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

by Hambly

  Gil unbuckled her jacket, and pulled up her tunic. “This help?”

  A long coil of light rope – barely thicker than ribbon, but spelled for the strength of steel cable – was wrapped around her body.

  *

  Gil had planned to sleep much of the day, intending to inform Shuji – who seemed to have developed a fatherly interest in her – that she felt feverish. Though incapable of magic, the Black Rock wizards still retained the senses of the mageborn, which included not only the ability to see in complete blackness but a sense of where the sun and the stars were, even when they themselves were sixty feet below the surface of solid rock. “Our guards,” Thoth Serpentmage informed her, when she’d rappelled – with great and gingerly care – down into their midst, “keep themselves down at the end of the corridor near the stair. We can hear them coming long ere they arrive.”

  Like Tirkenson, the usually clean-shaven Recorder of Quo was scruffy with a month’s growth of silvery beard – after a month’s imprisonment all the male wizards looked like a gang of vagabonds. By the glow of her lantern Gil could make out where blankets and huddles of clothing lay around the walls of the immense cell, or had been stretched to cover whatever latrine facilities there were. The light glimmered faintly on the thin trickle of water that ran down one wall and into a sort of basin near the door. Gil wondered what Marspeth had told himself, or what his dreams had invented, as a reason to bring them food, yet keep them under guard.

  She’d painted the ward on the arms of Kara of Ippit and Kara’s mother Nan, on Saerlinn of Dele and Dakis the Minstrel. With the deft fingers of an artist, Thoth Serpentmage had scratched the thin slurry of lamp-black, salt and silver deep into the skin of the marked subjects. His own tattoo had faded, but would still, he assured Gil, hold spells of warding. “I’d read of these zylwynges,” he said, using an archaic pronunciation. “But the annals said they were wiped out—“

  “It’s what comes of reading annals instead of travel,” pointed out Dakis – who had, Gil had heard from Ingold, flunked out of the School of Wizards in Quo after less than a year. He shook back the black tousle of his hair. “In the mountain villages above Karst, they’d talk about zillywigs, that supposedly hid in the deep caves. The children would hunt for them.”

  “And how many mageborn children, do you suppose,” sniffed Thoth, “never came to knowledge of their own power because of the things?”

  “But the children!” A sweet-faced woman named Tima – a village midwife, Gil recalled, before the Time of the Dark, whose own children had been killed by the things – looked around, trying not to watch Kta’s inscribing of the ward-mark on her wrist. “What will happen to them? You know the zillywigs aren’t going to stay here, if they can no longer feed on our magic.”

  “I daresay they won’t,” returned Thoth drily. “Since Tirkenson and I – and as many of the rest of you as will care to join us – are going to go through this Keep from top to bottom and burn out every nest of these things we find.”

  And Grey, one of the weatherwitches, put a comforting arm around the woman’s heavy shoulders and said, “What will happen to them when the White Raiders figure out that there’s no more magic to defend the Keep, honey? Either way, the children will lose their dreams. This way, at least they won’t lose their lives.”

  “Will they think that’s a worthwhile trade?” asked Chezmi, silver-eyed and black, from the deep Alketch realms where all magic had been from time immemorial forbidden. “To lose even the ability to dream—“

  “You might have one answer to that sitting here,” responded Kara, “and another one, when the Raiders actually start cutting into your belly.”

  The argument was terminated by Saerlinn’s observation that it was close to dawn outside, and that if Gil didn’t want to draw suspicion she’d better return to the above-ground purlieux of the Keep. “We can continue to mark one another here,” went on Thoth, counting with his eye those who had yet to be warded. “’Twill be a day’s walk for Ingold and Rudy to Spider Woman Cave, and some hours to imbue their marks there. The soonest they could return will be tomorrow afternoon. Having magic then, ‘twill be no great feat to enter the Keep itself tomorrow night. At which point,” he added, his golden eyes glinting dangerously, “I will have some words to say to Master Marspeth.”

  Old Nan pointed out, “If we don’t have a visit from the White Raiders first.”

  Which was precisely the situation to which Gil, emerging from the Vaults in the dark pre-dawn, returned.

  *

  Approaching the Keep the previous day, she had noted around the outer walls the coops for geese and, of all things, dusty and dilapidated peacocks, among the corrals where the horses and cattle were penned. When she emerged from the mouldery-smelling dampness of the south-west stairway into the dark of the corridor, she heard, not only the rising outcry of voices in the Aisle, but the barking of dogs and the high, yammering gabble of the watch-birds.

  Crap. She didn’t need to be told what the problem was. Raiders…

  She headed for the Aisle at a run.

  The main gate of the Keep was closed, and, Pardilla had told her yesterday, would remain so during raids: one never knew how many Raiders were attacking. There was a ladder from a sallyport cut into the north wall at the third level, so that defenders could climb down relatively quickly into the horse-lines, but Raiders couldn’t cut in behind them and enter the Keep itself. By the time Gil scrambled down and got mounted on a scrawny pinto, the Raiders had driven off a dozen horses and twice that many cows, stock that the Keep could ill afford to lose. They’d fired the cattle-sheds and such of the wood-stores and workshops as lay outside the Keep, and Gil spent the remainder of the day – from before sunrise until nearly sundown – with the Black Rock cowboys, chasing down horses, cattle, and mules which had escaped in the confusion and had to be rounded up before the Raiders got to them, too.

  They didn’t catch many. Most of the Keep’s riders had remained behind to deal with the fires in the tinder-dry wood.

  “We were lucky,” Tarew said, when the men and women of Black Rock met around the great central fire-pit in the Aisle that night, half their number still out on watch. “It was a small raid…”

  “But it told the Raiders,” pointed out Gil, seated on the lowest step of what had been the Grand Stair, just behind the fire, “that we don’t have magic to defend ourselves.”

  There was a murmur of anger and assent – and, a little to her annoyance, a great deal of outcry against the perfidious wizards for running off and leaving them even if their magic had disappeared.

  “But it was a small raid.” Marspeth stepped up onto the Stair, like a golden tower in the firelight. “It’s the last of them—“

  “How do you know that?” Gil got to her feet to face him, though she felt like her bones had gone through a cheese-grater and all she wanted to do was sleep. “How do you know they’re leaving?”

  He looked at her, like a kindly father hearing out the specious whining of a child. He said, “I’m sorry you lost your friends, Gil-Shalos. And I understand that, after your experience, you’ll be seeing Raiders behind every bush. But my visions are true visions. Ask anyone here.”

  He gestured around him to the crowding forms. Not the entire population of the Keep, Gil noted. She wondered – since it was Marspeth who’d assigned the night-watch – whether he’d cherry-picked his supporters for this assembly. (Not to mention locking up Tirkenson’s rangers at the new moon – meaning, probably, anybody who truly thought Marspeth is an idiot…). Several people called out agreement, and anecdotal evidence of Marspeth finding lost cattle, or water-holes, or seeing the wizards leaving (And did anybody ever see their tracks?). Gil considered yelling outright that both Tirkenson and the mages were imprisoned in the Vaults, but remembered that some, at least, of Marspeth’s supporters had to know this already – if they were feeding and guarding them. As an outsider, her voice wouldn’t carry much weight.

  And this is not
the time, she thought, to provoke a fight within the Keep. Not with the Raiders God-knows-how-close outside, and damn little defense.

  Ingold will be here sometime tomorrow.

  She sat down again, burning with anger, and held her peace. When Marspeth’s supporters – led by Tarew – and those who, like herself, doubted whether every one of his visions were true got into scattered and vociferous yelling-matches with each other, she slipped away and climbed the various rickety stairways that led to her cell. Passing Shuji’s door, she paused and looked in – there was only a curtain, separating it from one of the winding corridors of the Keep.

  The gray-haired weaver was seated next to the adobe wall-bench where his grandchildren slept: a boy of ten, a smaller boy of eight, a little girl of three in a sort of cradle made of cattle-horns, all wrapped up closely against the bitter cold. Though Gil knew that none of them had had quite enough to eat that day, by the orange glimmer of a pine-knot torch she saw that their faces wore expressions of peaceful bliss,.

  Shuji smiled at her, his strong mouth wry at the sound of the quarreling in the Aisle. Softly, he said, “I hope to hell he’s right. Because there’s really noplace else to go, you know.”

  Gil said quietly, “No.”

  Shuji turned his face back to the dim-lit room, to the sleeping children. “We just have to get through each day. Each night.”

  In her cradle, the little girl laughed with joy in her sleep.

  Gil closed her hands to hide the stains of lamp-black, silver and salt on her fingers, and went up to her own bed feeling like a traitor and a thief.

  *

  Gil’s own survey of Black Rock Keep convinced her that the logical way for someone to get inside after the gates were closed for the night was through the third-level sallyport. From the doorway of her cell she watched the gate-guards, visible in the thin moonlight, and when they both abruptly slumped over asleep she grinned, and made her way along the rickety gallery that still surrounded most of the Aisle at that level. Sure enough, the guards on the sallyport were asleep as well, and didn’t stir when she opened the gate, and let down the ladder.

  Rudy and Ingold were at the bottom, raggedy as a couple of tramps waiting for a bus.

  “You find ‘em, Spook?” asked Rudy, when they’d reached the narrow entry and drawn the ladder up again. “Is it really these zillywig things?” He moved his left arm with the pained gingerliness of a man with a fresh tattoo under his sleeves.

  “Oh, yeah.”

  As they passed swiftly through the Keep to the south-west stair – Ingold woke the guards with a gesture of his fingers the moment he and his companions passed into the dark mazes of corridors – Gil thought of her own son, back at the Keep of Dare. Ingold’s son. Of the handful of Keep children, growing up in the bleak world of increasing cold and grinding hardship. Growing up with hunger, with the back-breaking labor of dirt-farming in the high vales of the Great Snowy Mountains. With the narrow world of the Keep’s black walls, and the fading parental memories of a world that hadn’t used to be like this.

  How could you not take refuge in dreams?

  How could you survive – or even want to survive – if your ability to dream itself were snatched away?

  Even before they reached the Vaults, zillywigs swarmed around them, appearing from the darkness like glittering, boneless silken umbrellas. Rudy brushed at them with one hand and said, “Those are them, hunh?” but Gil felt for them a flash of bitterest hate.

  “Do they know what we’re up to?”

  Ingold shook his head. “Beats the hell out of me. But let’s not take chances.” The guards left posted on the mages – and on Tirkenson’s men in their separate cells –still snored. Even as Ingold was unbolting the door of the mages’ prison, Tomec Tirkenson and his rangers came out of the darkness, armed with the weapons of their own erstwhile sentinels.

  “I don’t know how long it’ll take,” said Ingold, “for the dreams of the zillywigs to cease. One of the many things we don’t know about them, the records having been lost…”

  He stepped back, out of the doorway, as the mages hurried through, old Kta limping on his crooked staff, Kara throwing herself into Tirkenson’s arms while her mother looked on with a sneer. Then old Nan turned to survey Ingold: “Got here at last, did you? You took your time.”

  All had been marked with the warding sign. “It’ll take time,” said Ingold, “to lay the spells on these signs that will shield their magic from the zillywigs. Tirkenson, I should take it very kindly if you’d lead us to someplace where we can work undisturbed – and if you and your men could station themselves in the corridors to make sure we’re undisturbed until we’re done. Thoth, you don’t happen to recall the rite…? Ah, well…”

  “Considering,” returned the Serpentmage haughtily, “that such wyrds were neither needed nor taught for the past six hundred years—“

  “I thought you’re always telling us, Nothing is forgotten,” Nan cackled, pleased at having caught the Recorder of Quo in an error. “Not the smallest fragment of knowledge is suffered to pass away—“

  Their voices faded into the darkness, beyond the blue-white glimmer of the witchlight with which Ingold had touched the rangers’ helmet-crests and swords. Gil remained at Tirkenson’s side. “How well does Marspeth know this level of the Vaults?” she asked quietly, as the landchief led the way through the maze of empty caverns, echoing corridors, and darkness, stationing his rangers by twos and threes at strategic points.

  “Well enough to find a room to lock us in,” he growled. “But that’s about it. I’ve been exploring down here for years, and I still get lost.” He held out his sword, its blade glowing faintly with the spells Ingold had laid on it, and it illuminated a half-dozen directions chalked on the slick black of the wall. “But if Marspeth got some kind of a dream vision from these zillies that the mages should be locked up – locked up and kept fed, mind you – you can bet he’ll get another one about where they’re hiding. Listen.”

  He stopped. Gil half-recognized the small ante-chamber which opened into the twisted stairway up to the Keep. The door to the stair was shut, but when the landchief crossed to it, and opened it, Gil heard, from the darkness far above, the crying of children.

  Wailing, as the deepest delights of their short lives vanished like smoke.

  Tirkenson said, “Shit,” from the bottom of his soul.

  Down the shaft, moments later, came the louder voices, the angrier cries, of the children’s’ parents. Marspeth Ankeion’s gyred above them, like the screeching of a hawk. The three rangers who had remained with Gil and Tirkenson looked at each other: Dreven, Shigen, and Norek. Sunburned warriors who had guarded the Keep’s cattle and gone on rescue posses more than once, to retrieve those taken by the White Raiders, if they could. Gil guessed that none of them would have flinched from taking on any threat from a T. Rex to King Kong.

  But not their own neighbors. Not their own families and friends.

  At Tirkenson’s sign, the five of them – Gil, the landchief, and the three rangers – retreated to the inner door of the antechamber that led into the Vaults, and waited with drawn swords that Gil knew that none of them, when push came to shove, was going to use.

  Fortunately, everyone in the mob that came boiling out of the stairway moments later was so startled, so shocked to see Tomec Tirkenson and his rangers standing there in the light of their torches that they stopped dead. In the moment of silence – even as Marspeth was drawing breath to shout – Tirkenson asked in a normal tone of voice, “You lookin’ for me?”

  No one spoke. The landchief paused just long enough to take note of faces, to look Marspeth up and down with his cold tawny eyes. “You lookin’ for the people that Marspeth has had locked up down here for five weeks, while you’ve just sat there with your arses out for the White Raiders to stick full of arrows once they realize it’s not a trap? You lookin’ for the wizards?”

  Shuji called out, “The wizards deserted us!”

&
nbsp; “And they have no power anyway!” yelled somebody else.

  “You want to ask ‘em about it?” inquired Tirkenson, still in that calm voice. “Or about who’s been keeping ‘em locked up in the Vaults—“ Gil saw his glance travel from face to face of the men surrounding Marspeth, picking out the ones he had seen on guard, “—and why?”

  “They were plotting against the children of the Keep!” shouted Marspeth. “Plotting black magic!”

  At which point – as Gil had guessed was inevitable, given the hour and the events of the morning before – dim and far-off down the stairway shaft and mingling with the bitter crying of the children, came the clang of the alarm bells. “And that’s the Raiders,” she said, though only Marspeth and Tirkenson were close enough to hear her.

  Marspeth shouted, “That’s impossible!” but the mob was already thrusting and shoving its way back toward the stair, and didn’t hear him, either.

  Tirkenson snapped, “Let Ingold know,” to Dreven, and the other two – Norek and Shigen – followed him and Gil as they raced up the stair to the defense of the Keep.

  Smoke was already thick in the air when they reached the Aisle. Some was from the remaining out-buildings that surrounded the Keep – the corrals and sheds where livestock was kept – but the rest was from the little adobe dwelling-houses in the Aisle itself, the dry thatch of acacia-boughs and brush ablaze from fire-arrows shot high over the walls. Gil and Tirkenson reached the sallyport together, Gil noting, even as she scrambled down the extended ladder, the precise maneuvering of the pale-haired Raiders as they drove out the stock again. Tirkenson yelled, “Get to the fields!” in a voice like leather and brass, and Gil saw what he meant: a half-dozen of the warriors, ignoring the cattle, were riding toward the patchwork of corn, oats, and wheat growing in the bottom-lands south and east of the Keep, torches like streaming banners in their hands.