"It could," the wizard said slowly, his voice low and very grave. "But at what cost to yourself, my lady? Gnodyrr is black magic. But more than that, in certain places, local Church rulings have condemned the subject of the spell as well to imprisonment, banishment, or death."
Aide's eyes seemed to get huge in her pale face.
Indignant, Rudy cried, "How come?"
"Don't speak of it so loudly," Ingold said. He leaned upon the workbench, his blunt, thick hands folded on the dark metal of its shining surface. The witchlight threw a curiously sinister glitter into his eyes. "Suppose I were to use gnodyrr on Minalde and instruct her to-oh, three years hence-put ground glass into her brother's food. Then I go away and don't return until Alde has been executed for murdering her brother, leaving the Regency open..."
"The Regency!" Gil gasped, as Aide's arms tightened involuntarily around her child's body. Indignant at such treatment and oblivious to the dangers that surrounded him, Tir demanded rather unintelligibly to be released at once to pursue his quest among the litter of the table.
Rudy felt suddenly cold all over.
Aide whispered, "But you wouldn't..."
"No," the old man agreed. "But the law is based upon the possibility that I might." His scarred fingers brushed the thick coils of hair that veiled her ashen cheeks. "If Alwir learned of it, the consequences to you would be unthinkable, my child. An expensive risk to run, for something that might not be among your memories at all."
No more was said on the matter that morning, and Rudy returned to his experiments with the flame throwers. Alde and her overly venturesome son remained after Ingold and Gil departed. Alde to help and Tir to prevent either of them from getting anything accomplished in peace for very long.
Prince Altir Endorion, heir to the Realm of Darwath and last Prince of the House of Dare, had been a source of never ending wonderment to Rudy since the first morning that he had unwillingly aided Ingold in rescuing the child from the pursuit of the Dark Ones. Small and with his mother's air of compact delicacy, Tir had nevertheless survived the sack of cities, the destruction of a civilization, and a succession of dangers that had made Rudy's hair stand on end, with a calm resiliency that would have been awesome if it were not so utterly matter-of-fact.
If I'd gone through all that little rugrat has . Rudy told himself, watching Alde prevent her son from crawling out the door to lose himself in the endless darkness of the Keep's underground levels, I'd spend the rest of my natural life in the fetal position. I sure as hell wouldn't have this talent for wandering away toward shadows or high places or any other kind of available danger .
There were times, looking into the infant's wide, jewel-blue eyes, that he wondered how much of that fearlessness came from the buried memories of his ancestors and how much of it was his own, inherited from a father who had been a warrior King and a mother whose crazy courage Rudy had encountered in only one other woman in his life.
By the end of the afternoon, he had satisfied himself that the optimum range of the flame throwers was about twenty-five feet and that no adjustments of the barrel or barrels would lengthen it much beyond thirty.
"That's still farther than a mage can throw fire from his hands isn't it?" Alde inquired as she followed him along the teeming corridors of the first level, with her much-soot-blackened son balanced upon her hip. Around them in a hundred jerry-built cells, the voices of men and women could be heard quarreling, gossiping, and making love. Woodsmoke stung Rudy's eyes, and the heavy, ever-present, compound reek of unwashed clothing and greasy cooking assaulted his nostrils.
"I'm not sure," he replied, wiping the stray smut from his hands. "I've seen Ingold throw fire about fifteen feet. I asked Thoth about it once, and he said that if the danger were any more than fifteen feet away you'd be better off to run."
Aide laughed. "That sounds like Thoth." But there was a trace of uneasiness in her laughter. Like everyone else, she was a little afraid of the serpentmage.
By common consent, neither of them had spoken of their coming parting. There was an aura of peace about them, even in its shadow, that they were loath to break.
They turned a corner, and the noise from the Aisle hit them, a vast commotion of sound. Startled, they exchanged a glance; then Rudy put his arm about her shoulders and quickened his stride. They found the great open space at the core of the Keep filled with a crowd of men and women warriors, slapping sleet out of their bedrolls and stomping mud from their boots. At the far end of the Aisle, more and more were entering by the great gates, bringing with them blasts of icy air and the whirling gray snow blown by the storm outside. Torchlight and glowstones threw a restless, flickering illumination over the vast, steaming crowd, picking out ruffianly faces, ragged coats of fleece or buffalohide, and hands and cheeks scarred by recent battles with the Dark.
In the midst of it, hoary with ice and hairy as a werewolf, Tomec Tirkenson, landchief of Gettlesand, stood facing Alwir, Ingold, and Govannin with an ugly expression in his saddle-colored eyes.
"Dammit, I am the only landchief between the mountains and the Western Ocean!" he growled in his gravelly bass. "Half the men I brought are from Dele, and they're all you're likely to see from that part of the world. Dele was wiped out. These came to me with Kara of Ippit's folks, after months on the road."
"I would have expected a better showing," Alwir replied dryly, "from the landchief of the whole southwestern half of the Realm." The diamonds sewn in his black gloves caught slivers of light and strewed the dark brocade of his sleeves with fragments of color as he folded his arms. "If that is, indeed, what you claim to be."
"I'm not claiming a thing," the landchief rumbled. "But I've got a Keepful of women and kids-an old Keep, which was half-torn-down way back in the old days and rebuilt as best we could. It's damn stout, but there's no magic in its walls, bar the spells old Ingold put on it five years back and what Kara and her mother could do before they got the summons to come here. If I'd left the place unmanned, I'd have come back to find it gutted, sure as the ice in the north."
"So you made the decision not to fulfill your vows to the High King..." Alwir began with a sneer.
"Dammit, I brought all I could!"
"And he has done more than any other landchief in the Realm," Ingold added quietly. "And more than any of the others will."
The Chancellor swung around, an unpleasant curl to his full lips. "And are you party to the counsels of such traitors, my lord wizard?"
"No, my lord." Ingold stepped aside, to give room to a couple of snow-covered brigands who were lugging a groundsheet piled high with sacks of provisions and fodder.
"But I and the other mages have scried in our crystals, north, south, and east. And neither from the Keeps of Harl Kinghead in the North, from the lands of the petty princes of the Eastern Woods, nor from the country of the landchief Degedna Marina have we seen any sign that any other landchief in the Realm is sending you the aid you requested."
"So." Alwir drew himself up, haughty and bitter, his sapphire-dark eyes flashing at this new evidence of the fractioning of the Realm. "All the more reason for my lord Tirkenson not to have stinted the duty that he owes to the Realm."
"An excommunicate such as the Lord of Gettlesand..." Govannin began in her thin, vicious voice.
"The Lord of Gettlesand is welcome, with all those whom he could bring." Minalde stepped forward quickly, holding out her hand, heedless of the dust that daubed the hems of her faded peasant skirt and liberally smutched the baby Prince in her arms. "In our time of need we could scarcely ask for a more loyal vassal."