Barbara Hambly - Darwath 2 - The Walls Of Air

VIP免费
2024-12-07 0 0 524.88KB 266 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
Prologue
The Reaches of the Dark
Gil Patterson thought her vision of the strange city was all a
dream - until the wizard Ingold Inglorion appeared one night in
her kitchen, seeking a place to bring the infant Prince of Dare
from the ancient horror that was attacking the city of Gae.
Rudy Solis didn’t believe in wizards and magic - even when
he saw Ingold emerge, with an infant in his arms, beside the
place where Rudy had stopped to fix his car.
But when one of the monstrous, evil Dark crossed the Void in
Ingold’s wake, their only escape was back with the wizard to
the embattled world from which he had fled.
It was a world where magic worked within a logic of its own.
And it was a world where the loathsome Dark were again
ravening, after they had lain almost forgotten in underground
lairs for three thousand years. Gae had fallen, and the city of
Karst was jammed with refugees. The King was dead, and
proud, ambitious Alwir was now Regent for the infant Prince
Tir, as brother to the young Queen Minalde - or Aide, as most
called her.
Then the Dark struck in massive numbers at Karst. In the
fighting, Gil discovered that even a graduate student of history
could become a warrior. And Rudy found himself aiding the
young Queen to save her child again from the Dark.
At Ingold’s urging, those who were left began the long,
agonizing march toward the Keep of Renweth through trails
choked with snow and buffeted by mountain winds. During that
flight, Dissension among the leaders was as much a danger as
the trailing Dark and the White Raiders, who were coming from
the plains to loot. Alwir and the fanatic lady Govannin, Bishop
of the Church, were engaged in a struggle for power. And both
feared Ingold -the Bishop because all wizardry was evil in her
Faith.
To Gil and Rudy, unused to the hardships of freezing cold and
day-after-day marching, the trip was hard. But Gil found herself
accepted as one of the Guards, the elite fighting force of Gae.
And Rudy found that Aide returned his love. His joy in this was
equalled only by his discovery that he could call up fire - and by
Ingold’s promise to teach him to be a wizard.
In the end, through the efforts of Ingold, some eight thousand
people reached the monstrous, black Keep, built three thousand
years before by wizardry as a defence against the previous
scourge of the Dark. There, in its vast chaos of deserted aisles
and chambers, they could make themselves a refuge for a time,
though the perils before them were many and terrible.
Yet somehow Gil and Rudy discovered that they no longer
had any desire to return across the Void to their own world.
Chapter 1
The setting was the Shamrock Bar in San Bernardino on a
rainy Saturday night. Rain drummed softly on the plate glass
window, and the tawdry gleam of lights shone on the wet
pavement outside. Two bearded bikers and a sleazy blonde were
playing pool in the back. Rudy Solis swigged off his second
beer of the evening and watched the room. There was
something he had lost, something that had been taken from him,
but he no longer remembered what it had been. Only a numb
ache was left.
He was out of money and not nearly drunk enough yet.
Behind the bar, Billie May moved back and forth along the
shelf of empty glasses and bottles of beer, her reflection trailing
her in the flyspecked mirror, showing her black eye make-up
and the red lace of her bra at the low neck of her sweater. The
mirror revealed all the usual Saturday night crowd, people Rudy
had known since high school – since childhood, some of them:
Peach McClain, the fattest Hell’s Angel in the world, with his
old lady; Crazy Red, the karate instructor; Big Bull; and the
gang from the steel mill. But it was as if they were strangers. He
made a gesture with one hand, and a beer bottle levitated from
the shelf before the mirror and drifted across the intervening
space to his hand. No one noticed. He poured the beer and
drank, hardly tasting it. From the jukebox, the tinny whine of
steel guitars backed a syrupy nasal voice hymning adultery. The
hurt of the loss within him was unbearable.
He let go of the bottle in midair a foot above the surface of
the bar and made it stay there. Still no one noticed, or no one
cared, anyway. Rudy stared past it at his own reflection in the
mirror - the sharp bone structure and backswept eyebrows in
their frame of long, reddish-black hair. His fingers were stained
with car paint and grease, and his name was tattooed across a
flaming torch on his wrist. Behind him, the plate glass window
had grown suddenly dark, as if all light had died outside.
He turned, chilled with a horror he could not define. No
streetlights were visible outside, no sheen of neon, only
darkness that seemed to press against the window, soft and
living - darkness that stirred with a restless movement, as if
creatures impossibly sinuous haunted its livid depths. He tried
to cry out, and his voice was only a kind of feeble rattle in his
throat. He tried to point, but the people in the bar ignored him,
as if he were not there. A bolt of energy or power from outside
struck the wall of the bar like a monster fist, caving it in amid
an explosion of shattering bricks. Through the torn wall,
darkness rolled like a wave.
‘Rudy!’ Cold hands caught his flailing wrist. ‘Rudy, wake up!
What is it?’
He woke gasping, sweat icing him to the bone. In the
darkness of the room, his wizard’s sight showed him Minalde,
Queen of Darwath and mother of the heir, sitting up in bed
beside him, the starred silk of the counterpane gleaming around
her shoulders and the fear in her wide iris-dark eyes making her
seem younger than her nineteen years. The warm, still blackness
of the room smelt of beeswax and of the perfume of her tumbled
hair. ‘What was it?’ she asked him again, her voice very low.
‘Was it a dream?’
‘Yeah.’ Rudy lay back beside her, shivering, as if deathly
cold. ‘Only a dream.’
In the lightless barracks of the Guards on the first level, Gil
Patterson woke, her dreams of quiet scholarship in another
universe called California broken by an unshakable sense of
impending horror. She lay on her narrow bunk for a time,
listening open-eyed to the small sounds of the fortress Keep of
Dare, and to the hammering of her own heart. The Keep was
safe, she told herself. The one place in the world where the Dark
Ones could not break in.
But the terror of the dreams grew rather than diminished in
her heart.
At last she rose, soundless as $ cat. The dim yellowish glow
from the banked hearth in the main guardroom threw a feeble
reflection into the cell shared by the women of the day watch. It
touched anonymous shoulders, shut eyes, tangled hair, the black
cloaks with the simple white quatrefoil emblem of the Guards,
and the hard gleam of steel. By that faint suggestion of light, she
pulled on a shirt and breeches, wrapped herself in her cloak, and
slipped from the room. The floor was icy to her bare feet as she
made her way between the bunks in the guardroom beyond. She
guessed it to be midway through the deep-night watch, the
watch between midnight and morning, but time was different in
the windowless Keep.
She pushed aside the curtain at the far end of that room.
Ingold the wizard was not in his so-called quarters. Actually,
the wizard slept in a sort of cubbyhole that the Guards used to
store part of the food supplies they’d scrounged, salvaged, and
defended against all comers in the wreck of the Realm. The
feeble gleam of the light from the hearth showed Gil a hollow in
the sacks of grain piled in the back of the closet, a couple of
moth-eaten buffalo robes, and a very grubby patchwork quilt,
but no wizard. His staff was gone, too.
She moved quickly back through the guardroom, through the
outer chamber used for storing weapons and casks of Blue Ruin
and bathtub gin, and out into the cavernous depths of the Aisle.
The great central hall of the Keep stretched nearly a thousand
feet from the double gates at the west end to the dark, turreted
wall of the administrative headquarters at the east. She might
almost have been outside, for the featureless black walls that
bounded the Aisle on either side stretched up out of sight,
supporting a ceiling whose shadows had never been dispelled.
Across the broad floor murmured the deep, black water
channels, spanned by their tiny bridges; around her the stillness
was like the great silence of the snowbound mountains outside.
But instead of moon or stars, the darkness was lighted by
torches that flickered on either side of the dark steel of the
gates. The dim orange flame defined a small double circle on
the smooth blackness of the polished floor and touched fiery
echoes in bolt, brace, and locking ring.
Where the two halos of red flame merged, a man stood, his
rough white hair fringed by the fire in a line of burning gold.
She called out softly, ‘Ingold!’
He turned and lifted an inquiring eyebrow. Gil pulled her
cloak more tightly around her shoulders and pattered up the
broad steps to the gate. Since she had crossed the Void in his
company, to come unwillingly to this other universe, she
couldn’t remember a time when she had been warm.
‘Yes, my dear?’ he asked, in a voice like raw whiskey and
velvet. The face revealed by the restless light had never been
more than nondescript, but sixty-odd years of existence had
given it an extremely lived-in look, seamed and wrinkled and
mostly hidden behind a close-clipped, rather scrubby white
beard. When she stood beside him, her eyes were level with his.
‘What is it?” she asked him quietly.
He only said, ‘I think you know.’
She glanced nervously over her shoulder at the dark steel of
the gates. Here the horror was stronger, a sense of brooding
malevolence in the night. Here she felt the strange, chill terror,
the irrational sensation of being watched from across
unknowable gulfs of time by a malign and incomprehensible
intelligence. They’ve come,’ she whispered, ‘haven’t they?
Ingold rested a hand gently on her shoulder. ‘I think you had
better go arm.’
Her eyes dark in the wan bluish witchlight, Minalde watched
Rudy dress. ‘What’s wrong?’ she whispered.
‘I don’t know.’ His voice was low, so as not to wake the royal
infant who slept in his gilded cradle in the shadows on the
opposite wall. ‘But I think I’d better be getting back.’ After a
month in this world, the alien clothing was more or less familiar
to him, and he no longer felt self-conscious in the homespun
breeches and full-sleeved shirt, tunic, knee-length boots, and
gaily embroidered surcoat he’d scrounged off a dead nobleman
after the great massacre by the Dark Ones at Karst. But he still
mourned the simplicity of jeans and a T-shirt. He buckled on his
sword and leaned across the tumble of variegated silks to kiss
the girl who watched him so silently. ‘Will you be at the gate in
the morning to see us off?
His hands framed her face. She caught his wrists, as if to hold
him to her for a few minutes longer. ‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘I
can’t, Rudy. It’s a long way to Quo and a dangerous road. Who
knows if you’ll even find the Hidden City or the Archmage,
once you reach the end?’ Her blue eyes shimmered suddenly in
the pale phosphorescence of the witchlight. ‘I never could stand
goodbyes.’
‘Hey!’ Rudy leaned-over her again, his hands gripping her
neck and shoulders, the dark hair spilling heavily down over his
fingers as he drew her mouth to his. ‘Hey, Ingold’s gonna be
with me. We’ll be okay. I can’t imagine anyone or anything
crazy enough to take on that old geezer. It won’t be goodbye.’
She smiled crookedly up at him. ‘Then there’s no point in
making much of it, is there?” Their lips met again, gently this
time, the loose strands of her hair tickling his face. ‘Go with
God, Rudy, though the Bishop would die in her tracks if she
heard me say that to a wizard.’
Through their next kiss Rudy mumbled something about the
Bishop. ‘Which probably wouldn’t do her any harm,’ he added
as their mouths parted. He reached up tenderly and brushed the
tear from her cheek. In all his twenty-five years, he couldn’t
remember anyone, man or woman, who had ever been
concerned about what he was going to do. Why did it have to be
a girl in another universe? he wondered. Why did it have to be a
Queen? Another tear stole down her cheek, so he whispered,
‘Hey, you look after Pugsley while I’m gone.’ His way of
referring to Prince Tir, the last heir of the House of Dare, made
her laugh in spite of herself. ‘All right.’ She smiled shakily.
‘We’ll find the Archmage and his Council,’ Rudy whispered
encouragingly. ‘See if we don’t.’ He kissed her once more
quickly and turned and fled, the bluish feather of light dying
behind him.
In darkness he hurried through the mazes of the Royal Sector,
misery in his heart.
She was afraid for him, and more than that, he was all she had
- he and her baby son. In the past month she had lost the
husband she had worshipped, the Realm she had ruled, and the
world she had grown up in. Yet she had never said, ‘Don’t go.’
And what’s more, you selfish bastard, he cursed himself, //
never crossed your mind not to go.
She had never questioned that his need to be a wizard took
precedence over his love for her. Wretched as the truth made
him, he understood it for what it was; he was first and foremost
a wizard. Given a choice of what to do with the limited time
remaining to him in this universe, he would rather seek the
sources of his own power and the teachings that Ingold and the
other wizards could give him than remain with the woman he
sincerely loved.
Why did I have to find them both at the same time? he
wondered miserably. Why did I have to choose?
Even her understanding of his choice was like gall in the raw
wound of his guilt.
Yet there had been no possibility of another choice. He
stopped at the head of the main east stairway, leading down to
the first level.
The sensation of wrongness, of unnamed horror lurking in the
black mazes of the Keep, was stronger now, teasing at him like
a half-heard sound. He shivered like a dog before the thunder,
the hair at the nape of his neck prickling. All around him silence
seemed to move through the branching corridors. Glancing
nervously behind him, he started down the stairs. Somewhere
below him, a door must have been opened.
Faint as a drift of incense, he caught the sound of chanting,
the sweet murmurous richness of monks’ voices singing the
offices of the deep-night. Rudy paused on the stairs,
remembering that the Church headquarters lay directly below
the Royal Sector and that, to the fanatic Bishop of Gae, wizards
were anathema.
As far as he knew, his love for Aide was unknown to any,
except perhaps his fellow exile Gil. He doubted anything
serious could happen to Aide because of it ~ she was, after all,
Queen of what was left of Darwath, and the King had perished
in the holocaust of the burning Palace at Gae. But he knew too
little of the mores and taboos of this place to want to risk
discovery. And hell, he thought, maybe there’s some kind of
noninterference directive in force, since Frnfrom another
universe and really shouldn’t be here at all.
But if there was, he did not want to know.
At the moment it wasn’t critical - there were plenty of other
stairways down. Some of them had been part of the original
design of the Keep, built like the walls of black, massive,
obsidian-hard stone. Others had evidently been rigged millennia
ago by ancient inhabitants who had simply knocked holes in the
floors of the corridors where it suited them and let down jerry-
built steps of wood. The same process had clearly been in force
with the walls and cells of the Keep, for in places the black
walls marched into darkness in rigid rectilinear order, while in
others makeshift chaos prevailed. Passages had been blocked to
build cells across the right of way, access routes had subdivided
other cells, and partitions of brick, stone, and wood had
chopped the original plan into literally thousands of self-
contained units whose forms had shifted with their functions,
with a result, over three thousand years, that would have
challenged the most worldly rat in all of B. F. Skinner’s
laboratories.
Optimistically, Rudy set off into the maze.
‘I feel nothing,’ Janus of Weg said quietly. The big
Commander of the Guards of Gae sat on the edge of a bunk near
the guardroom hearth, his face grave in the loose frame of
coppery-red hair that surrounded it. He glanced across the
hearth at Ingold. ‘But I trust you. If you say the Dark are
outside, I would believe you, even if the sun were high in the
sky.’
There was a stirring among the other captains and a murmur
of assent. The Icefalcon, like a foreigner among the Guards with
his long white viking braids, said softly, The very smell of the
night is evil.’ Melantrys, a diminutive girl with the eyes of a
ninja, glanced nervously over her shoulder.
‘Smell, hell,’ rumbled Tomec Tirkenson, landchief of
Gettlesand, a big craggy plainsman whose domains lay on the
other side of the mountains. ‘It’s like the nights when the cattle
stampede for no reason.’
The Icefalcon glanced coolly across at Ingold. ‘Can they
break in?’ he asked, as if it were a matter of no more moment
than the outcome of a race on which he had bet only a small
sum.
‘I don’t know.’ Ingold shifted his weight on his perch by the
hearth and folded sword-scarred hands on his knee. ‘But we can
be certain that they will try. Janus, Tomec - I suggest that the
corridors be patrolled, on all levels, to every corner of the Keep.
That way ...’
‘But we haven’t the men for it!’ Melantrys protested. ‘We’ve
enough for a patrol of sorts,’ Janus admitted. ‘But if the Dark
effect an entrance, it’s sure we’ve not enough to fight at any one
place, spread so thin.’
The Icefalcon cocked a pale eyebrow at the wizard. ‘Are we
going to fight?’
‘If we can,’ Ingold said. ‘Your patrols can be eked out with
摘要：

PrologueTheReachesoftheDarkGilPattersonthoughthervisionofthestrangecitywasalladream-untilthewizardIngoldInglorionappearedonenightinherkitchen,seekingaplacetobringtheinfantPrinceofDarefromtheancienthorrorthatwasattackingthecityofGae.RudySolisdidn’tbelieveinwizardsandmagic-evenwhenhesawIngoldemerge,wi...

展开>> 收起<<
Barbara Hambly - Darwath 2 - The Walls Of Air.pdf

共266页,预览10页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：266 页 大小：524.88KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-07

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 动力学连接体 力的合成 配电装置 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 266
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注