The Walls of Air Page 0,4

craggy plainsman whose domains lay on the other side of the mountains. 'It's like the nights when the cattle stampede for no reason.'

The Icefalcon glanced coolly across at Ingold. 'Can they break in?' he asked, as if it were a matter of no more moment than the outcome of a race on which he had bet only a small sum.

'I don't know.' Ingold shifted his weight on his perch by the hearth and folded sword-scarred hands on his knee. 'But we can be certain that they will try. Janus, Tomec - I suggest that the corridors be patrolled, on all levels, to every corner of the Keep. That way...'

'But we haven't the men for it!' Melantrys protested. 'We've enough for a patrol of sorts,' Janus admitted. 'But if the Dark effect an entrance, it's sure we've not enough to fight at any one place, spread so thin.'

The Icefalcon cocked a pale eyebrow at the wizard. 'Are we going to fight?'

'If we can,' Ingold said. 'Your patrols can be eked out with

volunteers, Janus. Get the Keep orphans as your scouts. They're always into everything anyway; they might as well be put to use. We need to patrol the corridors, simply to know if and where the Dark break in. It isn't likely that they can,' he went on gravely, 'for the walls of the Keep have the most powerful spells of the ancient world woven into their fabric. But whether the spells have weakened, or whether the Dark have grown stronger in the intervening years, I do not know.' Despite the calm in that deep, scratchy voice, Gil thought he looked grim and driven in the uncertain flicker of the hearth-light. 'But I do know that if the Dark Ones enter the Keep, we shall have to abandon it entirely, and then we will surely be lost.'

'Abandon the Keep!' Janus cried.

'It stands to reason,' the Icefalcon agreed, leaning back against the wall behind him. He had a light and rather breathless voice that sounded disinterested even when discussing the loss of the last sanctuary left to humankind. 'AH those little stairways, miles of empty corridors... We could never drive them out.' The captains looked at one another, knowing the truth of his words.

'It's not only that,' Gil put in quietly. Their eyes turned to her, a quick glitter in the room's shifting shadows. 'What about the ventilating system?' she went on. The air in here has to travel somehow. The whole Keep must be honeycombed with shafts too small for a man to fit through. But the Dark can change their size as well as their shape. They could fit through a hole no bigger than a rat's, and, God knows, we have rats in the Keep. All it would need would be for one of them to get into the ventilation -the thing could attack at will, and we would never be able to find it.'

'Curse it,' Janus whispered, 'that the Dark should rise at the start of the worst winter in human memory. If we quit the Keep, those as aren't taken at first nightfall would freeze before they came to shelter. These mountains are buried in snow.'

'Rats...' Tirkenson said softly. 'Ingold, how do we know the

Dark aren't lurking somewhere in the upper levels already? The Keep stood empty for nigh two thousand years.'

'We would have known,' the wizard said. 'Believe me, we would have known by this time.'

'But their eggs?' Tirkenson went on. 'How do the Dark Ones breed, Ingold? As Gil-Shalos said, it would need only one to go through the air tunnels, laying eggs like a salmon along the way. We could be sitting on top of a spawning ground of the Dark.' Though the Guards were not as a rule nervous people, a ripple of horror seemed to pass through the assembled captains. The instructor Gnift shuddered and exchanged a quick, worried look with Melantrys.

'You needn't concern yourselves with that, at least,' Ingold said quietly. He picked a bit of straw from the frayed sleeve of his mantle and avoided all their eyes. 'I have seen the breeding places of the Dark beneath the ground, and I assure you that they do not multiply in any fashion so - tidy - as that.' He looked up again, his face carefully calm. 'But in any case, we cannot allow the Dark entrance under any circumstances. The corridors must be patrolled.'

'We can get Church troops,' Janus said, 'and Alwir's private guards.'

'I have my own men,' Tirkenson added,