Barbara Hambly - 03 The Armies of Daylight

The few Penambrans who had remained after Govannin's removal followed Gil silently into the dark hall, accompanied by the Bishop's confused and whispering monks. Brother Wend looked up from his patient, his hollow eyes tortured by doubt.

"Who is it?" he whispered. "Whom do you seek?"

"Yeah," Rudy said, confused. "Who do they have sealed up?"

The Bishop of Penambra raised an eyebrow, and wrinkles laddered all the way up his high, narrow forehead. "You have not guessed?"

The sensitive hands resting on Elder's wrist trembled. In a shaken voice, Wend murmured, "She told me that he was dead. I killed him. I..." He bowed his head, unable to go on.

"I sincerely doubt," Maia said, bending down to touch the priest's shoulder in a faint rustling of patched brocade, "that with your small skill you would be capable of concocting a poison strong enough to kill Thoth the Scribe. Nor do I believe that my lady Govannin would permit any wizard simply to die painlessly - It was painless, wasn't it?"

Wend nodded wretchedly.

"To die painlessly or quickly, if it were in her power to make it otherwise. So take courage, Brother-her spite may well have been her undoing in this." He straightened up and moved back toward the door as Wend returned shakily to his task. Only to Rudy did Maia turn a worried face, in the shadows that shrouded the doorway. "By the look of my lord Eldor," he said in a low voice, "it will take all Thoth's great skill to save him. I pray that he can be found."

But the night hours wore into morning, and Gil and her squad did not reappear. Rudy and Brother Wend did what they could, using Wend's stock of herbs and Ingold's medicines and working with their combined magic to hold soul and body together, but Rudy could feel Eldor's life slipping away.

His own mind and body were numb, and his hands fumbled at their tasks. He was barely cognizant of the passage of time or of his surroundings, scarcely aware of hunger or thirst. All he knew was the task before him and a weariness that became a dull torture. The golden flicker of the fire on the embroidered hangings around the bed began to swim before his tired eyes, and his occasional speech with Wend grew less and less connected. He wondered that it had been only yesterday morning that the messenger had ridden to the steps of the Keep- a little over twenty-four hours since the Army of Alketch had departed.

Alwir must have begun to plan it then , Rudy thought, and he had been mere bait, the ostensible trigger for the larger trap. With what feeling remained to him, he felt a dull anger at Alwir, lying stiff with cold and rigor mortis in puddles of frozen blood on the hill. He would have stamped me out like a cockroach, disgraced - maybe killed - his own sister, and slain Gil more or less in passing - all as a cover-up for the real thing .

And yet, beside the silent passing of the Dark Ones toward Gae, Alwir, Eldor, and even he had already begun to seem very small and insignificant. His suspicion had strengthened to virtual certainty; he knew in his heart what was awaiting the Dark there. And he knew what would have to be done.

He sank, exhausted, down on a bench and leaned his head against the mingled colors of the tapestry behind him. The bullion stitching of it scratched his cheek; distantly, dark against the shaded glow of the banked white lamps, he saw Brother Wend wiping his hands, his dark eyes weary and defeated. Eldor had ceased to toss and rave. Exhausted and broken from repeated purgings, he lay with his half-open eyes sunk into skull-like sockets, staring blindly at the ceiling above him. Rudy's glance crossed Wend's, and the little priest shook his head.

Rudy sighed, mumbled a curse, and tried to find the energy to stand. "Maybe if we..."

"No," Wend said. "I do not think there is anything we can do for him now." His head and face had been shaved anew for his return to grace, and the razor burns stood out red and ugly against his pallor.

"There's got to be," Rudy said doggedly. "Where the hell is Gil?"

"Perhaps she could not find the sealed door." Wend moved stiffly to a carved chair and slumped down on its yellow silk cushions. The coarse burlap of his sleeves had been rolled up over his elbows; he continued to wipe his hands, slowly and mechanically, as he spoke. "Perhaps Thoth is dead, as my lady said. The poison-I-I did not mean..."

"Hell, I know Govannin." Rudy sighed. "I'd hate like hell to try and stand against her will on something I was sure of, let alone something I wasn't." He tried to remember how long it had been since the arrest of the wizards, but the days slipped from his mind as the pestles and tubes and herbs had slithered from his nerveless fingers. He ran his hands through his long hair, as if trying to clear cobwebs from his brain. "There's got to be something..."

Wend shook his head. "We have done what we can," he said quietly. "Elder has been weakened by his wounds and by the long debilitation and undernourishment in the Nest."

"And it may be," a woman's soft voice added, making both men turn in surprise, "that he has no further desire to live."

Aide rose quietly from the corner where she had been sitting so silently that neither of the mages had remembered her presence in the room. She still wore the dark red velvet dress that she had worn when she had come to Rudy the night before. Within the frame of her dark hair, her face looked haggard. Rudy tried to recall what he had been saying to Wend at intervals during the last few hours. He knew he had described Alwir's death, and, although Alde had long since ceased to believe in her brother's love, she need not have heard of his death so callously. Her eyes and nose looked raw from weeping, but he could not remember having heard a sound.

As she came into the brighter light and sat on the edge of Eldor's bed, Rudy could see the glisten of two white threads among the unbound blackness of her hair. She took the King's good hand, his unburned one, in hers. When she spoke, her voice was low and tired. "They are much alike, you know-Gil and Eldor. Having lost everything, they are too stubborn to die. And they are both the kind of person who would rather die under torture than admit their true feelings or ask anyone for anything." She turned Eldor's hand over in hers, stroking the fine shape of the fingers, the split and bitten nails, and the scars left by the hard mastery of the sword. "I never knew what he did feel for me," she went on quietly. "Maybe it was that he didn't trust Alwir and feared I would be his pawn. Maybe he just did not trust himself."

Rudy sagged back against the embroidered hangings and looked up into her still, ravaged face. "Maybe he just didn't know how to show love. There are people like that, too. It's hard to tell the truth, even when you want to very badly."

The long white fingers clenched suddenly over Aide's. Looking down, she saw the gun-metal eyes blinking up at her, heavy and sardonic and half-asleep. "Aide?" the King whispered.

It was the first time that Rudy had heard Eldor address his wife by her name.

"I'm here," she said.

"Are you well?"

She touched the tops of his protruding knuckles with gentle fingertips. "Yes," she murmured. "Yes, I'm well."

"It is true, as they said?" he whispered. "Alwir is dead?"

"Yes," Alde replied softly. "The girl Gil-Shalos killed him in a duel."

There was silence, and then the faint, creaking breath of a laugh. A sliver of the old, amused malice gleamed in the sunken eyes. "He must have been surprised."

The corners of Aide's mouth tucked in, very slightly. "Perhaps," she said and transferred her light touch to his forehead. "No one else was. Rest yourself, my lord. Later..."

"Rest." The hideous features twitched in a grimace. "Rest indeed." His breath was coming in thick wheezes through half-uncovered teeth. "No later," he whispered, "no light. Only dreams. Tir?"