Pretty Polly Read online

  PRETTY POLLY

  by

  Barbara Hambly

  Published by Barbara Hambly at Smashwords

  Copyright 2010 Barbara Hambly

  Cover art by Eric Baldwin

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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  Table of Contents

  Pretty Polly

  About The Author

  The Further Adventures

  PRETTY POLLY

  by

  Barbara Hambly

  Pretty Polly was crying.

  Though ice-winds scoured the bare mountains that surrounded the fortress-keep of Dare, in most of the Keep it was warm. Only in the outer chambers of the black fortress’s mazes did the huddled remnant of humanity have to build fires to fend off the creeping cold, and here in the complex of chambers and subdivided chamber-lets, niches, and nooks allotted to the Guards, the problem was more often stuffiness and the reek of cooking-smoke.

  Yet in her dream, Gil Patterson felt the cold.

  Though it was dark in her dream, she could see the white cat, and it cut her heart to see how thin Pretty Polly was; to see the blood on her dirty fur. Polly would lick her bleeding paw, stop, and mew in that tiny kitten-voice, though she would – Gil calculated even asleep – be nearly twelve now…

  Damn her! she wanted to scream, through tears of rage and distress, God damn her for throwing Polly out…!

  If Donna didn’t want a cat she could have taken her back to Mom’s…!

  There were times when Gil hated her younger sister.

  But when she woke she was weeping, deeply and brokenly, not only for Pretty Polly, but for the sister and the mother she had left behind with barely a backward glance.

  *

  She woke to voices in the outer Guard-room, and knew immediately: There’s trouble.

  Beside her, her baby son clucked and fussed – absolutely a child of the Guards, Mithrys seldom cried, always seemed to be watching the dark, strange world of the Keep with his father’s bright-blue eyes. While Gil fed him and changed him by the light of the single glowstone that she kept in the little chamber – and the stronger illumination of glowstones and lamps that came through the louvers from the Guard-room beyond – she listened to the voices in the other room, and what she heard sluiced away the grief of her dream in cold shock and dread.

  “There’s something back there,” a young man was saying, terror in his voice. “Something up there. I knew it! I heard it three days ago…”

  By his accent he was one of the back-level folks, the dozen or so colonies of poorer families who lived up on the fifth level, or far back into the lower four levels away from the Central Aisle, where the water didn’t circulate through the Keep’s oddly elaborate plumbing system, and where the air was rank. When the survivors of the Coming of the Dark had taken up residence in the Keep of Dare, five years ago, the first-comers to the fortress had taken the cells in its endless, lightless labyrinths that lay closest to the vast central Aisle, where streams of open water ran and the air moved and whispered in the open spaces in the dark. Those who had come later, refugees from the southern cities of the Realm and, later still, from the demolished woodland fiefs, had taken the less desirable warrens, where it was a long walk to water or latrines and where centuries of makeshift remodeling during the Keep’s first era of habitation – rooms added, rooms subdivided or combined, corridors blocked or re-routed for the convenience of clans long vanished – had left large pockets of chambers airless and stuffy.

  Then, too, over the five years since the Coming of the Dark, some of the latecomers had found ways to move to better locations, while those who didn’t particularly care to have neighbors overlooking their infractions of Keep regulations concerning cleanliness, appropriate behavior, and allocation of resources were just as happy to trade off a few extra yards to the nearest water, or a little pong in the air. Who cared about smells anyway if you were operating a liquor-still or keeping livestock that you didn’t tell the Keep Council about?

  As an historian, trained at the University of California before circumstance had brought her to the ruins of the Realm of Darwath and the arms of her sometimes-vexing True Love, Gil was fascinated to observe society in the making.

  As a member of the Keep Guards, Gil was simply annoyed, because many of the back-level folks had fallen into the habit of shirking the common Keep tasks, like plowing (when the storms outside permitted), garbage-recycling and disposal (when the storms outside permitted), and the cleaning of corridors, latrines, laundry-fountains, and the Great Aisle, not to speak of their own living-quarters. If Guards were sent to round up the slackers, or to search for thieves, the fifth-level folks would simply disappear into the darkness of those back-corners and distant areas where no one lived and no one went, enclaves uninhabited since the Keep’s first dwellers – in the first Time of the Dark three thousand years before – had emerged, with the disappearance of the Dark Ones from the world.

  But it was always in her mind that anything could be back there.

  And now, it seemed, something was.

  “It took Nebby,” sobbed a woman. “I know it. I saw his blood…”

  “And Tallia’s gone.” Another man’s voice, deeper than the first. “She was to meet me last night, by the Dog-Fountain. She never came.”

  “You live near the Dog-Fountain, don’t you, Hila?” Ingold Inglorion’s voice unmistakable, deep and flawed and scratchy, like gravel and bronze. Greatest mage and swordsman in the West of the World… Gil gathered his cloak from the end of the bed, thrust her sword-sheathe through her belt, and scooped her child into her arms. “Towards the back of the fourth level?”

  He looked up as Gil came into the Guard-room and met her eyes: sturdy and unprepossessing, long white hair and a white beard that looked as if he’d trimmed it with his knife, the scars around his eyes blending into the gouges of laugh-lines and sun-lines and thought-lines with the fleet flicker of his smile. “Thank you, my dear,” he added, as she handed him the cloak.

  “Where was the blood?” The Icefalcon’s pale braids picked up red glints of firelight as he turned his head, tall among the dark knot of Guards who sat around the hearth. “And how do you know it was your son’s?”

  “He was playing by the fountain.” Hila’s voice was barely more than a cracked whisper. “I was with my sister, she lives near there, at the Little Spiral near the weavers’ room. There was a fight – children can be so rough – Nebby ran away with Essa Billet’s doll, down one of the small corridors. I went back and told my sister I’d have to take him home. I went after him, and found the doll, beside blood splashed on the wall and the floor.”

  The Guards traded a glance – somewhere between How do we do this? and Oh, crap – and then eyes went to Ingold again. Though not a Guard, the old wizard had worked closely with them even before his involvement with Gil, understanding – as few besides the Guards themselves did – that vigilance could never be relaxed, and that even the smallest anomalies of behavior, events, apparent co-incidence must be investigated. Even the eighty percent or so that quite clearly were going to turn out to be nothing.

  This one at least, reflected Gil, doesn’t look like it’s in that category…

  “You say you heard something up there – Kei, is it?” said Ingold, with a glance at the younger of the two men.

  Kei, who’d been staring down at his clasped hands, looked up swiftly
, his blue eyes haunted. “At the back of the fourth level,” he whispered. “South side of the Aisle… close to the Little Blue Bridge. I – my uncle lives up there, he doesn’t get around as well as he used to. I took a short-cut back to the bridge and I must have missed my turning.”

  He shivered, and rubbed his arms as if with remembered chill: a sturdy and broad-shouldered young man, the wool of his tunic, jacket, trousers carefully cleaned – not usual among the dwellers in the more obscure mazes at the backs of the upper levels – and meticulously mended. “I had a dip with me,” he said – a reed that had been soaked in tallow, the usual form of illumination among those who couldn’t afford glowstones – “but it went out, though I couldn’t feel any wind. I heard… I can’t even really describe it. Whistling… Not like someone whistling a tune, but a couple of low notes, almost metallic. And a kind of scraping sound. I felt… something—”

  He shook his head, looked around him at the Guards, at the woman Hila and the other man present – older and grimier, with dirty nails and a few days’ beard-stubble on his dark face. “Do you know how it is when you feel there’s something – something wrong? That you just have to get out of there at once, or something terrible is about to happen?”

  Ingold tilted his head a little to one side. “Can you show me the place?”

  “I think so.”

  The woman whispered despairingly, “Nebby—” and put her hands before her mouth. And then, reaching out to the older man with the dirty nails, “Oh, Derron, I know something terrible has happened!”

  “We were to marry,” said the man Derron numbly. “Tallia and I. She said she had to speak to me—”

  Ingold glanced across to Janus, the Commander of the Guards. “Would you send someone to My Lady, and let her know what’s going on? I’ll want to talk this over with her when I get back – I shouldn’t be more than an hour.”

  *

  When he’d been gone three hours, Gil carried Mithrys to the cell of a woman named Dathy – who looked after many of the babies and toddlers of the Keep – and made her way up the succession of stairways and ladders that led to the fourth level, working her way back toward the Little Blue Bridge. It was close to dawn outside, and everywhere in the narrow mazes of corridors around her, she could hear chickens waking and clucking, as if they could feel by some instinct the movements of air above the storm-clouds that still, according to the horns echoing dimly in the Aisle, covered the valley: the two junior mages of the Keep took turns scrying the weather outside.

  She carried a glowstone, wrapped in a corner of her cloak. Slits and lances of its blue-white light bobbed over the smoke-dark walls. Here close to the Aisle, the original slick, black stone of which the whole Keep was built alternated with rough brick, plastered boards, makeshift partitions of woven willow-branches packed with river-mud. Corridors had been blocked, new rights-of-way cut, wooden stairways ascended to the level above or dropped through roughly hewn holes to the one below. The eyes of cats flashed at her from the blackness: the Keep was riddled with areas where the blanket rat-and-mouse spells – both old and new – simply did not operate, and as a result, the Keep’s cat population was large and active. We’re just lucky we don’t have bats as well.

  Or maybe we do. Maybe that’s something else we just don’t know about.

  Gil moved on, soft boots soundless on the dirty floors.

  Lights were coming up behind some of the doors as she neared the Little Spiral district, cells that sheltered one family, or two, or had been joined to the cells on either sides as families grew and alliances shifted. Down on the lower levels the old nobility of the realm of Gae still held independent enclaves, by virtue of the ownership of things of value to this new world into which everyone had been pitch-forked five years ago: livestock, looms, metal, weapons. Up here, most people didn’t have much use for the ancient houses of the nobility, the Skeths and the Ankreses and the Brigs who managed to live in a fair degree of comfort. Here the smoke of cooking-fires drifted like trails of cloud; others places stank of chicken-guano, though it was strictly against Keep Law for animals to be kept in the living areas. The doors that closed off the cells were mostly makeshift coverings of woven branches or hides, where they weren’t simply curtains. Someone cursed about the porridge; someone else shouted “Damn you, I’m sick and tired of feeding you while you just sit around all day…”

  A girl came out of one of the cells, looked anxiously down toward the end of the corridor where the cell-doors stood uncovered and dark. She turned her head, saw Gil, and hurried toward her, pulling a faded shawl close around her coarse shift. Dark-haired and blue-eyed, like most of the inhabitants of the valley of the Great Brown River in the days before the Time of the Dark, and startlingly pretty. Gil guessed her age at fifteen or sixteen. She would have been a child when the Dark came. Her clearest memories would be of living in the Keep.

  “Gil-Shalos?” said the girl hesitantly. Everyone in the Keep knew Ingold’s woman, at least by sight. “Have you heard? Did he find anything of her? Tallia,” she added quickly. “I’m her sister. Lysha—”

  “Ingold hasn’t come back.”

  Lysha’s eyes widened, shocked. “Hasn’t come back? Kei said he had—”

  “When?”

  “Hours ago!”

  Hours, Gil had found, was a fairly relative term in the Keep, particularly during the winter when the days outside were short and the Keep was snowed shut sometimes for weeks on end. The wizards and the Guards – the Keep Guards and also the small private troops maintained by both nobles and the Church – were almost the only ones who kept track of the divisions of day and night. Otherwise people ate when they were hungry – provided food wasn’t being rationed – slept when they were sleepy, and any time one wanted to go out into the Aisle there was usually someone awake.

  “Before the chickens started waking up?”

  Lysha nodded, then added hastily, “Oh, we don’t have any chickens.”

  “Yeah,” said Gil. “I forgot. Where is Kei?”

  Kei was in the Weff family weaving-room near the Little Spiral – Tallia and her family were members of that far-flung clan. When Gil and Lysha came in the young man ran to them: “Did he find her?”

  “He didn’t come back,” said Gil. “Where did you leave him, and why?”

  “He told me to.” Kei looked completely taken aback by her words. “I showed him the place where I’d heard the whistling. It all seemed normal – quiet – well, that whole area back of the Dog Fountain is empty. We went two or three turnings further, then he said, I think you should go back now. I told him no, I’d stay with him, but he insisted. Since he didn’t say—”

  He whirled as another of the Weff cousins came pelting through the cell, yelling “Can’t catch me! Can’t catch me!” to the three smaller kids who dashed at his heels. A woman stringing one of the looms called out “Perik!” in exasperation rather than admonition, and Kei snapped, “Damn it, when are you going to teach that brat some manners?”

  “Seems like you’re the one who needs manners!” retorted the mother, and Granny Weffie – the family matriarch who was just settling to her own loom – added, “Kei, Perik is his mother’s business.”

  “He’s going to get himself killed!” retorted Kei. “The way he runs wild—”

  “Are you telling me I don’t know how to take care of my boy?”

  Kei caught Gil by the arm and drew her into the darkness of the corridor, muttering, “That’s exactly what I’m telling you, you gin-soaked twit.” To the rising sound of voices behind them in the weaving-room, Kei went on quietly, “He hasn’t come back? That’s been over an hour, maybe longer – nobody was awake when I came back here except Granny Weffie. Now everybody’s up and setting up—”

  “Can you take me there?”

  “Of course.”

  *

  Three of the Guards went with them – Caldern, Melantrys, and the Icefalcon – and Rudy Solis, Gil’s fellow exile from California and the se
cond of the Keep wizards: tallish, quiet, with an air of steadiness very distant from the passionate screw-up Gil had first met five years ago in the San Bernardino hills. Before they even left the Guards’ chambers again he took out the thumb-sized yellow crystal of quartz which he always carried, and angled it to the light of the glowstones, gazing into its depths. “Ingold?” he said softly. “Ingold, can you hear me, man? Pick up the phone.”

  No wizard can scry another wizard, Gil knew. But she also knew that Ingold wouldn’t ignore Rudy’s summons to look into his own scrying-crystal. Not unless there was something desperately wrong.

  As they followed Kei back into the empty corridors of fourth south back, Gil could see Rudy searching for traces of the old mage’s presence, walking with his hand spread out and held a half-inch or so from the wall, an expression of listening in his half-shut eyes. She’d seen Ingold do this, too: Ingold could pick up the psychic residue of almost anyone, sometimes weeks after they’d passed by. By his expression, Rudy could feel where Ingold had been.

  And she could tell when he lost track of him.

  “Crap.” He moved back, then walked forward, hesitantly… and the glowing wisp of witchlight that had floated before them all the way up from the first level waned and died as well.

  “This one’s only about thirty feet,” said the Icefalcon, the light of the torch he carried making his silvery eyes seem paler in the shadows. It was like the Icefalcon to have brought a torch – he’d probably have carried one outside in broad daylight, reflected Gil, on the off-chance that the Sun would go out – but in the Keep it was a reasonable precaution. There were perhaps a hundred dead spots in the Keep, places where no magic would work. Some of these were rooms, concentrated mostly in what had been the Church enclave – the war between the Church and the mageborn was an old one and the recent truce an innovation. Others were simply areas of corridor, or one end or another of certain cells. The bulk of them formed a sort of pattern, one of the several patterns of power and energy that moved through the Keep’s dark bones. But not all of them aligned with any known pattern, and there were dead spots which only blanked on certain spells, or, disconcertingly, on the spells of certain wizards.