The Walls of the Air

by Barbara Hambly

  After a time Ingold came into the shelter and crawled under the fur robes. The fire outside had almost died. Rudy whispered, "Ingold? What do you think?"

  Ingold's voice murmured back out of the darkness. "About what?"

  "About the ghost, for Chrissake."

  One blue eye and part of a beard appeared from under the shaggy furs. The wizard raised himself up on one elbow. "I don't believe there is one. Or at least, not as the Raiders fear it. At the bottom of those caverns, I could sense no living thing."

  "You think the Dark left on their own, then?"

  "I think it's possible."

  "Could they have been driven out by an ice storm like today's?"

  Ingold was silent for a moment, considering. Finally he said, "I hardly think so. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a previous storm this far south, and the Dark left their Nests in the plains, according to Hoofprint of the Wind, at the time of the first quarter moon of autumn, some seven weeks ago. The Dark are not weather-wise, Rudy. Even the most skilled wizard cannot predict when and where an ice storm will strike more than a few minutes before it happens."

  In the outer darkness, a horse whinnied, a comforting sound. There was no other noise except for the endless groan of the wind. Even the wolves were still.

  "Is that what they mean when they say something's as —as unstoppable as the ice in the north? Or as sure as the ice in the north?" Rudy asked.

  "Not in reference to the storms, no," Ingold said. "In the north you'll find the great ice fields, where nothing can live and where there is nothing but an endless waste of ice. In places the ice is growing as much as an inch a year. In some places, more."

  "Have you been there?"

  "Oh, yes. That was long ago. Lohiro and I had—I suppose you could call it an errand in the ice, and both of us very nearly froze to death. At that time, the rim of the ice lay along the crest of a fair-sized range of hills that the old maps call the Barrier. The last time I was there, the hills were almost completely buried."

  "Ingold," Rudy said softly, "what's the connection? Seven weeks ago was the first quarter moon of autumn. Gae fell. Lohiro and all the wizards in the world cut off contact with everyone and anyone. The Dark disappeared from the Nests in the plains after murdering their herds. What the hell is going on, Ingold? What's happening?"

  The old man sighed. "I don't know, Rudy. I don't know. Is this one more catastrophe in a tale of random catastrophes, or is it all part of a single riddle, with a single key? We have shared this planet with the Dark for all the years of humankind's existence, yet we know nothing about them except that they are our enemies. If there is a key, is it at Quo? Or does the key lie with the Dark themselves, beyond human understanding at all? Or is it in the last place we would look for it, back at the Keep of Dare?"

  Chapter Eleven

  The messenger from the Emperor of Alketch came riding up the valley on a rare sunny afternoon, after a week of snows. Most of the Keep was out of doors, working on repairing the mazes of corrals or building new fences for the food compounds, chopping wood or hauling rocks for the projected forge. The cohorts of warriors at exercise under various of the company captains ran, jumped, and swung weighted weapons with sweaty good will. Children of all ages scattered through the Vale, sledding, skating, or sit-down tobogganing on the frozen stream, their shrieks of delight like the piping of summer birds.

  Gil had picked that afternoon to experiment with one of the little white polyhedrons that she and Alde had found in such numbers throughout the old storerooms and shafts of the Keep. These had remained a puzzle to them, turning up with ubiquitous regularity, businesslike and yet to all intents and purposes useless. Like the Keep, they were smooth and shining enigmas.

  At first she had theorized to Alde that they might be toys.

  "They'd break if they were dropped, surely," Alde objected. The girls were walking along the new-dug path back to the clearing in the woods where the Guards had spent the morning in practice. Gil had recently returned to regular training and was black-and-blue.

  "Votives?" she suggested.

  "For what?" Alde asked reasonably. "Votives are gifts of light, candles, scent, incense, or of wealth given to the Church, in which case you present little bronze or lead models of what you've given."

  "Maybe they were toys," Gil remarked. 'They do stack together." And they did, fitting facet against facet, like a cellular structure or a three-dimensional honeycomb. "Do they really break?"

  But, from an oblique sense of uneasiness at what she did not understand, or merely from an overdose of science fiction films in her own universe, Gil had elected to wait for clear weather to perform the experiment outdoors. She and Alde found Seya and Melantrys at the clearing, sparring with wooden training swords, and warned the two Guards of their intentions. There was a flat rock in the center of the clearing, and Gil set one of the white glass polyhedrons on this, threw a piece of sacking over it, and hit it with a hammer. The result was unspectacular. The polyhedron shattered into six or seven pieces, releasing neither poisonous gas nor embryonic alien beings. Gil felt embarrassed over her own apprehensions, but she noticed that Alde , Seya, and Melantrys had all stayed a respectful distance away.

  The pieces appeared to be nothing more than glass of some kind, heavy and slick, like white obsidian. They were vaguely translucent when held to the wan sunlight, but otherwise unremarkable.

  "You have me beat," Melantrys remarked, taking one of them between her small, scarred fingers. "It's nothing I've even heard of."

  "I know," Gil said. "The records make no mention of them. But we're finding them all over the Keep."

  "Maybe you're right about their being toys," Seya said. "Tir certainly likes to play with them."

  And indeed Tir, who was bundled up in black quilting and furs, so that he looked less like a baby than like a stubby-limbed cabbage, 'was solemnly rolling another one of the milky prisms back and forth across the side of the rock. Alde sat next to him, sending the thing back at him every time he pushed it toward her. She glanced up at Seya's words. "But the Keep was built by people fleeing a holocaust," she argued suddenly. "Would they have brought toys?"

  "We can't know that these things are as old as the Keep," Seya pointed out.

  "No," Gil said. "But on the other hand, we've found nothing to show how they were made."

  Alde turned back just in time to keep her son from crawling over the edge of the rock and tumbling into the snow beneath. Tir was growing into a quiet, compact infant whose calm demeanor and lack of fussing disguised an appalling capacity for mischief. He could crawl unnoticed for long distances, making his silent and efficient way toward any danger, gravely consuming whatever mouth-sized morsels fate placed in his path and his mother wasn't quick enough to get away from him. Sometimes he seemed preoccupied with the white polyhedrons, stacking and unstacking the dozen or so Alde kept in her room, examining them for hours in fascination. Gil wondered if this was simply a baby's marveling at the world or if he remembered something about them from some long-forgotten ancestor in the Keep.

  "If the people who built the Keep came here in as bad a shape as we did," Melantrys commented, pulling the rawhide thong loose from her hair and shaking down the thick barley-colored waves over her shoulders, "it would stand to reason that the things were pretty important. Maia says that when his people came up the Pass, they found thousands of crowns' worth of jewelry that people had chucked away in the snow."

  Voices came faintly to them through the trees. Looking up, Gil saw Alwir pass, his fine hands gesturing to the melody of his speaking voice. At his side, Maia of Thran was nodding, a seven-foot longbow held unstrung in his hand. The Chancellor glanced up through the thin screen of bare birches and saw the three Guards in their black, shabby uniforms and the young Queen with her son. He passed them by without a word. Gil heard the swift, ragged draw of Alde 's breath; turning, she saw the quick misery that had crossed the girl's face.

  A voice called ou
t, young and shrill, and Tad the herdkid came running up the path toward the Chancellor with a string of the Keep orphans at his heels. Alwir looked down his nose at the boy until he heard what Tad had to say; then Gil saw him bend forward, suddenly attentive. She didn't hear what Tad had said, but she saw the look that flashed between the Bishop and the Lord of the Keep. Then Tad and his little band were running toward the clearing, Tad calling out, "My lady! My lady!"

  Alde got quickly to her feet. "What is it, Tad?"

  The children roiled to a stop, red-faced and snow-flecked, in the steaming cloud of their breath. "It's the messenger from Alketch, my lady," the boy gasped. "Lyddie here saw him coming up the road from the valley."

  What seemed .like the whole of the Keep had assembled on the steps to watch the coming of the messenger from Alketch. But whether they were ones who had come from Gae or from Penambra, they were silent, a sea of watching faces. From her position among the ranks of the Guards, Gil could see that the messenger rode alone. The Icefalcon had not returned with him.

  For a time, grief clouded her vision, and she saw nothing. The Icefalcon had been her friend, the first of her friends among the Guards. Cool, aloof, and self-contained, he had only once paid her a dubious compliment—if she wanted to take being told she was a born killer as a compliment; in the course of training with her as a Guard, he had given her welts and bruises enough to qualify in most circles as a deadly enemy. But they had both been foreigners among the people of the Wath, and that had been a bond. And they had both stood behind Ingold, the night the Dark had come to the Keep.

  For that, Alwir had sent him south. And he had not returned.

  The messenger was dismounting. The murmuring among the vast, dark crowd around the doors of the Keep was like the lapping of the distant sea. He was a youngish man, black-skinned, with haughty, aquiline features and great masses of curly raven hair. Under a patched scarlet traveling cloak, he wore a knee-length tunic stamped with gold, its pattern picked up again on his close-fitting, high-heeled, crimson boots. A small horn recurved bow hung at his back; on the saddlebow rested a spiked helmet of gilded steel, and a slim, two-handed killing sword was scabbarded below. In his dark face, his eyes shone a bright, pale gray.

  He made a profound salaam. "My lord Alwir."

  Standing above him on the lowest step, Alwir gestured him to rise.

  "I am called Stiarth na-Salligos, nephew and messenger of his Imperial Majesty, Lirkwis Fardah Ezrikos, Lord of Alketch and Prince of the Seven Isles." He straightened up, diamond studs glittering in his earlobes.

  "In the name of the Realm of Darwath, I greet you," Alwir said in his deep, melodious voice. "And through you, your master, the Emperor of the South. I bid you both welcome in the Keep of Dare."

  Gil heard the murmuring behind her rise at that, and a man's angry voice grumbled, "Yeah? And all his bloody damn troops as well?"

  "Ration our bread to feed the damn southerners," someone else growled, the sound of it almost lost among the general whispering, and a third voice replied, "Murdering fags."

  With this in her ears, Gil watched Minalde come down the steps to greet Stiarth na-Salligos, her head high and her face very pale. The graceful young man bent over her hand and murmured formal courtesies. She asked him something; Gil heard only his reply.

  "Your messenger?" Those elegant brows deepened in an expression of concerned regret. "Alas. Our road here was fraught with perils. He was struck down by bandits in the delta country below Penambra. The land is rife with them, hiding by night to haunt the roads by day, stealing and killing whatever they find. Barely did I escape with my life. Your messenger was a brave man, my lady. A worthy representative of the Realm."

  He bowed again, deeper this time. And as he did so, he swept his scarlet cloak back like a mating bird, its scalloped edges like blood against the snow. Gil had a brief glimpse of the token that hung on his gilded belt—small, oak, shaped to a man's hand. Hot rage swept her, more blinding than her former grief. She stood motionless as Alwir offered Minalde his arm, the massed troops and the populace of the Keep parting before them, and led her upward to the dark gates, Stiarth of Alketch trailing elegantly at their heels.

  What the messenger wore at his belt was the token of the Rune of the Veil that Ingold had given to the Icefalcon for his protection before the man rode away.

  "He murdered him." The tapping of Gil's boot heels sounded very loud in the arched roof of the great west stairway. "The Icefalcon would never have given up that token."

  "Not even to someone who was empowered to negotiate for the troops we'll need?" Minalde asked quietly. She and Gil reached the landing, where an old man from Gae seemed to have homesteaded with two unofficial wives and large numbers of caged chickens. "Not even in the case of an emergency? If it was a choice between one or the other of them? He'd fulfilled his own mission in summoning the messenger."

  "The Icefalcon?" Gil sidestepped two chicken crates and a cat and continued down the steps. From the corridor below, dim yellow light shone up, marking the back door of the Guards' barracks; with it came a whiff of cooking odors and steam. "Believe me, there was no one he valued as much as he did himself. Least of all some—some scented Imperial Nephew whom he could have broken in half on his knee." They turned right at the foot of the steps, went down a short stretch of corridor whose walls looked to be of the original design, and then passed through a makeshift side door and into a jumble of rough-partitioned cells to the right again. "He never went in for that kind of altruism, Alde . The only way Stiarth could have gotten that amulet of Ingold's was by force, in which case he'd have had to kill him, probably by trickery. Stealing it from the Icefalcon would have been tantamount to murder;' that was his first line of defense against the Dark."

  Gil spoke quietly, but her anger was still hot in her breast. Maybe it was the memory of the messenger's creamy smirk, or the fact that the negotiations were first and last with Alwir, with Alde being used merely as his rubber stamp. Maybe it was only the memory of waking up in the rain-dripping dimness of that stable back at Karst, when the Icefalcon had come to check in his cool, impersonal fashion whether she was well. But something of it must have carried into her voice, for Alde touched her sleeve, bidding her to halt.

  "Gil," she said, "whether the Icefalcon would have given it to him of his own free will or not—let it be."

  "What?" Gil's voice had an edge, sounding sharp in the gloomy half-darkness of these deserted corridors.

  "I mean—Gil, you're the only one here who knew about that token. But you're not the only one who thinks that— that Stiarth na-Salligos might have had something to do with the Icefalcon's not coming back. And, Gil, please…" Her low voice was suddenly urgent, almost frightened, her eyes plum-colored in the grubby and nickering light. "… Alwir says we can't afford to let negotiations fall through. Not for that."

  Gil bit back a cruel reply. She stood for a moment, struggling with her sullen rage, knowing that Alde was, in a sense, right. What's done is done. The murder by treachery of one of the few friends I had is done. Past.

  "Maybe," she said slowly. "But if that kind of treachery is common coin, do we really want negotiations to continue?"

  Alde turned her face away. "We don't know that."

  "Like hell we don't! Alde , you've been reading those old histories and records as much as I have. Compared with some of the crap they've pulled on settling the Gettlesand border question, murdering the Icefalcon would be Scout's Honor."

  Alde looked back at Gil, her face imploring. "We don't know that he murdered the Icefalcon."

  "Don't we?" Gil asked. "He sure as hell lied about it. If bandits had killed him, they would have looted the body, and Stiarth never would have gotten that amulet."

  Minalde was silent.

  "All right," Gil said softly. "I won't talk it up with the other Guards, though Melantrys is as convinced as I am about it. And I won't take any kind of revenge that would wreck negotiations. But I can't answer for anyone else
."

  Silence and shadow lay between them for a moment, broken only by the distant random talk in corridors closer to the Aisle than this one. The great gates would soon be shut for the night; the Church had tolled its bells throughout the Keep, and no few participants had made their way to the nightly services in the great cell beneath the Royal Sector where the Bishop Govannin centered her scarlet domain. Among them, Gil knew, would be Stiarth of Alketch, like all the dark southerners, a fanatic son of the Church. Someone—Bok the carpenter, she thought—had told her the Imperial Nephew had supped with the old prelate and had been closeted with her for some hours before the Council meeting with Alwir, Minalde, and the other notables of the Keep. Now Alde looked strained and worn in the dim light of her clay lamp, her loosely bound hair kinked and wrinkled from her formal coronet. She was a royal princess and the source of her brother's power, Gil thought, looking at that white, withdrawn face. And she was as much a pawn as any one of the Guards.

  "Thank you," Alde said quietly.

  Gil shrugged. "I hope it's worth it."

  "To establish a bridgehead for humankind at Gae?" Alde blinked up at her, startled. "Once the Nest there is burned out…"

  "But will it be? With Govannin and the troops of the Alketch trying to get rid of the wizards, and the Archmage, whenever he shows up, and Ingold, and with all the other leaders fighting Alwir for power? With the old-timers in the Keep resenting Maia's Penambrans and the common people accusing the merchants of stealing grain? Alde , you have a gunnysack full of cats here, not a team of mules that's going to pull together."

  "I know," the Queen said softly. "And that's why I thank you for not—not making the situation worse."