Chapter 16
Unlike the messenger of Alketch, Rudy and Ingold did not merit formal reception. But from the crowd that stood in the streaming light of the gates, two figures detached themselves, hurrying down the dark steps to halt, suddenly shy and confused, at the bottom.
Rudy's eyes met Aide's, and his whole soul felt as if it were trying to leap from his body and carry him, weightless, up the snowy path. Somehow he was holding her hands, the torchlight edging her braided black hair in fire, his heart hammering so loudly in his breast he wondered if everyone in the Keep could hear it, and desperately telling himself, It's a secret. Our love is a secret that no one must know. He felt he would stifle if he spoke, so he only stood, gazing into the cornflower deeps of her eyes.
He was broken from this reverie by Gil's little squeak of delight as Ingold flung one arm around her neck and took from her a resounding kiss of welcome, to the cheers of the Guards assembled on the top step. Looking up, Rudy recognized them -Janus, Seya, Melantrys, Gnift - along with a sizeable bunch of civilians who had quite probably defied a specific Church directive and turned out to welcome the pilgrim wizards home. It was a nice gesture, but he earnestly wished them all in Hell and the steps vacant but for himself and the woman before him.
'Alwir's inside,' Aide said, stepping back from him. The touch of her fingertips had kindled a fire of hunger through his body, and the light of it was echoed in her eyes. But, mingled with her joy and desire, he could see something else in her face that curious sense of security of a woman who had felt all along that her man would return.
'He's been shut up with Stiarth of Alketch all day,' Gil said,
still pink with confusion. 'You guys don't rate.' She disengaged herself from Ingold's arm and came over to give Rudy a chaste, sisterly peck on the cheek. 'But I'm damn glad to see you home, punk.'
Home, Rudy thought, fve been home, by the Western Ocean, and found it a haunted ruin. He glanced down at her unsurprised eyes and said, 'I guess you know, hunh?'
She nodded and glanced back at where Ingold stood, Kta still in tow, talking a mile a minute with Thoth and Kara and that chattering group of others. To half of them, Rudy had discovered, Ingold Inglorion was a legend - he could still see it in their eyes. They were a ragtag and bobtail crew, gathered around those three. Rudy recognized Kara's mother - Nan, somebody said her name was -a withered little white-haired woman with a bent back and a cackling voice, one of the very few who didn't seem to be particularly impressed by Ingold. Kta was another - he was beaming toothlessly at all and sundry and Thoth was the third. But the others, from the fat little man in a brocade turban and overembroidered surcoat and the fey, red-haired girl-child in castoff rags to the scholarly black gentleman in an outlandish white and silver toga and the gaudy minstrel boy, were looking at Ingold with an awe that bordered on worship.
'And, Ingold Ingold, listen!' Minalde cried suddenly. Her dark-blue eyes were wide with enthusiasm, and she had evidently forgotten that she had ever been terrified of the old man. She slipped through the crowd of wizards and caught his sleeve eagerly, her face like a child's at Christmas. 'We've found things here, wonderful things!'
'The old laboratories are here, intact,' Gil added, carried away, and Rudy was drawn with them into the general group as the girls plunged into an excited duet, accompanied by much repetition and gesture. 'Things we don't understand...' 'And Gil's been digging up the records...' 'Air ducts and water pumps, and the old observation rooms...'
Like schoolgirls, Rudy thought, amused. Schoolgirls who've turned the place inside out and maybe found the keys to the defeat of the Dark that Ingold and I traipsed all the way to Quo and did not find at all.
'... and Aide has the inherited memories of the House of Dare,' Gil finished in triumph, 'which is how we found any of it to begin with.'
Ingold looked curiously at the younger girl, so like a flushed, eager schoolgirl with her braided hair and thin, gaudy skirts. 'Do you?'
Aide nodded, suddenly shy. 'I think so. I recall things that I see, but they aren't - they aren't visions, like - like Eldor had.'
There was the slightest break in her voice, and Ingold passed over it without giving a sign that he had noticed. 'A woman's memories, or a man's?
She hesitated, not having thought of that aspect before. 'I don't know. A man's, I suppose, if they come from Dare of Renweth. And they're less memories than a sense of recognition, of having been somewhere before. It was Gil's scholarship that helped us more, and her maps.'
'Interesting,' the wizard said softly. 'Interesting.' He looked for a moment longer at the girl, the child-wife of his dead friend, shoulder to shoulder with Rudy now, her hand seeking his, half-hidden by the folds of her skirts. Ingold's brow kinked swiftly, as if with passing pain, but it smoothed again; he turned back to Gil and put his arm across her angular shoulders. 'And where have you put all this?
By this time, Janus and the Guards had come down the steps to join them, and it was Janus who replied. They've taken over the rooms, at the back of the barracks. It started out as Gil-Shalos' study when she outgrew the storeroom; it's quite a complex now.'
'The wizards started arriving only last week,' Gil informed
them as the whole group trooped in a body up the steps and through the dark, echoing passage of the gates. 'Dakis the Minstrel was the first, then Grey and Nila the weather-witches...'
'And Bektis was absolutely livid,' the minstrel declared, pirouetting delightedly over the narrow span of a bridged watercourse. 'I thought we should surely lose him toapoplexy.'
Eyes followed them as they crossed the dim reaches of the Aisle, idle or curious, hostile or sympathetic, noting, perhaps, the number of Guards that walked with them, or who were the civilians in the crowd. They moved inashifting blur of witchlight, the glow of it stirring around them like a luminous fog.
Ingold stopped, startled at the chaos that prevailed in the wizards' complex. 'We haven't had time to get things straightened out yet,' Gil apologized.
'It comforts me to hear that,' the old man said, surveying the long, narrow room. Fleeces, skins, and crates seemed to make up most of the furnishings; staffs leaned in corners like rifles in an armoury; makeshift shelves had been set up, stacked with dilapidated books. The bluish witchlight slid like silk over the round body of a pearwood lute and winked on the angles of white and grey glass polyhedrons that were scattered across the table, the floor, and everywhere else. Parchments, wax tablets, dusty chronicles, and scrolls of yellowed paper littered every horizontal surface in sight, and over one of the room's fewchairs lay a great pile of homespun brown cloth, and with it a tiny satin pincushion sparkling like a miniature hedgehog.
The wizards had evidently made themselves very much at home.
'And we have to show you -' Aide began.
But Thoth broke in. 'Let them rest, child, and eat.' His voice was as harsh as a vulture's, slow and heavy. He glanced once at the crescent-tipped staff that Rudy leaned in a corner and looked
back down at Ingold. 'You found Quo, then?