Darwath 3 - The Armies Of Daylight (11 page)

“The Regency!” Gil gasped, as Aide's arms tightened involuntarily around her child's body. Indignant at such treatment and oblivious to the dangers that surrounded him, Tir demanded rather unintelligibly to be released at once to pursue his quest among the litter of the table.

Rudy felt suddenly cold all over.

Aide whispered, “But you wouldn't…”

“No,” the old man agreed. “But the law is based upon the possibility that I might.” His scarred fingers brushed the thick coils of hair that veiled her ashen cheeks. “If Alwir learned of it, the consequences to you would be unthinkable, my child. An expensive risk to run, for something that might not be among your memories at all.”

No more was said on the matter that morning, and Rudy returned to his experiments with the flame throwers. Alde and her overly venturesome son remained after Ingold and Gil departed. Alde to help and Tir to prevent either of them from getting anything accomplished in peace for very long.

Prince Altir Endorion, heir to the Realm of Darwath and last Prince of the House of Dare, had been a source of never ending wonderment to Rudy since the first morning that he had unwillingly aided Ingold in rescuing the child from the pursuit of the Dark Ones. Small and with his mother's air of compact delicacy, Tir had nevertheless survived the sack of cities, the destruction of a civilization, and a succession of dangers that had made Rudy's hair stand on end, with a calm resiliency that would have been awesome if it were not so utterly matter-of-fact.

If I'd gone through all that little rugrat has
. Rudy told himself, watching Alde prevent her son from crawling out the door to lose himself in the endless darkness of the Keep's underground levels, I'd spend the rest of my natural life in the fetal position. I sure as hell wouldn't have this talent for wandering away toward shadows or high places or any other kind of available danger.

There were times, looking into the infant's wide, jewel-blue eyes, that he wondered how much of that fearlessness came from the buried memories of his ancestors and how much of it was his own, inherited from a father who had been a warrior King and a mother whose crazy courage Rudy had encountered in only one other woman in his life.

By the end of the afternoon, he had satisfied himself that the optimum range of the flame throwers was about twenty-five feet and that no adjustments of the barrel or barrels would lengthen it much beyond thirty.

“That's still farther than a mage can throw fire from his hands isn't it?” Alde inquired as she followed him along the teeming corridors of the first level, with her much-soot-blackened son balanced upon her hip. Around them in a hundred jerry-built cells, the voices of men and women could be heard quarreling, gossiping, and making love. Woodsmoke stung Rudy's eyes, and the heavy, ever-present, compound reek of unwashed clothing and greasy cooking assaulted his nostrils.

“I'm not sure,” he replied, wiping the stray smut from his hands. “I've seen Ingold throw fire about fifteen feet. I asked Thoth about it once, and he said that if the danger were any more than fifteen feet away you'd be better off to run.”

Aide laughed. “That sounds like Thoth.” But there was a trace of uneasiness in her laughter. Like everyone else, she was a little afraid of the serpentmage.

By common consent, neither of them had spoken of their coming parting. There was an aura of peace about them, even in its shadow, that they were loath to break.

They turned a corner, and the noise from the Aisle hit them, a vast commotion of sound. Startled, they exchanged a glance; then Rudy put his arm about her shoulders and quickened his stride. They found the great open space at the core of the Keep filled with a crowd of men and women warriors, slapping sleet out of their bedrolls and stomping mud from their boots. At the far end of the Aisle, more and more were entering by the great gates, bringing with them blasts of icy air and the whirling gray snow blown by the storm outside. Torchlight and glowstones threw a restless, flickering illumination over the vast, steaming crowd, picking out ruffianly faces, ragged coats of fleece or buffalohide, and hands and cheeks scarred by recent battles with the Dark.

In the midst of it, hoary with ice and hairy as a werewolf, Tomec Tirkenson, landchief of Gettlesand, stood facing Alwir, Ingold, and Govannin with an ugly expression in his saddle-colored eyes.

“Dammit, I am the only landchief between the mountains and the Western
Ocean!” he growled in his gravelly bass. “Half the men I brought are from Dele, and they're all you're likely to see from that part of the world. Dele was wiped out. These came to me with Kara of Ippit's folks, after months on the road.”

“I would have expected a better showing,” Alwir replied dryly, “from the landchief of the whole southwestern half of the Realm.” The diamonds sewn in his black gloves caught slivers of light and strewed the dark brocade of his sleeves with fragments of color as he folded his arms. “If that is, indeed, what you claim to be.”

“I'm not claiming a thing,” the landchief rumbled. “But I've got a Keepful of women and kids—an old Keep, which was half-torn-down way back in the old days and rebuilt as best we could. It's damn stout, but there's no magic in its walls, bar the spells old Ingold put on it five years back and what Kara and her mother could do before they got the summons to come here. If I'd left the place unmanned, I'd have come back to find it gutted, sure as the ice in the north.”

“So you made the decision not to fulfill your vows to the High King…” Alwir began with a sneer.

“Dammit, I brought all I could!”

“And he has done more than any other landchief in the Realm,” Ingold added quietly. “And more than any of the others will.”

The Chancellor swung around, an unpleasant curl to his full lips. “And are you party to the counsels of such traitors, my lord wizard?”

“No, my lord.” Ingold stepped aside, to give room to a couple of snow-covered brigands who were lugging a groundsheet piled high with sacks of provisions and fodder.

“But I and the other mages have scried in our crystals, north, south, and east. And neither from the Keeps of Harl Kinghead in the North, from the lands of the petty princes of the Eastern Woods, nor from the country of the landchief Degedna Marina have we seen any sign that any other landchief in the Realm is sending you the aid you requested.”

“So.” Alwir drew himself up, haughty and bitter, his sapphire-dark eyes flashing at this new evidence of the fractioning of the Realm. “All the more reason for my lord Tirkenson not to have stinted the duty that he owes to the Realm.”

“An excommunicate such as the Lord of Gettlesand…” Govannin began in her thin, vicious voice.

“The Lord of Gettlesand is welcome, with all those whom he could bring.” Minalde stepped forward quickly, holding out her hand, heedless of the dust that daubed the hems of her faded peasant skirt and liberally smutched the baby Prince in her arms. “In our time of need we could scarcely ask for a more loyal vassal.”

Alwir looked down his nose at her dishevelment, but Tirkenson grinned, the frost glittering on his mustache and unshaven cheeks. The explosion that would have erupted in another instant between Chancellor, Bishop, and landchief faded like a rumble of thunder into the distance and dissipated under Aide's warm smile.

“It is hardly the time or place, my sister, to extend formal welcome to the leader of this—vast legion,” Alwir said primly. “If it is true that he is the only landchief to answer our summons, then we shall meet in Council at sunset to determine the time and distribution of the upcoming reconquest of Gae. I trust,” he added, his lips pinched, “that you will trouble to comb your hair for the occasion.”

Turning on his heel, he strode off through the mob of ragged, gesticulating Gettlesand rangers that filled the Aisle and quickly blotted him from view.

Aide's face was crimson with anger and shame at his last remark. Tirkenson laid a gloved, comforting paw on her shoulder.

“He's put out that we're so few,” he rumbled. “Don't trouble yourself over it, my lady. We're few enough and, unless they have found the means old Dare used to drive back the Dark, we're going to be hard put to it.” He glanced down at her, his yellow-brown eyes sharp. “They haven't, have they?”

In a hushed voice. Alde said, “I don't know.”

“My lord Chancellor's precious mages have devoted enough time to it,” Govannin remarked spitefully, her coldly beautiful face disdainful in the restless, jerking shadows that surrounded them. “Yet they themselves seem to have doubts about their solutions.” She rested her hands on the jeweled buckle of her sword belt in a gesture Rudy found reminiscent of Gil's; like a baleful eye, the amethyst of her episcopal ring flashed in the dimness.

“That reminds me,” Tomec Tirkenson said suddenly. “I brought you another mage, Ingold.” He raised his head, scanning the bustling confusion whose noise seemed to echo and re-echo from the black, featureless walls around them. Then he caught sight of someone—God knows how, Rudy thought, in that steamy chaos of snow-covered bodies—and yelled in his foghorn voice, “Wend! Wend! Get over here, you little warlock!”

A young man emerged from the crowd and elbowed his way with surprising diffidence to the big landchief's side. Looking at the newcomer, Rudy realized with a start that it was, in fact, the same Brother Wend whom he and Ingold had met in Gettlesand, the village priest who had refused to risk his soul, as he believed, by acknowledging himself a mage.

He looked thinner in the harlequin shadows of the Aisle than he had in the little fire-lit cell in the back of the Church. He had left off shaving his head and face, and both were covered in a uniform black stubble that glistened with flecks of ice. His eyes, as he faced Ingold in silence, were the eyes of a man who had crossed half a continent to seek his own damnation—haunted, weary, empty of all but despair.

Ingold stepped forward, his face filled with compassion. “So you came,” he said quietly.

After a long moment the priest whispered, “After you spoke with me that night I—I could not stay away. I tried. But if—if mages are needed for the defeat of the Dark, I will become one, though it costs me my soul.”

All around them, the Aisle was a jostling sea of weary bodies, lit by crazily bounding torchlight and raucous with soldiers' raillery and quartermasters' curses. But for an instant of time, it seemed to Rudy that these two stood alone, wizard and priest. The silence between them seemed stronger than the noise that rang on all sides.

Then, like a steel file, the voice of Bishop Govannin grated furiously into that silence. “You cannot!” She took a step forward in a billow of flame-colored vestments, her cobra eyes black with hate. “Apostate!” she cried.

Wend flinched, white-faced, from the balefire that seemed to burn in her face.

“Let the damned look to their own! You belong to the Church!” Her voice shook with livid rage—rage that any would desert the ranks of the Faithful, no matter what the stakes involved. She advanced upon Wend like a death-angel, and Ingold quietly stepped between them, meeting her scorching gaze with eyes that were at once utterly mild and utterly immovable.

“I should have known it would come to this!” she spat at him. “That, in your arrogance, you would rob what belongs to the Church! What belongs to me!” She was literally trembling with fury, her knuckles white under the thin skin of her clenched, skeletal hands.

“Well, he is yours, Ingold Inglorion,” she whispered in a dry voice that bit like broken glass. “You are his seducer. On your head lies the damnation of his soul.”

The little priest looked away, hands fluttering to cover his gray lips, but Ingold did not move. The Bishop's wrath broke over him like a wave on a rock.

“We damn our own souls, my lady,” he replied quietly. “Or save them.”

“Heretic!” Her rasping whisper was more violent, more terrible, than a shriek. “The time will come when God will judge you for what you have done today.”

“God has judged me all my life,” the wizard said. “But that is God's privilege, my lady. It is not yours.”

For a moment she faced him, her lips drawn back, the aura of her anger consuming her like a terrible heat. Then she turned and swept away into the confusion of the Aisle, leaving Rudy, Aide, and Tirkenson all feeling that they had been scorched by their proximity to her wrath.

Night had fallen. Rudy and Kara of Ippit were standing together in the doorway of the large, square chamber just off the Wizards' Corps common room where the younger mages generally engaged in their more strenuous pastimes like invisible tag or dazzledart, watching Gil and Ingold fence.

The room before them was flooded with soft, brilliant witchlight, which showed every crack and strain on its grimy walls with merciless clarity. In that even, shadowless light, the old man and the girl circled each other, balanced to strike, with long, split-cane practice swords in their hands. Ingold's white robe was blotched with dark patches of sweat, and his silky hair was stringy and dripping, but he moved on his feet as lightly as a dancer. He sideslipped Gil's attack effortlessly, turned to let the hissing blade whine past him, and tapped his way through her guard with neither force nor haste.

“Gently, Gil,” he urged and turned the plane of his body a few degrees, so that, without taking a step, he was no longer in the path of her rush. “Why tire yourself out? You care too much about it.”

Gil muttered a curse. Rudy knew that she had practiced with the Guards earlier in the evening and he considered this additional training certifiable proof of lunacy. She looked sick with fatigue, her soaked hair straggling around a taut face. But she moved with a deadly lightness before which he personally wouldn't have wanted to find himself on the receiving end.

“Take your own death as a given,” Ingold told her. “Forget about it. It's your opponent's death you want.” And he attacked her with sudden viciousness, taking her off balance and driving her with brutal force to the wall. Rudy saw the split cane sting her flesh and winced, for he had seen the bruises that the practice swords could leave. The wizard's face never lost its serene expression, but in his eyes was an almost inhuman intensity that Rudy had seen only once before, in the rain-slashed ruins of Quo. Ingold cut his way through Gil's defenses and always seemed to be a step ahead of her dodges. Her back to the wall, she hacked against his greater strength, droplets of sweat flying from the ends of her hair. Finally she faked, parried, and slipped through his guard and past him, out into the center of the room, gasping for breath.