The Walls of Air Page 0,8
a skeleton, old blood still staining the raw bones, crabs crawling gruesomely through the wet, gleaming eyes of the skull. The Archmage barely turned his steps aside from it. The hem of his dark cloak brushed over it as he passed and swept the sand as he went down the beach.
Rudy sat back, cold with sweat and suddenly terrified. The light died out of the crystal below him, leaving the room pitch-dark but for the bluish echo in its heart. Then he heard a sound, faint and distantly booming, a vibration that seemed to shake the Keep to the dark, ancient bones of its agelong foundations.
Thunder, Rudy thought.
Thunder? Through ten-foot walls?
His stomach seemed to close in on itself. He got up and headed quickly for the door. A second booming reverberated through the Keep, setting up a faint, sinister ringing in the metal junk heaped in the corners and shivering in the mighty walls.
Rudy began to run.
Chapter 2
'Damn the boy,' Ingold whispered, and Gil thought that he looked very white in the wild jumping of shadows. The first blow of that incredible power smashing at the outer gates had jarred the torches in their sockets, and they guttered nervously, as if the light itself trembled before the coming of the Dark. Behind her in the Aisle, utter chaos prevailed.
Men with torches ran to and fro, calling mutually contradictory rumours to one another and brandishing makeshift weapons in frightened hands. Little flocks of children and old people, the nuclei of small families, huddled like frightened birds along the watercourses, as close to the centre of the great space as they could get, having fled their cells in terror when the pounding started. Others, mothers and fathers who had left their dependants back in the close darkness of their cells, crowded around Janus and the small knot of Guards who had remained in the Aisle, waving their arms, demanding what was being done, pleading for even lying assurances of safety. Janus towered above these lesser people in the torchlight, his voice deep and intense, allaying fears and recruiting patrols as best he could in that whirling chaos of noise and lamplight.
It was a scene out of Dante's Hell, Gil thought, with darkness like velvet and a random frenzy of flickering light. Thank God, the Keep is solid stone. Maybe we can get out of this'without immolating ourselves by morning.
If the Dark don't get us first, she added.
But Ingold was there, and Gil had never found it possible to be truly afraid when she was at the wizard's side.
So she felt only a kind of cold detachment, though her blood rushed violently through her veins and her body tingled with a cold excitement. The separation was physical as well as emotional, for she and Ingold stood together on the steps before the gates, with the pounding, sounding roar of the beaten steel at their backs; none would come near them there.
The noise in the Aisle was tremendous, the repeated bellowing clang mingling with the wild keening of voices, to rise and ring in the huge ceiling vaults until the whole Aisle was one vast sounding chamber. Men and women rushed wildly about, purposeful or aimless, the bobbing of the torches and lamps in their hands like the storming of fireflies on a summer night. Behind Gil, the pounding of the Dark upon the gates was a bass vibration that sounded in her bones.
Ingold turned to her and asked quietly, 'Is Bektis here?' He named the Court
Wizard of the Chancellor Alwir, the only other mage in the Keep.
'Surely you jest,' Gil murmured, for Bektis had a most solicitous concern for his own health. Ingold did not smile, but the quick flicker of amusement that lightened his eyes turned his whole face briefly, elusively young. It was gone as quickly as it came, the lines of strain settling back again.
'Then I fear that I shall have no choice,' the wizard said softly. The blue-white glow from the end of his staff touched his face in shadow; the flicker of'the torches beyond might have been responsible for the illusion Gil had of bitter self-reproach in the old man's expression, but she could not be sure. 'Gil, I had not wanted to ask this of you, for you are not mageborn, and the danger is very great.'
That doesn't matter,' Gil said quietly.
'No.' Ingold regarded her for a moment, and a curious expression that she could not read overlay the serenity of his face. 'No, to you it