03 The Armies of Daylight d-3 Read online

  Rudy sniffed. He did not like Bektis. "If he's out here tonight, I'll eat my boots without even scraping the mud off 'em."

  "If that's the case, I regret to inform you that you're going to miss a meal." Ingold sighed. "Bektis knows Gae, too. But I'm sure that his ever-pressing duties will not permit..."

  He looked up suddenly, the words dying on his lips. A scream split the mountain stillness, a hopeless, echoing shriek that scaled up to a frenzied pitch of horror, then jarred and broke. Rudy sprang to his feet, the hair prickling on his neck, and was instantly arrested by the iron grip on his arm.

  "Be still, you fool."

  A figure broke from the edge of the woods on the far side of the valley, black and tiny against the hoarfrost landscape. A man , Rudy thought, watching the way he ran, young and slender, stumbling over his own cloak in his terrified haste.

  A swirl of darkness passed like a whirlwind over the snow. The fugitive screamed again as he ran, his arms outstretched, plunging blindly down the hill toward the black monolith of the Keep of Dare. Darkness swelled from the trees behind him, a strange shifting of images that even the dark-sight of a wizard could not pierce. Something flashed, wet and sticky, and a last piercing cry rang out, as if ripped from the dissolving flesh. Then there was silence, and something scattered over the half-melted snow.

  Even at this distance, Rudy could smell the blood on the backwash of the erratic winds.

  "Who was it?" Rudy asked.

  His voice was pitched low, audible only to certain beasts, or to another wizard. But still his words sounded sacrilegiously loud in the horrible stillness of the hillside.

  Ingold straightened up from the sodden, stinking mess in the torn snow. Even the bones they had found had not only been stripped of flesh but seemed strangely deformed, as if the bone tissue itself had been melted. Nauseated, Rudy looked away from the black, half-liquefied remains, to Ingold's impassive face. Darkness masked the wizard's features, but mageborn eyes could penetrate ordinary night; Rudy could see no change of expression in that lined, nondescript countenance.

  But then, he supposed, after what had taken place in the ruins of the City of Wizards, it was not likely that the old man would ever be shaken up by much of anything again.

  "We shall come out with the others, when the sun is in the sky, to burn what remains," Ingold said quietly. "To do so now would only bring the Dark Ones once more upon us."

  He dropped what he held in his hand back onto the fetid little heap. Round, discolored lenses flashed in the starlight in their twisted frames. Ingold said, "It seems that I shall be visiting the Dark Ones at Gae, after all."

  Dawn was just thinning the stygian overcast of the night when Rudy and Ingold again reached the gates of the Keep. Against a charcoal sky, the ebony mass reared like a small mountain, close to a hundred feet from the top of the rock knoll on which it stood to its flat, snow-powdered roof and nearly half a mile in length. Its black, windowless walls faintly mirrored the trampled snow and dark trees that lay below it. Only its western face was broken by a gate and a short flight of broad steps. From a distance, the torchlight flickering in the square opening gave it the appearance of a single, small, baleful eye in the midst of an otherwise utterly featureless face.

  As Rudy climbed the muddy path past the goat pens and ramshackle workshops that surrounded the Keep in a vast zone of trash, he could see most of the Wizards' Corps assembled on the icy steps. He could pick out those who, like himself, had spent the night outside. Kara of Ippit, tall and homely, in her threadbare mantle and the two cardigans her mother had recently knitted for her. Thoth the Scribe, called the serpentmage, sole survivor of the massacre at Quo, austere as a bald vulture-god of antiquity, his topaz eyes illuminating his narrow white face like a jack-o-lantern's. Dakis the Minstrel. A little fourteen-year-old witch-child from the north called Ilae, her dark eyes peering from behind a mane of red tangles. Others, a pitiful few, it seemed, huddling in the shadows like refugees in an old photograph of Ellis Island. And behind them stood those survivors of the massacre by the Dark who had been judged too lacking in power to participate in this trial of spells: itinerant conjurers, spellweavers, weatherwitches, and goodywives, the lower end of the spectrum of power that had not answered the dead Archmage's fatal summons to the City of Quo.

  Rudy's heart sank at the sight of them. So few , he thought. And what the hell can we do, anyway, against the might of the Dark ?

  Other shadows appeared in the firelit tunnel that pierced the wall, leading from the outer gates to the inner, their forms ghostlike in the steam where the warmer air within came in contact with the outer cold-the day watch of the Guards, rubbing their bruises from the morning's weapons practice and cursing one another and their deceptively elfin instructor good-naturedly. The Keep herdkids went tearing out in an enthusiastic boiling of infant energy to throw snowballs and milk goats. Soap boilers, hunters, woodcutters, and tanners emerged, men and women plying what trades they could from the scanty resources of this bitter and isolated valley.

  And among them were a dark-haired girl in a black fur cloak and a peasant woman's rainbow skirts and a tall, rather gawky woman some five years older, dressed in an outsize black uniform and white quatrefoil emblem of the Guards.

  Minalde brushed the sable hood from her dark hair as she ran down the steps to meet Rudy, the rich fur of her cloak rippling glossily in the gray light. In sunlight, her eyes were the unearthly blue of a volcanic lake on a midsummer afternoon; shadowed as they were now, they were velvet-blue, almost black, and wide with anxiety. She caught Rudy's hands. "They told me they'd heard a scream," she said.

  Rudy fought the urge to put a comforting arm around her shoulders, as he would have done had they met alone. She's the Queen , he told himself, the Regent and the mother of the heir, for all she's nineteen years old and scared. There are too many people watching .

  "Glad to see it wasn't you, punk," Gil Patterson added, bringing up the rear, her long sword tapping at her ankles as she walked. Since she had joined the Guards of Gae, her former shy defensiveness had been gradually replaced by a toughness that, Rudy reflected, wasn't any easier to see through. Those pale schoolmarm's eyes still forbade any inquiries into the true state of her feelings, but she did look pleased that he'd survived.

  At his side, Alde whispered, "Who was it?"

  "Saerlinn. I don't know if you knew him."

  She nodded, tears starting in her eyes. Alde knew, and was friends with, almost everyone in the Keep. Again Rudy struggled with his instinct to hold her, to offer her silent reassurance. "It puts us in a bad place," he admitted quietly. "When we go to scout the Nest at Gae..."

  "You?" Fear widened her eyes. "But you can't-" She bit off her words, and a slow flush rose to her cheeks. "That is-it isn't just for that," she added with a soft-voiced dignity that made Rudy smile. "What about your experiments with the flame throwers, Rudy? You said you'd be able to create weapons to hurl fire from the things that Gil and I found in the old laboratories. You can't..."

  "They'll just have to wait," Rudy said quietly. "I'll put one together for myself to take to Gae; the rest can wait till I return." He put his hands on her shoulders and smiled at her frightened, woebegone face. "And I will return," he promised her.

  She looked down, her eyes veiled, and she nodded.

  Gil's voice cut sharply into the silence between them. "You think you'll really be able to put working flame throwers together, then?"

  He looked up, startled at her tactlessness, and saw what she had seen-the tall form of the Chancellor of the Realm, Alwir, Minalde's brother, standing watching them in the mist and firelight of the gates. Rudy backed quickly away from Alde and took a few steps up the path toward the Keep.

  "You bet," he bragged in his best Madison Avenue voice. "Hell, in a month we'll make swords obsolete."

  "That would be to your advantage," Gil commented, "since you can't pick one up without cutting yourself."

  But in spite of the banter, Rud
y was acutely conscious of Alwir's cold gaze on him as he rejoined Ingold among the mages at the foot of the Keep steps.

  Alwir came down toward them, "a gleaming edifice of sartorial splendor," as Alde had once joked, dominating those around him with his size, his elegance, and his haughty, unbending will. Like his sister, he was cloaked in black, a velvet mantle that billowed like wings behind him. The chain of sapphires that lay over his broad shoulders and breast were not bluer or harder than his eyes. He was trailed by the obsequious Bektis, his Court Mage, who alternately rubbed his long white hands together or stroked his waist-length, blue-silver beard as if in a self-congratulatory caress.

  The Chancellor came to a halt on the lowest step and looked down at Ingold with an impassive face. "So your information was correct," he said, in his rich, well-modulated voice. "The thing can be done."

  "By those with the strength," Ingold returned quietly. "Yes."

  "And the reconnaissance?"

  "We shall leave this time tomorrow morning."

  Alwir gave a satisfied little nod. Beyond them, the rising of the cloud-veiled sun had cast a kind of sickly, diffuse light upon the snowy wastes of the Vale, bringing forth from shadows the tangled grubbiness of the barricaded food compounds and the chain-hung pillars on the hill of execution across the road from the Keep.

  "And these?" The Chancellor's careless gesture took in the other mages-old women, young men, solemn black Southerners, and ice-white shamans from the plains.

  "Believe me, my lord," Ingold said, and there was a flicker of anger in his shadowed eyes, "whether or not it is decided to undertake this invasion, these people constitute your chief defense against the Dark Ones. Do not treat them lightly."

  Alwir's eyebrows went up. "An unprepossessing lot," he commented, scanning them, and Rudy felt that those enigmatic, speedwell-blue eyes lingered for a moment on where he had returned again to Aide's side. "But perhaps more dangerous than they look."

  "Far more dangerous, my lord." The new voice drew Rudy's eyes and, half against his will, Alwir's as well. In the suffused pallor of the dawn, the Guards on the steps had doused their torches in the snow, but within the gate passage above them fires still reflected redly on the polished walls. Against that reflection stood the red-robed shape of the Bishop of Gae, Govannin Narmenlion, her bald head and narrow, delicately jointed hands giving her the appearance of a skeleton wrapped in a crimson billow of flame.

  "If you undertake your invasion using the Devil's tools, my lord," she warned, in a voice as dry and deadly as famine winds, "they will be its downfall. They are excommunicates, who have traded their souls to Evil for the powers they possess."

  Anger stained the big man's cheeks, but he kept the melodious calm of his voice. "Perhaps if the Straight Faith were as dependent upon a centralized government as the Realm is, you would be even at this moment showering them with blessings," he commented sardonically.

  The fine- chiseled nostrils flared in amused scorn. "Such words tell more about the speaker than they do about their subject," she remarked, and Alwir's flushed face reddened further. "Better your precious invasion should fail than that you should bring yourself under the wrath of the Church by harboring such as these. Having commerce with the mage-born-the magedamned!-fouls the soul like clinging mud, until all the Faithful can see it, and cast you out. Even to converse with them taints you."

  Rudy felt Aide's icy fingers close over his and, glancing sidelong at her, he saw the shame struggling in her taut face. She had been a good daughter of the Faith until the rainy night on the road from Karst when he had found his power- and they had become lovers.

  Alwir grated, "That didn't prevent you from coming out to see how they had fared!"

  The Bishop's dry voice was silky with menace. "It pays to count one's enemies, my lord Alwir."

  There was silence on the steps, save for the rising whine of the icy wind in the trees. The Guards watched this confrontation uneasily. They had long grown used to the swift, vicious arguments between Bishop and Chancellor, but there was never any telling when one might suddenly escalate into civil war.

  Then Alwir's eyebrow canted mockingly. "And do you count me so, my lady?"

  "You?" The gray light slipped along the curve of her shaven skull as she looked him up and down, austere scorn in the curve of her delicate lips. "You care not whether you are numbered among the godly or the wicked, my lord, as long as you can command what you call your niceties of life. You would sup in Hell with the Devil, were the food good."

  So saying, she turned in a swirl of scarlet and vanished into the darkness of the gate passage, her ringing footfalls dying away across the vast, empty spaces of the Aisle beyond toward the dark mazes where the Church kept unsleeping domain.

  Aide whispered, "Rudy, I'm afraid of her."

  Hidden by the folds of her heavy cloak, his hand pressed hers. Talk had surged up again around them. Two of the junior weatherwitches had been offering to send the coming snowstorm elsewhere until Saerlinn's body could be burned, and Thoth's harsh, academic voice was saying, "To do so is to presume upon the laws of the Cosmos that bid the winds blow where they will." There was some argument, but all of them, with the exception of Ingold and a withered little hermit named Kta, were terrified of the Scribe of Quo.

  Under cover of the talk, Rudy said softly, "What can she do, babe? You're the Queen. Even if she knew about us- which she doesn't-we aren't doing anyone any harm."

  "No," she murmured. But her fingers trembled in his.

  CHAPTER TWO

  "Ingold?"

  Gil paused in the narrow doorway, all but invisible in the harlequin shadows that spangled the room. One of the other mages, the wizened little guru Kta, had told her that he was here, in a tiny chamber hidden deep within the secret levels of the Keep-the subterranean levels of whose very existence nine Keep dwellers out often were ignorant. Looking into the room, Gil saw that it was a miniature version of the "observation chamber" up on the second level, in whose stone and crystal table Rudy had once seen the possessed Archmage from afar.

  Ingold was sitting on the edge of the circular, black stone table, looking into the changeable brightness that flowed upward from its heart. He raised his head at the sound of her voice, his face checkered with light and shadow; then he held out his hand to her, and the white light faded.

  "I was on the point of sending for you," he said quietly as she took a seat on the table's edge beside him. Then, seeing the tautness of her mouth and the way her long, hilt-blistered fingers fidgeted with the buckle of her sword belt, he asked, "What is it, my dear?"

  "Is it true what Rudy said?" she demanded. "That you're going to lead the reconnaissance to Gae?"

  For a moment he studied her in silence. It seemed to Gil that, as the cold brightness of the light faded, the lines of his battered face deepened momentarily. "After Saerlinn's death, I am the only one who can lead it," he replied.

  She cried in despair, "You're going to be killed!"

  At that the blue eyes lightened. Ingold's smile was a curious thing, for it transformed him as sunlight could transform a Highland landscape, making what was grim and angular suddenly young and wild. "You wound me, Gil," he chided. "My very own cloaking-spell..."

  "This isn't a joking matter." In Gil, concern for others had always taken the form of anger. Her voice was rough and harsh as she spoke. "The Dark Ones took Lohiro, and he was the goddam Archmage."

  "Lohiro went to them willingly," pointed out the man who had loved the Archmage as a son. Against the chill, shifting luminosity of the crystal's light, the scar he'd taken in killing Lohiro stood out jaggedly raw on the flattened corner of his cheekbone.

  "Well, if they could hold him as their prisoner," Gil snapped, "they sure as hell won't have any problems killing you ."

  An echo of that wild lightness still lingered in his eyes. "They'll have to catch me first."

  Gil looked across the flickering fountain of light at him for a moment, struggling with anger and
caring. Then she sighed, disarmed. "Well, all I've got to say is, you have the flakiest way of hiding out from them that I've ever seen, but that isn't any of my business."

  " Ah." Ingold smiled regretfully. "But it is your business, Gil. I have rather effectively made it your business, by bringing you to this world against your will and by getting you trapped here."

  Gil shook her head. "That wasn't your fault. You couldn't have known the Dark Ones would try to get through the gap in the Void."

  "It's kind of you to say so. But I should have reasoned it out earlier than I did." Amid the darkness of the wall, his huge shadow stooped forward like a giant as he took her hand and drew her to his side. "I knew of the possibility. But at the time I rescued Prince Tir, flight into your world seemed to be my only recourse, and I needed a confederate on the other side of the Void. And believe me, it has been a grim lesson to me about the inadvisability of tampering with worlds beyond my own."

  Oil shrugged. "If you hadn't tampered, Rudy would still be painting bikes for the Hell's Angels. You can't say that was just coincidence."

  "I don't believe that there is such a thing as coincidence," Ingold said, and for a moment their eyes met. "And in any case," he went on, "if I had not tampered, you would not have been dragged from the life you were working to build for yourself at the university, your research, and your friends. If it had not been for the danger that the Dark could follow you back across the Void and devastate your world as it has destroyed ours, you would have returned to all that long ago. And that, my dear," he concluded quietly, "is why I came here tonight." He drew her forward. Light pulsed suddenly in the crystal inset in the table's center, bathing them in a white kaleidoscope of brightness. "Look into the crystal, Gil."

  She obeyed him, bending over it and blinking against that coruscating glare. "I- I don't understand," she stammered.