The priest's soft mouth tightened and he turned his face away. "They were right," he whispered, "who said that the Lord of Demons is subtle, and crueler than death. The holy place protected us from the horrors of war, but it could not guard us against Evil."
"What the hell...?" Gil stared at that tormented young face, uncomprehending.
"I assure you," Ingold's voice cut in gently over hers, "none of the people protected within these walls by my magic owes the Evil One a thing. I quenched the fires, not they, and I did it solely because I would not see them harmed." A woman walked below the platform where they stood, going late out of the church; she carried a boy of two and led another, ten years old and pretty as a girl, by the hand.
Ingold watched them, a kind of bitterness in his eye, as if he knew from terrible experience what happened to pretty boys as well as pretty girls, and not-so-pretty girls, and fairly ugly grandmothers, when soldiers sacked a town. "They have their lives and their freedom, to choose and find the good. Where lies the evil in that?" There was sorrow in the young priest's face, as if he heard sentence of his own death.
"All things that arise from Illusion partake of Evil," he said. "The Hand of Illusion lies upon it, and upon you, and now upon them by extension, and on this whole town."
He laid fingers like black velvet, workless and fine, upon Ingold's arm, and his eyes were pleading-Gil wondered for whose forgiveness. "I believe you meant only good, my friend. But the Lord of Lies has lied even to you, masking from your own eyes why you did what you did. Masking from you the stench of evil that touches all illusion, all magic, all things of his, no matter how they are meant."
In one of the houses close by the square an old man's quavery voice lifted, crying out in horror at what he found when he returned to his home. The priest's head moved, following the sound, and his face contracted with grief.
"I must go to them." He raised his saint-beads to his lips. "Go now. I won't speak of this to them until sunset, by which time you can be far away. If this lies upon my soul for letting you escape after what you have done, so be it. I believe in my heart that you meant no ill. That you were deceived."
Gil was speechless, assembling the implications of what was said. It was almost easier to believe the whispered lies in her mind than that these people would believe that salvation from the wrong source would damn them all.
More cries went up from other houses in the town, weeping for those who had not made it to the church, or perhaps only for the fact that there was now no more seed and, like those in the Keep, they faced starvation.
Ingold said, "Thank you. It is kind of you, and that kindness should weigh something with God. Come, Gil."
The priest shook his head as they stepped past him, and he followed them down the pink sandstone of the steps. "If you are an agent of Evil," he said, "even an unknowing one, you know nothing of the Judges of the Way, or the saints, or the rule of the Straight God."
"Of all the bloody goddamn nerve!" Gil looked back at the village for the dozenth time. From the high hill it was small now in the discolored light. "You saved those people from being raped and tortured and sold into slavery, and he's going to 'let you go' out of the motherless goodness of his heart? I'm so overwhelmed at his generosity I think I'm going to faint! What would they have done? Burned you at the stake?"
The wizard smiled a little, as at an inner joke. "Well, since that would have been done with the same tinder I quenched around the church to save their lives, I think most of them would have girned at that. But did anyone in the town possess some kind of rune plaque or spell-ribbon or poison-yellow jessamine or passion-flower are what they use hereabouts-I'd probably have been in for a flogging at least."
He spoke lightly, but Gil had seen the marks on his back from long-ago manhandling by the then High King; she had witnessed, also, the imprisonment and sentencing to death of all the wizards of the Keep by the Bishop Govannin of unpleasant memory. There were dozens of saints in the calendar like St. Prathhes, of whom nothing further was known except that he had been called "Killer of Wizards."
She was silent, treading the dusty way beside him, the dry glitter of the silvery olive leaves all around them, the world silent but for the scrape of insects and the dry rattle of geckos in the tangle of thorn and brushwood.
"The ability to use magic doesn't make a person good, Gil. It's a tool, like a knife, which can be used for good or ill. The Church has traditionally been the check upon wizards who use that tool for selfish ends or who sell it to further the greed of others. Given the nature of southern politics, it's no surprise that attitude has been popular hereabouts for centuries."
"Even if you saved their lives." She knew he spoke the truth. Brother Wend, Thoth's student, had undergone agonies of guilt before accepting that he was what he was. "You know we've found evidence that the wizards who built the Keep, or their immediate successors, were destroyed or driven out," Ingold said. "It could have been politics, but politicians as a rule hang on to a few wizards even though they might throw out the ones that side with their enemies. Only fanaticism makes so clean a sweep."
"And indeed," he went on sadly, pausing at the crest of the hill, "I have no guarantee that poor Father Crimael-and Brother Wend, and all the others-aren't absolutely right. If there is an Evil One, a Lord of Illusion, he-or she-might deceive me so thoroughly that I think I am doing good by saving those people, when in fact I am putting them all in debt to the forces of Illusion, the powers of denial and lies. I wouldn't know the difference."
He shook his head, old doubt, old guilt, old horror a shadow on his face. "The same way I do not know whether the vision I saw in the Nest of the Dark Ones was correct; whether my quest is madness that will leave the Keep undefended to its doom." Gil was silent. The subject of madness was a tender one with her, and she shied from it. The voices in her mind were quiet, only the thread of music remained, far back, and that odd, sweetish smell.
She felt her wrist bones again, wondering if Ingold's silence about the changes she felt sure were taking place stemmed only from his punctilious politeness. She felt strange and light-headed, and glad of the chance to stop and rest.
Ingold's face was averted from her. She knew there was something between them that ought to be said, but all that could be said had been said... And it would change nothing. The visions remained lodged like broken glass in her brain, scenes of ugliness and violence that she knew had never taken place.
She was a threat to him, and to the success of this mad journey. It was reasonable, she thought, that he treat her as such and keep her at arm's length.
From here the village looked like someone had dropped a box of toy blocks, white and pink and mostly brown around the edges, ringed in a wide straggle of fences, corrals, sheds, and barns, the stream bright on one side, demon shrines making spots of red or blue in the corners of the fields, and the church a fantasia of color and gilt.
Smoke blossomed from the roof of the church.
"Ingold..."
She pointed. As she did so, more smoke puffed, like exploding dandelions, from the roofs of two houses, then some sheds. She could see people moving around in the square, leading forth a few animals, but calmly, as if buildings were not taking fire all around them. Nobody seemed to be going far water. Nobody seemed to be warning anyone else. There were no horsemen, no soldiers, no flash of weaponry in the tiger-lily sunset.
The people themselves were firing the village. "Atonement," Ingold said. He'd retrieved his dust-colored robe and brown mantle from Father Crimael's house; the sleeve was marked with spatters of the steward's blood. "And cIeansing. Hoping that this will pay off their debt to the Lord of Demons, for saving their lives." Gil could only stare. "They're idiots! Summer or not, it's damn cold around here at night! Most of them have kids. Even if they got run out of most of their food, to destroy their shelter, everything they own..."
"Most people are idiots about something, Gil." The old man sounded beaten and sad. "Only some of them be
have like fools about liquor, or whatever drug they've chosen, or about scholarship, or training in war, or learning odd facts about the magical world, or their own personal power... or love." His voice hesitated over that last, and Gil turned her head quickly, trying to catch the look in his eyes.
His gaze, however, remained enigmatic, looking out over the valleys, and he kept his arms wrapped around himself, not offering her his hand. She thought, He can't. He no longer trusts me.
Hatred for the ice-mages razored her, small and cold and perfect, beyond the murmur of their voices in her mind.
On the other side of the ridge they found a dead man in the crimson tunic of some military company pinned with an arrow to the trunk of a burned olive tree. Someone had already taken his weapons, boots, rations, and cut off a finger which presumably had sported a ring. There were bloody gouges in his earlobes where earrings had been. By the amount of blood around him, all of this had been done while his heart still beat.
Gil stood for a time looking down at him, smoke and bloodsmell thick in her nostrils, listening to the cawing of the kites overhead. Ingold put his hand gently on her shoulder. "Welcome to the Alketch, my dear."
Chapter Eleven
Needless to say, Scala Hogshearer's reaction to the realities of learning the craft of wizardry was precisely what Rudy's had been when he realized that she, of all the folk in the Keep, was to be his first pupil. "Yuck! That's stupid! I won't do it!"
"Fine." Rudy took back the book she'd slammed shut, the Black Book of Lists for which Ingold had nearly lost his life in the giddily balanced ruin of the Library Tower of Quo. "Don't. See you." He turned away.
"You can't!" She grabbed his arm, twisting his sleeve. He was reminded of a girl he'd been to junior high with, the daughter of the owner of the biggest used-car dealership in San Bernardino. She'd always had the newest clothes, which never fit her, and the reddest lipstick on her pouting mouth.
"Papa says you have to teach me." There was spiteful pleasure in her voice. "He says the whole Council voted you had to, because I'm a wizard like you. So you have to." Anger prickled through him like the heat of fever at the Council's self-important motion and vote. Rudy had been sorely tempted to tell the lot of them to go to hell-he'd teach whom he pleased. But from Hogshearer's smug handrubbing, he had looked across to Alde's white-faced grimness, and realized the seriousness of the danger in which Ingold had left them.
This girl was mageborn. The Keep would need her. One day her magic might very well save Alde's life. He still had to fight to keep his voice even and reasonable. "Great." He pushed the book back across the workroom table at her. "So learn." "I want to learn something real!" She thrust it away again, the overblown rosebud lips puckering with scorn. "I want to learn something I can use." "For what?" He was aware that his refusal to rise to her was driving her crazy. "To spy on Lala Tenpelts or Nilette Troop with their boyfriends, so you can tell their parents and get them in trouble again?" "They were mean to me."
"Well, that sure justifies your behavior, doesn't it?"
She threw him a glare of smoldering rage. "They're selfish. They wouldn't let me wear their necklaces. And they're liars. They tell lies about me all the time." She wasn't looking at him now, pushing one stubby forefinger back and forth on the waxed wood of the old table. "But I showed them. Nilette's papa beat her when I told him about what she and Yate Brown were doing. He pulled her dress off her back and beat her with a strap."
"Spied on that, too, did you?"
She glanced up at him, ugly anger in the small, pouchy dark eyes. Even as a nine-year-old, when he'd first met her, she'd been unpleasant, stealing food from the general stores of the Keep and begging for things other people had, though her father was one of the wealthiest men in the Keep.
It was now pretty clear how Hogshearer had learned about that merchant, earlier in the spring. For years the moneylender had been telling everyone that his only child would grow to be not only beautiful but brilliant.
"How'd you do it?" he asked, folding his arms and contemplating her across the table in the glow of the witchlight that he'd called forth to burn on the tips of the metal spikes which had long ago been driven into the walls. "In fire? In water? In a piece of glass?"
She looked as though she was about to say, Wouldn't you like to know? but thought better of it. "In fire," she said grudgingly. "All I have to do is look into fire, and I can see anybody in the Keep, anybody in the world."
"Fire's the easiest," Rudy said. It was, but he admitted to himself that he wanted to take the wind out of the little bitch's sails.
"It is not!"
"Okay," Rudy agreed affably. "I can see you know more about this than I do. But I'm telling you, Scala, learning magic is learning lists. Learning the True Names, the secret names, of everything, everything in the entire world. Every plant and leaf and pebble and animal has its own name, its real name. Learning the essence of these things, learning what they really are, gives you the power to Summon them, the power to command. I still have to memorize lists. Ingold still works on his lists. Until you learn that, you're just like everybody else."
Only hours after this conversation, Varkis Hogshearer cornered Rudy on one of the minor stairways to the fourth level.
"You don't fool me one bit, Master Wizard!" he rasped, shaking a bony forefinger in Rudy's face. "You're prejudiced against my girl because she stands up to you for her rights instead of bowing down and licking your boots and the boots of that sly old man! Well, I'm letting you know right now that I won't have it! You want to keep all the knowledge to yourself, you and that-"
"Master Hogshearer," Rudy said tightly. "If I'm prejudiced against Scala-and I admit that I am-it's because she's bone lazy, she's a sneak, and a liar, and a spy; because she likes to get other people into trouble for her own amusement; and because she won't work. All those things make her a bad student."
"Don't think you can say that about my girl!" the merchant roared. "If there was any law in this Keep willing to go up against the likes of you, I'd put an injunction on you for saying that about her! You're all prejudiced-prejudiced by that Woman who thinks she can keep hold on everything in this community! Prejudiced by sheer jealousy of me! Well, now my daughter's got what you want, what you need, and I swear you're not going to keep her down!"
He stormed down the stair without waiting for a reply-back to the five-cell complex he'd traded and bargained several other families out of, where he and his wife and Scala lived in comfort with all the pots and pans, needles and pins, plowshares and hoe heads, bought from those who needed a little money or food and held until someone in the Keep was desperate enough to pay what he wanted for those unobtainable commodities.
Rudy sighed, leaned his shoulders against the coarse mix of plaster and stone behind him, and knocked the back of his head gently but repeatedly against the wall. Ingold, he thought, you better be saving the world, because this sure ain't worth it if you're not.
Hell, I could be back at Wild David Wilde's Paint and Body Shop in Fontana. I'd have worked my way clear up to counterman by this time.
Nah, he reflected on further thought of that alternate future, that alternate life. By this time I'd have got some chick pregnant and be married with a coupla kids.
And wretched, he thought. Wretched beyond contemplation or guessing, with no idea what was wrong-only that there was something that he should be doing that he wasn't. That there was someone he loved to the marrow of his soul, who had not been born into that world.
Pain tightened hard around his heart at the memory of Minalde's cold anger-And rightfully so, he thought despairingly. Nobody knew better than he-except Alde-what a hell of a situation they were all in, facing starvation, facing the uncertainties of a world growing more hostile by the week with the inexorability of that pearlescent wall of ice creeping toward them down the valley. She must have been counting the weeks till the old boy got back. And he'd aided and abetted.
But I had to! he argued silently. Ingol
d had to be the one who went. Somebody had to go...
Yeah, right. There's these three old magic guys hiding under a glacier a thousand miles away, see, and they're gonna destroy the world in four or five years or so if they're not stopped.
Even to Rudy it sounded like the kind of logic espoused by those who wore colanders on their heads to stop the Martians from reading their brains. No wonder Alde was furious. A soft voice said, "Rudy?"
He opened his eyes. She was standing next to him, blue eyes almost plum-colored in the grubby glare of the pineknot torch at the head of the stairway. The shawl around her shoulders, which Linnet had knitted for her, made her look as frumpy and unstylish as that hypothetical shotgun bride back in Berdoo. She was as beautiful as daylight and sun. She said, "I'm sorry." Rudy sighed, feeling as if the weight of the Keep had evaporated off his back. "Naah." He put his arm gently around her shoulders, and just the movement of her, the thankfulness with which she settled into place against his body, was everything he could have asked for in life, Hogshearers and gaboogoos and the Fimbul Winter notwithstanding.
"Christ, you have every right to be sore. It's your job to take care of everybody, and I helped Ingold screw you big-time. I'm glad you're not mad at me anymore, but for God's sake don't apologize to me for getting mad. I sure deserved it." The worry passed from her eyes, and she rested her forehead against his chest. "You didn't. Even Ingold doesn't, not really."
The silence of the Keep closed them in; Rudy spared a residual spell to make anyone inclined to take this route from the fourth level urgently recall something they'd left back in their cell.
Her hair smelled of the sandalwood combs she arranged it with and the aromatics Linnet put in her soap.
Her arms tightened around his rib cage. "Those creatures under the ice you spoke of... they're real."
"I've never known Ingold to be wrong," Rudy said simply. "I don't think anybody ever has. It's in his contract or something."
04 Mother Of Winter d-4 Page 17