by Hambly
“He knows he is right, to the marrow of his soul. Other people are simply wrong – and evil, for obstructing what is right. Those who agree with him find this enormously attractive.”
Gil said, “Oh, boy,” again.
“So, yes,” concluded the wizard, leaning on his staff to rise. “I’m fairly certain Marspeth would kill, to protect the pleasure these dreams give him. And he’d find a good, altruistic reason to do so. And if, for whatever reason, the settlement at Black Rock is not destroyed by the White Raiders before summer ends, when the older children start to lose their capacity to dream, they – or their parents – will find someone to blame. And from there, I fear, the end will come swiftly.”
“Lose their capacity to dream… at all?” Gil stood, too, and glanced up at the top of the gully, where, indeed, she could glimpse the scuffed brown-and-blue of her friend Rudy’s patched coat.
“My teachers spoke of it,” the wizard said, “at Quo. I later looked up the passages in the Black Book of Aersyn and the Elkaith Fragments. Children exposed to these dreams – children who experienced the intensity of what the zillywigs give by their mere presence in an area – were devastated when the creatures were driven away. They sometimes followed them into the mountains or the wastelands, though of course without the magic of humans to feed on, the zillywigs themselves were no longer capable of producing the dreams the poor children sought. When caught and brought back by their distracted parents, the Ullat Chronicle said in the Fragments, the children ‘pined their lives away.’”
*
Pined their lives away.
Died? Gil wondered. Or just died inside? Did they simply lose whatever spark it is that keeps a person getting out of bed in the morning? She couldn’t recall ever feeling that dead inside. Even in those black weeks during the Time of the Dark, when she had indeed thought Ingold dead – or had fought the growing suspicion that he wasn’t dead but a mentally gutted prisoner of the Dark… Even in that time, she had always been able to get up in the mornings. She had trained with the Guards, carried on conversations with people as if she weren’t numb inside.
In the Aisle, beyond where she sat beside Tarew’s bread-ovens, she could see the children, chasing each other until one of the older girls called them back to their chores. They giggled and sang as they came from the chicken-houses with eggs. (Tiny eggs, the size of California dates, and all different shades of browns and whites and speckles; the chickens themselves were nothing compared to those of Gil’s own world.) The children looked as if they’d been raised on short rations, but their faces were radiant with a kind of gleeful joy. Gil remembered how it had felt, the entire week before a promised trip to Disneyland.
Turning her head, she saw Tarew’s wife Klinnian emerge from the wood-store with a double-armload of that scarce and hard-won commodity, and pause for a moment, watching the children. Watching her child. Dark-haired Imaleen, coming down the wide ceremonial stair at the end of the Aisle with a sack of ground flour in her arms. Laughing with Jellin, who was thirteen and nearly the image of her sister Pardilla: gold hair, brown eyes. Klinnian’s face fairly glowed with happiness, as if her daughter’s joy were her own.
…when the older children start to lose their capacity to dream, Ingold had said, his voice filled with pity. Not taking action was not going to save them.
Jellin would be one of the first.
“Gil-Shalos.” She recognized the light tenor behind her as Marspeth Ankeion’s. “No, don’t get up,” he added, as she started to, and he sat on the other end of the bench she occupied. It was wrought of cattle-horns, wood of any kind being too precious to waste on mere furniture, in these treeless lands. He did have a warm friendliness to him, a sunny confidence. “Are you well?”
“Better.” She tried to meet those slightly washy, medium-blue eyes, but his glance slipped from hers, though he gave her an encouraging smile.
“Will you be staying?” he asked. “As you see, there’s plenty of room here, and we always need another hand with the herds. You’re one of the Guards at the Keep of Dare?” His big hand – gloved, as nearly everybody’s were, against the chill – moved to indicate the black tunic she wore, that bore the white quatrefoil emblem, which was likewise painted on the thick dark leather of her jacket. “And we’re short of rangers, as you’ve probably heard.”
“I’d like to go back,” said Gil. “I pretty much need to, to tell the Queen what I’ve found here. What happened to…” The image of Ingold returned, Ingold dead, disemboweled, tortured, and her voice broke with the sudden pain of it, just as if it were real.
Are the dreams Marspeth gets from the zillywigs THAT real?
“What happened,” she finished.
Marspeth’s golden brows pulled together as he nodded, as if he felt her pain. He took her hand between his big ones – something Gil loathed even from most of the people in the Keep of Dare – and patted it, but she had the feeling that this, like his expression, was something he’d been taught, not something he felt.
Incomplete, Ingold had said of him.
Or is it only that I know what’s going on here?
“Of course,” he said. “It’s why you came, isn’t it?”
“To report back to the Keep, yes. When we lost touch with the mages here, Ingold—“ She had to force her voice to remain steady, “—Ingold said we had to come, to see what had happened…”
Marspeth’s mouth pursed so that the dimple in his chin stood out, like a pouty baby’s. A weak mouth, Gil thought. But again, I’d think he looked weak and stupid even if he were Superman, knowing what I know.
“I still find it hard to believe,” he sighed after a time, “that they’d abandon us the way they did. And that they’d convince Tirkenson to go with them! That must have been witchcraft. I never trusted that mother-in-law of his…” He shook his head, seeming to have missed the point that if the mages had lost their magic somehow it would have been impossible for Old Nan to turn the landchief’s heart against his own people by means of spells.
Gil didn’t contradict him. She noticed he didn’t ask, Did Ingold have any theory about why this happened? Or anything else that might reasonably have been asked by someone who honestly didn’t know what was going on.
“Would you be able to lend me a horse, my lord?” she asked. “And give me food for the journey? I’ll send the horse back with whoever you send with me—“
His wave dismissed the issue. “I don’t really think you’ll need an escort, Gil-Shalos. It was a terrible thing, I know – But the White Raiders really are leaving these lands. They’re moving west.” He gestured around them, at the women working their spindles a few yards away, and Tarew loading up his ovens with wood for the night.
“Ask anyone here,” he encouraged. “No Raiders have been seen for nearly a month.”
Gil almost pointed out that even without a shaman to cover their movements, Raiders were never seen if they didn’t want to be. Even if they’re all around the Keep checking to see what was up with the mages here before making their next move…
“East of here, there shouldn’t be any left at all. The lands should be perfectly safe.”
And, when Gil still looked deeply unconvinced: “These dreams that I have – these visions—“ He took her hand again, “—have never guided me wrong, Gil-Shalos. I have seen them leaving. Warriors, women, horses and dogs… moving on into the west. Following their own visions, maybe. Guided by whatever force it is that guides me.”
Gil had never been very good at pretending to feel what she didn’t feel, but she put on the expression worn by Sally Field in numerous films concerning hesitant compassion and learning to trust. She said – in her best imitation of a scared-but-willing guest-heroine on Star Trek – “All right,” and nodded.
Marspeth gave her a big golden smile. “That’s my girl!”
As he walked off, Gil heard, behind her in one of the broken-down cells of the old Keep, an infant laughing with purest joy.
Is HE a
lready having happy dreams?
*
Crap. Gil slid the cover of her lantern half an inch higher, inspected the lock on the lowest doorway of the southwest corner stair. Original to the Keep, and had probably been locked since Alexander the Great left for Babylon. Ingold had taught her to pick locks of later date, but – he had said regretfully – nothing short of magic could make the ancient ones yield. Given the fact that he’d been able to unfasten locks by magic since the age of fifteen, she wondered where he’d learned to open them with bent nails and fish-hooks.
Noise on the stair above her.
NOT a rat…
Food wasn’t stored anywhere in this area of the Vaults.
She’d already slipped the cover back down over her light and had kept it shielded with her body from the long column of darkness above her. But, she thought, whoever was up there had to know she was here. There wasn’t any other place to be.
In absolute blackness she moved two steps to the column that supported the inner ends of the winding stair, slithered around it to the niche beneath the first turning of the flight where it ascended. He’ll know this niche is here and it’s the second place he’ll look…
She recalled that slightly flat, self-involved look in Marspeth’s eyes, behind the friendly warmth. Thought of what she’d dream about, if offered the chance to have whatever she wanted, whatever it was, in her dreams. Would I kill to keep it from being taken away?
Maybe if my dream – my VISIONS – told me that the person who’d rob me wasn’t really human? Didn’t really deserve life?
She waited in the dark, barely breathing. Marspeth didn’t look like the kind of man who’d do his own killing, but there were certainly men in the Keep ready to do his bidding. She’d had a day to see how they looked at him. To hear the note of reverence in young Pardilla’s voice.
The stair’s not wide, but if I can slip past him while he’s still groping around here in the dark…
She’d checked the narrow southeastern stair earlier in the night, level by level, door by door. As she’d descended, she had once or twice thought she’d seen things, like slow-gliding jellyfish the size of platters. They’d vanished like the incandescent visions of a migraine hallucination, the moment she’d turned her head.
Zillywigs.
They eat magic. They excrete dreams.
There must be a nest somewhere in the vaults.
She wondered if they could sense the contents of her satchel. Needles stolen from poor Klinnian’s sewing-kit. The awl that Gil herself usually carried. Charcoal ground fine – she’d spent most of the afternoon after her talk with Marspeth preparing it in her cell – mixed with the powder of lapis and silver that Ingold had given her from the little packets that he always carried. A little bit of salt, a few oak-galls.
The careful diagram the wizard had drawn for her in the arroyo, folded small.
You don’t have to make the whole tattoo, he had said. (How could he have done that, if the Raiders killed him…? THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN!) (Maybe it was the presence of the zillywigs, that made the vision of his death seem more real to her now than their conversation of the forenoon…) Draw the ward, then just a few slits in the skin, to drive the powder into the flesh. When we’re out of here, they can be made permanent.
How smart ARE those things?
What can they know?
The slight creak of boot-leather. Closer.
Then a long, long pause.
I’ll have to kill him, to get away.
She’d killed men in battle, and in fights for her life with miscreants whose crimes would have endangered very soul in the Keep. Back when she was studying history at UCLA it wasn’t something she’d ever dreamed she’d one day know how to do, much less do well. She knew that her best chance here – since her assailant would almost certainly be a man, with a man’s greater weight and more powerful grip and upper-body strength – would be murder from behind, in the dark, while he was checking the lock on the door. She knew exactly where he’d be and how she’d do it. The Icefalcon had practiced with her, in how to cut someone’s throat in the dark.
Have I REALLY become somebody who’d DO that?
In seven years as a warrior, defending people in this dying world, she’d never ninja-killed someone because she knew she couldn’t win a fair fight.
She could hear the Icefalcon – the deadliest of the Keep’s warriors and a White Raider himself – saying, It is not your life. It is the lives of everyone in the Keep. Are you going to sacrifice them to keep your good opinion of yourself?
It wasn’t like Ingold was going to show up and pull her out of this decision in a blaze of witchlight. Ingold was thirty miles away giving Rudy his zillywig vaccination and wouldn’t be back until the day after tomorrow.
You’ve got to do this. Her throat closed with the sensation of dry tears. The Raiders will show up any day and all those happy little children are going to be hanging on the acacia-bushes with elk-horn prayer-blades sticking out of their eyes. And you have TWO SECONDS to make up your mind…
She smelled him: wood-smoke in his leather doublet, sweat in his hair and man-smell in his linen. One step, arm around the throat, dagger straight across…
She completely detested Marspeth and the thought of doing this made her ill.
She flattened her body to the center-post of the stair and slithered past him and up. The space was so narrow that for all her bony slightness Gil felt the warmth of his body, felt him turn and grab her sword-arm in a grip like a gorilla’s. She dropped her lantern and yanked free her dagger, felt him angle his body away from the thrust at the same time she felt the blade pierce leather, turn on a buckle or plate.
He swore and she knew his voice.
“Tirkenson!” she gasped, as he grabbed her hair. “It’s Gil!”
He stopped mid-way in a body-slam against the wall, which was pretty good, she thought, considering how narrow was the space at the bottom of the stair.
“Gil-Shalos,” she added, but she felt him – still keeping that iron grip on her arm – stoop to pick up a lantern of his own. He unsheathed it and held it up, about the wattage of a cigarette-lighter.
“God’s underpants!” He yanked her to him in a ferocious hug, a big red-gold man like a dilapidated lion. His straggling beard scraped her face. “Gilly! Festering shit I’m glad to see you!”
“I thought you’d be locked up with the rest of them.”
“Not while there’s men dumb enough to fall for, ‘Look over there what’s that?’” And he brandished his fist with a crooked grin.
Gil snickered soundlessly: “Hey, they believe Marspeth, don’t they?” and his grin briefly widened.
Then it vanished, and he said, “But they’d disarmed us – I was asleep when they came for me—“ He took her hand, led her swiftly up the stair to the level above, their whispers barely touching the darkness around them. “I managed to steal these—“ He produced two thin blades from the back of his belt, “—but I haven’t been able to get near any of my rangers. What the hell’s been going on?”
He inserted the blades into tiny slots above and below the lock on one of the shut doors into the vaults, and lifted the whole lock mechanism out with barely a click. “And what the hell are those—“ He made a gesture with both hands, mimicking the movement of the thing she thought she’d seen in the darkness.
“Zillywigs,” said Gil, as they stepped through the door and he replaced the lock.
“Zilly—WHAT? Zillywigs?” His eyes, golden-hazel and fringed with red-gold lashes like a beast’s, blinked in the shaded glimmer of the lantern-light. “Those little pink butterfly-things my granny used to tell me about, that would give you a wish if you caught one?”
“That’s them.” And as he guided her through the moist, mold-choked chambers far below the Keep, she told him all that Ingold had told her, and what they had surmised about the events at Black Rock. “Ingold has Rudy back at Spider Woman Cave, putting a zilly-ward on him – I guess you ha
ve to make the mark and imbue it with magic.” She patted her satchel. “I’m assuming Marspeth locked up the mages someplace down here, along with you and everybody he figured would take your word over his.”
“That’s about the size of it. I knew about the kids’ dreams,” he added, ducking low through the entryway into what seemed to be a cave, where a thread of water trickled down one wall.
He’d placed a tin cup under the trickle. It was half-full. The whole room stank of niter.
“So that’s what happened to the wizards’ magic? I’ve seen the nest – it’s on the northeast end of the Vaults, close to where they’ve got the wizards locked up. Marspeth feeds ‘em – the wizards, I mean.” He took the water-cup from beneath the drip and offered it to her: Gil shook her head. She suspected it didn’t fill very fast.
“And he has a couple of his jaspers to guard ‘em, so somebody up there knows they didn’t just high-tail it out of here. When’d you get here?”
“Yesterday. Ingold sent me ahead to scout.”
“He still have magic?”
“He will tomorrow. The field extends about thirty miles from the nest. Marspeth is the only adult having dreams, and he’s set himself up as a kind of visionary. Pretty much everybody believes him when he says the Raiders have left the country—”
Tirkenson swore, profoundly, and added, “This is the guy who went around seven years ago, saying the Dark Ones were just old granny-tales. You know the god-damned Raiders have got to be watching the place—“
“Can you get to the wizards. Are they all right?”
“Pissed,” said the landchief and finger-combed his long, greasy hair back from his eyes. “For an academic who spends two hours a day in spiritual meditation, the Serpentmage has a scary line of curses. For all the good it does him. There’s a sort of window in the vaulting of the cell where they have them – it’s like a well, thirty feet deep. My rangers are locked up in another place, in two or three cells, guarded – I can’t get to them. But the mages’ll throw me up some of their rations – old Kta made a sort of throwing-stick from his staff and he’s got damn good aim. I can’t get down to ‘em—“
