Barbara Hambly - 02 The Walls of Air

She can't be doing that! Rudy thought desperately, running to the foremost edge of

the scattered and horror-struck groups that stood in the Aisle. She hasn't got any magic of her own. If the Dark break through the gates and swamp Ingold's power, she has nothing!

But he could not go toward them. He stood helplessly on the edge of the darkness.

The blackness of the passage framed the old man in his stained and rusty brown mantle and the girl in faded black with the white emblem on her shoulder and the wan light glowing above her head. The bawling roar of the power of the Dark surrounded them in the midnight of that enclosed space, but neither Gil nor Ingold looked around. Ingold's eyes were on the gates, Gil's, unquestioningly calm in the midst of that unearthly roaring, on Ingold's back.

She's crazy, Rudy thought in horror. Never, never, never...,

Ingold had reached the end of the narrow tunnel. By the swift-waning glow of the witchlight, Rudy saw him put out his hands, touching the shaking steel of the outer gates. Only inches of metal separated him from the wild blood-hunger that haunted the night outside - separated everyone in the Keep from instant and hideous destruction. The witchlight flickered, fading...

And like fire, spreading from Ingold's fingertips, Rudy could see the runes that spelled the gates. They seemed at first to be only a faint reflection, swimming within the metal like schools of fish below the surface of clear water, visible only to his wizard's sight. But under Ingold's touch they brightened, flickering into life in a webwork of shining graffiti, spread over the gates from top to bottom and across the walls beside them. They were incomprehensible in their complexity, meshing tighter and tighter as more of those faint silver threads glimmered into view. The light from them outlined the old man in silver and bathed his scarred hands in a quivering foxfire glow. Silenced by the beauty of it, Rudy forgot the danger and the wrath of the Dark outside. He watched Ingold's hands move across the surface of that phosphorescent galaxy, his touch calling forth the woven names of ancient mages, tracing his own name among those lattices of light.

Impossibly, under the harsh, wild roar, Rudy could hear him speaking, his scratchy, velvet voice weaving his own spells of ward and guard there, placing his power on the doors. As he had felt it on the road down from Karst, Rudy felt again the force of the power filling and surrounding that nondescript little man.

'What the hell does that old fool think he's doing?

The words were screamed out a foot from Rudy's ear. He could barely make them out above the din of the gates. His concentration broke. For an instant he saw Ingold as nonwizards would see him, an old man in a patched brown robe, standing alone in the darkness, tracing imaginary patterns on the door with his fingers. Then Rudy swung around to see the Chancellor Alwir at his side, the man's face dark and clotted with anger.

'He's spelling the doors!' Rudy shouted back.

The Chancellor brushed past him, striding forward up the steps. 'He'll have us all killed!' Alwir strode through the darkness and the roar of sound like a man facing

blinding rain, to seize the edge of the great door in order to shove it to. The counterweighted steel moved easily, swinging smoothly before another hand stayed it. Cool and arrogant, the Icefalcon looked across into the Chancellor's jewel-blue eyes.

Rudy couldn't hear what passed between them. Alwir's shout was lost in the roaring fury from the passage beyond, and the Icefalcon did not raise his voice to reply. The cacophony was hardly so much sound anymore as an elemental force that blotted sound. In the sickly pallor reflected from the staff in Gil's hands, the scene before the gates had an air of nightmare unreality blurred by the dirty redness of the torches. The two black-clothed men faced each other soundlessly, the one raven, the other pale as ice.

Though Gil, within the tunnel of the gates, must have known what was taking place, Rudy could not see that she so much as turned her head. The light of the staff she held was dying.

Looking beyond Alwir and the Icefalcon into the darkness, Rudy saw to his horror that the light of the runes had entirely died. Ingold stood alone in a dark hollow of sounding metal, the only marks visible on the shivering steel the silver tracing of his own spells. Still Rudy saw him moving in the darkness, tracing signs that flickered and were swallowed by the malice of the Dark. Over the furious hail of blows on the gates, Rudy heard Alwir yell, 'Shut the gates! I order you to stand off and shut them!'

The Icefalcon only stood, regarding him with cold, colourless eyes. Behind him, the tunnel had grown utterly dark.

The Chancellor cried something in his great battle voice, and his hand went to the hilt of his sword. Metal flashed in the reddish shadows of the torches as it swept free of its scabbard...

... and the faint hiss-ching of the edge singing clear was as audible and distinct as a note of music.

The sudden, utter silence that fell upon the hall was like a roaring in the ears. It was like an outdoor silence in so huge a place, for the first second unbroken even by a drawn breath among the several hundreds of people who had come to take problematical refuge in the Aisle. So deep was the hush that lay over them all that Rudy could hear clearly the soft, light tread of Ingold's returning feet.

The wizard stepped through the dark gate, with Gil moving quietly at his heels. The old man took the door edge from Alwir's clench and pushed it gently to. The faint, hollow boom of its closing reverberated to the ends of that soundless hall.

The gates will hold against the Dark now.' Like the sound of the gates, Ingold's grainy voice was low, but it carried to the farthest corners. 'It may be that they will try to break in elsewhere tonight, but... I think the main danger is past.'

'You - foolish - old - bastard!' Alwrr's resonant voice grated over the words like a file. 'Opening the inner doors could have been the death of us all!'

They would never have held if the Dark Ones had forced the spells on the outer,' the wizard returned mildly. His face was very white, and his hair was matted dark

with sweat, but only Gil stood close enough to him to see that his hands were not altogether steady. Quietly, she returned his staff to him and stood close by his elbow.

Alwir spoke as cuttingly as a flaying whip. 'And is that something else that you, as a wizard, speak of with sole authority? As the only wizard in the Keep, do you feel justified in every crackpot scheme you care to pursue?'

Ingold raised heavy-lidded blue eyes to meet Alwir's. 'Not the only wizard,' he replied softly. 'Ask your court mage Bektis.'

Alwir swung around. 'Bektis!'

The word was snapped in the way a dog-handler might crack a whip on his boot to bring his dog belly-down to heel. The court mage disengaged himself with great dignity from the crowd that had formed itself before the western doors and came forward, the jumping torchlight salting fire over the bullion embroidery of his velvet sleeves.

'Whether the gates would have broken or not,' he said, stroking his waist-length silvery beard with delicate fingers, 'it would have been perhaps better, had you consulted with others before any course was decided upon.' He looked haughtily down his nose at Ingold. Rudy could see his high, domed forehead all pearled with sweat.

'Indeed it would have,' another voice purred suddenly, low and dry and as thin as wind through bone, 'had you been here.'

Bektis turned as if bitten. Govannin Narmenlion, Bishop of Gae, moved up the steps toward them at the head of a small company of the Red Monks, the bald-shaved warriors of the Church. Above the gory crimson of the episcopal robes, the Bishop's face was thin and bone-hard, a skeleton with living coals burning in the dark eye sockets. Only the fullness of her lips betrayed her sex. Her harsh voice rode easily over the court mage's indignant reply. 'I commend your courage, Ingold Inglorion. But it is said that the Devil guards his own.'