Barbara Hambly - [Darwath 06] - Pretty Polly Read online

  Sure enough, when Rudy advanced a dozen yards into the darkness, the blue-white flicker of light came to life again.

  Rudy walked backwards and forwards, passing his hands repeatedly over walls and floor, then returned to the dead spot and with the Icefalcon’s torch, carefully examined the black stone of the walls again. Two cells opened from that section of corridor, and he minutely examined them both, his witchlight fading down to a pinpoint that illuminated almost nothing. Much further along the corridor he picked up traces of Ingold’s presence again, but shook his head: “These are… they may be old. They’re real faint. I know he explored a lot back here last year…” They followed nevertheless, a flicker here, a whisper there, until the signs merged with a more travelled corridor that led back to the Little Blue Bridge.

  But Ingold was gone.

  *

  “What is it?” Janus of Weg, commander of the Keep Guards, slumped into the chair by the hearth of the Guards’ watchroom and looked around at his colleagues. “What could it be?”

  The other Guards traded uneasy glances. Gil, folded up small on the corner of the watchroom’s great hearth with her arms wrapped around her knees, said nothing, as if breaking the silence would be admitting that whatever it was – whatever had eluded them through nearly ten hours of searching – it had taken the Archmage, the most powerful wizard in the world, without a trace.

  Twice she had left the search, to return to Dathy’s cell and her son. At eight months, Mithrys was walking, albeit unsteadily, and though he wouldn’t fuss if left without one of his parents, he displayed a disturbing genius for escaping to follow them. On both occasions, Janus had insisted Gil be accompanied by two of the other Guards: walking through the blind darkness of those empty mazes, Gil had listened, watched – tried to stretch out her senses as wizards did, for scent of danger, of trouble, of anomaly…

  And had heard only the whispered echoes of their own footfalls, smelled only the drifting wisps of cooking-smoke and uncleaned latrines and illegal chicken-guano. I’d know it if something had happened to him, she told herself – and told herself still. Now, curled in her corner of the Guard-room hearth, she heard the horns in the Aisle blowing sunset and storm – the storm going into its fifth day.

  Something is in the Keep…

  The nightmare that she, and every inhabitant of that great fortress, had shared from the first night they had taken refuge there from the Dark Ones.

  Something is locked in here with us.

  Something that kills.

  She was uneasily conscious that their search – which had ranged over the whole of the fourth level south, into the fourth level back and up into the fifth – could have missed large areas of the maze. On the lower levels, in the areas where people lived, corridors, junctions, fountains, warrens were marked. Even in those areas of the fifth level where the Biggars and the Gatsons and all their dependents had lived – before they had been decimated by eating the rubbery growths that had begun to displace crops since the coming of the Dark – it was relatively easy to find one’s way. Deeper in, farther back, nobody went, and the mazes of crumbling wood and partitions half-torn-down seemed featureless and endless, the darkness only broken by the flickering eyes of cats.

  “How could it have got in?” Rudy wanted to know, and Parus Anksman – one of those who’d been stationed outside the locked door of the Keep transporter, which no one was permitted to use – shook his head.

  “No one came near me. I can swear to that—”

  His partner nodded, one of the junior Guards. “I don’t think there’s been a time this past month, that anything weird happened near that door – I mean, nobody’s ever come on-shift and found the other watch sleeping, and the seals have always been in place—”

  “Even today?” asked the Icefalcon in his whispery voice.

  “Today? The girl disappeared last night—”

  “Ingold could have left,” pointed out the Icefalcon. “For reasons of his own.”

  “What reasons?”

  The Icefalcon raised colorless brows. “Reasons I wouldn’t think of,” he replied, “not being a wizard.” He glanced at Gil, who only shook her head.

  Rudy – sitting on the stone hearth beside Gil’s feet with Mithrys perched on his knee – said, “I think Ingold could have gotten past the both of you and used the transporter if he’d wanted to, and I think he could have done it in such a way that the seal on the doors wouldn’t be broken, but I don’t think he did. If the old man learned something about the Alien—”

  In spite of herself Gil smiled, at the movie short-hand that only the two of them knew.

  “—that he needed to investigate through the transporter, he’d have told someone what he knew before he left. And if he didn’t learn anything about it, he wouldn’t have gone. Not and left us here with it inside.”

  “And are we sure,” persisted the Icefalcon, with the matter-of-fact pessimism of the White Raider soul, “that the transporter by the laundry-rooms of the Royal Sector is the only one in the Keep?”

  The silence that followed this truly appalling suggestion lasted for several minutes – as well it might, thought Gil. She had never felt truly safe since she’d learned about the original transporter – which as far as anyone was ever able to tell, connected the Keep with the haunted, and now destroyed, Tiyomis Keep, the Keep of Shadows, buried deep beneath the Ice in the North. Ingold had sent ensorcelled rats through it, aiming for other Keeps that he knew about – the ruined Prandhays Keep in the Felwoods, the equally demolished Black Rock Keep in Gettlesand – but he had not been able to find any trace of them with his scrying-crystal afterwards.

  Like many pieces of the technology of the Times Before – the technology that had built the Keeps – it was something that neither wizards nor anyone else understood.

  “We’re pretty certain,” said Rudy warily. “Ingold and I have checked on that pretty carefully.”

  “But if another transporter emerged into a dead spot,” said Melantrys worriedly, “would you know?”

  “The damn thing is, Spook,” said Rudy later, when he and Gil were alone again in Ingold’s room, “I honestly don’t know.”

  The talk in the watchroom was still going on, but Gil, her head aching, had retreated to the long, narrow cell that for five-plus years had been her home – Ingold’s home. She had meant to change Mithrys, feed him and put him to bed, and then return. But these tasks done, the thought of returning to anyone’s company had repelled her. The miles she had walked along lightless corridors, up and down makeshift ladders and stairs, seemed to gather and press upon her, and she had lain down on the bed she’d shared with Ingold last night. The pillow still smelled like his hair: herbs and soap. For a time it seemed to her that she could not have gotten up if she’d wanted to.

  She heard the scratching on the door and said, “Yeah.” She knew it was Rudy.

  “I was down and talked to Brycothis,” he said softly, “in the heart of the Keep. And she couldn’t tell me… anything.”

  “Would she even know something like that?” In Gil’s experience – by what Ingold had told her, and Rudy, of the spirit of the ancient mage whose living power had gone into the walls of the Keep – Brycothis, though originally human, had long since ceased to have wholly human concerns. From the visions her spirit sent, Rudy had learned – and had put together with Gil’s help – diagrams of the energy patterns of the Keep, but they’d found at least a dozen dead spots that either Brycothis didn’t know about or hadn’t considered worth mentioning, including the one in which Ingold’s trail had disappeared. And Brycothis had never mentioned any of the Keep ghosts, or the room in the crypts that would kill anything that entered it except, for some reason, cats, or a number of other odd Keep anomalies.

  Speaking to her, Ingold had said, was not like communicating with a human being.

  “I don’t know that either.” Rudy sat on the end of the bed beside Gil’s feet, folded his arms around his knees. “Hell, I don�
��t even know if she’s still sane. How would I tell? Spook, I don’t know what the hell to do.” Having done all that could be done – walked every foot of the mazes that she had walked, stretched his magic out into the darkness for something that seemed to have blended itself into the silence – enforced inaction of ignorance left him helpless and slightly panicky.

  “Two things.” Gil sat up, scratched loose the remains of her braid, her coarse black hair tumbling loose over her skinny shoulders. Outside in the watchroom, voices had died down. It sounded like they were still tallying up all those things in the world that could take on the Archmage of the Wizards of the West without leaving a trace: dragons, rogue elementals, certain types of demons. Things Gil didn’t want to know about.

  “It’s either from outside, or it’s something that’s been here all along—”

  “It hasn’t,” said Rudy. “I mean, we’ve been here for five years, for Chrissake. What’s it been eating before last night? Where does it shit?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Gil. “It could be a ghost. That tommyknocker in the Sketh Sector didn’t start until last year.”

  “Yeah, but that’s a tommyknocker. That’s just noise…”

  “So far,” pointed out Gil.

  “You had to say that.”

  “Myself, I think the knocker is connected with that niece of Lady Sketh’s – she started hearing it long before anyone else did. Five years ago she was a baby in arms. What I’m saying is, it could be some kind of spirit or entity that hasn’t come active before this… for whatever reason.”

  “Christ,” Rudy whispered. “I think you’ve been spending too much time with the Icefalcon.”

  “It could even be a defense that was wired into the Keep. As far as we can tell, the original Time of the Dark – the one three thousand years ago – lasted for six or seven hundred years, and people were living in the Keep for at least another two or three hundred after it was safe to spend the night outside… or mostly safe. We don’t know what wizards were here or who they were working for or what cockamamie religions or power-politics or personal issues they thought were worth cooking up a demon over… Maybe it’s something that only shows up when Venus goes into retrograde, or when there’s a certain comet in the sky – and how could we tell, when there’s cloud-cover two hundred days of the year? – or when the mean yearly temperature hits thirty degrees. I think that’s more likely than that we’ve got an Alien Face-Hugger laying eggs in the back corners of the Keep.”

  “That’ll make me sleep better at night.” He nodded toward the far end of the long room, where on makeshift shelves Ingold had assembled all the books that he, Gil, and Rudy had spent the years since the coming of the Dark laboriously collecting: from Quo, the ruined City of Wizards on the Western Ocean; from the flooded ruins of Penambra and the demon-haunted Zenuuak on the Gulf. Gold leaf gleamed softly in the reflected light from the watchroom outside. Opals twinkled on a small volume’s silver clasps. “You help me get started on those?” he asked. “I can get Brother Wend to read the ones in the Old High Tongue, but he might not pick up on some details—”

  “Tomorrow,” said Gil, and got to her feet. “Would you do me a favor, punk? Would you follow me with your crystal?”

  “Whoa, you’re not going back there? I’ll come with you—”

  “No,” said Gil. “We’ve already figured out that whatever it is, it doesn’t come out if there’s ten guys with swords and a wizard to back them up—”

  “It doesn’t give a rat’s ass about wizards! It’s already—” He visibly bit back the end of that sentence: It’s already lunched the most powerful wizard in the world…

  He wouldn’t say it, as much because he dared not think it for himself, as for her feelings.

  But their eyes met.

  It isn’t true.

  And his sickened fear that it was.

  “We don’t know what it gives about what,” said Gil. “Now will you follow me, or not?”

  *

  Darkness hidden in darkness. From the Little Blue Bridge, working her way back, following the chalk-marks Janus had left on their first search that morning. Now stillness, as the clamor of the inhabited area died behind her, music and children playing and babies crying, lovers quarrelling, friends singing after supper. Just black stillness, centuries deep.

  Gil carried the glowstone wrapped in her cloak as she had before, and listened. Ingold, she thought, Ingold I know you’re here…

  But she didn’t.

  And whatever it was, IT was here, too.

  Eyes flashed, red and beady: rats whipping through the darkness. Cats, a mirror-shimmer of coppery wariness, then gone too. Rudy had seen one of the Keep ghosts back here somewhere, nearly a year ago – Why that one soul, out of the thousands who’d lived and died here over the centuries? What had happened to her – Rudy had said it was a her – that made her unable to leave this place? Gil moved cautiously, but didn’t really expect to see her, whoever she had been. One apartment she’d had in LA in her college days, she had later learned, had been the scene of a double shotgun murder three years prior to her own occupation and she’d never noticed a thing…

  Scratching.

  She froze, her heart lurching in her chest.

  She was in an old warren, where some family or power-group had broken down walls, re-built partitions, diverted hallways and subdivided cells, a messy tangle of little rooms like hexagons of a wasp-nest that someone had later used as garbage-dump. Unnamable dust and animal-bones that crumbled if you touched them. The room she stood in, she knew, was a dead spot. If anything happened, she was on her own. It was impossible to tell where the sound was coming from.

  But somewhere, something was scratching on a wall.

  A steady sound for a moment, neither advancing nor retreating. She moved the cloak around her glowstone a millimeter, and the widened glow caught in a cat’s round eyes, startling her nearly to death before the animal trotted away. Then, low and buzzing, a sound between a hum and a whistle, fading almost instantly.

  Gil slid her sword from its scabbard, tucked the end of her cloak through her belt, to hold the glowstone where it was. Moved forward with a cold sense of being barely able to breathe, to look through the door beyond her.

  Ingold. If I can get a look at it, we’ll know something. We may be able to track it, find him…

  She slipped through the narrow slot of the door. A tiny chamber with three more doors. Cat-eyes gleaming.

  The corridor beyond lay empty.

  Gil searched for another two hours, and returned to the watchroom only when she became aware that exhaustion was affecting her concentration. She ascertained that Rudy had seen nothing in his crystal, then lay down and slept like the dead.

  In the morning she woke to the news that another child had disappeared.

  *

  Gil had dreamed of her sister.

  Four years younger than herself, Donna was beautiful, with a sleek effortless beauty that their mother – beautiful also – had striven for all her life. Tanning-beds and makeover classes. You have to work at it, she remembered being told – endlessly – from the moment she’d entered Middle School. You have to think about it, all the time…

  Hours at nail salons while Gil read Toynbee and Barraclough.

  When she dreamed about her family – and it wasn’t often – in her dreams it was usually that awful year between graduating High School and entering UCLA, working temp jobs and living in her mother’s house as she’d stubbornly tried to put together the money to pay for her own education (“Dearest, we simply can’t afford it and I don’t care what those idiots in Financial Aid say… and my income tax forms are none of their business…”). This time, in her dream she was her current self – skinny, scholarly, clothed in the black uniform of the Keep Guards – something Donna didn’t seem to notice – and armed, which Donna also didn’t notice. And Donna, sitting on the pale-cream couch in their mother’s pale-cream living-room, looked the way Donna would
look at twenty-five.

  Except that one eye was bruised under the careful cosmetics, and on her slim, aerobically-conditioned bare arm, she bore another bruise, the four small dark dints that Gil recognized as coming from a man’s fingers. She’d seen her sister bruised like that before.

  In her dream she was yelling at her sister; furious, tears running down her face. “You’re fucking kidding me!”

  And Donna kept shaking her head and saying, “You don’t understand. I love him.” She cradled Pretty Polly to her, and Pretty Polly half-rose on her hind-legs to rub her smooth white head under Donna’s chin, then curled up in her lap and kneaded ecstatically with her paws – silent. As far as either girl had ever known, Donna’s cat had never been able to purr. Where her slim hand cradled the cat’s body, a diamond winked from her finger in the snowy fur. “How can I explain? It’s like trying to talk about colors to somebody who’s color-blind—”

  “I don’t have to have been in love to see that this guy’s an abusive asshole!”

  And Donna – Gil saw her trim Coach luggage-set stowed half-behind the couch, complete with Polly’s cat-carrier – smiled patronizingly: “Yes, but when we make up the sex is fantastic!”

  “The sex is fantastic if you buy one of those plastic gizmos from the Pleasure Chest!”

  Donna laughed, like silver bells, and shook her head, as if at the hyperbole of a child. “Oh, baby,” she said. “After all this time, and you still don’t know.”

  The back door slid open and a man came in, Donna’s – current husband? fiancé? Someone Gil had never seen. Big and blond – Donna always married blond men – and muscled as if he worked out. Pretty Polly leaped from Donna’s lap and streaked from the room in a way that turned Gil hot with anger, by the treatment that it implied: “You ready to go, baby?” the man asked. “It’s a long way back up to the mountain.”