Darwath 3 - The Armies Of Daylight (39 page)

After her single outburst of tears on the road, she had not mentioned Ingold or the upcoming battle to Rudy again. As he watched her in the Palace courtyard, methodically stripping off her cloak and surcoat and hanging them on the limbs of a burned tree, it came to him why this was.

Grief or pity would have blinded her, weakened her. She had made up her mind what she must do, Rudy realized; she had sealed whatever chinks in her defenses she could. There would be time enough to think after Ingold was finally dead.

The two remaining palace buttresses, stabbing like skeleton fingers into the white air, cast watery shadows over Gil's face as she removed her scabbard from her sword belt and turned to Rudy with the sheathed weapon in her hand. Wind flattened her shirt sleeves over thin, hard-muscled arms. “You ready?”

Rudy nodded and tightened his grip on his staff. He'd used it to help himself over the rough ground, all the way from Renweth, but its pronged, razor-edged crescent could serve as a weapon as well. Ironically, it was the very weapon Lohiro had used against Ingold at Quo.

Which didn't do him a helluva lot of good
, Rudy thought dryly as he followed Gil over the blackened, sunken remains of the steps and down into the vaults.

The explosions that had torn the roofs from the underground tunnels and trapped the invaders had shaken the Palace above. Through riven roofs and crumbling beams, wan sunlight lay in bars and streaks of fallow gold. The upper level of the vaults was a smeared ocean of ash and muck, cracked stone and fallen groinings wallowing up through the mess like half-sunk hulks. The lower level, though foul with the stink of the herds, was empty, except for places where the clinging, ubiquitous vines had taken root in some fallen heap of stone and dirt overhead.

Through the gaping vaults, wan light checkered the floor, showing the crisscrossed tracks of the herds, like a spattering of clay on the black smoothness of the unbroken pavement. In spite of the miasmal light that slatted across Gil's figure from above and in spite of the cloaking-spell that lay around them both, Rudy found himself looking uneasily over his shoulders, waiting for the Dark Ones to attack.

Walking ahead of him, Gil seemed to fear nothing, feel nothing. Rudy could see that the hand that gripped the worn leather of the scabbard she carried was relaxed; when he glanced sideways at her, her face, surrounded by the ragged wisps that escaped from the thick braid of her hair, was calm. The shiny places in the hilt of her dagger winked in the occasional glints of sunlight. She never looked back at him, never hesitated, but wove her way through the broken forest of the limitless pillars and arches as if her feet had known that route from the beginning of time.

They emerged into a sort of clearing in the vaults, and Rudy recognized the red porphyry stair before them, down which the army had descended to the black stair of the Dark. Mud, dead leaves, ashes, and bones lay all about the place now. From a broken ceiling two levels above, a great aisle of straw-colored sunlight streamed, like an imperial carpet, to within ten feet of the utter blackness of the gaping pit.

Between darkness and light, crumpled on the pavement at the very lip of the abyss, was the body of a man, face down. The hooded brown mantle that covered him was streaked and bleached with the slime of the Dark, frayed by battle, and stained with smoke and blood. One reaching hand lay in the bar of light—a scarred, blunt-fingered warrior's hand.

He was unconscious and unarmed.

Gil sighed. “Stay here,” she ordered and pulled her dagger from her belt.

There was something horrifying in her businesslike calm as she crossed that bright bar of light. It's better this way, Rudy thought hopelessly. If he had a chance to fight us, it would be all over, not only for us but for everyone in the Keep. It's our only hope of taking out the most powerful mage in the West of the World, whose mind is the mind of the Dark.

But tears blurred his eyes and ran, stinging, down his face.

Gil knelt beside the body, drew her sword, and set it aside, the hilt ready to her hand just in case. She shifted her grip on the hilt of the dagger, reached out to touch Ingold's shoulder, and carefully turned him over. Rudy saw the old man's face outlined against the light as the hood fell back from it, scored and shadowed with the tracks of sixty-odd very rough years. The light glinted in the rough, dirty silk of the white hair. He looked at peace, sleeping as Rudy could scarcely remember having ever seen him sleep—the profound sleep of exhaustion.

Do it, Rudy thought, fixing his gaze on the shining blade of the dagger. If he is what Lohiro was, a prisoner in his own body, let him go before he wakes to become what he fought so hard to escape!

But Gil made no move. She studied the sleeping wizard's features for an endless time, and Rudy saw the bright glitter of tears on her inhumanly still face. Light skated along the edge of the knife with the sudden trembling of her hand.

Do it, he cried silently, and for God's sake, have done!

At that moment the old man's eyes opened and looked up into Gil's.

The razor edge that lay against his throat did not move. He looked worse than he had in the desert, the horrible pallor of his face blotched and discolored with bruises and the small, vicious wounds of the Dark Ones' claws beneath a layer of bloody grime. He made no move; he only sighed, closed his eyes again, and said something softly to Gil, something that Rudy did not hear.

A stray beam of sunlight sprang from the blade as Gil's body was suddenly shaken with a convulsive shudder. With an abrupt movement, she hurled the dagger against the red stone of the steps that led up toward the light, her shoulders bowing as sob after sob racked her body. To Rudy's utter horror, he saw Ingold half-rise and reach out to her and Gil crumple forward into the wizard's arms.

With an inarticulate cry he sprang forward, the pronged gold of his staff flashing in the wan sunlight as he drove its points toward Ingold's unprotected back. Gil cried out a warning, and the old man twisted away from the blow, thrusting her out of danger as he staggered to his feet and raised his arm to shield his eyes from the unaccustomed glare of the light. Gritting his teeth, his own eyes half-blind with tears, Rudy drove the razor edge of the crescent on the end of his staff toward Ingold's throat.

Rudy had not reckoned on Gil. A pair of bony knees scissored his legs viciously from under him and he fell, the staff clattering on the stone floor. He groped for it, and Gil kicked it out of his hands. He looked up in time to see her scramble to her feet, snatch up her drawn sword from the floor, and fling it, glittering, into Ingold's waiting hands.

Sobbing, Rudy grabbed for the staff again, and this time Gil stepped back, tears pouring uncontrollably down her face. With a cry of frustrated fury, he took a step toward her, his own mind unclear as to what he intended.

Ingold rasped, “Touch her, and I swear you will never leave this city alive.”

Rudy stopped, blinking, wondering for a dizzied second whether Ingold had placed some kind of spell of gnodyrr upon Gil with those few words he had murmured to her when he lay with her dagger at his throat. The old man's ragged breath was the only sound to pierce the uncanny stillness of the cellar. His blue eyes, pale and bright within the rings of cut and blackened flesh, went warily from one to the other.

Then in a strained voice, Ingold said, “Neither of you should be in this city. Get out of here. Get as far away as you can.”

“I won't leave you,” Gil said quietly.

He rounded on her, his eyes widening with sudden and blazing fear. “You'll do as I say! Get out! Get out now!”

“The hell we will!” Rudy yelled, and Ingold swung back toward him, his borrowed sword flashing in the pale light. “You've been a prisoner of the Dark…”

The wizard moved back a step into the bar of sunlight, his long, matted hair glistening like seaweed. The light around him dimmed. Looking up, Rudy could see, through the crazy tangle of broken timbers and charred stone, the soft coils of white fog beginning to blur the day.

“And what?” Ingold asked softly.

Rudy cried out, “Why did they want you?”

“You'll learn that in time.” The wizard retreated another step, the blade poised before him, orienting himself, his red-rimmed eyes growing used to daylight again. Rudy took a hopeless step toward him, and Ingold shifted a little, readying himself for an attack, his body moving with the old, deadly lightness.

Then Gil cried, “Rudy!” Her voice was sharp with terror. He whipped around and saw her blink in surprise, like someone just waked from a trance…

… and turning back, he saw that Ingold was gone.

Cursing, he plunged up the red stone steps toward the waning daylight. Gil hurried at his heels, stammering, “I'm—I'm sorry. I don't know why I yelled…”

“You yelled because he wanted you to!” Rudy stormed at her, his voice rough with anger that was three parts fear. He stopped and caught her arms, facing her in the mottled shadows of a broken doorway among leaf drifts and rotted bones. “Christ, Gil, why did you stop me?” he whispered. “I understand how you couldn't do it, but—”

“No,” she interrupted quietly. Her eyes were swollen but perfectly calm. “If he had been possessed by the mind of the Dark, I would have cut his throat. But he wasn't.”

“Fantastic!” Rudy sighed in disgust. “That's all I need to—”

“I don't know what's going on,” she continued, unruffled, “but his mind is his own. I know it.”

“How the hell would you know it?” Rudy yelled passionately. “He's had you wrapped around his finger from day bloody one! The Dark have had him. He's been their prisoner. There's no way they would have let him go—not after they hunted him from one end of the continent to the other!”

“I know it because I know him!” she lashed back at Rudy, jerking her arms free of his grip and striding on ahead of him up the stairs. Above their heads, the broken vaults of the Palace showed the sky a chill and smoky white, and Rudy could see that Gil was shivering with the cold seeping through her frayed homespun shirt.

He stormed after her. “And just where the hell do you think you're going?”

“I'm going to find him, you jackass!” she flung back over her shoulder. She slipped through a half-fallen arch, her boots slurring thickly in the knotted mats of half-burned creepers that swamped the halls. “He wants us out of town because he's in some kind of danger himself.”

“He wants us out of town so we won't stop him from heading back to the Keep and opening the gates some dark night!” Rudy's foot snagged on a coil of vine, and he fell sprawling. Cursing, he scrambled to his feet again. “It's up to us—”

Gil whirled so suddenly he all but impaled himself on the dagger that appeared like a splinter of ice in her hand. “You harm a hair of his head, punk…”

Cold stirrings of wind blew a thin mist over them and muttered in the blackened tangles of half-dead vegetation. The air felt suddenly weighted with the presence of the Dark. Even in the daylight, both of them looked around, as if expecting to see blackness stealing from the murky shadows of the fallen Palace. It occurred to Rudy how very alone they were.

Through dry lips, he managed to say, “We can't split up, Gil. We've got to stay together.”

Slowly, she lowered the knife. “All right,” she said.

It was on his lips to say, “If we meet him, don't kill me from behind,” but something in those gray, cool eyes forbade it. He remembered that she had given Ingold her sword.

Though it was almost noon, the light was graying. Fog was rising from the scummed marshes of the drowned lower town, spreading clammy, ubiquitous tendrils throughout the dripping streets. Gil and Rudy moved cautiously through the broken, silent Palace, past empty chambers teeming with eruptions of mosses or slithering with vines, and over crazy, tilting pavements where the rotting tapestries whispered with a horrible suggestion of rodent life. Skulls grinned at them from under chairs, veiled in the white stirring of ground fog. Through the broken barrel vaults of one chamber, gray mists leaked like some kind of heavy gas, to flow like water around their feet.

Rudy paused, feeling the touch of a counterspell on his mind. Heart hammering, he looked around the empty hall and out past crumbling archways to the buckled and subsided pavements of a courtyard flooded with brown, filthy pools.

“Gil,” he whispered. “Gil, listen to me, please. You know what's happened to him.”

She stopped for a fraction of a second, then turned her face away and moved on.

“Dammit, Gil, if you can't help me, at least—at least stay out of it,” he pleaded. “I need your help, for God's sake! I'm not a warrior and I'm not a hero! I can't do it.”

“Can't,” Ingold's soft voice chided from the smoky deeps of the mist. “If you say can't enough, you will end up convincing yourself of it, Rudy.”

Rudy whirled, his throat seeming to tie itself into knots. It took him a long moment to realize that Ingold was standing beside the arch that led into the court, his hoary rags stirred by the faint winds that moved the mist.

For an instant they faced each other, and Rudy felt as if he were trapped between love and death. His feeling for the old man struggled against his terror of the wizard's power, his memories of another battle in a ruined city against another Archmage, and his knowledge of what would happen to Tir and Alde if Ingold lived. With a wrench of almost physical pain, he broke the hold that seemed to be closing over his mind and hauled his flame thrower clear of its holster and fired.

The column of flames roared glaringly bright into the dull grays of that monochrome world. Ingold made no move to avoid the blast; the fire splattered against the wall a few feet to his left. Steam hissed and curled from the damp stone. Cursing his aim, Rudy fired again and heard Gil's frantic footsteps running toward them. He missed again, the lichens searing from the ruined pillar of the arch beside which Ingold stood. Just before Gil's hands tore at his wrist, he fired a third time and realized what was happening.

Never fight when you can pass unseen
, Ingold had said to him out in the windy plains. He wouldn't put it past the old man to fox his aim. In fact, there wasn't much he'd put past the old man at all. As Gil hung panting on his unresisting arm, his eyes met the wizard's. Under the weedy tangle of beard, Ingold's smile broadened. He lifted Gil's sword in salute and walked out into the mist-enshrouded court without another word.