Darwath 3 - The Armies Of Daylight (24 page)

“But it isn't,” Gil protested unwisely. “Just because a thing is created doesn't mean that it's immutable. Look at a man's body. It changes and grows old, grows a beard in its proper time or loses hair, and gains or loses flesh—”

“Don't quibble with me, girl!” the Chancellor roared, towering over her like an enraged bear. “This idiocy about women's fashions and rocks and plants and where it snows and when—pah! What proof have you that these had anything to do with the first rising of the Dark?”

“Aide's memories…” Gil began—and stopped. She felt slow heat rising to her face, realizing that that, at least, was one source of information that could never be revealed. Particularly not now, when Alde had put herself in defiance of her brother and publicly as much as announced her intentions of wielding at least a certain degree of power in the Keep. “The record crystals…” she began again.

“Don't speak to me of them unless you can feel the air of those times!” Alwir sneered bitterly. “Women would parade the streets naked in a snowstorm if fashion dictated they must! And as for your memories, my sister…” He bent his scathing gaze upon the girl who sat, head bowed in wretched silence, across from Gil. “You know as well as I do that only men bear the memories of the House of Dare. A convenient departure from custom,” he went on, swinging around to face Ingold, who had risen and gone to Gil's side. "And how well it proves your point!

“So I am to give up the reconquest of the world from the Dark and the alliance that will rejuvenate our civilization, not because you and your amorous student wish to keep the power in the Realm between you, not because you have had a price on your head in the Empire since you fled from there as an escaping slave, not because my sister scorns to marry a true man or because our allies will not tolerate seeing the likes of you in power—but because this other student of yours has foreseen that the Dark Ones will destroy Alketch—in divinations based upon ladies' millinery!”

He leaped up, moved around the table, and snatched the parchment scroll from Gil's hands. Ripping it in two, he turned and flung the pieces into the fire. “That for your answer. Where are the records from which you obtained these so-called facts?”

Gil moved toward him, blazing with icy rage. Her scholarly instincts were far too offended to permit her to feel fear; for the wanton destruction of her notes, she would gladly have killed him. But a strong hand caught her arm, staying her, and it was Ingold's calm, scratchy voice that replied.

“They are in the Church archives, Alwir,” he said quietly. “I turned them all over to Bishop Govannin.”

“You what?”

“I feared that they might come to harm,” the wizard returned, unfazed by the Chancellor's crimson face. “My lady Govannin is—quite protective of her library.”

Remembering the bitter quarrels between prelate and Chancellor that had punctuated all the long journey from Karst, Gil reflected that Ingold's talent for understatement occasionally bordered on the awesome. As for Alwir, he stood for a time unable to speak, the ugly rage of a man cheated of what he had felt to be his own settling around him like a cloud of noxious smoke. Shocked stillness had descended upon the common room; in it, the Chancellor's breath sounded thick and hard, as if he had been running.

“Very well,” he said finally. “I was warned, and perhaps this is something that I have brought upon myself. Having taken you in—you and this wretched crew of vagabonds you call your intelligence corps—” The slash of his hand included the dumbstruck mages, who sat frozen in their places around the table. "—and having fed you out of the rations of my own household, I should have perhaps expected something better than this treason; but it seems that in dealing with you, Ingold Inglorion, one must be prepared for the unexpected.

“As for you others,” he continued, glancing about him, “you are still my servants. As such, I expect you to fulfill your part in the invasion of the Nest to the letter. Afterward you may come or go as you choose. But I tell you this: if any word comes to me, from any source whatsoever, of what was spoken here tonight or if any mention is made of this— this ridiculous treason—of the Dark rising in Alketch, either to our allies or to anyone else in the Keep, I will turn you all over to the mercy of the Inquisitor. And believe me, it would be better then had you not been born.”

His eyes traveled slowly over them, fraught with a rage-blistered menace that silenced even Kara's mother. Then he looked back at Ingold. “And as for you and this besotted chit of a girl—” He broke off, the words sticking in his throat.

Gil felt Ingold's reaction, like a sudden wave of smoking heat, though she would have been at a loss to describe any change that took place in the old man at her side. But the power that blazed forth from him was like a vortex offered, an Archmage's wrath like the unveiled core of some terrible energy. She saw Alwir fall back a step before it, his face yellow with shock.

“My lord Alwir,” that soft, scratchy voice said, “none of these my children are your servants, nor shall you do anything against them or against this girl.”

Alwir licked his dry lips, but his throat seemed unable to produce a sound. Terror-sweat stood out on his brow and cheeks, glittering in the crystalline light. Like Gil, he had known that Ingold was Archmage of the West without truly realizing what that meant.

In the utter silence that gripped the room, Ingold's low voice was the only sound. “You will act like a fool if you choose, my lord. But do not deceive yourself that I act out of any fear or regard for you or your policies. I do what I do for the good of what is left of humankind. If your quarrel is with me, then speak to me of it; for if you harm any one of these in this room, it shall be the worse for you. Now leave us.”

“You…” the Chancellor gasped hoarsely, but his breath dried in his mouth. His face was ghastly, a grotesque contortion of fear.

“Get out.”

The bigger man flinched, as if from a sword thrust. He backed slowly to the door; but in the shocked stillness of the common room, all could hear when his footfalls broke into a run in the darkness of the halls.

Like the slow fading of sunset, the power that had scorched the air in the room waned, and with it the soft brilliance of the light. Gil had not moved, frozen in awe of the man who stood beside her; now she turned to him and saw how the lengthening shadows deepened the crags of his face. A last fragment of the torn parchment in the fireplace caught, and the sudden flare of light stippled his white hair in gold.

Kta's piping voice was the first to break the silence. “He will never forgive you that.”

Ingold sighed and closed his eyes. “He would never have forgiven me in any case.”

Gil put a hand under his arm and steered him to the thronelike seat so recently vacated by Alwir. Thoth came around the end of the table to join them and laid a slender, ink-stained hand on his shoulder.

“You are weary,” the serpentmage said in his dry old voice. “You should sleep.”

The other mages were drifting from the room, talking in low, frightened voices of what had passed or debating what was to be done. At one end of the table, Rudy still sat, his bulky flame thrower in his hand, turning it this way and that in the light of the fire, with Alde silent and anxious at his side. The last glow of the magelight had been superseded by the rosy colors of the fire.

Ingold raised his head finally to look at Gil. “I am sorry, child,” he said quietly. “You worked hard. More than that, I'm convinced that your answer to the problem of the Dark is the true one.” He reached up and took her hands. “Thank you.”

There was silence, fraught with unspoken words. Looking down into his face, Gil was overwhelmed by fear for him and by the sense of shadows closing and thickening around him. Where, after all, could he go? Within the sanctuary of the Keep was Alwir; without it, the Dark.

“And in any case, tomorrow it will no longer be your concern,” the wizard murmured. “It is the Winter Feast. You are free to return to your own world, without putting it in danger of invasion by the Dark. I shall send you back through the gap in the Void at sunrise—unless you stay long enough to keep the Feast with me.”

His voice was pitched low, excluding the few who remained in the shadowy common room. His mouth had a set look under the tangled forest of white beard, as if braced against some bitter emotion; Gil fought her own urge to reach out and touch his rough, silky hair.

Instead, in a brisk voice, she said, “In spite of all this—in spite of the fact that you know that the Dark are seeking you—will you still march north with the army?”

“Of course…” he began, and then looked more sharply up at her, catching some inflection in her voice. “… not,” he finished. “Of course not.”

Thoth's honey-colored glance flicked sideways, startled, but Ingold cut off his words. “No, I shall remain here at the Keep. Alwir has my permission to perish in his own chosen fashion, but after tonight, I see no reason to oblige the Dark by letting them strip my bones. Don't worry about me, my child. I shall be quite safe.”

Gil nodded. “I'm glad to hear it,” she said. “Even though it will make things rougher for the rest of us when we march on the Nest.”

“There's no need for you to endanger your life!” he retorted sharply.

“Oh, come on, Ingold, you can't expect me to leave on the eve of an invasion without knowing how it will turn out.”

“I certainly can, particularly when you know better than anyone else that it is most likely to turn out, as you say, with you dead. You know how little chance there is…”

“I know how little chance there is,” she told him maliciously, “if you're staying at the Keep. The Guards will need every sword.”

She intercepted a startled look from Rudy, to whom this plan was news. It was, in fact, news to her.

A dangerous glitter of annoyance shone in Ingold's eyes, which Gil met with an air of mild defiance, daring him to contradict his own lie.

More quietly, she went on. “It was you who taught me not to forsake those I love, even though their cause might be lost.”

He regarded her for a long moment, at a loss for once in his life for a retort. His hands, still closed around hers, tightened slightly; had it not been both their lives at stake in this joust of wills, she could almost have laughed at the emotions warring in his face.

Then he said, “Has anyone ever told you how unbecoming it is for the young to outwit their elders?”

Gil shook her head, her eyes wide, as innocent of guile as a schoolgirl's. “No, sir.”

He snorted. “Consider yourself told.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now go to bed. And, Gil…”

She paused in the doorway, turning to see him half-risen from his chair, edged in the reflected amber of the hearthlight as if with a lingering of his earlier searing power. Behind him, all was darkness, but for the oily sparkle of Rudy's flame thrower on the table and the shimmering twinkle of the harp strings in the corner of the hearth.

“You never needed me to teach you that kind of loyalty, Gil.”

“I needed you in order to understand it.”

She turned and strode quickly into the darkness, feeling exhausted, lightheaded, and yet curiously at peace.

“Did Gil really mean it?” Alde hugged her black fur cloak more tightly about her; though the sun shone, pale and distant, for the first time in many weeks, the air was icy cold. She and Rudy came out of the gate passage into the open and moved down the steps, jostled by the crowds around them. From the jumbled warren of booths made of pine boughs and ragged, colored awnings that stretched along two sides of the meadow, a skiff of freezing wind carried voices and music.

“Of course she meant it.” Rudy looked over at Alde in surprise.

“But she might be killed.”

The path leading down to the meadow was slushy, trampled already by the crowds that had been taking that way since dawn. Rudy put a steadying arm around Aide's shoulders. Tir, wrapped up like a little black and white cabbage and tucked within her cloak, blinked about him with wide, jewel-blue eyes and gurgled happily at the noise and confusion below.

“I didn't understand all of what she said last night,” Rudy went on, “but she's right about one thing. She couldn't leave without knowing if her friends were going to live or die.”

“No,” Alde agreed quietly. “But she's the one who wrote that report. She knows better than anyone that humankind never defeated the Dark. She knows how hopeless it is.”

“That's a helluva thing to say to the man who invented our side's secret weapon,” Rudy declared in mock indignation.

The path was narrow; they brushed elbows with others descending around them: Guards in threadbare black uniforms and Tirkenson's rangers in sheepskin boots; women in rainbow skirts like those of peasants, their hair twined with jewels they'd picked out of the mud of Karst; and children, scorning the careful steps of their elders, sliding down the muddy snow, waving precious bits of honey candy in sticky fingers and shrieking like little birds.

On the edge of the warren of booths. Alde put a hand on Rudy's arm, halting him; the breath of the Feast, of honey and snow and pine and music, swirled over them from the meadow in a disturbing backwash of sound and smell. “Do you still believe that Dare of Renweth defeated the Dark with flame throwers?”

“Babe, I don't,” Rudy said gently. “I've never really believed it, mostly because, while you recognized this, that, and the other thing around the Keep, you never recognized a flame thrower. I think the wizard-engineers were working on them as a defensive weapon when they disappeared and the labs were sealed up. But that doesn't mean that Alwir's plan won't succeed. If we can burn out the Nest—if we can cauterize the nurseries at its bottom—it will be enough for me and a damnsight more than Dare ever did.”

“You're very serious about destroying the nurseries,” she murmured, her eyes searching his, sober and worried.

“I was down there,” Rudy said. “Yeah, I am.”

The tug of the Feast overwhelmed Tir. He struggled in his mother's arms and declared insistently, “Andy! Andy!”

Aide caught the flailing little hand that grabbed her hair. “All right, you little wretch, I'll get you some candy.” She looked back at Rudy, her face grave. “Why did the wizard-engineers vanish?” she asked softly. “What happened to them?”