Barbara Hambly - 03 The Armies of Daylight

Vines seemed to knot themselves around his ankles, and he tripped, barely keeping hold of his staff as he fell. He heard Ingold retreating through the tangles of foliage and scrambled hastily to his feet, wading after the wizard through the oddly persistent creepers. Darkness hid Ingold from him, but he heard the old man pause.

A paving- stone tilted under Rudy's feet, pitching him into the rubble that choked an abandoned gateway. Hands lacerated, heedless of anything but his frantic need to finish his quarry before darkness permitted Ingold to take on the form of the Dark Ones, Rudy plunged after the wizard, down a long tunnel of black fog and shadows.

In the open ground outside the city walls, the darkness seemed less pressing. The leaden mists cleared a bit, showing Rudy the wizard moving off downhill, his stain-mottled mantle blending into the colors of the fog. Rudy threw all of his strength into a clearing-spell, a wind to scatter the mists, and felt on his mind the cold grip of counterspells that strangled his power into silence. The mists wrapped tighter around him, a dun burial shroud, and he broke into a run, feverish with terror at what should happen if he met Ingold and what should happen if he did not.

He found himself stumbling blindly through a gray, steaming world, his way blocked at every turn. The stunted corpses of dead trees loomed before him in the darkness. Roots snagged at his feet, pitching him headlong into slimy patches of mud and scum. The skirts of his sodden coat slapped wetly at his thighs, his streaming boots felt weighted down with mud and water, and his body was chilled and aching to the bone. Lost, half-frozen, and gummed to the eyebrows with mud, he stumbled on alone through a nightmare of darkness and fog.

Then, wholly unexpectedly, he burst into a clearing in the mists. He staggered to a halt, the flickering light of his staff casting a wan illumination over the scene before him.

He saw Ingold and Gil standing, facing each other, close enough that the magelight mingled their two shadows into a single pool of indigo blue on the rock-hard ground. The sword Ingold held gleamed in his hand as he turned it and offered its hilt to Gil.

She took it and tested its familiar weight. Her long hair was half-unraveled around her face, and her eyes were gentler than he had ever seen them; for the first time since Rudy had known her, he could understand how a man could find this scholarly, violent, and entirely contradictory woman fascinating.

Ingold stood before her for a long moment, his hands empty at his sides. Framed by the long, dirty mane of white hair, his face was haggard, the bones seeming to stand out through colorless flesh, but for an instant Rudy found it impossible to believe that this man was anything other than the charming old wizard that he and Gil loved in their separate ways.

He wondered suddenly if that was why the Dark Ones had wanted Ingold-for his charm, which made it impossible for anyone to close the gates against him for long.

Numbly, Rudy made a move toward them. Ingold raised his head, and for an instant his eyes met Rudy's-exhausted, driven, and yet curiously serene. Mists blew between them, momentarily obscuring Rudy's vision; when they cleared, only Gil stood on the barren hillslope, her sword in her hand. Not so much as a track marked the rocky ground.

She sheathed the blade as Rudy stumbled toward her. In their search of the Palace, Gil had long ago recovered her cloak and surcoat, but they were damp from the mists, and she shivered.

Quietly Rudy asked her, "Why, Gil?"

"He might have needed it."

Rudy wiped his numbed, stiffening fingers on his soggy coat. "You're crazy, do you know that?"

"Probably," she agreed.

He looked around him at the shifting wraiths of fog that hemmed them in. "So what do we do now?"

Gil shrugged. "Wait. If he survives whatever danger he's going to meet tonight, I think he'll be back for us."

"Oh, come on!" Rudy exploded, the calmness of her voice putting the finishing touches on the day's cold, terror, and exhaustion. "You don't still think he's out to have his final confrontation with the Dark tonight, do you? More likely he's hotfooting it back to the Keep..."

She folded her arms, huddling the cloak tighter about her thin shoulders. "If that's so, why didn't he kill me?"

Exasperated, he retorted, "Probably because you were more use to him alive!"

"Then why didn't he kill you?" she pointed out hotly. "And don't tell me he couldn't have carved you into hors d'oeuvres half a dozen times in the course of the day. Why did he let us track him-"

"That's it!" Rudy said suddenly. "Why did he let us track him, Gil? Ordinarily, nobody could track Ingold across a black floor sprinkled with flour. But if he was trying to lead us out of the city, why didn't he lead us the shortest way from the Palace, to the land gate opposite Trad's Hill? Why did he take all day and work us out to wherever we are now?"

Gil frowned. "Did he want to keep us away from that end of town?"

"Or from Trad's Hill? It's the biggest landmark outside the city."

She looked quickly around her. Rudy had begun to sense it, too-an uneasiness in the air, an electric dread, as if earth and fog had begun to stir with the power and malice of the Dark. For no reason, he looked behind him, half-expecting to see a shadow forming there, and felt his heartbeat quicken.

Gil whispered, "You think Trad's Hill is where he's going to meet the Dark?"

"Yeah," Rudy murmured. "But the question is: Why?"

It was full night when they reached Trad's Hill, black and icy, thunderous with the overwhelming sense of the presence of the Dark. Rudy had quenched the light that came from the end of his staff and, in the black overcast, he led Gil by the hand, picking his way cautiously over the rough ground of the plain. In spite of the cloaking-spell that covered them both, he felt smothered by the dread of the Dark. They were too close to Gae, he thought-they had followed its broken walls, barely visible in the fog-too close to the horrors that he sensed were welling from every cellar, every vault, and every passage of the endless, twisting mazes of the half-burned Nest. He felt almost stifled with fear and was shivering in the deep cold of the night.

Sudden and chill, wind whipped them, chasing the last wet rags of fog from the landscape. It flung his long, damp hair around his face and stung his abraded hands. He felt Gil's fingers tighten over his arm. The smoky veils cleared, revealing the long, irregular darkness of the walls of Gae and the paler shape of the land beneath the eerie glow of the stars.

Then he heard Gil gasp. Looking back at Gae, he saw the Dark. They rose above the broken roofline like the funnel of a monster tornado, a swirling column that spread to blacken the air. Their faint, chittering hum buzzed in his brain. The illusion they spread engulfed the cloud-splotched sky, drowning the world in stygian, all-encompassing darkness; the wind from them rushed like a hurricane over the sightless earth.

In the darkness, light flared at the top of Trad's Hill, white and strange, its reflection picking out the lines of Gil's temple and jaw, giving Rudy a brief, terrible impression of a skull within the whirling mane of her ragged hair. The mounting clouds of darkness loomed higher, blotting the invisible towers of Gae; the little spark of whiteness burst again, and this time Rudy could see, outlined in its thin glow, the black form of a man at the top of the hill, with the billowing rags of his torn mantle falling back to bare the sword-scarred, muscular arms.

Light sprang from Ingold's upraised hands, its reflection flickering in the blowing halo of weedy white hair and on the claw-cut, upturned face. The white spark broadened in the heavy air and lengthened to a twisting thread of fire that jerked and wavered in the sudden winds that swept down over the hill in a bitter, stinging wave of the smell of acid and stone. As the Dark poured down toward him, the light expanded to stretch from the hilltop to the louring blackness of the overcast sky.