The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,133

old man to fox his aim. In fact, there wasn't much he'd put past the old man at all. As Gil hung panting on his unresisting arm, his eyes met the wizard's. Under the weedy tangle of beard, Ingold's smile broadened. He lifted Gil's sword in salute and walked out into the mist-enshrouded court without another word.

With a strength born of desperation, Rudy shook Gil off him and slammed the useless flame thrower back into its holster. With his staff held before him like a spear, he plunged into the milky vapors of the court. He stopped, panting, scanning the wall of mist before him, his hair hanging wetly in his eyes. Some sign-some clue...

Steel whined, and he barely parried as the sword whipped down from behind. Ingold had merely stepped to one side of the arch, letting Rudy pelt out past him into the open. The blade snarled thinly against the metal of the staff's sharpened crescent, brushing it aside. Rudy moved back, staggering in the icy water and narrowly avoiding the loss of his staff. He attacked the sword, trying to catch it between the crescent's points and wrench it from his opponent's hands, as he had seen Lohiro do. But he had neither the former Archmage's tuning nor his precision of eye. The sword nicked away. Rudy sprang clear of its slash and sank to his knees in something under the surface of the waters that shifted and bubbled horribly.

Parrying frantically, he backed to higher ground. Ingold had a far better sense of footing than he and drove him relentlessly, exhausting him in a defensive battle that left him no opportunity for riposte. Slimy things clung to his ankles as he scrambled to a ridge of dry pavement. The wizard cut at him out of the darkness of the fog. He felt the staff parried, the prongs knocked aside, and heard the sheering whisper of the descending blade. In desperation he caught the sword on the iron-hard shaft, up close to the hilt. For a split second of locked strength, he stood almost breast to breast with the vagabond specter he fought and found himself looking into those blue, brilliant, disconcerting eyes.

There's something wrong , he thought suddenly. Lohiro... Lohiro ...

Then Ingold smiled, though his face was white with strain. An instant later, he reached out one heel to hook Rudy's braced foot from beneath him. Rudy toppled backward with a sickening plouf ! into the squishy waters of the slough, and Ingold was gone, flitting like a wraith into the smoky darkness.

Gil emerged from the fog a second later and helped him to his feet, dripping and shivering and utterly filthy. She picked up his fallen staff and handed it to him. "There," she whispered, pointing into the murk. "Can you see him?"

Something moved in the opaque mists that filled a broken gateway. The mists stirred, as if brushed by the torn hem of a mantle.

Rudy picked a rotting weed stem from the matted fur of his coat collar, streaming dirty liquid at every move. "Let's go," he muttered.

At times in that horrible pursuit, Rudy remembered bitterly that Ingold had originally led the reconnaissance to Gae because of his knowledge of the alleys and byways of the ruined town. He hunted the old man through broken and abandoned mansions, filled with the rotting loot of the city and stinking of ghouls and foxes, and along streets and courtyards where the thickening veils of fog wreathed impassable tangles of rope-tough vines. Sometimes Rudy found the mark of the wizard's boot in the smeared mud by a cracked marble cistern or printed in the frost that furred the broken cobbles. He traced his quarry in the stirring of water, in the slurred track of Ingold's cloak over the dew that beaded the greenish mats of filthy mosses like silver carpets of diamonds, and in the matted, overgrown bushes broken by the passage of his body. And always Rudy thought, There's something wrong here. I'm missing something important. Lohiro ...

A rustling sound caught his attention, the slip of feet over stone. He stopped, his eyes struggling to pierce the cloudy miasma that seemed thicker there than it had appeared elsewhere in the ruined city. He thought he saw a dark doorway in a wall, set between molded pillars leprous with moss and festooned with the brown, knotted cables of clutching vines.

Beside him, Gil paused, her boots scrunching softly in the twisted mats of half-dead vegetation. She caught his sleeve