by Hambly
He had intended to work back through the deeper mazes of the First Level, making signs to draw the ghosts into the front part of the Aisle. But this proved impossible. As Wend had said, the shadowy warriors were everywhere, appearing around corners and stepping through the doors of cells and store-rooms abandonned by their terrified inhabitants. Even the Keep’s mice and rats – which Rudy had thought driven out years ago by spells – had been flushed from their hiding-places by terror of the queer, icy smoke that seemed to cling to the invaders, and scurried madly through corridors and passways in the dark. After the fifth encounter with the Soul-hunters, silent as mist – How much are they aware of anyway? – Rudy and Tarpaeis retreated to the Aisle, nearly as black as the mazes of corridors, for all the lamps, glowstones, torches were drawn back around the ornamental doors of Church territory, nearly a thousand feet away.
Minalde was someplace back there. Rudy couldn’t see her, among the crowded mass of Keep-dwellers huddled behind the line of bonfires. Her son Tir, whom Rudy loved as his own, and little Gisa, his own daughter by the Lady of the Keep… Gil and Ingold’s child. Ilae and Wend. The Keep Guards. The people Rudy had lived with and come to know as he’d never really known his family and his old drinking-buddies back in California.
Weariness dragged his heart, the cold, drained sensation of the exhaustion of his magic, pulled from his bone-marrow by spell after spell. It crossed his mind that the hard part of this plan – the dangerous part of this plan – might prove beyond his strength.
It wasn’t a death he particularly wanted to die.
“You go back to the others,” he told Tarpaeis, who looked about to collapse with fatigue. “Keep the ghosts away from that end of the Aisle. And pray this works.”
He headed for the Keep’s great outer Doors at a run.
The Icefalcon was beside them, just within the great black rectangle where the Door-passage cut through the Keep’s massive walls. The inner pair of the Doors stood open – the Icefalcon, Rudy guessed, had figured out what he intended to do. (Did Gil tell him about that movie?) The outer pair – the Doors which would open into the frozen outer world of the Vale of Renweth – were closed, and the runes and sigils of three millenia of protection glowed faintly in the gloom. The Icefalcon, torch in hand, stepped back when Rudy reached him: “You need chalk? Silver? Blood?”
“I got no idea what these sigils were originally drawn in,” panted Rudy. “So we’re just gonna go with light.” He pulled from his pocket Tarpaeis’ drawing of the glimmering sign which had appeared both in the transporter-room and Lady Sketh’s chicken-ranch (and I hope every rat in the Keep makes nests in her underwear-drawer…), and with his forefinger, traced the signs in light on either side of the great inner Doors. “Summer hasn’t come outside or anything, has it?”
“Ilae checked,” replied the White Raider calmly, and handed him a coat made of bison-hide. “The blizzard is still going.”
“Just thought I’d ask. You better get clear. If this works all the Soul-hunters in the Keep are going to – Here they come.”
“How gratifying for you.” The Icefalcon strode lightly into the deep passageway to the outer Doors, caught the bronze locking-ring of one side, and dragged it back.
Blizzard wind and blizzard cold took Rudy’s breath away. He squinted against the blinding swirl of snow-pellets, hard as bird-shot, and summoned around himself a spell of heat, and one that would keep the snow out of his eyes – one which even Ingold couldn’t make work all the time. Stumbling against the driving force of the wind, he headed down the hill, toward the Hill of Execution, straight downhill a mile from the Keep Doors. Ancient pillars of black stone and black steel rose like fangs from the little knoll, where Rudy had once, years ago, been chained. The night was pitch-black and though, as a wizard, Rudy could see in the dark, the snow effectively blinded him despite the spell. When he glanced back the first time he could still make out the gleam of torches in the square of the Doors.
After that, nothing.
Darkness, and bone-piercing cold.
Dammit, I’m not gonna make it…
Yes you are. He conjured Gil’s voice in his head. Don’t be a sissy.
This has got to work. The ghosts won’t come out if they don’t feel their sigil out here.
The cold was like having his skeleton crushed in steel pliers. His skull crystalized from the inside out. Even at its lowest strength – and he concentrated on the unfamiliar task of keeping a spell of only a little bit of heat around him – he could feel power drain from his flesh like a haemhorrage. All those ghost-wards he’d made, all those illusions…
If I live through this I’m gonna put a curse on Lady Sketh’s underwear so she’ll NEVER stop scratching…
Contemplation of it shattered even the small heat-spell, and he was shaking so badly – so disoriented with the cold – that he was barely able to call it back.
Keep your mind on what you’re doing or you’re never gonna get through this…
Such was the violence of the storm that Rudy almost bumped into the pillars on the knoll before he saw them. Weeds and saplings had grown up around them in seven and a half years, twisted and flattened now by the scouring wind. He and the other novices had often used them as a convenient marker of distance from the Doors: How far away can you make a spell of this-or-that work?
They better be able to see this one through the snow…
Kneeling between the pillars, he pulled off one of the gloves that had been in the coat’s pocket, closed his eyes and called the sigil back whole to his mind, in the way he’d been taught (and had been drilled to do even when Ingold was shouting at him and hitting him with a stick…). Called back to mind the unfamiliar energies he’d sensed in it, when he’d seen it first in the transporter room. Conjured the thought of it being the same sigil, the very sigil, written there, and written in the chicken-ranch.
The rock between the pillars had been swept bare by the wind, but the wind did not seem to touch the sign he drew in light on the stony ground.
He emptied into it, as he drew, all the energy of his magic: Just a simple spell to brighten and strengthen, like you do when a glowstone is fading…
Just like they did in that stupid movie about the giant grasshoppers, where they killed them all by broadcasting a mating-call from the bottom of Lake Michigan…
C’mon, man, this has got to work… Go get them sexy bugs!
But at the same time, deep in his heart, he thought, NO…!
Lost. These are men. And I’m just sending them along down the line…
But I can’t risk anything else.
Cold cut through the bison-fur coat as if he were wearing a t-shirt and a Speed-o and he knew his power was spent. His sense of direction was good enough that he was pretty sure in which direction the Keep lay, but he saw nothing through the swirling darkness and knew in any case he’d never make it. Still he pushed himself off the nearest pillar, bowed against the wind. He fell once, a hundred feet from the knoll, and managed to get up again. Shortly after that he fell again, and it was as if the frozen earth, the frozen air were drinking the blood from his body.
Alde, I’m sorry… Minalde’s face flickered through the darkness of his mind, Minalde holding Tir against her, two-year-old Gisa in her arms. Firelight in the Aisle, she was with the people who hadn’t gotten into the shelter of the Church. I hoped this would work…
And it did. Through the blizzard darkness he felt them, saw them in his mind. Smelled – through the icy brutality of the storm-winds – the chill smoke that surrounded them.
A line of soldiers, swords flickering in their hands. They passed within feet of him, stumbling as they pressed through the darkness. Half-formed shapes of glowing mist, struggling to reach the sigil that they thought would bring them to their destination. That would transfer them on to fulfill their duty. The leader’s hood had fallen back. Wind whipped long gray hair.
He wanted to call out to them, I’m sorry, guys! But it was you or
us…
One man fell, and the gray-haired leader turned back to help him. The glowing substance that made up their bodies shredded away in the screaming wind.
*
The shriek of the storm didn’t cease, but warmth surrounded him. Hands grabbed his elbows and dragged him to his feet. “Rudy—”
Ingold’s voice. I’ve got to be dreaming.
Gil slapped him and said, “Don’t you frakking die on me, punk.”
Fucken-A, they’re really here—
“Sketh,” she said, “you take that side—”
“I can’t,” gasped Lord Sketh’s voice, “I’m faint—”
“Oh, shut up,” snapped a girl’s voice, as Rudy’s weight was shifted over to what felt like a man of His Lordship’s height and girth. “Don’t be such a whiner. Where are we, Lord Wizard?”
“About a thousand yards from the Keep.” The mage’s deep voice sounded, as always, perfectly calm and unsurprised. “This way.”
*
Rudy came more fully to himself in his cell in the Guards’ complex, with Ingold and Minalde sitting beside him. Gil and Melantrys perched at the foot of his bed, Melantrys – awake and alert – turning over in her hands one of the short-bladed ghost-swords. The cold light had gone out of its blade. “One of the soldiers who got killed where we were was a medic,” Gil was saying. “I figured these guys had to be prepared for accidents with their own weapons, and once the Dark Ones had oriented Ingold about how to find his way back to this planet, Sissy and I went and searched the bodies til we found both a healing-kit – we tried it on one of the critters that had been wounded – and a de-activator.”
“I’m glad it worked,” commented the blonde Guard, swinging the blade experimentally. “The balance on these things is terrible and I think that’s just pot-metal it’s made out of.”
“Their deadliness lay in the spells that were on them,” said Ingold, bringing over a cup of tisane from the hearth. “Not on their quality as blades – nor, perhaps, on any skill of the men who wielded them. Can you drink this, my boy? There – good… As for the healing sigils in the kit, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t have worked. The place where we went – the planet where we were – is still in this universe. Once the Dark Ones had shown me where it lay in relation to the nearest universes around it, I was easily able to take us into a parallel world – one which was totally inimical to the Dark Ones—”
“—and weird as a sack of snakes,” added Gil, wiping blue slime off her boot.
“—and thence back to this world at a different point. Rudy, that was an exceptionaly brave thing you did—”
Minalde had already taken Rudy’s hand, and pressed a kiss, first on it, then on his lips.
“—and a very clever one, given how little information any of us had about the… invaders, I suppose one must call them. I’ve been through the whole of the Keep, and found no trace of them, even in the so-called ‘haunted sector’—”
“Thank the late-late show.” Even talking exhausted him. “Any sign of Lady Sketh’s chicken-ranches?”
Minalde’s voice was slightly grim. “We’re still working on that.”
“About six months ago Her Ladyship had me put spells of concealment on them.” Tarpaeis appeared in the torchlight of the cell door, holding the hand of a slender, pretty dark-haired girl in a hand-me-down dress. With a slight start, Rudy recognized her as the lovely Sisa. “I’ve… I think I’ve disabled all of the spells, but we still haven’t found them.”
“Which could mean you weren’t her only wizard,” remarked Gil.
“Or could mean,” surmised Ingold quietly, “that there are areas of the Keep which in spite of nearly seven years’ residence here, we still haven’t discovered. An unsettling thought.”
No shit… Rudy wasn’t certain which option was worse.
“Have you been out to the Hill of Execution?” he asked after a moment. “Did any of those guys make it that far?”
“I was out there this morning,” said the mage. “As soon as the storm died down. I un-made the sigil there, as I’ve un-made the others in the Keep. I saw no trace of the ghosts, neither around the rocks themselves, nor between them and the Doors. I suspect,” he added gently, seeing the look of pain in Rudy’s eyes, “that whatever… transporter malfunction, as Gil calls it … it was that misdirected those warriors here to the Keep, it also prevented them from complete materialization here. Maybe even from complete awareness of where they were, or who they were. I’m not sure we could have negotiated with them.”
“They only knew one thing,” said Rudy quietly. “They had a duty to do, or to die trying.”
*
The following day, when he was up and on his feet, Rudy walked from the Doors down to the Hill of Execution, marveling a little that he’d made it all the way down to them in a blizzard, much less a third of the way back without a heat-spell to protect him. Snow had begun to fall from a wet, gray sky, blanketing the stunted trees, the withered orchards that Rudy suspected would die within a year or two, as the world grew bleaker and colder yet.
The world he’d chosen, he reflected. The world where magic existed, without which he’d have stayed back in Riverside as a heavy-drinking screw-up slated for an early death doing something stupid…
And what the hell do you call that stunt yesterday? Profound wisdom?
Well, he thought, a wizard’s gotta do what a wizard’s gotta do… Especially if he’s been temporarily promoted to Senior Mage because of somebody else’s idiocy.
He found the place where he’d written the sigil on the ground between the pillars, but there lingered no trace of the magic he’d poured into it. Nor did he find any sign that the ghostly warriors had made it this far.
Yet in after years, the children of the Keep, and the herd-dogs, avoided the place, and stories grew up that on moonless nights, voices could sometimes be heard around the pillars, calling in languages unknown. The one time Rudy returned there on a summer night and listened, he heard nothing. But later that same night, lying at Minalde’s side in the safety of the Keep, he dreamed of the place, and of a band of warriors – not eyeless, not masked, their faces scoured with beaten exhaustion in the flickering glow thrown by their swords – seeking in nameless darkness for a gleam of witchlight that vanished as they turned towards it.
Do you know the way? their gray-haired Captain asked, coming up to Rudy in his dream. Can you show us how to get out of here? It’s been so long…
Rudy could only shake his head.
The man said, Thank you anyway, friend. And held out his hand, which Rudy gripped in farewell.
The last he saw of them was the line of them, walking away into the blackness, toward a sigil that appeared and vanished, like the foxfire on some endless marsh.
He wanted to say, Good luck, man, but could not. Blackness swallowed them up.
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.
She very much hopes you will enjoy these stories.
Professor Hambly also teaches History part-time, paints, dances, and trains in martial arts. Follow her on Facebook, and on her blog at livejournal.com.
Now a widow, she shares a house in Los Angeles with several small carnivores.