02 The Walls of Air d-2

by Barbara Hambly

  Aide frowned. 'If the Penambrans do come, where can we store the food? They'll need all that space to live in.'

  'Easy,' Gil said. 'Put it outside. That's been talked of before - build a giant compound out past the cattle byres and wall it against deer and wolves. The Dark don't eat dead meat or grain.'

  'Do you think Alwir will?

  'Alwir would love it. He would be tickled to death to know where all the food in the Keep is. Govannin will block it, and they'll start fighting over whether the Keep needs all those nonwarriors.'

  Aide looked at her reproachfully. 'Has anyone ever told you that your logic is appalling?

  Gil grinned in the dusk. 'Why do you think I never got married?' She stopped, catching Aide's arm to make her halt also. But the sound she'd heard had only been the sigh of wind, rubbing bare branches in the icy cold. She was aware that it was suddenly very dark. They went on, quickening their pace.

  'There,' she said as they rounded a curve in the slushy road. Far off against the black flank of the mountains, a square of reddish light was visible. 'They'll have built fires around the doors and left them open.'

  'They can't do that!' Aide protested. 'It's against Keep Law! If the Dark came in force...'

  'It means they know you're gone,' Gil said quietly and glanced up at the leaden sky. On either side of the road, the trees had faded into misty darkness, forming a

  murky cathedral through whose endless mazes of dark pillars an occasional black-flecked beech shone like silver in the gloom. The last fading of the daylight would leave them walking almost blindly.

  'But Tir's in there,' Aide insisted. It was like her, Gil thought wryly, to think of her child before her own safety. 'Alwir should have...'

  'Oh, come on,' Gil said roughly. 'Do you really think he would?' She stopped again, this time certain. She could feel it in her veins, a rush of electricity that had very little fear in it. Gooseflesh rose on her arms. Like the breath of agelong night, she felt the restless stirring of air on her cheek.

  She sensed a movement in the air above; but looking up, she saw only the blackness of clouds. Yet she felt something in the shadows, haunting the snowy darkness with malignant watchfulness. In the utter silence, the faint ringing of her drawn sword seemed very loud.

  'There!' Aide whispered. Gil swung around and saw the drift of darkness like a ghost above the snow. Sinuous, inhuman, it flickered into brief visibility and was gone. Without being certain why she did so, Gil turned and glimpsed something - the suggestion of anomalous motion, the flick of snow swirling against the drift of the breeze - to their right. But it faded, like a word whispered into darkness.

  Then something dropped from the dark air above, something that splattered acid from a monstrous mouth to melt the snow in stinging rain, something that stank of blood and darkness. Gil's sword whined faintly, a blur of razor-bright steel cleaving the sooty protoplasm and dousing them both in a stream of foul and gritty black water that gushed from the wound. She saw the creature now as it swung through the air, a formless darkness that grew as it moved, the catch of crustaceous pincers and the long, sudden slash of a spined tail, coiling like a whip and thicker than a man's forearm. She hacked downward, severing six feet of that thrashing cable, which began at once to disintegrate. Like a howling storm of silence, the creature turned on her, the dripping tentacles of its mouth reaching out for her, an eldritch, all-swallowing cloud of night. She slashed into the darkness, stepping into the slimy welter of beating membranes and knowing, the instant before her sword cleaved the thing, that she had it and had it clean. Then the sticky remnants of the severed creature were streaming and folding messily around her like wet, dissolving sheets in the wind. The snow around them stank.

  Aide started to get up from the ground, where she had very sensibly thrown herself to give Gil a clear field. Her face was dead white under the bloody slime, but calm.

  'No,' Gil said softly, 'stay down.' Without a word, Minalde obeyed. Nothing moved in the darkness, but Gil felt the chill presence of the Dark still. Above the fetor of the mucky snow around them, she smelled the sharper odor of the living creatures. In a single motion, she turned and slashed, her body reacting to cues before her mind registered them. The creature that loomed so suddenly from the darkness behind her split on the bright metal of a long, one-handed side-cut that Gnift had told her only that morning looked like an old granny beating a carpet...

  To hell with Gnift and his granny, Gil thought, turning in the storm of slime to cut downward at the third Dark One, delighting, as she always did, in that clean and

  terrible precision. Her face and hands smeared now with charred muck, she swung around, scenting the night for further signs of attack.

  The night was still. She reached down quickly and hauled Aide to her feet, running for that square of burning orange light that was the only thing visible in the blackness of the overcast night. 'Are there more?' Aide whispered, glancing back over her shoulder at the massed, windy darkness of the trees and mountains beyond. 'Can you...'

  'I don't know,' Gil panted. She stumbled, her feet slipping in the trampled goo of the road, her drawn sword in one hand and her other gripping Aide's elbow. There's a Nest of them in the valley twenty miles to the north they haven't got far to come. I guess those three were strays from the main attack.' The light was nearer now, warm and amber on the snow, hard as glass reflected from the black sides of the Keep. Against an orange whirlwind of fire, forms were recognizable - Alwir, like Lucifer in his winged cloak, the Guards' instructor Gnift with the firelight flashing off his bald head, Seya and the other Guards.

  'Main attack?' Aide asked, horrified. 'But where...'

  'Can't you guess where the rest of the Dark are? Why we were attacked by only two or three?' They reached the last slope of ground, coming into the glare of the fires. The ruddy light gilded Aide's scratched, dirty face and shimmered like a live thing over the dark, rippling fur of her cloak. She shook her head, confused.

  They're all down at the Tall Gates,' Gil said quietly.

  Aide looked absolutely stricken. *Oh, no,' she whispered.

  Dark figures massed within the slit of brightness that was the gate. Alwir came striding down the steps toward them, looking relieved and concerned and, Gil thought, just a trifle annoyed. It didn't help that Aide immediately and automatically accepted the blame for herself and hung back like a schoolgirl caught out in a scrape. Her brother took her arm gently and led her up the steps.

  In the gate passage, everyone was talking at once. The gates were closed - six inches of solid steel. The well-oiled locking mechanisms clicked softly as the rings were turned. There seemed to Gil to be hundreds of people in that ten-foot passageway - Guards and Alwir's red-uniformed troopers, volunteers and herdkids, and people who were idle, curious, or ineffectually helpful. The narrow space rang with their chatter and was filled with crowding faces and flaring torches. Gil heard herself gabbling out what had happened, explaining it to Seya and Gnift. Strong hands rested on her shoulders and back; her friends were all around her. Before her, barely visible through the massed backs, the jumping shadows played crazily over Queen and Chancellor, grimy little sister and tall brother sharing the big man's vast, dark cape.

  As they crowded out from the inner gates into the Aisle, Gil passed them. She could see Aide talking earnestly, her wet hair shaken around her face with the intensity of her speech. Alwir stopped, listening gravely to her.

  Gil was close enough to hear him say, 'Aide, I'm sorry. There is nothing I can do

  'You can try!' Minalde cried passionately. 'You can at least talk to him! Not turn them away like tramps!'

  'You are a mother,' the Chancellor said quietly, 'and easily touched by pity. I am a commander. Janus and his foraging party set out this afternoon for the river valleys, and it may be that we can reassess the situation when they return.'

  'It will be too late by then!' she insisted, and her brother caught her by the shoulders, looking down at her white, intense fa
ce, her burning eyes.

  'Aide, please understand,' he said softly. She turned her face away, her cheek resting against the soft beaded leather of his gauntleted wrist. He put a gentle hand to her cheek and brought her eyes back to his. 'Aide, my sister - don't undermine me, I beg of you. If you go against me, the Keep will dissolve into chaos, and we will all perish. Please. Don't go behind my back again.'

  She nodded wretchedly, and Alwir placed a comforting arm around her waist. Aide leaned against her brother as if exhausted, her black hair spilling down over the velvet of his shoulder, and he led her back toward the Royal Sector that was their home.

  Standing among the Guards, Gil watched them, two dark figures silhouetted in the leaping warmth of the torchlight. Well, what the hell, she thought. Now that Rudy's gone, he's all she has. And I can even understand Alwir's not wanting to take in men who will hate him for turning them away before.

  But nevertheless, she felt as if she had just seen a death warrant signed for that gentle priest and his ragged congregation among the ruins of the Tall Gates.

  Chapter 5

  'Holy Christ!'

  'Really, Rudy,' Ingold returned, in the mildest of tones. There's no need for concern. They're only dooic.'

  'Famous last words.' Rudy stood irresolutely in the sunken roadbed, warily scanning the filthy host of semihumans that had appeared with such suddenness on the banks above. 'That's what Custer said about the Indians.' Ingold blinked at him in surprise. 'Never mind.' He drew his sword and set himself for a fight.

  Back in Karst, Rudy had seen tame and enslaved dooic shambling along after their masters with frightened, doglike eyes; he had thought them pathetic. Feral and naked, baring their yellow tusks along both sides of the empty road, they were an entirely other matter. There must have been twenty or more big males in the band; the tallest of them, standing in the centre of the road with a huge rock grasped in one distorted hand, was close to Rudy's own height. Ingold had told him once that the dooic would eat anything, including burros - possibly even including human beings, if they could kill them. He wondered how much effect his and Ingold's swords would have against so many.

  Ingold clicked his tongue reprovingly and placed a comforting hand on Che's head. The burro was on the verge of hysterics - not that it ever took much to reduce him to that state - but he quieted under the old man's touch. Rudy, who stood a little in the lead, risked a glance back at them.

  'Would those things attack people?'

  'Oh, possibly.' Ingold took Che's headstall in one hand and brushed past Rudy, making his way calmly toward the half-

  dozen or so hairy, two-legged animals blocking the route. 'In this part of the country they're hunted and put to work on the treadmills in the silver mines. I don't believe the wild ones know where the captives are taken, but they associate humans with horses and nets and fire, and that is enough.'

  The big male in front of him raised its weapons with a threatening shriek. Ingold pointed unconcernedly toward the main mass of the band, the females and infants, grouped on the hillside above. 'You see how the weaker members of the tribe travel in the ring of the stronger? It's for protection against the prairie wolves or the hrigg, the horrible birds.'

  Rudy took a deep breath, something seldom advisable in the vicinity of large numbers of wild dooic. Okay, man, it's your game, he thought grimly and hefted his sword, prepared to sell his life dearly.

  Several paces in front of him, Ingold didn't even turn his head. 'Gently, Rudy. Never fight if you can pass unseen.' As he came close, the dooic seemed to forget why they were standing in the roadway. Some began looking aimlessly at the sky, the ground, and each other; others wandered off the road, scratching for vermin or picking among the skimpy brush for lizards to eat. Ingold, Rudy, and Che wound their way among them, but the only assault was olfactory.

  'Always take the easiest way out,' Ingold counselled pleasantly, scratching the burrow's ears as they left the subhumans behind them. 'It saves wear and tear on the nerves.'

  Rudy glanced back at the scattering Neanderthals, who had returned to the usual primate occupations of hunting bugs and picking lice. 'Yuck!' he said succinctly.

  Ingold raised his brows, amused. 'Oh, come, Rudy. Barring rather crude table manners, they aren't the worst company I can think of. I once travelled through the northern part of the desert with a band of dooic for nearly a month, and though they weren't particularly elegant company, they did take care that I came to no harm.'

  'You travelled with those things?

  'Oh, yes,' Ingold assured him. This was back when I was village spellweaver for a little town in Gettlesand. It was hundreds of miles from their usual runs, but they evidently knew I was a wizard, for when the single water source in the midst of their territory went bad, they came south and carried me off one night to go there and make it good again.'

  'And did you?' Rudy asked, both fascinated and appalled.

  'Of course. Water is life in the desert. I couldn't very well force them to come in closer to the settlements for it, else they would have been trapped or killed.'

  Rudy could only shake his head.

  They had left the high plains and had passed the borders of the desert itself. They

  moved through a dry, cold world where marches were measured from water to water and the wind whipped dust-devils across a barren horizon. In the great sunken flats that were like the beds of abandoned lakes, the wind played skeleton-tunes in the rattling bones of thorn and jumping cactus. But the high lands between were bare rock, clay, and lava, scoured into fantastic shapes by the unbroken cruelty of the elements, or ground to rock and pebble and sand. In places, dunes covered the road entirely, the sand printed with the laddering tracks of enormous sidewinders, six to eight feet long. Once Rudy glimpsed what looked like huge, two-legged birds dashing weightlessly along the red skyline. It was an eerie land, where for days, unless one of them spoke, there would be no sounds but the persistent whine of the wind, the tap of the burro's hooves on the roadbed, and the hissing slur of moving sand. It was like the silence of the hills back in Rudy's California home, the silence he had sought there on his solitary expeditions with shotgun or bow. In that unending stillness, the whirring of an insect was like the roar of an airplane engine and the only noises heard were those of the listener's own making - the creak of belt-leather and the draw and release of breath.

  In all this empty vastness the travellers met no one, and the solitude, far from bringing loneliness, created a kind of measureless peace in Rudy's soul. They seldom spoke these days, but neither seemed to feel the lack. Sentences uttered two and three days apart took on the flow of conversation. Ingold would point out the burrow of the tarantula-hawk or the tracks of the little yellow cat-deer; sometimes Rudy would ask about an unfamiliar cactus or type of rock. Twice they felt the presence of the Dark Ones, seeking them on nights when the wind died down. But for the most part, they were utterly alone.

  'How long were you in the desert?' Rudy asked, after a long time of walking in silence.

  'Forever,' Ingold replied and smiled at the startled look Rudy gave him. Since the start of their journey, the pale cloud-cover had not broken; in the shadowless light, the wrinkles in his windburned face seemed very dark. 'You see, the desert is my home. Quo is my heart-home, the place of my belonging. But I was raised in the desert. I have travelled it from one end to the other, from the borders of the Alketch jungles to the lava hills that rim the northern ice, and still I do not know it all.'

  'Was this when you were village spellweaver?'

  'Oh, no. That came much later, after King Umar, Eldor's father, had me exiled from Gae. No. For fifteen years I was a hermit down in the split-rock country, the land of empty hills and sky. I would be months alone there, with nothing but the wind and stars for company. I think I once went for four years without seeing another human being's face.'

  Rudy stared at the wizard, horrified but uncomprehending. It was inconceivable to him. Like most of his generation
, he had seldom spent more than twelve hours alone at any one time. He could literally not imagine being alone, absolutely alone, for four years. 'What were you doing?

  His feelings must have crept into his voice, for Ingold smiled again. 'Looking for food. You do a lot of that in the desert. And watching the animals and the sky. And thinking. Mostly thinking.'

  'About what?'

  Ingold shrugged. 'Life. Myself. Human stupidity. Death. Fear. Power. This was -oh, years ago. There was another hermit there then, a man of great power and kindness, who helped me at a time when I needed help desperately.' He frowned, remembering. Rudy saw in his eyes the brief echo of the young man he had been, wandering the solitudes of the wastelands alone. Then Ingold shook his head, as if dismissing an impossible thought. 'He is very likely dead by this time, for he was quite old when he first found me, and I was only a little older then than you are now.'

  'Can you contact him?' Rudy asked curiously. 'If he's a wizard, he might have some word about the wizards at Quo.'