Minalde brushed the sable hood from her dark hair as she ran down the steps to meet Rudy, the rich fur of her cloak rippling glossily in the gray light. In sunlight, her eyes were the unearthly blue of a volcanic lake on a midsummer afternoon; shadowed as they were now, they were velvet-blue, almost black, and wide with anxiety. She caught Rudy's hands. "They told me they'd heard a scream," she said.
Rudy fought the urge to put a comforting arm around her shoulders, as he would have done had they met alone. She's the Queen , he told himself, the Regent and the mother of the heir, for all she's nineteen years old and scared. There are too many people watching .
"Glad to see it wasn't you, punk," Gil Patterson added, bringing up the rear, her long sword tapping at her ankles as she walked. Since she had joined the Guards of Gae, her former shy defensiveness had been gradually replaced by a toughness that, Rudy reflected, wasn't any easier to see through. Those pale schoolmarm's eyes still forbade any inquiries into the true state of her feelings, but she did look pleased that he'd survived.
At his side, Alde whispered, "Who was it?"
"Saerlinn. I don't know if you knew him."
She nodded, tears starting in her eyes. Alde knew, and was friends with, almost everyone in the Keep. Again Rudy struggled with his instinct to hold her, to offer her silent reassurance. "It puts us in a bad place," he admitted quietly. "When we go to scout the Nest at Gae..."
"You?" Fear widened her eyes. "But you can't-" She bit off her words, and a slow flush rose to her cheeks. "That is-it isn't just for that," she added with a soft-voiced dignity that made Rudy smile. "What about your experiments with the flame throwers, Rudy? You said you'd be able to create weapons to hurl fire from the things that Gil and I found in the old laboratories. You can't..."
"They'll just have to wait," Rudy said quietly. "I'll put one together for myself to take to Gae; the rest can wait till I return." He put his hands on her shoulders and smiled at her frightened, woebegone face. "And I will return," he promised her.
She looked down, her eyes veiled, and she nodded.
Gil's voice cut sharply into the silence between them. "You think you'll really be able to put working flame throwers together, then?"
He looked up, startled at her tactlessness, and saw what she had seen-the tall form of the Chancellor of the Realm, Alwir, Minalde's brother, standing watching them in the mist and firelight of the gates. Rudy backed quickly away from Alde and took a few steps up the path toward the Keep.
"You bet," he bragged in his best Madison Avenue voice. "Hell, in a month we'll make swords obsolete."
"That would be to your advantage," Gil commented, "since you can't pick one up without cutting yourself."
But in spite of the banter, Rudy was acutely conscious of Alwir's cold gaze on him as he rejoined Ingold among the mages at the foot of the Keep steps.
Alwir came down toward them, "a gleaming edifice of sartorial splendor," as Alde had once joked, dominating those around him with his size, his elegance, and his haughty, unbending will. Like his sister, he was cloaked in black, a velvet mantle that billowed like wings behind him. The chain of sapphires that lay over his broad shoulders and breast were not bluer or harder than his eyes. He was trailed by the obsequious Bektis, his Court Mage, who alternately rubbed his long white hands together or stroked his waist-length, blue-silver beard as if in a self-congratulatory caress.
The Chancellor came to a halt on the lowest step and looked down at Ingold with an impassive face. "So your information was correct," he said, in his rich, well-modulated voice. "The thing can be done."
"By those with the strength," Ingold returned quietly. "Yes."
"And the reconnaissance?"
"We shall leave this time tomorrow morning."
Alwir gave a satisfied little nod. Beyond them, the rising of the cloud-veiled sun had cast a kind of sickly, diffuse light upon the snowy wastes of the Vale, bringing forth from shadows the tangled grubbiness of the barricaded food compounds and the chain-hung pillars on the hill of execution across the road from the Keep.
"And these?" The Chancellor's careless gesture took in the other mages-old women, young men, solemn black Southerners, and ice-white shamans from the plains.
"Believe me, my lord," Ingold said, and there was a flicker of anger in his shadowed eyes, "whether or not it is decided to undertake this invasion, these people constitute your chief defense against the Dark Ones. Do not treat them lightly."
Alwir's eyebrows went up. "An unprepossessing lot," he commented, scanning them, and Rudy felt that those enigmatic, speedwell-blue eyes lingered for a moment on where he had returned again to Aide's side. "But perhaps more dangerous than they look."
"Far more dangerous, my lord." The new voice drew Rudy's eyes and, half against his will, Alwir's as well. In the suffused pallor of the dawn, the Guards on the steps had doused their torches in the snow, but within the gate passage above them fires still reflected redly on the polished walls. Against that reflection stood the red-robed shape of the Bishop of Gae, Govannin Narmenlion, her bald head and narrow, delicately jointed hands giving her the appearance of a skeleton wrapped in a crimson billow of flame.
"If you undertake your invasion using the Devil's tools, my lord," she warned, in a voice as dry and deadly as famine winds, "they will be its downfall. They are excommunicates, who have traded their souls to Evil for the powers they possess."
Anger stained the big man's cheeks, but he kept the melodious calm of his voice. "Perhaps if the Straight Faith were as dependent upon a centralized government as the Realm is, you would be even at this moment showering them with blessings," he commented sardonically.
The fine- chiseled nostrils flared in amused scorn. "Such words tell more about the speaker than they do about their subject," she remarked, and Alwir's flushed face reddened further. "Better your precious invasion should fail than that you should bring yourself under the wrath of the Church by harboring such as these. Having commerce with the mage-born-the magedamned!-fouls the soul like clinging mud, until all the Faithful can see it, and cast you out. Even to converse with them taints you."
Rudy felt Aide's icy fingers close over his and, glancing sidelong at her, he saw the shame struggling in her taut face. She had been a good daughter of the Faith until the rainy night on the road from Karst when he had found his power- and they had become lovers.
Alwir grated, "That didn't prevent you from coming out to see how they had fared!"
The Bishop's dry voice was silky with menace. "It pays to count one's enemies, my lord Alwir."
There was silence on the steps, save for the rising whine of the icy wind in the trees. The Guards watched this confrontation uneasily. They had long grown used to the swift, vicious arguments between Bishop and Chancellor, but there was never any telling when one might suddenly escalate into civil war.
Then Alwir's eyebrow canted mockingly. "And do you count me so, my lady?"
"You?" The gray light slipped along the curve of her shaven skull as she looked him up and down, austere scorn in the curve of her delicate lips. "You care not whether you are numbered among the godly or the wicked, my lord, as long as you can command what you call your niceties of life. You would sup in Hell with the Devil, were the food good."
So saying, she turned in a swirl of scarlet and vanished into the darkness of the gate passage, her ringing footfalls dying away across the vast, empty spaces of the Aisle beyond toward the dark mazes where the Church kept unsleeping domain.
Aide whispered, "Rudy, I'm afraid of her."
Hidden by the folds of her heavy cloak, his hand pressed hers. Talk had surged up again around them. Two of the junior weatherwitches had been offering to send the coming snowstorm elsewhere until Saerlinn's body could be burned, and Thoth's harsh, academic voice was saying, "To do so is to presume upon the laws of the Cosmos that bid the winds blow where they will." There was some argument, but all of them, with the exception of Ingold and a withered little hermit named Kta, were terrified of the Scribe of Quo.