The Walls of the Air

by Barbara Hambly

  The afternoon was wearing toward its pallid close, the darkness pouring down upon the east. At the Keep of Dare they would be shutting the great doors soon, under Govannin's prayers and Bektis' mediocre spells.

  "So where does Bektis fit into all this?" Rudy asked idly. "Did he go to Quo, too?"

  "Oh, yes; in fact, Bektis was about ten years senior to me. He feels I've come down in the world."

  "So you learned to be a wizard at Quo, too."

  "Well—not exactly." Ingold glanced across at Rudy, the evening shadows blurring his features within the shadows of his hood. "I studied at Quo for seven years," he went on, "and I learned a great deal about magic, power, and the shaping of the fabric of the universe. But unfortunately, no one there managed to train me out of my vanity and stupidity and my fondness for playing God. As a result of this, my first act upon returning to my home was carelessly to set in motion a train of events which wiped out every member of my family, the girl whom I loved, and several hundred other perfectly innocent people, most of whom I had known all my life. At that point," he continued mildly, into the silence of Rudy's shock and horror, "I retired to the desert and became a hermit. And it was in the desert, Rudy, that I learned to be a wizard. As I believe I said once before," he concluded quietly, "true wizardry has very little to do with magic."

  And to that Rudy had no reply.

  Chapter Six

  By command of her brother, Minalde did not return to the refugee camp by the Tall Gates. But a week after her first visit there, Gil took the downward road again, as cautious as a hunter of leopards, conscious of Maia's warnings about the kind of man who might succeed him in command of the Penambrans.

  The watch on the road was still kept, but far less strictly. The numbers of the Penambrans had dwindled alarmingly; a Guard named Caldern, a big, deceptively slow-looking north-countryman, had visited the camp and said they were but a handful, huddled around their pitiful fires, cooking a fox they'd snared. He had seen nothing of Maia, and at this news Minalde had wept.

  Why, then, Gil wondered, standing in the overcast gloom beneath the silent trees, did she feel this prickle of danger, this sense of being watched? About her the winter woods were hushed, a somber world of wet sepia bark and drab, snow-laden black pine needles, the bare, twisted limbs of shrubs sticking through the drifts like the frozen hands of corpses. It had not snowed in three days, and the ground was churned in muddy tracks where the Penambrans had been foraging and setting their snares. In the still air, she could smell the woodsmoke of the camp.

  Why did the desolation have that sensation of hidden, watching life? What subliminal cues, she wondered, keyed her stretched nerves so badly? Or was it simply rumors of White Raiders and the old, half-buried wolf tracks she'd seen farther up the road?

  The Icefalcon would know, she thought. The Icefalcon would not only sense the danger—if there was danger— but be able to identify its source.

  But the Icefalcon was slogging his way down the drowned river valleys and dealing with dangers of his own.

  Through the silence of the brooding woods, sounds came to her from the direction of the road—the smuch of hooves through frosty slush, the creaking of wheels, men's and women's voices, and the faint ringing of sword belts and mail—sounds comforting in their familiarity, if for no other reason. Gil hurried toward the road, thankfulness in her heart. The forage-train had returned in safety from the valleys below.

  From the high bank of the road at this point, she saw them, the straining horses slipping in the frozen mud. She recognized Janus afoot, leading the way; his horse had been pressed into service to draw a wagonload of moldy, filthy grain bags and the smoked carcasses of half a dozen swine. The road was bad here, and the Red Monks and Alwir's troops had fallen to, helping to lift and force the sinking wheels through the knee-deep slop. Every wagon was laden.

  She saw Janus stop and raise a hand to signal a general halt. He was almost directly below her, and she noticed that, in the week of foraging in the valleys, he'd visibly lost flesh; his square face under a grimy, reddish stubble was drawn and marked with sleepless nights and bitter, exhausting labor by day. He stepped forward, probing the road with a stick he carried; it sank in the ice-skimmed slush. His whole body, like those of his troops, was plastered in half-dried, half-frozen mud, his dark surcoat scarcely distinguishable from the scarlet ones of the men he led, except for the places where the mud had been brushed off. With a gesture of disgust, he summoned the troop to him; Gil heard his voice, assigning men to collect pine boughs and branches to lay over the road, to make some kind of footing so they wouldn't be stuck there until this time next week.

  The men and women scattered, scrambling up the frozen banks, vanishing into the darkness of the woods. They were fewer than when they had gone down to the river valleys, worn, exhausted, and muddied to the eyes. Janus walked back to stand among the handful who were left, glancing uneasily at the crowding, close-ranked trees. There was something in all this that he, too, misliked. Then he saw Gil, and some of the tension lightened from his eyes. "Gil-Shalos!" he called up to her. "How goes it at the Keep?"

  "The same," she called back down. "Little word of the Dark; a few broken heads. Did you pass the camp at the Tall Gates?"

  He nodded, and his taut, over-keyed face seemed to harden with regret. "Aye," he said, more quietly. "Curse Alwir, he could take in those who are left. There's few enough of 'em now; they wouldn't cause him trouble."

  Another voice, soft and gentle and a little regretful, replied, "Perhaps more than you think."

  Gil looked up. Maia of Thran stood on the high bank of the road opposite her, looking like the rag-wrapped corpse of a starving beggar whose hair and beard had grown after death. There was a stirring in the woods. Clothed in the skins of beasts, with their matted hair like beasts themselves, half a hundred of his men appeared from the monochrome darkness of the trees. Among them they pushed the bound, gagged, and unarmed dozen or so of the Red Monks who had gone to look for pine boughs.

  Janus' call for help died on his lips.

  "It is an easy matter," the Bishop continued in his soft voice, "even for starving warriors to ambush a warrior or two alone. Easier indeed than it has been to keep that road shoveled and churned into mud impassable by laden wagons and to watch here for you. If you had been gone three more days, I doubt we would have been able to keep it up. But now, as you see, we have food…" He gestured toward the stocked wagons. "… and the wherewithal!, once we have recovered our strength, to go see for more."

  Gil heard a noise behind her. Penambrans were coming out of the woods on her side of the road as well—grimy, wolflike, so thin that the women could be distinguished from the men only by their absence of beards. Those who did not have steel weapons had clubs or makeshift armament. One woman carried an iron frying pan whose bloodstained undersurface proclaimed successful use. They were already scrambling down the banks to the road to carry away the contents of the wagons.

  "Once upon a time we trained together as warriors, Janus of Weg," Maia continued, his clawed, crippled hands shifting their grip upon the staff that Gil suspected was all that kept him on his feet. "Perhaps you will do me a service now and carry a message for me to the Lord of the Keep of Dare."

  Gil sighed and rubbed at her tired eyes. "I would sell my sister to the Arabs," she announced to the empty darkness of the Aisle around her, "for a cup of coffee." But no one heard this handsome offer, and only the echoes of midnight stillness murmured to her in response.

  It was night in the Keep.

  It was always night there. The dark walls held darkness inside as effectively as they held the Dark without. But in daylight hours the mazes of its corridors were alive with the flickering confusion of lights, grease lamps, pine knots, and the smolder of tiny fires in grubby and crowded cells. Voices echoed and re-echoed with laughter, song, scolding, Keep gossip, and Keep politics. The Aisle was always a circus of people working on what handicrafts they could barter for food or go
ods or simple good will, people washing clothes in the pools by the water channels, and people gathered to talk or to gamble for points, pennies, and love. In the deep night, one could feel the weight, the age, the mass of the Keep. Then the empty silence reminded Gil of Ingold's descriptions of the Nests where the Dark bred underground.

  The silence oppressed her, redoubling the loneliness in her soul. From the rickety second-level balcony where she stood, Gil could see very little of the cavernous spaces before her, for they were lighted only by the gate torches, weak and tiny with distance, and by occasional wall sconces down near the doors of the Church. A draft touched her face, clammy as the finger of a passing ghost. A tribute, like the murmur of the water below, to someone's long-past skill as an engineer.

  Whose?

  Gil flexed her stiff muscles and tried not to yawn. The last two days had been exhausting ones.

  She had not been a party to the Council meetings called in the wake of the message that Janus had delivered to Alwir from Maia of Thran. But she had been there when the Chancellor and Govannin had met Janus on the steps of the Keep; and she had seen the livid rage that had suffused Alwir's dark face at the news that several tons of food, plus every wagon and every spare horse in the Keep, had been appropriated by the Bishop of Penambra and his people. It had not helped the situation when, after a second of shocked silence, Govannin had said, "I told you to send more guards." Had Alwir been a wizard, Gil thought, the Bishop of Gae would surely have hopped, rather than walked, away from his glare.

  A very plump merchant in green velvet who had come out as part of Alwir's entourage cleared his throat uncomfortably and ventured, "Is there any possibility, my lord, that the Dark Ones might destroy this—this shameful upstart?"

  Govannin replied dryly, "The Bishop of Penambra would seem to be an able enough commander to forestall even that for quite a while yet."

  The merchant toyed for a moment with the ermine tags that decorated his doublet. "Um—between the Guards of Gae and your own troops, my lord Alwir, we ourselves Can field quite a force…"

  "No." The harshness of the new voice startled them all. In the shadowless gray of the overcast afternoon, Alde 's face was like marble, her mouth set and her nostrils flared with anger. None of them had seen her slip up, as quiet as Alwir's shadow, to join the group upon the broad Keep steps. "They are our people, Bendle Stooft, and they will be sharing this fortress with us. I shall thank you to remember it."

  Against her rage, even Alwir had nothing to say. There had been councils, of course, and negotiations. The earlier system of food distribution, personal barter, subsidy, and random charity had to be revamped, and Govannin fought tooth and nail against the suggestion of a general inventory of food in the Keep. But that same day outside storage compounds were laid out; every man, women, and child in the Keep, warrior and civilian, was turned out to help work on building them and to transport food to them to clear the upper levels. It was an exhausting task to those who also mounted watch through the dark hours of the night, but necessary. Gil knew that whatever Alwir wanted to say in negotiations, Maia and his Penambrans would be admitted into the Keep.

  And so they should be, she thought, stretching her shoulders to ease the kinks from them and fighting the ache in her muscles that came from too little sleep and too little food. Quite apart from the need for the extra warriors of Penambra to counterbalance the troops of the Empire, when they arrived, it had been monstrous to deny the refugees shelter in the first place.

  She had watched through too many nights herself, on the road from Karst to Renweth, ever to be free of the horror of being in open ground in the dark. She thought of the Icefalcon, making his way alone through the flooded and peril-fraught valleys, with only the token of the Rune of the Veil to guard him, and of Rudy and Ingold, out in the emptiness of the plains. She found she missed Ingold more than she had imagined possible and wished that, like the wizards, she were able to see faces in the firelight. It wouldn't be the same—nothing was the same as Ingold's presence, his wry, tolerant amusement at the world around him—but at least she'd know if he were still alive.

  She could think of no single person in her own world whose loss affected her so. The world itself, yes—the sunlit tranquility of the UCLA lawns, gilded by autumn evenings, and the warm peace of the library at midnight, surrounded by musty volumes as she traced a single reference through reams of medieval Latin and Old French. By this time, her women friends and her advisor, Dr. Smayles, would have reported her missing, and her parents would have instituted a search. The thought of what they all must be going through troubled her deeply. Of course they would have found no sign of any intention to leave anywhere in her cluttered apartment. Maybe they'd even come across her old red Volkswagen, rusting in the hills near where a deadbeat pinstriper named Rudy Solis had last been seen.

  And how would she explain when she got back?

  A cross-draft pulled at the flame of her torch, making her shadow leap nervously across the wall at her side. On the cross-draft. Oil smelled the scent of snow.

  The doors of the Keep were open!

  She held her torch aloft, her eyes narrowed with darkness and distance. Her heart pounded suddenly loud in her breast. It was the dead of night outside; the Dark could be anywhere. At this distance she couldn't tell whether there was any widening in the shadows of the gates or not, but the torches beside them, she saw now, were leaping and flickering in the draft, throwing irregular sooty patches on the dark wall behind. There was no sign of the gate Guard anywhere.

  Fear chilled her. If the Dark had gotten in and seized the Guard… It would be Caldern, she thought rapidly, ducking through the mazes of stone-flagged passages at a run, the smoke of her torch trailing her like comet-hair. If the Dark had gotten in and seized Caldern… But how would they have gotten in? She counted turnings, left and right, dodging through a makeshift access corridor and down a splintery ladder, her sword already in her hand. The torchlight jerked crazily around her spinning shadow as she emerged into the Aisle and ran for the doors.

  The inner gates stood a foot or so ajar, the slot of darkness between them like an eye slit in the visor of a black Hell. Gil sidled toward it, feeling the rushing of her own blood like fire in her veins. The steps where she had stood with Ingold, when he had asked her to hold the light at his back, were empty, and Gil frowned suddenly at the anomaly. If the Dark had gotten in and seized Caldern, there would have been something—bones, blood, his sword—to show it. Even if they had seized him, carried him off bodily…

  She swung violently around. The empty Aisle stretched a thousand feet at her back.

  Don't start that, she told herself grimly. First things first.

  She pushed the inner gates a fraction wider and stood in the inky slit.

  The misty starlight visible in the narrow rectangle of the open outer gates wasn't much, but it was enough to show her the ten-foot passage of the gates. There was no movement in the inky shadows clustering in the corners and the vault of the roof and, more importantly to Gil, no feeling of the presence of the Dark. She held up her torch; though it jittered in the draft, it revealed nothing untoward. Still her whole body was tensed like a cat's as she slid noiselessly down the tunnel and stood in the open doors of night.

  For the first time since Gil had come to Renweth, the cloud-cover had broken. Icy moonlight frosted the world outside, turning the snow to diamonds and the shadows to velvet. Frost lay like lace on the black stone of the steps. Three sets of heavily booted tracks led down the steps and through the frozen mud of the path outside, circling around toward the food compounds that had been built only that week and filled within the last two days.

  Gil sighed tiredly. The story was now clear.

  Maia and the Penambrans would be coming to the Keep within days. The food stored by Alwir's government and hundreds of large and small Keep entrepreneurs had been moved out to the compounds to make room for them. Probably not all, Gil guessed; there were still probably hoards
cached in deserted cells and back corners by those who did not trust fate and would not admit to anyone all they had. Guards, Alwir's men, and Church troops were supposed to protect the compound by day—and fear of the Dark by night.

  The wetness in the tracks was not yet frozen. Caldern could easily have been lured away; since the night of the Dark's great. assault on the Keep, the Dark Ones had made no further attempt to break the gate, and the post of gate Guard was generally given to the captain of the watch, simply so the other members of the watch would know where to find their leader. Who would guess, Gil thought, that somebody would actually leave the gates open to venture outside at night to steal food?

  There were three of them, she thought, considering the tracks, and a fourth to distract the captain. That argued a ring—not a single man or woman, fearful for some family's hunger after the arrival of the Penambrans in the Keep, but an organized group who would steal as much as they could and lock it away, holding it until the starving spring.

  It was all as clear as the moonlight that edged the steps in crystal.

  Gil stood for what seemed like a long time in the diamond night, the smell of snow and pine like ice water in her nostrils. Long ago, she remembered, she had been a scholar, and it had never been her wish to harm anyone. All that she had ever desired had been the clean solitude of knowledge, the peace of mind and heart to read, to think, to unravel riddles and reconstruct past times, and to seek the truth behind the polemics of those whose business it was to lie about the dead. Alone in the hoarfrost cold of midnight, she remembered it clearly, for knowledge had been all she had ever wanted. She had chosen it over the husbands she might have had, if she had ever bothered to seek them, and the peace of family good will that she had let slip by the wayside in the wake of her parents' horror at her chosen course.