Darwath 3 - The Armies Of Daylight by Barbara Hambly Page B

any case,” the old man went on, “I would hesitate to surrender the control of my mind to anyone, even to someone whom I trusted implicitly—Gil or Kta. I have far too much power to take a risk of that kind, even for the best of causes. If for no other reason, mine are the spells that bind the gates of the Keep against the Dark. And as holder of Master-spells…”
    “Master-spells?” Rudy frowned, reaching out with one foot to prevent Tir, who had grown bored with his cocoon, from seeking his fortune among the piled junk under the workbench.
    “Certainly.”
    For an instant Rudy was conscious of what he had seen, one night in the depths of the desert—his own isolated soul, viewed through the bright sea-blue eyes that suddenly held his. Like an image made of crystal, there was nothing in his mind or spirit that the old man could not probe out, if he wanted. Ingold's thoughts, his will, were like a needle of ice and lightning, piercing to the bottom of Rudy's startled brain.
    Then, with a shock as palpable as the cutting of a straining rope, he was released, and had to catch his balance on the edge of the table, for all the strength seemed to have gone out of his legs. The shadows in the stark, rectangular lab had deepened. Rudy realized that his own witchlight had been quenched and that the only illumination in the room was that which burned like searing ball lightning above Ingold's uncut, silky white hair. He found his hands were unsteady, his face drenched in sudden, icy sweat.
    “Master-spells,” the old man explained gently.
    “Ingold.” Alde straightened up from retrieving a dust-blackened Tir from beneath the workbench. “Could you work this—this gnodyrr—on me?” Her voice was halting, as if her own audacity terrified her. "I have no—no Master-spells. But I am descended from the House of Dare.
    “We have all talked of the heritable memories of the House of Dare,” she went on hesitantly, clasping the grimy and repulsively dirty scion of that House in her arms. “Eldor had them. Maybe Tir has them. My grandfather had them. And I can recognize things that my ancestors must have seen, here in the Keep, though I can't remember independently, as—as Eldor used to. But—why do we remember at all?”
    Gil's head came up, her gray eyes suddenly sharp and hard.
    “You see,” Alde continued, her fingers plucking nervously at the cobwebs trailing from Tir's dress, “Gil and looked all over the Keep for records. Anything, to tell us how the Dark Ones may have been defeated. And there's nothing, nothing at all. But—but maybe the old wizards, the engineers who raised the Keep, knew that records do get lost, especially when, as you said, fire is the principal weapon.”
    Gil's finger stabbed out like a sword. “They tied the memory to the bloodline, and that was their record! A record that wouldn't get lost and couldn't be destroyed!”
    “Could they do that?” Rudy asked doubtfully.
    “I wouldn't put it past them.”
    Rudy glanced through the half-open door of the laboratory, past the blue-white bar of light with its diamond mist of dust motes, and out to the blackness of the hidden levels of the Keep beyond where lay hundreds of thousands of square feet of sunken hydroponics tanks filmed with dust, sealed labs and enigmatic storerooms, and pumps which had operated for a score of centuries on power sources that were still unknown.
    When he thought about it, he wouldn't put much of anything past them.
    “It seems that women remember these things differently from men,” Alde said, gently thwarting Tir's attempts to escape her arms and investigate the frost-gray crystals that twinkled so invitingly on the workbench beside him. “But could what I half-remember be brought to the surface by— by gnodyrr?”
    “It could,” the wizard said slowly, his voice low and very grave. “But at what cost to yourself, my lady? Gnodyrr is black magic. But more than that, in certain places, local Church rulings