Barbara Hambly - 03 The Armies of Daylight

Then Gil screamed, " No !" Turning, Rudy saw in those shock-stricken gray eyes a blinding understanding, horror, realization, grief-and the knowledge that she had, after all, been betrayed.

Torrents of cold brightness rained over them as the streak of light opened into a fluttering gap. It was as if earth and sky had been painted upon a curtain, and that curtain was pulled aside, drawing everything with it. Beyond lay only the misty whiteness, the colorless fires, and the vivid darkness of the Void.

Toward that enormous gap, all the assembled Dark Ones of the world swarmed in a howling river of doom.

California , Rudy thought numbly. All the world that gave me birth. That was their target all along .

He did not know why he had not seen it earlier. They had all known that Ingold was the sole guardian of the secrets of the Void. The Dark Ones must have known it as well. It was to prevent just this thing from happening that he and Gil had voluntarily submitted to exile all those long and frozen months.

And for nothing , he thought. For nothing .

Though there was no possible way Gil could have stopped the wizard or closed the blazing wound in the fabric of the Cosmos, she flung herself up the hill at him, the glaring light of the Void bursting like nova fire from the edge of her drawn sword. Ingold swung around, a black, swirling shape framed in that blinding aura, and raised his hand; Gil fell to her knees in the muddy snow. He towered on the hillside over her, blazing with an Archmage's terrible power. Still near the foot of the hill, Gil bowed her head to her hands, and her single, hoarse cry of bitter despair splintered the spinning darkness of the night. Then she was silent.

Above her, the Dark ones poured around Ingold, through the gap in the Void, and to the world beyond.

They seemed to have no fear of the weird brilliance that streamed from the Void. Indeed, Rudy was aware that, while it had the appearance of light, it was not truly light as it was known in this world. Its cold brightness stabbed through those sleek and dripping bodies and showed that the Dark Ones were not dark at all, but as transparent as spring water, beings of crystal protoplasm threaded with clear ruby veins. From the millrace of shadows, a single creature detached itself, shrinking in size as it drifted down, to alight like some grotesquely beautiful glass insect upon Ingold's shoulder. Others followed it, pulsing, glittering, and sinking vicious, delicate claws into the folds of his mantle and his sleeve, their long, whiplike tails hanging like sparkling ropes down his back. The chill nonlight threw into stark prominence every line graven into his ravaged face, every protruding muscle and bone, and the tortured exhaustion of his haunted eyes.

It had been known from the beginning that Ingold was the strongest and the cleverest of them all, Rudy thought, his tired mind stumbling over the realization of what he witnessed. Gil's love for the wizard was his ideal cover. Dead, damned, or enslaved by the Dark, he knew she would never have harmed him. Loyal, brave, and single-minded, she had not truly conceived in her heart of hearts that he would ever be defeated.

And the knowledge that she could have killed him and saved our world from the destruction that has encompassed this one is the price she has to pay for that blind trust.

Like a shimmering at the edges of his mind, Rudy heard a kind of singing, a music made without sound by creatures without ears The spell of it drew at him and cast over him a confused and frightened longing. He looked quickly away from the blinding brightness of the gate to which he had felt a sudden, irrational urge to run. As he turned his head, he saw movement in the darkness near Gae, a shuffling, sluggish stream of almost-humanity, following the music with wide, unblinking eyes toward the Void.

They passed within a few feet of him, close enough for him to see the round faces, the chinless, slobbering mouths, and the white arms that clutched heavy burdens of moss. Of course , he thought. The Dark would take what was left of their herds, to pasture on the ruins of their new world, in the windowless high- rises of New York and in the sewers of Paris . There were thousands of them, far more than Rudy would have imagined could have survived in the cold under the cellars of Gae. The fetid, flabby smell of them filled his nostrils as they ambled by, their squeaking chatter grating on his nerves. They moved around Gil, jostling and shouldering one another, the light glaring out over them, unbearably bright.

Standing among his glittering masters, Ingold gazed at them expressionlessly as they were swallowed in the cold glory of the light.

Through the endless horror of that freezing night, Rudy watched the setting forth of the invasion of the Dark. Their limitless numbers and the vast size of the herds lost all meaning in his mind; he had not thought that there could be so many of them on the face of this earth.

He had learned too much about politics, power plays, and the confusion of crisis to believe that his own world would be able to take the necessary kind of concerted action against them quickly enough to stem the first tide of destruction. If there was some kind of general crisis in the U.S., he thought, its enemies would take the opportunity to bomb the daylights out of it first and ask questions later .

I never intended to go back - but I never believed that it would be destroyed behind me .

In numbed grief, Rudy let his eyes return to the tattered, silent form of the gatekeeper of the Cosmos, standing alone at the conjunction of worlds, rimmed in searing light.

The clouds overhead broke shortly before dawn. The dazzling radiance of the Void narrowed to a slit as the fabric of the torn universe was allowed to heal itself, and the slit shortened to a single flame and vanished like the paling stars in the blue darkness.

The Dark and their herds were gone; the road by which they had traveled had vanished, too. At the end of the trampled track of churned slush, there was no mark; the huge spoor ended abruptly, as if it had been chopped short with a pair of scissors. Beyond it, pale and untouched, frost gleamed on the bare ground.

Ingold stood like a marking stone on that vanished road, his head bowed, alone beneath the vast, cold darkness of the empty sky.

The Dark had left him, Rudy thought, to account for what he had done.

Faint wind stirred through the dawn stillness, and the old man raised his head. Shining thinly in the predawn light, a sword stood, stabbed upright in the earth, just beyond where the gate had been. Ingold walked toward it, the hem of his robe sweeping damply across the glittering ground, and pulled it free. Rudy saw that it was the wizard's own sword, the one that had fallen from his hands on the dark stair beneath the Palace. The Dark had returned it to him.

The silence that filled the earth seemed to stretch unbroken to the fading hems of the sky. Ingold turned the blade in his hands, looking unearthly in the underwater blueness of dawn, as if he had absorbed some of the Void's blinding light. As Gil and Rudy came slowly up the hill toward him, he turned. The sword glinted as he sheathed it in the empty scabbard he wore at his belt.

He faced them empty-handed.

"If it would do any good." Rudy said quietly, "I would kill you for what you have done."

The old man regarded him in silence for a time, swaying slightly on his feet with weariness. In their bruised and darkened hollows, his eyes were heavy with fatigue, yet still serene. Rudy had not seen such peace in them since he and Ingold had set forth to seek the Archmage at Quo.