Barbara Hambly - 03 The Armies of Daylight

But tears blurred his eyes and ran, stinging, down his face.

Gil knelt beside the body, drew her sword, and set it aside, the hilt ready to her hand just in case. She shifted her grip on the hilt of the dagger, reached out to touch Ingold's shoulder, and carefully turned him over. Rudy saw the old man's face outlined against the light as the hood fell back from it, scored and shadowed with the tracks of sixty-odd very rough years. The light glinted in the rough, dirty silk of the white hair. He looked at peace, sleeping as Rudy could scarcely remember having ever seen him sleep-the profound sleep of exhaustion.

Do it , Rudy thought, fixing his gaze on the shining blade of the dagger. If he is what Lohiro was, a prisoner in his own body, let him go before he wakes to become what he fought so hard to escape !

But Gil made no move. She studied the sleeping wizard's features for an endless time, and Rudy saw the bright glitter of tears on her inhumanly still face. Light skated along the edge of the knife with the sudden trembling of her hand.

Do it , he cried silently, and for God's sake, have done !

At that moment the old man's eyes opened and looked up into Gil's.

The razor edge that lay against his throat did not move. He looked worse than he had in the desert, the horrible pallor of his face blotched and discolored with bruises and the small, vicious wounds of the Dark Ones' claws beneath a layer of bloody grime. He made no move; he only sighed, closed his eyes again, and said something softly to Gil, something that Rudy did not hear.

A stray beam of sunlight sprang from the blade as Gil's body was suddenly shaken with a convulsive shudder. With an abrupt movement, she hurled the dagger against the red stone of the steps that led up toward the light, her shoulders bowing as sob after sob racked her body. To Rudy's utter horror, he saw Ingold half-rise and reach out to her and Gil crumple forward into the wizard's arms.

With an inarticulate cry he sprang forward, the pronged gold of his staff flashing in the wan sunlight as he drove its points toward Ingold's unprotected back. Gil cried out a warning, and the old man twisted away from the blow, thrusting her out of danger as he staggered to his feet and raised his arm to shield his eyes from the unaccustomed glare of the light. Gritting his teeth, his own eyes half-blind with tears, Rudy drove the razor edge of the crescent on the end of his staff toward Ingold's throat.

Rudy had not reckoned on Gil. A pair of bony knees scissored his legs viciously from under him and he fell, the staff clattering on the stone floor. He groped for it, and Gil kicked it out of his hands. He looked up in time to see her scramble to her feet, snatch up her drawn sword from the floor, and fling it, glittering, into Ingold's waiting hands.

Sobbing, Rudy grabbed for the staff again, and this time Gil stepped back, tears pouring uncontrollably down her face. With a cry of frustrated fury, he took a step toward her, his own mind unclear as to what he intended.

Ingold rasped, "Touch her, and I swear you will never leave this city alive."

Rudy stopped, blinking, wondering for a dizzied second whether Ingold had placed some kind of spell of gnodyrr upon Gil with those few words he had murmured to her when he lay with her dagger at his throat. The old man's ragged breath was the only sound to pierce the uncanny stillness of the cellar. His blue eyes, pale and bright within the rings of cut and blackened flesh, went warily from one to the other.

Then in a strained voice, Ingold said, "Neither of you should be in this city. Get out of here. Get as far away as you can."

"I won't leave you," Gil said quietly.

He rounded on her, his eyes widening with sudden and blazing fear. "You'll do as I say! Get out! Get out now!"

"The hell we will!" Rudy yelled, and Ingold swung back toward him, his borrowed sword flashing in the pale light. "You've been a prisoner of the Dark..."

The wizard moved back a step into the bar of sunlight, his long, matted hair glistening like seaweed. The light around him dimmed. Looking up, Rudy could see, through the crazy tangle of broken timbers and charred stone, the soft coils of white fog beginning to blur the day.

"And what?" Ingold asked softly.

Rudy cried out, "Why did they want you?"

"You'll learn that in time." The wizard retreated another step, the blade poised before him, orienting himself, his red-rimmed eyes growing used to daylight again. Rudy took a hopeless step toward him, and Ingold shifted a little, readying himself for an attack, his body moving with the old, deadly lightness.

Then Gil cried, " Rudy !" Her voice was sharp with terror. He whipped around and saw her blink in surprise, like someone just waked from a trance...

... and turning back, he saw that Ingold was gone.

Cursing, he plunged up the red stone steps toward the waning daylight. Gil hurried at his heels, stammering, "I'm-I'm sorry. I don't know why I yelled..."

"You yelled because he wanted you to!" Rudy stormed at her, his voice rough with anger that was three parts fear. He stopped and caught her arms, facing her in the mottled shadows of a broken doorway among leaf drifts and rotted bones. "Christ, Gil, why did you stop me?" he whispered. "I understand how you couldn't do it, but-"

"No," she interrupted quietly. Her eyes were swollen but perfectly calm. "If he had been possessed by the mind of the Dark, I would have cut his throat. But he wasn't."

"Fantastic!" Rudy sighed in disgust. "That's all I need to-"

"I don't know what's going on," she continued, unruffled, "but his mind is his own. I know it."

"How the hell would you know it?" Rudy yelled passionately. "He's had you wrapped around his finger from day bloody one! The Dark have had him. He's been their prisoner. There's no way they would have let him go-not after they hunted him from one end of the continent to the other!"

"I know it because I know him!" she lashed back at Rudy, jerking her arms free of his grip and striding on ahead of him up the stairs. Above their heads, the broken vaults of the Palace showed the sky a chill and smoky white, and Rudy could see that Gil was shivering with the cold seeping through her frayed homespun shirt.

He stormed after her. "And just where the hell do you think you're going?"

"I'm going to find him, you jackass!" she flung back over her shoulder. She slipped through a half-fallen arch, her boots slurring thickly in the knotted mats of half-burned creepers that swamped the halls. "He wants us out of town because he's in some kind of danger himself."

"He wants us out of town so we won't stop him from heading back to the Keep and opening the gates some dark night!" Rudy's foot snagged on a coil of vine, and he fell sprawling. Cursing, he scrambled to his feet again. "It's up to us-"

Gil whirled so suddenly he all but impaled himself on the dagger that appeared like a splinter of ice in her hand. "You harm a hair of his head, punk..."

Cold stirrings of wind blew a thin mist over them and muttered in the blackened tangles of half-dead vegetation. The air felt suddenly weighted with the presence of the Dark. Even in the daylight, both of them looked around, as if expecting to see blackness stealing from the murky shadows of the fallen Palace. It occurred to Rudy how very alone they were.

Through dry lips, he managed to say, "We can't split up, Gil. We've got to stay together."

Slowly, she lowered the knife. "All right," she said.

It was on his lips to say, "If we meet him, don't kill me from behind," but something in those gray, cool eyes forbade it. He remembered that she had given

Ingold her sword.

Though it was almost noon, the light was graying. Fog was rising from the scummed marshes of the drowned lower town, spreading clammy, ubiquitous tendrils throughout the dripping streets. Gil and Rudy moved cautiously through the broken, silent Palace, past empty chambers teeming with eruptions of mosses or slithering with vines, and over crazy, tilting pavements where the rotting tapestries whispered with a horrible suggestion of rodent life. Skulls grinned at them from under chairs, veiled in the white stirring of ground fog. Through the broken barrel vaults of one chamber, gray mists leaked like some kind of heavy gas, to flow like water around their feet.