The Walls of the Air

by Barbara Hambly

  Bektis coughed solemnly. "The men of the ancient realms, my lady," he intoned, "had powers far exceeding our ken. Very little is known of them, or of their works."

  Alde broke in hesitantly. "My lady Bishop says that the people of the Times Before were evil and practiced abominations."

  A gleam of spite flickered in the old man's dark eyes. "So she says of all things of which she does not approve. In those times wizardry was a part of the life of the Realm, rather than a thing to be tampered with at risk. There were more wizards then, and their powers were much greater. Even in our own memory, my lady, wizardry has not been anathema, for did there not used to be citadels of wizardry, not only at Quo but in Penambra and in Gae itself, on the very spot where the Palace now stands?"

  "Did there?" Gil asked curiously.

  The dark eyes slid sideways at her. "Indeed there did, Gil-Shalos. We had respect then, in the great days of wizardry; it was wizardry that helped to build the Realm. But the Church drove us out, playing upon the sentiments of the ignorant; and one by one, those citadels closed, and such wizards as were left them took to the road. It was centuries ago," he continued, his words soft and light but suddenly fraught with impotent malice, "but we do not forget."

  Gil shifted her arm uncomfortably in its grubby sling. "And your learning preserves nothing of their deeds?"

  "Nor does anyone's, my lady." The old man looked down, his voice turned smooth again. "The Archmage Lohiro made a study of some of the works of the Times Before, but even his knowledge is fragmentary."

  Probably because he didn't have a mechanized world-view to start with, Gil thought, rising from her chair. She caught Alde 's eyes and signaled her away, and they left the Court Wizard carefully pestling pearls to mix with hogwort and fennel as a charm against indigestion, the blue witchlight falling over the spiderlike movement of his hands.

  They searched, not only through the dark halls of the Keep itself but, in Gil's patient, scholarly fashion, through all the ancient records they could lay their hands on. But matters that were of interest to contemporary chroniclers were not always the things that historians sought. Gil found herself wandering through a second maze of trivial information regarding the love lives of vanished monarchs, petty power duels with long-dead prelates, accounts of famines and crop failures, and how high the snow stood in Sarda Pass. Often her efforts took on a strangely surreal quality, as if she wandered back and forth through time as well as space, crossing and recrossing the myriad layerings of the universe on some curious quest whose meaning she only vaguely understood.

  It was in this that she longed more than anything else for Ingold. She felt herself at sea, wrestling with facts and languages and concepts she barely comprehended. Alde 's help was invaluable, but her breeding had been upper-class and her education orthodox; there was much about the history of the Church, the Realm, and wizardry that she simply did not know. As Gil patiently decoded the masses of filthy and overwritten palimpsests in her tiny study far into the watches of the night, she missed the old man's presence, if not for actual help, at least for moral support or for his company. At times when the voices of the deep-night watch could be heard in the distant corridors and weariness made the unfamiliar words swim before her eyes in the smutty yellow gleam of the lamp, she'd prop her injured arm on the slanted surface of the desk and wonder how she'd gotten where she was. How in a matter of six weeks or so had she gone from the lands of sunlight and blue jeans to a freezing and peril-circled citadel in the midst of alien mountains, digging through unreadable parchments for mention of something he had asked her to find? And she wondered if he watched her in that little magic crystal of his, or if he cared.

  Between the two mazes of present and past lay a third maze, far less comprehensible but, she sensed, far more important than the other two. It was a maze of memory, as elusive as a whiff of smoke or the faint sounds one might think one heard in the night—a maze only barely to be glimpsed by that inward remembering look in Minalde's eyes,

  "That's interesting," Gil said as she and Minalde emerged from the back entrance of a boarded-up cell crammed to the ceiling with old furniture and dozens of those useless, enigmatic white polyhedrons. Clouds of dust clung to their clothes; Alde sneezed in it, fanning it away from her face. Both of them were gray with it, like urchins playing in the construction yards. "From the furniture we found in there, it looks as if this area was growing increasingly crowded at the same time the fifth level was being abandoned."

  "That doesn't make sense," Alde said, puzzled, trying to wipe the dust from her arms and only succeeding in putting huge, blackish smudges on her white sleeves. "If they were having such a space problem, why not move onto the fifth level?"

  Gil shrugged and marked another arrow on the wall. "It takes forever to get up and back there," she said. "The second level was just more popular. In cities of my homeland, people will live in worse crowding than this, just to be in a fashionable part of town." She looked around. "So where the hell are we?"

  Alde held the lamp up high. A short neck of corridor dead-ended twenty feet away in a blank wall—by its composition, part of the Keep's original design. Shadows shifted around them with the movement of the lamp, and Gil shivered a little in the draft.

  A warmer breath of air from somewhere nearby brought the voices of monks chanting. "Close to the Royal Sector, I think," she answered her own question. "There should be a stair…"

  "No, Gil, wait a minute." Alde stood very still, pale and small in the impenetrable shadows. "I know this place, I'm positive. I've been here before."

  Gil was silent, watching the struggle on her face.

  Alde groped helplessly for a moment at the memory, then shook her head in despair. "I can't bring k back," she whispered. "But it's so close. I feel I've passed this way before, so many times. It was part of my life, going to do something… something I did so often I could go there with my eyes closed."

  Then close your eyes," Gil suggested softly, "and go there."

  Alde handed her the lamp and stood, eyes closed, with the darkness hemming her in. She took a hesitant step and another. Then abruptly she changed her direction, her stride lengthening smoothly as her thin blue and purple skirts brushed the ancient dust of the floor. For a moment Gil thought she was going to walk slap into the wall. But the angle thrown by shadow and lamplight was deceiving; just as Gil cried, "Whoa! Watch it!" the shadow seemed to swallow Alde . She tripped and cursed in a mild and ladylike fashion. Coming to her side, Gil saw that, instead of the wall, she had met with a short flight of black steps that mounted to a dark door with a rusted and broken lock.

  "Is this it?"

  Gil looked up from angling the lamp, trying to see down into the cloudy crystal inset into the table. "Of course," she said. "This is the observation room Rudy found the night before he left; this is what Ingold asked me to look for. And you found it." She hesitated, seeing the puzzled doubt still on Alde 's face. "Isn't it what you were looking for?"

  Alde walked slowly along the workbench against the wall, running idle fingers over its smooth edge. She picked up a white polyhedron that perched there, the reflected lucency of the lamp making it glow faintly pink where her fingers touched. "No," she said quietly.

  "Don't you recognize this?" Gil swiveled around, sitting on the edge of the dark table.

  Alde looked up from the small faceted thing she was examining, her dusty hair hanging in tendrils around her face, "Oh, yes," she said matter-of-factly. "But I have the impression of having walked through here on my way to—somewhere else."

  Gil glanced around the room. There was only the single door. Their eyes met again, and Alde shook her head helplessly. The silence lengthened between them, and Gil shivered with the sudden sense of coming close to the unknown. In that silence she became slowly conscious of something else, a faint, barely perceptible humming or throbbing that seemed to come from the dark stone of the walls themselves. Gil frowned as it gradually worked its way into her perceptions. It w
as familiar, as familiar to her as the beating of her own heart—something she ought to recognize, but had not heard since…

  … When? Puzzled, she rose and went to the wall opposite the door, where the soft thrumming seemed the loudest. She reached across the narrow workbench to place her fingers against the stone.

  "Oh, my God," she whispered as the realization struck her. Vistas of possibility for which she had been unprepared seemed to gape like chasms before her startled feet.

  Alde saw the look in her eyes, snatched up the lamp, and came hastily to her side. "What is it?"

  Gil turned her head to look at Alde , the chill gray of her eyes kindled almost to blue in the wavery glow. "Feel the wall," she whispered.

  Alde obeyed, hesitating, and at once a frown of puzzlement that was half-fear and half-recognition touched her brow. "I—I don't understand."

  Gil's voice was barely a breath, as if she feared to drown out that almost unheard sound. "It's machinery."

  The trapdoor was not hidden, as Gil had feared it would be. It was merely set out of the way. The workbench, built centuries later, had been laid right across it. The hollow tube, like a wormhole through the darkness of the Keep's black wall, seemed to go up forever.

  As she emerged at last into the vast space of warmth, dust, and the soft, steady throbbing of metal and air, it was borne upon Gil that she had, indeed, crossed a threshold and entered realms unknown to anyone else in this world—including, she was positive, Ingold himself. It came to her that the Keep of Dare, far from being a simple stronghold, was in itself a riddle, as black and impenetrable as the Dark.

  She reached down the shaft and took the lamp that Alde carried. As she held up that single point of brightness, dark shapes limned themselves from the blackness around her—monstrous pipes, oily and black and shining, coils of twisting cable strung like vines from the low ceiling, and the gaping maws of enormous ducts that breathed warm air like the nostrils of some inconceivable beast. The noise, though not loud, drummed into her bones like the beat of a massive heart.

  Alde emerged from the ladder shaft and stared around at the labyrinthine vista, barely to be seen in its cloak of shadows, with huge and frightened eyes. Gil suddenly realized that she was dealing with someone who had been brought up at approximately a fourteenth-century level of technology—and of the nobility, at that. A few minutes ago, she had felt no difference between them, as if they were contemporaries. Now the gulf of time and culture yawned like a canyon. She herself, theoretically acquainted with Boulder Dam and the wonders of Detroit, was silent before that endless progression of lifts and screws and pipes whose shapes the lamplight only hinted at. To Alde it must be like another world.

  "What is it?" Alde whispered. "Where are we?"

  "At a guess," Gil replied in tones equally soft, as if she feared to break the silence that lay on those stygian metal jungles, "I'd say we're at the top of the Keep, up above the fifth level. That ladder in the shaft seemed to go on forever. And as for what it is…" She held up the lamp and sniffed at the faint oily smell of the place. There was no dust here, she noticed, and no rats. Only darkness and the soft, steady beating of the Keep's secret heart. "It's got to be the pumps."

  "The what?

  Gil stood up and walked along the perimeter of the little clearing by the trapdoor. The light in her hand played over sleek, shining surfaces, and the warm drafts stirred her coarse, straggling hair. "Pumps to circulate air and water," she said thoughtfully. "I knew they had to exist somewhere."

  "Why?" Alde asked, puzzled.

  "As I said, the air and water don't move themselves." She stopped and bent down to pick up another white glass polyhedron from where it lay half-hidden in the shadows of a braided mass of coils as big around as her waist.

  "But why wasn't any of this mentioned in the records?" Alde asked, from her perch on the edge of the trapdoor.

  "That, as a very great man of my own world would say, is the sixty-four-dollar question." Gil slipped around a massive pipe of smooth, black, uncorrupted metal and passed her hand across the mouth of a huge duct. Deep within its shadows she could see a grid of fine-mesh wire. Evidently she wasn't the only person who'd worried about the Dark Ones getting into the air conditioning. "And here's another one. What's the power source?"

  "The what?"

  "The power source, the—what makes it all move."

  "Maybe it just moves by itself because it is its nature to move." Which, Gil reminded herself, was a perfectly rational explanation, given a medieval view of the universe.

  "Nothing lower than the moon does that," she explained, falling back on Aristotle and sublunary physics. "Everything else has to have something to cause it to move."

  "Oh," Alde said, accepting this. The unseen walls picked up the murmur of their voices and repeated them over and over again, behind the sonorous whooshing of the pipes.

  "Alde , do you realize…" Gil turned back, grubby and dusty in her black uniform, the lamplight glowing across her face. "There could be other places in the Keep like this, other rooms, laboratories, defenses, anything! Hidden away and forgotten. If we could find them… God, I wish Ingold were here. He'd be able to help us."

  Alde looked up abruptly. "Yes," she said. "Yes, he would. Because—Gil, listen, tell me if this makes sense. Could the—the power source—be magic?"

  Gil paused, thinking about it, then nodded. "It must be." After three thousand years, she thought, it was an easier solution than a hidden nuclear reactor.

  "Because that would explain why none of this was mentioned in the records." Alde leaned forward, her dark braids falling over her shoulders, her eyes wide and, Gil thought, a little frightened. "You say the Keep was built by —by wizards who were also engineers. But the Scriptures of the Church date from long before the Time of the Dark. The Church was very powerful even then." Her voice was low and intense. "It's so easy to fear wizards, Gil. If they held the secret of the Keep's building—once the secret was lost, there would be no finding it again. And that could happen so easily. A handful of people… If something—something happened to them—before they could train their successors—"

  Gil was silent, remembering Ingold before the spell-woven doors of the Keep and the fanatic hatred in Govannin's serpent eyes.

  Alde looked up, the lamplight shining in her eyes. "I was raised all my life to distrust them and to fear them," she went on. "So I know how people feel about them. I know Rudy has power, Gil, but still I'm afraid for him. And he's out there somewhere, I don't know where. I love him, Gil," she said quietly. "It may be unlawful and it may be foolish and hopeless and all the rest of it, but I can't help it. There used to be a saying: A wizard's wife is a widow. I always thought it was because they were excommunicates." She put her feet on the descending rungs of the long ladder back to the second level. Her eyes met Gil's. "Now I see what it does mean. Any woman who falls in love with a wizard is only asking for heartache."

  Gil turned her face away, blinded by a sudden flood of self-realization and tears. "You're telling me, sweetheart," she muttered.

  Alde , who had already started her descent, looked up. "What?"

  "Nothing," Gil lied.

  Chapter Eight

  The smothering sense of impending horror woke Rudy from a sound sleep. Wind screamed overhead, but the arroyo in which they'd made camp was protected and relatively still. He sat up, the rock against which he'd leaned to take his turn at guard duty digging sharply into his back, his breath coming fast, his hands damp and cold. His heart chilled with the knowledge that Ingold was gone.

  A hasty look around confirmed it. He could see nothing of the wizard in the shifting darkness of the fire.

  Rudy scrambled hastily to his feet, the terror of being left to his own devices in the midst of the wind-seared desert night fighting the horror born of guilt for falling asleep on duty. A thin shiver of wind lashed down on him from above, but it wasn't that which made him shudder. He knew himself incapable of surviving without the wizard.
And—who or what could have snatched Ingold so silently?

  Panic seized him. He caught up his bow and quiver and scrambled up the steep, rocky bank. At the top, the seething turmoil of the winds struck him, his wizard's vision showing him nothing but the wild movement of tossing sagebrush and cloud. Despairing, he cried against the winds, "INGOLD!" The winds threw his voice back upon him again.

  The cold up here was incredible, burning like a sword of ice run through his lungs. Raging winds ripped the sound of his cry from his lips, throwing it at random into the darkness. He yelled again, "INGOLD!" His voice was drowned in the maelstrom of the night.

  What was he to do? Return to the camp to wait? For what? Beat his way back to the road a few dozen yards away to look for some sign of the old man? Wait for morning? But he might as well give up hope then, for tonight's storm would scour all sign of Ingold from the face of the earth. A kind of frenzy took him—the terror of being alone in the dark. He knew he was helpless without Ingold, unable to go on and probably unable to return to Renweth either, set down in the midst of a hostile and terrible place. He fought off the overwhelming urge to run, to flee somewhere, anywhere. The wind shrieked curses in his ears and tore at his face with claws of frozen iron. Ingold was gone—and Rudy knew he could never survive without him.