'Is that what they mean when they say something's as - as unstoppable as the ice in the north? Or as sure as the ice in the north?' Rudy asked.
'Not in reference to the storms, no,' Ingold said. 'In the north you'll find the great ice fields, where nothing can live and where there is nothing but an endless waste of ice. In places the ice is growing as much as an inch a year. In some places, more.' 'Have you been there?'
'Oh, yes. That was long ago. Lohiro and I had I suppose you could call it an errand in the ice, and both of us very nearly froze to death. At that time, the rim of the ice lay along the crest of a fair-sized range of hills that the old maps call the Barrier. The last time I was there, the hills were almost completely buried.'
'Ingold,' Rudy said softly, 'what's the connection? Seven weeks ago was the first quarter moon of autumn. Gae fell. Lohiro and all the wizards in the world cut off contact with everyone and anyone. The Dark disappeared from the Nests in the plains after murdering their herds. What the hell is going on, Ingold? What's happening?'
The old man sighed. 'I don't know, Rudy. I don't know. Is this one more catastrophe in a tale of random catastrophes, or is it all part of a single riddle, with a single key? We have shared this planet with the Dark for all the years of humankind's existence, yet we know nothing about them except that they are our enemies. If there is a key, is it at Quo? Or does the key lie with the Dark themselves, beyond human understanding at all? Or is it in the last place we would look for it, back at the Keep of Dare?'
Chapter 11
The messenger from the Emperor of Alketch came riding up the valley on a rare sunny afternoon, after a week of snows. Most of the Keep was out of doors, working on repairing the mazes of corrals or building new fences for the food compounds, chopping wood or hauling rocks for the projected forge. The cohorts of warriors at exercise under various of the company captains ran, jumped, and swung weighted weapons with sweaty goodwill. Children of all ages scattered through the Vale, sledding, skating, or sit-down tobogganing on the frozen stream, their shrieks of delight like the piping of summer birds.
Gil had picked that afternoon to experiment with one of the little white polyhedrons that she and Aide had found in such numbers throughout the old storerooms and shafts of the Keep. These had remained a puzzle to them, turning up with ubiquitous regularity, businesslike and yet to all intents and purposes useless. Like the Keep, they were smooth and shining enigmas.
At first she had theorized to Aide that they might be toys. 'They'd break if they were dropped, surely,' Aide objected. The girls were walking along the new-dug path back to the clearing in the woods where the Guards had spent the morning in practice. Gil had recently returned to regular training and was black-and-blue. 'Votives?' she suggested.
'For what?' Aide asked reasonably. 'Votives are gifts of light, candles, scent, incense, or of wealth given to the Church, in which case you present little bronze or lead models of what you've given.'
'Maybe they were toys,' Gil remarked. 'They do stack together.' And they did, fitting facet against facet, like a cellular structure or a three-dimensional honeycomb. 'Do they really
break?'
But, from an oblique sense of uneasiness at what she did not understand, or merely from an overdose of science fiction films in her own universe, Gil had elected to wait for clear weather to perform the experiment outdoors. She and Aide found Seya and Melantrys at the clearing, sparring with wooden training swords, and warned the two Guards of their intentions. There was a flat rock in the centre of the clearing, and Gil set one of the white glass polyhedrons on this, threw a piece of sacking over it, and hit it with a hammer. The result was unspectacular. The polyhedron shattered into six or seven pieces, releasing neither poisonous gas nor embryonic alien beings. Gil felt embarrassed over her own apprehensions, but she noticed that Aide, Seya, and Melantrys had all stayed a respectful distance away.
The pieces appeared to be nothing more than glass of some kind, heavy and slick, like white obsidian. They were vaguely translucent when held to the wan sunlight, but otherwise unremarkable.
'You have me beat,' Melantrys remarked, taking one of them between her small, scarred fingers. 'It's nothing I've even heard of.'
'I know,' Gil said. 'The records make no mention of them. But we're finding them all over the Keep.'
'Maybe you're right about their being toys,' Seya said. Tir certainly likes to play with them.'
And indeed Tir, who was bundled up in black quilting and furs, so that he looked less like a baby than like a stubby-limbed cabbage, was solemnly rolling another one of the milky prisms back and forth across the side of the rock. Aide sat next to him, sending the thing back at him every time he pushed it toward her. She glanced up at Seya's words. 'But the Keep was built by people fleeing a holocaust,' she argued suddenly. 'Would they have brought toys?'
'We can't know that these things are as old as the Keep,' Seya pointed out.
'No,' Gil said. 'But on the other hand, we've found nothing to show how they were made.'
Aide turned back just in time to keep her son from crawling over the edge of the rock and tumbling into the snow beneath. Tir was growing into a quiet, compact infant whose calm demeanour and lack of fussingdisguised an appalling capacity for mischief. He could crawl unnoticed for long distances, making his silent and efficient way toward any danger, gravely consuming whatever mouth-sized morsels fate placed in his path and his mother wasn't quick enough to get away from him. Sometimes he seemed preoccupied with the white polyhedrons, stacking and unstacking the dozen or so Aide kept in her room, examining them for hours in fascination. Gil wondered if this was simply a baby's marvelling at the world or if he remembered something about them from some long-forgotten ancestor in the Keep.
'If the people who built the Keep came here in as bad a shape as we did,' Melantrys commented, pulling the rawhide thong loose from her hair and shaking down the thick barley-coloured waves over her shoulders, 'it would stand to reason that the things were pretty important. Maia says that when his people came up the Pass, they found thousands of crowns' worth of jewelery that people had chucked away in the snow.'
Voices came faintly to them through the trees. Looking up, Gil saw Alwir pass, his fine hands gesturing to the melody of his speaking voice. At his side, Maia of Thran was nodding, a seven-foot longbow held unstrung in his hand. The Chancellor glanced up through the thin screen of bare birches and saw the three Guards in their black, shabby uniforms and the young Queen with her son. He passed them by without a word. Gil heard the swift, ragged draw of Aide's breath; turning, she saw the quick misery that had crossed the girl's face.
A voice called out, young and shrill, and Tad the herdkid
came running up the path toward the Chancellor with a string of the Keep orphans at his heels. Alwir looked down his nose at the boy until he heard what Tad had to say; then Gil saw him bend forward, suddenly attentive. She didn't hear what Tad had said, but she saw the look that flashed between the Bishop and the Lord of the Keep. Then Tad and his little band were running toward the clearing, Tad calling out, 'My lady! My lady!' Aide got quickly to her feet. 'What is it, Tad?' The children roiled to a stop, red-faced and snow-flecked, in the steaming cloud of their breath. 'It's the messenger from Alketch, my lady,' the boy gasped. 'Lyddie here saw him coming up the road from the valley.'
What seemed like the whole of the Keep had assembled on the steps to watch the coming of the messenger from Alketch. But whether they were ones who had come from Gae or from Penambra, they were silent, a sea of watching faces. From her position among the ranks of the Guards, Gil could see that the messenger rode alone. The Icefalcon had not returned with him.