The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,11

the cells that housed Alwir's private guards and a storeroom where he was sure the Chancellor was illegally storing undeclared food for one of his merchant buddies. He passed through a closetlike cell that had been partitioned off an old scriptorium and turned down a cutoff through a dark, disused latrine.

Aide had shown him this route after he'd returned from Quo. It was the quickest way from the Wizards' Corps commons to her rooms, allowing for a detour to avoid Church territory. Alde and Gil had spent weeks exploring the Keep, digging out the mysteries of its building, and either of them could get through the stygian warrens of jerry-built walls, spiraling mazes of old brick and grimy plaster and up and down the drunken spiderweb stairways with the swift, unthinking ease of a second-grader getting through the Pledge of Allegiance. As for the mysteries whose answers they had sought, they had uncovered no answers, but only more mysteries.

They had found fuel less, everlasting lamps and the component parts of flame throwers; they had found the ancient machinery that the Keep's builders, the wizard-engineers, had used to power the air and water pumps; they had found riddles as enigmatic as the frosted gray polyhedron crystals that littered the lower labs in such useless numbers. But they had discovered no evidence that the vast hydroponics gardens had ever been used, no records of the early days of the Keep, and no sign of how the wizard-engineers had so suddenly vanished.

There was no evidence of how Dare of Renweth, builder of the Keep and founder of the line of High Kings, had defeated the Dark-nothing at all as to why the Dark Ones had ceased their ancient depredations upon humankind and returned to the black abysses that had spawned them.

Rudy stepped cautiously around an oblique corner and through a dark complex of cells where, even at this late hour, a soft flicker of greasy yellow lamplight winked through a crack in a door and quarreling voices brushed his awareness like wind as he passed. Rodent eyes sparked redly at him from the murk; somewhere a chicken clucked loudly, followed by the sodden thump of a thrown boot.

Had it been the flame throwers that defeated the Dark?

He didn't think so; the pieces he'd found in the labs were few and incomplete. Besides, the Dark had been around for centuries after Dare's time. Had some other champion of humankind arisen, some other warrior who had dealt the Dark Ones so crippling a blow as to render them unwilling to continue the attack?

How had humankind defeated the Dark?

The question is the answer , Ingold always said.

The question is always the answer.

But Rudy had cudgeled his brains over all possible answers and had found himself faced with only that question.

Maybe Tir would remember how. Maybe his father Eldor would have remembered eventually, had he not perished in the blazing ruin of the Palace at Gae. Though Tir was yet too young to speak, the baby prince gave evidence of having inherited that terrible and mysterious legacy common among the descendants of Dare of Renweth, not only from his father, but-by carrier, as it were-from Minalde as well. Her memories were vague-recognition rather than recall- but if the flame throwers were the answer, wouldn't she have known it?

And if not the flame throwers, what?

White light gleamed palely before Rudy, reflecting against the slick, black stone of the walls. He passed the head of one of the main stairways of the Keep, its smooth construction announcing that it had been built at the time of the founding of that colossal maze itself. In a cage over it hung a single glowstone. a warning to the unwary.

How else had humankind defeated the Dark? Had the wizard-engineers stood at the top of those hellish stairways that led down to their hideous domains and dumped barrels of glowstones into that chasm?

Unlikely. Early experiment had shown that sufficient numbers of the Dark Ones could damp the light of glow-stones, just as they killed fires or sucked the strength from a wizard's spell of light.

Some other weapon, buried in the deeps of time? Something Ingold might have learned of in his years of study and wandering? Some piece of knowledge that lay like an unexploded bomb in the depths of that complex mind?

Rudy would have swapped several of his younger siblings for the answer to that one.

A drift of warmer air rose from the stairway, stirring his long hair. It bore on it