All this will pass away, she had said, and leave us with nothing.
I’m sorry.
“Rudy?”
The tiny voice behind him almost didn’t register. The words In a minute, Ace formed on his lips and froze there as he realized that what had once been a completely commonplace communication was now fraught with meaning.
He drew his breath and let the images within the Cylinder fold away on themselves. Let his thoughts settle and return home.
Another breath, for good measure.
Then he turned in his chair.
Small and clean in his shabby jersey and patched jerkin, Tir came into the workroom. His azure eyes were uncertain as they considered Rudy, and by the lines at the corners of his small mouth, he wasn’t finding this easy. He was angry still and struggling to put it aside.
He carried a bundle in his hands.
“What can I do for you, Prince Altir?” Instinct told Rudy not to assume anything about Tir’s visit, and Tir relaxed the smallest fraction at the formality of Rudy’s attitude. I understand you don’t want to be my friend anymore and I respect your choice, Rudy said, looking into the eyes of the child who had been like a son to him.
Tir’s voice was stiff. “Rudy, I found this today in one of the rat traps. I thought you had to see it.”
He set the bundle on the scrying table in front of Rudy and climbed onto the other stool to unwrap it. Rudy could see by the way the small hands worked at the dirty washrags that Tir didn’t want to touch the thing inside.
“Yikes!” Rudy drew back hastily from what was revealed. “What the …?”
Tir was watching him with grave eyes. A king’s eyes, Rudy thought. A king who guessed his people were in danger and was checking the problem out with the local mage in spite of the fact that that mage had been responsible for the deaths of all his friends.
The rat was the size of a small terrier, and of a shape no rat had any business to be—a shape Rudy had never seen in a lifetime that had encompassed Wilmington wrecking yards and cities choked with the bodies of slain men.
His mind clicked to Gil’s thin hands, scraping and picking at the collection of sticky and deformed bones. To the Icefalcon, showing him the slunch beds in the woods and the tracks around them. To the rubbery wastes of sickly herbiage that glowed in the twilight and the revolting sense of things bouncing and scuttling around their verges. He whispered, “Friggin’ hell.”
Tir looked up at him, the distance he had set between them momentarily put aside in their shared responsibility for the inhabitants of this small, beleaguered domain. Rudy saw in his frightened face that he’d guessed already what was going on; that he was hoping he was wrong. But he wasn’t.
Knowing it to be true, Rudy said, “There’s slunch growing in the Keep.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Two girls from the fifth floor north found it: a deserted cell in one of the many waterless areas near the back wall, with slunch covering two walls and most of the ceiling. Rudy was interested to note, brightening the magelight above his head as Janus of Weg ordered his Guards to scrape the stuff down with shovels, that the organism had attached itself only to the partitions of wood and plaster that long postdated the building of the Keep.
“Pull down that ceiling,” Janus ordered, squinting up at the rude beams that indicated a storage area jerry-rigged overhead. “Those walls have to come out as well. Biggar, send a couple of your boys down to the crypts for barrels …”
“On your authorization,” the head of the Biggar clan said quickly. “I’m not having that thief Enas saying those barrels are charged to me.”
“Seya, go with them,” said Janus, who since the minor coup of the Keep Council had become very tired of details like this. “Tell Enas I’m asking for them and we’ve got authorization from Her Majesty. That suit you?” he added sarcastically, and the People’s Representative of the fifth level north drew himself up, a greasy-haired, repellent man with a fleshiness sharply in contrast to the rather gaunt look that most of the Guards—and most of the people in the Keep—had these days.
“There’s no need to be abusive,” Biggar said. “I just like to keep these things clear.”
“Tear down the whole thing.” Janus had already turned back to his Guards. “Even what doesn’t have the stuff on it. Rudy, what do we do? Burn it?”
Rudy straightened up. He’d been on one knee, studying the rat droppings that strewed the floor. Their size and configuration gave him a queasy feeling about what must be scuttling around the Keep.
“Ingold’s got enough sulfur in the crypts to make vitriol.” He came back over to the Guards, brushing off his hands. Caldern, the tallest, snagged a ceiling beam with a billhook and threw his weight on it; the whole thing sagged, and Rudy ducked aside as the skeletons and droppings of rats, plus an unspeakable rummage of disintegrated baskets, cracking brown rags, old dishes, and featherbeds rotted with rodent nests and insects came pouring down. Rudy could see slunch growing on the upper side of the false ceiling as well. “What a Christly mess.”
The Guards moved by torchlight and glowstone through the fifth level and the fourth, their numbers augmented by the warriors and livery servants of Lords Ankres and Sketh and assorted volunteers. Rudy didn’t like this latest development, because of a suspicion that was growing in his mind, but when he voiced his desire to limit the search to the Guards, Lord Sketh retorted, “So, have you decided to rule the Keep by yourself now, Lord Wizard?” Rather than subject Alde to yet another round of hair-pulling among the factions, he had held his peace.
But later in the day he spoke of it to her, when they stood together in the cold twilight on the Hill of Execution, watching the Guards pour oil of vitriol on the pitful of slunch and the still-squirming pieces of the one gaboogoo that Biggar’s brother-in-law Blocis Hump had cornered and cut up in a back corridor on the fifth.
“Remember all those shufflings and whispering behind locked doors up in that area of the fifth that was supposed to be deserted?” he said quietly, turning his face aside from the acrid smoke that hissed up from the burning. “And what Gil said about not liking the color of Saint Motherless Bounty’s robes?”
“I asked Maia about Saint Bounty,” Alde said. “He said there is no such saint—not in the canon, anyway. But small villages did have their local saints, whom no one else had ever heard of.”
“Maybe,” Rudy said grimly. He made a move to lean his shoulders against the two iron pillars that crowned the hill, but at the last moment avoided their touch. He had been chained between them one cold winter night, and left for the Dark Ones—it was a memory that lingered.
“But I had another look at those statues, and I figured out what it is Gil didn’t like about the color of Saint Bounty’s robes. They’re the same color as slunch. And the stuff he’s sitting on, that looks like spaghetti or pig entrails or whatever? It also looks like slunch.”
He cast a quick glance around, to see if any of the Ankres henchmen were near, and then, taking Minalde’s hand, led her down the hill toward the narrow path that led around the south wall of the Keep and on to the higher ground, the orchards and the graveyard in the rear.
“I think there are people in the Keep who are raising slunch and eating it.”
Alde drew back with an exclamation of disgust. “How could—” She stopped herself. In the five years of Gil and Ingold’s career as scavengers in the decaying cities of the Realm, they had brought back tales of things far worse. Instead she said, “Janus and the Guards searched.”
“Janus and the Guards and old Ankres’ bravos and Sketh’s guys and a whole squad of other folks, including people like Old Man Gatson and Enas Barrelstave who I know have caches all over the Keep of chickens and grain and meat swiped from the smoking racks. I’m betting there’s corridors and cells around Lord Sketh’s chambers that our people haven’t searched; Barrelstave’s, too. There could be anything there.”
Alde drew her cloak more closely around her thin shoulde
rs and walked at his side with bowed head, the chill glacier-wind flaying at the edges of her hair. “They’re speaking about setting up a Council of Regency, you know,” she said softly. “Lord Ankres and Lord Sketh—which actually means Lady Sketh—and Maia. There’s a lot of unrest among their adherents, and among the general folk of the Keep. They say that you should not be so close to the governance of Prince Tir.”
Rudy felt the hair of his nape rise. “Screw ’em,” he said. “If they want a showdown with a wizard, I’ll sure be glad to give ’em one.”
“It’s not that easy,” Alde said. She had released his hand, and walked with arms folded, drawn in on herself. “I need Ankres, and I need Sketh—I need their men, and the power they wield. And I need the goodwill of the Keep. And you can’t seriously think of using your magic against those who have none. You have to sleep sometime, Rudy, and you know already there are those in the Keep who have the poisons that will rob a mage of his power.”
He was silent, but his breath came hard, clouding white in the lurid, fading glare of the sunset. If he fought anyone, he knew, the loser would be Alde. She would lose Tir. Maybe, if the Guards put up a fight, if the factions chose up sides, they all might lose the Keep entirely.
As they approached the dying orchards, the graveyard with its steles that seemed to reach like the skinny fingers of buried hands to plead with some unfair god, he heard Varkis Hogshearer’s voice: “Don’t you fret about it, my lady. My girl’s powers are growing every day. Why, in no time at all she’ll be able to get you what you want …”
Rudy thought, among the gray boles of the withered trees, that he could make out the dark red gown and particolored veils he remembered seeing on Lady Sketh, down by the pit where they’d burned the slunch.
Slowly, he said, “So what do we do? Wait? Let the stuff keep growing in the Keep? I swear that’s the reason I can’t contact Ingold from inside the Keep—the slunch is interfering with magic in there, concentrating itself within the walls. What’s it gonna interfere with next? The ventilators? The pumps?”
His mind went back to the Bald Lady, walking through what he would have sworn was some deep crypt within the Keep, passing the sparkling webs, the columns of crystal, the glimmering lights. Walking in magic.
We have failed. Sitting on her black glass plinth in the unfinished foundations, she had looked up into the long-haired warrior’s eyes. I’m sorry.
But she’d been wrong.
She’d walked the halls of the Keep, weeping; passed through its crypts, deeper and deeper, tears running down her face …
All of this will pass away.
But it hadn’t.
“We can’t let the Keep go, Alde,” he said softly. “No matter what Barrelstave and his fugheads say about moving downriver or resettling where it’s warmer or making deals with whoever rules Alketch. No matter what kind of answer that idiot Pnak sends back, if he isn’t playing postman to the White Raiders’ ancestors by this time. No matter who we have to kill. The answer is there. The food is there. It was made as a shelter, to last for all of time. It’s our only hope, if we can figure out … whatever it is we need to figure out.”
They had reached the high ground, where the land steepened still farther toward the upper meadows and glacier streams. Westward the Keep reared, huge, black, slick, its half-mile bulk biding the notch of Sarda Pass that led away into the west, hiding the knoll of execution itself.
Rudy recalled again being chained on that hill, the night the Dark had passed over the Keep in a silent, inky, inexorable river. The night Gil had killed Alde’s brother in the moonlit snow. He still got the willies, being outside at night.
Now he thought about those pillars, that hill, the way they framed Sarda Pass like a gun sight if you stood on the steps of the Keep the way the bloodied warrior of his vision had stood.
They had the whole lower meadow to build a hill on. Why put one there?
The images came almost at once.
As before, it seemed to Rudy that he had grown tiny and was sitting within the Cylinder itself, rather than holding it in his hands where he knelt between the black pillars on the knoll.
It was night in his vision, a quarter-moon glistening like meringue on the glaciers, which were themselves no more than a thin rime above the coal backbone of the mountain walls. The grass that grew thick underfoot was diamonded with dew. The warmth of the night was almost palpable, warmer than the morning in which he actually sat, and he knew somehow that the scents of grass, of water, of the pine trees that grew thick over the floor of the valley, were drenching and heavy, like an exquisite drug.
Even the shape of the land was different. The whole Vale babbled with streams, bright and multifarious in the moonlight: streams and ponds and freshets where the big wheat field was now, fat with standing cattails and willows, wild grape, ivy. A sense of sleeping birds. The knoll had not existed then.
Where it would be, the grass had been scythed, burned over, and scattered with sand in a wide circle. Marshlights like will o’ the wisp flickered in the tall sedges beyond the circle’s bounds, delineating the Warden-spells of certain more ancient forms of the craft. A shape had been traced in the sand, three long lines, glowing circles knotted and inter-knotted with trackways—Roads, they were called in the oldest books, or Weirds. Flames burned where they crossed.
All this he saw as clearly as he still saw the Keep, the knoll, the wheat fields, and the present course of the stream. But the realities were equal, and for a time he did not know which was the dream and which present life.
The Bald Lady knelt in a protective circle only a few feet before him, but several yards down, at the old level of the ground. She was making the signs of what Rudy recognized as a dispersal, clearing up the ambient power from the air at the end of a rite. She wore a simpler version of the gauze sheath that she’d had on in his earlier visions, over it only a kind of sleeveless robe, also of gauze.
When she stood, the lines of multicolored light sinking back into the sand and the blue Warden-fires dying to coals, Rudy saw that she was young.
Younger than he was now.
She turned her head as at some sound in the deep woods of oak and hemlock, and a breeze Rudy could not feel lifted the gauze of her dress to a momentary, shimmering veil. Her straight, dark eyebrows dove in unalarmed puzzlement, and he followed her eyes to the thing that stood pallid and ghostly against the black trees.
His first thought was that it was a dooic. But the next second he saw that the thing was entirely human in shape, a naked, whitish, hairless grub raising tiny malformed hands to protect its huge eyes even from moonlight. It turned to flee, but the Bald Lady stretched out her hands, and Rudy felt the Word she laid on the warm night air: Safety. Peace. Good. The gentle strength of the spell was such that could he have done so, he would have stepped down out of the Cylinder and gone to her, too.
She gathered her gauzy clothes around her knees and waded through the summer lupine toward the newcomer.
She laid on words of trust at the white and pitiful thing—trust in her own strength, her serene power to protect—and watching her, Rudy felt his heart clutch up at the awareness of her own trust, the confident kindness in her step, the way she held out her hands. But as it stepped toward her, with its scratched, bloody hands, its tiny mouth gaping, huge eyes blinking helplessly—Rudy understood what it was.
It was a herd-thing. Of human descent, its race had been bred by the Dark Ones in their caverns below the earth, bred for thousands of generations as food.
Rudy sat for a long time between the black pillars of the knoll, thinking about what he had seen after the images were gone.
Our strength was not enough, she had said. All this will pass away.
He remembered her face, old and weary beyond words. Remembered the tears on her face and the fact that though she wept, she still bore herself like a queen.
And her secret was still there, whatever it was. Locked within the heart of the Keep.
; He looked up, the night vision melting back to daylight, and saw Scala, the Bald Lady’s prospective successor, toiling sweatily up the knoll with the martyred air of one bearing an almost impossible burden for the good of all. He noticed again the unhealthy plumpness of her cheeks and neck, and the way her too-expensive crimson gown strained across the breasts and hips. Food theft? Or was Hogshearer holding something out for himself and his family?
A horrible vision flashed across his mind of Hogshearer having somehow found and broached the old food caches; of Scala disenchanting them; of everyone digging in and eating them instead of saving them for seed …
Don’t be ridiculous. If you can’t get the things to quit being rocks, she sure as hell won’t be able to …
When she was ten feet away from him, Scala pulled back her arm and flung at him the thing she had in her hand. Rudy saw what it was the instant she released it and grabbed in a panic, barely saving it from breaking. “For Chrissake, Scala! We’ve only got a few of these things, and—”
“It doesn’t work!” she screamed at him. “It’s a stupid, crummy, worthless piece of trash and I don’t care if it breaks! I’m doing it right! I know I’m doing it right!”
Yeah, and you’re talented and beautiful like your daddy says. He stifled his anger, bit back his words, the little porcelain spell-bowl cradled protectively in his hands. “Yeah, but how smart is it to get mad at the bowl?” he asked gently, looking into the bloated, red, furious face. “Let me try.” He held it cupped in his hands and spoke the Name of Water in his mind. “You been practicing your—”
“Of course I’ve been doing my stupid meditation!” she yelled. “Daddy makes me, hours longer than you said. And that doesn’t work, either! It’s stupid! You lied to me! Everybody lies to me!”
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