'You should let Alwir know about the bundle of parchments we found,' Gil remarked at one point as they retraced their steps back from a remote corner of the fifth level. The puddle of yellow lamplight wavered around their feet. The air up here was warmer, the crowding walls of the empty warrens of cells pressing down on the girls in silence. Grotesque shadows lumbered along the wall, bending around the flame like pteranodon moths about a diminutive candle. Gil felt wryly envious of Rudy and Ingold's blithe, unthinking ability to summon light. Damn wizards probably never gave it a second
thought.
'I will,' Minalde agreed, holding the lamp up for better visibility. 'He and Bishop Govannin are already quarrelling about writing materials. Alwir wants to make a census of the Keep.'
'He should. And he should be keeping his own chronicles.'
'I know.' Aide had imbibed enough of Gil's historical sense to realize that the Church accounts of certain events differed radically from secular records. 'But because there's almost nothing to write on, nobody's keeping any kind of chronicles at all.'
'Great,' Gil said. 'So when in three thousand years all this happens again, everybody's going to be in as rotten a shape as we are now.'
'Oh, no!' Aide protested. 'It couldn't - I mean -'
Gil raised her eyebrows and paused in a shadowy doorway. 'Like hell it couldn't. This could all be part of a regular cycle. We don't know why the Dark came before or how many times it has happened. We know they have herds of some kind below the ground; we know they're taking prisoners. Are the herds descended from prisoners they took three thousand years ago? Did people drive them back underground, or did they just go away of their own accord?'
'But why would they?' Aide cried, much distressed.
'Beats the hell out of me.' Gil paused, catching a faceted glimpse of something in a deserted doorway. She picked up another one of those little white glass polyhedrons and turned its uncommunicative shape thoughtfully in her good hand. 'But that's what we've got to find out, Aide. We've got to get a handle on this somehow - and right now the Keep and the records are the only starting places I can think of.' She shrugged. 'Maybe we're wasting our time, and the Archmage will have all the answers when he comes back here with Rudy
and Ingold. And then again, maybe he won't.'
They continued on down the corridor, Gil caching the polyhedron in her sling for further investigation later. Echoes whispered at their passing, mocking footfall and shadow and breath. But the Keep hid its secrets well, furled tightly within the spiral and counterspiral of the winding halls, or revealed them in enigmatic or incomprehensible ways.
Early in their endeavours, they decided to ask Bektis about the observation room with its crystal table, on the off chance that his lore might have preserved some clue to its whereabouts.
The Court Wizard of the House of Dare, however, had little time to spend on the games of girls. He looked up with a frown as they came quietly into his room, a large cell tucked away in the warren of the Royal Sector. The light of the bluish witchfire that burned above his head shone on his high, bald pate and the bridge of his proud, hooked nose. Dutifully, he made a stiff little bow. 'All my pardons, my lady,' he said in his rather light, mellifluous voice. 'In such a gown as that, one might easily take you for a commoner.' Rigid disapproval seemed to have been rammed like a poker up his backbone.
Still he listened to Gil's description of what they sought, nodding his head wisely with his usual expression of grave thoughtfulness, which Gil suspected uncharitably that he practised daily before a mirror. As she spoke, Gil looked around the room, noting the few black-bound books lining the shelves in the little sitting-room area at the far end of the cell, and the richness of the single chest and carved bedstead. Unlike the table in her own minuscule study, the bedstead was newish, and the latest style current in Gae at the time of the coming of the Dark. It had clearly been brought down from Karst in pieces and reassembled, rather than scrounged from the old storerooms at the Keep. What sympathy she had once cherished for Lord Alwir's transport problems faded. He couldn't have been doing too badly if he could afford to cart along his Court Conjurer's bedroom set. In the cool brightness of the witchlight, Bektis' sleeves twinkled with scarlet embroidery, stitched into a pattern
Gil recognized as the signs of the Zodiac. She picked out her own symbol, the tailed M of Virgo, before it occurred to 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.