Darwath 3 - The Armies Of Daylight (16 page)

Alwir's sapphire gaze cut sharply sideways at him. “I had thought, my lord Stiarth, that the final terms had already been negotiated.”

The Ambassador sighed. “So had I, regretfully. But upon returning to the South, I received new instructions from my Imperial Uncle. It has been a bad winter in the South as in the North. Though we have not, of course, experienced the depredations of the Dark Ones, the harsh weather has caused crop failures, and many troops that my uncle would otherwise gladly have committed to your aid were needed to suppress unrest.” He looked up, the diamonds in his earlobes glinting no less brightly than his teeth. “But with good faith on both sides, all things are possible, are they not?”

“Indeed they are.”

The last time Gil had seen a smile like that, it had been on the face of the loser of a tennis championship as he'd shaken hands with the winner.

Commander Vair returned to the group at the foot of the steps, the wan sun winking off the polished chain of his gilded mail and the rainbow hues of his brocaded surcoat and cloak, making him appear like some deadly, scintillant tropical fish against the dull, muddy background of dirt and snow. With his hooks he gestured for Inquisitor Pinard, as a prelate of the Church, to precede him up the Keep steps. But the motion froze in mid-gesture. His expression hardened and his pale eyes gleamed suddenly with the red glint of a hatred long cherished.

He had caught sight of Ingold, standing among the Guards near the bottom of the steps.

“You…” he whispered.

He came forward slowly, and the murmur of talk that had risen among the Guards at the mention of the Alketch bodyguard's being admitted to the Keep faded to utter silence. The silver hooks flashed as he lashed out with them. Without any seeming haste, Ingold intercepted them on the iron-hard wood of his staff. The wizard's brows were drawn down, his face puzzled.

The Commander whispered, “So you don't remember, do you?”

With considerably more haste than tact, Alwir intervened. “My lord Vair,” he introduced. “Ingold Inglorion, the head of the Wizards' Corps and the Archmage—” His voice flourished almost mockingly over the tattered title, “—of the Wizards of the Western World.”

Vair spat the words. “We've met.”

And suddenly, Ingold's eyes widened with startled recognition.

The Commander went on bitterly. “So you were a mage all the time.” His hooks clattered against the wood of Ingold's staff. “I should have known I lost my hand and all my chance for a life of glory through a wizard's tricks.”

Ingold sighed. There was regret in his voice, but he never relaxed his guard against the dragon-bright warrior standing before him. “It was no magic that let me overcome you, my lord Commander,” he said quietly. “I was no mage then, and if anything, you had the advantage of me.”

“You were never my superior with a sword!” Vair lashed out. “You were a man grown. Fledgling Archmages don't come to their power so late in life.” He turned to the discomfitted Alwir, his lip pulling back from his white teeth in scorn. “So this is your—ally,” he rasped. “Your weapon against the Dark. See that it doesn't turn and cost you the hand that wields it, my lord.”

So saying, the Commander thrust his way past those who stood on the steps and climbed to the gates, where Stiarth waited with a look of calculation in his eyes and Pinard with one of I-told-you-so. After one glance of bitter hatred at Ingold, Alwir hurried to catch up, and his fluent, melodious voice could be heard drifting placatingly back as they disappeared into the darkness of the Keep.

The sun would set soon. From her position on the high ground, where the track to the caves passed between the rock spur and the knoll in the forest, Gil could see the activity around the Keep. Men and women were coming in from the woods with cut kindling on their backs. Those fortunate enough to be possessors of cows or goats moved about the heavily fenced pens and byres to do their evening milking. The wind stung her cheeks like acid. It was time she returned.

To what
? she wondered.

She had spent the day combing the secret levels of the Keep, gathering record crystals. She knew that she would likely spend the night reading them patiently, one by one. Body and bones hurt for sleep, but she was aware that the Winter Feast was less than two weeks away, and after that the army would march, with the riddle of the Dark's former defeat still unsolved. So she had opted for a walk in the freezing air instead, and the promise—which had gotten her through her master's thesis at UCLA last year—that she could sleep when she'd done a little work.

Wolves were howling in the high Vale, and Gil spared a thought for horses of the Alketch and the cattle they had brought as part of their provisions. Well, they'd protected them thus far. But she drew her cloak more closely about her shoulders and hurried down the broad, trampled track that led back toward the Keep. The temperature was dropping— the soupy muck churned up by the feet of the army was already freezing. From somewhere above the gray, constant cloud-cover, winds sneered down from the glaciers.

“Gil-Shalos!”

The gray mists between the trees seemed to thicken, materializing into the Icefalcon's tall form. He fell into step with her, one pale eyebrow lifting. “Strolling?”

“Picking buttercups,” she replied, and he grinned.

Clothed once more in the familiar black uniform of the Guards, he seemed to be as Gil had first known him, back in the noisy chaos of Karst. He'd gotten rid of the bones in his hair; his long white braids hung smoothly over his back. In fact, the only signs that he'd ridden with the Raiders at all were the slight darkening of his fair skin and the wariness in his eyes.

“I, too, seek buttercups,” he said quietly. “Only I have sought them farther along the cliffs, near the pool under the caves.”

Gil said, “Stiarth isn't there.”

The fine-chiseled nostrils flared slightly. “He will be, one day.” Like a cat, the Icefalcon picked his way around an ice-scummed puddle in the road, his boots making barely a sound in the decayed snow at the track's edge. “And when he is, believe me, my sister, he will pray for even half the poison that he dumped into my food that night in the river valley.”

“I wondered how he'd done it,” she said after a time.

The Raider sniffed. “I am not certain whether he meant me to die of the dose, or whether it was only to make me sleep. In the open ground in the valleys, it makes no odds.” The colorless eyes glittered suddenly, like dirty ice. “He had been better to make sure of his job.”

Gil sighed. She would not say so, for she knew that the Icefalcon had brushed sleeves with death, but it was in her mind that if Stiarth were to die, Vair na Chandros would be the leader of the Alketch troops. This doesn't concern me. she told herself despairingly. I'm getting out of here before the invasion, and what happens afterward is their problem. But she remembered the hatred in Vair's eyes as he had spoken to Ingold before the doors of the Keep, and she shivered.

“You'd think Stiarth would have made sure you were dead,” she remarked. “If he brought poison on the trip in the first place, he must have planned to use it.”

“Not necessarily.” The Icefalcon skirted a steep place in the track, leaping down a snow-covered boulder to avoid the mud-wallow made by the slipping horses of the Southerners.

“Things are very different in the South. A man in Stiarth's position carries poison as a matter of course.”

For some reason, the graceful, bejeweled people of the crystal came to her mind, flirting through the ceremonies on the ancient water-stairs. Had they, too been a race of poisoners? “Tell me about the South,” she said.

He shrugged. “You have seen the men. The South is a land of all colors. The people dress like popinjays. There are flowers there, orange ones with stripes or purple ones like something you see in fever dreams. Even the ants are all hues of the rainbow.” His light, terse voice formed the images curiously clearly to her mind, against this snowy waste of dreary mud and somber trees.

“The Round
Sea is warm; Alketch is a land of jungles, palm trees, and mile after mile of untouched white beaches. There are high mountains, like a wall in the west.” His hand sketched their mist-hung skyline. “The people are all colors, too—black and red and gold. They put too much spice in their food, stink of depilatories, and treat their women like cattle. There are no Dark Ones in the South.”

“Why is that?”

He shrugged again. “Ask the Dark. Ask Ingold. Ask our lady Govannin, for that matter. She will tell you it is because the Church rules the Empire, where their Straight God is better honored. There are rumors in places—but there are always rumors. Rumors of people who have disappeared, or of matters that someone else saw. But all those I spoke to in the South seem to think of the Dark Ones as a sort of plague that has befallen the North.”

Gil was silent as she slopped through the shadowy woods, suddenly troubled by the half-memory of something Ingold had once said. “Yeah,” she protested, “but Ungolard—the old scholar from Alketch who joined the Wizards' Corps— says there was what he thought was a Nest buried under the ruins of an old city in the jungle near his home. And he says that historically the earliest records of civilization in his part of the world don't go back much farther than they do in this one.”

The pale eyebrows quirked. The Icefalcon had little use for chronicles and books. “How long does parchment last?” he asked her. “Even words carved on stone can be broken to make way for a king's pleasure garden. The South is a warm land, and records perish easily there.”

“How far back do records of your people go?” Gil countered, and he smiled.

“To the days of the gods,” he replied softly. In his breathless voice she caught the echo of campfire light and shamans' songs, the taste of tundra and ice fields on the wind. His voice sank, half-chanting the words, as if they came from the distant memories of his wild boyhood among his own people. “To the days when the rain fell upon the grasses, and men stepped forth from the growing seed. To the days when the Long Songs were not made, and the List of Heroes was short. To the days when the Sun Chief fought the Wall of Ice, and drove it back to make the Sea of Grass for his people to dwell on, and caught the birds of the air in his hands, to make the horses for us to ride.”

Gil frowned as some thought snagged at the back of her mind. Something in that soft, husky voice… something that Tomec Tirkenson had grumbled in the bitter snowfall of Sarda
Pass. The hills of Gae above an arbor of tropical flowers… the dusty sole of a sandal, found in a midden in a cave.

She felt a stirring in her, a quickening, as images coalesced in her mind—the warm, putrid vapors of the Vale of the Dark and Minalde's night-blue eyes, tear-filled, gazing into the horrors of an earlier life…

Gil stopped, staring out into the gray, cold distance with unseeing eyes, as knowledge broke like an exploding star within her.

She saw it whole, a pattern resolving from meaningless shapes, and the understanding smote her like a blow. As surely as she knew her own name, Gil knew why the Dark had risen.

“The ice in the north,” Ingold said quietly, folding his scarred fingers together and gazing into the distances beyond the walls of his narrow cell. “Lohiro spoke of it as he lay dying. The bitterest winter in human memory…” He glanced up at Gil, the movement of his shadow making the gold-leaf embellishments of his manuscripts flicker like autumn stars. “It is… a fantastic explanation. Can you prove it?”

“I don't know!” Gil threw up her hands in despair. Her explanation to him had taken some time, for the old man had not been familiar with the concept involved, but when she finished, his face was grave. “I know it's true. It's the only explanation that covers everything—why the Nests were deserted in the North, why they haven't risen in the South. I can't point to a single source and say, This is why.' But—I know.”

The muscles of Ingold's jaw grew taut under the white scrub of his beard. She thought that he looked tired these days, driven and vulnerable, as if he lived with some knowledge or dread that he could scarcely endure. “Alwir won't want to hear it,” he said at last. “Can you prove it, before the Winter Feast?”

“I can try.”

In the days that followed, Gil was little to be seen by anyone in the Keep of Dare. Her friends in the Guards—the Icefalcon, Seya, Melantrys—spoke with her at training, which she still attended, though Janus had given her leave from regular duty. Sometimes Alde came to the little room that Gil had taken for her study in the midst of the Corps complex and spoke to her while she herself waited for Rudy to emerge from his work in the labs. Rudy visited her, too, bringing the slim ration of stew and bread from the Corps kitchen at mealtimes, and reminded her to eat. But they all found her distracted, her mind elsewhere.

Ingold helped her, as much as he was able. He was often to be found in her study, sitting cross-legged on the rug with one of the Quo chronicles on his knees, taking notes by the flickering gleam of St. Elmo's fire that burned above his head. But more often Gil worked alone, hearing the watches change in the corridors outside without much idea of whether they were day or deep-night.

Occasionally she would be seen in the Corps common room, talking to the tall Raider shaman. Shadow of the Moon, or to Ungolard, the diffident, black-skinned professor who had left the University of Khirsrit to answer Ingold's summoning. Once she buttonholed Caldern, a big, brawny north-countryman in the Guards, and asked him questions regarding his childhood; once she spent most of an evening in the fourth-level Church, where Maia ruled his gaudy slums of garlic-eating Penambrans, taking notes and listening while that lanky, gentle prelate told her things without asking why she wished to know.

One evening while the other mages were playing ball-and-ring-toss with moving fireballs in the commons, she took Kta aside, and he told her, in his rambling, piping voice, of certain strange matters that he had seen with his own eyes during the endless years of silence in the Gettlesand deserts, or of things that the dooic had told him.