The Walls of Air Page 0,42

in response.

It was night in the Keep.

It was always night there. The dark walls held darkness inside as effectively as they held the Dark without. But in daylight hours the mazes of its corridors were alive with the flickering confusion of lights, grease lamps, pine knots, and the smoulder of tiny fires in grubby and crowded cells. Voices echoed and reechoed with laughter, song, scolding, Keep gossip, and Keep politics. The Aisle was always a circus of people working on what handicrafts they could barter for food or goods or simple goodwill, people washing clothes in the pools by the water channels, and people gathered to talk or to gamble for points, pennies, and love. In the deep night, one could feel the weight, the age, the mass of the Keep. Then the empty silence reminded Gil of Ingold's descriptions of the Nests where the Dark bred underground.

The silence oppressed her, redoubling the loneliness in her soul. From the rickety second-level balcony where she stood, Gil could see very little of the cavernous spaces before her, for they were lighted only by the gate torches, weak and tiny with distance, and by occasional wall sconces down near the doors of

the Church. A draught touched her face, clammy as the finger of a passing ghost.

A tribute, like the murmur of the water below, to someone's long-past skill as an engineer.

Whose?

Gil flexed her stiff muscles and tried not to yawn. The last two days had been exhausting ones.

She had not been a party to the Council meetings called in the wake of the message that Janus had delivered to Alwir from Maia of Thran. But she had been there when the Chancellor and Govannin had met Janus on the steps of the Keep; and she had seen the livid rage that had suffused Alwir's dark face at the news that several tons of food, plus every wagon and every spare horse in the Keep, had been appropriated by the Bishop of Penambra and his people. It had not helped the situation when, after a second of shocked silence, Govannin had said, 'I told you to send more guards.' Had Alwir been a wizard, Gil thought, the Bishop of Gae would surely have hopped, rather than walked, away from his glare.

A very plump merchant in green velvet who had come out as part of Alwir's entourage cleared his throat uncomfortably and ventured, 'Is there any possibility, my lord, that the Dark Ones might destroy this - this shameful upstart?' Govannin replied drily, The Bishop of Penambra would seem to be an able enough commander to forestall even that for quite a while yet.'

The merchant toyed for a moment with the ermine tags that decorated his doublet. 'Um - between the Guards of Gae and your own troops, my lord Alwir, we ourselves can field quite a force...'

'No.' The harshness of the new voice startled them all. In the shadowless grey of the overcast afternoon, Aide's face was like marble, her mouth set and her nostrils flared with anger. None of them had seen her slip up, as quiet as Alwir's shadow, to join the group upon the broad Keep steps. They are our people, Bendle Stooft, and they will be sharing this fortress with us. I shall thank you to remember it.'

Against her rage, even Alwir had nothing to say.

There had been councils, of course, and negotiations. The earlier system of food distribution, personal barter, subsidy, and random charity had to be revamped, and Govannin fought tooth and nail against the suggestion of a general inventory of food in the Keep. But that same day outside storage compounds were laid out; every man, woman, and child in the Keep, warrior and civilian, was turned out to help work on building them and to transport food to them to clear the upper levels. It was an exhausting task to those who also mounted watch through the dark hours of the night, but necessary. Gil knew that whatever Alwir wanted to say in negotiations, Maia and his Penambrans would be admitted into the Keep.

And so they should be, she thought, stretching her shoulders to ease the kinks from them and fighting the ache in her muscles that came from too little sleep and too little

food. Quite apart from the need for the extra warriors of Penambra to counterbalance the troops of the Empire, when they arrived, it had been monstrous to deny the refugees shelter in the first place.

She had watched through too many nights