around the fringes of the group by the gate. She looked about anxiously, rubbing her reddened knuckles and twisting at her cloak; but when Seya went over to speak to her, she fled again.

  Starting from the corridor outside the observation room, Gil and Aide worked their way steadily back through the Keep, comparing the composition and design of walls, floors, and doorways, stopping repeatedly for Gil to scratch additions to her maps on

  the wax tablets she carried and for Aide to think. Her memories were not always reliable, but weeks of research and mapping had fleshed them out. By this time, there was probably no one who knew more about the Keep than the two of them.

  When they could, they stuck to the places where the original structure of the Keep remained. They descended by one of the original stairways to the first level and followed the line of the original corridors. 'We seem to be heading back toward the barracks,' Gil remarked as they turned down a narrow access corridor to find themselves in a long, deserted chamber that appeared to be the centre of its own minor maze. 'In fact, I think we're almost directly behind them, in the southwest corner of the Keep. '

  'The observation room was in the southeast corner,' Aide said. 'That's where the main pump shaft seemed to connect. '

  'I wonder. . . ' Gil stepped through an obliquely set doorway and looked around her. Aide raised the lamp as high as she could for what better light they could gain. 'Well, we're close, anyway. This was part of the original design, and I think that wall there is the inside of the front wall of the Keep. You can see there's no trace of blocks of any kind. If we've come three rows in. . . ' Gil turned and pointed with her silver hairpin. 'Through there. '

  'Through there' proved to be not a cell or a closet, as she had supposed it would be, but a tiny passageway that ultimately ended in a square corner room, so jammed with junk as almost to hide in shadow the wooden trapdoor in the floor. With a cry of delight and without the smallest consideration for what Frankensteinian horrors might lurk in the shadows below, Gil pulled on its rusted metal ring and was greeted by a black well of shadows, a great smell of dust, and a soft, billowing cloud of warm air.

  'It's like a different world. ' The great dark space took Minalde's soft voice and echoed it back to her like the sighing murmur of a million past voices. 'What kind of a place was this?'

  Darkness yielded unwillingly to the feeble glow of the lamp. Shapes materialized: tables, benches, the gleam of metal, scattered polyhedrons, white or frosty grey, and the twinkle of faceted crystal. Gil stepped forward and was greeted by the leap and sparkle of the lampflame repeating itself in countless tiny mirrors. Fragments of gilding slipped over the close-curled edges of a scroll and flickered in glass vessels half-filled with ashy powders or pale dust. The black floor rose in the centre to form an altarlike platform, its hollowed top lined with charred steel.

  Gil turned around, her wheeling shadow turning with her. 'At a guess,' she said, 'this isn't so much a different world as one that's more the same. I think it's still as it was when it was built, the work of the last generation born in the Times Before. ' She ran her hand along the smooth, obsidian-hard edge of the workbench. This is one of the old labs. '

  'Like Bektis' workshop?' Minalde asked, coming timidly into the centre of the room.

  'More or less. ' Gil brought the lamp closer to the workbench, touching, first with light and then with hesitant fingers, the frosted glass of the polyhedrons that lay there

  in such disarray.

  'But what is all this?' Aide lifted a short apparatus that looked like a barbell made of glass bubbles and gold. 'What's it for?'

  'Beats me. ' Gil set a smooth, meaningless sculpture of wood up endwise; the lamplight slid like water from its sinuous curves. She rolled a sort of big glass egg haltingly into the light and saw it crusted inside with whitish crystals that looked like salt. 'It's one hell of a thing to find the laboratories of the old wizards at a time when all the wizards on earth are on the other side of the continent. '

  Aide laughed shakily in agreement. Her eyes in the shadows were wide and wondering, as if she remembered what she saw from another personality, another life.

  'And it's warm down here,' Gil pursued thoughtfully. 'I think this is the first time since I crossed the Void that I have been warm. ' She pushed gently at the steel doors at the far end of the room, and they slid back on their soundless hinges, poised like the gates of the Keep itself. In the room beyond, she heard the faint echo of machinery pumping; the light of the lamp she bore touched row after row of sunken tanks, the black stone of their sides marked with vanished water and a climbing forest of steel lattices. Gil frowned, walking the narrow paths between them. 'Could it be -hydroponics?'

  'What?' Aide knelt to trace the water stain with a curious finger.

  'Water- gardening. Aide, what in hell did the
y use for light down here? Light enough to get plants to grow?' She pushed open another door, and vistas of empty tanks mocked her from the shadows. She turned back. 'You could feed the whole damn Keep down here if you had a light source. '

  'Are we going to tell Alwir?' Gil asked much later as they ascended the straight, narrow little stairway back to the hidden storeroom. Aide carried the lamp now, walking ahead. Gil's hands were full of bits and pieces of meaningless tools, half a dozen jewels of varying sizes she'd found in a lead box, and two. or three of the new polyhedrons, frosted grey instead of milky, but just as uncommunicative. She shivered as they came up from below and the colder air of ground level nipped at her rawboned hands.

  'N- no,' Aide said. 'Not yet. '

  They dumped their finds on the dusty trestle table that ran down the centre of the large, deserted room and set the lamp down among them in its pool of dim and wavery light. Through the door and down the corridor they could see the blurred echo of other firelight and hear a baby cry, with a man's deep, smooth, bass voice rising in the snatch of a lullaby. The smell of food cooking came to them there, together with the odour of dirty clothes. All the sounds and smells of the Keep were there, telling of life safe from the Dark. Here in this small complex of cells was only shadow, and dust, and time.

  'Gil,' Aide said slowly, 'I - I don't think I trust Alwir. ' The confession of disloyalty seemed to stick in her throat. 'He - he uses things. This ' She rested her hand on a frosty crystal before her, joined spheres of glass and a meaningless tangle

  of interwinding tubes. 'This is part of something that could be very important when the mages come back. But Alwir might destroy it or lock it up if he thought he could get some kind of concession from Stiarth by doing so. He's like that, Gil. Everything is like cards in his hands. '

  Her voice trembled suddenly with misery. Embarrassed, Gil spoke more gruffly than she'd meant to. 'Hell, you're not the only person in the Keep who doesn't think he's God's gift to the Realm. '

  'No,' Aide agreed, her lips quirking in an involuntary smile that was instantly gone. 'But I should. He's been very good to me. '

  'He ought to be,' Gil commented. 'You're the source of his power. He has no legal power of his own. '

  Aide shook her head. 'Only the real power,' she assented. 'Sometimes I think even his friendship with with Eldor was part of his games. But Elder was strong enough himself to keep him down, strong enough to make Alwir work for him, like a strong man riding a half-wild horse. ' She sighed and rubbed at her eyes with one long, white hand. 'Maybe Eldor knew it,' she went on tiredly. 'Maybe that's why he always kept so distant from me. I don't know, Gil. I look back and I see things that happened then and I start to doubt everything. Sometimes I think Rudy's the only person who ever loved me for who I am and not for what I could be used for. '

  Gil reached out and rested a comforting hand on the slender shoulder. That's what happens when you mess with power,' she said softly. 'We are what we are, God help us. '

  Aide laughed suddenly, tears still filming her eyes. 'So why must I have all the disadvantages of power and none of its rewards?' She picked up the lamp, her expression wryly philosophic. 'But you see,' she said as she led the way back toward the corridor, 'why I don't think Alwir should know of all this just yet. '

  They stepped into the Aisle again, into a confusion of lights and voices. There was a little group ahead in the shadows of the gates. Even from here, they could hear a woman crying. A quick glance passed between them, and they hurried up the steps.

  By this time of night, not many civilians were in the Aisle. It was, Gil guessed, a few hours before the deep-night watch came on. Her own watch began at eight the following morning, but training was at six; she was uncomfortably reminded that she ought to get to sleep.

  It was the red-haired woman she had seen earlier who was crying, huddled against the wall with a small group of Guards around her, the torchlight like fire over the thick, tangled rope of her hair.

  Janus was saying, 'Dammit, are we going to have to post a watch to keep the people inside at night? You'd think the Dark would do that. '

  'It's the food,' Gnift said simply, and those elf-bright eyes flickered toward the closed gates. 'Things are thin now. With the troops coming up from Alketch -

  'Surely the Emperor can't expect us to feed his armies!' one of Alwir's lesser

  captains protested.

  Melantrys gave him a snort of derision. 'Hide and watch him. '

  'What is it?' Aide asked. 'What's happening?'

  The woman raised a face smeared with tears in the yellow torchlight. 'Oh, my lady,' she whispered. 'Oh, God help me, I never thought he'd do it. He said he would, but I didn't believe. '

  'Her husband,' Janus explained briefly. 'Man named Snelgrin. He hid himself outside the Keep when the gates shut to steal food and cache it in the woods. '

  'I never thought he would,' the woman moaned. 'I never thought. . . '

  'Obviously he never thought, either,' Melantrys retorted softly. Gil remembered the couple now - Lolli was the woman's name. They were the first instance of an old-time Keep dweller marrying a Penambran newcomer. Maia had performed the ceremony less than three weeks ago.

  Lolli was speaking again, her voice low and muffled, an animal moaning. Aide knelt beside her and took her gently by the shoulders for comfort, but she scarcely seemed to notice. 'He didn't mean any harm,' she groaned. 'I tried to tell him, but he only said there was a full moon and a clear sky and no harm would come of it. I prayed and prayed he'd change his mind. . . *

  Gil turned silently on her heel and left them there. There was nothing she or anyone else could do, and privately she agreed with Melantrys. The man's stupidity was his own business and he had evidently not given much weight to the possible sufferings of his wife.

  On the other hand, she thought as she lay awake in the narrow darkness of her bunk, people did all kinds of things when impelled by fear or love. She found it impossible to dismiss them, as she once would have done, simply as silly people engaged in incomprehensible stupidities. The love and suffering and fear there were too real and too close to what was in her own unwilling heart.

  In time she heard Janus and Gnift come in and return silently to their bunks. Somewhere in the Keep, she thought she could hear the woman Lolli wailing still, though it might have been her imagination or some other sound entirely. She wondered what they'd find of Snelgrin when the gates were opened in the morning.

  She thought of the Icefalcon, cool, aloof, and very young, riding away down the river valleys, then of Ingold and Rudy, setting off like the hapless King Drago on a journey to the greatest magic place, never to return.

  Maijan Gian Ko.

  Sleepily, her scholarly mind picked at the etymology of the words.

  Gian Ko.

  Gaenguo.

  Her eyes opened in the darkness. What had Bektis said? '. . . in Penambra and in Gae itself, on the very spot where the Palace now stands?'

  She felt the blood turn to water in her veins.

  But it doesn't make sense, she thought. The terrible silence of the Vale of the Dark returned to her, the heaviness of the vaporous air and the louring sense of being watched. She remembered the hideous geometry of the place, visible only in the angled light of sunset from the tangled rocks of the cliffs above, the sense of breathless confusion there, and the disruption, rather than the magnification, of Ingold's spells.

  But was the effect always negative with regard to magic? At one time, could it have been positive? Is that why wizards built their citadels and people their cities near those. . . fortunate places?

  And in that case, she thought, is that why the places were fortunate - the effects positive - to begin with?

  Gil did not sleep that night.

  Gil had never had much of an opinion of humankind, and it went down s
everal more notches when the gates were opened at dawn. Word had evidently circulated through the Keep, for over a hundred civilians had shown up, idling in the Aisle since before seven in the morning for no better purpose than to be present to see what was left of the hapless Snelgrin. Gil was on day watch, logy from a sleepless night and bruised and exhausted from morning training; she felt she could have turned in her tracks and cursed them all.

  As she had hoped, Aide was there, half-supporting the taller and heavier Lolli. It was clear that neither had slept. Lolli's face was blotched red and swollen from weeping; Aide's was very tight and calm. It was only her manner that kept the people there from pushing and staring. Rather to Gil's surprise, Alwir had shown up, too, and Govannin, keeping to the background but making their presence felt.

  Quite an audience, Gil thought sourly, surveying them as Janus and Caldern worked the heavy locking wheels of the inner gates, then walked down the dark tunnel to open the outer. / hope they find something worth their while.

  But in the end they were doomed to disappointment, of a sort. The Dark had had other fish to fry last night. Snelgrin was found, alive but stunned, on the steps of the Keep, half-frozen from lying in the snow. The Dark had been known to devour the minds of their victims while leaving the bodies living, but Gil had seen those pitiful remains; they stood still, like cataleptics, or moved if jostled by the wind. Snelgrin managed to get to his feet, his movements odd and jerky, and stumbled up the steps without assistance. His wife was screaming and sobbing with joy. In a way it was touching, Gil thought, shivering in the icy cold of the sunrise. But it must be poor exchange for a pile of ice-crusted bones to some of the spectators.

  After the smells of grease and smoke and human frowziness, the ice-water clarity

  of the morning was a welcome relief. Mauve clouds piled the lower slopes of the peaks above. Beyond them, the sky was a pale bluish green, the light cool and holy on the tracked brown slush and ice-crusted mud. Gil stood on the steps, her cloak wrapped tightly about her, thinking of the three men on whom she had closed the gates - of the Icefalcon, when the slender protection of the Rune of the Veil had been stolen from him, of Ingold, journeying slap into the biggest Nest of the Dark in the West of the World, hoping to find the Archmage there, and of Rudy -

  'Gil?'

  Aide was standing at her elbow. Gil breathed a sigh of relief. 'You're just the lady I want to see. ' As they walked together out of Gil's watchpost among the sprawling food compounds, Gil hastily outlined last night's conclusions with regard to the meaning of the words 'fortunate place. '

  'So the guys are walking straight into that,' she finished, her breath drifting in a white veil against the darkness of the inky trees beyond. 'Bektis will be awake by this time, won't he? Can you ask him if he can get in touch with them? Ingold talked about getting in contact with Lohiro at Quo, so there's got to be a way to do it. I mean, to talk back and forth by crystal. Get him to contact them and tell them not to go any farther until I can talk to them. ' She glanced up at the pale brightness of the sky. It was late October, she calculated, but the days were already shortening to the time of the Winter Feast. 'I'll be off duty around sunset. '

  'All right. ' Aide wrapped her sable cloak more tightly around her and hurried off down the slushy path for the Keep once more, the thick fur rippling in the light. But in less than an hour she was back, stumbling over the slippery mess of the icy trail, holding her thin peasant skirts clear of the mud.

  Gil, huddled like an undernourished blackbird at one corner of the compound, left off trying to warm her hands and strode toward the girl. 'What did he say?'

  'I'm sorry, Gil,' Aide panted. A flurry of the Keep children ran past them, throwing snowballs and shrieking, on their way to pick up kindling in the woods. A drift of smoke came to them from the wash-pots or the smokehouses, and with it the thunk of an arrow in a practice tree. 'I'm sorry. Bektis says they're there already. '

  'What?'

  'He says they've reached the walls of air. His spells can't find them within the mazes. '

  Gil cursed, comprehensively and imaginatively. 'How long have they been there? Or does that tea-leaf reader know?'

  'No - Bektis isn't very careful about things like that. But they've been gone only a little over four weeks, so I'd imagine they've only just reached the Seaward Mountains. '

  'Son of a - I've been stupid,' Gil said. 'Blind and stupid. I should have figured out the etymology before this. ' She picked up a chunk of snow from the ground and hurled it with vicious strength against the mud-slab side of the nearest shelter.

  'So if they've reached the walls of air,' she went on more quietly, 'then by the time they come out, they'll already know anything we have to tell them. '