Barbara Hambly - [Darwath 07] - Whisper Read online

  “Generally human wards are far stronger than rat-magic.”

  “And damn lucky for us,” Gil added.

  “You don’t think a… a RAT from the Lost Keep could have snuck through while the Transporter was open?” Rudy sat down on the log at Ingold’s other side. “And be teaching the others here?”

  “After eating what for two thousand years in the Lost Keep?” inquired Gil. “We walked around there for three hours and we didn’t see a sign that anything or anybody had lived there since the Fall of the Roman Empire.”

  “Oh,” said Rudy. “Yeah. Good point.” His troubled frown remained as he turned over in his hands the waxed board he carried, covered with his notes on the old High Church tongue. “Up on Fourth South it looks like they swarmed a cat,” he said after a moment. “Pretty much tore the flesh off its bones. Not good.”

  Gil had taught herself Latin and Old French in her studies at UCLA, and had learned how to learn languages. She was ahead of the others, reading and deciphering the Chronicle of Zhechores and the Black Scroll of Quo. Brother Wend had come to the Keep with only enough knowledge of the Church Wathe to enable him to read the Scriptures, but had learned enough of the older Church tongues to deal with such volumes as Maia, the Bishop of the Keep, lent to the project: Ingold, though he trusted the Bishop, had had sufficient bad experiences with bishops to limit access to volumes concerning magic. Ilae and Rudy, as relative novices to languages, alternated working with the record-crystals, taking notes on those dozens – there were far more crystals than books in the Keep – that Gil hadn’t yet even gotten around to viewing, and re-viewing those that might conceivably contain images that referred to other Keeps.

  So far they had found nothing of use.

  Ingold interviewed every member of the expedition again, letting them speak as they chose, of everything they had seen or smelled or felt or heard or fancied in those black hallways that crunched with rat-bones and droppings, sifting every word they said for clues.

  “He should be sharing what he learns with us,” sniffed Lady Sketh, when the council of the Keep-Lords came down to the Guards’ Complex – as they periodically did – for a briefing with Janus. “We contribute to the defenses of the Keep – and to the upkeep of the wizards! – and we aren’t even accorded the courtesy of being told what they’re up to!”

  “Other than eating their heads off,” put in Lord Pnak, “and casting rat-wards that don’t work.”

  “I’m sure,” remarked the Icefalcon, who was helping Gil put together a plate of food for the researchers beside the Guard-room hearth, “that the Keep mages would respect your request to refrain from warding your store-rooms… and the caves where your herds are kept.”

  If looks could maim, reflected Gil, the Icefalcon would be in a basket.

  “Her ladyship does not mean to be divisive,” said Lord Ankres, with a glance toward the two Guards. “Yet it’s clear there is something amiss here in the Keep—”

  “It is nothing of the kind!” retorted Lady Sketh, who had very little use for the House Ankres and wouldn’t have agreed with its Lord if he’d said the sun rose in the east. “And don’t tell me what I mean and don’t mean.”

  She swung around to face Janus again, the veils that trailed from the tall horns of her headdress billowing like summer thunderheads. She had salvaged dozens of henins, liripipes, chaperons, padded turbans and wired and steepled fantasias of silk and seed-pearls and brought them to the Keep in several wagons, leaving the family library to rot.

  “Is it divisive to claim our rights, as members of the Keep Council, not to be excluded from these secret cabals that Ingold Inglorion seems so fond of forming?” She glared in the direction of the door that led through to the library. “To ask what it is that these wizards are doing, that they don’t want us to know about? Bad enough they’ve arranged for the Lady of the Keep to fall in love with one of their number, so that he may dominate the education of the rightful King…”

  A blonde-haired little Guard named Melantrys stood up, snapped, “You were glad enough of the wizards when Alketch troops were besieging the Keep last summer!” and Janus didn’t even look over his shoulder at her:

  “That’ll do.” His flat-boned, oddly sensitive face was expressionless, but by the set of his shoulders Gil could tell he was struggling to keep annoyance out of his voice. “I’ve nothing to say about the Lady of the Keep, your ladyship, save that she has no authority over the mages either, save to turn them out. Which I don’t think anybody here wants.”

  The squabbling voices of the Keep-Lords followed Gil back to the library as she delivered Guard-room stew and a pitcher of ale to Ingold, Rudy, and Ilae – with the cessation of the storms there was at least hunting going on again. But when she’d set the vessels down, she made her way back to the Guard-room as their visitors were departing, and quickened her steps to catch up with Lord Ankres and his men.

  “Your lordship,” she said, and he turned back, looking down his hawk nose at her in spite of the fact that he was an inch shorter than her five-foot-seven. “What did you mean when you said there was something amiss in the Keep? Did you mean the rats? Or is there something else?”

  “I meant the ghosts,” he said. “And the nightmares.”

  *

  There were five or six cells in the Keep that were haunted, and at least six places, in its tangled spirals of corridors and ladders, that not even rats would go. Since several of these were in the territory that Lord Ankres had claimed for his followers, Ingold had simply checked for the presence of the usual specters. Now, called out to the Guard-room to speak with his lordship, he looked both grave and vexed at the news that the ghosts – whom not everyone could see – were appearing to more people, and far more frequently, than they had before. “That pair of white hands that you can sometimes see feeling along the wall of that chamber near the Leopard Fountain,” said his lordship. “You can now see her whole body, and her face as well. I don’t know if that’s the reason more people are waking with nightmares – or if it’s just more people are talking of them. I haven’t taken a count or anything.”

  Gil said quietly, “I’ve sure been having them.”

  Ingold glanced sharply across the hearth at her: he had not, Gil was well aware, come to bed at all for two nights, dozing instead in cat-naps in his library chair. “What about?”

  “I don’t know. I wake up with my heart pounding, but whatever it is, it disappears. Or I’ll dream I wake up, and hear scratching in the room with me… which could just be rats. Then I’ll wake up in truth, sometimes because Mithrys is crying. I think he has them, too.”

  “Look…” Rudy leaned closer into the little group around the Guard-room fire. “The first year we were here at the Keep, you used a spell on Minalde, to unlock the memories of her ancestors. You called it gnodyrr—”

  “That’s black magic!” Lord Ankres’ sharp gray glance went from Rudy’s face to Ingold’s. “You’re not telling me that you used black magic on the Queen…!”

  “With her consent,” said Rudy quickly – Gil wanted to put her hand over his mouth, or better yet slap him upside the head. She could see both fear and outrage in the Keep-Lord’s face.

  Ingold closed his eyes momentarily but said nothing.

  “Consent?” His lordship sniffed. “And how was that obtained, I wonder?” He glared pointedly at Rudy, then turned back to Ingold. “Is that true?”

  “I for one,” said Gil, “would let that spell be used on me—”

  “We know you didn’t take anything out of that Keep, Spook,” said Rudy, and Lord Ankres swung back toward him.

  “And I know that none of my men did, either,” he snapped. “And I’ll not have a black spell laid on any of them, for you—” He jabbed a finger at Ingold, “—to whisper commands to them to do your bidding.” He jerked to his feet, and strode from the long chamber in a great swirl of green velvet cloak.

  “Nice goin’, Punk.” Gil jabbed a stick more firmly into the little b
laze on the hearth. “Now it’ll be all over the Keep in about twenty-five minutes how Ingold uses black magic to make Alde into a tool of the wizards—”

  “I didn’t know!”

  Ingold raised his brows.

  “I mean, I didn’t know people took it that seriously. I’ve been here six years and nobody’s ever talked about black magic at all.”

  “That’s because I’m the only person in the Keep who knows it,” said the wizard mildly. “And because the last time I dabbled in it – prior to that single spell of gnodyrr I cast on Queen Minalde – I managed to destroy my father’s realm and kill every person in my family. So I hesitate to use it – and it’s understandable that no one in the Keep wishes me to do so. Certainly not the Keep-Lords.”

  So the matter rested – uneasily – until the children began to not wake up from their dreams.

  *

  It was two at first, toddlers Mithrys’ age, born since the Summerless Year. Their mothers came, weeping, to Ingold: the children weren’t dead, but could not be wakened. Ingold, haggard and red-eyed from sleepless nights in the library, stood for a long time beside the infants’ cradles, and beside him Gil – who had never had any use for children prior to bearing Mithrys – felt tears burn her eyes, of pity, horror and grief. The wizard passed his thick-muscled warrior’s hand across the still faces, stroked his thumb across the lids of the shut eyes, his own eyes shut, as if listening intently. When he turned away his face was grim with anger.

  Bors met them outside the cell of the second of the terrified families. “Put your black magic in my mind,” he said softly. “Turn it inside-out and see if ever I touched a thing that brought this pass on those little ones.”

  Gil and Caldern both insisted that Ingold work the spell of gnodyrr on them as well – far deeper than hypnosis, which Gil had also had at a birthday-party when she was fourteen, though she suspected she’d been too skeptical, even then, to be a good subject. The Icefalcon refused, but nobody really suspected him of pocketing glowstones or anything else for the black market anyway.

  “At least I know now what it might be,” murmured Ingold, when Bors, shaken, drowsy, and certifiably not the culprit, was helped by two of his friends down the long Guard-room to his bunk. The old man sat back, exhausted himself, and accepted the hot tea Gil handed him: black magic, she gathered, was extremely hard on the practitioner as well as the subject of the spells, one reason that it was usually sourced from the energies raised by blood, pain, and death.

  Rudy, Ilae, and Brother Wend gathered more closely around his chair, and the Guards – at least a dozen of whom had remained in the long room, at Bors’ insistence, to bear witness to his innocence – got their training-swords and filed out to join the drill class going on next door, leaving the little group of wizards around the hearth.

  “There are spirits called Whispers,” said Ingold quietly. “Not magic in themselves, but they have an affinity for magic. If that’s what this thing is, it’s by far the largest I’ve ever encountered. One usually finds them in low-lying country, where it’s hot – or was hot, anyway. Coastal salt-marshes in Alketch or in the Morrian Lands—”

  “Then the Lost Keep must be the one the Black Scroll calls Skanyin,” said Gil. “It was in what I’m pretty sure is the Morrian area – that’s east of here, isn’t it? Across the Eastern Ocean? It would be mid-morning there, when it was still night here. It’s only mentioned once, in the oldest section of the scroll.”

  “Is there a ward against them?” Brother Wend’s round, rather boyish face puckered with anxiety. “A spell that will drive them forth?”

  “There is.” Ingold cradled the small ivory cup between his hands. “The small ones can generally be easily dealt with. But in order to do that I need to see the thing itself, or – since it could be hiding anywhere in the Keep now – whatever it was that it came in on.”

  Ilae said a word that indicated that she was spending way too much time in the Guard-room, and Rudy groaned.

  “Oh, Lady Sketh’s going to love that.”

  “I very much fear,” said Ingold, “that you’re right.”

  *

  Lord Ankres flatly refused to permit a spell of gnodyrr to be laid on any of his guards, and reacted with cold anger to the suggestion that either Captain Hayox or Kasti – the other Ankres trooper who’d gone – would have either disobeyed Rudy’s orders, or lied. Lord Sketh bridled indignantly when the Lady Minalde, Ingold, and a small contingent of Guards presented themselves at the guarded doorway that led into Sketh Territory – as that portion of the Second Level North was referred to – and declared himself mortally insulted by the very idea.

  “In any case,” added Lady Sketh, appearing at his side surrounded by her usual contingent of ladies-in-waiting and torch-bearers, “both Tarpaeis and Wargin have left the Keep on a hunting party.”

  Minalde frowned. Despite surviving the destruction of human civilization, six years of ruling the Keep, the bearing of two children and the formal crimson velvet robes of monarchy that added to her slight stature, she still looked about fourteen. “I heard nothing of a hunting expedition.” She glanced over the iron and wooden railings of the gallery behind them, down into the Aisle, where the great Doors were being closed for the night. Women’s’ voices were raised on the galleries across the Aisle, and above, calling children in to supper or chores. A man chanted a droning cry:

  “Water, water, fresh and bright,

  Got some here for your dinner tonight…”

  Her ladyship raised her shaved eyebrows. “Lord Sketh was not aware that he needed your permission to send one out, my lady.”

  “No,” agreed his lordship hastily. “Indeed not.”

  Gil saw the mingled panic and query in the look he shot her ladyship, who merely added, “If you wish it, my lady, we will inform you when they return.”

  Minalde said, “Thank you,” and signed the others to follow her back to the Guard-room. “Ingold,” she said, her voice slightly gritty as they descended the Great Staircase to the floor-level of the Aisle, “I trust you have your scrying-crystal about you?”

  Ingold was already digging it out of his belt-pouch as they entered the Guard-room, to find Captain Hayox and the green-clothed guard Kasti standing by the hearth.

  Hayox stepped forward, bowed his head to Ingold as if the movement threatened to break his stiff neck, and said, “Do what you will, wizard. Ask what you will and how you will. There’s three more children been taken.”

  Gil swung around in a panic, but saw Hethya in a corner near the door to the small chamber Gil and Ingold called their home, trying to convince Mithrys to eat some porridge. The toddler sprang to his feet, scattering bowl, spoon, and cushions, and flung up his arms: Gil strode to him without a word, caught him and held him hard.

  “What’s this I’m hearing?” demanded Hethya in a whisper. “Dathy over on Second Level north tells me these children were found, sound asleep in corners. Their little friends couldn’t waken ‘em, nor their parents when they moved ‘em, not even pourin’ a jar of water over ‘em. They brought ‘em here, put cots in the trainin’ floor for Brother Wend to see ‘em. He’s in there now…”

  Minalde had gone into the training-chamber immediately, most of the Guards at her heels. From the doorway of that long double cell Gil could see Rudy, Ilae, and Brother Wend kneeling beside the little pallet beds that had been set up, silvery witchlight flickering in the eyes of the children’s’ parents who knelt beside them, of the Guards standing around. One man was crying; Minalde went to comfort him, forgetting – as she often did – that she was the Lady of the Keep. The rest of the room was deathly quiet.

  Silently Gil returned to the Guard-room hearth. Ingold sat beside it alone, scrying-crystal in his palm, the flame-light reflected from it making tiny points of gold in his blue eyes. She took her place on the arm of the rough-built chair, and after a long time he closed his fist around the crystal, said, “Well, well, well.”

  “Where are they?
” Minalde asked. She and Rudy had come quietly back into the Guard-room, and Gil saw that she, too, had been weeping, for the father’s helpless grief.

  And her own, thought Gil. Her son Tir could be next, eight years old and the true Lord of the Keep… her two-year-old daughter Gisa would be asleep in her bed, and maybe it would be that child – Rudy’s child – who might not open her eyes at tomorrow’s dawn.

  The wizard’s glance traveled to Rudy’s face, and on to Gil’s.

  Janus emerged from the training-room door behind Minalde, hands shoved in his sword-belt and eyes hard as brown agate. “She got ‘em locked up?”

  “Wargin’s in a cell,” reported Ingold grimly, “though I don’t see any guards.”

  “And Tarpaeis?”

  “Tarpaeis,” said the wizard, “I cannot scry at all.”

  Rudy said, “You mean she’s got him hidden in a dead spot?”

  “Either that, or Tarpaeis has developed powers of wizardry himself.”

  *

  “That’s ridiculous!” Lady Sketh declared, without even bothering to wait for her husband to say it first. This time, when Minalde, Ingold, and the Guards had strode across the Aisle and up the Great Staircase to the cell that acted as vestibule to the Sketh’s private realm, the lords of House Sketh had put in their appearance backed by their white-clothed troops.

  “Lady Sketh…” Minalde had waited just long enough to send a message to Maia, the bishop of the Keep, in the hopes that the noble couple would listen to the Church. The tall, cadaverous bishop spread his crippled hands coaxingly, and her ladyship sniffed.

  “Huh! After all your sermons, Maia, about how the Church must act as the conscience of the Keep, you’ll sell yourself quickly enough to this poppet and her wizard whoremaster when it comes to seeing anyone other than Ingold Inglorion holding any magic in the Keep! Not that the boy Tarpaeis does,” she added quickly. “He’s just a common, ordinary guard—”