On the other hand, she thought as she lay awake in the narrow darkness of her bunk, people did all kinds of things when impelled by fear or love. She found it impossible to dismiss them, as she once would have done, simply as silly people engaged in incomprehensible stupidities. The love and suffering and fear there were too real and too close to what was in her own unwilling heart.
In time she heard Janus and Gnift come in and return silently to their bunks. Somewhere in the Keep, she thought she could hear the woman Lolli wailing still, though it might have been her imagination or some other sound entirely. She wondered what they'd find of Snelgrin when the gates were opened in the morning.
She thought of the Icefalcon, cool, aloof, and very young, riding away down the river valleys, then of Ingold and Rudy, setting off like the hapless King Drago on a journey to the greatest magic place, never to return.
Maijan Gian Ko.
Sleepily, her scholarly mind picked at the etymology of the words.
Gian Ko.
Gaenguo.
Her eyes opened in the darkness. What had Bektis said? '... in Penambra and in Gae itself, on the very spot where the Palace now stands?'
She felt the blood turn to water in her veins.
But it doesn't make sense, she thought. The terrible silence of the Vale of the Dark returned to her, the heaviness of the vaporous air and the louring sense of being watched. She remembered the hideous geometry of the place, visible only in the angled light of sunset from the tangled rocks of the cliffs above, the sense of breathless confusion there, and the disruption, rather than the magnification, of Ingold's spells.
But was the effect always negative with regard to magic? At one time, could it have been positive? Is that why wizards built their citadels and people their cities near those... fortunate places?
And in that case, she thought, is that why the places were fortunate - the effects positive - to begin with?
Gil did not sleep that night.
Gil had never had much of an opinion of humankind, and it went down several more notches when the gates were opened at dawn. Word had evidently circulated through the Keep, for over a hundred civilians had shown up, idling in the Aisle since before seven in the morning for no better purpose than to be present to see what was left of the hapless Snelgrin. Gil was on day watch, logy from a sleepless night and bruised and exhausted from morning training; she felt she could have turned in her tracks and cursed them all.
As she had hoped, Aide was there, half-supporting the taller and heavier Lolli. It was clear that neither had slept. Lolli's face was blotched red and swollen from weeping; Aide's was very tight and calm. It was only her manner that kept the people there from pushing and staring. Rather to Gil's surprise, Alwir had shown up, too, and Govannin, keeping to the background but making their presence felt.
Quite an audience, Gil thought sourly, surveying them as Janus and Caldern worked the heavy locking wheels of the inner gates, then walked down the dark tunnel to open the outer. / hope they find something worth their while.
But in the end they were doomed to disappointment, of a sort. The Dark had had other fish to fry last night. Snelgrin was found, alive but stunned, on the steps of the Keep, half-frozen from lying in the snow. The Dark had been known to devour the minds of their victims while leaving the bodies living, but Gil had seen those pitiful remains; they stood still, like cataleptics, or moved if jostled by the wind. Snelgrin managed to get to his feet, his movements odd and jerky, and stumbled up the steps without assistance. His wife was screaming and sobbing with joy. In a way it was touching, Gil thought, shivering in the icy cold of the sunrise. But it must be poor exchange for a pile of ice-crusted bones to some of the spectators.
After the smells of grease and smoke and human frowziness, the ice-water clarity
of the morning was a welcome relief. Mauve clouds piled the lower slopes of the peaks above. Beyond them, the sky was a pale bluish green, the light cool and holy on the tracked brown slush and ice-crusted mud. Gil stood on the steps, her cloak wrapped tightly about her, thinking of the three men on whom she had closed the gates - of the Icefalcon, when the slender protection of the Rune of the Veil had been stolen from him, of Ingold, journeying slap into the biggest Nest of the Dark in the West of the World, hoping to find the Archmage there, and of Rudy -
'Gil?'
Aide was standing at her elbow. Gil breathed a sigh of relief. 'You're just the lady I want to see.' As they walked together out of Gil's watchpost among the sprawling food compounds, Gil hastily outlined last night's conclusions with regard to the meaning of the words 'fortunate place.'
'So the guys are walking straight into that,' she finished, her breath drifting in a white veil against the darkness of the inky trees beyond. 'Bektis will be awake by this time, won't he? Can you ask him if he can get in touch with them? Ingold talked about getting in contact with Lohiro at Quo, so there's got to be a way to do it. I mean, to talk back and forth by crystal. Get him to contact them and tell them not to go any farther until I can talk to them.' She glanced up at the pale brightness of the sky. It was late October, she calculated, but the days were already shortening to the time of the Winter Feast. 'I'll be off duty around sunset.'
'All right.' Aide wrapped her sable cloak more tightly around her and hurried off down the slushy path for the Keep once more, the thick fur rippling in the light. But in less than an hour she was back, stumbling over the slippery mess of the icy trail, holding her thin peasant skirts clear of the mud.
Gil, huddled like an undernourished blackbird at one corner of the compound, left off trying to warm her hands and strode toward the girl. 'What did he say?'
'I'm sorry, Gil,' Aide panted. A flurry of the Keep children ran past them, throwing snowballs and shrieking, on their way to pick up kindling in the woods. A drift of smoke came to them from the wash-pots or the smokehouses, and with it the thunk of an arrow in a practice tree. 'I'm sorry. Bektis says they're there already.'
'What?'
'He says they've reached the walls of air. His spells can't find them within the mazes.'
Gil cursed, comprehensively and imaginatively. 'How long have they been there? Or does that tea-leaf reader know?'
'No - Bektis isn't very careful about things like that. But they've been gone only a little over four weeks, so I'd imagine they've only just reached the Seaward Mountains.'
'Son of a - I've been stupid,' Gil said. 'Blind and stupid. I should have figured out the etymology before this.' She picked up a chunk of snow from the ground and hurled it with vicious strength against the mud-slab side of the nearest shelter.
'So if they've reached the walls of air,' she went on more quietly, 'then by the time they come out, they'll already know anything we have to tell them.'
Chapter 12
'Do you see it?'
'See what?'
Ingold did not reply. He only tucked his mittened hands into his sleeves and watched Rudy with a close, speculative expression, as he watched the younger man when he practised spells of illusion or made the waters of a creek rise or fall. A breeze shook the leaves of the yellowed aspens over their heads, spattering them and the sodden path underfoot with leftover rain.
'You mean the road?' Rudy asked, looking back.
The turning he'd seen - or thought he'd seen - was gone. Only the main road was visible, its hexagonal blocks unevenly worn and faintly silver under their carpet of tawny decay, winding away in silence through the wet cathedral stillness of the woods.