Do him justice , Gil thought. It was only yesterday that Ingold kicked the props out from under his plans to settle down into a nice, cozy Regency here, with Alketch troops at his back and the Inquisition to keep people like Rudy in line. And after he drove out the Dark Ones from Gae - after he'd given people even the illusion that things were on their way to returning to what they used to be - he'd hardly have needed to dispose of Tir. His own prestige would have made him King by acclamation. It's no surprise that he views Ingold as a malicious meddler in affairs that hardly concern him .
But the stubborn set of Alwir's mouth and the sullenness smoldering in his eyes made her stomach sink with dread.
Ingold took his seat at the head of the table; with a glance he commanded silence in the room around them. It always surprised Gil how the wizard, usually the most unobtrusive of men, could dominate any gathering he entered, merely by walking into the room and choosing to do so.
Alwir's voice was rough, "There's a rumor going about that you've found the key to the defeat of the Dark. If this is true, why wasn't I told? And why do you say -"
"It is to tell you of it that we asked you here tonight," Ingold said, folding his hands upon the table before him. Behind his head, against the blotched brick and soot-stained plaster of the wall, Thoth's mathematical and astrological charts formed a kind of tapestry, half-obscured by braids of drying herbs. On the hearth, the marmalade torn, the biggest of the Corps cats, was licking his paws and studiously ignoring the pans of bread which Kara had set to rise among the warm ashes.
Gil could see Alwir's gaze travel over that homey and unprepossessing room and over the faces of those who sat around the table-old men, young girls, foreigners, heathens, and vagabonds-before coming to rest on his sister. His nostrils flared with contempt.
"Then you have a damned queer way of going about it. But after yesterday, I don't suppose I have a right to be surprised by anything you choose to do." He did not trouble to hide the bitterness in his voice. "Suppose you tell me.
then, since you are my Chief of Intelligence. How did humankind defeat the Dark? Or is that going to stay one of the things that only you know?"
Ingold sighed. "Often, my lord," he said after a moment's pause, "when an answer seems impossible to find, the best thing to do is to see if the proper question was asked. In this case, the question should not have been: How did humankind defeat the Dark? It should have been simply: Did humankind defeat the Dark?"
Alwir seemed to rear in his seat. "Of course it did! Else why did the Dark depart?"
"Another very good question, my lord-and one closer to the heart of the matter. Perhaps the real question should be, not why they departed, but why they rose."
Ill- concealed anger grated in Alwir's words. "Of what earthly good would it be to know that? It doesn't matter why they rose! If that was all you asked me here to tell me-"
"That," the wizard said quietly, "and other things. I believe I was the first human to see the Dark Ones begin to hunt on the surface of the earth, the year I was hiding in the deserts of Gettlesand, playing spellweaver and astrologer in a little farming village, with the High King's price on my head. I followed the Dark One back to its city-not a paltry hive of a defeated remnant, but a teeming metropolis of creatures to whom humankind was of no more moment that wild cattle."
Gil shivered as Ingold told of it, his voice casting its spell over those who listened. His words dislimned the shabby common room around them and drew them into the frozen blueness of that starlit desert night and to the smothering blackness of underground. Even the mulish look about Alwir's mouth faded somewhat as the old man drove home to them the horror of what he had first realized then-that the Dark did not live in that fashion because they had been driven to it, but because they had chosen it for their own.
"I had lived for five years in Gae," Ingold went on, "for three of them in the Palace, as tutor to Prince Eldor, the High King's son. I knew of the stairway in the lower vaults-more than one, some said. They were thought to be part of the old Citadel of Wizards that once stood upon the spot or part of some heathen temple out of bygone years. All that the Masters at Quo could tell me was that there were other stairways in various parts of the world, that they had the property of distorting magic, so that no mage who had ever descended one could communicate with others after he was out of sight, and that no one who had ever gone down had returned. They were thought to be curiosities, like the gray lands in certain parts of the world where time is unaccountably distorted or like those spots in the mountains where you can stand and hear voices speaking in tongues unknown to the West of the World. But no more than that.
"Yet after I had seen that unspeakable city, I was frightened; and in the years that followed, years in which I learned and read and traveled, I heard an occasional tale that frightened me still more. A chieftain of the White Raiders told me of a man who had vanished in open country on a moonless night. In a village close to the ice, there had lately been a wave of superstitious dread of the night-people could not be induced to leave their houses after dark, though they would not say why this was. I began to investigate any story that came my way of mysterious disappearances or of certain things seen or felt."
Alwir said bitterly, "So you always knew of the Dark."
"Indeed I did," Ingold replied mildly. "And I told anyone who would listen, with the result that King Umar had me imprisoned, publicly flogged, and exiled from the Realm, ostensibly for treasonously alienating the loyalties of his only son. Prince Eldor hardly needed my aid in despising his father-and he had inherited the memories of the House of Dare. He remembered the Time of the Dark. To him, my warning came like the fulfillment of some dreadful prophecy. He trusted me," Ingold finished simply-an epitaph, Gil thought, for the man who had given him his son and sent him from the final battle. "Without that trust and the preparations he made because of it, we would have been utterly lost."
Across the table from her, Gil saw Alde suddenly bow her head, staring down at her tight-clenched hands as if taken unawares by the memories of those last days.
Ingold went on. "Even then-and it was twenty years ago that the stories were first circulated-it struck me that most of them came from a small area around Shilgae in the far North, and a few from the lands of Harl Kinghead, near Weg. But even though I knew this, I did not understand what it meant until a few weeks ago, when I spoke of it with Gil-Shalos. Since that time, she has searched far and wide for knowledge of the Dark. In her own country she is a scholar and a teacher. I believe that the answer that she has found to this riddle is the true one, though she has read it, not from any man's writing, but as a hunter does, from the tracks of the game that he seeks."
He held out his hand to Gil. She took a deep breath, glanced automatically behind her for a nonexistent blackboard, and stood up. In the clear, rosy brightness of that long room, she was conscious of nothing but watching eyes and silence.
"Any historian can tell you," she began, in her best doctoral orals voice, "that why is probably the most slippery of all questions to answer, so for the moment I'll start with the things that we do know for sure-when and where the Dark rose.
"Ingold is our first source on when-which puts it twenty years ago in Gettlesand. Tomec Tirkenson tells me that there have always been stories about haunted caves in the Flatiron Mountains in that part of the country, of the 'way back in the days' variety, but when he was younger he said there was at least one incident of a child who disappeared in that part of the hills at night. It was put down by her family to dooic- but as he remembers it, there were no dooic around the Flatirons for a stretch of several years. Three of his rangers who come from that part of the country bear him out on this. This was when Tirkenson was twenty-seven or twenty-eight, just before he succeeded to rulership of the lands..." She consulted her notes. "That puts it around eighteen years ago. This was at the same time Ingold was in the North, investigating other rumors of disappearances around Shilgae.