Against the dark bulk of that square knoll and half-seen tower, he glimpsed the sudden flash of starlight on metal, winking momentarily and then gone. He looked again, releasing all thoughts of striving from his soul. The metal twinkled once more, and he caught the long swirl of a cape brushing sand, the scuff of a foot above the tide line. Like a sudden wash of spilling opals, the stroke of a wave eradicated footsteps from the sand. The man whose prints they were walked slowly on, and Rudy could see the starlight now on his bright gold hair hair the colour of sun-fire.
It surprised him, for he had expected the Archmage Lohiro to be old.
But this man wasn't. He was surely less than forty, with a young, clean-shaven face. Only the firm lines of the mouth and the creases in the corners of eyes that were a flecked and changeable kaleidoscope blue betrayed the harshness of experience. His
hand around the hard, gleaming wood of his staff reminded Rudy of Ingold's hand, nicked with the scars of sword practice, very deft and strong. The staff itself was tipped with a metal crescent some five inches across, whose inner edge glinted razor-bright. The starlight caught in it, as it caught in those wide blue eyes and on the spun-glass glimmer of foam that washed the beach in a surge of lace and dragged at something half-buried in the sand.
Looking down, Rudy saw that it was a skeleton, old blood still staining the raw bones, crabs crawling gruesomely through the wet, gleaming eyes of the skull. The Archmage barely turned his steps aside from it. The hem of his dark cloak brushed over it as he passed and swept the sand as he went down the beach.
Rudy sat back, cold with sweat and suddenly terrified. The light died out of the crystal below him, leaving the room pitch-dark but for the bluish echo in its heart. Then he heard a sound, faint and distantly booming, a vibration that seemed to shake the Keep to the dark, ancient bones of its agelong foundations.
Thunder, Rudy thought.
Thunder? Through ten-foot walls?
His stomach seemed to close in on itself. He got up and headed quickly for the door. A second booming reverberated through the Keep, setting up a faint, sinister ringing in the metal junk heaped in the corners and shivering in the mighty walls.
Rudy began to run.
Chapter 2
'Damn the boy,' Ingold whispered, and Gil thought that he looked very white in the wild jumping of shadows. The first blow of that incredible power smashing at the outer gates had jarred the torches in their sockets, and they guttered nervously, as if the light itself trembled before the coming of the Dark. Behind her in the Aisle, utter chaos prevailed.
Men with torches ran to and fro, calling mutually contradictory rumours to one another and brandishing makeshift weapons in frightened hands. Little flocks of children and old people, the nuclei of small families, huddled like frightened birds along the watercourses, as close to the centre of the great space as they could get, having fled their cells in terror when the pounding started. Others, mothers and fathers who had left their dependants back in the close darkness of their cells, crowded around Janus and the small knot of Guards who had remained in the Aisle, waving their arms, demanding what was being done, pleading for even lying assurances of safety. Janus towered above these lesser people in the torchlight, his voice deep and intense, allaying fears and recruiting patrols as best he could in that whirling chaos of noise and lamplight.
It was a scene out of Dante's Hell, Gil thought, with darkness like velvet and a random frenzy of flickering light. Thank God, the Keep is solid stone. Maybe we can get out of this'without immolating ourselves by morning.
If the Dark don't get us first, she added.
But Ingold was there, and Gil had never found it possible to be truly afraid when she was at the wizard's side.
So she felt only a kind of cold detachment, though her blood rushed violently through her veins and her body tingled with a cold excitement. The separation was physical as well as emotional, for she and Ingold stood together on the steps before the gates, with the pounding, sounding roar of the beaten steel at their backs; none would come near them there.
The noise in the Aisle was tremendous, the repeated bellowing clang mingling with the wild keening of voices, to rise and ring in the huge ceiling vaults until the whole Aisle was one vast sounding chamber. Men and women rushed wildly about, purposeful or aimless, the bobbing of the torches and lamps in their hands like the storming of fireflies on a summer night. Behind Gil, the pounding of the Dark upon the gates was a bass vibration that sounded in her bones.
Ingold turned to her and asked quietly, 'Is Bektis here?' He named the Court
Wizard of the Chancellor Alwir, the only other mage in the Keep.
'Surely you jest,' Gil murmured, for Bektis had a most solicitous concern for his own health. Ingold did not smile, but the quick flicker of amusement that lightened his eyes turned his whole face briefly, elusively young. It was gone as quickly as it came, the lines of strain settling back again.
'Then I fear that I shall have no choice,' the wizard said softly. The blue-white glow from the end of his staff touched his face in shadow; the flicker of'the torches beyond might have been responsible for the illusion Gil had of bitter self-reproach in the old man's expression, but she could not be sure. 'Gil, I had not wanted to ask this of you, for you are not mageborn, and the danger is very great.'
That doesn't matter,' Gil said quietly.
'No.' Ingold regarded her for a moment, and a curious expression that she could not read overlay the serenity of his face. 'No, to you it would not.' Taking her hands, he placed his staff in them. The wan white glow remained at its tip, though she felt no sense of power or vibration in the staff itself. It was only wood, grip-smoothed over decades of use, and now warmed from his hand. The light may fade if the spells of the Dark draw off too much of my power,' he warned her. 'But don't desert me.'
'No,' Gil said, surprised that he should even mention the possibility.
Ingold smiled at the self-evident tone in her voice. 'I am not saying that either of us will survive this,' he went on. 'But if the outer gates go, the inner ones will crumple like thin tin. Icefalcon!' he called, and the thin young captain ran to them from where he had been among Janus' Guards..
It was thus that Rudy saw them as he dropped the last few feet down a makeshift ladder from a rickety second-level balcony. They looked like scouts in enemy territory, framed in the sooty jumping shadows of the gate torches, their faces revealed by the white light of the staff. The clamour of the gates redoubled, the separate blows merging into one continuous assault, roaring like an earsplitting cannonade that set the inner gates visibly vibrating and stopped Rudy's breath with horror.
Someone close to him screamed. The Icefalcon mounted the steps at a light-footed run, braids white in the shadows against his black surcoat, and began to turn the locking rings that closed the inner gates. The thought of the pounding fury in the night outside made Rudy's blood run cold, but he would not for any reason whatever have gone close enough to the gates to stop them. The gates moved open, inward on their soundless hinges; the bellowing roar of the assault on the outer gates rolled from the ten-foot passage between, a howling tidal wave of sound. The black square gaped, a clanging maw of darkness and roaring horror.