Darwath 3 - The Armies Of Daylight (30 page)

Rudy's mind traced the murky ways of the Keep and considered how he could reach that perfumed, sleeping sanctuary in peace.

Then a thin sliver of light stabbed into the image as the door of the room was pushed slowly ajar. A tall shape blotted the dim glow from the hall, a momentary shadow of a man who pushed the door quickly to behind him— soundlessly, Rudy thought, for on the bed Alde did not stir. I he intruder stepped carefully forward, a cautious movement marred by the man's horribly staggering gait, like that of a badly wielded marionette. The roseate light slithered across the soft black leather of the mask that covered his whole head and glinted on the gold eagle embroidered on his breast.

Rudy felt his breath stifle in his lungs.

Yet Eldor made no move toward his wife's bed. Instead, he stole, with that limping, awkward hobble, to the shadows that flanked Tir's cradle and stood for a time looking down at the child within. The silence of it, the clarity of those tiny images prisoned in the crystal, sent a prickle of horror down Rudy's back. The fact that this was occurring now, close to half a mile away at the far end of the Keep, and that he would be a helpless witness to whatever happened exerted a kind of terrifying fascination over him, so that he could not turn his eyes away.

At length, the King moved away; with that same stealthy limp, he returned to the door and was gone. As the door closed quietly behind him, Rudy saw the silken bedclothes stir, and Alde raised her head to look at the fading crack of light that marked where Eldor had gone. Her eyes were wide, plum-colored in the darkness—and wholly awake.

His hands shaking, Rudy laid the crystal aside. In time he tell into a fitful sleep, prey to other visions more terrible than that—and to one in particular, a recurring horror that he had begun already to pray was only a dream.

In all that wretchedness and despair, the one thing that he clung to was the music of the harp Tiannin. He had salvaged the instrument from the ruins of Quo, the city that he had felt instinctively should have been his home; Dakis the Minstrel and Minalde had both taught him the rudiments of Tiannin's art.

Now, through the dark winter days, it was his only company, the magic of its music the only outlet for his longing and grief. For hours on end he played, sometimes straight through the long nights, his hands clumsily shaping the songs he had learned, or following their own inclinations into long, melancholy improvisations. He sensed, as he had always sensed, the presence of a crystalline beauty within the harp that lay far beyond his striving. The notes seemed to rise toward it, as flocks of marsh birds rose toward the sun at dawn. But because Ingold had once teased him about how badly he played, he was not aware of how close to that beauty he came. The other mages, some of the Guards, and those in the Keep who had their own losses to mourn in that bleak dead of winter often came to sit in some room of that thin-walled, half-deserted complex to hear those clean and shining strains.

It was thus that Gil found him, the night that the Church finally struck.

So engrossed was he in the shimmering sounds that he did not hear her swift feet in the hall. The first he knew of her presence was when the door was flung open, and she strode with light and terrible urgency into the room.

She paused, blinking in the darkness, but she was moving toward the bed where he sat by the time he had called a feather of light to the air above his head.

“What the—” he began.

She removed the harp from his startled hands. In the pale glow of the witchlight, her brows were two black slashes above eyes that were coolly impersonal. “I just got word,” she informed him briefly. “All the Alketch troops up on the second level are being sent down here. Their orders are to put all the wizards under arrest.”

Rudy gasped. “What?” And then, rather incoherently, he protested, “It's the middle of the goddam night!”

She paused on her way back out the door, the harp tucked under her arm, its strings glimmering like quicksilver against the darkness of her voluminous surcoat. With cool scorn, she asked, “You think they'd pull a bust like this if there were likely to be witnesses?”

“But…”

She was gone, her black clothes mingling with the shadows. Rudy was still standing in the doorway of the cell when torchlight flooded the corridors, followed by voices, curses, and the clatter of boots. A squad of Alketch troopers turned the corner and barged toward the cell door—flat-faced, mahogany-dark men in scaled armor that glittered like an oiled rainbow in the light.

Confusion had slowed Rudy's reflexes. He slammed the door instants before they reached it and made a dash across the room for the flame thrower that was holstered beside the bed. The door was kicked open and men poured in, surrounding him before he reached his weapon; it occurred to him, as heavy hands slammed him against the wall, that he could have used a cloaking-spell instead.

His arms were twisted behind him, and he was searched, not gently; it came to him for the first time how civil and pleasant the San Bernardino cops had been.

“Listen…” he gasped—and collected a slap from a mailed hand that took his breath away.

He was jerked away from the wall, stifling a cry as his arms were all but wrenched from their sockets. Something sharp pricked his ribs, and someone said, “You make a noise, mage, and it will be the last one you ever make.” A hot thread of blood trickled down his side.

They dragged him into the corridor, past the door of the commons. Dark figures passed back and forth across the flaring light of the hearth, their shadows huge on the walls. Firelight glittered on armor; the soldiers were smashing glowstones and record crystals, ripping to pieces Thoth's mathematical notes, and dumping books and phials of medicinal powders into the fire. He heard a groaning crash as one of them stamped his boot through Dakis the Minstrel's lute and realized belatedly why Gil had taken his harp. Then he was shoved on into the darkness and cuffed when he stumbled, his arms aching and the knife point grating against his ribs. They passed the main stairway that led up to the second level and turned aside.

It was only then that he grasped fully what was happening. Gal had known it, when she said there would be no witnesses—her mind must have leaped to the truth in

NOTE:

Royal administrative and residential quarters occupy roughly 1/2 the area of Church
Territory, directly above it on the 2nd level.

The Penambran refugees occupy most of the 4th, and all of the 5th, levels.

The Keep of Dare

the first moment she had seen that the arresting troops were from Alketch. The wizards would not be tried by the High King; very likely. Elder was not even aware of their arrest.

They were to be tried by the Inquisition.

Torches gleamed redly on the breastplates of the soldiers around Rudy and threw huge shadows that stalked in lumbering procession at their heels down the shadowy passageway. From dark doors, he caught the scent of incense as the passage narrowed, winding its way into the territory of the Church. He was conscious of others joining them, though the troopers behind him and the angle at which his arms were twisted made it impossible for him to see. But he heard the weighted rustle of robes and the murmur of chanting. The flaring light touched darker corridors of the Church mazes—cells where the Red Monks bivouacked, aisles where the dust lay undisturbed but for a single threaded line of bare footprints, and guardrooms that defended locked doors watched by the red-robed warriors of the Faith. And all that shadowy domain, lighted by the dim flicker of grease lamps and candles and thick with layer after layer of incense-laden gloom, whispered with the soft chanting of nightlong prayers.

They passed through a long corridor without light. Footfalls echoed in the closing walls. Panic and terror seized him, but he could not struggle and he knew in his heart that, if he cried out, no one would come. He remembered Ingold, imprisoned in the doorless cell beneath the villa at Karst. There was a smell, a feel, to this place that was half-familiar. They were somewhere deep in the Church's maze, far from any inhabited section of the Keep at all. Dust rose about their feet, glimmering in the fitful glare of the torches. The smell of the place was vile, disused, and damp.

Someone pushed open a door in the dark wall. Rudy stumbled over something on the threshold and was thrust through, his cramped arms failing to break his fall. He landed hard and lay for a moment, breathless, aching, and terrified, listening to the inhabited silence in the room.

In the darkness, a bell rang. Rudy rolled painfully over, feeling the cold scratchiness of a floor long given over to dust and dirt beneath his palms. He half sat up, his wizard's sight showing him dim shapes: the weatherwitches Grey and Nila, holding hands, their voices soft and fearful; Dakis the Minstrel, unconscious, his bleeding head pillowed on Ilea's lap; Ungolard, his face bowed despairingly on his hands; and Kara, her black hair rumpled down her back, flushed with anger and working at untying and ungagging her mother.

He looked around him, frowning into the darkness. He had found that in certain times and places—in the Nest of the Dark or among the twisting Walls of Air that circled Quo—his dark-sight was less clear, and so it seemed here. He could make out the shape of a double cell, black-walled and cold, some twenty feet by forty. Its ceiling he could not see, hidden as it was in shadows. He could see only one door. The place had a fusty smell to it, sterile and somehow at once disgusting and frightening. He shivered at the half-forgotten memory that it stirred and called a sliver of witchlight…

… and nothing came. It was as if he had dropped his spell of summoning into a dark well and had seen the water swallow it.

This was a cell where no magic would work.

Dame Nan's shrill voice slashed into the terrible silence of that leaden room. “Filthy, rotten, fish-eating Southerners, to manhandle an old woman!”

“Mother!” Kara whispered, frightened, and the old witch-wife scrambled to a sitting position, rubbing her skinny wrists.

“Don't you 'mother' me, my girl! If they're listening, so much the better! Curses of itches on them, from that yellow-bellied lefty on down to the last drab's bastard of a foot soldier's catamite of 'em! May piles like the warts on a drunkard's nose decorate their—”

“Mother?”

And in the darkness, someone gave a cracked, hysterical laugh.

Half-crouched, as if he feared to be seen by some unknown watcher, Rudy made his way to the scar-faced spellweaver's side. “Where's Thoth?” he whispered, and she shook her head.

Rudy looked around him. There was no sign of Brother Wend or of Kta. Knowing Kta, Rudy figured that the old guru had probably been in his usual seat by the common room fire when the Alketch troops had sacked the place, and they simply had not noticed him. That was two free… maybe three.

Free for what? he wondered. To rescue us? From the middle of Church territory? And where the hell will we go if we are rescued? Away from the Keep? To the Dark?

He buried his aching head in his hands. It became suddenly, terribly, clear to him what had happened to the wizard-engineers who had built the Keep. They had vanished without a trace… their labs had been sealed up… gradually the light had died out of the glowstones, and the memory of the building of the Keep had disappeared from the minds of all but those few, like Dare, who had volunteered to carry the knowledge on in their bloodlines. If they'd kept records, the Church had most likely destroyed them.

The Devil guards his own, Govannin had said. Only there was no Devil and no Archmage—no Ingold. Govannin would never have been able to touch us when he was alive.

Thoth, Rudy thought. Where's Thoth? And Wend? Or did Govannin have something special in mind for them? Thoth, as the most powerful of us left, and Wend, as the traitor to the Faith…

Despite everything he could do, Rudy's too-vivid imagination began to conjure all the things that could happen to those who simply vanished.

The bell rang again, clear and cold in the darkness. The door opened, an orange bar of light falling over the frightened faces of those within; more Alketch troopers entered, jeering and laughing at the tall, elegant old man whom they shoved, stuttering with rage, in their midst.

“This is an outrage!” Bektis was gasping. “Infamy! You dare to lay hands upon…”

He was greeted by obscene laughter and a flurry of brutal horseplay before he was flung among the other mages, choking with terror and indignation. He made a move to rise, trod on the flowing hem of his robe, and stumbled to his knees; the room shook with the soldiers' merriment.

“You're better on your knees praying, grandpa,” the captain jeered.

“You might start by praying for all those you sent to their death with them exploding weapons,” said another trooper, whose burned face still bore the livid marks of the battle in the Nest. “And finish praying for yourself when the Devil gets back his own!”

“I had nothing to do with…” the Court Mage began, attempting to get to his feet. With the sense of timing of a trained athlete, the captain reached out with his spear butt and hooked the old man's supporting hand out from beneath him, knocking him in a sprawl to the floor once more. The other soldiers howled with laughter.

Bcktis' white cheeks were stained red with anger, and his rumpled, silken beard was trembling with fury. “I demand that my lord Alwir be informed of this! He would never—”

“My lord Chancellor knows where you are, Bektis,” a new voice said, a voice as soft and chilling as poison in the cold, sterile air of the black room. The troopers fell silent and bent their heads in reverence. Almost involuntarily, the mages moved back into the shadows, away from the lighted door.

Against the torchlight in the hall, two cowled forms stood framed, their faces hidden by the shadows of their hoods. But even if he had not guessed who was behind it, Rudy would have known the voice of the Bishop of Gae.

Red Monks filed into the room, their faces likewise hooded, the hands on their sword hilts white, brown, or black, strong or dainty. They moved along the walls until they surrounded those who huddled in the gloom of that long chamber. The last to enter bore candles; when the doors were shut, those two tiny slips of light were the only illumination in the pitlike darkness.