Barbara Hambly - 03 The Armies of Daylight

Rudy frowned, startled.

Gil went on in that almost absent-minded voice. "When you have lost the only person you loved-whether he ever loved you back or not-when you have lost your world and everything you ever had and are fighting your way forward without even a goal to fight for, it's tremendously easy to die, Rudy."

She got to her feet and adjusted her sword belt around her narrow hips. Her eyes met his, forbidding, defying him to reply or say anything to her of love or loss. "If you get on the road tomorrow, you can probably catch up with the Gettlesand party," she added prosaically. "I'll send you a birthday card when spring breaks."

But dawn brought a messenger to the gates of the Keep, a thin, brown boy on a winded horse, his crimson tunic sewn with the emblems of the Empire of the South. Janus sent one of the day watch running to fetch Vair from his quarters in the Royal Sector. Rudy, persistently unnoticeable in the cloak of his spells, had made his silent way down to the gates to sniff the weather and he saw at once that something was badly amiss.

Black clouds buried the peaks that loomed over the Vale; the distant Pass lay invisible under a gray roil of vapor and snow. By the direction of the wind, Rudy guessed that the weather would break sometime late that afternoon-very cold but clearing, he thought. If he left as soon as the gates were opened at daybreak, supping unobtrusively out with the woodcutters and hunters, he would still be able to catch the Gettlesand cavalcade within a day or so.

From the shadows of the gate passage, he watched Janus talking to the messenger while the herdkids swarmed around them. None of them so much as glanced at Rudy. Behind him in the tunnel, Alwir's deep, beautiful voice sounded, with Eldor's breaking in like a screeching counterpoint. The dark

Alketch Commander walked silently between. Rudy stood very still. Perhaps due to their preoccupation, perhaps due to his spells, none of them happened to be looking in his direction as they passed within a foot of him, though Eldor's cloak brushed his shoulder.

He remembered that one of the mages-Dakis the Minstrel?-had once recounted to him how, by judicious use of such cloaking-spells and his own native caution, he had lived for three weeks in an enemy's house without anyone's becoming aware of his presence. Rudy doubted the story was true, chiefly because Dakis could never have kept his mouth shut for three weeks. But throughout the interview on the steps, neither Janus not Elder nor anyone else ever looked in Rudy's direction. It was as if he were simply not there.

The messenger fell to his knees before Vair, his words a quick liquid babble in the southern tongue. Rudy saw the black Commander's eyes widen and his face grow ashen, as if he had been struck suddenly ill. The cold, yellow eyes flickered to the sky, the weather, and the road; an electric tension seemed to galvanize his body. Rudy knew what the message had been before Vair turned back to speak to the Lord of the Keep.

Gil was right , he thought without surprise. Gil was right, after all .

The Commander said, "The Dark have risen in Alketch."

Alwir's mouth opened in a quick gasp, as if he had taken an arrow through the throat. But Eldor flung back his head and let out a long shriek of wild laughter. He could not seem to stop himself; the weird, distorted cackling went on and on, until Janus took him by the arm.

"My lord..."

The King choked, gasping behind the black, faceless leather of the mask. "I knew it!" he cried. "We are doomed, after all! The earth is doomed! God, what a jape!"

"My lord..." the Guard repeated worriedly, and Alwir seized Eldor's other arm and shook him angrily.

"Is that all you can do?" Alwir demanded, his face livid. "The only Realm remaining whole and stable, the only seat of true civilization, falls to the Dark, and you laugh?"

Eldor was cackling to himself again; but, from his unseen post in the shadow of the dark walls, Rudy saw how the long white fingers of his good hand dug to the knuckles in the flesh of Janus' arm. "Civilization?" he gasped, fairly rocking with unholy mirth. "You call that bloody welter of intolerance and slavery in the South civilization? I laugh, my dear lord Chancellor, because our friend here-" He waved his twisted red claw at the rapidly purpling Vair. "-has been strutting about the Keep like a dunghill cock, for pride that the Dark did his conquering here for him. Fate seems to spread her favors with an even hand, my friend," he said, inclining his head to address the hook-handed Commander. The quickened draw of his breath flattened the soft leather into weird and terrible patterns over the disarranged points of his features. "Who knows what you will find upon your return?"

Alwir's gaze whipped from the rage-engorged face of the Alketch Commander to the invisible one of the King. "The treaty stated that a garrison would be left us for defense until such time-"

Vair opened his mouth to disagree, but Eldor cut him off with a kind of unbalanced delight. "Not when the scramble starts, my lord Alwir. Not when our left-handed friend here has the only stable, standing force in the land and when all Alketch is stricken in panic, with wealth and power there-" He held out one strong white hand, the fingers crooking and curling like claws. "-for the seizing." The face was gone, but the whippy restlessness of that agile body was like the lift of an eyebrow, the quirk of sardonic lips. "Going to take your chances at becoming Emperor is a lot more entertaining than helping the Inquisition slaughter poor little wizard-lings-isn't it, my lord Commander?"

Vair said stiffly, "The question does not arise." The ice winds ruffled in the ribbons of his gorgeous costume, its gay embroideries flashing like a rainbow against the drab obsidian wall of the Keep. "We have been ordered back to our homeland with all speed. The Dark rose in all places at once, on a night some three weeks ago. I do not know what has happened by this time, but my lord the Emperor has said that he needs every sword."

He turned again to Eldor, who stood rocking a little on his heels with a swaying motion like a serpent's, the scarred root of his left hand stuck loosely in the jeweled buckle of his sword belt. "Our undoing amuses you, my lord," he said bitterly. "But what you see is the ruin of humankind-the death knell, not only of our civilization, but of all hope for refounding your own."

"Indeed," Eldor said, shrill mockery edging his voice. "That is what amuses me."

"You're mad," Alwir said quietly, and there was no question now in his tone.

"No, no, my darling," Eldor crooned, laying a.long, soothing hand upon Alwir's quilted velvet shoulder. "Not mad. Hell has merely altered my sense of humor. There was once a man, they say, who could raise the dead-he was killed out of hand."

Alwir jerked his arm free of that mocking caress. "You're mad," he repeated, and Eldor laughed.

"Not as mad as you are, my friend, to lose your foreign troops." The King turned on his heel and went striding off into the Keep, his wild, metallic voice echoing into the dark vaults with the news that Alketch had fallen and the Dark Ones had overrun the face of the world.

Vair started to follow him, but Alwir reached out to stay the Commander, grasping the puffed and pearl-embroidered blue sleeve. A glance passed between them in the bruised dawnlight. Then they both went after the mad King, into the rising chaos of the Keep.

The day was one of utter confusion, as if the Keep, like a scientist's nest of ants, had been upended and shaken. As Rudy flitted here and there, hidden by his cloaking-spell and collecting provisions for his own departure, he was conscious as he never had been before of the perils of any sudden change to such a small and precariously balanced community.