by Hambly
“Sure thing.” Donna reached up, curled her manicured fingers trustingly around his. “It was stupid of me to leave. I’m sorry I worried you.”
He grunted, and picked up her luggage. “Who’s that?” he asked, glancing at Gil.
Donna shrugged. “A blast from the past,” she said. “Just let me get my little Pollywog… Where’d you go, sweetheart?” she called, rising from the couch in a slim flash of toned legs, Manolo slides. “Silly baby, Jerry won’t hurt you—”
Jerry’s sneer of contempt was the last thing Gil saw before she woke up to the sound of Rudy’s voice speaking her name outside in the watchroom.
“Gil heard it last night near the Dry Tiger Fountain, maybe an hour before that…”
“What is it?” Gil rolled to her feet, crossed to the door, still feeling ill and shaky with rage, with fear – with the despairing sense of having seen the world she’d left, to stay with Ingold. The world to which she could not go back.
She didn’t even know how she’d get back, or what she’d do…
Rudy turned from the knot of Guards gathered around him. “Perik Weff was killed last night on fifth north.”
*
This time, they made up parties of all the Guards in the Keep, including the private corps of Lord and Lady Sketh, Lord Ankres, and the red-clothed warrior-monks of the Church. The search started from the pool of blood – horribly splashed on walls and ceiling – that Rudy identified immediately as the missing boy’s. “What was he doing up here?” asked the Icefalcon, moving off down the short blood-trail with a glowstone in one hand, his sword in the other.
“He was always exploring,” said the boy’s uncle, one of the Weff weavers.
Nedra Hornbeam, the representative to the Keep Council from fourth south, added, “He didn’t want to stay home, I think. Not when his father was drunk.”
And the young man Kei added self-righteously, “That’s no reason for his mother not to keep a better hand on him.”
They followed the blood-trail. When it ended, the groups fanned out, torches flickering on the black ceilings, the grubby walls, cats darting away before them at the confusion and the noise.
Gil watched the glowing eyes vanish into the darkness. Thoughtfully, she turned back, and made her way alone back to the Aisle – not a great distance, from where the blood had been found – and crossed one of the narrow catwalk bridges, eighty feet above the dark floor and moving streams below, then descended by a ladder-like stair to fourth south.
Thinking about Pretty Polly.
Thinking about her dream.
She found Lysha Weff in the weaving-room among her friends – young girls in their middle teens, talking, whispering as they worked at the endless tasks of women in the Keep, spinning wool and flax accumulated during the short cold summers, for the long winter of confinement and darkness ahead. Lysha sprang to her feet when Gil came in: “Have they found anything?” Her eyes were red from tears. “Perik’s sister went out with the searchers—”
“What is it?” someone else pleaded. “They said they found blood—”
“Listen,” said Gil. “Did Tallia – your sister – have a place that she’d go to be by herself?”
The girls all glanced at each other.
“Or to not be by herself?” added Gil softly.
They looked at each other, looked away.
A girl with the fair hair of the old Felwood fiefs said, “Pretty much everybody around here goes to the Archway Room. It’s about two hundred feet beyond the Dog Fountain…”
“They’re supposed to not be able to find you there,” added an older girl, taller and pregnant. “I mean, if your Dad gets one of the wizards—”
“Wizards don’t go looking for missing daughters,” said someone else, and Tall Girl sniffed.
“My dad told them I’d been kidnapped.”
“Ah,” said Gil, remembering that occasion. “Did Tallia meet someone there?”
More traded glances. Lysha set aside her spindle and led Gil into the hallway, and – to be safe – a good dozen feet away from the door before she said, “She goes there to meet Kei.”
Gil frowned. “I thought she was engaged to Derron Dyerson.”
“She is,” said Lysha. “But he’s so—so grumpy. He’s Papa’s partner – they’re making spinning-wheels together… and he’s been in love with Tallia for just ages. And she knows it’s a good idea,” the girl added. “It isn’t like Papa’s forcing her or anything like that. Kei is sweet, and really smart in some ways, but he just… He’s never going to do anything, really, but take care of cows.”
“But he’s the one your sister really loves?”
“I don’t know if Tally really loves anyone,” said Lysha gravely. “She just likes it when boys love her. And they all do.” And at the thought of her sister – perhaps because she heard herself, speaking as if Tallia were alive - she began again to weep.
*
Rudy said roughly, “You’re nuts!”
“Maybe I am.” Gil’s eyes met his steadily, stubbornly. “But I think it’s worth a try.”
Around them the Guards – and the usual clusters of people who’d come down to the Aisle with laundry or sewing to sell or trade – grouped by the double doors of the watchroom, the gathering increased by the fear that had seized the Keep in the past twenty-four hours, fed by rumor and shock. Though sub-freezing winds still howled in the Vale outside, their force had lessened sufficiently for Rudy to assemble a party to venture outside, to minutely examine the outer walls of the Keep.
“It’s not,” Rudy said, and pulled on his gloves. “Whatever is up there kills, Spook. It killed Ingold—”
“You don’t know that.” Her voice was arctic. “If he’s still up there, still alive, even a little, trapped somewhere, this will find him.” She gestured with the thing she had rigged together: glowstones, wires, a pair of makeshift headphones slung around her neck. “It doesn’t depend on magic, Rudy. It’ll work in the dead spots. And I know the answer is in that dead spot on fourth south.”
“Gil, please.” Minalde, the Lady of the Keep, who had come down to see Rudy and the Guards off, reached out a hand to lay upon Gil’s sleeve, and though Gil and Alde were usually the best of friends, Gil now shook her off impatiently. “It’s just for a day—”
“If he’s hurt badly, or trapped somewhere, tomorrow will be too late. It’s got to be today.”
“And we’ve got to check out the outer wall today,” retorted Rudy, “before the storm worsens. We’ve already been over that dead-spot with a fine-toothed comb. He’s not there—”
“Then I’m going over it again.”
“The hell you are! We need every Guard right now, Gil, and Christ knows how badly we’re going to need them if there’s more than one of this thing. With Ingold gone, we’ll be lucky—” He gestured around him at the cavernous darkness of the Aisle, the Guards muffled in their heavy furs, the watching, frightened – and curious – populace, “—if we survive the winter, and I’m not going to have you getting yourself killed as well. Besides,” he added grimly, “you can’t just rig up a tricorder out of spare parts. There’s not nearly enough energy in a glowstone to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow in your particle accelerator beam—”
“The hell there’s not. I know what I’m doing, punk. I got my degree in sub-atomic astrophysics when you were still painting fenders in Fontana.”
“I know what you’re doing, too. You’re doing something stupid, and dangerous. Caldern—”
He turned to the second-in-command of the Guards, since Janus – and most of the day-watch, with the rather curious exception of the Icefalcon – was going with him outside.
“—You’re not to let Gil go test that thing ‘til I get back, understand?”
“It’ll be too late then!” Gil turned despairingly to Minalde, and she looked aside.
“Rudy is right,” the Lady said softly. “You’re confined to quarters. I’m sorry, Gil.”
*
Gil allowed an hour, for rumor of this conversation to percolate up to the fourth level, then slipped quietly out of the Guards quarters and made her way through the hidden corridors, the back ways of the Keep. She carried a torch, and kept her sword ready in her other hand, though she didn’t truly think she was in danger until she got up to the fourth level, and away from the inhabited cells.
There were far fewer children in evidence in the corridors, either running about in play, or engaged in the work of carrying wood or fetching water. More of the doors were shut – those cells that had doors – and she passed a number of cells where doors of branches and sticks, crudely lashed together, were being rigged up in place of the curtains that had been there before.
And you think that’s going to help you against something that could take out the best wizard and swordsman in the west of the world?
The thought of what had made him a victim turned her cold with rage.
On the lower levels, and closer in to the Aisle, the dead spots were marked with lamps. The wizards hated them – the less powerful mages, Ilae and Brother Wend, would go hundreds of steps out of their way to circumnavigate them – and with good reason, Gil guessed. The Church had never trusted the mageborn, and had always acted as a counterweight to those mages who had used their power – not always selflessly - in the service of the great houses of the nobility. Wizards were only men and women, shaped by their own greeds, their own convictions of what was right and wrong. In other days the Council of Wizards had done its best to police its own, but, as the saying went, Who watches the watchmen?
Gil climbed a rough-made ladder, through a round hole hewn in the ceiling of a corridor, where someone, sometime, had thought it convenient, though this crooked, much-altered passageway ran between deserted cells and darkness now. She was somewhere in the vicinity of the Third South Spiral, but the altered layout of the passageways blocked all sound from that lively warren of dependents of the Sketh clan. Her torchlight flickered over rough-made walls blackened with ancient soot. Cat-eyes flashed in the dark.
The Church had traditionally had mages of its own. And the Church had evidently made sure, at some point in the past, that there were rooms in the Keep marked with the Rune of the Chain, in which the mageborn could not only not work magic, but would be undiscoverable by those who did.
The fact that the current bishop of Dare’s Keep was a friend of the mages – and a man of enough sense to realize that without magic nobody would be able to survive the coming Age of Ice – had put Ingold off guard. Not, Gil reflected, that there needed to be any trace of religion in what she was fairly certain had happened, though she recalled hearing that Derron Dyerson was a man who feared demons and considered the mageborn their allies, and damned.
Anger stirred in her again, calm now and very cold.
Another ladder took her up to the fourth level. She waited a little at the top, listening – though she did not expect to hear a sound, from the man who would be at her heels. Then she moved forward again, picked up Janus’s chalk-marks from yesterday, followed them inward toward the dead spot. Thought of Ingold: lover, friend, the father of her son… The old man was tough as saddle-leather. Even if he’d been stabbed, or had his skull cracked, he’d hang on, if she could get to him. She thrust the torch into one of the holes in the black masonry, checked the magnetized needle that hung in a gimbal at the top of her tricorder, made an adjustment to the wires that surrounded the glowstone, and brought the earphones up over her ears. She’d tested them back in the Guards’ chambers, and had left holes in them sufficiently large that they wouldn’t prevent her hearing even the smallest whispers of sound behind her. Still they made her uneasy.
She knew she wouldn’t get more than a whisper of warning, if that.
It seemed to her that she could hear the thudding of her own heart.
The glowstone faded out. Gil thrust her torch into a wall-holder again, took one of the spare torches she’d brought, and kindled it. The last thing I need is to be fighting for my life in darkness. She’d brought four torches and lit them all, sticking three of them into the walls of the corridor, carrying the fourth into the smaller of the two side-rooms. She hoped the attack wouldn’t come there – it was barely more than a half-cell, seven feet by nine, with almost no room to maneuver a three-foot blade – but at least it didn’t have a door to it. She went to the back of the cell, knelt, holding the torch low to the grubby dust of the floor…
And felt, rather than heard, the barefoot rush of her attacker as he came at her from the door.
Gil shoved the torch at him as she rose, sprang aside; she’d guessed he’d be armed with something other than a sword and she was right. A club hit her left shoulder glancing, almost numbing her arm; she managed to prop the torch upright in a corner and slashed at him, after that first glimpse barely more than a shadow in the tricky light. He was big and he was powerful, and he came at her swinging, trying to overpower her with reach and weight alone. She ducked, turned, knowing she couldn’t kill him – not if she ever wanted to see Ingold alive again – feinted at his face and let him jump back. Don’t kill him – keep between him and the door…
He charged her again and she sidestepped, he following, trying to drive her into a corner, all too easy in that crowded room. She put a cut on his hand to teach him to stay back but it put him in a rage: he shouted “Bitch!” at her and came in swinging. Gil dropped to one knee, and as he came down on top of her with a skull-crushing swipe her sword flashed out, taking off one foot clean and lodging deep in the bone of his other ankle.
He went down shrieking.
Gil yanked her blade clear, shook the blood off it with a fast overhand loop and pulled off one of the thin scarves around her neck.
“Hold still, you fucking bastard,” she said coldly. “You’re not gonna die yet.”
She was tourniquet ting Kei’s leg when the Icefalcon appeared in the cell door. “You’re fast,” he approved, and knelt to apply a tourniquet to the other leg.
“You’re not.”
“I feared he’d overpower me and cost you time saving my life.”
Kei was screaming, “Oh God, oh God—!” and grabbing at his bleeding leg. Gil turned on her heels and slapped him.
“Did Tallia scream?” she asked. And, to the Icefalcon, “Let’s get him out of here so Rudy can keep him from going into shock.”
Rudy, Janus, and half a dozen of the other Guards were at the edge of the dead spot, snow still in their hair. They’d come back into the Keep the moment the Icefalcon had signaled to Rudy’s scrying-stone that Gil was indeed being followed. Rudy’s face was like stone as he laid spells on the sobbing Kei to keep him from passing out. Gil waited for a moment until Kei’s breathing steadied, then said, “Where is he?”
Kei managed to say, “I don’t know who—”
“Ingold,” said Gil. “Where’d you put him?”
The Icefalcon removed his dagger from his belt, took Kei’s clammy hand, and inserted the blade’s tip under one of his fingernails.
“Under the floor! There’s a cell under the floor of the long room—” Nobody in the Keep messed with the Icefalcon.
“How do you open it?”
“I don’t know!” sobbed Kei. “I don’t know! The lever there closed the trap – it was left open part-way to put garbage in—”
“Is that where you put Tallia’s body?” asked Rudy. “And Nebby’s?”
Kei nodded hysterically. “Knew he’d find them. He’d find Tally, he’d know—”
Rudy said, “You fucker.”
“Find where the Church headquarters was for this sector, when the Keep was built,” said Gil. “It should be a double or triple cell with wall-niches. Try the Archway Room they talk about, or the cells right around it. The opening lever will be there somewhere.”
It took them almost two hours, and torches enough to melt the Ice in the North, to find the levers, hidden in a cell recognizable as a former Church enclave only by the a
ncient niches in its walls. In the long room that opened from the dead spot, the closing-lever had been in a niche beside the door, and Kei had broken off the lever once he’d shoved Ingold’s unconscious body down into the chamber beneath. “The Biggars used to hide garbage down there all the time,” said Lysha Weff, who with her parents and Derron Dyerson had been summoned to confront Kei. “Before they died off from eating slunch, old Koram Biggar used to say the Big Bosses down on the first level would use mages to find who wasn’t taking out their garbage, and other things that weren’t their business—”
Gil swore. As a Guard, she was well used to the back-level folks hiding their garbage – in what the Guards referred to as “rat-farms” – rather than going to the trouble of hauling it down to the Aisle and so out of the Keep, and in cases this had included the bodies of the dead. “Didn’t anyone worry that kids might have been playing around with the lever and got themselves trapped?”
And Lysha’s father growled, “Hell, the lever was right there—”
Only of course it wouldn’t work to open the trap.
The panel in the old Church enclave that concealed the opening levers had been marked by the Rune of the Chain, but the spring that operated it still worked. Gil, who led the search for the levers, raced the fifty feet or so back through the turnings of the maze when she heard Rudy’s voice echo dimly, “That’s got it!” and reached the long room in time to see Janus and the Icefalcon lifting Ingold out of the old prison-cell, barely conscious from the murderous crack on the head Kei had given him, dehydrated and exhausted from keeping at bay the rats that had, fortunately, had other prey to devour during the hours of his imprisonment.
The bodies of the child Nebby, and of Tallia Weff, were still recognizable.
Kei kept saying, “I didn’t mean to kill her. I just wanted to know how come she was marrying that bastard Derron. I didn’t really mean to kill her—”
