The Walls of Air Page 0,27

and the Gilbert and Sullivan melody floated on the drift of an alien breeze through the dark, stony woods of another universe.

The road circled a stand of pines, and the smells of the Keep reached her from afar, the stinging woodsmoke, as women rendered used fat and ash into soap, and the warm reek of cattle. Children's laughter mingled with the confused bleating of sheep and goats, with the ringing of an axe in the woods, and with the sound of a deep bass voice lifted, like Gil's, in song. Half-frozen mud squished under her boots as she picked her way around that last turning of the path. And there it lay before her, its sleek walls sheened by the pallor of the dull sky.

It wasn't as big, maybe, as the monster high-rises Gil was familiar with as a child of the twentieth century. But the Keep was well over half a mile in length, hundreds of feet in breadth, and close to a hundred feet in height. Enormous doors were dwarfed by the monolith in which they were set. Its teeming inhabitants swarmed the broad steps and trampled snow at its base. Black and enigmatic, tVveKeep of Dare guarded its secrets.

What secrets? Gil wondered. Who built it, andhow?She was aware that it lay far beyond the technology of the present age, with its constant soft currents of air and dark, ever-flowing streams of water. Was it raised by magic or only by superb engineering?

And her infinitely distractible scholar's mind scouted the thought: Who would know?

Eldor, maybe. In a long-ago dream she had overheard the dead King speak of the memories he had inherited from the House of Dare, whose founder, Dare of Renweth, had raised those midnight walls. But Eldor had perished in the destruction of Gae. His son, Altir? The memories had been passed to him, to make him the target for the malice of the Dark. But he was an infant, too young to speak. Lohiro? Maybe. But the archmage was hidden at Quo, and it would be weeks before he came to the Keep, if he ever did.

Gil considered. Ingold had said that records did not go back to the time of the building of the Keep. The chaos of the first incursion of the Dark into the realms of humankind had been followed by centuries of ignorance, social dislocation, famine, and violence. But how far back did they go? And did they carry in them some memory of an oral tradition, like Merlin and his dancing giants who reared Stonehenge? What was in the wagonloads of Church records that Bishop Govannin had risked civil war with Alwir for on the road down from Gae?

A flicker of movement caught her eye and drove that thought from her mind. Someone was slipping through the trees to her right - someone who was furtive

without being particularly skilful about it. Gil got a brief glimpse of a peasant's fluttering rainbow-coloured skirts, all but hidden in the dark swirl of a cloak. She wondered if it was any of her business.

The shadow flitted from tree to tree, working through the woods above the road. Probably headed for the refugee camp, Gil guessed. That's the only thing in that direction. At least somebody's showing a little compassion, for all the good it's likely to do.

In that case, it was her business. There was barely time to make it there and back before darkness fell. Gil paused in the road and, for the benefit of the fugitive, snapped her fingers and cursed as if she had forgotten something, then turned and hastened back. Once out of sight of the watcher's probable course, she doubled back through the rocks at the road's edge and scrambled her way to higher ground. She slipped between two shaggy-barked fir trees to wait, her dark cloak blending with the gloom of the shadowy afternoon, the white quatrefoil emblem of the Guards on her shoulder like a patch of snow on wet-darkened wood. In time she saw that cautious figure emerge from the trees, hurrying along the path above the road, keeping a wary eye on the backtrail, and huddling for warmth in the folds of a black fur cloak. The hood had fallen back. A great jewelled clasp glittered like stars in the raven knots of hair.

It was the cloak Gil recognized. Only one woman in the Keep had a cloak like that.

'My lady!' she called out, and Minalde stopped, eyes startled and wide. Gil stepped from