The Walls of Air Page 0,112

Winna looked up quickly as her second in command, Tad the herd kid, admitted the newcomers.

'What is it?' Aide asked.

Winna shook her head. 'It seems to be the night for nightmares, that's all. First Lydris, then Tad, and now Prognor.'

'I didn't have a nightmare,"Tad protested, anxious to set himself off from his inferiors.

'No,' Winna corrected, 'you're too old for it to be called a nightmare - but a bad dream, anyway. How can I help you, Aide?'

Here was another one, Gil thought, who, with all her own griefs, had concern to spare.

Winna listened gravely to Aide's whispered explanations and Lolli's less coherent fears, nodding her head and stroking the fair hair of the child in her lap. The pale

faces and wide eyes that floated disembodied in the thick shadows of the room were those of the orphans whose parents had perished in the ruins of Gae and the massacre at Karst. Peter Pan's Lost Boys, Gil thought; tough little survivors of the ruin of the world. As she and Aide left, her last sight of the cell was of Winna chivvying a place among the children for Lolli to sleep, and Tad and some other child volunteering to share their blankets.

'What do you think?' Gil asked as she and Aide headed back into the darkness of the mazes. The single bobbing flame of their lamp threw monstrous gargoyle repetitions of them in the walls behind, trailing them like inept spies.

Aide shook her head, her fingers working loose the main coil of her hair, the braided knots of it falling like skeined silk over the blackness and fire of her gown. 'I don't know,' she said quietly. 'But Lolli's afraid. Is it possible that the mere fear of the Dark could have driven Snelgrin mad?'

'It's what I was afraid of,' Gil said. 'And believe me, the idea of a madman wandering around the Keep at night does not do wonders for my sense of well-being.'

'And you're armed,' Minalde added. 'I think the next thing we should do is talk to Janus. But if Snelgrin is mad, what then? Do we lock him up? Feed him through the winter on rations that could cut into the spring seed? Have someone cut his throat, like -' She broke off, but Gil could finish the sentence. Like the Icefalcon cut Medda's. Medda, whose mind the Dark had devoured, had been Aide's nurse from childhood. On the road from Karst to Renweth, no one could have looked after a stumbling zombie, and there would have been no point'to it. Aide knew this, and had known it at the time. But Gil realized that she had never forgiven the Icefalcon for being the one assigned to the job.

'Is he dangerous?'

'I don't know. Is there a way to find out?'

'Sure,' Gil said cynically. The authorities in my part of the world used it all the time. If a man flipped out, they'd wait till he actually killed somebody, then lock him up. Otherwise they couldn't know for sure.'

Aide stared at her in disbelief. 'You're not serious.'

'Cross my heart.'

'That's abominable!'

Gil, who'd had a grandmother murdered by known drug addicts in a parking lot for the contents of her purse, shrugged. 'Yeah.'

They passed a makeshift stairway that led to the upper levels, the hole where it pierced the ceiling hung with laundry to catch the rising drift of warmer air. There was no light from above, but the next stairway, also a rickety wood one, leading down, admitted a faint glimmer of candlelight from a curtained cell door, and a man's voice singing a lullaby. The girls climbed down, the darkness of the corridor below yawning like a well to receive them. As the winds of the ventilation stirred at their long hair, Gil felt it again, that sense of impending evil - shivering horror like a

subsonic note, just below the level of perception. She remembered what Winna had said about three of the children having nightmares.

'Aide,' she asked quietly, 'can you feel anything?'

'Like what?' Aide stopped. The shadows of the hallway closed around them.

'Just stand still a minute.'

Perhaps forty seconds trickled by. The silence was as audible as the drawing of breath in a room that should be empty. Gil felt an intruding consciousness of the vastness of the Keep and of the darkness filling its halls and cells. Aide shivered. 'No,' she said. 'Let's go, Gil. What do you feel?'

'I think the Dark are in force outside,' Gil said. 'It felt like this the night of their