The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,100

taken his harp. Then he was shoved on into the darkness and cuffed when he stumbled, his arms aching and the knife point grating against his ribs. They passed the main stairway that led up to the second level and turned aside.

It was only then that he grasped fully what was happening. Gal had known it, when she said there would be no witnesses-her mind must have leaped to the truth in

NOTE:

Royal administrative and residential quarters occupy roughly 1/2 the area of Church Territory, directly above it on the 2nd level.

The Penambran refugees occupy most of the 4th, and all of the 5th,

levels.

The Keep of Dare

the first moment she had seen that the arresting troops were from Alketch. The wizards would not be tried by the High King; very likely. Elder was not even aware of their arrest.

They were to be tried by the Inquisition.

Torches gleamed redly on the breastplates of the soldiers around Rudy and threw huge shadows that stalked in lumbering procession at their heels down the shadowy passageway. From dark doors, he caught the scent of incense as the passage narrowed, winding its way into the territory of the Church. He was conscious of others joining them, though the troopers behind him and the angle at which his arms were twisted made it impossible for him to see. But he heard the weighted rustle of robes and the murmur of chanting. The flaring light touched darker corridors of the Church mazes-cells where the Red Monks bivouacked, aisles where the dust lay undisturbed but for a single threaded line of bare footprints, and guardrooms that defended locked doors watched by the red-robed warriors of the Faith. And all that shadowy domain, lighted by the dim flicker of grease lamps and candles and thick with layer after layer of incense-laden gloom, whispered with the soft chanting of nightlong prayers.

They passed through a long corridor without light. Footfalls echoed in the closing walls. Panic and terror seized him, but he could not struggle and he knew in his heart that, if he cried out, no one would come. He remembered Ingold, imprisoned in the doorless cell beneath the villa at Karst. There was a smell, a feel, to this place that was half-familiar. They were somewhere deep in the Church's maze, far from any inhabited section of the Keep at all. Dust rose about their feet, glimmering in the fitful glare of the torches. The smell of the place was vile, disused, and damp.

Someone pushed open a door in the dark wall. Rudy stumbled over something on the threshold and was thrust through, his cramped arms failing to break his fall. He landed hard and lay for a moment, breathless, aching, and terrified, listening to the inhabited silence in the room.

In the darkness, a bell rang. Rudy rolled painfully over, feeling the cold scratchiness of a floor long given over to dust and dirt beneath his palms. He half sat up, his wizard's sight showing him dim shapes: the weatherwitches Grey and Nila, holding hands, their voices soft and fearful; Dakis the Minstrel, unconscious, his bleeding head pillowed on Ilea's lap; Ungolard, his face bowed despairingly on his hands; and Kara, her black hair rumpled down her back, flushed with anger and working at untying and ungagging her mother.

He looked around him, frowning into the darkness. He had found that in certain times and places-in the Nest of the Dark or among the twisting Walls of Air that circled Quo-his dark-sight was less clear, and so it seemed here. He could make out the shape of a double cell, black-walled and cold, some twenty feet by forty. Its ceiling he could not see, hidden as it was in shadows. He could see only one door. The place had a fusty smell to it, sterile and somehow at once disgusting and frightening. He shivered at the half-forgotten memory that it stirred and called a sliver of witchlight...

... and nothing came. It was as if he had dropped his spell of summoning into a dark well and had seen the water swallow it.

This was a cell where no magic would work.

Dame Nan's shrill voice slashed into the terrible silence of that leaden room. "Filthy, rotten, fish-eating Southerners, to manhandle an old woman!"

"Mother!" Kara whispered, frightened, and the old witch-wife scrambled to a sitting position, rubbing her skinny wrists.

"Don't you 'mother' me, my girl! If they're listening, so much the better! Curses of itches on them, from that yellow-bellied lefty on down to