Darwath 3 - The Armies Of Daylight (34 page)

Softly, he asked, “Do you want to come with me? To Gettlesand, to the Keeps of Tomec Tirkenson?”

Until he spoke the words, he had not so much as thought of it. But in her silence and the sudden tremor that passed through her body, he could feel the possibilities of that solution. Her lips parted a little, her eyes wide and filled with a sudden flare of desperate hope.

Then she looked away and said in a small, flat voice, “I can't leave my son.”

“Bring him, then. I can get both of you away from here under a cloaking-spell. We could go to the Keep at Black Rock…”

“No.” The violence in that low-voiced denial told him how fierce was her temptation. Against the dark red velvet of her gown, her face was dead white in the darkness, her hands trembling in his. “If I had our son, do you think he'd ever let us be? He would follow us, Rudy. Then Tirkenson would have to decide which one of us to betray, me or his King. We'd be fugitives wherever we went, Rudy,” she whispered. “I wouldn't do that to Tir—or to you.”

“Does Eldor care that much for you?” he demanded angrily.

“I don't know!” Her voice cracked over the words. Unbidden, to Rudy's mind rose the grim scene he had witnessed, the grotesque shape of the mutilated King looming in the shadows, looking down at his sleeping son. Was Tir the only one Eldor had looked upon? And was the single incident that Rudy had seen but one of a series of stealthy visits? Did Alde have to lie there, feigning sleep, every night?

In a strangled voice, he said, “You've got to get out of here. Aide. God knows what he's likely to do. I'll go back for Tir…”

“No,” she said, soft but unyielding.

“We'll find some place…”

“No,” Alde repeated. “It isn't only for Tir.” She shivered, and he drew her down to him again, warming her in the circle of his arm.

She went on softly. “Rudy, I may be the only person capable of bringing Eldor back to his senses. I can get through to him somehow—I know I can. I can't leave him.”

“He might kill you!”

She was silent, but he felt the shudder that passed through her flesh.

“Do you love him?”

“I don't know,” she whispered. “I don't know.”

He felt the warmth of her tears through the coarse fabric of his shirt and cradled her head against his shoulder. She sighed, her bones relaxing in his grip, and for a time it was as if she had fallen asleep. He turned his head, and her scented hair tickled his nostrils.

“Aide,” he said quietly, “I think I'll always love you. I only want to see you happy.” He spoke slowly, the words difficult. “If you ever need me—no matter for what—don't let anything keep you from asking.”

He sensed her nod, and her arms tightened about his body.

“Send Gil for me,” he went on, though he knew in his heart that, because of his love, she would never call on him for help. “If anyone can find me, she will.”

“Gil!” Alde pulled free of his arms and sat up with a gasp.

“What about Gil?”

“Gil sent a message to me.” She shook back her rumpled hair with fingers that trembled. “That's why I came here. She—she said you were dying.”

“What?” Rudy pushed himself up to a sitting position. “Gil said that?”

“She sent me a note.”

“Tonight?”

“Just now. Just…” She fell silent, her eyes staring, huge and frightened, into his. There was the sudden reflection of torchlight under the door, the tramp of boots in the hall.

“Oh, Christ.” Rudy made a move to roll off the bed, to do something—anything—when the door was hurled open with a crash, and the glare of torches and the whiter light of glowstones stabbed into the dark heart of the room. Alde stumbled to her feet, her face blanched with terror, and hurried to meet the man who came striding out of that blaze of brightness.

Eldor did not so much as look at her. With terrible strength he hurled her aside, and the Guards who filled the doorway and crowded the hall beyond caught her and held her when she tried to run back to the King.

For a long instant, Rudy and Eldor faced each other in silence. Behind the eye slits of the featureless mask lay nothing but darkness, but Rudy could feel the King's bitter gaze resting on him in smoking hatred. Then Eldor stepped forward and knocked him to the floor with a backhand blow.

Rudy caught himself on one knee and forced himself to stay down in spite of the consuming wave of rage that went through him. It would help neither him nor Alde to return the blow. As he knelt there, his head ringing with the force of it, he looked at the Guards in the doorway and saw that the man who held Alde back, the man who stood foremost of them with a slight, scornful smile on his full lips, was Alwir.

He knew then who had sent Alde the note that had brought her here.

A shadow fell over him, and he looked up into the blackness behind the slits in the mask.

“You love an impatient woman, young man,” Eldor said softly. “It would have been better had you waited until I was away from home.”

There was a hypnotic quality to that featureless face that dried Rudy's voice in his throat. He stammered, “It's not— not how it looks.”

The King laughed bitterly. “Is it ever?”

“Eldor!” Alde pulled desperately at her brother's grip. “It isn't his fault. I came to him. He told me to leave. Eldor, listen to me! I had to speak to him…”

He faced around on her, and she shrank from the demon glitter that she saw deep behind the mask-holes. He took a step toward her with that swaying gait that was so oddly terrifying, and she pressed back against Alwir's immovable, velvet bulk.

“If you went to him,” Eldor whispered, his voice poison-soft, “he had more than time enough to send you away. I understand your whoring after him when you thought that I was dead, and perhaps even now, when you wish that I might be.” He reached out to touch her face, and she flinched from the deformed hand.

There was a kind of amused satisfaction in his harsh voice. “I suppose that even in the dark, you would know that you shared the pillow with this face. But you are the Queen and the mother of my heir. There are ways of making sure of the paternity of my other heirs.”

He loomed so close above her that his shadow seemed to cover her; her eyebrows stood out like streaks of ink against a face chalky with terror. But her voice was steady as she whispered, “Let me talk to you. Alone. Please, before you do anything.”

The twisted fingers caressed her tousled hair, then her cheek, and this time she did not pull away. “There will be time,” he replied, “for you to plead your case at leisure. As I said, I understand your desire for a young and well-favored lover, with time on his hands to entertain you. You are young, and the young bore easily. But I will not have all the Keep saying that the King is a cuckold, not even to oblige you, my sweetest of queens.”

“It's not like that.”

His voice hardened suddenly. “Then perhaps you can tell me what it is like when a woman bribes and suborns her way out of her room, to creep in darkness down to join her lover.”

“He is not my lover!” she cried, and the King laughed, a high, wild, screeching laugh, as he had laughed that morning when word had reached them that the Dark Ones held sway now over all the earth. He laughed on and on, the sound harsh and terrible but not hysterical, and Rudy felt his flesh creep.

Eldor choked himself silent at last, the gasp of his breathing pulling the mask flat over the twisted remains of nose and lips. “If he is not your lover, my sweeting,” he rasped, “he is at least a mage who has defied my order of banishment and remained behind in the Keep when ordered to go. And since he has—for what reasons we can only surmise—chosen this fate, let him have the death that my other sweet lady, my lady Govannin, would originally have meted out.”

He turned to the Guards. “Take this man out and chain him on the hill.”

“Tonight?” Janus asked uneasily. “But the gates are shut…”

“I said tonight!” the King shrieked. “Let the Dark Ones take him, if they'll have him! And count yourself fortunate, my lady, that I do not give you leave to bear him company as well!”

The Rune of the Chain hung roped to Rudy's right hand. In the vague dreams of his half-conscious state, it took on other shapes and other meanings—visions of horror and disgust, vileness and pain. At other times, as his mind cleared briefly, he saw it as it was, a round lead seal marked with that terrible Rune, turning slowly on its black ribbons. The aura that flowed from it was a corruption that smothered all magic. In its presence his mind felt blotted; the hope and knowledge upon which magic was founded were swallowed in fetid pits of despair.

Rudy wondered where the Dark Ones were. The night was dead still and brutally cold, and the moonlight shone through the breaking clouds to turn the snow into a hard, brilliant crust of diamonds. It was the kind of night they loved. Their darkness could smother the moonlight; their illusion could stretch out the long, hard shadows of the black Keep to creep toward him across the buried road. He wondered if having the flesh pulled off his bones would be any more painful than the slow soaking away of his life from the cold, and found that he couldn't much care. His shoulders ached, half-wrenched from their sockets by the drag of his body weight against the chains that suspended him between the pillars. Now and then he tried to stand to relieve the drag on his arms, but exhaustion, cold, and the numb dizziness from the blows he'd received when he had fought against the Guards robbed him of strength. Then he fell, and was brought up short by the agony of his arms again.

In the silence of the Vale, he could hear the wolves howling, as they had howled out on the plains. Without the rushing of the wind in the dark trees, it seemed to him that he could hear everything in the night around him; his senses spread like the great blazing net of the Milky Way over the blackness of the earth. The smell of his own blood on his wrists was very clear to him, as was the scent of the glaciers moving inexorably down from the high peaks. He felt that he could hear the faint, crinkling music that the stars made as they moved and all the sounds of the night world. He could hear the distant groan of the ice in the north, advancing a few inches every year, and the rippling of the wind in the curtain that separated universe from universe. And far below the earth, he sensed the clatter and whisper of claws in the dark and Ingold screaming.

He came to suddenly, to a shock wave of pain. In the brightness of the moonlight, he saw a grim, pale face close to his and felt the warmth of a hand on his frozen arm through the rags of his torn shirt. He must have cried out in pain, for a voice whispered, “Shut up, punk.” Thin, scarred fingers worked at the key.

The release of his left wrist was like a lightning bolt of agony. Gil caught his body as he sagged on the remaining chain and eased him down as gently as she could. Her breath was a steam cloud of diamonds in the moonlight, her eyes frost-white under the thick shadows of curving lashes.

To hell with all the movie pin-up girls and even Minalde, Rudy thought groggily. At this moment Gil Patterson is absolutely the most beautiful lady I have ever seen.

“What the Sam Hill is this?” she whispered, drawing back in sudden revulsion from the dangling seal.

He managed to say, “The Rune of the Chain. What they used to imprison Ingold back at Karst. Govannin brought it out for me, special.”

“Sweet of her.” Gil wiped her palm instinctively on her breeches. Then she drew her sword, as Rudy had done when he'd first come in contact with the thing, and gingerly cut the sable ribbons. The lead seal fell with a little scrunch into the snow; Gil kicked it aside, as far as she could. Then she set to work with the key again.

Rudy's breath felt dry and burning in his lungs, the numbness of his body broken only by fiery shoots of agony at the slightest movement. When the chain fell away, he crumpled like a soaked blanket into the snow, and darkness gathered him and warmed him.

From several miles away, he felt his body being shaken and heard Gil say, “You pass out on me now, punk, and I'll kill you.”

He tried to explain to her that he was perfectly all right and he'd feel fine after he woke up again, but somehow the words never made it past his throat. Every muscle in his back screamed in red agony as he was jerked to a half-sitting position against a bony shoulder. Someone threw what felt like a ratty old army blanket over him, tipped his head back, and dumped several gallons of napalm down his throat.

Rudy came to gasping. “What the…” He struggled, trying to break clear of Gil's cloak and recognized the taste in his nasal passages as guardroom gin.

“Shut up and lie still,” Gil ordered briefly. She pulled off her surcoat—it had been inherited in the first place from some other poor soul who was currently feeding the worms and was far too big for her—and threw it over the cloak. “Think you can make it as far as Gettlesand? I brought some food, but I couldn't carry much. I'll let Alde know you got away safe.”

“Thanks,” Rudy whispered. “Gil, thanks. I don't know how you managed to do all this, but…”

“I pinched the keys from Janus,” she replied. “I suspect he knows—or anyway, he won't ask. The Icefalcon's on gate guard tonight.”

Rudy tried to move one arm and was rewarded by what felt like a terminal case of cramps. “You'd better get on back, then,” he whispered. “You'll both be in trouble if someone comes by and finds the gate open.”

“The gate's not open,” Gil said, shocked at the suggestion. “You think, after all we've been through, I'd leave the gate open?”

“But the Dark…”

She shrugged. “The Icefalcon lent me this.” She pulled a little token of wood from her belt, hand-carved and old, on which Rudy could make out the carven Rune of the Veil. There seemed little point in asking how the Icefalcon had reacquired it from the late Imperial Nephew. “It should be plenty warm in the cattle pens, and I know how to get in past the wolf traps around them. Don't worry about me, punk.”

He looked up at her face, as chill and aloof as marble, and wondered that he had thought of her as a mere bookworm spook when he'd met her in the warm dream world of California. He rolled up onto his side, the effort bringing blinding pain.