The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,102

hagridden face of Brother Wend. As the two cowled inquisitors moved past the tiny flames. Inquisitor Pinard was seen to wear the expression of a man regretfully doing a distasteful duty; but Govannin's lips curled with a demon triumph.

They stood ranged before the doors with their light-bearers behind them, so that their faces were hidden in darkness. Only an occasional gleam of a shifting eye or the red-purple glint of the Bishop's ring as she moved those white, skeletal fingers betrayed them as living creatures, and not simply embodied voices from a nightmare of despair.

The Inquisitor spoke, his hands in their white sleeves folded, composed as those of a statue, his voice deep and rather low. "You stand convicted of heresy, of the willing sale of your souls to the Devil in trade for the Devil's powers of illusion. You stand convicted of causing the death of hundreds of good men, by weapons of evil and by the evil counsel that caused them to be used against the Dark. You stand convicted-"

"Convicted?" Rudy gasped indignantly. "Who in the hell convicted us? We haven't had a goddam trial!"

"Your life has been a trial," Govannin's dry, spiteful voice snarled, "and you convicted yourself the first day you went to the mage Ingold Inglorion and asked him to teach you the ways of power. Your trial began the day you were born, with the Devil's shadow upon your face."

"The hell it did!" Rudy surged to his feet, shaking off Kara's urgent, snatching fingers from his sleeve. "I no more had a choice about that than I did about the color of my eyes!"

The Bishop's thin voice bit across his. "Be silent."

"You know as well as I do that the invasion was doomed to failure from the beginning!" he stormed on heedlessly. "It was Alwir who wanted it, Alwir and Vair-"

"Be silent!"

"And you know yourself that it's no more against civil law to be a wizard than it is to be an actor..."

He barely saw the finger that Govannin lifted. But he heard the heavy stride of the Red Monk behind him and whirled to take the stunning blow from a leaded spear butt across the side of his jaw and neck instead of on the back of his skull.

He was only vaguely aware of falling through oceans of roaring blackness to the floor.

For a long moment, the uproar in the room seemed to come to his ears from some vast distance, blurred by the buzzing murk that appeared to surround him. Distantly, he saw Brother Wend's face behind Govannin's shoulder, rigid and white, as if he were going to be sick. Dame Nan's screeching voice rose, screaming accusations of perversions that he had never imagined possible. Then he heard the sound of booted feet scuffling, and blows, and Kara's voice crying, " Don't ! Please, she's only an old woman!" Bektis' whining and other sounds faded unidentifiably back along an endless corridor of muzzy pain.

Sometime later he heard Govannin's voice, spitefully triumphant, reading the formal sentence into a silence broken by Kara's muffled sobs. He felt the stickiness of blood all along the side of his face and tasted dust on his lips. As the Bishop droned on, he wondered why she bothered, unless it was to get back at someone who wasn't even there-someone who was perhaps long dead. Through the ache in his head and the growing nausea, he thought he heard the words "sentence of death" pronounced, but could not be sure. His consciousness was beginning to fade again.

Other footsteps approached from outside the door. Rudy heard the soft, measured tread of scores of feet and the muted clink of chain mail. The heightened senses of a wizard that operated to a degree even in the null spaces of that terrible room told him that there roust have been over twenty of them, and he wondered with a weary disinterest why they thought they would need so many. Then the door was thrown open, and the torchlight from outside was mingled with the white brightness of the glows tones carried by the Guards of

Gae.

Eldor Andarion, High King of Darwath and Lord of the Keep of Dare, stood silhouetted in the doorway.

A sudden, hideous silence fell upon the room. Though the movement brought the sour taste of sickness to his mouth, Rudy crawled to a sitting position, and his heart quickened with fear at the sight of the King.

"My lady." The King's voice was shrill, edged by the cracked suggestion of