The Walls of Air Page 0,89

be Scout's Honour.'

Aide looked back at Gil, her face imploring. 'We don't know that he murdered the Icefalcon.'

'Don't we?' Gil asked. 'He sure as hell lied about it. If bandits had killed him, they would have looted the body, and Stiarth never would have gotten that amulet.' Minalde was silent.

'All right,' Gil said softly. 'I won't talk it up with the other Guards, though Melantrys is as convinced as I am about it. And I won't take any kind of revenge that would wreck negotiations. But I can't answer for anyone else.' Silence and shadow lay between them for a moment, broken only by the distant random talk in corridors closer to the Aisle than this one. The great gates would soon be shut for the night; the Church had tolled its bells throughout the Keep, and no few participants had made their way to the nightly services in the great cell beneath the Royal Sector where the Bishop Govannin centred her scarlet domain. Among them, Gil knew, would be Stiarth of Alketch, like all the dark southerners, a fanatic son of the Church. Someone Bok the carpenter, she thought had told her the Imperial Nephew had supped with the old prelate and had been closeted with her for some hours before the Council meeting with Alwir, Minalde, and the other notables of the Keep. Now Aide looked strained and worn in the dim light of her clay lamp, her loosely bound hair kinked and wrinkled from her formal coronet. She was a royal princess and the source of her brother's power, Gil thought, looking at that white, withdrawn face. And she was as much a pawn as any one of the Guards. 'Thank you,' Aide said quietly. Gil shrugged. 'I hope it's worth it.' 'To establish a bridgehead for humankind at Gae?' Aide blinked up at her, startled. 'Once the Nest there is burned out...'

'But will it be? With Govannin and the troops of the Alketch trying to get rid of the wizards, and the Archmage, whenever he shows up, and Ingold, and with all the other leaders fighting Alwir for power? With the old-timers in the Keep resenting Maia's Penambrans and the common people accusing the

merchants of stealing grain? Aide, you have a gunnysack full of cats here, not a team of mules that's going to pull together.'

'I know,' the Queen said softly. 'And that's why I thank you for not - not making the situation worse.'

Gil paused in her steps, looking curiously over at the sweet, sensitive face on the other side of the lampflame, seeing a girl who in Gil's world would be barely out of high school, yet with all the experience of ruin, horror, and death, of judgement and the soiled meshes of political expediency, behind those tired dark-blue eyes. Gil's grievance against the Imperial Nephew seemed suddenly very personal and rather petty. 'Better thee than me, honey.' She sighed. 'But you know I'll back you all the way.' 'Thank you,' Aide said again. Their footsteps chimed together as they turned down the black hallways toward the barracks. In the dark weeks of winter, the friendship between them had grown, a friendship born of loneliness and mutual respect. Aide stood a little in awe of Gil's learning and her quick, cold intelligence; Gil envied Aide's patience and compassion, knowing them as qualities which she herself lacked. The two women recognized each other's courage, and Gil, from her own disastrous family life, understood Aide's misery and confusion at her increasing isolation from her brother in the welter of Keep politics. But if Aide understood the trouble that Gil had found growing in her own heart these dark, snowbound days, she never spoke of it.

After a time Aide asked, 'Were you going back to your research tonight?'

Gil shrugged. 'I don't think so. I've decoded most of that last chronicle, and there isn't a whole lot in it. It's late - I think Drago the Third was the last King to rule from Renweth, and that was centuries after the Time of the Dark. When he disappeared, they moved the capital back up to Gae, where the big citadel of wizards was in those days.'

'He disappeared?' Aide asked, startled. 'Well - he took off with somebody named Pnak for some place called Maijan Gian

Ko, and there was this huge fuss about it, and he never came back. Where's Maijan Gian Ko, I wonder?'

'That was the old name for Quo,' Minalde said. 'The greatest fortunate place or Great