Barbara Hambly - [Darwath 08] - Elsewhere Read online

  ELSEWHERE

  By

  Barbara Hambly

  Published by Barbara Hambly at Amazon

  Copyright 2017 Barbara Hambly

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  Table of Contents

  Elsewhere

  About the Author

  Elsewhere

  “You WHAT?” Rudy Solis, student mage and – up until an hour ago, according to what his fellow (and junior) student mage Tarpaeis had just informed him – second wizard of the Keep of Dare, stared at Tarpaeis in a horrified mixture of shock, panic, and the overwhelming desire to brain the junior student with his staff.

  “’Twas only for the fourth part of an hour,” pleaded the young man miserably. “We thought no harm would come of it—”

  “You thought no harm would come of it,” fumed Rudy, “if you sent away guards who’d been specifically detailed to stand in front of the doors of the transporter chamber, to make sure no one went in there while those sigils, whatever the hell they are, were glowing on its walls—”

  “It doesn’t matter what Tarpaeis did.” Lady Sketh thrust the hapless culprit aside. A regal woman of the old aristocracy of the Realm of Darwath, she had – when the remnant of humankind had fled before the depredations of the Dark Ones at their terrible rising eight years previously – guaranteed House Sketh its accustomed position of prominence by packing in her wagons foodstuffs, seed-wheat, chickens, iron, salt, and numerous other commodities which she had guessed would be in desperately short supply. It was also said in the Keep that she’d packed her entire wardrobe as well. Certainly her tall headdress and figured velvet gown were ten times more imposing than the plain white frock worn by Minalde, the Lady of the Keep, who sat quietly at the end of the table in the cell set apart as a conference-chamber in the tangle of training-rooms, barracks and store-rooms that comprised the enclave of the Keep Guards. Here Lady Sketh, surrounded by her train of her own warriors, her steward, and Tarpaeis himself, had located Rudy that bitter morning when the tenth blizzard since the autumn equinox scoured the black walls of the Keep.

  “The fact remains that my husband – the Heir Presumptive of this Keep and this Kingdom, I might remind you – is in mortal peril…”

  “The fact remains—” Rudy’s voice was now dangerously level, “—that your husband has managed to rob the Keep of its only trained wizard, at a time when, for all we know, we might all be in mortal peril…”

  “Nonsense!” retorted the Lady. “The sigils that appeared in the Chamber of the Door had nothing to do with the room becoming active.”

  “And we’re not all in mortal peril,” added Tarpaeis. Up until a few months ago Rudy had known the youth – who had just turned eighteen – merely as the youngest of Lord Sketh’s private company of guards, who would occasionally come and train with the Keep Guards to improve his swordsmanship. Since the spring, however, Tarpaeis had been Rudy’s fellow-pupil in the secrets of wizardry, under the instruction of Ingold Inglorion, greatest of the few surviving wizards in the West of the World…

  Who had, evidently, been in the transporter room – the Chamber of the Door – with the vanished Lord Sketh when that chamber had activated.

  Rudy guessed his fellow-Californian Gil Patterson had been with them as well. He could imagine no other reason why the former historian wasn’t in the conference-room at that moment, demanding Tarpaeis’ head.

  “And how do you know, Lady Sketh,” he asked quietly, “what activated the transporter – uh – the Chamber of the Door?”

  She drew herself up, pendulous cheeks blotching red, and Minalde said, “Let us take this from the beginning.”

  “There is nothing to take,” proclaimed the Lady. “Owing to an understandable wish on the part of my poor husband to verify a theory he had concerning these absurd rumors of a ‘haunting’ in the back portion of the Fourth Level—”

  Minalde lifted her hand. A slender young woman of average height, the Lady of the Keep was not someone people noticed in a crowd. Widow of the last King of Darwath, Regent for his eight-year-old son, she was still very like the girl Rudy had met – and fallen passionately in love with – upon his arrival in this peril-haunted world.

  But nearly eight years of ruling the remnant of humankind within the black walls of the Keep had left its mark, less on her face than in the morning-glory blue of her eyes.

  When she signalled for silence, even Lady Sketh shut up.

  When she had that look in her eyes, Rudy sure as hell knew not to mess with her.

  “You say—“ Minalde’s voice had the quiet sweetness of glass chimes, “—that Lord Sketh was concerned about the haunting at the back of the Fourth Level. That he had a theory about why it seems to be spreading.”

  Everybody knew about the haunted cell on Fourth Level Back. When the refugees had sought protection here from the starving hordes of the Dark Ones, the Keep had already been well over three thousand years old. Built in the Times Before as a sanctuary from the Dark Ones, it had stood empty for at least a thousand years, and for a millennium before that had been used by the farmers of these high mountain vales as a shelter for sheep in time of storm. The magic in its core had slept. Its secrets – and the secrets of the other Keeps, mostly ruined and their magic hearts broken – had been forgotten.

  Like the evidences of the great machines of the Times Before, like the crumbling books in a few ancient libraries that no one had bothered to re-copy, no whisper remained of what had taken place here, or how humankind had lived during the years of the Dark Ones’ first rising. When the world had warmed again, sufficiently to let those hideous beings retreat belowground, humankind had emerged – first hesitantly, then more confidently – from its windowless citadels. Towns, then cities, had re-arisen in the great river valley and the green plenty of the Felwoods. New songs, new stories had replaced those that spoke of the Time of the Dark.

  Thus nobody knew whose spectral hands those were, that sometimes appeared in a chamber on the Second Level, feeling along the wall. Nobody knew why neither rats, nor cats, nor dogs would pass down a certain stretch of corridor on the east side of the Third Level, nor the cause of the thin trickles of what looked like glowing slime that sometimes appeared to be flowing down the southern wall of a little half-cell in the middle of a tightly-built-up tangle around the Dog Fountain on Two; nor the source of the voices that could sometimes be heard whispering at the far northern end of the main corridor of Third North, nor what language it was they spoke.

  But the refugees didn’t inhabit cells any closer to those places than they had to. And the children who played in the mazes of the Keep’s corridors – fewer and fewer of them, as the winters lengthened and supplies of food remained precarious – knew very well where the “bad places” were, and stayed clear.

  It was the children who’d first notified Rudy – three weeks ago – that whatever it was that was in that cell on Fourth Back – it sometimes looked like moving lights, sometimes the shadows of eyeless men – had been seen sometimes in the corridors outside the cell as well.

  “His Lordship never thought that the ghosts in that cell were coming out.” Lady Sketh’s protuberant blue eyes shifted. “It’s almost directly above the Chamber of the Door. But of course, God forbid anyone but Lord Ingold is ever allowed into that chamber, for whatever reason…”

  “Du
h!” retorted Rudy. “That’s why Ingold ordered the transporter chamber kept off-limits! We have no idea how the goddam thing works, and we have no idea where or what is on the other end of it at any given time. Those sigils that appeared on its walls last week could mean any goddam thing! With an early winter coming on we can’t risk—”

  “Nevertheless, had my lord wizard—“ Her voice dripped sarcasm, “—been a little more forthcoming with information about it, Lord Sketh would have been able to simply enter it, to check a detail he had in mind, without subjecting himself to the possibility of accident! And accident is all that it was!”

  “If it was an accident,” put in Minalde reasonably, “why do you say that the sigils that appeared on the walls of the the Chamber of the Door had nothing to do with the Chamber waking to life?”

  Lady Sketh glared at Tarpaeis, whose family, Rudy knew, had been dependents of House Sketh for generations. Very pale, the young man said, “Because an identical sigil appeared at the same time in a cell on the level above. I… I activated that sigil – um – by mistake.”

  “WHAT?”

  “By mistake?” Minalde tilted her head.

  “’Oh, gosh,’” mimicked Rudy savagely, “’here’s this completely unknown mark that appeared on the wall at the same time there’s something going on down in the transporter chamber, I think I’ll just activate it and see what…’”

  Minalde held up her hand again. “I think perhaps,” she said, “we need to go see this new sigil. And the… the transporter chamber itself. Rudy—”

  Rudy had meanwhile dug his scrying-crystal from the pocket of his vest. Heart beating hard, he concentrated on the mental exercises Ingold had taught him to clear and open his mind – no small trick, he reflected, given the fact that the old man might very well have been killed – and stared into the white lattices of the crystal’s heart.

  Ingold… You there? Pick up the phone…

  Did scrying-crystals have a range?

  Though if Gil was alive she’d be with Ingold – and her image could therefore not be seen – he focussed his thoughts on the thin, tough academic who’d come to this world with him…

  “Where is my husband?” Lady Sketh’s powerful contralto boomed across his concentration. “Can you see him?”

  “Fuck your… If he’s with Ingold I won’t be able to.” Minalde had kicked him sharply under the table. “And I can’t reach Ingold… if any of them are even alive at all.” In his heart of hearts Rudy suspected that had Ingold been killed, he would have been conscious of it, somehow. But rage and dread – this was far from the first time Her Ladyship had caused trouble – closed his mouth on this theory. After a few deep breaths he said, “There may be some trace in the transporter. And yeah, I’d kind of like to see that sigil in the room above it that you didn’t bother to mention to anybody.”

  Lady Sketh whispered something to her steward, then stepped forward as the Lady of the Keep made to rise. “I think I need to explain,” she said, “how all this came about.”

  Her explanation, boiled down to its bullet-points, consisted of:

  1) Lord Sketh had a theory about why the “ghosts” on Level Four were starting to come out of their chamber. (Why didn’t he mention this to Ingold? Why didn’t TARPAEIS mention this to Ingold? Or to Minalde? Or to – oh – like, ANYONE…?)

  2) He’d had Tarpaeis “make a spell” to send the guards away from the transporter room doors, (Why the hell would anyone connect the ‘ghosts’ with the transporter room? They were around for years before we knew what the thing was) so he could go inside and check something. (WHAT, for Chrissake???) (And why didn’t he just ask Ingold?)(And what was Lady Sketh doing along on this expedition?)

  3) Tarpaeis and Lady Sketh had then retreated up the stairs to the fourth level, to a room where a glowing sigil, identical to the odd, glowing sign which had manifested itself on the walls of the outer vestibule of the transporter chamber a week ago, had appeared at the same time as those in the room below (AND YOU DIDN’T BOTHER TO MENTION THIS TO INGOLD WHEN THEY FIRST APPEARED? WTF???).

  4) Tarpaeis had “accidentally done something” to activate that upstairs sigil, which in turn had “activated” the sigils in the transporter chamber. (WHAT???)

  5) Tarpaeis and Lady Sketh (you still haven’t explained what you were doing going along, honey) had then rushed downstairs to the transporter chamber and to their horror had found it empty.

  By that time Rudy’s list of questions about why they hadn’t stayed by the transporter chamber when Lord Sketh went in, what they’d thought that upstairs sigil was or did (And it sounds like it’s smack in the middle of the Level Four Back haunted territory…), and how it could have been “accidentally” activated, had passed his capacity to express them. And the way Lady Sketh delivered her information, with a plethora of circumlocution, back-tracking, and unnecessary detail, made him increasingly suspicious. She wasn’t usually this long-winded.

  That meant…

  A glance at her entourage confirmed that her steward was gone.

  Cleaning up evidence while she stalls.

  “Can you explain this while we’re on our way there?”

  “Certainly. Except that you must understand…” Five more minutes of verbiage while her Ladyship stood her ground like a velvet-swathed refrigerator and blocked Minalde’s every attempt to get past her to the door.

  For a woman who’s in a sweat about her husband’s safety she’s sure taking her time.

  “Your Ladyship,” said Rudy at last. “Every frakking minute we stand here pushes the chances of us finding your husband – and the only goddam wizard in the Keep who can deal with whatever the hell might attack us next week – further away. So if you don’t mind…”

  Lady Sketh gave way at that, and as she strode out of the conference chamber beside Rudy and Minalde, there was even a slight pucker of worry on her brow within the frame of her the red-and-gold veils. To do her justice, Her Ladyship had shown herself on occasion to care for her husband, in her overbearing fashion. Lord Sketh (Whose picture, Gil said, could be found in any dictionary illustrating the entry for “Pussywhipped”) in his turn seemed to have genuine affection for his bride, despite the fact that she told him what to say and what he could and couldn’t do and how to run House Sketh and its dependencies.

  Or maybe he’s just too scared to let it seem otherwise.

  Rudy’s hand tightened around the crystal in his pocket, as if the warmth of his palm alone could somehow break whatever barrier separated him from his indomitable old master.

  He’s not dead. I’d know if it he was dead…

  Wouldn’t I?

  *

  For the first six years of the Keep’s current occupation, the little complex of rooms at the back of the Third Level had been used primarily as laundries. Elsewhere in the Keep, rooms with water had tended to be claimed for residential purposes by whoever thought they could get away with it, but the laundries and their fountain had been directly above the area claimed by the Bishop Maia and the red warriors of the Church. Only gradually had Rudy gathered that the inhabitants of the Keep wouldn’t have lived in those rooms even had the Bishop not commanded they be kept as the property of all.

  They had never felt quite right.

  “Yeah, we left our post.” Melantrys, the little blonde spit-cat who’d been guarding the former laundry doors, glared at Lady Sketh. The twisting mazes of the Keep’s corridors were uniformly ill-lit, but someone had gathered half a dozen glowstones – milk-white polyhedrons of light – and set them around the doors, and this gleamed on a faint scribble of blue light, barely visible, written across the face of the portal.

  Ingold’s mark.

  Do NOT come in.

  “Gil and I were on duty. We heard a scream up at that end of the corridor. I thought the Hornbeams had cleared out of those cells five days ago, after Lapith saw what looked like a man in armor, taking shape in his childrens’ cell. We ran down there to check and Gil ran to get
Ingold, and when I came back here to the door it was shut, and Ingold’s mark was on it.

  “After a few more minutes Her Frakking Ladyship sort of loiters up holding Lackbeard here—“ she glared at Tarpaeis, “—by the arm. Madame asks, had Sketh been by? I said I didn’t know. So Tarpy puts his hand on the door the way you guys do—“ She nodded at Rudy, “—and says, Er, um, uh, he sure has… Then her Ladyship sort of swells up and yanks the door open, and there’s Sketh’s cloak on the floor.

  “But the room’s empty.”

  Rudy said, “Crap,” and opened the door.

  Carefully.

  The transporter room – as Gil and Rudy had named it – was in fact a series of four chambers: a square vestibule, and a long chamber with a fountain. The two successive rooms beyond had originally been bricked shut. As far as anyone could tell, it had long ago been part of a system of communication between Keeps, but no record existed of when or how, or how it had worked.

  In the first chamber, a grid of crystals had been set into the right-hand wall. A few feet from this grid, a sigil – written in light and unknown to Ingold or to any of the mages he had contacted at the Black Rock Keep in Gettlesand – had appeared mysteriously seven days previously. No one knew why.

  But as Rudy entered, he saw that all the crystals in the grid – which Ingold surmised controlled or predicted the activation of the transporter spells – pulsed with a faint, greenish glow. This too had begun a week ago, two weeks after the children had first reported ghosts in Level Four back. That was when Ingold had asked that a guard be set on the chamber.

  Lord Sketh’s unmistakeable white velvet cloak lay just in front of the crystal pillars that flanked the entrance to the second, long chamber.

  Rudy’s heart was pounding so that he almost felt sick. The only other Keep transport chamber they’d been in – now destroyed beneath the glaciers of the north – had had a completely different system of guidance spells. Nobody – not Ingold, not Thoth of Gettlesand, not the glowing, conscious heart of the Keep of Dare itself – knew how to control the transport chamber here. If he himself vanished, nobody – certainly not his three fellow-novices – had the slightest idea of how to bring him back.