The Walls of the Air

by Barbara Hambly

  At the mention of her lover's name, Alde 's cheeks colored faintly, and Gil hid a grin. In many ways this dark-haired girl reminded her of the freshmen she'd taught; she was sweet, shy, pretty, and very unsure of herself. At such times it was difficult to remember that this soft-voiced girl had passed through fire and darkness, had seen her husband die in the flaming ruin of the battle-broken Palace, and had gone against the forces of the night, armed only with a torch and her own wild courage. She was the Queen of Darwath, the true ruler of the Keep, sitting at the foot of the disordered bunk with her legs crossed under her multicolored peasant skirts.

  "So anyway, the Bishop offered to lend me the books to look for the answers," Gil said, edging herself up against her makeshift pillows. "Gnift's already told me that training or walking patrol is out for at least three weeks… I suppose he's right," she added regretfully, looking down at her strapped shoulder. "I'll have to get someone to read them to me and teach me the language, though."

  "Oh, I can do that," Alde said. "Really, it would be no trouble. I know the Old Wath and the High Tongue of the Church, which is very different from the Wathe. It would be the first time, you know, that I've ever really used anything that I learned in school."

  Gil regarded her for a moment through the barracks gloom, fascinated. "What did you learn in school?"

  Alde shrugged. "Needlework," she said. "Songs, and how to write the different modes of poetry. I did an entire tapestry once of Shamilfar and Syriandis—they're famous lovers—but it nearly drove me crazy and I never did another. Dancing, and playing the harp and dulcimer. Something about the major parts of the Realm and a little history. I hated history," she admitted, shamefaced. "Most people do," Gil said comfortingly. "You don't." Alde 's slim, well-kept hands traced the curve of the leather cover's embossing.

  "I always was a freak that way." Rudy's teasing nickname of "spook" was hardly a new one.

  "Well, the way you talk about it, it's as if—as if it has a point," Alde said. "As if you're looking for something. All they ever taught us about history was these little stories that were supposed to be morally uplifting, like the one about the man who died in a valiant rear-guard action for the sake of his comrades, or the story about all those old patriarchs who let the enemy slaughter them rather than be enslaved. That kind of thing. Things that I suspect never really happened."

  The image of a stiff little boy in a powdered wig confessing to his father about who axed the cherry tree floated through Gil's mind, and she laughed. "Maybe."

  "But if you need someone to read to you, I'll be glad to do it."

  Gil studied Alde 's face for a moment in silence. She herself had closed out the UCLA library, the way some people close out bars, far too many nights not to understand. And as for having a Queen as a research assistant— Alwir, Gil reflected, will hardly miss her. "Sure," she said quietly. "Any time you can get away."

  They took over the little cubbyhole in the back of the barracks of the Guards, which Ingold had once used as his quarters. It was private, yet close to the center of things, and, Gil noted to herself, at the opposite end of the Keep from the Royal Sector and its politics. Alde took to coming there every day, usually bringing Tir with her, to work laboriously through the ancient chronicles, while Gil scribbled notes on tablets of wood coated with beeswax that she'd found in an abandoned storeroom. In another storeroom she found a desk, spindle-legged and archaic, small enough to fit into the narrow confines of her study. She used a couple of firkins of dried apples for a seat.

  Thus she entered into a period of quiet scholarship, her hours of transcribing and sorting notes alternating with long, solitary rambles through the back reaches of the Keep in search of some sign of the mysterious circular chamber Rudy had described before his departure. It was from one of these that she returned one day to find Alde sitting at her desk, studying one of the tablets in the dun light.

  "Is this what you do?" the younger girl asked, touching the creamy surface with a doubtful finger. "Is this all?" Gil looked down over her shoulder. She habitually wrote with a silver hairpin as a stylus, in a combination of English and the runes of the Wathe. The tablet had written on it:

  Swarl (?)'s. of Tirwis, ss. Aldor, Bet, Urgwas— famine, snows Pass 2, Tl Gts grsnd 4 (—)—no mtn Dk—pop Kp 12000 +3 stmts (Big Ring, ??)—buried gaenguo (?)—Bp. Kardthe, Tracho

  "Sure," she replied cheerfully. "That's from the chronicles you were reading to me yesterday. It's just a condensation—Swarl, whenever the bell he ruled Renweth, had three sons named Aldor, Bet, and Urgwas…"

  "Bet's a woman's name," Alde pointed out.

  "Oh." Gil made a notation. In the Wathe, pronouns had no gender. "Anyhow, in the second year of his reign there was a famine, and snows heavy enough to close Sarda Pass. The population of the Keep at that time was estimated at twelve thousand, with three settlements in the valley, one of which was named the Big Ring—don't ask me why. There was no mention of the Dark in the chronicle, which isn't surprising, since we have yet to find any word of the Dark in any of these chronicles, and right around the fourth year of his reign there is a statement that the Tall Gates were garrisoned, though they might have been so for years. The Bishops during his reign were Kardthe and later a man or woman named Tracho—"

  "That's the old spelling for Trago. It's a man's name."

  "Thanks." Gil made another notation. "And in his reign they buried the gaenguo, which I meant to ask you about. Isn't gaenguo the old word for a—a lucky place, or a good place?"

  "Well—not so much good as just—I guess awesome would be the best word." Alde reached out with her foot and gently rolled Tir's ball back toward him where he was playing happily on the floor. "There were supposed to be places where certain powers were concentrated, where people could see things far off or have visions."

  Gil considered, while Tir came crawling busily back across the crackly mat of straw and old rushes that strewed the floor. Alde bent down and let the infant catch her fingers, then lifted him to a standing position beside her knees. Tir threw back his head and crowed with delight.

  "You know," Gil said thoughtfully, 'I bet what they buried was the old Nest of the Dark." She picked up the tablet and turned it idly over in her fingers, the touch of the wax as cold and smooth as marble. "God knows, the place is creepy enough. But it's really sort of an opposite to a gaenguo. The atmosphere disrupts magic rather than channels it. Interesting," she murmured.

  "Interesting how?" Alde glanced curiously up at Gil, holding her son's hands in her own.

  "Because it looks as if by that time they had completely disassociated the idea of the Dark from the Nests. Which is less surprising than it seems," she went on, "when you consider that the bonfire was the first line of defense against the Dark. Which, of course, is why we have no records at all from the Time of the Dark itself."

  Alde let Tir down, and the child crawled determinedly away in pursuit of his ball. "How vexing," she said, inadequately.

  "Well, more than that." Gil sat on the narrow bed of grain sacks and covered her cold feet with her cloak. "It left everybody completely unprepared for it when it happened again. I mean, before last summer nobody had even heard of the Dark."

  "Oh, but we had," Alde protested. "That's what— In a way it worked against Ingold, you see. When I was a little girl, my nurse Medda used to tell me not to get out of bed and run about the house at night because the Dark Ones would eat me up. I think all nurses used to tell their children that." Her voice faltered—in the end it had been Medda who had been eaten up by the Dark. "It was something you grew out of. Most little children believed in the Dark Ones. It was only their parents who didn't."

  Gil momentarily pictured the probable fate of any shabby and unlikely pilgrim who tried to convince the authorities that the bogeyman was really going to devour America. "I'm surprised Eldor believed him," she murmured.

  "Eldor—" Minalde paused. "Eldor was very exceptional. And he trusted Ingold. Ingold was his tutor when he
was a child."

  Gil glanced up quickly, hearing the sudden tension that choked off Alde 's voice. The younger girl was looking determinedly away into the distance, fighting the film of tears that had appeared so abruptly in her eyes. Whatever her love for Rudy, Gil thought, there is a love there which can never be denied. In the strained silence which followed, Melantrys' voice could be heard, arguing with Seya about whether or not she should get rid of her cloak in a sword fight.

  Then Alde forced a small rueful smile and brushed at her eyes with the back of her wrist "I'm sorry."

  "It's okay."

  "No," Alde said. "It's just that sometimes I don't understand what there was between me and—and Eldor. As if I never understood it. I thought I could make him love me if I loved him hard enough. Maybe I was just being stupid." She wiped her eyes again. "But it hurts, you know, when you give everything you have and the one you give it to just—just looks at it and turns aside." She glanced away again, unable to meet Gil's eyes. Gil, clumsy-tongued and unhandy with her own or anyone else's emotions, could find nothing to say.

  But Alde seemed to take no offense at the silence. In fact, she seemed to find a kind of comfort in it. Tir, having reached the end of the room, came crawling back toward the girls with his usual single-minded determination, and Alde smiled as she bent to help him stand once more. He was very much like Alde , Gil thought, watching mother and child together—small-boned and compact, with her wide morning-glory-blue eyes. Just as well, she added to herself, that there's so little of Eldor in his only child. When you're carrying on an affair with a man the Church says is a servant of Satan, it's no help to have the echo of his predecessor before your eyes every time you turn around.

  Alde looked up suddenly, as if deliberately putting aside the pain and confusion of that first, hopeless love. "So where were you?" she asked Gil. "The Guards said you'd left right after breakfast."

  "Oh." Gil shrugged. "Exploring, looking for something, really… You've never run across any mention anywhere of a—a kind of observation room in the Keep, have you? A room with a black stone table in it, with a crystal kind of thing in the middle?"

  "No." Then Alde frowned, her black brows drawing down into two swooping wings. "But that's funny—it sounds so familiar. A table—has it a crystal disc, set into the top of the table?"

  "Yeah," Gil said. "It's part of the table. How did you know?"

  "I don't know. I have the feeling I've seen something like that before, but—almost as if I dreamed about it, because I know I've never seen anything of the kind. That's funny," Alde went on quietly, sitting back against the desk, her face troubled. Tir, whom she had lifted onto her knee, promptly reached for the jeweled clasp that held her hair, and she undid it and gave it to him, her dark hair falling in a river down over her shoulders and her child.

  Gil propped the arm in the sling against her knees. "Why is it funny?" she asked.

  "Because—I've had that feeling a lot of times in the Keep," Alde said in a worried voice. "As if—as if I remembered things, remembered being here before. Sometimes I'll be walking down a staircase or along a hall, and I'll have this feeling of having been there before."

  "Like deja. vu?" There was a technical term in the language of the Wathe for that—a circumstance which Gil found interesting.

  "Not entirely."

  "Like the inherited memories that are passed on from parent to child in certain families?" Gil asked quietly. "You did tell me your House was a collateral branch of the House of Dare."

  Alde looked over at her worriedly in the gloomy yellowish lamplight. "But the memories only pass from father to son," she said softly. "And Eldor told me once that his memories of other lives were like memories of his own. Very clear, like visions. Mine are just—feelings."

  "Maybe women hold inherited memory differently," Gil said. "Maybe it's less concrete in women and therefore hasn't been called upon for centuries, because there was always a male heir of the House of Dare. Maybe you haven't remembered because you didn't need to." Gil leaned forward, the grain in the sacks she sat on scrunching softly and giving off a faint musty odor into the tiny room. "I remember a long time ago, Ingold said that Eldor's father Umar didn't have Dare's memories at all, because there was really no need—that the inherited memory will skip generations, one or three or sometimes more. But he said that they woke in Eldor because it was necessary."

  Minalde was silent, looking down at the child who played so obliviously in her lap. Her unbound hair hid her expression, but when she did speak, her voice was soft and filled with doubt. "I don't know," she said.

  Gil stood up briskly. "I think it's neat," she announced.

  "Do you?" Alde asked timidly.

  "Hell, yes. Come on exploring with me. See what you can remember."

  As the winter deepened and the snows sealed the Vale into a self-contained world of whiteness, Gil and Minalde conducted their own rather unsystematic exploration of the Keep of Dare. They wandered the upper reaches of the fourth and fifth levels, where Maia of Thran had established his headquarters. He greeted them amiably in his own church down near the western end, with his own armed troops about him. They explored the crowded slums that huddled around the stairheads on the fifth level, hearing nothing but the liquid southern drawl of the Penambrans in their ears, and probed the dark, empty halls that stretched beyond. Armed like Theseus with a ball of twine, they traversed miles of dark, abandoned halls that stank of mold and dry rot, with the dust of ages drifting like ground fog about their feet.

  They found storerooms, chapels, and armories filled with rusted weapons in the back halls of all levels. They found the remains of bridges that had once spanned the Aisle at the fourth and fifth levels, thin spiderwebs of cable heretofore hidden by the clustering shadows of the ceiling. They found cells stacked halfway to the ceiling with spiky mazes of piled furniture, carved in unfamiliar styles and painted with thin running lines of hearts and diamonds picked out in gold leaf. They passed locked cells scurrying with rats, food stores cached by unknown speculators. They discovered things they did not understand— moldering parchments overwritten in debased and unreadable bookhand, or what looked like puzzling little white polyhedrons made of milky glass, three-quarters the size of Gil's fist, their function unknown and unguessable.

  "You should let Alwir know about the bundle of parchments we found," Gil remarked at one point as they retraced their steps back from a remote corner of the fifth level. The puddle of yellow lamplight wavered around their feet. The air up here was warmer, the crowding walls of the empty warrens of cells pressing down on the girls in silence. Grotesque shadows lumbered along the wall, bending around the flame like pteranodon moths about a diminutive candle. Gil felt wryly envious of Rudy and Ingold's blithe, unthinking ability to summon light. Damn wizards probably never gave it a second thought.

  "I will," Minalde agreed, holding the lamp up for better visibility. "He and Bishop Govannin are already quarreling about writing materials. Alwir wants to make a census of the Keep."

  "He should. And he should be keeping his own chronicles."

  "I know." Alde had imbibed enough of Gil's historical sense to realize that the Church accounts of certain events differed radically from secular records. "But because there's almost nothing to write on, nobody's keeping any kind of chronicles at all."

  "Great," Gil said. "So when in three thousand years all this happens again, everybody's going to be in as rotten a shape as we are now."

  "Oh, no!" Alde protested. "It couldn't—I mean—"

  Gil raised her eyebrows and paused in a shadowy doorway. "Like hell it couldn't. This could all be part of a regular cycle. We don't know why the Dark came before or how many times it has happened. We know they have herds of some kind below the ground; we know they're taking prisoners. Are the herds descended from prisoners they took three thousand years ago? Did people drive them back underground, or did they just go away of their own accord?"

  "But why would they?" Alde cried,
much distressed.

  "Beats the hell out of me." Gil paused, catching a faceted glimpse of something in a deserted doorway. She picked up another one of those little white glass polyhedrons and turned its uncommunicative shape thoughtfully in her good hand. "But that's what we've got to find out, Alde . We've got to get a handle on this somehow—and right now the Keep and the records are the only starting places I can think of." She shrugged. "Maybe we're wasting our time, and the Archmage will have all the answers when he comes back here with Rudy and Ingold. And then again, maybe he won't."

  They continued on down the corridor, Gil caching the polyhedron in her sling for further investigation later. Echoes whispered at their passing, mocking footfall and shadow and breath. But the Keep hid its secrets well, furled tightly within the spiral and counterspiral of the winding halls, or revealed them in enigmatic or incomprehensible ways.

  Early in their endeavors, they decided to ask Bektis about the observation room with its crystal table, on the off chance that his lore might have preserved some clue to its whereabouts.

  The Court Wizard of the House of Dare, however, had little time to spend on the games of girls. He looked up with a frown as they came quietly into his room, a large cell tucked away in the warren of the Royal Sector. The light of the bluish witchfire that burned above his head shone on his high, bald pate and the bridge of his proud, hooked nose. Dutifully, he made a stiff little bow. "All my pardons, my lady," he said in his rather light, mellifluous voice. "In such a gown as that, one might easily take you for a commoner." Rigid disapproval seemed to have been rammed like a poker up his backbone.

  Still he listened to Gil's description of what they sought, nodding his head wisely with his usual expression of grave thoughtfulness, which Gil suspected uncharitably that he practiced daily before a mirror. As she spoke, Gil looked around the room, noting the few black-bound books lining the shelves in the little sitting room area at the far end of the cell, and the richness of the single chest and carved bedstead. Unlike the table in her own minuscule study, the bedstead was newish, and the latest style current in Gae at the time of the coming of the Dark. It had clearly been brought down from Karst in pieces and reassembled, rather than scrounged from the old storerooms at the Keep. What sympathy she had once cherished for Lord Alwir's transport problems faded. He couldn't have been doing too badly if he could afford to cart along his Court Conjurer's bedroom set. In the cool brightness of the witchlight, Bektis' sleeves twinkled with scarlet embroidery, stitched into a pattern Gil recognized as the signs of the Zodiac. She picked out her own symbol, the tailed M of Virgo, before it occurred to her that this was yet another unexplained transfer, in one direction or the other, across the Void.