The Walls of the Air

by Barbara Hambly

  Then the dragon fell, hitting the earth like a derailed freight train, and the ground shook under the impact of its weight. It heaved itself halfway up, screaming harshly and metallically, its beribboned mane lashing in the frenzy of its death throes. The trees cracked where it heaved against them, their leaves shriveling in the scorch of its blood.

  Rudy pulled Ingold a little farther up the loose rock of the slope, so weak with terror and reaction that he felt he could hardly move himself. The old man was a dead weight in his arms, the back of his mantle sticky where the claws had raked through to the flesh.

  In malice or unknowing agony, the dragon reared and made one final lunge at them, the vast jaws snapping shut in a spew of blood and drool. Then the great body twisted in one last convulsive heave and lay still. Black liquid trickled from between the chisel teeth.

  Rudy whispered, "Jesus Christ…"

  But Ingold said softly, "Hush."

  The gold eyes opened. They stared upward, baleful, inhuman, at the two wizards crouched out of its reach on the slope. Then they blinked, filmy, translucent shutters sliding down over the dying inner fire, and for a moment there was a blank, curious question in the dragon's eyes. The hideous mask of scarlet bone was incapable of expression; but for a fleeting instant, Rudy had the impression of some other personality looking out through the sunken eyes. A thin, dark, bearded face, he thought, whose dragon gaze rested briefly on Ingold before those dim, amber lamps were extinguished forever.

  Around them, the hush was like the draw of expectant breath. Rudy felt the air stir and change, though there was no breeze; it was like the shifting in a curtain of perception.

  "Look behind you," Ingold said softly.

  Rudy turned his head to look. A path, old and overgrown, wound on up toward the pass that was, he saw now, less than five miles from the end of the canyon. For the first time since they'd come to the Seaward Mountains, he had no sense of illusion or misdirection. He looked down at the crimson carcass where it lay amid the decaying broken trees and smoking sand, its gaudy tags and scales already beginning to blacken in the virulence of its own body chemistry. Then he looked back at Ingold's face, to see it white with shock, hollow and stretched and old.

  "What is it?" Rudy whispered.

  Bleak blue eyes shifted to his own. "It's the road to the pass, Rudy," he said quietly. "The road into Quo."

  "It wasn't there before."

  "No." Ingold got stiffly to his feet, catching his breath as he tried to move. "He—removed the illusion. Just before he died."

  "He?" Rudy echoed, confused. "He who? The dragon? But how did the dragon have any power over the maze?"

  The wizard turned wearily and led the way to the top of the slope, where Che could be heard, squealing in panic and fighting his tether. Ingold took his staff from where he'd left it propped against the scabby bark of a twisted oak and, leaning heavily on it, limped to free the burro. Rudy realized his own staff had been left down below, scorched to charcoal in the dragon's blood.

  Ingold went on. "I think the inference is obvious. You and I, Rudy, have just killed one of the makers of the maze—one of the members of the Council of Wizards, I have told you before how easy it is to forget your own nature, once you have taken on the nature of a beast." He looked back down the slope to where the dragon lay, steaming faintly, gay colors quenched in darkening blood. "Having taken on the being of a dragon, he forgot what it was to be a man and a wizard. He became a prisoner in his own maze. Only in death did he recognize me and remember, to do what he could for me in memory of our friendship." Under the slime of blood and dirt, his face was a bruised mass of cuts, the blood from them leaking slowly into his beard.

  "You mean—that was a friend of yours?"

  "I think so," Ingold whispered.

  "But—why would he do it? Why would he change himself into a dragon in the first place?"

  Ingold sighed, and the sound was like a death rattle in his throat. He wiped his eyes, and his sleeve came away fouled with red, gritty slime. "I don't know, Rudy. The answer to that lies in Quo. And I'm beginning to fear what that answer is."

  Chapter Thirteen

  Night walked the halls of Dare's Keep, bringing darkness and the soft stirring of sleepers, through cell on cell and corridor on corridor of those ancient and storied mazes. There was stillness, except for the uneasy breath of the moving air, and silence, except where, here and there, sleepers would wake with cries from hideous and identical dreams.

  The small gleam of the lamplight gilded the round globes of a sandglass and licked with tiny flames on the scrollwork at the fancy end of Gil's silver hairpin. The worn wax of her tablets glowed a creamy yellow where the light touched, and the intricate fretwork of the tablet's narrow frame gleamed mahogany red, like old claret Around her, the study was silent.

  This was the new study, to which she and Alde had carried the increasing quantities of tablets, parchments, and artifacts scrounged from the lab levels below. The lamplight picked out shapes on the table: polyhedrons, milky white or crystal gray, a scattering of faceted jewels, odd, tubular mechanisms of gold and glass, and strangely shaped entities of metal and wood, some hard and angular, others sinuous, shaped to the hand. There were stacks of wax tablets and piles of dirty, mildewed, overwritten parchments—the stuff of failed scholarship, the jigsaw puzzle whose message, Gil feared, would be delivered the hard way.

  The message was now, to her, very clear. She'd tracked it like a long-forgotten spoor through her notes, tangling on old words, old spellings, changes of dialect, and the language itself. The correlation was not invariable, but it was there. Not all Nests had had the citadels of wizardry built near them in the early days when the healers and seers and loremasters had held power, in these northern realms, comparable with that of the mighty Church of the south. But all citadels of wizardry—and the cities that had grown up around them—had been built somewhere near the Nests.

  Gil threw her silver stylus aside and began to pace the room. Her shoulder ached, the muscles violently complaining of the renewed rigors of practice; her hands hurt, blistered from the sword hilt, her fingers so stiffened that it was hard to write. Her hair fell in a sweaty straggle around her face, to hang in a sloppy braid behind. And her head ached, blinded by fatigue and worry and fear. She knew how Ingold must have felt, trying desperately to contact Lohiro and unable to do so, forced to baby-sit the convoy down from Karst when he could have been on his way to Quo already. And, she reflected wryly, getting damn little thanks for his trouble.

  Why do I care? she wondered desperately. Why am I concerned, why do I fear this way for him and grieve with him in his grief? This world is none of mine and I'll be returning to my own, to a place where the sun shines and there's always enough to eat. Why do I hurt this way?

  But as Ingold always said, the question was the answer. Always provided, she added wryly, you want an answer that badly.

  "Gil?"

  She looked up. Minalde blew out the touchlight she carried and stepped through the thin veil of its smoke. She looked white and tired, as if from exhausting labor. As she stepped into the tiny circle of the lamplight, Gil could see she had been crying.

  There was no need to ask why. Gil knew there'd been a Council that evening, and Alde was still dressed for it, the high-necked black velvet of her gown sewn with the gold eagles of the House of Dare that glittered as if she had been sprinkled with fire. The braided coils of her hair flashed with jewels. This was Alde as Queen, and very different from the girl in her thin peasant skirts and worn bodice who hurried so eagerly through the corridors of the Keep.

  She brought up a folding chair and sat down, mechanically stripping the rings from her fingers and her ears, her face as unmoving as wax. Gil sat opposite her, watching in silence, toying self-consciously with her curlicued silver hairpin.

  After a long time Alde said shakily, "I wish he wouldn't do this to me." Her trembling fingers dropped a ring, a signet carved out of a single blood ruby.
>
  "How did the Council go?" Gil asked gently, to get her talking.

  Alde shook her head, pressing her folded hands against her mouth to keep k from trembling. Finally she steadied her voice. "I don't know why it keeps on hurting me when he gets like this, but it does. Gil, I know I'm right. Maybe I am wanting—wanting to eat my cake and still have it to look at, at the expense of our allies. But they can afford to feed their own troops. We can't, not if we're going to have enough seed in the spring to mean anything. And yes, I know we had trade commitments to them for corn and cattle, but those were made years ago, and everything's changed. And yes, I know I'm trying to welch out of a bad debt when the going gets tough, but God damn it, Gil, what can we do?" Her voice rose, cracking, skimming almost unnoticed over the first swearword Gil had ever heard her utter. "But I'm not going to buy our way out of those debts by signing away part of the Realm! I've learned enough from you and Govannin about legal precedents for that. If I sign that treaty…"

  "Wait a minute," Gil said, trying to cut the rising flood of fury and pain and guilt "What treaty? What part of the Realm do they want you to sign away?"

  The words broke the flow of Alde 's emotions as a rock breaks the coming of a wave, reducing its force. She sat still for a moment, her white fingers stirring at the little heap of jewels before her, like miniature coals dyed with reflected flames of crimson, azure, and gold. "Penambra," she said finally.

  "Penambra!" Gil cried, horrified. "That's like selling New Orleans to the Cubans! That seaport's the key to the whole Round Sea. If you sign it over to the Alketch, they'd hold that whole coastline!"

  Alde looked up hopelessly. "I know," she said. "And I know it's flooded and there's nothing there but the Dark and ghouls and ruins. It's worthless to us; we can't hold it if we don't get a—a bridgehead at Gae. Alwir says that would be paying the Emperor of Alketch in counterfeit coin, and we can always take it back. He wants a bargain with Stiarth at any cost."

  "You didn't sign, did you?" Gil asked worriedly.

  Alde shook her head. "Afterward, he said I'd ruined us all." She sniffed and wiped at her nose, the fine-carved nostrils red and raw. "He said I'd condemned us to rotting here in the Keep while the Realm was hacked apart piecemeal between the White Raiders and Alketch, all because I wanted to cling to—to the pride of being Queen…"

  The slight quavering of her voice told its tale. Alwir's accusations generally had their drop of truth, enough truth to plant doubt in his opponents' minds as to their own motivations. As a girl, Minalde had probably preened herself about being Queen—pride was part of the office. And, being Alde , she had probably felt guilty about it and maybe even handed her brother the wedge by admitting it to him. Bastard, Gil thought dispassionately.

  "Well, look," Gil reasoned. "If Stiarth gets his nose out of joint and pulls out completely—which he won't, since the Emperor would love to have somebody else fight his battles for him—what have we lost? The whole scheme of invading the Nests is a gamble to begin with."

  Alde 's cheeks got very pink, and she looked away quickly. "That's what he said," she murmured. "That I—I wanted to ruin the expedition."

  "Why?" Gil asked, more startled than sympathetic. A lack of sympathy was one of her less endearing traits, she told herself bitterly a moment later.

  Alde leaned her face on her hands. "He says that Ingold's poisoned my mind. And maybe he's right. A year ago…"

  "A year ago you had somebody else to carry the ball for your people," Gil said roughly.

  Alde shook her head miserably. "Gil, he knows more about this than I do."

  "Like hell! He knows a lot, but he knows only what he wants to know, and that's the truth." When Alde neither moved nor spoke, Gil went on more gently. "Look—have you eaten anything this evening?… Then your blood-sugar level's bottomed out hours ago. I'll scrounge something for you in the barracks, and you should have a glass of wine and go to bed."

  But Alde still didn't move. Almost in a whisper, she said, "He cared for me. Gil. He used to care for me."

  He cared for you the way a man cares for a twenty-dollar screwdriver, Gil thought coldly, because it's a good tool. But since that was what lay at the heart of her friend's wretchedness, she did not add to it by saying so. Instead she asked, "How did Maia take it?"

  Alde looked up, her eyes suddenly almost frightened. "He was furious," she said softly. "I've never seen him so angry, not even when Alwir turned them away from the gates. He never showed it, not while Stiarth was there, but afterward… He's usually so gentle. Govannin will use that against Alwir." She shook her head again tiredly. "So that's one more thing," she went on. "I can't cause schism in the Keep by siding with them against him. I don't know why I'm still upset about it…"

  You're upset because he wants you to be, Gil thought sourly, then turned, her quick ears catching the soft tap of feet in the passage outside. "Who's there?" The walk was that of a woman, not one of the Guards.

  "Gil-Shalos?" A grimy little blear of flame appeared in the dark doorway, shining on an unkempt twist of dark-red hair. "They say my lady Alde 's here."

  "Come in, Lolli," Alde sat up straighter in her chair as the big Penambran woman came quietly into the room. "How's Snelgrin?"

  It never ceased to surprise Gil how even the most humble of the Keep's inhabitants seemed to accept Minalde as Queen and friend at once. She'd seen Alde making her rounds of the Keep by day, usually with Tir on her hip, sitting on the benches by the pools along the watercourses of the Aisle, talking to the women as they did their washing. Gil had come into the barracks of the Guards, or those of the troops of Alwir's household, and found Alde sitting deep in sympathetic conversation with some scarred old veteran of a dozen sacked towns.

  "My lady, he's not good," Lolli said quietly. "I had to come and see you. You know about people, about sickness, maybe?"

  Alde shook her head.

  "But you're learned? You've read books?"

  "Some. A little. But I couldn't…"

  "I've spoken to Maia, but he had no answer for me. And that Bektis, that wizard… Begging your pardon, my lady, for he's of your House, but he couldn't so much as charm away warts, much less—this."

  "What?" Alde asked gently. "What's the matter with Snelgrin? Is he ill?"

  "No!" the woman cried in despair. "He's fit as a fiddle, he's strong—but he's different. He changed, after that night."

  "If he spent the night outside," Gil remarked in a quiet voice, "it's no surprise."

  "No," Lolli insisted. "Bektis may say that, but not like this." Her brown eyes sought Alde 's, pleading for her to understand. "It—sometimes there are times I think it ain't Snel there at all. That it ain't him."

  "What?" both girls cried in approximate unison, and Alde asked, "How can you tell?"

  "I don't know I If I knew, it would be easier." Lolli buried her face in her big, red-knuckled hands, and her voice came muffled through her palms. "He forgets things, things he should know, like—like passages around the Keep, or why he was out that night. Sometimes he just wanders. I don't know what to do, my lady! And he won't hardly speak. Only now and then, and it's—different."

  Gil's eyes met Alde 's over the bowed red head. "Shock?" she asked softly, and Alde nodded.

  "It's not just the shock of it" Lolli raised her face to them, her eyes pleading. "It's not just the night he went outside, waiting for the Dark to have him. When he touches me…" A look of loathing passed across her face, her lips squaring back from her teeth in shuddery horror. "I can't stand it. We haven't been married but a few weeks, and we only wanted to be happy. Now it seems—I can't stand for it to touch me. It isn't him, and, by God, I don't know what it is. Oh, Snel," she whispered hopelessly. "Snel."

  Alde 's hands rested on the woman's shoulders, rubbing the taut, quivering muscles. Lolli lowered her head again, sobbing quietly under Alde 's touch like a frightened beast For a long time there was silence, broken only by her moans, but something in the quality of the silence prickled Gi
l's hair, as if she felt herself being watched. Gold slivers of light moved in the tangled copper hair and picked out the knuckles of Alde 's hands and the deep iris blue of her eyes as her gaze crossed Gil's. Her look was troubled, seeking advice.

  "Lolli," Gil asked after a moment, "where is he now? Where's Snel?"

  The woman only shook her head wearily. "The Lord, He knows," she murmured. "Walks all the time, nights. Just walks. Dead eyes in a dead face. He's my husband and I loved him, but I won't be alone with him in bed."

  "No, of course not," Alde agreed. "Listen, Lolli, are you still in the same cell you were, up on the fifth level? Then what I suggest you do for now is move. Take your things and find another cell, preferably with someone else. Do you think Winna would let you sleep on her floor for the night?" She named the girl who was the head of the Keep herdkids, in whose company she and Gil had often seen Lolli. "I'll ask Janus to have his Guards keep an eye out for Snel, and when someone finch him, Gil and I will talk to him. Maybe it's just that he's still strange from the shock. It was only a day or two ago…"

  "Two days," the woman whispered. "And two ghastly nights."

  "Come." Alde reached under Lolli's arms and coaxed her to her feet. "You need rest now."

  Alde's just had a political knock-down-drag-out and been cursed by the one man whose opinion of her she took as her own, Gil thought wonderingly, and she's still got sympathy and more to spare for other peoples' marital problems. Following in the wake of the two other women, with lamp in hand to locate the rabbit warren of the orphans, Gil could only shake her head in amazement at the young Queen's capacity for helping others.

  At this hour the corridors were deserted, the cells that lined them silent. Gil shivered, oppressed by that terrible darkness, at the same time wondering at herself. She had walked deep-night watch many times and never before felt the weight of this eerie dread. Twice she started, turning in her tracks like a frightened cat, but the lamplight showed nothing in the massed shadows behind. Still she found herself prey to a curious sensation of impending horror and shrank from every blind turn of the twisting passageways.