Rudy stepped quickly over to the wagon. "We've got to run for it, babe," he said softly, and she nodded, turning unquestioningly back into the shadows of the cart to fetch Tir. She reappeared a moment later with the heavily muffled infant in her arms, her face pale in the light of Ingold's staff, her eyes wide with apprehension. Gil held out her arms and received the child awkwardly, while Rudy helped Minalde down over the broken wagon tongue. Even through two pairs of gloves and the burning numbness of his fingers, he was conscious of the touch of her hand.
"How far?" she whispered.
Gil nodded toward the distant orange gleam of the Keep doors. "About two miles."
Alde took the baby back, feeling as she did so the chill, prickly sensation she had known before, the subconscious awareness of the presence of the Dark. The Dark Ones had not been defeated by the advent of the light. They had merely drawn off to wait.
The wind still howled overhead, but near them the air was uncannily still. From all around them in the Vale they could hear voices, distorted by cold and distance, voices of fear, hope, despair. Refugees throughout the dark mountains were making for the lights of the Keep, unseen forms fighting their way through stillness and deep snow; but within the circle of light cast by Ingold's staff, the little group of Guards around the fallen wagon were alone. Coated with frost, they seemed to be some kind of fantastic ice-creatures, beaded with diamonds and breathing crystal smoke. And beyond them, invisible in the blue-black ocean of the night, that sense of restless motion stirred just out of the range of vision.
Ingold came over to the little group by the wagon tongue, his light harsh on their drawn, haggard faces. He was a man who imparted his own strength to others; Gil found she drew warmth from his presence, as from a fire, and saw that Rudy and Alde looked a little less deathly as well. He put a hand briefly to Alde's cheek and gazed sharply into her face. "Can you make it?"
"I have to," she said simply.
"Good girl. Rudy... "
Rudy stepped forward hesitantly.
"Channel your Power through your staff; that's what it's there for, not just to keep you from stubbing your toes."
Rudy looked in surprise at the six-foot walking stick he'd cut for himself miles up the road. "Uh-you mean, that's all? You don't have to do anything special to make a staff magic?"
Ingold appeared to pray briefly for patience. "All things are inherently magic," he said patiently. "Now... "
Tentatively, Rudy called light again, feeling the power of it through his hand, through the wood that had become smoothed to his grip by its use, through the air. Light began to burn smokily from the end of the staff, growing brighter and throwing doubled shadows, blue and black, on the spokes of the wagon wheels, on the thin, frightened faces of the two girls, on the dilapidated cart, and on the deep-set hollows of Ingold's eyes.
Softly, the wizard said, "Don't leave them, Rudy." Rudy had the sudden, uncomfortable feeling that the old man knew about his giving up, his lying down to die and leaving the others to their own devices. He felt himself flush.
"I'm sorry," he mumbled.
Wind stirred around his feet. He swung about, scanning the darkness beyond. He felt a counterspell, like the cold touch of an alien hand, slipping into his mind from the darkness. He felt the light dimming, looked up, and saw that Ingold's staff, too, had begun to flicker unsteadily. At the same time he smelled the cold, bitter, acid stink of the Dark. Steel whined as Gil drew her sword; all around them was the muted flashing of blades as the Guards closed in an outward-facing ring.
What instinct warned him he never knew, but he ducked, drew and turned, and slashed in one movement, almost before he was aware of the thing that fell suddenly on him out of the night. He heard Alde scream and got a confused glimpse of Gil, with a face of stone and a blade of fire, cleaving darkness in a long side-on cut that seemed to cover them all in an explosion of blood and slime. The witchlight dimmed to gray, and the Guards pressed back, defending as best they could against the slimy onslaught. The counterspell sucked at him, draining his power as if from a cut artery, and for a time he saw nothing, knew nothing but that he must keep between the Dark and the woman at his back.
Then, without warning, they were gone, and the strength of the witchlight was renewed. Somebody yelled, "Come on!" and Rudy found himself grasping Alde's right arm while Gil held her left, hurrying over the slime-spattered muck of the snow, the light of his staff brightening over the mess of mud and bloody bones, with the Guards closing around them in a tight flying wedge. Ingold strode ahead, white breath smoking in the light that showed the snow all around them trampled by stampedes of fleeing feet and strewn with the discarded bundles of the refugees. Groggily, Rudy tried to keep up with him, leaden with cold and fatigue and stumbling in the drifted mess, trying to keep his eyes on the brilliant square of orange light in the distance that marked the end of this nightmare road. He could make out movement there clearly now, small shapes in those great doors. He could sense the Dark massing above them like storm clouds and felt the touch of their spells again, drawing and sapping at his strength.
Then the soft, sinister shadows dropped like vultures from above, a half-seen cloudy death that filled the night. Rudy's sword seemed to be weighted with lead, his arm shot full of Novocain. He knew that if he hadn't been in the center of the pack, he would have been killed at once. Seeing Gil slash and dodge in the gray darkness and step in under the whining arc of a spined whip half again as long as she was, he understood why Gnift flayed the bodies and souls of his Guard students and why Gil and the others trained the way they did, doggedly, through injuries, cold, and fatigue. It was only their training that saved them now.
Thin winds ruffled mockingly around them, and the Dark were gone. Rudy, gasping for breath, hung onto his staff for support, holding the half-fainting Alde with his other arm and wondering if he'd have the strength to drag her as far as the Keep. Though they were less than a mile off, the roaring glow of the gate-fires could barely be seen through the massed, cloaking shadows that filled the night. The Guards closed up again. "Now," Ingold said quietly. "Go. Go quickly." Horrified, Janus protested, "They're all around us, they'll never let us through."
The wizard was panting with exertion, and the pallid light showed his hands cut and noisome with slime. "They will if you go now. Hurry, or-"
"You're not staying!" the Commander cried.
"But- " Rudy began, stupefied.
"Do as I say!" the wizard thundered, and Rudy stepped back a pace, shocked. Ingold drew his sword in a single gleaming movement, the blade flashing in the dark. "Go!"
Janus looked at him for a long moment, as if he might, at the last, disobey. Then abruptly he turned and strode off through snow and darkness; after a momentary, uncertain pause, Rudy and the others followed, he and Gil half-dragging Minalde between them. He could feel the spells of the Dark shifting aside from the light he bore and could sense their malice concentrated elsewhere. Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw Ingold standing where they had left him, a dark form in the burning aureole of the light, his head cocked to listen to the sounds of the night, blood dripping from his gashed knuckles to stain the snow at his feet.
The wizard waited until the little party of Guards had gone almost two hundred yards from him. Then Rudy, turning again to look back, saw him throw down his staff in the snow. The light went out. The sword blade swung in a searing, phosphorescent arc. Rudy knew that the Dark had closed in on the old man.
They ran on. Tir had begun to wail, his cries thin and muffled with exhaustion, within the shelter of his mother's cloak. There was no other sound; but looking across Alde once, Rudy got a glimpse of Gil's face, a pale-eyed mask of pain. The blazing gates seemed to get no nearer, though he could now clearly distinguish the shapes grouped on the steps in the glare of the bonfires, with the Runes of Guarding and Law looming behind them, reflected in the bloody light. One dark shape he knew must be Tomec Tirkenson; another, he thought, was Govannin. There seemed to be s
omething wrong with his perception of distance. The air was still, without movement or scent or breath, without even the sensation of the nearness of the Dark-though he knew he had to be wrong about that; it must be only the effect of his senses slipping gradually away. The Dark had to be following, waiting the moment to strike. Twice he looked back over his shoulder and saw the firefly movement of Ingold's blade in the darkness. He wondered dizzily why the wizard had sent them on and wondered, with all the strength left in him to wonder, if they'd make it as far as the gates before the Dark finally fell on them from above. The ground steepened; he seemed to be moving through a knee-deep sea of slush, struggling to keep to his feet.
Then from above them, the wind streamed down-not the winds of the Dark, but the storm winds, swirling snow down on them as they fled toward the blazing Hell-mouth of the gates. The howl of the rising gale was like the keening of wolves on the kill. The storm winds that hit them with a force that made Rudy stagger were blinding, freezing, raging over them with wild, malicious glee. He struggled on, seeing before him the towering darkness of some vast, somber cliff, the storm winds driving the flames into thirty-foot maypoles of fire. He tripped on something in the darkness and fell, Alde's arm sliding from his grasp. Looking up, he saw before him the blazing gates; he had fallen on the steps. He could see Gil dragging Alde up the steps, framed in a wild coruscation of snow and fire, the wind mixing their dark hair into a single streaming cloud.
Someone came down to him and hauled him up and into that red inferno. Sick and half-fainting, he could see only that the hand that gripped his arm was covered by a black velvet glove glittering with rubies, like droplets of newshed blood.
When his eyes cleared, he was lying on the floor just within the gates, half-covered in blowing snow. Men and women were coming inside, staggering with cold and exhaustion-children, too, he saw, and realized Gil had been right. His surrender to fate back in the snowy darkness had been an act of cowardice that an eight-year-old could have bettered. Beyond them, silhouetted against the ruddy light, he saw Govannin, a skull with live coals in the eye sockets, a sword in her skeleton hand. Alwir was a dark tower, his sister leaning on the strength of his mighty arms, her child sobbing exhaustedly at her breast. Alwir's eyes were not on either of them, but looking beyond, into the dark cave of the Keep itself, calculating the dimensions of his new kingdom. And past them was Gil, her coarse, witchy hair fluttering in the backwash of the storm as she stood at the gates, looking out into the darkness. But in all that waste of ice and bitter wind, Rudy could see no trace of any moving light.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
"Where is he?" Rudy asked.
"With the Guards." Gil adjusted her sword belt without meeting his eyes. He could see that she had been crying.
Rudy rolled over and found he had to use the wall to climb painfully to his feet. His body ached, and little electric flashes of pain were stabbing every muscle and joint as he tried to move. Lassitude gripped not only his bones but his spirit as well, so that nothing-not last night's flight, nor the news Gil had wakened him with this afternoon-brought him either sorrow or joy. He recognized this as a symptom of extreme fatigue.
When I get back to California, he vowed tiredly, I am never, ever going to gripe about anything again. I will always know for a sure fact that things could be loads worse.
If I get back to California, he amended, and followed Gil out of the cell.
The cell was one of a warren of partitioned-off cubicles that stretched haphazardly beyond a door to the right of the gate. To get out, he had to pick his way through ill-lit huddles of those who still slept, lying where they'd fallen in blind exhaustion, and step over and around the pitiful little bundles of pots and blankets heaped in the corners of the tiny rooms. Next to a small hearth, a porcelain-headed doll slumped like a dead child against a pair of broken boots. The place stank of unwashed clothes and a child's neglected diaper. Blinking in the dim light, Rudy stepped out into the central hall of the Keep.
Looking around him at the dark fastnesses of that fortress, he could only wonder at the human powers of recuperation and the human tendency to make oneself at home. Here, in this awesome fortress of stone and steel, after they'd fought their way through peril and death and darkness, people were settling themselves in cozily for the winter. Children-Minalde was right, children were tough little survivors-ran madly up and down that great, echoing hall, their shrill, piercing yells ringing off the unseen vaults. He heard women's voices, sweet and high, and a man's genuine laugh of pleasure. Down at one end of that monstrous space, a rectangle of blinding light marked the doors-daylight, filtered with clouds and snow. At the other end of the hall, a couple of monks in patched red robes were putting up a bronze crucifix over a cell doorway otherwise indistinguishable from a hundred small black doorways exactly like it to establish the domain of the Church-Renweth Cathedral and the administrative offices of Bishop Govannin. She was evidently wasting no time. On the narrow catwalk above, he saw Alwir, like Lucifer in his velvet cloak, quietly surveying his dominion.
The Guards had a complex of cells to the immediate right of the great Keep doors. Gil led Rudy through a narrow entrance. By the smoldering light of grease lamps, he saw Janus arguing with a couple of indignant-looking burghers who had the air of having been men of property before the Dark had made hash of wealth and land and prestige.
Janus was saying patiently, "Cell assignments aren't the province of the Guards, they're the responsibility of the Lord of the Keep, so I suggest... " But neither of the men looked as if he were listening.
The room was heaped with provisions and mail, weaponry and kindling. Guards were sleeping in the chaos, with their slack, pinched faces showing the last stages of weariness. In the room beyond, the confusion was worse, for most of the Guards there were sitting around, eating a scratch dinner of bread and cheese, sharpening their swords, and mending their uniforms. The Icefalcon, his white hair unbraided and hanging in a sheet of liquid platinum past his waist, was keeping a pot of water from boiling by watching it impatiently. People looked up and called greetings, cheerful and noisy, which Rudy returned with what bloodless enthusiasm he could conjure. The place stank of filth and grease and smoke. What the hell was it going to be like in a year? Or two years? Or twenty? The thought was nauseating.
A grubby curtain partitioned off a sort of closet, where the Guards had stored their spare provisions in wildest disorder. Stepping through the grimy divider, Rudy blinked at the dimness, for barely any of the greasy yellow illumination managed to leak through from the room beyond; he had the impression of heaped sacks, scarred firkins, a floor mucky with mud and old hay, and an overwhelming smell of dusty cheese and onions. Across the back of that narrow cell somebody had excavated a makeshift bed on the fodder-sacks. On the bed, looking like a dead hobo, lay Ingold.
"You're crazy, do you know that?" Rudy said.
The blue eyes opened, drugged and dreamy with fatigue. Then the familiar smile lightened the whole face, stripping the age from it and turning it impish and curiously young.
"You could have got killed."
"You have an overwhelming capacity for the obvious," Ingold said slowly, but his voice was teasing, and he was obviously pleased to see Gil and Rudy alive and well. The wizard's hands were bandaged in rags and his face welted and snow-burned, but on the whole, Rudy thought, he looked as if he'd live. He went on. "Thank you for your concern, though the danger was less than it appeared. I was fairly certain I could keep the Dark Ones at bay until I released the spells over the storm. I knew I could escape them under cover of the storm, you see."
"Yeah?" Rudy asked, sitting down at the foot of the bed. "And just how the hell did you plan to escape the storm?"
"A mere technicality." Ingold dismissed the subject. "Is it still snowing?"
"It's coming down pretty heavy," Gil said, drawing her knees up like a skinny grasshopper and settling herself beside the head of the bed. "But the wind's stopped. Tomec Tirkenson says this is
the coldest it's been in forty years. The Icefalcon said he's never seen the snow pile up in the canyons like this so early in winter. You're gonna have one chilly trek over the Pass." Barely visible in the smoky darkness, her face looked thin and haggard, but at peace.
"I'll wait until it actually stops snowing," Ingold said comfortably, and folded his bandaged bands before him on the moth-eaten wool of the coverlet. Half-hidden in the gloom, he looked white and ill. Rudy didn't like the dreamy weakness of his voice, nor the way he lay without moving, propped on the sacks of grain. Whatever he said, the old boy had had one hell of a close call. "I can't delay much longer than that," the wizard continued. "Things have happened about which it has become imperative that I consult Lohiro, quite apart from the fact that, so far as I know, Alwir still proposes to assemble his Army here, for the invasion of the Nests of the Dark."
"Look," Rudy began. "About your going to Quo... "
But before he could finish, the muted voices outside rose to a quick babble, followed by the hasty scuffle of too many people all trying at once to get respectfully to their feet in too small a space. The ragged curtain was thrust aside, and a towering shadow blotted the infalling light. Alwir, Lord of the Keep of Dare, stepped through. At his side, dark and slender as a young apple tree newly come to blossom, was the Lady Minalde.
The Chancellor stood silent for a moment, gravely regarding the old man lying on his bed of sacks. When he spoke, his melodious voice was quiet. "They told me that you were dead."
"Not much of an exaggeration," Ingold said pleasantly, "but not strictly accurate, as you see."
"You could have been," the Chancellor said. "Without you, we might all have been, back by the river. I have come-" The words seemed to stick in his throat like dry bread. "I have come to say that I have wronged you, and to offer you my hand in friendship again." He held out his hand, the jewels of his many rings flaming in the shadows.
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