02 The Walls of Air

Optimistically, Rudy set off into the maze.

'I feel nothing,' Janus of Weg said quietly. The big Commander of the Guards of Gae sat on the edge of a bunk near the guardroom hearth, his face grave in the loose frame of coppery-red hair that surrounded it. He glanced across the hearth at Ingold. 'But I trust you. If you say the Dark are outside, I would believe you, even if the sun were high in the sky.'

There was a stirring among the other captains and a murmur of assent. The Icefalcon, like a foreigner among the Guards with his long white viking braids, said softly, The very smell of the night is evil.' Melantrys, a diminutive girl with the eyes of a ninja, glanced nervously over her shoulder.

'Smell, hell,' rumbled Tomec Tirkenson, landchief of Gettlesand, a big craggy plainsman whose domains lay on the other side of the mountains. 'It's like the nights when the cattle stampede for no reason.'

The Icefalcon glanced coolly across at Ingold. 'Can they break in?' he asked, as if it were a matter of no more moment than the outcome of a race on which he had bet only a small sum.

'I don't know.' Ingold shifted his weight on his perch by the hearth and folded sword-scarred hands on his knee. 'But we can be certain that they will try. Janus, Tomec - I suggest that the corridors be patrolled, on all levels, to every corner of the Keep. That way...'

'But we haven't the men for it!' Melantrys protested. 'We've enough for a patrol of sorts,' Janus admitted. 'But if the Dark effect an entrance, it's sure we've not enough to fight at any one place, spread so thin.'

The Icefalcon cocked a pale eyebrow at the wizard. 'Are we going to fight?'

'If we can,' Ingold said. 'Your patrols can be eked out with

volunteers, Janus. Get the Keep orphans as your scouts. They're always into everything anyway; they might as well be put to use. We need to patrol the corridors, simply to know if and where the Dark break in. It isn't likely that they can,' he went on gravely, 'for the walls of the Keep have the most powerful spells of the ancient world woven into their fabric. But whether the spells have weakened, or whether the Dark have grown stronger in the intervening years, I do not know.' Despite the calm in that deep, scratchy voice, Gil thought he looked grim and driven in the uncertain flicker of the hearth-light. 'But I do know that if the Dark Ones enter the Keep, we shall have to abandon it entirely, and then we will surely be lost.'

'Abandon the Keep!' Janus cried.

'It stands to reason,' the Icefalcon agreed, leaning back against the wall behind him. He had a light and rather breathless voice that sounded disinterested even when discussing the loss of the last sanctuary left to humankind. 'AH those little stairways, miles of empty corridors... We could never drive them out.' The captains looked at one another, knowing the truth of his words.

'It's not only that,' Gil put in quietly. Their eyes turned to her, a quick glitter in the room's shifting shadows. 'What about the ventilating system?' she went on. The air in here has to travel somehow. The whole Keep must be honeycombed with shafts too small for a man to fit through. But the Dark can change their size as well as their shape. They could fit through a hole no bigger than a rat's, and, God knows, we have rats in the Keep. All it would need would be for one of them to get into the ventilation -the thing could attack at will, and we would never be able to find it.'

'Curse it,' Janus whispered, 'that the Dark should rise at the start of the worst winter in human memory. If we quit the Keep, those as aren't taken at first nightfall would freeze before they came to shelter. These mountains are buried in snow.'

'Rats...' Tirkenson said softly. 'Ingold, how do we know the

Dark aren't lurking somewhere in the upper levels already? The Keep stood empty for nigh two thousand years.'

'We would have known,' the wizard said. 'Believe me, we would have known by this time.'

'But their eggs?' Tirkenson went on. 'How do the Dark Ones breed, Ingold? As Gil-Shalos said, it would need only one to go through the air tunnels, laying eggs like a salmon along the way. We could be sitting on top of a spawning ground of the Dark.' Though the Guards were not as a rule nervous people, a ripple of horror seemed to pass through the assembled captains. The instructor Gnift shuddered and exchanged a quick, worried look with Melantrys.

'You needn't concern yourselves with that, at least,' Ingold said quietly. He picked a bit of straw from the frayed sleeve of his mantle and avoided all their eyes. 'I have seen the breeding places of the Dark beneath the ground, and I assure you that they do not multiply in any fashion so - tidy - as that.' He looked up again, his face carefully calm. 'But in any case, we cannot allow the Dark entrance under any circumstances. The corridors must be patrolled.'

'We can get Church troops,' Janus said, 'and Alwir's private guards.'

'I have my own men,' Tirkenson added, rising. 'The lot of us can take the south side of the Aisle.'

'Good.' Ingold stood and lifted his head to search the faces of those crowded into the narrow barracks, seeking someone in the uncertain yellow light. 'I doubt that the Dark will be able to breach the walls themselves, but if they do, we must know it.'

'Can we know?' Melantrys straightened her sword belt, glancing up at him with chill black eyes. The Dark can swallow a man's soul or blood or flesh between one heartbeat and the next, a yard from his fellows, before he can cry out.'

'A Guard?' Ingold inquired mildly.

She bridled. 'Of course not.'

There you are.' He picked up his staff, his shadow looming behind him like the echo of the darkness waiting beyond the gates of the Keep. Once more he scanned the room, the figures there fading into milling confusion of preparation and departure. It might have been a trick of the firelight, but the lines seemed deeper in that calm and nondescript face. Whether this was from weariness, apprehension, or sheer annoyance, Gil could not tell.

All around them men and women were slinging on swords and finding cloaks; voices called to one another through the dark, narrow doors of the barracks. The air seemed somehow heavier, the fear in it as palpable as electricity; if she had touched Ingold's cloak, Gil thought, sparks would have jumped from the fabric. Janus remained for a moment at Ingold's side, towering over him, his broken-nosed, pug face grave.

That is for the corridors,' he said quietly. 'What of the gates?'

'Yes,' Ingold said. The gates. I feel that is where they will concentrate their attack. But with the height of the ceiling in the Aisle, once inside they can strike from above, and ground defence will be almost useless.'

'I know,' Janus said softly. They'll have to be fought in the gate tunnel itself, won't they?'

'Maybe,' the wizard replied. 'Gil - I shall need your help at the gates.' Then he frowned and cast a swift, raking glance over the remaining Guards. Bright azure eyes hooded like a falcon's glittered in the shadows. 'And where,' he asked grimly, 'is Rudy?'

At the moment, it was the question uppermost in Rudy's mind as well.

He knew he was still somewhere on the second level, but that was about all he could be sure of. Having missed the turning for the stairway he sought, he had tried to double back along an allegedly parallel corridor, with disastrous results. A makeshift

hall through what had once been a large cell beckoned, only to dead-end him in a black warren of crumbling brick and dry rot that spiralled him eventually into the centre of the maze, a long-deserted outlet for the Keep's indoor plumbing system. Cursing those who had designed the Keep and those who had felt called upon to improve it alike, he crossed through the dark, water-murmuring privy and out into the corridors beyond.