The Walls of the Air

by Barbara Hambly

  Gil paused in her steps, looking curiously over at the sweet, sensitive face on the other side of the lampflame, seeing a girl who in Gil's world would be barely out of high school, yet with all the experience of ruin, horror, and death, of judgment and the soiled meshes of political expediency, behind those tired dark-blue eyes. Gil's grievance against the Imperial Nephew seemed suddenly very personal and rather petty. "Better thee than me, honey." She sighed. "But you know I'll back you all the way."

  "Thank you," Alde said again. Their footsteps chimed together as they turned down the black hallways toward the barracks. In the dark weeks of winter, the friendship between them had grown, a friendship born of loneliness and mutual respect. Alde stood a little in awe of Gil's learning and her quick, cold intelligence; Gil envied Alde 's patience and compassion, knowing them as qualities which she herself lacked. The two women recognized each other's courage, and Gil, from her own disastrous family life, understood Alde 's misery and confusion at her increasing isolation from her brother in the welter of Keep politics. But if Alde understood the trouble that Gil had found growing in her own heart these dark, snowbound days, she never spoke of it.

  After a time Alde asked, "Were you going back to your research tonight?"

  Gil shrugged. "I don't think so. I've decoded most of that last chronicle, and there isn't a whole lot in it. It's late —I think Drago the Third was the last King to rule from Renweth, and that was centuries after the Time of the Dark. When he disappeared, they moved the capital back up to Gae, where the big citadel of wizards was in those days."

  "He disappeared?" Alde asked, startled.

  "Well—he took off with somebody named Pnak for some place called Maijan Gian Ko, and there was this huge fuss about it, and he never came back. Where's Maijan Gian Ko, I wonder?"

  "That was the old name for Quo," Minalde said. "The greatest fortunate place or Great Magic place—the centerpoint of magic on earth. If Drago took off for Quo, no wonder everyone was upset. Was Drago a wizard, then?"

  Gil shrugged. "Beats me. But his son was the one who started the campaign against the mages of Gae, which eventually got them kicked out of the city. Why do you ask?"

  "Well," Alde said, "I've often thought about how we found the observation room—just by closing my eyes and walking. Sometimes at night I'll lie in bed and do that, just remember walking down halls, seeing things around me. Most of the time it's nothing. But once or twice I've had the feeling that there ought to be more levels in the Keep. Do you think there might be levels beneath this one, dug out in the rock of the knoll itself?"

  "It makes sense," Gil agreed. "Even if the power source for the pumps was magic, they had to put the machinery for it somewhere, and we haven't found it yet. But as to how we'd find the entrances—you've got me there."

  They stepped through the wide, dark archway into the Aisle, where the gates were being shut for the night. The warriors of the day and evening watches were grouped around them, the soft run of their talk carrying over the general noise of that great central cavern, Melantrys was making her dispositions for the night, sharp, small, and arrogant next to Janus and the head of Alwir's troops. In the shadows of the gates, the white quatrefoils of the Guards shone like a ghostly meadow of asphodel on the faded black of their massed shoulders; black stars strewed the scarlet heavens of the uniforms of the House of Bes like an LSD vision of the Milky Way; the ranks of the Church wore deeper crimson, somber and unrelieved.

  Alde frowned in thought. 'The best way to explore this, I think, is for you to get the tablets on which you're making the Keep map and for us to go back to the observation room. We can start from there and go…"

  "Wherever," Gil finished. They headed for the barracks door, almost tripping over a woman who loitered in its shadow. She hurried away from them as soon as they came near, a tall, red-haired woman whom Gil found vaguely familiar, clutching a threadbare brown cloak around her broad shoulders. A few moments later, when they emerged from the barracks with Gil's maps, they saw her again, hanging around the fringes of the group by the gate. She looked about anxiously, rubbing her reddened knuckles and twisting at her cloak; but when Seya went over to speak to her, she fled again.

  Starting from the corridor outside the observation room, Gil and Alde worked their way steadily back through the Keep, comparing the composition and design of walls, floors, and doorways, stopping repeatedly for Gil to scratch additions to her maps on the wax tablets she carried and for Alde to think. Her memories were not always reliable, but weeks of research and mapping had fleshed them out. By this time, there was probably no one who knew more about the Keep than the two of them.

  When they could, they stuck to the places where the original structure of the Keep remained. They descended by one of the original stairways to the first level and followed the line of the original corridors. "We seem to be heading back toward the barracks," Gil remarked as they turned down a narrow access corridor to find themselves in a long, deserted chamber that appeared to be the center of its own minor maze. "In fact, I think we're almost directly behind them, in the southwest corner of the Keep."

  "The observation room was in the southeast corner."

  Alde said. 'That's where the main pump shaft seemed to connect."

  "'I wonder…" Gil stepped through an obliquely set doorway and looked around her. Alde raised the lamp as high as she could for what better light they could gain. "Well, we're close, anyway. This was part of the original design, and I think that wall there is the inside of the front wall of the Keep. You can see there's no trace of blocks of any kind. If we've come three rows in…" Gil turned and pointed with her silver hairpin. "Through there."

  "Through there" proved to be not a cell or a closet, as she had supposed it would be, but a tiny passageway that ultimately ended in a square corner room, so jammed with junk as almost to hide in shadow the wooden trapdoor in the floor. With a cry of delight and without the smallest consideration for what Frankensteinian horrors might lurk in the shadows below, Gil pulled on its rusted metal ring and was greeted by a black well of shadows, a great smell of dust, and a soft, billowing cloud of warm air.

  "It's like a different world." The great dark space took Minalde's soft voice and echoed it back to her like the sighing murmur of a million past voices. "What kind of a place was this?"

  Darkness yielded unwillingly to the feeble glow of the lamp. Shapes materialized: tables, benches, the gleam of metal, scattered polyhedrons, white or frosty gray, and the twinkle of faceted crystal. Gill stepped forward and was greeted by the leap and sparkle of the lampflame repeating itself in countless tiny mirrors. Fragments of gilding slipped over the close-curled edges of a scroll and flickered in glass vessels half-filled with ashy powders or pale dust. The black floor rose in the center to form an altarlike platform, its hollowed top lined with charred steel.

  Gil turned around, her wheeling shadow turning with her. "At a guess," she said, "this isn't so much a different world as one that's more the same. I think it's still as it was when it was built, the work of the last generation born in the Times Before." She ran her hand along the smooth, obsidian-hard edge of the workbench. "This is one of the old labs."

  "Like Bektis' workshop?" Minalde asked, coming timidly into the center of the room.

  "More or less." Gil brought the lamp closer to the workbench, touching, first with light and then with hesitant fingers, the frosted glass of the polyhedrons that lay there in such disarray.

  "But what is all this?" Alde lifted a short apparatus that looked like a barbell made of glass bubbles and gold. "What's it for?"

  "Beats me." Gil set a smooth, meaningless sculpture of wood up endwise; the lamplight slid like water from its sinuous curves. She rolled a sort of big glass egg haltingly into the light and saw it crusted inside with whitish crystals that looked like salt. "It's one hell of a thing to find the laboratories of the old wizards at a time when all the wizards on earth are on the other side of the continent."

  Alde
laughed shakily in agreement. Her eyes in the shadows were wide and wondering, as if she remembered what she saw from another personality, another life.

  "And it's warm down here," Gil pursued thoughtfully. "I think this is the first time since I crossed the Void that I have been warm." She pushed gently at the steel doors at the far end of the room, and they slid back on their soundless hinges, poised like the gates of the Keep itself. In the room beyond, she heard the faint echo of machinery pumping; the light of the lamp she bore touched row after row of sunken tanks, the black stone of their sides marked with vanished water and a climbing forest of steel lattices. Gil frowned, walking the narrow paths between them. "Could it be—hydroponics?"

  "What?" Alde knelt to trace the water stain with a curious finger.

  "Water-gardening. Alde , what in hell did they use for light down here? Light enough to get plants to grow?" She pushed open another door, and vistas of empty tanks mocked her from the shadows. She turned back. "You could feed the whole damn Keep down here if you had a light source."

  "Are we going to tell Alwir?" Gil asked much later as they ascended the straight, narrow little stairway back to the hidden storeroom. Alde carried the lamp now, walking ahead. Gil's hands were full of bits and pieces of meaningless tools, half a dozen jewels of varying sizes she'd found in a lead box, and two or three of the new polyhedrons, frosted gray instead of milky, but just as uncommunicative. She shivered as they came up from below and the colder air of ground level nipped at her rawboned hands.

  "N-no," Alde said. "Not yet."

  They dumped their finds on the dusty trestle table that ran down the center of the large, deserted room and set the lamp down among them in its pool of dim and wavery light. Through the door and down the corridor they could see the blurred echo of other firelight and hear a baby cry, with a man's deep, smooth, bass voice rising in the snatch of a lullaby. The smell of food cooking came to them there, together with the odor of dirty clothes. All the sounds and smells of the Keep were there, telling of life safe from the Dark. Here in this small complex of cells was only shadow, and dust, and time.

  "Gil," Alde said slowly, "I—I don't think I trust Alwir." The confession of disloyalty seemed to stick in her throat. "He—he uses things. This—" She rested her hand on a frosty crystal before her, joined spheres of glass and a meaningless tangle of interwinding tubes. "This is part of something that could be very important when the mages come back. But Alwir might destroy it or lock it up if he thought he could get some kind of concession from Stiarth by doing so. He's like that, Gil. Everything is like cards in his hands."

  Her voice trembled suddenly with misery. Embarrassed, Gil spoke more gruffly than she'd meant to. "Hell, you're not the only person in the Keep who doesn't think he's God's gift to the Realm."

  "No," Alde agreed, her lips quirking in an involuntary smile that was instantly gone. "But I should. He's been very good to me."

  "He ought to be," Gil commented. "You're the source of his power. He has no legal power of his own."

  Alde shook her head. "Only the real power," she assented. "Sometimes I think even his friendship with—with Eldor was part of his games. But Elder was strong enough himself to keep him down, strong enough to make Alwir work for him, like a strong man riding a half-wild horse."

  She sighed and rubbed at her eyes with one long, white hand. "Maybe Elder knew it," she went on tiredly. "Maybe that's why he always kept so distant from me. I don't know, Gil. I look back and I see things that happened then and I start to doubt everything. Sometimes I think Rudy's the only person who ever loved me for who I am and not for what I could be used for."

  Gil reached out and rested a comforting hand on the slender shoulder. "That's what happens when you mess with power," she said softly. "We are what we are, God help us."

  Alde laughed suddenly, tears still filming her eyes. "So why must I have all the disadvantages of power and none of its rewards?" She picked up the lamp, her expression wryly philosophic. "But you see," she said as she led the way back toward the corridor, "why I don't think Alwir should know of all this just yet."

  They stepped into the Aisle again, into a confusion of lights and voices. There was a little group ahead in the shadows of the gates. Even from here, they could hear a woman crying. A quick glance passed between them, and they hurried up the steps.

  By this time of night, not many civilians were in the Aisle. It was, Gil guessed, a few hours before the deep-night watch came on. Her own watch began at eight the following morning, but training was at six; she was uncomfortably reminded that she ought to get to sleep.

  It was the red-haired woman she had seen earlier who was crying, huddled against the wall with a small group of Guards around her, the torchlight like fire over the thick, tangled rope of her hair.

  Janus was saying, "Dammit, are we going to have to post a watch to keep the people inside at night? You'd think the Dark would do that."

  "It's the food," Gnift said simply, and those elf-bright eyes flickered toward the closed gates. "Things are thin now. With the troops coming up from Alketch—"

  "Surely the Emperor can't expect us to feed his armies!" one of Alwir's lesser captains protested.

  Melantrys gave him a snort of derision. "Hide and watch him."

  "What is it?" Alde asked. "What's happening?"

  The woman raised a face smeared with tears in the yellow torchlight. "Oh, my lady," she whispered. "Oh, God help me, I never thought he'd do it. He said he would, but I didn't believe."

  "Her husband," Janus explained briefly. "Man named Snelgrin. He hid himself outside the Keep when the gates shut to steal food and cache it in the woods."

  "I never thought he would," the woman moaned. "I never thought…"

  "Obviously he never thought, either," Melantrys retorted softly. Gil remembered the couple now—Lolli was the woman's name. They were the first instance of an old-time Keep dweller marrying a Penambran newcomer. Maia had performed the ceremony less than three weeks ago.

  Lolli was speaking again, her voice low and muffled, an animal moaning. Alde knelt beside her and took her gently by the shoulders for comfort, but she scarcely seemed to notice. "He didn't mean any harm," she groaned. "I tried to tell him, but he only said there was a full moon and a clear sky and no harm would come of it. I prayed and prayed he'd change his mind…"

  Gil turned silently on her heel and left them there. There was nothing she or anyone else could do, and privately, she agreed with Melantrys. The man's stupidity was his own business and he had evidently not given much weight to the possible sufferings of his wife.

  On the other hand, she thought as she lay awake in the narrow darkness of her bunk, people did all kinds of things when impelled by fear or love. She found it impossible to dismiss them, as she once would have done, simply as silly people engaged in incomprehensible stupidities. The love and suffering and fear there were too real and too close to what was in her own unwilling heart.

  In time she heard Janus and Gnift come in and return silently to their bunks. Somewhere in the Keep, she thought she could hear the woman Lolli wailing still, though it might have been her imagination or some other sound entirely. She wondered what they'd find of Snelgrin when the gates were opened in the morning.

  She thought of the Icefalcon, cool, aloof, and very young, riding away down the river valleys, then of Ingold and Rudy, setting off like the hapless King Drago III on a journey to the greatest magic place, never to return.

  Maijan Gian Ko.

  Sleepily, her scholarly mind picked at the etymology of the words.

  Gian Ko.

  Gaenguo.

  Her eyes opened in the darkness. What bad Bektis said? "… in Penambra and in Gae itself, on the very spot where the Palace now stands?"

  She felt the blood turn to water in her veins.

  But it doesn't make sense, she thought. The terrible silence of the Vale of the Dark returned to her, the heaviness of the vaporous air and the louring sense of being watched. Sh
e remembered the hideous geometry of the place, visible only in the angled light of sunset from the tangled rocks of the cliffs above, the sense of breathless confusion there, and the disruption, rather than the magnification, of Ingold's spells.

  But was the effect always negative with regard to magic? At one time, could it have been positive? Is that why wizards built their citadels and people their cities near those … fortunate places?

  And in that case, she thought, is that why the places were fortunate—the effects positive—to begin with?

  Gil did not sleep that night.

  Gil had never had much of an opinion of humankind, and it went down several more notches when the gates were opened at dawn. Word had evidently circulated through the Keep, for over a hundred civilians had shown up, idling in the Aisle since before seven in the morning for no better purpose than to be present to see what was left of the hapless Snelgrin. Gil was on day watch, logy from a sleepless night and bruised and exhausted from morning training; she felt she could have turned in her tracks and cursed them all.

  As she had hoped, Alde was there, half-supporting the taller and heavier Lolli. It was clear that neither had slept Lolli's face was blotched red and swollen from weeping; Alde 's was very tight and calm. It was only her manner that kept the people there from pushing and staring. Rather to Gil's surprise, Alwir had shown up, too, and Govannin, keeping to the background but making their presence felt Quite an audience, Gil thought sourly, surveying them as Janus and Caldern worked the heavy locking wheels of the inner gates, then walked down the dark tunnel to open the outer. I hope they find something worth their while.

  But in the end they were doomed to disappointment, of a sort. The Dark had had other fish to fry last night. Snelgrin was found, alive but stunned, on the steps of the Keep, half-frozen from lying in the snow. The Dark had been known to devour the minds of their victims while leaving the bodies living, but Gil had seen those pitiful remains; they stood still, like cataleptics, or moved if jostled by the wind. Snelgrin managed to get to his feet, his movements odd and jerky, and stumbled up the steps without assistance. His wife was screaming and sobbing with joy. In a way it was touching, Gil thought, shivering in the icy cold of the sunrise. But it must be poor exchange for a pile of ice-crusted bones to some of the spectators.