The Walls of the Air

by Barbara Hambly

  "If we can," Ingold said. "Your patrols can be eked out with volunteers, Janus. Get the Keep orphans as your scouts. They're always into everything anyway; they might as well be put to use. We need to patrol the corridors, simply to know if and where the Dark break in. It isn't likely that they can," he went on gravely, "for the walls of the Keep have the most powerful spells of the ancient world woven into their fabric. But whether the spells have weakened, or whether the Dark have grown stronger in the intervening years, I do not know." Despite the calm in that deep, scratchy voice, Gil thought he looked grim and driven in the uncertain flicker of the hearth-light. "But I do know that if the Dark Ones enter the Keep, we shall have to abandon it entirely, and then we will surely be lost."

  "Abandon the Keep!" Janus cried.

  "It stands to reason," the Icefalcon agreed, leaning back against the wall behind him. He had a light and rather breathless voice that sounded disinterested even when discussing the loss of the last sanctuary left to humankind. "All those little stairways, miles of empty corridors… We could never drive them out." The captains looked at one another, knowing the truth of his words.

  "It's not only that," Gil put in quietly. Their eyes turned to her, a quick glitter in the room's shifting shadows. "What about the ventilating system?" she went on. "The air in here has to travel somehow. The whole Keep must be honeycombed with shafts too small for a man to fit through. But the Dark can change their size as well as their shape. They could fit through a hole no bigger than a rat's, and, God knows, we have rats in the Keep. All it would need would be for one of them to get into the ventilation—the thing could attack at will, and we would never be able to find it."

  "Curse it," Janus whispered, "that the Dark should rise at the start of the worst winter in human memory. If we quit the Keep, those as aren't taken at first nightfall would freeze before they came to shelter. These mountains are buried in snow."

  "Rats…" Tirkenson said softly. "Ingold, how do we know the Dark aren't lurking somewhere in the "upper levels already? The Keep stood empty for nigh two thousand years."

  "We would have known," the wizard said. "Believe me, we would have known by this time."

  "But their eggs?" Tirkenson went on. "How do the Dark Ones breed, Ingold? As Gil-Shalos said, it would need only one to go through the air tunnels, laying eggs like a salmon along the way. We could be sitting on top of a spawning ground of the Dark." Though the Guards were not as a rule nervous people, a ripple of horror seemed to pass through the assembled captains. The instructor Gnift shuddered and exchanged a quick, worried look with Melantrys.

  "You needn't concern yourselves with that, at least," Ingold said quietly. He picked a bit of straw from the frayed sleeve of his mantle and avoided all their eyes. "I have seen the breeding places of the Dark beneath the ground, and I assure you that they do not multiply in any fashion so—tidy—as that." He looked up again, his face carefully calm. "But in any case, we cannot allow the Dark entrance under any circumstances. The corridors must be patrolled."

  "We can get Church troops," Janus said, "and Alwir's private guards."

  "I have my own men," Tirkenson added, rising. "The lot of us can take the south side of the Aisle."

  "Good." Ingold stood and lifted his head to search the faces of those crowded into the narrow barracks, seeking someone in the uncertain yellow light. "I doubt that the Dark will be able to breach the walls themselves, but if they do, we must know it."

  "Can we know?" Melantrys straightened her sword belt, glancing up at him with chill black eyes. "The Dark can swallow a man's soul or blood or flesh between one heartbeat and the next, a yard from his fellows, before he can cry out."

  "A Guard?" Ingold inquired mildly.

  She bridled. "Of course not."

  "There you are." He picked up his staff, his shadow looming behind him like the echo of the darkness waiting beyond the gates of the Keep. Once more he scanned the room, the figures there fading into milling confusion of preparation and departure. It might have been a trick of the firelight, but the lines seemed deeper in that calm and nondescript face. Whether this was from weariness, apprehension, or sheer annoyance, Gil could not tell.

  All around them men and women were slinging on swords and finding cloaks; voices called to one another through the dark, narrow doors of the barracks. The air seemed somehow heavier, the fear in it as palpable as electricity; if she had touched Ingold's cloak, Gil thought, sparks would have jumped from the fabric. Janus remained for a moment at Ingold's side, towering over him, his broken-nosed, pug face grave.

  "That is for the corridors," he said quietly. "What of the gates?"

  "Yes," Ingold said. "The gates. I feel that is where they will concentrate their attack. But with the height of the ceiling in the Aisle, once inside they can strike from above, and ground defense will be almost useless."

  "I know," Janus said softly. "They'll have to be fought in the gate tunnel itself, won't they?"

  "Maybe," the wizard replied. "Gil—I shall need your help at the gates." Then he frowned and cast a swift, raking glance over the remaining Guards. Bright azure eyes hooded like a falcon's glittered in the shadows. "And where," he asked grimly, "is Rudy?"

  At the moment, it was the question uppermost in Rudy's mind as well.

  He knew he was still somewhere on the second level; but that was about all he could be sure of. Having missed the turning for the stairway he sought, he had tried to double back along an allegedly parallel corridor, with disastrous results. A makeshift hall through what had once been a large cell beckoned, only to dead-end him in a black warren of crumbling brick and dry rot that spiraled him eventually into the center of the maze, a long-deserted outlet for the Keep's indoor plumbing system. Cursing those who had designed the Keep and those who had felt called upon to improve it alike, he crossed through the dark, water-murmuring privy and out into the corridors beyond.

  He walked in the darkness without light. This was another ability which had surprised him, like being able to call fire from cold wood, or light to the end of his staff. Ingold had told him that this wizard's sight had been born in him, like his other talents, the seeds of a magedom that could bear no possible fruit in the warm, lazy world of Southern California.

  And still he felt it—the building of tension, like water mounting behind a weakening dam, the brooding horror that seemed to fill the dark mazes through which he walked. His step quickened with his heartbeat. The conviction grew in him that the Dark were outside, focusing inhuman lusts and will upon the smooth, impenetrable walls of the Keep. Beyond human magic or even human comprehension, their numbers and power were so great that their presence could be felt through the ten-foot walls wrought of time and stone and magic. He had to find Ingold, ha
  He found himself in a short neck of corridor that bore every sign of having been part of the original Keep. A flow of warmer air indicated a stairway somewhere nearby, leading down to the first level. Rudy paused, trying to get his bearings. Directly in front of him loomed the end of the passage, black and seamless, as if poured from a single sheet of dark glass. That would be the back wall, he realized in surprise, of the Keep itself.

  Fantastic, he thought. I've come in a bloody circle and, after all that wandering around, I still get to come down in the middle of Church territory anyway. He shrugged. But it beats hell out of wandering around up here all night.

  He did not go forward, however. A short stairway of a few steps branched up to his right, with a door at the top. The mirror-smooth blackness of the stone proclaimed steps and wall as part of the Keep's original design, but the setting of the door caught his attention. It was so placed as to be absolutely shadowed, thrown into virtual invisibility, from any light carried in the corridor itself. Only a wizard, walking like Rudy without light, could have seen it at all.

  Fascinated, Rudy moved forward. His sense of the mounting peril and terror of the Dark grew no less. They would strike, and strike
soon—he felt that much in his bones. But he knew that, provided they survived the night, he and Ingold would be setting out on their journey in the morning, traveling hundreds of miles through the barren plains and desert to seek the City of Quo where it lay hidden on the Western Ocean. Concealed as this room was, he was not altogether sure that he'd be able to find it when he returned.

  But above all, pure curiosity drew him as a string might draw a cat, the unslakable curiosity that was the leading trait of any wizard.

  The door was shut, the ironwork of the lock so rusted as to be almost unworkable. But it was no worse than the oil pans of some cars Rudy had wrestled with in his time. The chamber within was circular, unlike the uniformly rectangular cells elsewhere in the Keep. A bare workbench ran halfway around the walls; under the bench, wooden boxes proved to contain miscellaneous rusted junk.

  But in the center of the room stood a table, rising from the floor itself and built of the same hard, black, glassy stone. It was about four feet across, and inset in its center was a plug of heavy crystal, like the glass covering of a display case. But when Rudy perched himself on the table's edge and called a ball of witchlight over his shoulder to look, the white gleam glared back into his eyes, for the crystal was cloudy, showing only a kind of angular glitter underneath. First with his nails and then with the tip of his dagger, he tried to pry the cover off, without results. But there was something under there, of that he was sure. Elusive glimpses of angles and surfaces whispered in those frosted depths. An observer, watching him as he examined the impenetrable stone, would have been reminded of a large and gaudy cat frustrated by a mirror.

  To hell with it, he thought in disgust and made as if to rise. This is no time to be messing with toys.

  But he was drawn back again. His shadow lay hard and dark over the gray glass, sharp-edged in the cool, steady light of the ball of phosphorous that hung behind his shoulder. After a moment's thought, he dimmed and diffused the light, trying to peer past the flickering crystal, but the thing still denied his gaze. Gradually he let the witchlight die entirely and sat looking at the thing in the dark.

  Around him the room had fallen utterly silent. He knew that he should go but did not. He sensed that the thing was magic, of a deep and mechanistic sorcery far beyond his natural talents. Was this the magic, he wondered, that he would learn at the school at Quo?

  His fingers probed at the crystal again, finding no seam between glass and rock.

  Another thought came to him. Hesitantly, he projected a thin sliver of light into the crystal itself.

  White and blue and lavender reflections blossomed forth around him like the three-dimensional tail of a celestial peacock. He shied back, shielding his eyes from that bursting fountain of light, then dimmed it, working awkwardly with the few light-spells he had been taught, like an artist's child with his first crayons. He suffused the crystal with a dim light and leaned over again to look inside, to the glittering bed of colored rock salts that lay at the bottom of their crystal cylinder.

  A toy? A trip-light? An enchanted kaleidoscope?

  Or the magic tool to further magics?

  Staring down into those bright depths, he relaxed his mind, slowly emptying his soul of all concerns for the Dark, for Ingold, for Alde , and for the answer to this riddle itself. He let the soft, bright glitter of the gems below have its way with him, to do whatever it did.

  For a time the images confused him. He did not understand what they were—incoherent scenes of blowing sand, rock hills on which nothing grew, rolling seas of brown grass invisible in the overcast night. He sensed rather than saw a dark place take shape, roofed with clouds and drifted deep in snow, walled in by high cliffs of black rock crowned with twisted pines. Beyond the black clouds he sensed gorge-riven peaks, knife-edged heights, and the endless miles of glaciers where the ice winds skated, screaming… Sarda Pass? he wondered. Tomorrow's road? The images grew clearer—ragged foothills and then an endless brown plain, with tawny grasses waving under the lash of the wind. A black sky was sheeted with cloud. A pale thread of road stretched out of sight into pitiless distance.

  Frozen and bitter vastness swallowed his soul.

  And, as if the images moved with his heart, he saw the soft glow of reflected candlelight and the starred embroidery on the changeable colors of a silken quilt. The colors shifted, aqua to teal to river-reed green, as they were shaken by the sobbing of the woman who lay there, her black hair thrown about her like scattered silk.

  I can't leave her, he thought in despair. I've known her such a short time.

  And miss Quo? the other half of his mind asked. And not speak with the Archmage? Not have Ingold teach you the ways of power?

  He closed his eyes. Like a tingling through his skin, he became aware again of the Dark and the building fury of them, riddling the night like the coming of an electrical storm. I have to go, he thought, with a sudden chill of panic. But still he stayed, paralyzed between his choices—Minalde on the one hand, Ingold and the Arch-mage Lohiro on the other.

  He opened his eyes, and the image in the crystal changed again. »

  Small and distant, the stars were visible—more stars than he had ever imagined, filling a luminous sky that hung low and glittering over the endless roll of the blue-black sea. Their piercing brightness touched the curl of foam on the silver curve of the beach. Outlined against that burning sky, he thought he could make out the shape of a tower, looming storey on turreted storey from the trees that crowded an angular point of land thrusting out into the ocean. But the tower seemed strangely elusive, slipping his eyes past it, turning them again to the stars. He tried to look inland, but found his gaze eluded there, too. Half-guessed shapes of buildings clustered there, twining patterns of color on stone columns muted by darkness, briefly visible and then swallowed by mists. Try as he would to focus on the land, he found his eyes coming back to the sand, the sea, and the midnight sky, as if in a gentle refusal to answer his questioning.

  Against the dark bulk of that square knoll and half-seen tower, he glimpsed the sudden flash of starlight on metal, winking momentarily and then gone. He looked again, releasing all thoughts of striving from his soul. The metal twinkled once more, and he caught the long swirl of a cape brushing sand, the scuff of a foot above the tide line. Like a sudden wash of spilling opals, the stroke of a wave eradicated footsteps from the sand. The man whose prints they were walked slowly on, and Rudy could see the starlight now on his bright gold hair—hair the color of sunfire.

  It surprised him, for he had expected the Archmage Lohiro to be old.

  But this man wasn't. He was surely less than forty, with a young, clean-shaven face. Only the firm lines of the mouth and the creases in the corners of eyes that were a necked and changeable kaleidoscope blue betrayed the harshness of experience. His hand around the hard, gleaming wood of his staff reminded Rudy of Ingold's hand, nicked with the scars of sword practice, very deft and strong. The staff itself was tipped with a metal crescent some five inches across, whose inner edge glinted razor-bright. The starlight caught in it, as it caught in those wide blue eyes and on the spun-glass glimmer of foam that washed the beach in a surge of lace and dragged at something half-buried in the sand.

  Looking down, Rudy saw that it was a skeleton, old blood still staining the raw bones, crabs crawling gruesomely through the wet, gleaming eyes of the skull. The Archmage barely turned his steps aside from it The hem of his dark cloak brushed over it as he passed and swept the sand as he went on down the beach.

  Rudy sat back, cold with sweat and suddenly terrified. The light died out of the crystal below him, leaving the room pitch-dark but for the bluish echo in its heart Then he heard a sound, faint and distantly booming, a vibration that seemed to shake the Keep to the dark, ancient bones of its agelong foundations.

  Thunder, Rudy thought.

  Thunder? Through ten-foot walls?

  His stomach seemed to close in on itself. He got up and headed quickly for the door. A second booming
reverberated through the Keep, setting up a faint, sinister ringing in the metal junk heaped in the corners and shivering in the mighty walls.

  Rudy began to run.

  Chapter Two

  "Damn the boy," Ingold whispered, and Gil thought that he looked very white in the wild jumping of shadows. The first blow of that incredible power smashing at the outer gates had jarred the torches in their sockets, and they guttered nervously, as if the light itself trembled before the coming of the Dark. Behind her in the Aisle, utter chaos prevailed.

  Men with torches ran to and fro, calling mutually contradictory rumors to one another and brandishing makeshift weapons in frightened hands. Little flocks of children and old people, the nuclei of small families, huddled like frightened birds along the watercourses, as close to the center of the great space as they could get, having fled their cells in terror when the pounding started. Others, mothers and fathers who had left their dependents back in the close darkness of their cells, crowded around Janus and the small knot of Guards who had remained in the Aisle, waving their arms, demanding what was being done, pleading for even lying assurances of safety. Janus towered above these lesser people in the torchlight, his voice deep and intense, allaying fears and recruiting patrols as best he could in that whirling chaos of noise and lamplight.

  It was a scene out of Dante's Hell, Gil thought, with darkness like velvet and a random frenzy of flickering light. Thank God, the Keep is solid stone. Maybe we can get out of this without immolating ourselves by morning.

  If the Dark don't get us first, she added.

  But Ingold was there, and Gil had never found it possible to be truly afraid when she was at the wizard's side.

  So she felt only a kind of cold detachment, though her blood rushed violently through her veins and her body tingled with a cold excitement. The separation was physical as well as emotional, for she and Ingold stood together on the steps before the gates, with the pounding, sounding roar of the beaten steel at their backs; none would come near them there.