The Walls of Air Page 0,58

her that this was yet another unexplained transfer, in one direction or the other, across the Void.

Bektis coughed solemnly. 'The men of the ancient realms, my lady,' he intoned, 'had powers far exceeding our ken. Very little is known of them, or of their works.' Aide broke in hesitantly. 'My lady Bishop says that the people of the Times Before were evil and practised abominations.'

A gleam of spite flickered in the old man's dark eyes. 'So she says of all things of which she does not approve. In those times wizardry was a part of the life of the Realm, rather than a thing to be tampered with at risk. There were more wizards then, and their powers were much greater. Even in our own memory, my lady, wizardry has not been anathema, for did there not used to be citadels of wizardry, not only at Quo but in Penambra and in Gae itself, on the very spot where the Palace now stands? 'Did there?' Gil asked curiously. The dark eyes slid sideways at her. 'Indeed there did, Gil-Shalos. We had respect then, in the great days of wizardry; it was wizardry that helped to build the Realm. But the Church drove us out, playing upon the sentiments of the ignorant; and one by one, those citadels closed, and such wizards as were left them took to the road. It was centuries ago,' he continued, his words soft and light but suddenly fraught with impotent malice, 'but we do not forget.'

Gil shifted her arm uncomfortably in its grubby sling. 'And your learning preserves nothing of their deeds?"

'Nor does anyone's, my lady.' The old man looked down, his voice turned smooth again. The Archmage Lohiro made a study of some of the works of the Times Before, but even his knowledge is fragmentary.'

Probably because he didn't have a mechanized world-view to start with, Gil thought, rising from her chair. She caught Aide's eyes and signalled her away, and they left the Court Wizard carefully pestling pearls to mix with hogwort and fennel as a

charm against indigestion, the blue witchlight falling over the spiderlike movement of his hands.

They searched, not only through the dark halls of the Keep itself but, in Gil's patient, scholarly fashion, through all the ancient records they could lay their hands on. But matters that were of interest to contemporary chroniclers were not always the things that historians sought. Gil found herself wandering through a second maze of trivial information regarding the love lives of vanished monarchs, petty power duels with long-dead prelates, accounts of famines and crop failures, and how high the snow stood in Sarda Pass. Often her efforts took on a strangely surreal quality, as if she wandered back and forth through time as well as space, crossing and recrossing the myriad layerings of the universe on some curious quest whose meaning she only vaguely understood.

It was in this that she longed more than anything else for Ingold. She felt herself at sea, wrestling with facts and languages and concepts she barely comprehended. Aide's help was invaluable, but her breeding had been upperclass and her education orthodox; there was much about the history of the Church, the Realm, and wizardry that she simply did not know. As Gil patiently decoded the masses of filthy and overwritten palimpsests in her tiny study far into the watches of the night, she missed the old man's presence, if not for actual help, at least for moral support or for his company. At times when the voices of the deep-night watch could be heard in the distant corridors and weariness made the unfamiliar words swim before her eyes in the smutty yellow gleam of the lamp, she'd prop her injured arm on the slanted surface of the desk and wonder how she'd got where she was. How in a matter of six weeks or so had she gone from the lands of sunlight and blue jeans to a freezing and peril-circled citadel in the midst of alien mountains, digging through unreadable parchments for mention of something he had asked her to find? And she wondered if he watched her in that little magic crystal of his, or if he cared.

Between the two mazes of present and past lay a third maze, far less comprehensible but, she sensed, far more important than

the other two. It was a maze of memory, as elusive as a whiff of smoke or the faint sounds one might think one heard in the night -