Darwath 3 - The Armies Of Daylight (27 page)

“You were down there, Eldor. You know what you're leading these people into. Alwir thinks the Nest is something like a slightly larger version of his own wine cellars, but you know how much hope we have of…”

“Do you think I fool myself about it?” Rudy could almost see the taller man rounding on Ingold from the shadows. “After lying in the muck and eating wet moss and raw fish and fearing every second for my life, don't you think I know just how hopeless it is?” There was something akin to satisfaction in the voice—a pleasure in the justification of despair. “You forget, Ingold, that I remember. I remember—everything.”

“I had four long months to think, in the dark of the Nest; and, as they tell me is the case of—my sweet wife, I had new sights to stir old memories. Dare of Renweth did lead a force down the stairways—twenty thousand men. The men of the Times Before were not more wise or foolish than they are now, and they could foresee what we have all foreseen—that their empires would not last five years. They had their flame thrower corps—oh, yes!—and other things besides. They had their wizards to cast light about them, for all the good it ever did. I know what happened to them down in the Nests. In the darkness I remembered it. When I returned to Dare's Keep, I could have laughed aloud to see how proudly our Alwir strutted his feathers like a dunghill cock. Dare's army was three times the size of this one. Do you know how many of them survived?”

For a long moment there was nothing, only that blazing, shocked, terrible silence. Lying in the darkness, Rudy knew that Ingold stared into the face of the man who had once been his friend and saw there only a stranger's hate.

When the wizard spoke, his voice was a whisper. “Why?”

The sound of pacing resumed, along with the click of scabbard buckles and the slurring whine of a cloak. “I remembered other things down there, Ingold. The Dark took none of it from me, though I prayed they would. I never forgot that I was High King of Darwath.” As that harsh voice rose and fell, the long, light tread of the pacing increased, the shadow under the partition whirling and moving, as if with the unseen motion of an arm.

“I remembered how I used to sit up nights sweating out a judgment over which nobleman had what rights over the souls of his people,” Eldor went on, in that low, harsh, terrible voice. “I remember endless councils and dickerings with the Church, with the Empire, with the merchants— going without sleep over the Raiders in the plains and the Alketch pirates in the Round
Sea. And for what? So that I could end up squatting on my hunker-bones, chewing roots in the dark, with all the Church and Raiders and merchants scattered like the fragments of some meaningless dream. What was the use of it? Why had I bothered to sweat and worry at all? If I'd lived like my father and wenched and drunk and taken all the sweet pleasures of life, I would have ended up in exactly the same position. I had been King, and for what?”

“So what do you want?” Ingold demanded, his voice suddenly very angry. “Do you want to go out in a blaze of honored glory so that people can make songs about how great the last King of Darwath was? Do you want to die and take thousands of your followers with you, to make your death look a little more like heroism and a little less like suicide? Are you choosing to leave your people leaderless and defenseless, because you would rather die with an army at your back than demean yourself to look after a few thousand peasants huddled in a stone blockhouse who lock themselves in every night out of sheer terror of the Dark?”

“Yes.” The word came soft, ugly, as if its speaker stood inches from his listener, towering over him like a lightning-blasted pine. “Yes, that's exactly what I want.”

“Then you're a coward.”

There was the ringing slap of a blow, backhand and then forehand, and the slight scrape of some piece of furniture as Ingold caught his balance. Then there was only the fast, shaky breathing of a younger man's trembling rage.

“Do you feel better for that?” Ingold asked quietly.

“We're lost, Ingold,” the King whispered. “And I know it—in some sense I have always known. There is nothing left, only fear and darkness. Every person who follows me knows it, too. Each has lived in the world before the Dark; and the comparison is not a nice one. Death in battle is not pleasant, but it has the virtue of being quick, and I know, in the marrow of my bones I know, that slavery to the Dark Ones, in fact or by fear, is infinitely worse. Why would any have followed me on this fool's errand if they did not all, in some sense, seek death?”

“They follow you because they have always followed you, Eldor—because they love you.”.

“It's their misfortune, then,” the King said, in that voice of soft hate. “Let them desert, if it suits them. I will die alone, if I must.”

In the long silence after these words, Rudy could feel the strain of will against will, like a terrible tension in the air. There were no sounds from beyond the partition but the thick draw of breath and the rising cry of the gale winds surrounding the camp. In his blankets, Rudy shivered, feeling that hideous striving as if it were a vibration, sensed through the skin. As if with physical effort, Ingold was forcing the King to see what it was that he was doing to the last of his people; and the terrible thing was that Eldor saw it clearly and did not care.

When Eldor spoke again, his voice was quieter, but it tasted of poison more bitter than the acid of the Dark.

“You were my tutor,” he said slowly, “and I followed you and adored you and trusted you, even when my father had you driven from the city like a criminal. Had you called me, I would have gone with you, forsaking everything I knew. I loved you that much. You made me what I was, Ingold; you made me love justice and law and you made me know my duty to my kingdom. You made me everything my father was not, and my love of you and hatred of him shaped my every action. There was a time when I would have died for you, Ingold, do you know that? I trusted you that much.”

Then there was another long and terrible silence, with no sound but the sobbing of the wind. The harsh voice spoke again, jagged and bitter, like a broken thing. “You knew about them,” he rasped. “You knew about them from the first. He is your disciple.”

In the even longer silence that followed, Rudy knew that the wizard could not meet his accuser's eyes. When Ingold spoke, his words were almost inaudible. “Not from the first. It was done before I learned of it.”

“But you never spoke.”

“What would I have said? You were dead, Eldor, and she was alone and very frightened. She needs love, and at that point even the illusion of love would have served. He was good to her. I feared for them, yes. But I have never commanded anyone as to what they could and could not do.”

“Then don't command me now!” Eldor shouted furiously. “You were swift enough to command Alwir to let her and her lover be!”

In the bitter pause that followed, a thousand other things could have been said—and possibly were understood.

“After tomorrow he may have her, for all of me, if he survives. I shall see you at dawn.”

Footsteps retreated suddenly; there was the scrape of icy ground, the swift, muffled whisper of robes, and Rudy was reminded of how quickly Ingold could move. Then icy, terrible silence was broken by Eldor's cold, grating voice. “Let me go.”

“For God's sake, Eldor—” Ingold pleaded, and was cut off by a harsh bark of laughter.

“God!” the King choked. “God! Do you know how many times, my dearest, oldest, most loyal friend, I called upon God, squatting in the moss in the darkness? How I pleaded and prayed for a deliverer?”

“And you were, in fact, delivered,” the wizard returned quietly.

“By whom and to what? By the man who had been tumbling my wife within two weeks of my reported death? I suppose you could call it just payment, if you had a sense of humor.”

“Maybe. But no one could call it sufficient reason to lead loyal men and women deliberately to their death, when you know the nature of the danger that will destroy them.”

“No?” There was a sudden crack to that voice, a faint sliding up the scale onto the edge of shrillness, that brought sweat to Rudy's face. “But life is very unjust, is it not, Ingold Inglorion?”

Cold and the wail of the wind streamed briefly into the tent in the wake of the King's going. A moment later Rudy heard those quick, striding steps retreating in the direction of the royal shelter. He lay awake waiting for Ingold to come in to sleep, frightened of tomorrow and frightened of that cracked, mad note in Eldor's voice; but when he drifted into sleep a few hours before dawn, he had still heard no sign of movement in the room beyond.

The armies of humankind entered Gae at first light.

Though the icy mists thinned away before them, revealing broken walls and flooded pavements, the ruined town still lay in the grip of that brooding desolation; there was not a man or woman of the ranks who would dare to speak above a whisper. The echoes of voices rang too hollowly in those dripping streets. Those who had known Gae in its prime or those who had spoken loudest of reoccupying the town, once the Dark had been driven forth, spoke not at all.

Among them Rudy trudged, sick with apprehension and terror, close enough to Eldor's nervous white mare to see the thin, unpleasant smile that curved the King's harsh lips as he looked around him at what had been the most beautiful city in the West of the World.

Rudy found himself thinking how easy it would be simply to throw a cloaking-spell over himself, find a comfortable seat on one of the ruined benches in the stinking swamp of the Palace courtyard, and sit this one out. But he saw Ingold break ranks and go to speak to a thin, gawky Guard; and though the dissolving mists still hung about the great courtyard of the Palace, he saw her shrug and shake her head.

Coward and quitter
, she had called him once.

It didn't do any good to tell himself that he knew for a fact their cause was lost. He suspected that Gil knew it, too.

Ingold certainly did.

How the hell come I always end up associating with maniacs
? he demanded despairingly, watching as the forces separated in the vast, half-frozen morass of the court. The sappers moved up to lead position with their cleated ladders; directly behind them, Eldor took his place on foot among a squad of Guards. The other prong of the strike force drew aside, a glittering serpent of Alketch forces, with Vair like a deadly, jeweled idol at their head. Rudy recognized Maia and his Penambrans among those ranks, along with Kara, Kta, a dozen or more of the other wizards, and half the firesquad.

Ingold joined the ranks at the head of the line near Eldor. For a moment his eyes met the King's; then Eldor's lips twisted in a sneer, and he turned away and gave the signal to descend.

The creeping horror of that descent was like the prelude to an evil dream. Through the vine-choked upper vaults, through the forest of pillars whose straight, inky shadows reeled and turned to the movement of the white magelight, Rudy could feel the watchfulness of the Dark Ones growing upon him. Like the warning prickle of hot breath on the nape of his neck, like a soft footfall in a room that should be empty, he could sense the touch of counterspells on the magic of the light he had summoned. In the narrow confines of the ancient stairway itself, it was a thousand times worse. He was aware of the Dark as he had never been aware of them before—the probing of that monstrous intelligence at the edges of his magic, the greedy nibbling at its weak points.

The stairway seemed to descend forever. The witchlight around him etched the faces of the Guards in harsh chiaroscuro and glittered on the weapons of the firesquad. Far below him, Rudy could see that Ingold's drawn sword had begun to burn with a chill, white light of its own.

Though there was no sign of the Dark, he could feel the pressure of their minds, their power, and the haunting evil of their presence. He scanned the gnawed rock of the walls, smooth as glass below eye level, where millions of jostling bodies had polished it over uncounted years, rough and sparkling with stray glints of quartz above. It was unbroken by crack or fissure. They would not be attacked from above.

Would the Dark lie in wait for them, he wondered, in the huge cavern below the drop-off of the stair? Or would the Dark give way before them, luring them on, to circle around behind them in the uncharted mazes of the passages?

The grip of his flame thrower felt clammy in his hand, and he found himself wishing he'd spent the backbreaking hours that Gil had spent in learning to use a sword. Unless he planned to cut off the army's retreat by prematurely starting tires in the moss, he couldn't even use the damn thing until they were deep in the Nest. He cursed his stupidity. And still they descended.

Wind licked his cheek, startling him almost to death. A murmur went through the crowding ranks that hemmed him in. Sweat ran from the faces that looked suddenly gray in the hard, pitiless glare, and he heard the faint whispering rattle of weapons gripped in tightening hands. But of the Dark themselves there was no sign.

The tunnel walls widened before them. The stair abruptly ended. From the cavern below, a faint breeze soughed, thick with the harsh stink of the Nest. As the white light streamed forth, revealing the world that had been hidden since the founding of the Nests, Rudy heard the whisper of awe that wound back and back through the ranks on the stair behind. Pillars and chasms and hanging teeth of stone glistened wetly with acid and nacre; dark pools in the carpets of brown, rolling moss caught the light in hard onyx surfaces. The putrid air seemed to press into Rudy's skull, weighted with the malice of unseen watchers. But in all that shadowy vastness, nothing moved.

The sappers flung down their ladders, and the hollow booming rang like a cannon shot, the echoes dying slowly amid the mazes of stone. The vanguard hesitated, looking about into that horrible, alien realm. On the brink of the ladder, Ingold paused, the vagrant winds stirring at the heavy folds of his mantle, his sword glinting like lightning in his hand. Then Eldor strode forward, and his footfalls sounded, each as distinct as the tap of an iron bell, upon the separate rungs. The cynical amusement in his eyes as he gazed about him filled Rudy with chill terror.