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

by Hambly

  Yesterday the Raiders had wanted food. Today, their goal was to destroy their enemies once and for all, to drive interlopers from their land.

  The battle was a short one. Pardilla, who’d been one of the guards last night, came pelting up to Gil with a couple of saddled horses. Though she’d had little training (and less skill) at mounted combat – there being almost no call for it, in Renweth Vale – she joined in the small group defending the crop-lands from the Raiders’ torches. When the Raiders wheeled and headed for the arroyo she yelled, “Don’t follow them!” (two of the defending band looked like they were going to), and sure enough, a dozen pale riders, ivory braids whipping in the wind, streamed up out of the gully a moment later, headed for the undefended ladder into the Keep.

  To pull it up, Gil knew, the defenders would condemn twenty of their own warriors – including herself – to horrible death, if captured. If they fled, that would be the end of the summer’s crop and the Keep’s winter food. She saw Tirkenson and a knot of his rangers emerge from the arroyo and head back toward the sallyport ladder at a gallop, and knew they wouldn’t make it. Wondered, briefly, if Marspeth was in charge of that high gate…

  And yes, there he was. She recognized his height, and the dark green leather of the doublet he wore. But a moment later the dark-robed form of Thoth Serpentmage appeared in the sallyport at his side, and the air around the ladder seemed to ignite in a firestorm of light. Three Raiders fell – nearly twenty feet, onto stone – and others dropped off the ladder immediately, racing for their horses. But before they reached them, the horses flung up their heads with screams of panic – Gil saw Rudy, and Kara of Ippit, in the sallyport’s shadows behind Thoth. The Raiders were left afoot, and Tirkenson and his riders ran them down easily with their spears.

  In the hard war of these arid, empty lands, there were scores to be paid, and one did not take chances by showing mercy. The surviving Raiders faded into the desert and vanished, as they always did.

  *

  “But it isn’t fair!” Tarew cried, for the sixth or seventh time. The smell of smoke hung over the Aisle in the harsh glare of noon, though the fires at last were out. A small group of wizards – the men still scraggily bearded, all of them still unwashed and ragged – stood waiting for the meeting to conclude, before they would go with the wood-gathering parties to the near-by arroyos, to collect materials to repair corrals and thatch. Along with the smoke, the sobbing of the smaller children seemed to drift everywhere in the Keep.

  Gil, sitting close to Ingold on the remains of the Great Stair, could see Pardilla in the crowd, her arm protectively around her sister Jellin. The smaller girl’s eyes were red from weeping: more, there was a desolation in them, and a shocked confusion as well. As if not only all joy but all capacity to feel joy had been ripped from her.

  Truculently, Marspeth said, “You could at least have called an assembly, Tirkenson, so that the citizens of this Keep could have a say on the matter before you banished these… these zillywigs, as you call them—“

  “Zillywigs is what they’re called,” pointed out Ingold mildly. “And strictly speaking, Tirkenson didn’t banish them. I simply made it impossible for them to feed on the magic of the wizards of this Keep.”

  “And I couldn’t call an assembly,” added the landchief, his rumbling voice dangerous, “because you had locked me up in the Vaults, Marspeth. Me, and every ranger who might question it, if the mages tried to leave the vicinity of the zillywig nest and you tried to stop them.”

  He turned his cold wolfish eyes back to the assembly. “Let’s take a vote, then. Will everybody who would have voted against returning their powers to the mages – all the mages – raise their hands?”

  In the absolute silence – the frozen stillness – that followed, Marspeth, standing before Tirkenson at the foot of the Stair, turned his face aside. His voice came out hoarse with despair. “You didn’t have to destroy their nest!”

  Several people looked surprised, since a moment ago Marspeth had insisted that the zillywigs did not exist at all, much less that they’d been responsible for both the dreams and the deadening of magic.

  “If you hadn’t destroyed their nest in the Vaults, they might not have left…”

  “Horseshit,” said Tirkenson calmly. “They were out of here the minute the last mage was warded against them. You felt it.”

  Marspeth looked as if he would have denied this – as he’d shouted denial when Thoth and Ingold had spoken to the assembly about what had taken place in the Keep over the past month. But in the end, he only stood with his head bowed, as his inner circle of supporters – the men who’d guarded the mages and the rangers in their cells – one by one moved away from him. Gil saw that he was weeping. The desolation in his eyes was every atom as great as that in the faces of Jellin, and little Imaleen Tarew’s daughter, and the other, older children who had come with their parents to the assembly.

  Maybe greater, she thought. Maybe he knows what he’s lost.

  She knew she should hate him, and found that she didn’t.

  “That nest was empty when Ingold burned it out,” the landchief went on – something Gil knew wasn’t entirely true. She’d gone with Tirkenson and the mages to the Vaults, when the attack was done, and though Ingold wouldn’t let her go anywhere near the nest – and Ingold and Thoth had looked damn careful when they’d gone up and inspected it – she’d seen there was still movement within the papery, glimmering sac that adhered to the stonework in the deepest corner of the foundations.

  Eggs? Grubs? Larvae? The sight of them filled her with loathing.

  Ingold and Thoth had come back from their inspection and had blasted the thing out of existence with blue lightning that had consumed even its ashes.

  Neither going down, nor coming back up, had they seen any trace of adult zillywigs.

  Shuji spoke up now, his voice shaking. “But what about the children?” Behind and beside him, his grandsons clung to his hands. “Can nothing be done?”

  The look in Thoth’s yellow eyes, and in Ingold’s blue ones, was his answer. Whatever records – whatever spells of healing – concerning the zillywigs that might once have existed, it had been lost in the Time of the Dark.

  The weaver’s face crumpled, and he turned away, to stroke his grandsons’ hair. “It’s all right, buddies,” he whispered. “It’ll be all right…”

  Gil said, “Can you invent a new spell?”

  Both master mages – and all the others of that confraternity, gathered behind them on the Stair – regarded her in surprise.

  “I mean,” said Gil, a little self-consciously, “in my world – the world I come from – the healers don’t have magic, but they’ve studied how peoples’ brains work. I don’t mean their minds, but the physical matter of the brains. Thoth – Ingold – in the City of Wizards, you’ve got to have studied Magic Theory. The connection of certain spells to certain areas of the flesh, like the liver or the lungs. You’ve told me about it. When you weave dream-spells, you send them to… to a particular spot, a particular place, in the person you’re targeting, don’t you?”

  Thoth said, “Of course,” but Gil could see Ingold’s eyes, as his thoughts raced ahead of hers, putting together pieces of knowledge in ways not pictured by those who had used magic for centuries.

  “If that spot, that place, has been desensitized – injured – by the zillywigs, can you send healing there? The same way you’d use magic to soften a scar? Can you at least send feelings of comfort to that place, so that it isn’t… isn’t empty?”

  The two old men looked at one another, exploring the idea. Old Nan the witchwife snapped, “Nonsense, girl! I could send my mother dreams that I was safe in bed, when I sneaked out at night, but I couldn’t have kept it up! Not night after night for years…”

  “I’d do it.” The herb-witch Tima stood up, the ward-mark that Gil had painted onto her – soon to be permanently tattooed – visible clear (and rather crooked) on her wrist. “I’d send that
kind of comfort, that kind of healing, for as many years as it would take, if it would help. If somebody would teach me how to do it.”

  “You haven’t the strength,” objected Saerlinn, the only other mage among them who’d had formal training at Quo. He turned to Ingold. “But I’ll be willing to do that as well, if such a spell can be wrought.”

  “And I.” Kara of Ippit stood as well. “And it may not take a lot of strength, Saerlinn—“

  Marspeth cried despairingly, “It won’t be the same!”

  No, thought Gil, studying his face. All the strength – and all the warmth – had gone out of it, like a punctured balloon. She saw that his mouth was trembling. Incomplete, Ingold had described him. And after this, probably the loneliest man in the Keep.

  She guessed his age at the mid-fifties. A hell of a time to have to grow up.

  *

  She, Ingold, and Rudy stayed at Black Rock Keep for another ten days, Gil helping the Gettlesand cowboys search for the Keep’s escaped stock while Ingold and Rudy – with the assistance of every mage in the Keep, even the untrained herb-witches and firestarters – brainstormed and experimented with spells that might, in time, repair the damage that the zillywigs had done.

  “Tarew is right,” she said one evening to Pardilla, as their little band of cow-hunters returned to the Keep with the day’s take – three steers, a cow, and a rat-tailed pinto who didn’t seem at all grateful to be retrieved. “It isn’t fair. It wasn’t the kids’ fault, any more than if some kind of fever had gone through the Keep and done the same thing.”

  “I tell myself that.” The girl nudged her buckskin gelding forward, to cut off the cow’s latest escape-attempt, the dust of the little herd making a sort of fog around them, suffused with the sunset’s gold.

  “And I tell myself what your pal Ingold said – if what he said was true – about Jellin losing her dreams in a couple of years anyway, though I don’t see how he’d know it…” The next moment she shook her head, as if aware of the unhelpful bitterness of this last remark. “It’s just… I hear her cry at night. And Girna Weaver’s son, in the cell next to ours. And I hear poor Girna trying to get Likky up out of bed in the morning, while I’m trying to convince Jellin to get up and get on with the day… And it’s hard.”

  She sighed, her voice shaky with tears. “And it’s hard not to blame them.”

  Gil bit back an impatient curse – after a week she was getting goddam tired of seeing how every parent in the Keep grew silent in the presence of every one of the wizards – and reflected that she’d probably feel differently about it, if it were her son – Ingold’s son – two-and-a-half-year-old Mithrys back at Dare’s Keep – who cried through each night and woke in the mornings with those dead and desolate eyes. She turned her horse to intercept the pinto as it made a final bid for freedom with the Keep’s walls in sight, and by the time she brought it back, there was no need for a reply.

  Ingold, she noticed, though he spoke with Ilae or Brother Wend at Dare’s Keep every night through his scrying-crystal, gave her news of their child quietly, in private, where none could hear.

  At the end of nine days, as Gil was crossing the Aisle in the morning after a stint on night-guard, she saw Jellin and little tousle-haired Imaleen helping Tarew unload bread from the ovens, and both girls greeted her with smiles and “Good-morning, Gilly!” For the first time Gil heard the boys cutting kindling talking to one another, as she’d heard them the day she first came to Black Rock. They looked tired, and there was still that horrible shadow in their eyes. But they seemed to be children again.

  *

  “It isn’t enough!”

  As she climbed the ramshackle boards of the Great Stair to the chamber allotted as the mages’ work-room, she heard Marspeth’s furious wail.

  Damn it… She broke into a run.

  “They’re children!” the big man was shouting, as Gil slipped around the door-frame and saw – to her alarm – that he was armed. He brandished a sword, and bore a twelve-inch dagger in the other hand. “They don’t know what they’ve lost! All they dream about is fucking candy or some shit! They’ll forget it all in a week!”

  On the other side of the long table – rough-hewn of pine and bleached with age – Ingold and Thoth, the only two wizards in the room, traded a glance and said nothing. The table was littered with wax writing-tablets, on which Gil could see they’d been working on a rota: which of the mages capable of doing so were willing to devote the whole of their thaumaturgical energies, in the years ahead, to the soothing half-dreams that were all that the damaged children could absorb. Which of the mages who were willing could be spared, from healing, from guarding, from warding the Keep against the dangers of this frozen and terrible time.

  “You don’t know what I’VE lost!” yelled Marspeth. “It wasn’t just dreams, you fucking morons! It was visions! Real visions: Women. Food. Decent wine – good God, for the taste of decent wine! The world seeing me for what I really am! For what none of these idiots here would ever admit!” Flecks of spittle spattered in the witch-light that glimmered around the table; tears streamed from his eyes and snot from his nose. “You had no right to do it! You could have found some other way!”

  Thoth started to snap, “Nonsense!” but Ingold laid a blunt, square hand over his wrist.

  “There was no other way, Marspeth,” said the Archmage quietly. “The Keep needs its mages. The children need all that we can do, and maybe more, simply in order to survive. We didn’t drive the zillywigs away. They left when they could no longer get what they wanted.”

  “You didn’t need to ward everybody! You could have left eight or ten—“

  “The eight or ten who’ll be working now for the next ten years,” returned Thoth drily, “to heal the damage to those children—“

  “Fuck those children!” Marspeth screamed. “It’s not enough! You had no right to take away my dreams!”

  And he lunged across the table with his sword.

  Of course it was a stupid thing to do and would have been even had Ingold not been a wizard. Ingold Inglorion was one of the finest swordsmen in the west of the world and was out of his chair even as his attacker came over the table-top at him. He stepped out of the way, caught Marspeth’s sword-wrist with effortless speed, and disarmed him even as he grabbed the back of Marspeth’s neck and flung him into the nearest wall. Thoth had shoved his own chair out of the way but didn’t get up. He made an impatient gesture and an explosion of the same white light that had blinded the Raiders on the sallyport ladder last week dropped Marspeth to the floor when he scrambled to his feet with his knife.

  The knife went skidding. Gil was around the table by that time and scooped it up. By the time Rudy, Kara, and Tomec Tirkenson burst through the doorway it was all over.

  Marspeth clumbered to his feet again, blinking, shaking his head – shaking all over. “This isn’t the end of it,” he shouted, and his voice cracked with fury. “I know there were never any fucking zillywigs! I know you mages just did this… just did this… I’ll make you sorry you took away my dreams!”

  He charged the doorway like a bull, and thrust Tirkenson out of his path as he pounded through it, down the stair, and out into the cold sharp morning of the Aisle.

  *

  Leaving the Keep the following morning, Gil saw where vultures were circling, above a canyon at the base of the red-rock hills. Though she, Ingold, and Rudy were all pretty sure of what they’d find, they rode to the place (on Tirkenson’s borrowed horses, trailed by the pack-mule they’d brought all the way from Renweth), and sure enough, it was Marspeth.

  And sure enough, he’d encountered the White Raiders.

  Despite the fact that she was with two wizards (who’d been inoculated against zillywiggery), Gil felt the back of her neck creep, with the certainty that the Raiders were somewhere near-by. Watching.

  It was like seeing again the vision Ingold had given her, of what the Raiders did to those they captured.

  “I’m
sorry,” said Ingold quietly, and reined away back down the canyon the way they’d come. “Sorry that for him, healing wasn’t enough. Little Imaleen thanked me, this morning as we left: she said she misses her magic friends in the dreams, but is glad that Thoth and Kara and the others can protect everybody again. So that’s something.”

  He sighed as he said it. Gil guessed what he was thinking. When they’d left Dare’s Keep after the first new moon of the chill and fruitless summer, they had half-expected to find Black Rock deserted when they reached it, scattered with the bodies of the dead. In lands haunted by the White Raiders, destruction could strike very quickly. Technically, she supposed the expedition had been a huge success.

  “Will their eyes always look like that?” asked Rudy quietly.

  And Ingold said, “I don’t know.”

  Would mere healing be enough for me, wondered Gil, if it were my son Mithrys? She didn’t know, either.

  About the Author

  Since her first published fantasy in 1982 - The Time of the Dark - Barbara Hambly has touched most of the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror, mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. She currently concentrates on horror (a vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, but the various fantasy series she wrote in the 1980s and 1990s for Del Rey still hold a strong place in her heart.

  For this reason, in 2009 Barbara started writing the “Further Adventures” series - short tales about the further adventures of the characters from her Del Rey fantasy series: the Darwath series centering on the Keep of Dare, the Unschooled Wizard stories about the former mighty-thewed barbarian mercenary Sun Wolf who finds himself unexpectedly endowed with wizardly powers, the Winterlands tales about the scholarly dragonslayer John Aversin and his mageborn partner Jenny Waynest, the Windrose Chronicles which recount the adventures of exiled archmage Antryg Windrose trying to make his way - with the assistance of his computer-programmer partner Joanna - in Los Angeles in the 1980s. To these have been added short stories about the characters from the Benjamin January historical mystery series, set in New Orleans before the Civil War; the stories that she has written for various Sherlock Holmes anthologies; and a couple of entertaining stand-alones.