The Walls of Air Page 0,57

air up here was warmer, the crowding walls of the empty warrens of cells pressing down on the girls in silence. Grotesque shadows lumbered along the wall, bending around the flame like pteranodon moths about a diminutive candle. Gil felt wryly envious of Rudy and Ingold's blithe, unthinking ability to summon light. Damn wizards probably never gave it a second

thought.

'I will,' Minalde agreed, holding the lamp up for better visibility. 'He and Bishop Govannin are already quarrelling about writing materials. Alwir wants to make a census of the Keep.'

'He should. And he should be keeping his own chronicles.'

'I know.' Aide had imbibed enough of Gil's historical sense to realize that the Church accounts of certain events differed radically from secular records. 'But because there's almost nothing to write on, nobody's keeping any kind of chronicles at all.'

'Great,' Gil said. 'So when in three thousand years all this happens again, everybody's going to be in as rotten a shape as we are now.'

'Oh, no!' Aide protested. 'It couldn't - I mean -'

Gil raised her eyebrows and paused in a shadowy doorway. 'Like hell it couldn't. This could all be part of a regular cycle. We don't know why the Dark came before or how many times it has happened. We know they have herds of some kind below the ground; we know they're taking prisoners. Are the herds descended from prisoners they took three thousand years ago? Did people drive them back underground, or did they just go away of their own accord?'

'But why would they?' Aide cried, much distressed.

'Beats the hell out of me.' Gil paused, catching a faceted glimpse of something in a deserted doorway. She picked up another one of those little white glass polyhedrons and turned its uncommunicative shape thoughtfully in her good hand. 'But that's what we've got to find out, Aide. We've got to get a handle on this somehow - and right now the Keep and the records are the only starting places I can think of.' She shrugged. 'Maybe we're wasting our time, and the Archmage will have all the answers when he comes back here with Rudy

and Ingold. And then again, maybe he won't.'

They continued on down the corridor, Gil caching the polyhedron in her sling for further investigation later. Echoes whispered at their passing, mocking footfall and shadow and breath. But the Keep hid its secrets well, furled tightly within the spiral and counterspiral of the winding halls, or revealed them in enigmatic or incomprehensible ways.

Early in their endeavours, they decided to ask Bektis about the observation room with its crystal table, on the off chance that his lore might have preserved some clue to its whereabouts.

The Court Wizard of the House of Dare, however, had little time to spend on the games of girls. He looked up with a frown as they came quietly into his room, a large cell tucked away in the warren of the Royal Sector. The light of the bluish witchfire that burned above his head shone on his high, bald pate and the bridge of his proud, hooked nose. Dutifully, he made a stiff little bow. 'All my pardons, my lady,' he said in his rather light, mellifluous voice. 'In such a gown as that, one might easily take you for a commoner.' Rigid disapproval seemed to have been rammed like a poker up his backbone.

Still he listened to Gil's description of what they sought, nodding his head wisely with his usual expression of grave thoughtfulness, which Gil suspected uncharitably that he practised daily before a mirror. As she spoke, Gil looked around the room, noting the few black-bound books lining the shelves in the little sitting-room area at the far end of the cell, and the richness of the single chest and carved bedstead. Unlike the table in her own minuscule study, the bedstead was newish, and the latest style current in Gae at the time of the coming of the Dark. It had clearly been brought down from Karst in pieces and reassembled, rather than scrounged from the old storerooms at the Keep. What sympathy she had once cherished for Lord Alwir's transport problems faded. He couldn't have been doing too badly if he could afford to cart along his Court Conjurer's bedroom set. In the cool brightness of the witchlight, Bektis' sleeves twinkled with scarlet embroidery, stitched into a pattern

Gil recognized as the signs of the Zodiac. She picked out her own symbol, the tailed M of Virgo, before it occurred to