The inner gates stood a foot or so ajar, the slot of darkness between them like an eye slit in the visor of a black Hell. Gil sidled toward it, feeling the rushing of her own blood like fire in her veins. The steps where she had stood with Ingold, when he had asked her to hold the light at his back, were empty, and Gil frowned suddenly at
the anomaly. If the Dark had got in and seized Caldern, there would have been something - bones, blood, his sword - to show it. Even if they had seized him, carried him off bodily...
She swung violently around. The empty Aisle stretched a thousand feet at her back.
Don't start that, she told herself grimly. First things first.
She pushed the inner gates a fraction wider and stood in the inky slit.
The misty starlight visible in the narrow rectangle of the open outer gates wasn't much, but it was enough to show her the ten-foot passage of the gates. There was no movement in the inky shadows clustering in the corners and the vault of the roof and, more importantly to Gil, no feeling of the presence of the Dark. She held up her torch; though it jittered in the draught, it revealed nothing untoward. Still her whole body was tensed like a cat's as she slid noiselessly down the tunnel and stood in the open doors of night.
For the first time since Gil had come to Renweth, the cloud-cover had broken. Icy moonlight frosted the world outside, turning the snow to diamonds and the shadows to velvet. Frost lay like lace on the black stone of the steps. Three sets of heavily booted tracks led down the steps and through the frozen mud of the path outside, circling around toward the food compounds that had been built only that week and filled within the last two days.
Gil sighed tiredly. The story was now clear.
Maia and the Penambrans would be coming to the Keep within days. The food stored by Alwir's government and hundreds of large and small Keep entrepreneurs had been moved out to the compounds to make room for them. Probably not all, Gil guessed; there were still probably hoards cached in deserted cells and back corners by those who did not trust fate and would not admit to anyone all they had. Guards, Alwir's men, and Church troops were supposed to protect the compound by day-and fear of the Dark by night.
The wetness in the tracks was not yet frozen. Caldern could easily have been lured away; since the night of the Dark's great assault on the Keep, the Dark Ones had made no further attempt to break the gate, and the post of gate Guard was generally given to the captain of the watch, simply so the other members of the watch would know where to find their leader. Who would guess, Gil thought, that somebody would actually leave the gates open to venture outside at night to steal food?
There were three of them, she thought, considering the tracks, and a fourth to distract the captain. That argued a ring - not a single man or woman, fearful for some family's hunger after the arrival of the Penambrans in the Keep, but an organized group who would steal as much as they could and lock it away, holding it until the starving spring.
It was all as clear as the moonlight that edged the steps in crystal.
Gil stood for what seemed like a long time in the diamond night, the smell of snow
and pine like ice water in her nostrils. Long ago, she remembered, she had been a scholar, and it had never been her wish to harm anyone. All that she had ever desired had been the clean solitude of knowledge, the peace of mind and heart to read, to think, to unravel riddles and reconstruct past times, and to seek the truth behind the polemics of those whose business it was to lie about the dead. Alone in the hoarfrost cold of midnight, she remembered it clearly, for knowledge had been all she had ever wanted. She had chosen it over the husbands she might have had, if she had ever bothered to seek them, and the peace of family goodwill that she had let slip by the wayside in the wake of her parents' horror at her chosen course.
But since that time, she had come to other knowledge.
She stepped silently back into the blackness of the gateway. Putting her shoulder to the massive iron bindings of the door, she pushed it to.
The guttering light of her torch threw a fitful and tarnished gilding over the rings and levers that operated the locks. She heard the muted click of the mechanism, deep within the tons of poised iron, and, as if hastening to escape from what she had done, she took her torch from its wall holder and hurried back up the passage. She walked soundlessly, all her senses keyed. It was not impossible that the Dark had slipped through the open gates and were lurking somewhere in the darkness of the Keep. Above her own fear, she felt fury at the irresponsibility of the men who had done it who had risked not only their own lives but the lives of everyone in the Keep and the integrity of the last sanctuary on earth for money.
In the weeks since the Guards had asked her to become one of them, Gil had killed dozens of the Dark Ones. The Icefalcon had said she was a born killer, a creepy sort of compliment that she wasn't sure she wished to accept. Maybe it only meant that she was naturally cold-hearted and single-minded and that she would, if put to it, rather kill than be killed. But she felt now as if she had cut a lifeline and let three men drown. She was glad she had not seen their faces and did not know who they were.
She never clearly identified the sound as she stepped out of the inner gates. It might have been cloth swishing, or the whine of something hard and heavy whistling through the air. But weeks with the Guards had given her hair-trigger ' reflexes, and the leaded stick meant to crush her skull cracked instead on her shoulder with splintering pain, throwing her forward to the floor. The torch skidded from her hand, and darkness seemed to swim down over her eyes, even as she rolled. Feet approached at a run, and she drew her sword with a long sideways hack at floor level, bracing her body as best she could against the impact. One of the looming figures in the darkness above her jumped. The other one screamed and fell on her, kicking and writhing in agony and screaming with a voice that rang in the hollow enormity of the vaulted Aisle. The weight of him crushed on Gil's injured shoulder, the screaming rang in her ears, and hot, slimy wetness gushed over them both.
Irrationally furious at him for wallowing over her like that, Gil twisted out from under, pain ripping through her shoulder as she moved. Her eyes cleared. A bearded man she vaguely recognized hopped around on the outskirts of the encounter, a short sword in his hand. There was another man in the shadows behind him, also armed with a sword, his fat face pallid with nausea. Without stopping to wonder, Gil tried to get to her feet, but the bearded man, taking his chance, stepped in on her with a brutal downward swing of his blade. Through a welter of pain and darkness, Gil recognized
the blow as 'coffin bait,' a fool's move, and her reaction was as automatic as a blink. She took him under the sternum with a two-handed thrust of her longer blade and saw blood burst simultaneously from chest and mouth. His eyes glazed with shock and with the amateur's almost comical astonishment at death. The fat little man dropped his sword and fled. On her knees, her head reeling, Gil watched him run all the way down the Aisle; she felt nothing but a cold, queer detachment, mixed with a little contempt for his cowardice. The man behind her was still thrashing on the floor, still screaming wildly on that same high note, still clawing vainly at his leg. Gil turned her head slowly and saw she'd cut his left foot off at the ankle. It was lying, still in its gold-stitched slipper of green kid, about four feet away. Then she fainted.
'She be all right?'
The voices around her were fuzzy and confused. Gil whispered, 'Ingold?' through cottony lips, blinking up at the hovering shadows.
'You'll be fine, Babydove,' Gnift's soft, hoarse voice said, and an encouraging hand patted her hair. 'Just fine.'
Gil sighed and shut her eyes against the smoky hurt of the dim lights. I guess the Icefalcon was right after all. So much for queasy considerations about closing the gates on those three poor thieves who'd got left outside and all that eyewash about the value of human life. Put to the test, she'd killed a man without so much as a token what am I doing?