The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,10

glow that pulsed from the embers that lay, like a heap of jewels, on the wide hearth. Their two shadows moved clumsily through the greater darkness of that long room, passing, like the shadows of clouds, over the paraphernalia of habitation there: the jewel-bound books, salvaged from the wreck of Quo or shamelessly stolen from the archives of the Church; Kara of Ippit's satin pincushion, sparkling like a diamond hedgehog among a great tumble of homespun cloth; the knuckly, knobby braids of herbs and onions hanging above the hearth; and the silver rainfall that was the strings of Rudy's harp. The round, gold eyes of the headquarters cats flashed at them from every gloomy corner.

Ingold sighed, breaking his bitter silence, and there was a note in his voice which she had never heard before. "I had never meant to put you in such peril, Gil. It is said that wizards, among their many faults, have a horrible way of endangering their friends. I only hope to get you safely away from here, back to your own world, before disaster strikes. Those who are close to me seem to have a shocking rate of mortality."

The beaten regret in his voice shocked her. "That isn't true," she said.

In the darkness he was only a darker shape, edged with the tawny colors of the fire. "You think not?" With his face hidden, the pain and irony of his words sounded all the clearer. "Rudy has inherited the staff of one of my dearest friends, child, and the widow of another."

"That had nothing to do with you."

"No?" Like a spark rising, his eyebrow was tipped with reflected gold. "One of them I deserted in the hour of his death; another I killed with my own hands. I don't see how much more I could have had to do with it."

"Either of them would have commanded you to do what you did, and you know it." When he tried to turn away from her, she caught at his robe, the rough homespun bunched in her fist. "You were all trapped together by forces you couldn't control," she whispered savagely. "Don't torture yourself because you were the survivor."

Still he was silent, except for the thick draw of his breath. In the fading ember light, he was only a dim shape to her, but she was aware of him as she had never been aware of anyone or anything in her life. The touch of the patched wool clenched in her hand, the scent of sweet herbs and soap and woodsmoke that permeated the cloth, the stippling of fire outlining the edge of his white hair- with a heightened consciousness, she felt that she would have known him anywhere, without sight or hearing, merely by his nearness alone. When he raised his fingers to touch her wrist, she felt it like an electric shock.

In a softer voice, she said, "Quit tearing at yourself, Ingold. None of it was your fault."

"But your death here would be."

"Do you think that matters to me?"

"It matters to me ." Then suddenly her hand was empty. She heard the dry swishing of the curtain that covered the door of the alcove where he slept, but her eyes could not pierce the gloom at that end of the room. His grainy voice came to her as a disembodied murmur from the shadows. "Good night, Gil. And goodby. Forgive me, if I should not return from Gae."

Elsewhere in the Keep, other goodbys had been said.

The hour was late. Rudy thought he had heard the changing of the deep-night watch some time ago; but though he was more aware than most people of the span of time that had elapsed since then, it cost him conscious effort to translate it mentally into hours and minutes. He knew, in one sense, that it was two-thirty or so in the morning. But this was something that had lost its importance. He had lost his impulse to check the time, just as he no longer automatically felt for a light switch when he walked through a door.

The calling of light was an easy matter, like whistling. Seeing in the dark was easier still.

He trod the lightless corridors of the second level soundlessly, taking his memorized turnings as surely as he had once known that you got off the San Bernardino Freeway at Waterman Avenue, and two right turns got you to Wild David Wilde's Paint and Body Shop. He threaded his way along a black, dusty passage between