Barbara Hambly - 03 The Armies of Daylight

"And just what is it, Rudy, that you believe I have done?"

Rudy blinked at him, his face blank with surprise.

The wizard faltered unsteadily on his feet. Gil, who had stood in taut silence, stepped quickly to catch his arm. Their eyes met, and Rudy thought he saw a lightening, like a smile far back in the drugged blue depths, answering Gil's look of tormented doubt. Then Ingold sighed and turned to Rudy.

"You were very fond of your world, Rudy. But, given the infinite number of parallel universes, the Dark would hardly choose a place so-relatively-chilly and so extravagantly over-illuminated." His hand tightened suddenly on Gil's supporting shoulder.

"Come," he said quietly. "I am dying of cold and, at the moment, I doubt I have the strength even to call fire."

In the hollow below Trad's Hill, Rudy removed the spells of ward from their hidden camp and kindled a fire there. Gil brought out the walking staff that she had used on the journey from Renweth and returned it to Ingold as he sat beside the blaze.

"I saved it, along with your other things," she explained.

He smiled up at her as he took it. "You couldn't have known you would have the opportunity to return it to me," he said.

"No," she told him matter-of-factly. "I planned to bury you with it, after I killed you."

An impish lightness flickered for a moment in his eyes, and, rather to Rudy's surprise, he took her hand and lightly kissed her fingers. "That's my Gil."

Then Rudy realized what had been wrong. In all the battle and pursuit through the slimy, fogbound ruins of Gae, he had never seen in Ingold's eyes the inhuman emptiness that had characterized Lohiro's. Throughout that day and through the eerie horrors of the night, the wizard had been frightening, but he had never been other than Ingold.

"That's why they wanted you, wasn't it?" Rudy asked softly.

"Yes," the old man murmured and held out unsteady hands to the warmth of the blaze. "They-wanted to talk to me. I think they would have come and fetched me eventually, wherever I was."

Above the trampled crest of Trad's Hill and the broken skeleton of Gae, the sky was now stained with lavender, a soft dove color that infused the earth from horizon to horizon and lent an ashy pallor to the old man's white face.

"Did they take over your mind?" Rudy asked.

Ingold kept his eyes steadily on the fire. "In a manner of speaking," he replied. "They are not exactly one being, but they speak from mind to mind in a fashion that we would find-rather horrible. It was only when Lohiro, in an act of foolhardy desperation, gave his mind to the Dark that they realized communication with us was possible in any fashion at all." The lacerated flesh around his eyes puckered suddenly as he closed them, as if to shut out some hideous vision. "I fought them endlessly," he went on. "I don't know how long." A shiver racked his body, and he bowed his head, his forehead resting on suddenly clenched knuckles. "Of course it was stupid," he whispered. "They knew they had only to wait until I tired."

Gil's hand gently touched his bent shoulder, and gradually the shivering ceased.

At length he raised his head again. "The Dark were in desperate straits, you see. They are a farsighted race, with understanding of things whose mere existence we ourselves have barely guessed. You were only partially right, Gil, when you spoke of a-a weather cycle. The deep cold spell of three thousand years ago was only a small fluctuation in a much longer, deeper cycle. This one-the one that began this autumn, after what I suppose could only be called a warning flutter twenty years ago-will last uncountable years of time. The Dark Ones said that the ice in the north will spread until it covers much of the world. It may be possible for humankind to survive the cold, they said-but the herds of the Dark would not last another two years. The famine in the Nest had already reached proportions far more severe than ever in the past, and there was no hope of salvaging the herds in the deepest caverns and waiting for the cold to pass. In a very short time the Dark Ones would have cracked the last citadels of humankind, devoured its final representatives-and themselves perished."

"Could they have?" Rudy asked doubtfully. "They tried to break the Keep at the beginning of winter..."

"They could," Ingold said somberly. "Believe me, Rudy, they could. I know the Dark-now.

"They saw no alternative to the annihilation of both races until this autumn, when I crossed the Void to speak to you, Gil. Then they became aware of the Void. When I rescued Tir from the destruction of the Palace at Gae, one of them crossed it... And they have hunted for me ever since."

He folded his hands and sat gazing into the fire. Around them, the wet, slushy plain was emerging from obscurity, gray sheets of ice lying in all directions, pricked with black friezes of branches and sedge. The mournful cry of rooks grated faintly into the dawn air.

"They wanted me to find them a new world," the wizard went on softly, as if scarcely aware now of either his surroundings or his listeners. "A world such as this one was eons ago, when the Dark first built their eldritch cities in swamps whose very memory is no more than stratum of pebbles in the bed of a desert stream. A warm world, dark and marshy, where they could tend their herds, build new cities, and dream."

Against the paling sky, the broken walls of Gae were clearly visible, a black crenelation against the gray of filthy waters. It was a city wholly empty now, except for the rats that fed on jewel-circled bones. As if in a vision, Rudy saw again the mists rolling back from the ruins of Quo and heard the dim boom of the breakers at the foot of Forn's shattered Tower. Dull anger burned in his heart for the greedy callousness that had crushed and wasted this world and then passed on, unscathed and unavenged.

"So they made you their slave," Rudy said quietly, "and left the rest of us to pick up the pieces."

Ingold glanced sideways at him. Life seemed to be stirring back into the wizard. The sunken, corpselike weariness was passing from his face. "Oh, I was never their slave," he murmured. "Merely their-collaborator."

Rudy looked up sharply.

"The Dark Ones never took over my mind," Ingold explained gently. "They couldn't do that-not if they wanted me to retain the knowledge of how the Void operates. If I were their slave, do you think I would have tried to get you out of town before you were caught up in the spells of the Dark and drawn along with the herds through the Void?"

In a dull voice, Rudy said, "Then after all they did- destroyed your world and murdered your friends-you helped them willingly."

Annoyance sparkled deep in the azure eyes. "Hardly willingly."

When Rudy still sat in smoldering silence at the unfairness of it, Ingold asked, "If you are in a fight and your opponent knocks you down and then walks away, do you call him back to hit you again, in the hope of defeating him?"

"Well- " Rudy said grudgingly. "Some people do."

"And that, Rudy, is how some people get noses like yours," the wizard retorted. "As for the rest-it is finished."

"You know they rose in the Alketch?" Gil said, after a moment's silence.

"I was informed when it happened."

"Did you know Eldor is dead?"

The wizard sighed, and it seemed that his broad shoulders sagged a little, as if at bad news long expected. He shook his head wearily. "But it hardly surprises me. He did not want to live very badly. As you yourselves have no doubt found, the world into which we have all been thrust is a poor trade for the security and comfort of civilized life." He looked up from the fire, the cool pallor of dawn now clearly visible about them. "And that, my children," he said, "brings us all to the time that I have come to dread. We are where we should have been many months ago, had not politics and the chances of fortune intervened."