Their eyes met. The meaning of this came to her slowly, like a whisper from incomprehensible gulfs of time.
“Come,” Ingold said. “This is no place for us to remain once the sun has gone in.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Once they were out of the valley, the winds began, searingly cold, ripping at their grip on the precarious handholds with active malice. At times they were far over the timberline, scrambling perilously over goat trails slippery with old snow, at others working their way through knots of vegetation, or clinging for support to the wind-flayed roots of twisted acrobat trees, trusting to their strength over a sightless abyss. Gil and Ingold moved through a world whose only elements were cold, rock, wind, and the distant roaring of water, where they could not have stopped if they had wanted to, for there was nowhere to rest. Without the threads of witchlight Ingold had thrown to outline the ledges, Gil was certain they would not have survived the climb; even so, looking back on it later, she felt only a land of dull astonishment that she had done it at all.
They slept, finally, in the crevices of the bare rock slopes, locked together for warmth; it was the first sleep Gil had had in close to forty hours. In the deeps of the night she felt the weather change and, in her dreams, smelled the far-off threat of snow.
In the morning the going was easier, not much worse than a rough backpacking trip. By noon Ingold found the ghost of a trail-head and followed it down the sheer, tree-covered western face of the Rampart Range, to reach, by mid-afternoon, the cold, winding Vale of Renweth.
Gil shaded her eyes and squinted into the long, bright distance. “What the hell?” The cold winds that snaked down the valley tore her breath away in rags and rippled in patterns like swift-pouring water over the knee-deep fjord of colorless grass. “What is it?”
“It’s the Keep of Dare.” Ingold smiled, folding his arms to keep warm and shivering slightly in spite of it. “What did you expect?”
Gil wasn’t sure what she’d expected. Something smaller, anyway. Something more medieval. Not that trapezoidal monolith of black stone that rose, bone of the mountain’s bone, on the great knoll at the foot of those distant dark-browed cliffs. Its roof was taller than the pine trees that grew on the ridge behind. Thin, powdery snow blew in clouds from the Keep’s flat roof, but none lodged anywhere on its sides, which were as bare and smooth as unflawed glass.
“Who the hell built that thing?” Gil whispered, awed. “How big is it?” She could believe, now, that in it humankind had withstood the Dark. The might of the Dark Ones, which could shatter stone and iron, would find this fortress impregnable. With a sense of surprise, she realized that there was, after all, a place of refuge in this dark and cold and terrible world into which she had been unwillingly cast.
“Dare of Renweth built it,” Ingold’s voice said at her side, “using the last of the technology and power of the ancient Realms, power which is far beyond our means today. In it he sheltered those of his people who survived the first onslaught of the Dark, and from it he and his line ruled this valley and Sarda Pass and all that was left of an empire whose name, bounds, and nature have been utterly lost to human memory. As to how big it is—” He gazed into the distance, surveying the black monolith that guarded the twisting expanses of the valley beyond. “It is small. It can hold some eight thousand souls in some sort of comfort, and the valley can be cultivated to support almost twice that many. The records no longer exist, if they ever existed, as to how many it has actually sheltered at any one time.”
As they waded toward it through the champagne grass of the Vale, the thing seemed to grow in size, shadowless in the cold overcast of the day. Gil looked around her at the Vale as well, a walled series of upland meadows scattered with stands of aspen, birch, and cottonwood, their leaves glittering restlessly in the winds that whined down from the peaks above. There was a hard, bright beauty to the place, first heartland of the Realm and last, cradle and grave. Her bones ached, even muscles trained to the endurance of swordsmanship burning with the lingering effects of that tortuous climb.
As a place to be cooped up in for years on end, she thought, it isn’t bad. Still, familiar as she had been with petty neighborhood bitchery, she had recognized its seeds already in the gossip that even a twenty-four-hour state of crisis hadn’t eliminated from the refugee train, and she saw where it would lead—a small town, cramped in an impenetrable fort with the same people, bound together year in and year out, and nowhere to go.
“The Keep has stood a long time,” Ingold said as they came at last to the roadway that led up past the Keep toward Sarda Pass, the same road where, miles below, Alwir led his people along in their quest for semi-mythical safety. “Yet the Runes of Power are still on the Keep doors, marked there by the wizards who helped in the building of the place—Yad on the left, and Pern on the right, the Runes of Guarding and Law. Only a wizard can see them, like a gleaming tracery of silver in the shadows. But after all this time, the spells of the builders still hold power.”
Gil turned her eyes from the towering masses of the mountains that rose, wall on wall of black, tree-enshrouded gorges cut with the distinct, shallow notch of Sarda Pass, to view again the looming shadow of the Keep. She could see nothing of the Runes, only great panels of iron, hinged and strapped in steel, and untouched for centuries.
The great gates stood open. Waiting in their shade were the assembled members of the small garrison Eldor had sent down years before to ready the place as an eventual refuge, when Ingold had first spoken of the possibility of the rising of the Dark. The captain of the garrison, a petite blonde woman with the meanest eyes Gil had ever seen, greeted Ingold with deference and seemed unsurprised at the news that Gae had fallen and its refugees were but a few days off.
“I feared it,” she said, looking up at the wizard, her gloved fingers idling on the hilt of her sword. “We’ve had no messages from anywhere in over a week, and my boys report seeing the Dark Ones drifting along the head of the valley almost every night.” She pursed her lips into a wry expression. “I’m only glad so many as you say got clear. I remember, when I was in Gae, people were laughing at you in the streets about your warnings, calling you an alarmist crackpot and making up little songs.”
Gil made a noise of indignation in her throat, but Ingold laughed. “I remember that. All my life I wanted to be immortalized in ballads, but the poetry of the things was so bad that they were completely unmemorable.”
“And,” the captain said cynically, “most of the people who made them up are dead.”
Ingold sighed. “I’d rather they were still alive to go on singing about what a fool I am, every day of my life,” he said. “We’ll be here the night. Can you feed us?”
The captain shrugged. “Sure. We have stock … ” She gestured to mazes of cottonwood-pole corrals that stretched out beyond the knoll, where a gaggle of horses and half a dozen milk cows stood rubbing their chins on the top rail of the fences, staring at the strangers with mild, stupid eyes. “We even have a still over in the grove there; some of the boys brew Blue Ruin out of gaddin bark and potatoes.”
Ingold shuddered delicately. “At tunes I see Alwir’s point about the horrors of uncivilized existence.” And he followed her up the worn steps to the gates.
“By the way,” the captain said as the other warriors of the garrison grouped up behind them, “we have Keep Law here.”
Ingold nodded. “I understand.”
They entered the Keep of Dare, and Gil was struck silent with awe.
Outside, the Keep had been intimidating enough. Inside, it was crushing, frightening, dark, monstrous, and unbelievably huge; the footfalls of the Guards echoed in its giant sounding-chamber like the far-off drip of distant water, the torches they bore dwindling to fireflies. The monstrous architecture with its blending of naked planes had nothing to do with the gothic liveliness of Karst—nothing to do with human scale at all. The technology that had wrought this place out of stone and air was clearly far beyond anything else in this world or, Gil guessed, in her own. She gazed down the length of that endless central cavern, where the small bobbing candles of torchlight were reflected in the smooth black of the water channels in the floor, and shivered at the cold, the size, and the emptiness.