thought this worth the guarding, the preserving, down through the centuries. And that alone makes it worth whatever it may have cost us.”
He touched the dressings on the side of her swollen face. At the contact, she felt stronger, warmer inside. “It is not unappreciated, my dear.”
Gil looked away. She had never known what to say in the presence of love, even after she’d stopped consciously thinking, When he finds out what kind of person I am, he’ll leave. Ingold, to her ever-renewed surprise, evidently really did love her, exactly as she was. She still didn’t know why. “It’s my job,” she said.
Scarred and warm, his palm touched her unhurt cheek, turning her face back to his, and he gathered her again into his arms. For a time they stood pressed together, the old man and the warrior, taking comfort among the desolation of world’s end.
They spent two days moving books. Chill days, though it was May and in times past the city of Penambra had been the center of semitropical bottomlands lush with cotton and sugarcane; wet days of waxing their boots every night while the spares dried by the fire; nerve-racking days of shifting the heavy volumes up the crypt stairs to where Yoshabel the mule waited in the courtyard, wreathed in spells of “there-isn’t-a-mule-here” and “this-creature-is-both-dangerous-and-inedible.” The second spell wasn’t far wrong, in Gil’s opinion. On the journey down to Penambra she had grown to thoroughly hate Yoshabel, but knew they could not afford to lose her to vermin or ghouls.
Sometimes, against the code of the Guards, Gil worked. Mostly Ingold would send her to the foot of the stairs from the stable crypt, where she listened for sounds in the court as well as watching the corridor outside the cell where the books were. He left his staff with her, the light of it glistening on the vile water underfoot and on the wrinkled, cranial masses of the slunch. What they couldn’t load onto Yoshabel, Ingold rehid, higher and drier and surrounded by more spells, to keep fate and rats and insects at bay until someone could be sent again on the long, exhausting journey from Renweth Vale to retrieve them.
In addition to books—of healing, of literature, of histories and law—they found treasure, room after room of Church vessels of gold and pearl and carven gems, chairs crusted with garnets, ceremonial candleholders taller than a man and hung with chains of diamond fruit; images of saints with jeweled eyes, holding out the gem-encrusted instruments of their martyrdom; sacks of gold and silver coin. These they left, though Ingold took as much silver as he could carry and a few of the jewels flawless enough to hold spells in their crystalline hearts. The rest he surrounded with Ward-signs and spells. One never knew when such things would come in handy.
They took turns at watch that night. Even in lovemaking, which they did by the glow of the courtyard fire, neither fully relaxed—it would have been more sensible not to do it, but the strange edge of danger drew at them both. Now and then a shift in the wind brought them the smells of wood smoke and raw human waste, and they knew there were ghouls—or perhaps bandits—dwelling somewhere in the weedy desolation along the canals. Gil, her face discolored and aching in spite of all Ingold’s spells of healing, fell asleep almost at once and slept heavily; wrapped in his fur surcoat, Ingold sat awake by the bead of their fire, listening to the dark.
This was how Gil saw him in her dream the second night, when she realized that he had to die.
They had made love, and she dreamed of making love to him again, in the cubicle they shared, a small inner cell in the maze of cells that were the territory of the Guards on the first level of the windowless Keep. She dreamed of falling asleep in the gentle aftermath, her smoky dark wilderness of hair strewed like kelp on the white-furred muscle of his chest, the smell of his flesh and of the Guards’ cooking, of leather oil from her weaponry and coat, filling her nostrils, smells for which she had traded the car exhaust and synthetic aromatics of a former home.
She dreamed that while still she slept he sat up and drew the blankets around him. His white hair hung down on his shoulders, and under the scarred lids his eyes were hard and thoughtful as he looked down at her. There was no gentleness in them now, no love—barely even recognition.
Then he began, while she slept, to work magic upon her, to lay words on her that made her foolish with love, willing to leave her friends and family, her studies at the University of California, as she had in fact left all the familiar things of the world of her birth. He lay on her words that made her, from the moment of their meeting, his willing slave.
All the peril she had faced against the Dark Ones, all the horror and fire, the wounds she had taken, the men she had killed, the tears she had shed … all were calculated, part of his ploy. Taken from her with his magic, rather than freely given for love of him.
Her anger was like a frozen volcano, outraged, betrayed, surging to the surface and destroying everything in its path. Rape, her mind said. Betrayal, greed, lust, hypocrisy … rape.
But he had laid spells on her that kept her asleep.
She would not be free of him, she thought, until he was dead.
She woke and found that she had her knife in her hand. She lay in the comer of the bishop’s courtyard, fire between her and the night. Yoshabel, tethered nearby, had raised her head, long ears turning toward the source of some sound. Ingold, his back to the embers, listened likewise, the shoulders of his robe and the mule’s shaggy coat dyed rose with the embers’ reflection. Gold threads laced the wet edges of the slunch bed, the leather wrappings of the books. Somewhere a voice that might have been human, half a mile or more away, was blubbering and shrieking in agony as something made leisurely prey of its owner.
Good, she thought, calm and strangely clear. He’s distracted.
Why did she feel that the matter had been arranged?
The blanket slid from her as she rose to hands and knees, knife tucked against her side. In her bones, in her heart, with the same awareness by which she knew the hapless ghoul was being killed for her benefit, she also knew herself to be invisible to the stretched-out fibers of Ingold’s senses, invisible to his magic. If she kept low, practiced those rites of silence the Guards had taught, she could sever his spine as easily as she’d severed that of the thing that had torn open her face.
His fault, too, she thought bitterly, surveying the thin fringe of white hair beneath the close-fit lambskin cap. His doing. His summoning, if the truth were known.
I was beautiful before …
She knew that wasn’t true. Thin-faced, sharp-featured, with a great witchy cloud of black hair that never would do what she wanted of it, she had never been more than passably pretty, a foil for the glamour of a mother and a sister whose goals had been as alien to her scholarly pursuits as a politician’s or a religious fanatic’s might have been.
The awareness of the lie pulled her back—pulled her fully awake—and she looked down at the knife in her hand.
Jesus, she thought. Oh, Jesus …
“Ingold …”
He moved his head a little, but did not take his eyes from the dark of the court. “Yes, child?”
“I’ve had a dream,” she said. “I want to kill you.”
“Once upon a time there was a boy …” Rudy Solis began.
“Once upon a time there was a boy.” Altir Endorion, Lord of the Keep of Dare, wriggled his back against the side of the big chest-bed to get comfortable and folded his small hands, the low glare of the hearth’s embers shining in his speedwell-blue eyes.
“And he lived in a great big palace …”
“And he lived in a great big palace.”
“With lots of servants to wait on him and do whatever he asked.”
The blue eyes closed.