The Walls of Air Page 0,56

'It's part of the table. How did you know?*

'I don't know. I have the feeling I've seen something like that before, but - almost as if I dreamed about it, because I know I've never seen anything of the kind. That's funny,' Aide went on quietly, sitting back against the desk, her face troubled. Tir, whom she had lifted on to her knee, promptly reached for the jewelled clasp that held her hair, and she undid it and gave it to him, her dark hair falling in a river down over her shoulders and her child.

Gil propped the arm in the sling against her knees. 'Why is it funny?' she asked.

'Because - I've had that feeling a lot of times in the Keep,' Aide said in a worried voice. 'As if as if I remembered things, remembered being here before. Sometimes I'll be walking down a staircase or along a hall, and I'll have this feeling of having

been there before.'

'Like deja vu?' There was a technical term in the language of the Wathe for that - a circumstance which Gil found interesting.

'Not entirely.'

'Like the inherited memories that are passed on from parent to child in certain families?' Gil asked quietly. 'You did tell me your House was a collateral branch of the House of Dare.'

Aide looked over at her worriedly in the gloomy yellowish lamplight. 'But the memories only pass from father to son,' she said softly. 'And Eldor told me once that his memories of other lives were like memories of his own. Very clear, like visions. Mine are just - feelings.'

'Maybe women hold inherited memory differently,' Gil said. 'Maybe it's less concrete in women and therefore hasn't been called upon for centuries, because there was always a male heir of the House of Dare. Maybe you haven't remembered because you didn't need to.' Gil leaned forward, the grain in the sacks she sat on scrunching softly and giving off a faint musty odour into the tiny room. 'I remember a long time ago, Ingold said that Eldor's father Umar didn't have Dare's memories at all, because there was really no need - that the inherited memory will skip generations, one or three or sometimes more. But he said that they woke in Eldor because it was necessary.'

Minalde was silent, looking down at the child who played so obliviously in her lap. Her unbound hair hid her expression, but when she did speak, her voice was soft and filled with doubt. 'I don't know,' she said.

Gil stood up briskly. 'I think it's neat,' she announced.

'Do you?' Aide asked timidly.

'Hell, yes. Come on exploring with me. See what you can remember.'

As the winter deepened and the snows sealed the Vale into a

self- contained world of whiteness, Gil and Minalde conducted their own rather unsystematic exploration of the Keep of Dare. They wandered the upper reaches of the fourth and fifth levels, where Maia of Thran had established his headquarters. He greeted them amiably in his own church down near the western end, with his own armed troops about him. They explored the crowded slums that huddled around the stairheads on the fifth level, hearing nothing but the liquid southern drawl of the Penambrans in their ears, and probed the dark, empty halls that stretched beyond. Armed like Theseus with a ball of twine, they traversed miles of dark, abandoned halls that stank of mould and dry rot, with the dust of ages drifting like ground fog about their feet.

They found storerooms, chapels, and armouries filled with rusted weapons in the back halls of all levels. They found the remains of bridges that had once spanned the Aisle at the fourth and fifth levels, thin spiderwebs of cable heretofore hidden by the clustering shadows of the ceiling. They found cells stacked halfway to the ceiling with spiky mazes of piled furniture, carved in unfamiliar styles and painted with thin running lines of hearts and diamonds picked out in golf leaf. They passed locked cells scurrying with rats, food stores cached by unknown speculators. They discovered things they did not understand mouldering parchments overwritten in debased and unreadable bookhand, or what looked like puzzling little white polyhedrons made of milky glass, three-quarters the size of Gil's fist, their function unknown and unguessable.

'You should let Alwir know about the bundle of parchments we found,' Gil remarked at one point as they retraced their steps back from a remote corner of the fifth level. The puddle of yellow lamplight wavered around their feet. The