Barbara Hambly - [Darwath 09] -Dreamers of Black Rock

by Hambly

  The Keep was settling down for the night. Voices – men’s and women’s – small as chips of colored glass, traded chaff as the riders went out onto night-guard. Gil wondered how long women would be included among the cowboys, with the mages and their spells to avert pregnancy gone.

  The mages…

  Darkness filled the Keep like a basin of ink.

  Rat-feet scritched along the gallery outside her door. There would be more, down on the floor of the Aisle. Few people lived up here where there was no water. The stink of latrines mingled with the smoke rising from below.

  The watches at the gate were switched. Guards’ voices marking the hour of the night.

  When silence had truly come Gil rose, found her satchel by touch in the dark, and from the pouch at her belt produced flint, a striking-steel, and a fluff of charred linen tow. These she carried to the door of her cell, where, shielding with her body all chance of observation from below, by starlight she cracked a spark to the wick of one of the candles she had schooled herself always to carry.

  She slipped the candle into a pierced lantern designed to carry one of the glowstones with which the Keep of Dare was generally – if feebly – illuminated, and edged the slide down as far as she could. Belting on her sword, and taking a piece of chalk in her other hand, she made her way to the end of the gallery, and down a level to the area of the Keep given over to the quarters and workshops of the mages of Black Rock.

  Ingold had told her where to find them, and a little to her surprise Gil found they were not guarded. Because they were situated in another waterless area of the Keep, the wizards – mostly small-time misfits whom the Dark Ones had not hunted down on the first night of their rising, or those, like Thoth or Saerlinn, who by chance or skill had managed to escape – had spread out through hundreds of feet of maze-like corridors. Workrooms, tiny libraries, sleeping-quarters furnished with the jetsam of a civilization. Thoth’s laboratory, where across the surfaces of four tables he’d worked for years trying to reproduce those ancient machines glimpsed in millennia-old record crystals. Dakis the Minstrel’s cozy lair, the strings of his harp glimmering faintly at the touch of Gil’s candle-flame. (He left without his HARP?)

  Movement flickered in the corner of her eye. Rat? Cat? When she turned it was gone.

  But she had the nagging sense that it hadn’t been at floor level. Something floating in the air?

  She moved on.

  The rooms were sparsely furnished, like every cell in the Keep, but everywhere Gil saw tell-tale untidiness. A table overset. Broken pottery scattered on the floor. A water-ewer shattered against a wall where – it looked to Gil – it would have broken had someone in the bed snatched it up and hurled it at someone or something in the doorway.

  Cloaks – including Thoth’s threadbare black mantle, the last trace of his high office of Recorder of the vanished City of Wizards – hanging from pegs. Kara of Ippit’s sheepskin coat. (They fled the Keep by night without CLOAKS?)

  Old Nan the witchwife hadn’t taken her basket of herbs and bandages. Saerlinn had left a book he was copying, ink dried upon the dropped pen.

  Damn it, Gil thought. Damn it…

  In the years she’d lived in this world, Gil had been in six Keeps: Black Rock was the seventh. Tiyomis Keep, buried now completely under the Ice in the North, and the horrifyingly haunted Keep she’d explored with the Guards last year, had both been intact. Penambra, Dele, and Prandhays in the Felwoods were all in much worse condition than Black Rock, but even so, it was clear that the plan of all of them was much the same. A quadrangular prism, over a thousand feet long and a hundred feet high, with a long Aisle running down the center. Half a dozen ceremonial staircases led from the Aisle up to the galleries on both sides, and up to zones originally allotted for the public areas of the Keep: chambers of justice and records, and space hallowed to the Church.

  All were riddled with stairways from one level to another. All had, somewhere near their corners, long shafts in which narrow flights helixed from the attics above the fifth level, down to the lowest levels of the vaults. At Ingold’s insistence, the lower doorways of these stairs at Dare’s Keep were kept locked; the old man had held the keys. Gil guessed that Thoth, with an academic’s distrust of ancient magics and three-thousand-year-old secrets, had followed a similar rule.

  It took her most of the night to find the stair to the vaults. As she’d suspected, once it descended below ground level the narrow doors were locked. But on the third level below the ground she found that the lock-plate – the originals in the Keep of Dare were the slick black steel that the ancient builders had been so fond of – had here been cut out, and simple bolts affixed, top and bottom.

  Warm air flowed through the square aperture where the lock-plate had been. It bore the smells of habitation somewhere: a greasy hint of food, the nasty whiff of latrines recently used, and the sweetish, old-clothes stink of rats. Not a lot of people. Gil listened intently in the darkness, her lamp entirely closed now. But definitely a few.

  At not too great a distance within, she heard a man cough.

  Since this was not the place to be cornered, with the doors locked on the two levels above her (and God only knew what further down!), Gil ascended as silently as she had come and a good deal more quickly. She kept her hand pressed to the wall to guide her, and strained her eyes for the smallest glimmer above, trying at the same time to formulate a good reason for being down here at this dead hour of the night. She left the stairway the moment she could and made her way, cautiously, up three levels above the ground via the narrow back-ways of the Keep, makeshift through-cuts where cells had been subdivided or knocked together, broken-down ladders and tiny chambers smelling of chickens and fermenting mash and mice, until she reached her own cell again.

  She blew out the candle and slept, and was grateful not to dream.

  *

  Marspeth Ankeion was out with the cattle-herders when Gil woke. Daylight coming through the curtain, and the sounds from the Aisle below, told her it was later than her wont, but she had walked a long distance the day before, and the hardships of over three weeks on the road had taken their toll. Tarew the baker, down by the beehive-shaped adobe ovens in the Aisle, gave her bread and cheese and ale, and as she ate, she talked with Tarew’s wife Klinnian and others of the women. All of them agreed that, although it had been reprehensible of Tirkenson to desert the Keep with ten of their best fighters, there was actually little to fear.

  “It’s sad for you – horrible.” Shuji, the gray-haired weaver, laid a comforting hand on Gil’s shoulder. “Horrible that one of the last bands should have found your companions. But in fact they are withdrawing from these lands.”

  Fighting the ache in her throat, Gil didn’t contradict. Something in the man’s eye told her that even had she spoken of the signs they’d found of the Raiders’ presence, she wouldn’t be believed. There was something more than trust in Marspeth’s dream-visions in the weaver’s voice. Something more than belief.

  Awe, thought Gil.

  Another thing that everybody seemed to agree upon was that in departing, neither the mages nor Tirkenson nor his rangers – experienced fighters – had taken horses.

  Or water.

  Or food.

  And nobody but Marspeth had seen them leave.

  If any of them thought this odd, they would not say so. They wished desperately to think him right.

  Marspeth’s visions notwithstanding, when Gil left the Keep at noon, walking back to the arroyo that ran a mile north-east of the settlement, she kept a wary eye on anything that could possibly be used by Raiders as cover, and kept her sword ready in her hand.

  Not that anybody ever saw the White Raiders before they attacked.

  Heart pounding, she skidded down the steep side of the gulch. In years past, even in summertime a little water had trickled here, and the bottom of the gully had been a nearly impassable tangle of thorny acacia, ironwood, and creosote bushes. Cold had killed most of these,
and this year’s late spring had brought only a grudging sprinkle of pale leaves. As Gil worked her way inward toward the rocks of the old stream-bed, she kept her attention focused on the tiny sounds around her: That’s a lizard. That’s a prairie-dog. The swift cautious cheeping of quail…

  No tracks, but then the White Raiders were very good about covering them.

  She stood still, absorbing the silence. Wind skated over the ground above the gulch, made a thin whisper in the rocks.

  Her voice a thread, she whispered, “Ingold…”

  And there he was.

  Like the Raiders, he was also very good about covering all trace of his passage.

  She stepped forward into his arms, gripped the broad shoulders with desperate strength. “God, I’m glad—“ and couldn’t go on.

  His beard scratched the side of her face. The smell of woodsmoke and dirty wool in his mantle was like a blessing from Heaven.

  “I knew it wasn’t true,” she said after a time. “But Jesus, that spell is awful!”

  He kissed her, and drew back a little to look at her, reading the sleeplessness in the corners of her eyes and mouth. Blue eyes like the heart of a fire. The gouges of time and concentration ran into the scrubby white beard. A voice like bronze and brown velvet, that she’d hear in her dreams if she lived to be a hundred.

  “Would you like me to remove the spell?” he asked. “I knew it would be hard on you—“

  She thought about it. Even looking at him, even standing here with his hands on her shoulders, she could still see his mutilated body on the bloody earth of a desert camp. See Rudy’s body, though she knew darn well Rudy was somewhere at the top of the arroyo, keeping watch. See it as if it had really happened.

  “You better not.” Like his, she kept her voice barely louder than the keening of the wind. “I don’t think I’m that good an actress – and there’s something definitely hinky going on at Black Rock.”

  She related to him what she’d learned – from Pardilla, from Tarew, from the women working their spindles and looms outside the thatch-roofed huts that crowded the old Aisle floor. Told him about the wizards’ deserted rooms, and the smell of the darkness beyond the stairway to the vaults. The look people got in their eyes, when they spoke of Marspeth Ankeion and his prophetic dreams.

  “I’ll be willing to bet these kids who said they heard all that codswallop about the mages plotting to murder children and regain their magic by bathing in their blood, heard it in their dreams. Every kid in the Keep has been having these – these amazing dreams. Dreams that make them joyful and contented. Their parents seem to think Marspeth has something to do with it. Maybe he does… I have no idea. And I don’t know if this even has anything to do with magic shutting down… Did you ever get yours to work closer than Spider Woman Cave?”

  She named the place where, three nights ago, Ingold had put the invisible mark on her, to put into her mind the terrible vision of finding his body and Rudy’s at the devastated camp. The cave was thirty miles away. A long walk, alone, with the two men trailing her unseen. But when the wizards had found their spells weakening or failing, Ingold had retreated a few miles, and had insisted that Gil go on as if her companions truly were gone.

  We don’t know what’s waiting for us at the Keep, he had said, stroking back the dark hair from Gil’s brow. But I should feel better sending a scout in first.

  And since Gil had volunteered to join the expedition to Black Rock solely for that reason – So you’ll have somebody with you who’s NOT a mage… – she had agreed.

  Recalling the searing resentment in the voices of the Black Rock women when they spoke of the mages, she was glad.

  She said now, “I get the feeling there’s a connection, but I can’t see—“

  “Unfortunately, I can,” said Ingold. And a shadow crossed his face, sickened grief and dread.

  Oh, shit…

  “It sounds like zillywigs.”

  “Zillywigs?”

  “Dreamers.” The old man’s eyes clouded with pain, as if he had heard sentence of death passed on every child in Black Rock Keep. “They eat magic. They excrete dreams.”

  Gil thought about that. “Oh, shit,” she said, understanding what it meant.

  “Shit indeed.”

  Ingold sat on a rock in the dry stream-bed; Gil hunkered beside him. The old man pushed down the cuff of the fingerless mitt he wore, and pushed up the sleeves of his robe and mantle, so that Gil could see the faded tattoo on his forearm. She’d seen in a thousand times – a sort of curliqueued trident, faded almost to nothing. “Kta put this on me, when I was in my twenties. At that time – nearly fifty years ago – it was thought zillywigs had been eradicated centuries before, in the time of the Archmage Carcaedin. I thought getting the ward-sign was absurd, but Kta insisted. He taught me the spells to activate it, but Rudy and I will have to go back to Spider Woman Cave to work them. And I shall have to mark Rudy’s arm, and imbue the mark, before anything else can be done. I daresay Thoth may have such a ward but I’m guessing the spells in it have faded. Kta, too, probably. Of the others, I doubt any will ever have heard of zillywigs.”

  “That’s what – two days? Three? How intelligent are they?”

  Ingold’s frown deepened as he cast his mind back – To what? Gil wondered. She supposed it was as if she suddenly had to recall, off the top of her head, after hearing it once in one of Dr. White’s lectures nine years ago, the name of the supposedly magical dog (was it white or black?) that had accompanied Prince Rupert of the Rhine into battle…

  “They’re in the Keep,” she said after a moment. “I saw one – glimpsed out of the corner of my eye. It sounds like they’re intelligent enough to know they had to get somebody to lock up the mages, if they’re going to go on feeding off their magic. And they know they’d better not let anybody in the Keep know about it. Will being fed off cause permanent damage? Permanent loss of magic? Because if it does,” she added grimly, “we’re all going to be in trouble.”

  “I never read anywhere that it did,” returned Ingold slowly. “And obviously Rudy and I had no trouble once we got far enough away from the Keep to put the spell of false memory on you. The old chronicles spoke of zillywigs as analogous to insects, amorphous and often invisible. My impression was that they didn’t steer or manipulate the dream-visions – the visions were true dreams, not fetches sent by the zillywigs with some purpose in mind. Mostly, their presence was only felt by children, though occasionally an adult would be able to… to absorb the quality of joyful dreams, the same way you or I would be able to enjoy living in a garden of jasmine and roses, to whose charms a man without a sense of smell would be impervious. One of the two accounts of the zillywigs which survived spoke of children losing this faculty at the age of thirteen or fourteen.”

  “What about the adults?”

  Ingold shook his head. “No one seems to have asked that question – or to have written down the answer. But I assume that an adult, like Marspeth, would be able to work it out that whatever is giving him these dreams – probably of things that a man finds glorious, not a child – is what is taking magic away from the local mages. I wonder what the White Raiders make of this?”

  “You think they’re affected, too?”

  “They have to be,” said Ingold. “The range of the zillywig nest at Black Rock is a good thirty miles. I’ve seen Raider sign closer than that.” He nodded to the ghostly gray thickets of half-dead thorn that choked the arroyo. “Raider scouts were here last night. They have to know their shamans don’t have power this close to the Keep, but if they’ve been watching the place – and by their marks they have – they’ll have seen that none of the Black Rock mages have been out and about. The Raiders may have legends of their own about the zillywigs.” His blue eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “I shall have to ask the Icefalcon about that, when we get back to Renweth. If we get back,” he added worriedly.

  “Is there a reason we wouldn’t?”

  “Think about it,”
he said, with the sad wisdom of a man who has seen human beings in positions of power for the whole of his long life. “Think about what men will do, if they feel in danger of losing the source of their deepest pleasure.”

  “But at the cost of leaving their community open to the Raiders?” Gil tried to think of anyone at the Keep of Dare – petty and power-hungry as some of the nobles could be – who would be that selfish. That greedy.

  A couple of them came close, but…

  “We’re talking about losing all the stock. About having some – or maybe all – of the people picked off and tortured to death…”

  Ingold only looked at her.

  “Don’t tell me Marspeth knows the Raiders are still around?”

  “Marspeth Ankeion,” said the wizard slowly, “almost certainly believes what he wishes were true. His father was one of my father’s vassals, so I knew him, both then and when I was a hermit in these parts. He’s always been a passionate believer in the objective truth of his own wishes.”

  Gil said, “Oh, boy.” She’d known men like that at UCLA.

  “He clearly knows that whatever it is that’s giving him whatever it is he’s dreaming about – presumably the adult version of candy and pony-rides – is connected with the wizards losing their magic. But his need to keep dreaming these dreams makes him wish – and dream – that in fact, the danger of the Raiders is going away. Wish and dream it so intensely that it’s inconceivable to him that it isn’t really true.”

  “A dream is a wish your heart makes.”

  Ingold raised his brows in query.

  “From a song in a…” How did you explain a Disney movie – Pinocchio? Cinderella? – to someone from another universe? “From a well-known story in my world.”

  “And true,” agreed the wizard quietly. After a moment he went on, “Ankeion has always had something… a little child-like about him. A little incomplete. People liked him because of that quality of impulsiveness. He will always agree, and agree passionately, with their concerns, rather like a child who switches his excuses back and forth to win the approval of whoever he’s talking with. I know Tirkenson has had endless trouble with him.