"Now, as close as I can date them, all these disappearance stories seem to center, not only physically around Shilgae, but chronologically in a span of three or four years. Coincidentally, that time period is better known for the failure of the wheat crop three years running, for the 'drowned summer' of the seventeenth year of Umar's reign, and for the failure of the sugar crop in Kildrayne, According to Maia, sugar has never been grown north of Penambra since. Maia knows, because his father was a sharecropper in the cane fields near Kildrayne and had to remove to the deep south because of it.
"After that four-year span, there were no disappearance stories until-" She checked her notes again. "-the winter before last. And those never reached anyone because they were in the country of the White Raiders. I've only heard of them recently, from Shadow of the Moon."
The Raider shaman inclined her head, and the strings of bleached, ancient bones twined in her snowy braids rattled faintly with the movement.
"Last winter there was a disturbance among the dooic of the Northern Plains, rumors of Night Ghosts that ate stragglers. Kta says several bands left their traditional runs near the hills. At the same time, several bands of the Raiders started shifting away from their old hunting grounds. According to some of the Gettlesand rangers I've talked to, there was a lot of trouble with them that year. Disappearances of men riding night-herd were put down to the Raiders... and maybe they were.
"But there seems to be a pattern appearing. First in the plains and high desert and in the far North; gradually moving south to more thickly inhabited lands."
Alwir raised his head suddenly, points of fire glinting in his eyes, like the stars at the heart of a sapphire.
"Most curious of all," Gil continued, "is what appears to be a pattern of abandonment of Nests, following the same course. According to the Raiders who remain on the plains. Nests in the far Northern Plains were abandoned early this autumn; Ingold and Rudy saw such a Nest, not more than a few days' journey north of the Westward Road. Before he died, Lohiro of Quo told them that the Dark Ones of the plains had deserted their Nests to join the assault on Gae and, I would guess, the breaking of the cities to the south of them as well-Dele and the towns along the Flat River, Ippit, Skrooch, Ploduck, and others. At the same time, Quo was broken by an unsuspected and deeply buried Nest beneath that town. In effect, at that time the Dark Ones destroyed all organized resistance in the Realm, struck at the one place where large amounts of information could be gathered and organized, and left us as we are now-fugitives in the grip of the worst winter in human memory."
Up and down the table, soft-voiced talk eddied, those who counted themselves scholars-and there were half a dozen of them-casting curious glances at one another, for this jigsaw puzzle of hearsay had little in common with the separate chronicles over which they customarily pored. Only Thoth the Scribe, once the Recorder of Quo, did not speak; his cold, amber-colored eyes brightened with interest as much in her methods as in her findings.
Alwir laced his fingers together, suspended midway between the dragon-head arms of his ebony chair. "So you believe that the Dark Ones have abandoned these northern Nests for good?"
"For a considerable time to come," Gil said.
"Why?"
"The White Raiders who captured Ingold and Rudy on the plains believed that the Dark Ones had been driven forth- or destroyed-by a ghost or spirit mightier than they," she said after a moment's thought. "But when Rudy and Ingold descended into the Nest, they found nothing-only the bodies of the herds, all dating from a single time, as if they had all perished together. Yet I think that-that ghost-was in the Nest with them all the time they were down there.
"The ghost's name is Cold."
"Cold?" the Chancellor snapped. "Be serious, girl. The Dark have attacked on nights colder than what a man could survive."
"The Dark can deal with the cold," Gil agreed. "Maybe they don't like it-there doesn't seem to be any way of finding out." She rolled up her parchment and set it on the table before her. "But I am virtually certain that their herds can't."
"Their herds ?" Alwir demanded incredulously. "What in the name of the ice in the north do those wretched creatures have to do with anything?"
"Everything," she responded quietly. "Their herds-and the moss in the Nests."
Rudy's head jerked up, as if her words had triggered memory and realization within him. She saw the wordless question that he flung to Ingold and the old man's silence that was only the echo of the answer that Rudy already knew in his heart.
"I think," Gil said, picking her way carefully over a morass that even her own world had not yet sorted out, "that the ancestors of humankind, the ancestors of the herds, and the ancestors of the dooic roamed together over this part of the world eons ago, countless ages. The similarity in their shape indicates they had a common way of living, common feeding grounds..."
"Common grandparents," Rudy added in English.
"Let's not broaden the Scopes of this investigation any more than we have to," Gil replied in the same language. Switching back to the language of the Wathe, she continued. "And I think that all three races alike were the prey of the Dark Ones.
"Now, at that time, hundreds of thousands of years in the past, the Dark Ones lived on the surface of the earth. If you climb the cliffs behind the Vale of the Dark twenty miles north of here, in the right slant of the light you can see the marks of buried walls, the patterns of a city that vanished so long ago that not even ruins remain; there are not even records of ruins ever having been there. The Dark tended to build in relatively stable, accessible places. You yourself have commented, my lord, on how they seem to shun high or geologically unstable ground. The Vale of the Dark is one of the few sites that hasn't been built over in the intervening millennia, and of course it is impossible to get high enough above the Nests on the plains to see whether this pattern can be detected in the country surrounding them or not.
"I think," Gil continued slowly, "that it was during this epoch that the powers of the mageborn first began to appear in humankind. It was a matter of survival. The lowest powers of the mages, the commonest even of the third echelon powers, is the calling of fire. Light, illusion, the command of the winds and storms, heightened senses, and the ability to see in the dark."
"This is all very well," Alwir said, his voice edged with suspicion, "but if what you say is so-and I am not yet convinced that it is-why did the Dark Ones abandon the surface? Why did they retreat belowground in the first place?"
For an answer, Gil searched among her things for the small leather pouch and took from it an irregularly shaped gray rock about a third the size of her fist. She rose and carried it down the length of the table to hand it to him.
He sat in silence for a time, examining the stone, turning it over thoughtfully in his gloved fingers. Without glancing at her, he asked, "And what is this?"
She took it and handed it to Thoth. The serpentmage examined it closely, angling it in the shadowless brightness of the magelight. Then he held it up between restless antennalike fingers. "How did you come by this, child?"
"Do you know what it is?"
"Not in the true sense, no," the old Scribe replied. "But I have seen ones like this before. They are found in many places, usually several together; there was a case of them in the library at Quo. Most of those were found in a stream bed in the hills behind the town, but there were some from Dele, and one-a most curious one, with imprints in it of strange insects the like of which no one has seen-that my lord Ingold brought back with him from the Barrier Hills, which border the Northern Ice."