Barbara Hambly - 03 The Armies of Daylight

With a flourish, Rudy drew, aimed at the far wall, and let loose a leaping column of fire that splattered from the stone and left a great charred patch.

"Random," was all the Icefalcon said. He turned back to Ingold, leaving Rudy stuttering with indignation.

The wind had turned icy when they emerged from the cave, stinging their faces and blowing brief, hard flurries of sleet down from the darkening sky. It clattered in the small bones that the Icefalcon had braided into his long hair. Boiled and picked clean, Gil thought, but disconcertingly like...

"Are those human handbones?"

His enigmatic eyes looked almost silver against the gold windburn of his face. "When I became a Guard," he said inconsequentially, "I vowed that I would become a civilized person and learn to fight honorably in a civilized fashion. These are the bones of a man who came upon me when I lay near death, after our civilized friend Stiarth of Alketch- parted company from me, I begged this man for water and he stole my boots and my cloak." The Icefalcon shrugged. 'Later my sisters and brothers, the barbarians of the White Lakes People, found me and healed me, and I rode with them for a time, though their people and mine were enemies in the plains. They helped me to-recover my cloak and boots."

A sleety gust of wind rattled the bones in his hair.

Gil stopped and raised her head to listen, having caught some sound over the growing cry of the wind. The straggling ends of her braided black hair fluttered around her face in the streaming currents of cold air that some trick of the cliffs' geology funneled through the gap between that oddly broken rock spur and the knoll. From here the Keep was visible, stabbing like a fractured bone end through the mucky wound of turned-up dirt, mud, fences, and trash that surrounded it.

"Is that- thunder?" she asked.

The others were also listening now to that faint, deep roar that underlay the keening of the wind like a bass note. The high shriek of the coming storm drowned it; then it sounded again, a throbbing in the air, more felt than heard.

Ingold drew his hood over his head. "At a guess," he said quietly, "it is the drums of the Army of Alketch. They should be on the road up the mountains now, and they will be at the Keep itself tomorrow."

The party in the barracks was long over. Gill wasn't certain how late the Icefalcon's welcome-home festivities had broken up, or even whether it was still last night or this morning. In the darkness of the Keep, time had little meaning, and here, in the hidden lower levels, there was not even the solitary tread of a patrolling Guard to mark the watches of day and night.

On the black stone table before her lay two heaps of crystals-frost-gray polyhedrons the size and shape of the glowstones, of a material identical to that of the table's circular central inset. She wondered why that had never occurred to her before.

From the larger pile she took a crystal at random, sighed, and automatically scratched the number 14 on the wax note tablet that lay at her elbow. Then she set the crystal before her, covering it with both her hands, and repeated in a clear, painstaking voice the words that Minalde had spoken in her trance, the words of unlocking. The sharp edges of the polygon pressed into her palms as she leaned forward to look into the table's faintly glowing core.

For a moment she saw nothing but the edge of her own huge shadow lying across the table and the dim reflected gleam of the light of the single glowstone she'd brought here with her. Around her, the black walls of the observation chamber formed a narrow circle of darkness. The silence was absolute. She cleared her mind, as Ingold had instructed her, stared into the angles of the crystal's heart, and waited.

Then something glittered deep below her, a flash of brightness that resolved itself into the blinding flicker of sunlight on water. Like dark knife blades, oars broke the blazing wake, and she saw a barge, carved over every inch of its surface and riding low in the smooth water under the weight of its own gilding. The oars stroked again, and the sun smote Gil's eyes. The colors seemed to intensify. Bright-hued birds flew up in startled explosions from the lotus patches that grew thick on the marshy shores. The barge put about, banking neatly before water-stairs of black-veined pink marble.

There was movement on the stairs, eerily silent, of men and women naked to the waist, their bronzed shoulders darkly gleaming under jeweled collars and pectorals. The breeze from across the lagoon rippled in the elaborate frills and tuckings of long gauze skirts and shifted the rainbow-dyed curls of servants who bore a carrying chair whose design Gill half-recognized. The style was sinuous, carved with winding lines of hearts, eyes, and diamonds, like the furniture she and Alde had found in the most ancient storerooms in the Keep.

Gil was not sure whether this was an intelligence report, a documentary, a manual, or the opening chapters of a novel, or what the date was, or the historical context. But she knew that she looked into the Times Before.

A haughty bishop descended from the barge, the Earth Cross of the Faith embroidered in bullion and sardonyx on the edges of his frilled white loincloth. Jewels flashed from white, unworked hands and from the earlobes and nostrils; people moved about, amid a bobbing of ostrich plumes; some kind of rite was clearly in progress. Gil noted that, though the bishop was shaven bald, all the others wore their hair as long as they could, braided into elaborate coiffures such as Minalde wore on ceremonial occasions, plumed, flowered, or jeweled. Beneath the eye paint and rouge, the faces of the audience on the steps looked bored to death, and Gil saw that they flirted among themselves whenever the bishop's head was turned, or else covertly eyed one another's outfits.

Govannin's words came back to her, with the memory of soft chanting among the tiered darkness of the great Sanctuary. I have heard that the men of the Times Before were evil and that in their pride and their splendor they practiced abominations ... One man in a padded, sunshine-yellow silk loincloth produced an ivory eyebrow comb and made minute adjustments with the aid of a mirrored ring on his little finger. A youth with lilies coiled in his blue-dyed hair noticed him and blew him a kiss. Sunlight glittered on the waters of the lagoon; parrots fluttered among the garlands that hung the marble colonnade along the shore. Gold flashed on the bishop's white, upraised hands.

Beyond the pillars, past the myrtle trees and arbors of roses, Gil had a glimpse of mountains, blue and close and shawled with a thin lace of snow...

Mountains she had seen before.

Where?

It was difficult to be sure because of the trees and the domes and turrets of the city in the distance. But a sense of familiarity pulled at her-a memory of ruined streets, of fallen and smoke-blackened walls, and of the buzzing, crawling stink of decay. Hadn't she turned to look over her shoulder once, her bones aching with the jarring jog of the exhausted cart horse she rode? Hadn't she glimpsed those mountains, standing just so, above the corpse of a despoiled city?

Those were the mountains that stood above the plain of Gae.

Frowning, Gil turned her eyes from the crystal at the center of the table, and the bright images before her died.

She sat for a long moment, staring into the darkness that seemed to press upon her from the walls of that narrow room.

This isn't how it's supposed to be , she told herself numbly. We were supposed to find the ancient records of the Times

Before, and there it would be in black and white or in this case in living color - the Answer. How to Demolish Dark Ones. (See: Secret Weapons, Specs. Appendix A.)