Around them the Keep was settled into the deep-night watch, when only the smallest sounds murmured in the black glass corridors: the light tread and harness-creak of a Guard's passing, the murmur of water in the pipes. The scurry of rats or the swift flick of a cat sliding serpentwise around corners in pursuit.
Darkness filled every crevice, like a liquid filling up the whole Keep from the crypts to the attics where the pumps churned with eternal, sourceless power; darkness and the breathing of sleepers, though Rudy was conscious that many within those walls wept in their dreams.
"Rudy," Gil said softly, "trust me when I say this sounds as weird to me as it does to you. Maybe weirder, because I don't know enough about magic to know whether it can be done or not. I really hope I am crazy, because if I'm not, I think we're all in real trouble. And I may be crazy," she added, rubbing the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger, her forehead suddenly creased with pain. "I feel so... so strange lately."
She shook her head, pushing the strangeness-and whatever it implied-aside. "But be that as it may... Doesn't it seem to you that somebody or something is using magic to terraform the world?"
Chapter Eight
Two nights later Rudy dreamed about the Bald Lady.
He recognized her, as he'd recognized the Guy with the Cats, from the record crystals: a tall, thin woman in a plain sheath of white gauze that fitted her rangy form closely. Though it was nearly transparent and left her flat breasts bare, he found her no more erotic than a ghost might have been.
Her head was shaved, as it was in the crystal's image, and, like the Guy with the Cats', patterned with a line of blue tattooing. She wore a dark blue cloak over her bare arms, and where her fingers curled around its edge, the blue lace of tattoo marked them like a glove.
She was walking in the Keep. There was no mistaking the black, sleek hardness of the walls, the uniformity of the square doorways. Rudy even thought he recognized one of the snailshell spirals of stair that led to the crypts below. She walked haloed in the white splendor of glowstones; once, she passed a fountain that sparkled with that clear radiance. She was alone. He thought there was no one else in the Keep, in all those vast black spaces-no one at all. Her face was calm but filled with unutterable grief.
She has the answer, he thought. The answer to the whole thing. How he knew this, he didn't know, except that he knew it was true. She had the key.
He thought he was standing at the foot of a stair-first level? Upper crypts? He wasn't sure, the Keep had changed too much over the years-watching her come down the spiraling steps toward him, her-blue cloak moving around her, he saw there were tears in her eyes. Her face was the face of death borne alone.
But she can't die, she can't go away! he thought frantically. She knows the answer to all this! He tried to speak to her, tried to stop her, to ask her where she was going, but she passed him, and in the dream he could feel the warmth of her cloak contrasting to the cold of the air when it brushed against his arm, and he could smell the cardamom and vanilla of her perfume.
She walked away from him, the glowstones picking up the midnight sheen of her cloak, the smooth line of her shoulders, the curve of her shaven head, as she vanished into the dark.
Rudy. Ingold's voice spoke very clearly in his mind.
Rudy came awake at once. He'd been expecting this, and groped under his pillow for his scrying stone. Almost instinctively he knew it was early in the night, the Dancers, the Demon, the Star-Lord with his shining belt, not yet clearing the ice-tipped tusks of the Rampart Range.
The witchlight he Summoned rested like a pale blue Tinker Bell on his hay-stuffed pillow, illuminating the scuffy patterns of the ancient brick wall that cut his own little half cell off the Guards' storeroom and seeming to impart a secret significance to the pattern of faded lights and darks of the quilt on his bed. "I'm here, man."
"And I'm here," Ingold said. "By the Four Ladies."
Past his shoulder Rudy could just make out the weathered shapes of the standing-stones that dominated the high meadow at the top of the Vale, blue dolomite found nowhere in the mountains: three on their feet, one lying among them, dead of grief, it was said, for her child. Though the stars burned faint and yellow through the thin overcast, their light glimmered in firefly threads on the glacier's towering wall. "Can I bring you anything?"
"Just some food." His white hair hung in strings around his face, which was bruised black and gulched with strain. Rudy wondered when he'd last eaten or slept. "I'm on my way."
Gil was tossing, breathing fast, in the narrow bed in Ingold's room, but she woke before Rudy could reach out to her with a spell of quiet. Her hand went to her sword and Rudy said quickly from the doorway, "It's me, spook," Summoning just enough witchlight so she could see him.
Though he doubted that any Guard would comment on his slipping out of the Keep to meet Ingold, a couple of Lord Ankres' warriors and one of Lord Sketh's were in the watchroom as well-sarcastically rehashing Lady Sketh's latest demands upon her hapless spouse-and Rudy didn't believe in handing anyone any more ammunition than they already had.
Gil rose and dressed without a word, while Rudy retreated to the workroom to wait for her. He stretched out his senses to pick up Melantrys' always hilarious imitations of Barrelstave's pontifications and Hogshearer's incessant whining, but it was clear even to him, from remarks the Sketh warrior made, that someone-probably Lady Sketh-had been twisting the interpretations of Ingold's motives and movements. "You got to admit, nine hundred people, near enough, died-and him the only one that survived?"
"He's a frigging wizard, you dolt. Of course he'd survive. And he's Ingold Inglorion. He'd survive if the Earth fell on his head." "Then why didn't he save the others?"
Gil emerged slinging on a thick sheepskin coat over her black uniform. From a cupboard she took a satchel of the bread and meat that she'd been sequestering from her own meager rations-with contributions from Rudy and the Icefalcon-for two days now.
Minalde had had her way, and placed all food and all seed in the Keep under guard; they were still fighting in Council about distribution, and Rudy knew for a fact that Varkis Hogshearer was the center of a spanking black-market trade. Rudy had checked and rechecked the hydroponics crypts-including Gil's suggestion about making sure the light there was full-spectrum-and it was obvious the yields were going to be too small to make much of a difference. Another thing to worry about. And Tir hadn't spoken to him since his return.
Only when they were out under the sable blanket of the night sky, Gil holding to Rudy's cloak, her drawn sword in her free hand, did Rudy ask, "You okay?" There was no need to whisper.
A trace of glamour had gotten them past the door Guards, and the wide-flung patrols had reported no sign of Raider or bandit anywhere near the Vale as of twilight. They had shut the Keep doors behind them, and in a weird way the Vale felt safe-safe in the moveless pall of death that lingered there still, like the oddly sculpted cones of unmelted snow remaining where the woods' shadows lay thick. No owl hooted, nor cried wolf, coyote, or any living thing. Their bodies had all been taken up by scavenging parties-stripped, broken, smoked, and stored. Rudy's mageborn eyes made out the black ranks of pine and cottonwood above the path, limp heaps of cold-killed summer vegetation rotting around their feet. "Nightmares." There was casual dismissal in Gil's voice. "About that thing in Penambra?"
"Yeah." Her tone was cool, the way it was when she was in pain and didn't want to talk about it. She'd left off covering the wound in her face. It still wasn't healing. "Some. No. I don't know." In the stillness he could hear the creak of her boot leather, the swish of the satchel against the hide coat, the faint scrunching of his own boots on the pine mast underfoot. Wind breathed a soughing sound from the trees and then fell still. Before them, St. Prathhes' Glacier stretched in a pearly rampart, nearly two hundred feet high, poised between the black teeth of the rocks.
"Jewels," Gil said finally, but she sounded puzzled. "I dreamed about... jewels."
"No. It was inside a jewel. Things that looked like jewels." The steady pressure of her grip on his cloak altered as her hand moved a little, a fumbling gesture, as if trying to express something she wasn't sure how to envision.
"They hurt Ingold," she said after a long time. "These three... things. Made of jewels.
They were playing the flute to the thing that sleeps in the pool. Now and then things would crawl out of the slunch in the pit in front of them. Blood..." She frowned, like a sleeper disturbed by incongruity but unable to wake.
"Are they up at the Nest?" Rudy pitched his words to be no more than a murmur in the dark, so as not to bring her away from the borderlands where she could still see down into her dream.
"I don't think so."
"In the Keep, maybe?"
She thought about that for a long time. "They're in this jewel," she said at last. "It's full of mist, and there's a statue there without any eyes, staring ahead into the darkness. But there's light where they are, only it isn't really light."
Light that was not really light flickered ahead of Rudy, a wizard's signal among the mourning humps of the stones. Five years ago Gil had shown Rudy the trail over which Ingold had led her from the Nest in what had once been a city of the Dark, and that trail was gone now, swallowed by St. Prathhes' inexorable advance.
Great heaps of wanly glittering ice lay all along the glacier's feet, broken from the wall above, and all the ground between the Four Ladies and what had been the trail head lay under a sheet of water, milky in the night.
The miniature elfwood of dwarf alder that had grown hereabouts was dying. One end of the meadow was leprous with slunch.
"Ingold?" called Rudy softly. "You there, man?"
"As much of me as is left after coming over the glacier." What Rudy thought was one of the Four Ladies moved, and the frost he thought he'd seen dislimned itself into wispy hair and an unkempt beard. Ingold levered himself to his feet using his staff. Fingers and palms were bandaged, the rags that wrapped them crusted with blood.
"Did you bring food?"
"You want an appetizer first, or the salad?" Gil handed him the satchel.
"Appetizer, please." Ingold limped painfully between the rocks, leading them to a hollow under the shoulder of a granite dome.
He was soaked to the thighs from wading through the lake of meltwater; streaks of mud and niter mottled his robe. The hollow was about the size of a restaurant booth and only three or four feet high, and from its entrance the whole of the Vale could probably be seen by day. As it was, only the faintly glowing beds of slunch stood out in the darkness, islands in an iron sea.
The feeble witchlight on the tip of Ingold's staff brightened somewhat, to illuminate the little chamber. The wizard sank to the ground and opened the bundle Gil had brought. "I do hope there's an entire ox in here, with peppercorns and just the slightest suspicion of garlic," he said in a hopeful voice.
"Darn!" Gil smacked her forehead with the heel of her hand, as if she'd only just noticed, "you turned into a person again! I brought stuff for a falcon!"
"Gillifer, my dear," Ingold sighed with feigned patience, and held up the few scraps of what looked like road-kill, ''you really need to write these things down."
"What kind of wine you want with that, man?" Rudy ducked low under the slope of the ceiling, dropped crosslegged at the old man's side and uncorked the small bottle of what was called Blue Ruin around the Keep.
"All of it in the entire world." There was a time of silence.
At length Rudy asked, "The Dark tell you anything?"
The wizard's eyes glinted under scarred lids. "I didn't telephone them, you know." He leaned his shoulders carefully against the cold, dimpled rock of the wall, wiped the last bits of grease from his fingers, and examined the picked bones regretfully. Gil had managed to cadge an apple, one of the last from the previous winter. The wizard had devoured it core and all.
He sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose, as if to massage away the ache of the old wounds. "It was more like... oh, sorting through diaries or looking through the record crystals, trying to piece together information for which there is no context. Like dreaming someone else's dreams."
Rudy said nothing. He had gone down into a deserted Nest once before the Dark Ones had departed from this world, and two or three times afterward, and the images he had carried back with him were those of endless caverns of limestone sheathed in the withered remains of brown moss, strewn with the bones of the Dark Ones' pitiful herds.
Ceilings, walls, stalactites and stalagmites had all been polished silken by the crawling feet of untold numbers of the Dark, the rock discolored into a thousand hues of yellow and green and blue by the action of their body acids. He didn't like to think of the old man's mind leaving his body to walk into the places where the shapeless ones had left their memories.
Didn't like the thought of what form those dreams might take.
Almost as if speaking to himself, Ingold went on, "Part of the problem is that those we seek could not exist in the same world as the Dark. Like the Dark-or like the Dark in the end became-they were travelers, Void-walkers. As the Dark Ones eventually moved on to another world, so these came here, long before either the Dark Ones or humankind arose. The world was cold then, bitter, iron cold, nearly waterless and locked under sheets of ice miles thick. Strange things moved over the surface of its ground, or swam weightless in its air. Things that crystallized out of its few pools and streams or grew like sponges from the rock. A cruel world, but it suited Them."
He frowned, gazing out at the glimmering precipice of the ice and the dim speckle of reflected witchlight on the thread of the stream.
"How long ago?" Rudy's voice was almost a whisper, and Ingold shook his head.
"The Dark didn't know. The Travelers came and had their eons of dominion, and sank first into sleep and then into death when the Dark Ones' furthest ancestors were no more than grubs clinging to the hot volcanic vents on the ocean floors. The stars were different then, the sun weak behind a universe of dust."
His voice, rough-textured and deep, seemed far away, speaking of those dreams that were not his dreams, as if he were barely aware of the two friends who sat at his side. Perhaps, Rudy thought, he was not.
"This I... saw in dreams, lying on the rocks in the darkness. I don't even know whether what I saw was true or only what the Dark believed to have taken place. The awareness of the Dark is not like the awareness of humankind.
"The Dark were aware that the final remnant of all those things still existed, deep within caverns wrought of ice, beneath the bones of an eternal mountain. The Dark hated cold and kept their distance, but they heard the songs of Those Who Wait."
He shook his head, unfocused, gazing still into the alien dream.
"They sang of waiting, to the music of a chiten flute. Eternal sureness, treading a black eternal road, waiting for the world to become what it had been once again." Rudy shifted uncomfortably on his hunker-bones. Wind made cat-feet on the milky glacier lake and brought the smell of ice and high places. "And that's happening?" "The current cold cycle has been enough to wake them up, anyway." Gil's voice chipped into the dense texture of the Dark Ones' dreams, her long, thin fingers twisting dark curls away from the unhealed mess of her cheek. Ingold's eyes opened, bright and present once again. "For whatever reason, Those Who Wait have decided to quit waiting."
"Gil's sort of figured out what's happening," Rudy said, and quickly outlined her theory of terraforming. "We think the gaboogoos have to be growing out of the slunch," he said at the end. "They disregard magic, the same way magic doesn't touch the slunch. Gil thinks that after animals eat it, slunch starts to metabolize them from the inside. But why the critters are mutating into the forms they are is beyond me." "Is it?" Ingold blinked at him, appearing not in the slightest surprised. "I suppose it would be." He fell silent then, hands folded before his mouth, witch-blue shadows deepening in the lines of his
face as he gazed back into the night, as if in the blackness he could see again the Dark Ones' dreams. "You knew about that?" Rudy demanded, miffed.
"Of course I knew it. I saw it," Ingold said. "In the vision. In the Nest. I saw it, but it seemed... without explanation. Insane. I can't tell you how pleased I am to discover that I'm not mad. Trust you, Rudy, and you, my Gil." He put out his hand and touched her wrist, and Rudy, who was looking in that direction, saw their eyes meet-saw the old man freeze. Ingold didn't flinch, but his eyes flared wide as he looked with shock and hurt and astonishment into Gil's face. Rudy didn't know what Ingold saw there, as Gil returned the wizard's gaze. In the shadows her eyes were uncertain, maybe doubting what Ingold detected as well, but he saw her mouth alter, and she turned her face quickly aside. In Ingold's gaze there was, for a moment, only shock, as if he had stumbled upon some new and dreadful knowledge. For a moment, before the wizard also looked away, Rudy thought he could see that shock followed by a grief past bearing, and bitterest pain.
Gil said nothing. Her stillness was like a bent bow whose arrow aimed at a human heart. Maybe, Rudy thought-he did not know why-maybe her own. Ingold drew breath to speak, but let the words leak away unvoiced. Whatever they were, they hung on the air, they and whatever he saw or thought he saw in Gil's face. It was a terrible silence, and Rudy, rather hastily, blithered into the breach. "Uh-so where are these guys waiting? The Dark tell you that?" There was a sleight-of-hand, a shift of expression, as if Ingold whisked away whatever he was feeling behind exasperation: "The Dark didn't tell me anything. They're not down there, you know." Rudy thought there was relief in his voice. "But yes. I know."
The white brows pulled down over his nose, and pain returned to the deep-scored lines of his face. "There's a mountain called Saycotl Xyam, the Mother of Winter; the last great peak of the Spine of the Serpent, the cordillera of the continent, that sinks into hills for a time and rearises as these mountains and the Bones of God in Gettlesand. Saycotl Xyam guards the plain of Hathyobar, the heartland of the Empire of Alketch, where the Emperor's city of Khirsrit rises on the shores of the lake of Nychee. They say the glaciers on its shoulders have never melted in all of human knowledge, in all of time. The mountain itself is said to have a core of ice, though none have been there to see."
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