"The Keep had to be built," she said quietly, staring into the darkness of that shadowy room hidden at the heart of the ancient fortress. "Everything was sacrificed to it-fuel, power, energy, magic. It was a cold and bitter winter. The Dark attacked us, night after night, killing or carrying off prisoners alive." She paused, her lips pressed tight to keep them from trembling and her eyes wide with remembered horrors.
"And then?" Ingold's voice was little more than a breath in that still, dark room. The cold light fragmented his lined face into chips of brightness and darkness. As he leaned forward, his moving shadow woke a single blink of brightness from the gray crystal set in the heart of the stone table. "Tell me, Minalde. What means, what weapon, did Dare of Renweth use to combat the Dark? How did he go against them?"
She sat still for a moment, staring into the darkness. Then her eyes widened, until it seemed that only the black pupils showed, dilated within a thin ring of indigo. She shut her eyes and began to weep, deep, heaving sobs that racked her body like the pains of childbirth.
Rudy sprang to his feet with a startled cry. Ingold waved him back and gathered the weeping girl into his arms, stroking the dark, braided head that he held pressed to his shoulder and murmuring words of comfort. Her sobbing quieted but did not stop. The wizard continued to murmur to her, rocking her like a child, and Rudy sensed the slow withdrawal of the spells that had filled the room. The air seemed to change. The scent, the feel, of power dissipated and the dark aura slipped away until Ingold was nothing but a ragged old vagabond, comforting a frightened girl.
Finally Alde sat up a little, her face blotched and swollen. From somewhere about his person, Ingold produced a clean handkerchief to give her.
"Are you all right?" he asked her kindly.
She nodded, her hands still shaking from the violence of her tears, and blew her nose comprehensively. "Why was I crying?" she whispered.
He brushed the wet tendrils of hair back from her face, a father's gesture. "You don't remember?"
She shook her head. Rudy put a gentle hand on her shoulder; her fingers slid around his, and she looked up at him with a wan smile. "Did you-did you learn what you were looking for?"
"We have learned some things of value," the wizard replied after a moment. "Something of the founding of the Keep." He frowned and got to his feet, helping Alde up with a strong, gentle hand. The soft glimmer of the witchlight in the room coalesced into a floating shred of ball lightning, which drifted out the door before them, showing their dusty route through the whispering darkness of the dry gardens.
"But nothing of how humankind defeated the Dark?"
In the bobbing blue light, Ingold's face seemed suddenly harsh. He said quietly, "Perhaps more than we know."
Minalde's experience with forbidden magic yielded other fruits than that ambiguous dread. In her trance she had spoken of caves, where the refugees from the realms in the valleys had lived through that first brutal winter, during the construction of the Keep itself. "And whereas we cannot, of course, tell Alwir how we came to learn of their existence," Ingold said as they returned to the Corps common room, "considering the border war that has been carried on for generations between Gettlesand and Alketch, were Rudy and I to 'discover' these caves, I think things could be much more peaceable in the Keep when the Army of the South arrives."
"The caves would have to be fortified, wouldn't they?" Gil mused, stirring the fire to life and prowling into the dark kitchen in quest of bread and cheese.
"They must have been, if the refugees survived in them until spring." Ingold held out his hands to the warmth of the blaze, the saffron light winking off the brass of his belt buckle and the hilts of sword and dagger. "They would provide a protected camp for our allies-protected not only from the Dark Ones but, I think, from the White Raiders as well."
Rudy shivered. The idle threnody that he had begun to pluck from the strings of his harp fell silent. He had seen too many of the hideous sacrifices that the plains barbarians offered to their ghosts. One would have been too many.
"When Rudy and I go in search of the caves..."
"Rudy and you?" Gil re-emerged from the kitchen and tossed a bannock lightly across the room that the wizard fielded without getting up. "If you plan on meeting the White Raiders, you're going to need me there as well as Rudy. Unless you want another forest fire," she added uncharitably.
"And you aren't leaving me behind." Alde spoke up unexpectedly from the hearth rug, where she had seated herself at Rudy's feet.
Ingold sighed. "This is not a primrosing expedition..."
"Do you really think you could find the place without me?"
So it was that the four of them set out in the morning, searching for a place whose appearance might have shifted radically in the last three thousand years. Ingold chose the cliffs that stretched north of the Keep, on the grounds that the caves that Alde had spoken of seemed to be higher than the rest of the Vale, and both Gil and Alde backed him up. Rudy, who had no opinion on the subject, brought up the rear, his holstered flame thrower slapping at his side, scanning the gloomy woods for any sign of the White Raiders.
Though there was nothing resembling a road from the Keep along the north cliffs, the woods there were not too thick to penetrate, and in places deer trails skirted up the benches and broken ground at the feet of those towering ramparts. The winter woods were silent under the gray, lowering sky. Once Ingold found wolf tracks, several days old; it was the only sign of life, human or animal, that they encountered.
But about a mile from the Keep, Alde stopped and looked through narrowed eyes at a spur of the mountain wall that ended too abruptly and at an irregular rock knoll just beyond. The way they were taking passed between the end of the spur and the knoll, and Rudy searched both in vain for some sign of artificial cutting. He did not have Gil's archaeological training or Minalde's memories- all he saw was trees.
A short way beyond that, Alde stopped again, looking around her. Below the bench on which they stood, a pool was set in a cuplike bay amid the rocks, all but hidden by the gray, tangling branches of a thicket of trees. The cliffs above were low and broken-looking at this point; the bench itself was strewn with boulders and talus spills, dotted with stands of dark-browed pines. It was a desolate-looking place, bleak and sinister, with the black trees of the forest sloping away below them and the beetling rocks shouldering one another above. But Alde looked around her, a slight, puzzled frown on her brow.
"I don't know," she murmured, her breath a faint drift of smoke in the icy air. "But-somehow I think we're here."
"Stands to reason," Gil remarked, tucking her gloved hands into her sword belt and scanning the dreary slopes around them. "There's water here and a break in the geological formation of the cliff that could mean caves underneath."
Minalde's frown deepened and she hugged the thick fur of her cloak more closely around her shoulders. There was a curious expression, both distant and inward, in her cornflower-blue eyes as she followed Gil's gaze along the snow and rock of the jumbled land above them, as if she were comparing what she saw with some inner picture that had been carried for generations in her heart. "There should be a stair..."
The Vale of Renweth
Rudy poked with the iron-shod foot of his staff at the mess of snow and dirt that half-covered the bench. "One good landslide would have taken care of that," he pointed out. "Hell, the cave itself could be buried."