Barbara Hambly - [Darwath 07] - Whisper Read online

  A human skeleton lay in a corner. Rat-bones sprinkled every level surface.

  “It’s got to be plague,” Gil replied softly to the young warrior’s question. “People don’t just let skeletons lie and rot in their living spaces.”

  “So what happened to the healers?” The youth’s horrified gaze traveled from the bones to the shadows.

  Gil said, drily, “Guess.”

  Ahead of her, she heard Rudy’s voice murmuring to his crystal. “It’s a Keep, all right. There’s furniture – old stuff, good stuff, like in the record-crystals, but it looks pretty banged-up. Bones everywhere. Gil says she thinks they got hit by plague…”

  “That’s insane,” whispered Hayox, commander of Lord Ankres’ personal guards. “Yes, the Church has periodically turned against some wizards. But you have to admit some wizards have well deserved it. And the Church has wizards itself.”

  “Yeah, and six years ago the Bishop of Gae tried to kill or banish every mage in the Keep of Dare,” pointed out Gil. “Without asking about anybody’s qualifications as a healer or anything else. People do some amazingly stupid things in the name of God.”

  When they stepped out into the corridor – one of those endless, lightless hallways that gridded the Keep of Dare, the frightful ice-bound Keep of Tiyomis and the patched remains of the Keeps at Prandhays and Black Rock – Rudy signed the others to halt. He closed his hand around the crystal, closed his eyes. Listening, Gil knew. Stretching his senses in the way that Ingold had taught him – in the way that Ingold trained all his three novices – spreading his awareness through the enclosed blackness of this sealed tomb. The silence was terrible, without the constant soft mutter of humanity that characterized even the depths of night in Dare’s Keep, without the faint trickle of water from the fountains, the occasional whisper of gusts in the ventilation system.

  Nothing. Like being trapped underground. The air smelled queer, and the breaths of all were visible as diamond cloud in the witchlight glimmer.

  “You think we might at least find glowstones?” murmured the Guard Bors. “We could sure use more of those on the upper levels.”

  Glowstones, Gil felt like reminding Hayox, were an example of the magical technology of the Times Before that had been lost when, sometime in the centuries after the first arrival of the Dark, a wave of religious fundamentalism had caused those who knew how to manufacture them to be executed for being in league with the Devil.

  “Ingold said don’t touch anything,” she whispered back.

  “He didn’t mean glowstones!” protested the Guard. “We really need those!”

  “My kid is back in the Keep,” returned Gil. “You touch a glowstone and I will cut off your hand. Besides, if these bozos got rid of their wizards, they may have done something dumb like smash every glowstone in the place as well, just to show how holy they were.”

  “Now, that’s not fair…” protested the devout Hayox.

  Rudy opened his eyes. “Nada,” he said. “Keep an eye out for anything that’ll tell us where the hell we are, Spook,” he added to Gil. “We could be on the other side of the world, and wouldn’t know it. I don’t think it’s night outside, it’s sometime in the afternoon—”

  It was part of a wizard’s training to be aware of the movements of sun and moon.

  “—so for Chrissake, keep an eye on the time.” He tapped the wristwatch that was one of the few things Gil had happened to bring with her, six years ago, from California. “I sure as hell don’t want to wait twelve years for that transporter to line up with the Keep again.”

  *

  There were, in fact, glowstones stacked up in several of the rooms, gone dark now with time. Gil didn’t take her eyes off Bors while they were in those chambers, and watched to make sure he didn’t slip away and go back when they moved on.

  On the ground level of the Keep, in what was Church Territory in the Keep of Dare, they found a Chamber of Silence, sealed with the Runes that deadened magic, and within it, human bones and about a dozen scrolls. Even the rats hadn’t come into this place. The skeleton lay whole, arms wrapped around the brittle, age-darkened fabric rolls, skull resting on them. Gil whispered to Hayox, “I told you so,” and Rudy – though he cringed visibly when he crossed the threshold – used his staff to move the bones aside, and to unroll one of the volumes enough for Gil to copy the lettering of its opening section on the ivory tablet she carried. The Icefalcon kindled a torch – since Rudy’s magelight wouldn’t work in this room – and some of the other Guards gathered around them, whispering uneasily.

  Caldern, who stood closest to the door, said sharply, “What’s that?” and they all nearly jumped out of their skins.

  “What?” Straining her ears, Gil could hear nothing.

  “Tapping,” said the big man. “Way off down the corridor.”

  Rudy handed his torch off to Hayox, walked to the door. Listened again to the blackness, as he had before.

  “I don’t hear anything,” he whispered, coming back to the little knot of Guards in the torchlight. “But let’s get the hell out of here. I think we’ve seen enough.”

  In their exploration, Rudy had left glowing smudge-marks on the wall with his thumb, to guide them back to the transporter chambers. But Gil, who like most of the Guards had acquired a strong sense of inner navigation in the dark corridors of the Keep, put her hand on Rudy’s sleeve when he would have turned to follow the line of the marks; and the Icefalcon raised his torch, to show their tracks proceeding straight, scuffed into the carpet of rat-droppings and bones. Thirty feet farther on they found Rudy’s glowing marks once more, following the tracks again: “What the fuck?” he whispered.

  Gil noticed that he’d developed a tendency to glance behind him, as if listening for something that he couldn’t quite hear. When they moved on the darkness behind them felt thicker, seeming to drink the light, and the featureless black walls stretched before them and behind.

  Rudy quickened his steps. Sweat beaded his face despite the bone-breaking cold; they moved more slowly, following their own tracks rather than the glowing smudges on the wall, which twice more disappeared, only to be glimpsed down corridors which – judging by the unmarked floors – they had never walked.

  Gil and the Icefalcon were the last ones through the Transporter, standing guard in the doorway of the old kitchen while the others went ahead of them; then retreating through the bunk-room with its dead. “What is it?” Gil breathed, as they passed the narrowest pair of crystal pillars, and saw – to Gil’s inexpressible relief – the double line of pillars glint ahead of them in the darkness, and the glimmer of magelight through the door at the end of that line.

  The Icefalcon’s gray eyes narrowed, and he only shook his head.

  When they came through the last doorway into the Keep, Gil felt as if they had barely avoided some terrible catastrophe. As if they had escaped just in time. Rudy made the signs Ingold had taught him, and the green light within the crystal pillars died away. With Minalde, and Ilae, and Lord Ankres and Lady Sketh all gathering around them asking questions, Gil looked over her shoulder through the door behind her.

  The last chamber of the line had become only a dark little room again, barely five feet deep.

  She had never thought that the sight of a black stone wall could bring on such a dizzying wave of relief.

  *

  A part of Gil sensed there was something wrong, almost from the beginning.

  Even before Ingold returned to the Keep – which he did three days later, looking as usual like a desert saint after a particularly rough night with demons, and carrying a satchel full of books – Gil found herself waking in the deeps of the night, thinking she heard scratching in the lightless corners of her cell. The Icefalcon confirmed that he was seeing more rats, not only in the back corridors of the Keep’s upper levels, but in the Guards’ complex itself. Like Gil he found the recollections of the Lost Keep disquieting. Like Gil, he was watching for trouble. Rudy came to the Guard-room and
renewed the rat-wards (“I didn’t know they can wear out, but maybe this is normal after six years…”), but Gil would still waken in the night, straining to hear sounds she wasn’t sure were real.

  Ingold, when he returned, listened to her account of the exploration, and of its possible aftermath, in troubled silence. Though he’d been on the road since before dawn, he tucked Mithrys into bed, and walked the Keep with Gil for the rest of the night: every corridor, every back-room and stairway, vault and attic. Listening. He even descended to the Keep’s dark heart, many levels below the ground, and spoke to the spirit of the Keep, the mage who long ago had let the Keep absorb her, that her magic might preserve its inhabitants safe.

  This was always an iffy proposition, and he came back well after dawn, having learned nothing.

  But he went to Janus, commander of the Keep Guards, and requested that Gil be excused from duty for an indefinite period. “I want you to start going through the oldest books we have,” he told her quietly, as they made their way from the commander’s tiny quarters to the double cell that housed his library. “I’ll get the Bishop to lend me his clerk to read the Old High-Church tongue, but I don’t think anyone besides yourself – and me – can read Old Gaenguo runes accurately…”

  “Accurately isn’t how I’d describe my reading,” she warned him, and the old man shook his head.

  “It’ll have to do. I’ll put the others on to help you, and I’ll be there as much as I can. It may only be a few words, it may only be rumor and mention in the oldest chronicles, but I need to find what that Keep was that you entered, and anything – anything whatsoever – about what happened there.”

  The ball of witchlight that floated before them broadened its light as they entered the library. Rough shelves filled one wall: scrolls, books, and fragments of books, some black with mold and water-damage, others glittering with bindings of gold and gems. Another shelf held record-crystals – those frost-gray polyhedrons that had been found in such numbers in the back corridors of the Keep. A doorway gouged through the cell wall connected the library with one of the small, round chambers that dotted the Keep, containing a black stone table through which the crystals could be read.

  Gil – trained as a historian at the University of California – regarded the library’s three hundred volumes, many of them completely unreadable, as a horrifyingly slender resource for civilization to depend upon, and for the past six years she, Ingold, and the other Keep mages had spent devoted their spare time to laboriously copying what they could, so that at least other copies would exist in case of accidents. Ingold had taught her some of the more arcane tongues that had existed in the world centuries ago, and in addition to her duties with the Guards – and the myriad exigencies of motherhood – she had even-more-laboriously worked at deciphering and translating the most ancient volumes. It didn’t help, she reflected, that since the Summerless Year eighteen months ago it was almost impossible to get parchment – the Keep sheep-herds had been reduced to almost nothing. Most of her notes and translations were done on thin slabs of wood or clay, smeared with wax. The Hornbeam family on Level Two North had figured out how to make a kind of coarse paper from wood shavings, pulped leaves, and shredded cloth, but it was difficult to write on and there was a constant tug-of-war with the Church – which had its own program of re-copying the Scriptures – over it.

  “I’ve been through most of what I can read already.” Gil nodded toward the upper shelf. “I don’t recall anything about any of the old Keeps besides the ones we knew about already: Dele, Penambra, Prandhays, Black Rock, and Hathyobar in the South. They don’t even mention Tiyomis, much less any system of transporter links between them, so that’s a piece of knowledge that must have been lost pretty early. Look how long it took you to figure out that the crystals in that wall-display in the old laundry was some kind of targeting control, and we still don’t know what it means or how to work it.”

  “You need to start on the older books,” said the wizard, and took down the largest of them, whose dark covers were netted over with rusted iron. “I know you were waiting til your command of the Old High Wathe was better, but we can’t wait. This is a copy of a translation of the oldest history that the mages of Quo possessed, and I’m afraid the spelling and orthography change every few pages; I’ll help you where I can. And I’m going to start teaching you – and the others – the Tethweir languages, that were in use in the Alketch and the Crimson Lands for about a thousand years, though they’ve quite died out now. The segment of that scroll you copied in the Lost Keep was in a form of Tethweir.”

  “Does that mean the Lost Keep might be in the south?”

  “It could. But forms of Tethweir were used by black magicians and necromancers everywhere, so it might mean nothing. Certainly the segment you copied didn’t sound like any work of black magic I’m familiar with, but it was a work completely unfamiliar to me…”

  His mouth tightened for a moment, and she saw in his eyes the bitter glint of regret. It was a scholar’s hunger that she completely understood: that a book he’d never encountered before had been momentarily within his reach, and now was gone.

  Gil put her arm through his, and led him back through the little neck of hall that joined the library to the Guard-room, and to their chamber beyond that. “You can start teaching me tomorrow,” she said. Through a curtained door to their left came the sharp bark of the swordmaster putting the Guards through their training-drills, the rhythmic thud of soft-booted feet on the training-floor. As they entered the Guard-room, Ingold paused by the doorway that opened out to the Keep’s central Aisle.

  Cold thin shafts of daylight streamed through the great Doors at its western end. Women chattered as they did laundry in the pools there, or worked at their spinning-wheels while the children played. In the pallid witchlight the lines of the old man’s face, the weariness of his journey, seemed suddenly deeper, like the gouges of a stylus in wax, but there was a gentleness in his eyes, and a profound and peaceful joy.

  Six years after the coming of the Dark, thought Gil, they’re still here. WE’RE still here. She remembered nights when she would have bet everything she owned that they – and every man, woman, and child in the Keep – would be dead before dawn.

  Those voices – those playing children, and mothers gossiping at their work… Those are his reward.

  And mine.

  And the only reward we’re ever going to get.

  She took his hand. “Right now you’re going to get something to eat, and get to bed… I don’t suppose any of those books is a dictionary of Tethweir? Or a grammar? I didn’t think so.”

  “I’m afraid, my dear, you’re going to have the honor of compiling those… In your copious spare time.”

  “Fuck you.”

  There was a flurry of angry shrieks among the spinners. Two rats whipped from a near-by doorway, darted along the Aisle wall for about thirty feet and out of sight into another door, the pale daylight streaking their fur.

  Gil glanced beside her at Ingold, and saw his white brows pulled down in a frown that was not only concerned, but angry.

  “And in the meantime,” he added quietly, and put his arm around her shoulders, “I’m going to need to have a talk with every person who was in that expedition.”

  *

  Bors protested volubly that he hadn’t touched a thing. Janus, troubled, averred that he’d never found the man untrustworthy. Bors was one of the two-score men who’d joined the Guards after the arrival of humankind’s remnants at the Keep. His family was poor, formerly farmers who now occupied the ill-lit mazes of the Keep’s upper levels where the air was poor and one walked a hundred yards to the nearest fountain for water.

  Gil guessed half the family was trading on the black market.

  Caldern immediately turned out the contents of his small trunk for inspection, but Gil knew this meant little. Anybody who’d swiped a glowstone or anything else in the Lost Keep would have sold it immediately.

  Lord Ankr
es and Lord Sketh both vouched for the honesty of their men, all of whom swore they had touched nothing.

  “That just means somebody’s lying, doesn’t it?” Gil said, when all had left the Guard-room and she and Ingold retreated to their cell for a game of finger-puppets with Mithrys before bed.

  “I very much fear so.”

  For three weeks, it was only rats.

  Ingold used three or four different wards. They would work for a time, then the rats would be back, bolder and more numerous. Wards against other vermin – foxes in the deep caves where the herds were kept, insect life of all sorts – continued to hold, and none of his other spells showed any diminution or change. “Do rats have magic?” Rudy asked, coming out of the Keep’s great Doors one afternoon to find Gil and Ingold, after a night-long session in the library, supervising Mithrys’ investigation of a hollow log in the woods near the first of the pastures.

  “Of a sort, yes. As do cats, and spiders, rabbits, mice, and snakes…” Ingold held out his hand, smiling, as his son toddled up to him with a crinkly-edged golden plate of oak-fungus to give him. The spring sunlight, the scent of pines and of the growing crops down by the river, were a blessing better than food, after the eerie brooding darkness within the Keep.

  “But it’s uncodified, and only what they can source from their own bodies. Like small children who’re mageborn, before their powers go into abeyance.” His brows tugged together for a moment: after six years, only one of the children who had refugeed to the Keep at the Coming of the Dark had grown back into mageborn powers, and she had died in the Summerless Year. No others had surfaced so far.