The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,111

was singing, as she did to herself when she was alone.

"You were the love that I should have met,

Had the roads we walked on crossed-

But time and the stars forbade it then

And the days of the summer were lost.

Now the white snow covers the hillside.

The wedding chimes are rung,

And my harp strings mourn the music

Of a song that was never sung."

He heard her voice crack a little. There was a long, desperate silence, her breath fighting sobs. Then she whispered to herself, "Don't do this. He's gone, it's over. Don't torture yourself. He's safe, and that's all that matters."

Tir's voice spoke, babbling and unintelligible, and Alde replied with a forced and broken lilt. Rudy turned away from the door, feeling as if nails were being pulled from his flesh.

If she thinks I left with the wizards , he thought, so much the better. She's taken the worst impact of the hurt already. It would be senseless cruelty to make her go through another farewell .

He stumbled down the black hallways with an ache in him that he had never dreamed possible. You wanted to hear her voice , he told himself bitterly, and you did . It was the last time he would hear it, the last time he would walk these halls. And Alde would remain, virtually a prisoner of a mad, twisted husband- He shoved the images from his mind, as he had shoved those other dreams of the crushing weight of stone and darkness. There was nothing that he could do. Tomorrow he would slip quietly from the Keep and take the long road for...

Where?

Gettlesand was the logical choice.

People had begun to drift back into the Keep; he heard the footsteps of patrolling Guards and drew around himself the protective veils of illusion long before they came into sight. Against his will, other possibilities formed within his brain of where he might go when he took the road.

Quo ? He saw Ingold's hands again as they passed reverently across the gilded bindings of the books in the ruined library. Like the harp Tiannin, they would lie sleeping, sunk in a lake of timeless stasis, until they could be brought to safety. The thought of braving the Walls of Air again chilled him, but he realized that only he and Kara of Ippit, in all the world, had ever been through those terrible roads. All the others were...

Dead?

There was another choice, and he turned his mind from it, shivering as if with fever. He hastened his steps down the murky corridors, passing an occasional servant like a ghost in his cloak of illusion. He barely noticed the old man he walked by, a thin old creature in a grubby burlap tunic lugging water in a pail. He certainly did not see the smoldering resentment in the dark eyes that followed him down the thick gloom of the hall or the spiteful curl of the lips in the hacked-off remains of what had once been a very splendid, white, silken beard.

In spite of-or perhaps because of-the unnatural silence of the Keep, Rudy's sleep was fitful, tortured by feverish dreams. He had searched for Gil since the closing of the great gates, but had not glimpsed her among the Guards, and had not liked to reveal himself to anyone by asking. He had an idea that some of them knew that he had not left the Keep-those who had gone up the Pass with the other wizards certainly knew-but he did not know whom he could trust. The sensation of being there and not there was beginning to prey upon his nerves. To walk unseen in the Nest of the Dark was one thing; to walk unseen among people who had been his friends was quite another.

He had returned to his cell in the deserted complex, made his final preparations for tomorrow's departure, and fallen into a restless sleep in which his terrible dream of darkness alternated with the vision of the rain-slashed ruins of Quo, the mewing sea birds, and the possessed Archmage's empty, soulless eyes.

It was from this sleep that he woke in the hour before midnight, to feel the sudden warmth of a woman's body pressed to his, a silken river of unbound hair across his cheek, and warm lips clinging frantically to his. He caught Aide's body in his arms and crushed her to him, half-awake, feeling her sobbing against him in the dark.

"My love, my love, you're all right? Rudy, tell me you're all right.