by Hambly
“He’s a common, ordinary guard who’s of the age when boys often come to power,” retorted Ingold. “He’s seventeen now. He’d have been – what? Sixteen? Fifteen? – when the first signs of it showed? And because his family owed allegiance – and their livelihood – to you, you were able to talk him into keeping that fact from us, so you could have a wizard in your household that nobody knew about – Is that how it went?”
“How dare you?” cried Lord Sketh, in wholly unconvincing dudgeon.
“Is it true?” Minalde’s face was pink with anger in the glow of Ingold’s witchlight. “The Keep needs every trained mage we can get—”
“Of course it isn’t true!” snapped her ladyship. “Tarpaeis is out with a hunting party—”
She whirled as the Icefalcon stepped quietly through the vestibule door. “Hunting a place to hide,” remarked the White Raider, in his soft, slightly breathy voice. “He’s broken out of Sketh Territory into the back of the Level on the run, with ten white guards after him—”
Lady Sketh’s eyes flared with rage.
“Get them,” Ingold said. “Surround them, don’t approach them – Rudy, go back to those children. Bring the other two down to the training-room. Lay whatever spells you can on them, to hold them… He’ll try to draw their lives into him, to give him strength.”
“Tarpaeis would never—” began Gil, remembering the boy who would sometimes train with the Guards. The boy who could give her a good fight without bullying or losing his temper.
“It isn’t Tarpaeis anymore,” said Ingold shortly. “The Whisper’s inside him… Lady Sketh, bring me whatever it was that Tarpaeis stole from the dead cell in that Keep—”
“You have no right to imply—”
“BRING IT!!!” thundered Ingold, suddenly furious, and Lord Sketh bolted like a terrified rabbit into the dark mazes of Sketh Territory.
“You.” The wizard turned to one of her ladyship’s ladies-in-waiting, his voice suddenly quiet again. “Bring me a silver vase. With a lid, if you’ve got one.”
Gil had no doubt that there was exactly such a thing in Sketh territory.
The woman went on the run, in a stormcloud of flapping veils.
“You dare to imply—” began Lady Sketh again, but Ingold had already turned to the Guard Melantrys, who, with Gil, had remained when the others had gone, to make sure Lady Sketh didn’t try anything silly to cover up her earlier, appalling attempt to acquire a mage of her own.
“Melantrys, tell Janus and the Icefalcon to drive Tarpaeis down to the Aisle. Maia—”
The bishop stepped forward, despite the fact that bishops weren’t supposed to take orders from mages. Everybody took orders from Ingold.
“Get as many of the Church guards as you can and station them in all the entrances to the Aisle. Gil, get back to the Guard-room and get whoever else is there to deploy as well. I want to meet this thing in the Aisle—” He gestured behind him, to the mammoth cavern filled with eternal night, prickled by scores of candle-lit doors, “—rather than try to deal with it in a maze. Ah, my dear—”
He accepted from the maid’s hands a silver jar, ringed with opal and cabochon emeralds and smelling faintly of orris-root and pomade. “Thank you.” And he smiled at her, like sunlight.
When Gil had delivered her message to the remaining Guards, snatched a halberd from the Guard-room rack and returned, at a run, to the Aisle, she found that the women with their spinning-wheels, the men sitting by their cell-doors to mend equipment or watch their children play after supper, had disappeared. Even the stray dogs and cats had fled. Ingold stood alone in the center of that vast space, the silver vase at his feet, a crumbling dark-bound book in his hand.
He signed Gil to approach: “It’s the Word-Book of Taranion,” he said, and gave it to her to hold. “It’s mentioned in the Black Scroll but I’ve never seen a copy – there wasn’t one at Quo, which had nearly every volume written. The Whisper clung to it, when Tarpaeis slipped it into his pocket in the dead cell of the Lost Keep.”
“No wonder he took it,” said Gil. “If I’d known it was something that rare, I’d probably have taken it.”
For a moment the blue eyes twinkled gravely into hers, knowing she wouldn’t have but smiling at her words, and the understanding they implied. Then he took his knife from his belt, and cut a long strip from the margin of one of the pages, and Gil flinched even at that cosmetic desecration as if the blade had gone into her own flesh. There were some things a historian simply can’t watch.
“You think Lady Sketh put him in the expedition for that reason?” she asked, as he dropped the strip into the silver vessel. “To find a magic book that you didn’t have your hands on?”
“Beyond a doubt.” With a quick move he yanked loose the leather thong that bound his white hair into a warrior’s topknot, and cut a handful of his hair, which he dropped in after the stiff vellum; then he pushed up his sleeve and deliberately gashed the back of his wrist, turning his arm over so that drops of blood fell into the silver jar as well. Shouting could be heard from the doorways that opened onto the balconies that overlooked the Aisle; two men in black tunics raced across one of the stone bridges far up in the darkness. Second level, thought Gil, her heart beating fast. They must at least have headed him off from the stairs that lead further up…
Thank God for small favors.
The torchlight behind those doors brightened, augmented by the cold white radiance of the glowstones carried by some of the Guards.
“Put that somewhere safe,” said Ingold quietly. “And keep behind me. If I had time I’d put a line of sigils around the Aisle but I don’t, I’ll have to rely on the torches of the Guards. I’m not sure they would work anyway. The same for a magic-circle for you. This thing is frightfully strong, Gilly. When I drive it into the silver jar, slam the cover down—”
“Will it get power over you from your hair and your blood? Or over Mithrys?”
“Not inside the silver. The real problem will be—”
He swung around.
Tarpaeis stood on the Great Stairway.
He still wore the white tunic and jacket of the Sketh guards. Gil wondered, looking at him, whether Lady Sketh had ordered him to train occasionally with the Keep Guards so that he could come and go around Ingold’s library unremarked. He seemed older now than seventeen, his face in its frame of dark curls barely recognizable as the diffident, oddly reserved boy who had on a dozen occasions talked to Gil about fighting technique and how to hand-rear motherless puppies. Even at a distance of nearly fifty feet, in the flickering gloom, Gil saw him open his mouth and make a breathy noise like a hiss, an animal sound. He looked back up the stairs and saw the line of white-clothed Sketh guards there, and with them the Icefalcon and two or three Keep Guards.
Looked at Ingold, standing in the Aisle alone.
Gil scanned the nearest doorways behind her, caught the eye of Captain Hayox in one. She held up the book and he raced across to take it from her: “Don’t let him pass,” she said softly. “Get your men up to the Second Level and the third, if there’s enough of them—”
“There aren’t. We’re barely covering the doorways down here.”
“Put anyone you can to make sure they’re covered. Don’t let him get into the mazes of the Keep. We’ll never get him out, and if the Keep isn’t safe we’ll totally be screwed.”
“What about the Doors?”
At the far end of the Aisle, two hundred feet behind her, the Gate-Passage, blocked with massive doors of sable adamant, led to the cold spring night outside. The only way out of the Keep.
“Keep someone on them,” said Ingold, quietly, over his shoulder. “If it gets out it’s only a matter of time before it gets in again. We need to destroy it. The only place it can feed is here.”
Gil cursed.
Tarpaeis came down the stairs at a light-footed run.
Arrows flashed and clattered on the steps around him. Gil yelled, “Don’t shoot!” as one of them –
insanely inaccurate – slashed through the hem of her tunic and another tore Ingold’s sleeve: she’d seen on other occasions what magic could do with arrows, once they were in the air. She thrust the silver jar-lid into the front of her tunic and gripped the halberd’s shaft; she wasn’t sure if the extra distance the weapon would give her would help if it came to taking Tarpaeis on herself, but she felt better with it. The young man ran straight at Ingold, sword in hand; from the corner of her eye Gil saw movement in two of the doorways that opened into the Aisle, heard a man there cry out in disgust and alarm and thought, Rats…
They were in the Aisle, too, dozens of them, swarming from all corners towards Ingold and, Gil realized, herself. She’d been afraid of them as a girl in California and living in the Keep – though the wizards’ rat-wards on the whole had kept the population in check – her fear had turned to a loathing respect. Do what you can, she told herself. They’re speedy little fuckers…
She moved closer to Ingold but the rats, rather suddenly, seemed to realize they were in the open and in danger, and swerved away…
Counter-spell, thought Gil. Not what he needs to distract him…
Tarpaeis – or the thing within him – veered, and Ingold sprang to cut him off; doubled in the other direction, but again the old wizard was before him. With another hiss, the younger mage stopped, sword raised in his hands—
And darkness fell. The witchlight that surrounded Ingold failed suddenly and completely, and in the same moment the firelight of the Guards’ torches and the cold white gleam of the glowstones died, as if Gil had been struck blind, which for that first, awful second she thought she had. Then she heard the cries and shouts of the other Guards – and the panicked screaming of the people of the Keep, who of course were clustered in the corridors behind them…
Dammit!
The owl-wing swoop of Ingold’s robes, followed by the clash of steel – He’s a wizard, he doesn’t need light, the light is for us…
Glowstone-light outlined one doorway, two… A scattered swirl of witchlight fountained around the two wizards, coalesced into feeble radiance as the two men struggled, blades glittering and striking sparks. Gil moved behind Ingold like a shadow, halberd held ready, watching: Tarpaeis is going to weaken. If I go in while he’s strong Ingold will have to help me, and that will break his concentration…
I’ll know my time.
Ingold stumbled, caught himself. Either Tarpaeis had got in a stroke or one of his spells had acted like a physical weapon, for blood poured down the side of the old man’s face, streaked his white hair. The witch-light showed him bathed in sweat, Tarpaeis’ face wooden, save for those demon eyes. A woman’s voice screamed from the Guard-room, “Ranny— !”
Ranny was one of them, Gil recalled. Ranny Nasis. He’s pulling his strength from them.
Tarpaeis drove in hard, and Ingold fell back before him, across one of the railless footbridges that spanned the Aisle’s streams. Dark closed around them again, like wings of shadow; Gil was aware – and she was pretty sure Ingold was aware – that the thing, the Whisper, was forcing him not toward the outer doors of the Keep, but toward one of the doors that led from the Aisle back into the lightless mazes. She saw standing within it the youngest of Lord Ankres’ guards, white-faced, blank-eyed with terror.
He’s going for the weakest link…
Ingold staggered again, the sword flashing as it was knocked from his hand to ring on the stone of the floor. Gil wasn’t sure how she knew this was a feint but something about the old man’s movement told her, He knows more tricks than an Alketch gladiator, and she was already moving in as Tarpaeis – his face suddenly convulsed with bestial triumph – instead of going for the doorway drove at the fallen wizard with sword upraised and his whole attention diverted to his kill.
And he knows YOUR weakest link, pal…
The spell Ingold threw included a blaze of something that wasn’t quite light, but dazzled and nearly blinded Gil as she swung the halberd like a razor-edged baseball-bat at Tarpaeis’ neck. At the last second he tried to dodge and the blade took him across shoulder and back, blood spraying like a fountain. He dropped to his knees and Gil swung the blade again, and that young face opened its mouth in a silent scream.
She saw something – thicker than steam, creamy-textured like chemical smoke – pour from his mouth and whip like a snake toward the one familiar anchor-point in the whole of the vast emptiness of the Aisle: a mage’s hair, a mage’s blood, and the parchment it had inhabited for so many thousands of years.
Gil dropped her halberd and had the silver jar-lid in her hand as she dove back across the stream to where the jar was, conscious of Ingold’s magic like a thunderclap around her as she slammed the lid into place.
She was kneeling beside the jar, shaking all over, holding the lid down with the whole of her weight, as the wizard stumbled across the little bridge and came to her side.
“What happens now?” The metal jerked, hot under her hands.
When Ingold didn’t reply she looked up. Saw him looking down at her, at the jar, blood pouring from the wound on his scalp and from his nose and the corner of his mouth. “We have to destroy it in the jar,” he said. He was leaning on her halberd, and white as a sheet under the gore.
Rats whipped around their feet, racing from all corners of the Aisle toward the jar. Ingold made a gesture at them and they fled back, but not far: He wasn’t kidding when he said this thing was powerful. The jar-lid shifted again, bumped upwards against her hands. At the same moment racing feet clattered from the direction of the Guard-room. Minalde, dark hair streaming over her shoulders, Hethya at her heels.
“They’re dying,” cried the nurse-maid. “It’s drinking their lives, they’re like wax—”
“Rudy and the others are putting all their strength into holding them,” whispered Alde. “But you can see the shadow growing over their faces…”
Gil looked up, and met Ingold’s eyes. When he said nothing, Gil waved the two women back, and waited til they were out of earshot before she spoke.
“Can you kill this thing?” she whispered.
“Not alone.”
She wondered if he’d have been able to take it out even if he hadn’t just been hammered flat by its strength.
“Call them,” said Gil. “It’ll break out of the jar soon and those kids’ll die anyway if it does. And so will the next ones it goes after.”
Ingold closed his eyes, turned his face away.
I managed to destroy my father’s realm and kill every person in my family…
She wondered, for the first time, Did that include a wife and a child?
And, if she said to him, Do it – and if the children died, as she knew they would the moment the three novice mages released their spells on them – would he ever forgive her, in his heart.
And then I’ll be… What? A small-time killer in a dying world, with nothing… Or a crazy woman back in my own, if he sends me back there… A world where I’ll no longer belong.
Have not belonged for years. Maybe I never did.
She said softly, “What if the next child he takes is Mithrys? Or Tir? What if the next child he takes is the next mageborn, the next wizard, who could save the next generation in the Keep?”
He didn’t say, I can’t, because he knew he could.
And would not forgive himself either, ever.
He looked at her and in his eyes she saw desperation, like a dying man.
She opened her mouth to say, Do it, but the words that came out were, “Have you got enough strength left to call weather?”
Ingold blinked, startled at the question – It clearly wasn’t what he’d been expecting her to say. “Of course.” Weather-spells were, Gil knew, fairly simple. They were among the earliest that he’d taught his three pupils, years ago.
“Then somebody get me some wire,” she said. “Iron or silver… chains, too, if we’ve got them—”
Hethya stood staring at her with tears running down her fa
ce but Alde caught up her queenly robe-skirts and ran for the armory as if the Devil were at her heels.
The silver of the jar was beginning to glow with heat by the time the blacksmiths and armorers of the Keep had wired the lid into place. When that was done Gil could feel the jar itself vibrating, and had the uneasy sense that in only minutes the metal itself would explode like a shrapnel grenade. Ingold, though he’d stayed beside them in the Aisle, had sunk in on himself, the witchlight around him fading as he called on his depleted strength to summon an early storm from the river-valley below; by the time the Guards had lifted the jar onto a litter, and carried it at a swift walk to the Gate-passage, the air that swirled in from the night outside was unseasonably hot, and smelled of ozone.
“We need to get it on top of the Keep.” Storm-gusts dragged at Gil’s hair, a coarse black mane soaked with sweat; lightning flickered in a sky like tar. Ingold, beside her, seemed to hear nothing. It couldn’t be easy, calling and holding a thunderstorm in May, barely a month after the last blizzards of April. The Icefalcon, pale braids jerked by the wind, caught Ingold by the arm, dragged him at a near run toward the wooden tower that had been built in the second year of the Keep’s occupation and re-built after the Summerless Year, a rickety, swaying needle whose top story sported a twelve-foot drawbridge that led to the roof of the Keep itself. No means of ingress had been found on the whole huge black space of that enormous roof, sloped behind a head-high parapet, but Gil had found what she thought were remains of old water-tanks up there, and the marks where some sort of machinery had long ago stood. The climb had terrified her, and she had not gone up again.
Now the weirdly humid blasts of the thunderstorm made the stair-tower’s wooden framework creak and shift, and the far-off lightning illuminated the trees around them, branches tossing as if with fevered life. I can do this… we’ve had worse winds than this one this winter and it didn’t fall. At least she could walk forwards up the swaying stairs: Janus, carrying the other end of the makeshift litter on which the jar rested, was ascending backwards, but then nobody in the Keep had ever accused the Guards’ commander of having nerves. The jar had begun to crack and steam; sickly yellowish light poured from beneath its lid. Through the sticks that served as handles Gil felt the uneven shuddering of the vessel itself. If it explodes now it’ll take out the whole top of the tower, it’s sixty feet to the ground…
