Darwath 3 - The Armies Of Daylight (38 page)

“Only supplies for the journey. I don't think we'll need a pack animal. With the wolves in the river valleys, it would be more of a hindrance than a help.”

“All right.”

Looking down into her eyes, he could see there her weariness and confusion, the tangled emotions of mourning men who had long ago died in her heart. He kissed her again, and this time she clung to his warmth, her face pressed to the woolly collar of his vest For a long time the scented silence of the room enfolded them, broken only by the faint sounds of the embers on the hearth.

“Will you be all right?” he asked at last.

She nodded, standing still in the circle of his arms. “The work is good for me,” she said. “Gil says that a tough project is the best drug the soul can take—and I think she's right. Thank God, Alwir's chief clerk kept the books decently.”

He chuckled a little in spite of himself at this matter-of-fact epitaph for the Chancellor. He saw that Alde had her own work now, her unschooled hands picking up the reins of responsibility and power. He could no more understand it, no more have done it, than he could understand or have emulated Gil's cold and rational violence; but he saw that, like Gil, Alde was going to be very good at what she did.

He wondered, very briefly, what would happen to her—to Tir, to all of them—if he and Gil were slain. He pushed the thought from his mind. Time enough for that later, he told himself. If there is a later.

“Rudy?”

Her doubtful voice called him back with a start.

“You aren't—you will be back, won't you?”

He felt an impulse to wipe the troubled fear from her upturned face with a heartening assurance, to protect her from unhappiness as he had often, not very successfully, tried to protect her from harm. But he owed their love more than that; and he could not drive from his mind the memory of the rain-slashed ruins of Quo and the knowledge of what he was going to Gae to meet.

So he bent to touch her lips again and whispered miserably, “Babe, I don't know.”

The journey to Gae was wet and bitterly cold. Rudy and Gil followed the track the armies had left, through slushy bottom lands, iron-gray in the frozen grip of winter, or over the stumpy summits of submerged hills. On the fringes of the vast, pewter-colored meres, they found evidence of bands of White Raiders; and once, in a hollow between three rocky hills, Gil found signs of some other large band of what she thought might be dooic, over a thousand strong. One night wolves attacked their spell-cloaked camp, and Gil killed three of them before they drew off.

“Pity about the skins,” she said regretfully. “I always did want a wolfskin rug in my study. It would impress the hell out of my Ph.D. advisor.”

It was one of the few times she referred to the life before her exile, and it already seemed incredible to Rudy that Gil had attended UCLA; or indeed, that she had ever been anything but a Guard. When they were on the road, she didn't speak much at all.

When the nights closed over the gray, crow-haunted land, Rudy spelled the camp against the Dark Ones, against wolves, and against bandits, while Gil built a hidden little fire to cook their meager rations of pan-bread and salt meat. Afterward Rudy played the harp, or they talked—of their journey, of the small doings of the people they knew at the Keep, of the possibility of Aide's restarting the hydroponics gardens, or of Maia's changes in Church policy. They plotted scenarios for Raider attacks, or what they would do in the event of another major assault by the Dark. They seldom referred to California, and then only in passing, as of a mutual childhood, half-forgotten.

“You'll be staying at the Keep now?” Gil asked one night as Rudy sat softly weaving the glimmering strains of a haunting, half-familiar melody that Dakis had sung.

He nodded. Neither spoke the same thought—that a week from now they might both be dead, the Keep shattered, and Tir's and Aide's bones mixed with the bloody snow that blew in through its broken walls. “I'm going to get in touch with the Gettlesand wizards and see if maybe some of them could come back to help out Thoth and Wend.”

Gil made a noise of assent, not looking up from the dagger she was whetting. She did not ask what good all the wizards in the world would do if Ingold returned to the Keep.

Rudy was silent in thought. Now and then he touched stray notes from the harp strings that dropped like silver coins into the dark well of the night. Across the shallow lakes of the valley, the wolves howled, and winds stirred the mists that curled from the waters' dirty surfaces.

“How long have we been here?” he asked at last.

“Six months, or a little longer,” Gil replied, turning her dagger edge to catch the light. “It's round about the middle of March, though you wouldn't guess it from the weather.” It had snowed last night, a thin, icy scum on the ground.

Rudy sighed. “As soon as the weather breaks, I'm taking the road.”

She looked up, startled.

He went on. “I'm going back to Quo.” He put his hand to stop the quavering of the harp strings and looked across them at Gil. “Ingold always said that he was the only person alive who understood how the Void works and how to create the gates from one universe to the next. But he had to have learned that from somewhere. I'm going to have a look at the library of Quo and see if I can find something about how to bridge the Void and get you home.”

The knife whined once more against the whetstone, then stilled. Gil did not look up. “Don't knock yourself out over it, Rudy,” she said. “We wouldn't have had any more luck returning than Eldor had.”

“Eldor?” Rudy frowned. “But Eldor was nuts when he came back. It wouldn't be the same if you went back to your own world…”

Gil sighed and looked up at him. “Punk, there was nothing wrong with Eldor that a couple of years with a good therapist wouldn't have taken care of. But as for going back…” She shrugged. “They ever teach you about the old Greek myths in school?”

“Some,” he assented doubtfully.

"You remember the one about the Goddess of Spring, who was carried off by the King of the Dead? She wouldn't eat or drink anything while she was in Hell, but just before she got bailed out, he tricked her into tasting a pomegranate. And because she'd eaten something in his domain, she had to stay there, at least part of the time.

“We're the same way, Rudy. We've eaten the pomegranate. Even if Ingold had lived, neither of us could have gone back.”

He folded his hands over the curve of the harp “I knew from the start that I never could,” he told her. “I didn't know you felt the same.”

She wiped the dagger and slid it back into its sheath with a vicious little snick. “I was afraid when we couldn't go back right away,” she said softly. “And after that… It does something to you when you kill someone, Rudy. And you improve with practice. I knew I was going to kill Alwir, weeks before it happened. I just didn't know how or when. But I'm not the same person I was.” She looked across the fire at him, the shadows dancing over the half-healed sword cut on her face.

She picked up a stick and began to rearrange the fire, the light reddening to blood the white emblem of the Guards on her surcoat. Rudy's hands returned to their music, shaping hesitantly, like a long and flashing chain of diamonds, the air of a dance. After a time he asked her, “Why did you decide to kill Alwir?”

The reflection of the flame sparkled in the tears that flooded her eyes as she raised her head. After two false starts, she said, “I loved Ingold, Rudy. I loved him with all my heart, from the moment I first saw him.”

“Yeah,” Rudy said softly. “I knew that.”

Her breath came raggedly as she fought to calm her trembling voice. “I told myself it was stupid, but it didn't do any good, you know. I told myself I had my own life, my own plans, and they sure as hell didn't include falling in love with a man who was forty years older than me and a wizard in another universe to boot. I told myself he'd never look twice at a skinny, ugly, crazy weirdo like me…”

“You were wrong about that one,” Rudy said quietly.

Gil sighed. “I told myself all kinds of stuff. It didn't matter. I loved him. I still do,” she added brokenly. “I still do.”

“Were you lovers?”

She shook her head. “I think we would have been from the start, you know, if he hadn't been afraid of—of doing just what happened, of tying a part of me to this world. And then, he knew that his love would make me a target of the Dark, too.” Tears were still streaming down her face, a torrent of all the wretched grief that had been pent behind her cool, ironic facade.

Her sorrow hurt him as sharply as his own, for he recalled how it had felt to know that he must lose both love and magic forever. But she would not tolerate his touch, so he only said, “I'm sorry.”

She shook her head. “It's all right,” she said in a calmer voice from which all that flat, cool, conversational tone had vanished. “I know why you asked me to come. If the Dark have taken his mind, we can't let him live. It sounds crazy, but I'd rather it was me who did it. And you don't have to worry about my bursting into tears and refusing to hurt him or anything. I'd hate you if you killed him.”

“Lady,” Rudy said softly, “there's damn little chance that I could even touch the guy.”

Her fingers shook as she pushed the straggling hair away from her face. In the aftermath of the storm, her features were more relaxed than he had ever seen them, the odd beauty of that thin, overly sensitive face emerging from behind the glacial reserve. “I don't hold a lot of hope that I'll be able to,” she admitted, brushing the tears from her long lashes. “You may have seen him fight—but I've fought him. He's stainless-steel lightning, Rudy.”

She lay down and drew her cloak and worn blanket over her. In a few minutes, Rudy heard her breathing even out into the dreamless rhythm of deep sleep. He himself sat awake far into the night, a prey to unwilling memories, playing bits and pieces of music on the harp.

The quick touch of Gil's hand brought him out of sleep into the black pit of predawn darkness. He tapped her arm soundlessly, signaling his wakeful ness, then sat up in his blankets and looked out toward the beaten paleness of the road. Mist had risen from the nearby lake, swathing the world in damp, intense darkness that even his wizard's sight was hard put to penetrate, but he could hear a kind of slipping, snuffling tread as someone or something hurried furtively south. After a moment's concentration, he made them out—twelve or more men and women, pale, unhealthy, and stinking, their faded silk rags glittering with jeweled embroidery.

In a subvocal whisper, he breathed, “Ghouls.”

Gil was kneeling beside him; he felt her hair brush his arm us she nodded. Even to one not mageborn, there could be little question when a shifting of the air brought their fetid carrion stench up to the camp. “But why are they leaving Gae?”

As softly as she had whispered, one of the ghouls halted, raising his head, weasel eyes glinting in the gloom. Their utter filth and the greed in those slobbery faces angered Rudy suddenly, and he drew to him a breath of illusion, a suggestion of directionless wind in the fog and the metallic, acid stink of the Dark Ones.

At this, the ghouls flinched and fled down the road, squeaking like spooked rabbits in the darkness. It seemed for a time that their reek lingered in the vaporous air.

“I don't know why they left Gae,” Rudy whispered, settling down into his blankets again. “But I can guess.”

In the two days that followed, his guess grew to certainty as every step brought them nearer to the haunted city of Gae. The louring consciousness of the Dark Ones was everywhere, like a sickness of the air that had spread from the city to engulf the gray desolation of the country around. Rudy sensed their presence, far off but in unthinkable numbers, and the dread of them seemed to stalk the sodden road at his elbow, even in what passed for daylight under the thick boil of wet, low-hanging clouds.

When they reached Trad's Hill before the gates of Gae in the vile darkness of early evening, Rudy looked down from its bare crown to the city. Horror congealed in his heart, not at anything he saw, but at things felt and half-seen. The presence of the Dark was like a marsh mist that hung over the whole town, and the shifting ripple of their illusion made the broken towers and groping, matted trees quiver in his wizard's sight, like a heat dance. Evil, violence, terror, and the lust to suck dry the squeaking rind of the human body rose to his senses like a reek from that dark cloud that seemed to hang above the slimy streets. Peering through the darkness, he sensed the maggotlike movement that teemed in the city's cellars, even before he noticed the flickering white shapes that wandered in the murk, picking vainly for forage among the frozen weeds—the herds, of course. He and Gil had found their stripped bones or frozen bodies everywhere in the surrounding countryside. But he barely noticed them. Over all the city seemed to lie a hideous doom, a waiting darkness, a terrible vortex of unspeakable malice and power.

At the center of that vortex, he knew, was the man whom he and Gil must kill.

Even the next morning's daylight could not dispel the murky horror that filled and covered Gae like a sour, dismal swamp. The sunlight strove weakly against the whitish overcast, brighter than it had been in days. But in Gae it was filtered, as if through a mist, into a dozen hideous perversions of unknown color. By that ghastly light, the city seemed foully unreal, its walls and towers sinking to the earth under the weight of unnaturally riotous vines, as if the stone itself were softened or had the life sapped from it by those obscene roots. The snow that lay in the streets appeared to have melted, though it was piled thick outside the limits of the city, and it was pulped by the churning of thousands of crooked little feet.

The bones of the dead herds were everywhere, fresh or in varying stages of depredation by the petty carnivores of the deserted town—wild dogs, cats, and bold, red-eyed rats. The cold killed the smell of them, but Rudy felt queasy with a nausea compounded from stench and revulsion.

Almost as bad as the dead and the hideous feeling of being watched was Gil's remote calm. She waded through the putrid muck of Gae's overgrown streets with scarcely a batted eyelash, and the queer, leaden light of the vaporous sky lent a terrible expression to her frost-hard features.