Barbara Hambly - 03 The Armies of Daylight

In a subvocal whisper, he breathed, "Ghouls."

Gil was kneeling beside him; he felt her hair brush his arm us she nodded. Even to one not mageborn, there could be little question when a shifting of the air brought their fetid carrion stench up to the camp. "But why are they leaving Gae?"

As softly as she had whispered, one of the ghouls halted, raising his head, weasel eyes glinting in the gloom. Their utter filth and the greed in those slobbery faces angered Rudy suddenly, and he drew to him a breath of illusion, a suggestion of directionless wind in the fog and the metallic, acid stink of the Dark Ones.

At this, the ghouls flinched and fled down the road, squeaking like spooked rabbits in the darkness. It seemed for a time that their reek lingered in the vaporous air.

"I don't know why they left Gae," Rudy whispered, settling down into his blankets again. "But I can guess."

In the two days that followed, his guess grew to certainty as every step brought them nearer to the haunted city of Gae. The louring consciousness of the Dark Ones was everywhere, like a sickness of the air that had spread from the city to engulf the gray desolation of the country around. Rudy sensed their presence, far off but in unthinkable numbers, and the dread of them seemed to stalk the sodden road at his elbow, even in what passed for daylight under the thick boil of wet, low-hanging clouds.

When they reached Trad's Hill before the gates of Gae in the vile darkness of early evening, Rudy looked down from its bare crown to the city. Horror congealed in his heart, not at anything he saw, but at things felt and half-seen. The presence of the Dark was like a marsh mist that hung over the whole town, and the shifting ripple of their illusion made the broken towers and groping, matted trees quiver in his wizard's sight, like a heat dance. Evil, violence, terror, and the lust to suck dry the squeaking rind of the human body rose to his senses like a reek from that dark cloud that seemed to hang above the slimy streets. Peering through the darkness, he sensed the maggotlike movement that teemed in the city's cellars, even before he noticed the flickering white shapes that wandered in the murk, picking vainly for forage among the frozen weeds-the herds, of course. He and Gil had found their stripped bones or frozen bodies everywhere in the surrounding countryside. But he barely noticed them. Over all the city seemed to lie a hideous doom, a waiting darkness, a terrible vortex of unspeakable malice and power.

At the center of that vortex, he knew, was the man whom he and Gil must kill.

Even the next morning's daylight could not dispel the murky horror that filled and covered Gae like a sour, dismal swamp. The sunlight strove weakly against the whitish overcast, brighter than it had been in days. But in Gae it was filtered, as if through a mist, into a dozen hideous perversions of unknown color. By that ghastly light, the city seemed foully unreal, its walls and towers sinking to the earth under the weight of unnaturally riotous vines, as if the stone itself were softened or had the life sapped from it by those obscene roots. The snow that lay in the streets appeared to have melted, though it was piled thick outside the limits of the city, and it was pulped by the churning of thousands of crooked little feet.

The bones of the dead herds were everywhere, fresh or in varying stages of depredation by the petty carnivores of the deserted town-wild dogs, cats, and bold, red-eyed rats. The cold killed the smell of them, but Rudy felt queasy with a nausea compounded from stench and revulsion.

Almost as bad as the dead and the hideous feeling of being watched was Gil's remote calm. She waded through the putrid muck of Gae's overgrown streets with scarcely a batted eyelash, and the queer, leaden light of the vaporous sky lent a terrible expression to her frost-hard features.

After her single outburst of tears on the road, she had not mentioned Ingold or the upcoming battle to Rudy again. As he watched her in the Palace courtyard, methodically stripping off her cloak and surcoat and hanging them on the limbs of a burned tree, it came to him why this was.

Grief or pity would have blinded her, weakened her. She had made up her mind what she must do, Rudy realized; she had sealed whatever chinks in her defenses she could. There would be time enough to think after Ingold was finally dead.

The two remaining palace buttresses, stabbing like skeleton fingers into the white air, cast watery shadows over Gil's face as she removed her scabbard from her sword belt and turned to Rudy with the sheathed weapon in her hand. Wind flattened her shirt sleeves over thin, hard-muscled arms. "You ready?"

Rudy nodded and tightened his grip on his staff. He'd used it to help himself over the rough ground, all the way from Renweth, but its pronged, razor-edged crescent could serve as a weapon as well. Ironically, it was the very weapon Lohiro had used against Ingold at Quo.

Which didn't do him a helluva lot of good , Rudy thought dryly as he followed Gil over the blackened, sunken remains of the steps and down into the vaults.

The explosions that had torn the roofs from the underground tunnels and trapped the invaders had shaken the Palace above. Through riven roofs and crumbling beams, wan sunlight lay in bars and streaks of fallow gold. The upper level of the vaults was a smeared ocean of ash and muck, cracked stone and fallen groinings wallowing up through the mess like half-sunk hulks. The lower level, though foul with the stink of the herds, was empty, except for places where the clinging, ubiquitous vines had taken root in some fallen heap of stone and dirt overhead.

Through the gaping vaults, wan light checkered the floor, showing the crisscrossed tracks of the herds, like a spattering of clay on the black smoothness of the unbroken pavement. In spite of the miasmal light that slatted across Gil's figure from above and in spite of the cloaking-spell that lay around them both, Rudy found himself looking uneasily over his shoulders, waiting for the Dark Ones to attack.

Walking ahead of him, Gil seemed to fear nothing, feel nothing. Rudy could see that the hand that gripped the worn leather of the scabbard she carried was relaxed; when he glanced sideways at her, her face, surrounded by the ragged wisps that escaped from the thick braid of her hair, was calm. The shiny places in the hilt of her dagger winked in the occasional glints of sunlight. She never looked back at him, never hesitated, but wove her way through the broken forest of the limitless pillars and arches as if her feet had known that route from the beginning of time.

They emerged into a sort of clearing in the vaults, and Rudy recognized the red porphyry stair before them, down which the army had descended to the black stair of the Dark. Mud, dead leaves, ashes, and bones lay all about the place now. From a broken ceiling two levels above, a great aisle of straw-colored sunlight streamed, like an imperial carpet, to within ten feet of the utter blackness of the gaping pit.

Between darkness and light, crumpled on the pavement at the very lip of the abyss, was the body of a man, face down. The hooded brown mantle that covered him was streaked and bleached with the slime of the Dark, frayed by battle, and stained with smoke and blood. One reaching hand lay in the bar of light-a scarred, blunt-fingered warrior's hand.

He was unconscious and unarmed.

Gil sighed. "Stay here," she ordered and pulled her dagger from her belt.

There was something horrifying in her businesslike calm as she crossed that bright bar of light. It's better this way , Rudy thought hopelessly. If he had a chance to fight us, it would be all over, not only for us but for everyone in the Keep. It's our only hope of taking out the most powerful mage in the West of the World, whose mind is the mind of the Dark .