Barbara Hambly - [Darwath 07] - Whisper Read online

  Seventy feet…

  Eighty.

  Bors had gone ahead, to lower the drawbridge: planks tied onto saplings, with only ropes as hand-rails. Lightning showed Gil mountains of cloud overhead and the wind whipped and twisted her clothing; she fixed her eyes on the dark bulk of the Keep before her but in her too-vivid imagination still saw the ground below. The thunder was almost on top of the white blazes that seemed to rip the sky, and the pine-tops around them thrashing as if with a demon’s invisible feet. Ingold, still moving like a man in a trance, followed them over the parapet, up the shallow slope of the roof to the narrow walkway of its ridge. In a stiff voice, as if struggling for words, he said, “Stay back.”

  Gil and Janus set the silver vessel down. Janus backed away; Gil remained, uncertain, as the dry glare flashed directly above them and the thunder rolled like cannon-fire.

  With a terrible searing, crinkling sound spears of light suddenly burst from the vessel as it cracked. Ingold flung up his hands, cried a word of power, a word of Summoning, into the blackness of the night, and Gil flung herself down and rolled with the slope of the roof. She’d stopped, however, and looked up as lightning poured from the cloud like the wrath of God, striking the silver jar and surrounding the wizard in a blue-white nimbus of electrical light, amid thunder like the rending of the world.

  The blackness after that was like being blinded again, and the stench – before the winds whipped it away – was unspeakable.

  Then a more distant stroke showed her Ingold lying near the melted ruin of the jar, under the sudden downpour of soaking rain.

  *

  “So they didn’t lock up the wizard in the Lost Keep, and his books, because he was a mage, did they?” said Gil quietly. She twisted the last of the rain-water from her hair, dripping on the black stone of the floor. “They locked him up because he’d been possessed by a Whisper.”

  “I think so, yes.” Leaning heavily on his staff – and he should, Gil privately considered, have been in bed, not patrolling the Keep one last time – the old man passed his hand over the arrangement of crystals set into the wall of the Transporter vestibule. Thirteen crystals across and thirteen down – a hundred and sixty-nine dark little fragments of what appeared to be quartz, barely visible against the blackness of the wall.

  Only, in the faint wisp of white light that floated over the end of Ingold’s staff, Gil thought she saw four of the wall-crystals had begun, very faintly, to glow.

  “He might well have been the only mage they had in the Keep,” the wizard went on. “It must have been a grievous choice for someone to make. Possibly,” he added, “himself.”

  He turned, and began to limp back toward the Great Staircase, and the moving torchlight in the Aisle. The mothers of the five wakened children – who had all come to their senses in the same moment, when the lightning had destroyed the silver jar and the thing it contained – had taken them home to bed. Rudy, Ilae, and Brother Wend had remained in the Guard-room infirmary, using their magic to hold Tarpaeis’ battered spirit in his flesh until Brother Wend’s healing-spells could take hold. Gil hoped somebody in the Guard-room had thought to make tea.

  “Could the Whisper have taken hold of you?” she asked. “Possessed you, the way it did Tarpaeis?”

  “It tried twice to do so during the fight.” Ingold glanced at her sidelong, blue eyes infinitely tired under their scarred lids. “But that would have entailed letting go of Tarpaeis, and until you wounded him as you did, the Whisper wasn’t ready to let go. When it did, it was sufficiently depleted itself by the combat to seek the path of least resistance.”

  “What about Tarpaeis?” asked Gil. “Will he be…” She hesitated. “Can we trust him?”

  “With regard to the Whisper? Yes.” The old man seemed for a moment to listen to the darkness that filled the maze of hallways around them. “It’s gone. The lightning was – if you will forgive the unforgivable, my dear – a master stroke.” And he mock-ducked from her mock-shove. “With regard to his loyalty to House Sketh, where his family still lives? That remains to be seen.”

  “But you’ll still train him?”

  “If his magic survived the exorcism of the Whisper, yes. Of course. He’s one of the few whose magic has surfaced since the Coming of the Dark; one of the few that the Dark Ones didn’t kill. We can’t not pass along to him everything that we know.”

  They paused at the top of the stairs. Below them, the Aisle was settling into silence again, though the dawn wasn’t far away. A shadow moved among the streams and bridges, bearing a firefly light: a Guard, walking his route.

  Making sure that all was well.

  That all were safe.

  Gil put her hand on Ingold’s sleeve, as he made to descend.

  “Would you have done it?” she asked. “If I hadn’t thought of taking that thing out and calling a lightning-strike down on it? Would you have pulled Rudy and the others away from those children, to help you destroy the Whisper before it broke free?”

  Ingold looked aside. For a moment she saw again the desperation in his eyes, the horror and the guilt that had been there when the silver jar had begun to rock and quiver under her hands. His fear of what her response would be, to his telling the truth. Not just about what he would have said, but about what he was in his heart. “I’m just glad it didn’t come to that.”

  “Would you have?” Her grip tightened on his scorched and blood-stained sleeve. “I have to know.”

  Shame tightened his brow, deepened the scars around his eyes. “Yes.”

  “Even if one of the children had been Mithrys?”

  My son. Your son. Our little Owl. The treasure of his heart and of hers…

  To save the Keep? To make it safe for the generation, or two, that would so desperately need safety in the years to come?

  Could I really have done that, to the children of others who loved them, as I love our boy?

  His eyes pleaded for a moment: Don’t make me say it.

  Don’t turn from me, for telling the truth.

  Then, “Yes.”

  Gil said, “Good.”

  For a moment they looked into each other’s eyes, understanding. Then they gathered each other into an embrace, held each other, the old man like a beggar in tattered robes, the girl in the black clothing of the Keep Guards. White hair mingling with black, warriors in the darkness at the precipice of the world. Each understanding the heart of the other, like a secret shared.

  After a time Ingold whispered to her, “But don’t tell anyone. I suspect it would be dangerous to us both – and to the wizards as a whole – if anyone in the Keep thought it’s what either of us would do, to preserve this remnant of humankind from destruction.”

  “If we’re lucky,” murmured Gil in reply, “no one in the Keep will ever find out.”

  ________________________________

  * See Icefalcon’s Quest

  About the Author

  Since her first published fantasy in 1982 - The Time of the Dark - Barbara Hambly has touched most of the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror, mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. Born and raised in Southern California, she attended the University of California, Riverside, and spent one year at the University of Bordeaux, France. She married science fiction author George Alec Effinger, and lived part-time in New Orleans for a number of years. In her work as a novelist, she currently concentrates on horror (the Don Simon Ysidro vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, though she has also written another historical whodunnit series under the name of Barbara Hamilton.

  Professor Hambly also teaches History part-time, paints, dances, and trains in martial arts. Follow her on Facebook, and on her blog at livejournal.com.

  Now a widow, she shares a house in Los Angeles with several small carnivores.

  She very much hopes you will enjoy these stories.

  The Further Advent
ures

  by Barbara Hambly

  The concept of “happily ever after” has always fascinated me.

  Just exactly what happens after, “happily ever after”?

  The hero/heroine gets the person of his/her dreams, and rides off into the sunset with their loved one perched on the back of the horse hanging onto saddlebags stuffed with gold. (It’s a very strong horse.)

  So what happens then? Where do they live? Who does the cooking?

  This was one of the reasons I started writing The Further Adventures.

  The other was that so many of the people who loved the various fantasy series that I wrote for Del Rey in the 1980s and ‘90s, really liked the characters. I liked those characters too, and I missed writing about them.

  Thus, in 2009 I opened a corner of my website and started selling stories about what happened to these characters after the closing credits rolled on the last novel of each series.

  The Darwath series centers on the Keep of Dare, where the survivors of humankind attempt to re-build their world in the face of an ice age winter, after the destruction of civilization by the Dark Ones. Ingold the Wizard is assisted by two stray Southern Californians, Gil Patterson - a historian who is now part of the Keep Guards - and Rudy Solis, in training to be a mage.

  The Unschooled Wizard stories involve the former mighty-thewed barbarian mercenary Sun Wolf, who finds himself unexpectedly endowed with wizardly powers. Because the evil Wizard King sought out and killed every trained wizard a hundred years ago, Sun Wolf has no teacher to instruct him in his powers. With his former second-in-command, the warrior woman Starhawk, he must seek one - and hope whatever wizard he finds isn’t evil, too.

  In the Winterlands tales, scholarly dragonslayer John Aversin and his mageborn partner Jenny Waynest do their best to protect the people of their remote villages from whatever threats come along: dragons, bandits, fae spirits, and occasionally the misguided forces of the distant King.

  Antryg Windrose is the archmage of the Council of Wizards in his own dimension, exiled for misbehavior - meddling in the affairs of the non-mageborn - to Los Angeles in the 1980s (that’s when the novels were written). He lives with a young computer programmer, Joanna Sheraton, and keeps a wary eye on the Void between Universes, to defend this world from whatever might come through.

  Though out of print, all four of these series are available digitally on-line.

  To these have been added short stories about the characters from the Benjamin January historical mystery series, set in New Orleans before the Civil War. As a free man of color, Benjamin has to solve crimes while constantly watching his own back lest he be kidnapped and sold as a slave. New Orleans in the 1830s was that kind of town. In the novels he is assisted by his schoolmistress wife Rose, and his good-for-nothing white buddy Hannibal; two of the four Further Adventures concerning January are in fact about what Rose does while Benjamin is out of town.

  I have always been an enthusiastic fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. Over the years I have been asked to contribute stories to various Sherlock Holmes anthologies, and when the character went into Public Domain, I added these four stories to my collection.

  Quest For Glory is a stand-alone, a short piece I wrote for the program book at a science fiction convention at which I was Guest of Honor.

  Sunrise on Running Water is tenuously connected to the Don Simon Ysidro vampire series, in that Don Simon makes a brief cameo appearance. After seeing the movie Titanic - and reflecting that the doomed ship departed from Ireland after sunset and sank just as dawn was breaking…and that vampires lose their powers over running water - I just had to write it. It’s the only story that’s more about the idea than about the characters.

  The Further Adventures are follow-ons to the main novels of their respective series. They can be read on their own, but the Big Stuff got done in the novels: who these people are, how they met, what the major underlying problems are in their various worlds. I suppose they’re a tribute to the fact that for me - and, it seems, for a lot of fans - these characters are real, and I at least care about what happens to them, and what they do when they’re not saving the world. They’re smaller issues, not world-shakers: puzzle-stories and capers.

  Life goes on.

  Love goes on.

  Everyone continues to have Further Adventures for the rest of their lives.

  *

  Novels in the Darwath Series (out of print but commercially available digitally)

  The Time of the Dark

  The Walls of Air

  The Armies of Daylight

  Mother of Winter

  Icefalcon’s Quest

  Table of Contents

  Whisper

  About The Author

  The Further Adventures

  Table of Contents

  Whisper

  About The Author

  The Further Adventures