by Hambly
Rudy dug in his heels, dragged his two rescuers into the nearest cell and slammed the door. “Ingold,” he gasped in explanation, as he shot the bolts. Turning, he grabbed a handful of Tarpaeis’ tunic-front and added, “Now you tell me how you worked that sigil in Lady Sketh’s chicken-ranch!”
“I… just summoned energy to it,” gasped the young man. “Just a simple spell to brighten and strengthen, like you do when a glowstone is fading, or to renew mouse-wards. I felt… Touching it, I felt that was all that it needed. And that it was the same sigil that was in the chamber below. Not a sigil written the same way, but the very same sigil, in two places at once.”
“You touched it?”
The novice nodded, dark eyes filled with wretchedness and a kind of puzzled wonder. “When I touched it, I felt that I was in the transport chamber as well as in the… the nesting-room for her Ladyship’s birds.”
Rudy resisted the urge to slam Tarpaeis up against the wall. “You’re frakkin’ goddam lucky you’re not the one who got zapped to Mars or wherever the hell Ingold is now… Crap,” he added, as glowing shapes began to slowly seep through the wood of the door. He dragged the younger man – Ilae at their heels – through a door on the other side of the cell (and I hope this is the store-room I’m thinking of and that we’re not in a dead-end…).
They were in somebody’s makeshift kitchen: a small charcoal range near the ventilator-duct, a table, a box with the week’s ration of potatoes and a couple of water-jars. Rudy tried to triangulate in his mind where on Three they might be (Is this Parfit Gatson’s cells?) while Ilae bolted the door behind them. “And I suppose Lady Sketh was with you when you said, Gosh, this sigil is in two places at once?”
Tarpaeis nodded again. “This was the day the sigil appeared in the transport chamber. My lady brought me up to the nesting-room and said it had appeared on the wall that morning, and demanded to know what it was. Made me swear not to speak of it—”
“Swear to Christ Minalde’s going to have to nationalize wizardry around here, as well as chickens… I don’t suppose she told His Lordship about it, did she?”
“No one. Please,” he begged miserably. “My mother and my sister would be destitute without what Her Ladyship gives them. The way she has my mother taken care of – the way she’s taken care of us all—”
Rudy’s lips pressed hard together, but he’d seen Tarpaeis’ mother. Many thousands had been stripped of their minds by the Dark Ones, in the ruin of the cities along the Great River – many hundreds, when the things would attack the refugee trains on their way up the mountain to the Keep. Only a few of these remained alive after all this time, vacant-eyed and stumbling, cared for by their families. It wasn’t often he thought of the mother and sisters he’d left behind him in California, but he thought now, Could I REALLY kill Mom, or Yolanda, orTeresa, even if I KNEW they weren’t ever going to come back from that?
Tarpaeis had been eleven when it had happened.
Rudy remembered being eleven. And being eighteen.
Of course he’ll do whatever Lord Sketh tells him. And Lady Sketh. Even if he suspects it’s stupid.
He shoved the novice in the direction of the door on the other side of the kitchen-cell. “I’m still gonna frakkin’ kill you. Ilae, you go downstairs and help Wend. Watch the doors into the Aisle and whenever these dudes come in sight, throw an illusion of our guys behind them, heading as far back into the cells as you can. You—“ He jabbed his finger at Tarpaeis, “—come with me and guard my back. We gotta work around back to that sigil of Ingold’s.”
Parfit Gatson and his family were, Rudy had long suspected, involved in the Black Market, but this meant that the little complex of cells they occupied had numerous exits, both into the tangle of Third Level North corridors and, via trapdoors, into Levels Two and Four. Whether it was some effect of the extended “haunting” of the Keep, of the blizzard outside, of the utter desertion of the upper levels, or of his own sheer funk, Rudy found the pitch-black, empty mazes horribly unnerving. The cries of panic and terror from the population as they’d poured toward the Aisle had ceased, and he wondered in dread what was happening down there: Jesus, don’t tell me those things killed them all…
They can’t have. They can’t have…
When he glanced back at his companion he saw the sweat on Tarpaeis’ face, and the white rim of terror glinting all around the pupils of his stretched eyes.
So twisted were the mazes of cells, half-cells, cut-throughs and makeshifts in this part of Level Three that he got lost twice before he found his way back to the narrow side-corridor where Ingold’s mark still flickered, dimmer (it seemed to him) than before, on the wall.
He pressed his hand to it. “Ingold? You there, man? Sorry to put you on hold… Ingold? Ingold?”
He closed his eyes, tried to breathe deep (I didn’t see any of those things and they’re probably off someplace else now…). Tried to let his mind open (Tarpaeis is keeping an eye out for them…). Tried to listen with the core of his being.
But there was nothing.
*
“Save us—“Lord Sketh clutched Gil around the waist. “Oh God, save us—”
Gil tried to twist free of him without taking her eyes off the nearest of the Dark Ones, which floated in the darkness like a monstrous jellyfish, just beyond the radius of Ingold’s witchlight. How many others there were she didn’t know, but she sensed them, smelled them, in the maze behind them. The perpetual, faint, directionless wind that always stirred around them caught in her long black hair, periodically flattened the sleeves of her tunic against her arms. The blaze of light that Ingold had called from the head of his staff had shrunk to a circle around them, perhaps twenty feet in diameter.
Beyond it, darkness lay like a wall.
“Let her go,” hissed Sisa impatiently, and grabbed His Lordship’s shoulder. “You’re tying up her sword-arm! Don’t be such an idiot!”
His Lordship, still on his knees on the broken stone, immediately transferred his clutch to Sisa’s waist instead.
Six feet from them, Ingold stood, staff in hand, facing the Dark One.
Gil had seen large numbers of the creatures stifle firelight, and even smother the light of a wizard’s staff. For the Dark Ones, darkness wasn’t merely the absence of light. It was a weapon, an atmosphere, an entity like water or poisonous gas, to be summoned and hurled at one’s prey.
She didn’t know how many Dark Ones it would take, to smother light cast by a mage of Ingold’s power. Is his magic as powerful on this world as back home? Is theirs stronger here than there? Once Sketh had released her it was as if he and Sisa had ceased to exist, and she felt curiously relaxed. The Dark Ones were fast, but she calculated she could reach Ingold’s side a half-second before the thing he faced overwhelmed him. Her sword, she knew, was sharp enough to razor it in two.
The sigil on the wall through which he’d been communicating with Rudy still glimmered, very faintly, in the blackness beyond the Dark Ones.
Ghost-soldiers in the Keep.
As lost as we are, on their way through to Elsewhere.
Paralysis and cold…
Moving with smooth slowness, Ingold sheathed his sword. The Dark One bobbed in the air, like a sea-creature shifting with the currents, but remained where it was, just beyond the light. Ingold knelt, and with one forefinger drew a circle in light, an inch or so above the uneven pavement. Then he made a pass with his hand across it, and the line of light dimmed and altered. Gil could still see it, but it was more like the dull red glow of a photographic safe-light. His eyes still on the creature, Ingold passed his hands across the circle three or four more times.
Then, rising, he retreated, the circle of light shrinking around his staff until it was barely a dozen feet across when he reached Gil and her two companions.
Lord Sketh immediately tried to grab his sleeve and ask him something and Sisa yanked him back impatiently. “Shhh! He’s concentrating!”
“But what’s he doi
ng? Was that a spell to keep the things at bay? What about the ones—”
Sisa and Gil chorused, “Shut UP!” and in the silence that followed, the far-off voices of the lost soldiers could be heard, muttering in the darkness.
One of the green moons had set.
Something huge stirred among the distant trees.
The Dark Ones could strike like snakes – the longest single strike Gil had seen had been, in fact, just about six feet, slightly less than the radius of light around them. But this one moved forward slowly with the shrinking of the bright aureole, spined tentacles uncoiling like shifting seaweed, acid smoking where it dripped on the ground. It stopped just above the circle Ingold had drawn, and lowered itself.
Alone among humankind, Ingold Inglorion had communicated with the Dark Ones. Instead of stripping away his mind, as they had with others, they had entered it, seven and a half years ago, to ask for his help.
And he’d given it to them.
Gil wondered how far the hive-minds of the creatures extended, and whether those on this planet remembered the wizard, or were merely impressed – or curious – that he hadn’t attacked.
It was difficult to see whether the Dark One settled itself into the circle Ingold had drawn, or merely hovered above it. Only splinters of the witchlight’s blue-white gleam whispered from the slick, dripping folds of that amorphous thing. It seemed to shrink in size, until it was only a few feet across, but when it rose again from the circle it spread out its tentacles to an almost twelve-foot span. And waited.
Ingold unbelted his sword, and handed Gil his staff – the light of it diminished by more than half the moment he took his hand from the wood – and kissed her. “If this doesn’t work,” he said softly, “I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry. But I can really see no other way.”
Lord Sketh let out a yelp and Gil and Sisa had to grab him to keep him from flinging both arms around the wizard to hold him back. “Don’t!” he screamed, as Ingold walked toward the Dark One. “Please! If you get killed, we’ll be—”
“He knows that,” said Gil quietly.
She felt the Dark Ones moving all around them, streaming past the diminished bubble of light. She could just see the silver gleam of Ingold’s hair, and the pale blur of his hands as he stretched them out. Then the Dark Ones closed in around him.
*
“Okay,” said Rudy quietly, “here’s the deal. I’m gonna stay here and sit on this frakkin’ sigil until Ingold gets back to me. You’re gonna go up the Church Stair to Level Five—“ He closed his eyes, summoning back, as he had learned to do, the exact route they’d taken in that first headlong flight up from the Sketh chicken-ranch, through the trapdoor, and down to the relative safety of the Aisle. “You go one level straight above the chicken-ranch, I’d say within thirty or forty feet of the trap-door, and you find a sigil written on the wall. It’s orange and dim and it sort of pulses. You make me a sketch of that and you touch it – you tell me what the energy in it feels like, or anything you can about it. And you make me a dead-accurate sketch of the sigil in the chicken-ranch. I can’t get these wrong. Got that?”
Tarpaeis nodded. He looked sick with shock.
As he damn well should, reflected Rudy, as the young man hurried away. Sitting here in the blackness – no less awful even though he could see through it, with the dream-like dark-vision of wizards – feeling the chill, whispering presence of the ghost-soldiers all around him, was like a nightmare. He didn’t dare take his concentration from Ingold’s sigil long enough to use his scrying-stone to contact Wend or Ilae in the Aisle – if they weren’t all dead down there…
And they know it, he realized. They haven’t tried to reach ME.
He could hear the Soul-hunters, with a sense that lay below hearing.
Dim presences, deadly.
Lost, Gil had said. Disoriented.
Jesus frakking Christ… it looked so goddam easy on Star Trek. Mr. Scott pulls the lever and bingo! You’re on Betelgeuse. And nobody even ASKS, Hey, what if something screws up…
Those poor bastards…
Soldiers, Ingold had said. Shipped through a relay-point someplace. The fact that transporter technology – either scientific or magical – didn’t exist in his own world (That I know about…) didn’t mean that Rudy couldn’t imagine how it might work… and what horrible potential there would be for it to screw up. Did it zap just their souls across to here and only part of their bodies? Did the co-ordinates for their real destination slip, like an old FM radio-dial? Did they pile into a chute someplace thinking they were on their way to a perfectly straightforward fight and end up as confused and terrified ghosts, just trying to do their goddam duty?
How long ago did they leave their base? Their homes?
To his complete surprise his heart ached for them – truly, literally lost souls… Would that Spell of Tongues Ingold put on me work on them, or would they just kill me if I stood there waving my arms and yelling, “Hey, it’s all a mistake…”? The breath of their nearness froze him and turning his head, he saw them pass across the mouth of the little corridor in which he crouched, swords flickering like white fire in their hands. But their clothing was more modern than swords, jumpsuits with hoods pulled close around their masked and goggled faces, he now saw – No wonder they look eyeless in the dark…
Whoever they’re fighting must be able to screw up the way a gun works…
And he bit his lip against the impulse to call out to them. They kill me and every man, woman, and child in this Keep is toast.
Ingold, for Chrissake come back to the phone and give me some guidance here…
But the only guidance he could find was the memory of a truly terrible 1950s monster-movie he’d seen one night back in San Bernardino on the late-late show.
After what felt like hours –though Rudy knew it was actually only about forty minutes – he heard Tarpaeis’ returning steps. “You see any more of those orange sigils on the walls?” Rudy breathed, when the young man knelt again at his side.
“Just one. At the head of the Grand Stair. It felt like… I didn’t feel any strange energy in it. It was like a low-level Summoning spell.” He laid his palm against Rudy’s and closed his eyes, but he hadn’t mastered the technique of memorizing the feel of a spell, much less sharing that senstation with another. All Rudy could feel was the cold sweat on the young man’s palms, and the way his hands were shaking.
Rudy muttered a curse, then said, “But you got a picture of the thing? Aces! And the big one in the chicken-ranch? I take back most of what I said about you, Tarpy…”
“You heard nothing of Lord Ingold?”
“Not diddley. And I don’t think we can wait any longer.” Especially if there’s Dark Ones roving around on Mars or wherever he is… “Looks like we’re going to have to deal with this by ourselves.”
And God knows, he reflected, as he and Tarpaeis slipped along the corridor in the direction of the Church Stair, what we’re going to do about people wounded by those frakking swords…
But first things first.
And let’s hope what worked for giant grasshoppers will work for lost souls…
With Tarpaeis guarding his back, Rudy pulled his scrying-stone from the pocket of his gaudily-painted fur vest, whispered, “Wend? You there?” and to his heartfelt joy the former monk’s round face appeared, as if reflected from far off, in the crystal’s heart.
“Rudy—”
“You okay down there? Is illusion working?”
“So far, but they keep coming back. There’s a lot of them – they appear first in one doorway, then another, groups of three or five… They’ve attacked into the Aisle twice, and were lured back both times. But anyone even touched by their weapons is… not in good shape.”
“See any on the galleries?”
“Not any more. They—”
The crystal went abruptly dark. Rudy signed to his companion to follow him, keeping the scrying-stone cradled in his palm. He strode through the lightless
mazes toward what he was pretty sure was the outer wall of the Keep. Here on Level Four it was territory thinly occupied, with many doors barred and many more gaping darkly into cells that had either been unoccupied for thousands of years, or had been briefly taken up and then abandonned by those who found them too inconvenient or too close to the “haunted” area. Hesitantly – hoping to goodness he wasn’t making the situation worse – Rudy marked the walls with the orange sigil, laying on the unfamiliar mark the faint suggestion of a generalized Summoning for warriors (And I sure as hell hope the spell to erase these things will work later on…)
He’d just worked his way back to St. Prool’s Stair when he felt Brother Wend whispering in the back of his thoughts, and opened his hand to look at the crystal again.
“You okay?”
“Another attack,” said the novice, and Rudy could feel the exhaustion that gnawed at the young man’s powers. Magic of any kind was a drain on a wizard, both psychically and physically. Neither Wend nor Ilae – nor himself nor Tarpaeis – could hold out indefinitely, and he was already feeling it every time he put a little whisper of Summoning in each sigil. He knew what he was going to have to do when he got to the First Level, and knew he’d jolly well better conserve his strength.
This had looked easier in that stupid movie.
“Move people back out of the Aisle into Church Territory and the granaries,” he said. “That’s where the biggest rooms are. If you can’t get them all back there, at least get them to the back of the Aisle, as far away from the Doors as they can get. I’m trying to draw the ghosts to the front of the Keep, and down to the Doors.”
“You can do that?” The young man’s dark eyes got wide.
“I’m gonna find out,” returned Rudy. “And, Wend… Gather up as much firewood and blankets as you can. It may get pretty cold in here.”
When he reached the Second Level, he became aware of the ghosts. Twice the two young men had to take to their heels, after throwing a Look-Over-There spell behind those shadowy warriors, and then painstakingly work their way back toward the stairs that led downwards. Once they were nearly ambushed, only the sense of cold that concentrated in the densely-twisting mazes warning Rudy that the dimly-glowing warriors were somewhere ahead. As he made the sigils, Rudy was aware, too, that they ghosts were following them, drawn by the familiar signs. “At least the plan is working,” he whispered to Tarpaeis, as they fled down the last stair and into the mazes of the First Level, near the barracks of the Guards. “The good news is they’re following us. But the bad news is… they’re following us.”
