The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,134

as he stepped toward the door and whispered, "Can't you feel it?"

All around them, the nearness of the Dark Ones was like a buzzing heaviness in the air. The day was far spent. In the dense, gray mist that shrouded the city, it was impossible to guess the hour, but Rudy knew that the light would soon fade. In darkness, Ingold would be utterly beyond his power.

Cautiously, he advanced toward the door. The crescent end of his staff began to burn with a pale, smoky light, blurred by fog. By it, he could see the peering gargoyle faces carved in the pillars and the darkness of a broken stairwell beyond them, its walls bulging under the thrust of young tree roots. A drift of warmer air touched his face and stirred the fog around him.

A footfall rustled; a heavy boot crunched in the dried snarls of the ubiquitous vines. Rudy whirled, and the white glow of his staff, barely penetrating the slaty darkness that engulfed them, showed him Ingold standing a few feet away.

Rudy's nerve snapped. White light streamed from the tip of his staff as he lunged at the wizard. The old man parried the thrusts, casually sidestepping the whining steel that missed his eyes by inches. The cold phosphorescence of the staff illuminated the honed steel, but Ingold himself was all but invisible in fog and darkness. Rudy pressed his attack, sobbing, exhausted, his chilled muscles cramping, and the wizard faded before him. Somewhere in the boil of vapors behind him, he could sense Gil moving, keeping on the fringes of the fight.

Vines seemed to knot themselves around his ankles, and he tripped, barely keeping hold of his staff as he fell. He heard Ingold retreating through the tangles of foliage and scrambled hastily to his feet, wading after the wizard through the oddly persistent creepers. Darkness hid Ingold from him, but he heard the old man pause.

A paving- stone tilted under Rudy's feet, pitching him into the rubble that choked an abandoned gateway. Hands lacerated, heedless of anything but his frantic need to finish his quarry before darkness permitted Ingold to take on the form of the Dark Ones, Rudy plunged after the wizard, down a long tunnel of black fog and shadows.

In the open ground outside the city walls, the darkness seemed less pressing. The leaden mists cleared a bit, showing Rudy the wizard moving off downhill, his stain-mottled mantle blending into the colors of the fog. Rudy threw all of his strength into a clearing-spell, a wind to scatter the mists, and felt on his mind the cold grip of counterspells that strangled his power into silence. The mists wrapped tighter around him, a dun burial shroud, and he broke into a run, feverish with terror at what should happen if he met Ingold and what should happen if he did not.

He found himself stumbling blindly through a gray, steaming world, his way blocked at every turn. The stunted corpses of dead trees loomed before him in the darkness. Roots snagged at his feet, pitching him headlong into slimy patches of mud and scum. The skirts of his sodden coat slapped wetly at his thighs, his streaming boots felt weighted down with mud and water, and his body was chilled and aching to the bone. Lost, half-frozen, and gummed to the eyebrows with mud, he stumbled on alone through a nightmare of darkness and fog.

Then, wholly unexpectedly, he burst into a clearing in the mists. He staggered to a halt, the flickering light of his staff casting a wan illumination over the scene before him.

He saw Ingold and Gil standing, facing each other, close enough that the magelight mingled their two shadows into a single pool of indigo blue on the rock-hard ground. The sword Ingold held gleamed in his hand as he turned it and offered its hilt to Gil.

She took it and tested its familiar weight. Her long hair was half-unraveled around her face, and her eyes were gentler than he had ever seen them; for the first time since Rudy had known her, he could understand how a man could find this scholarly, violent, and entirely contradictory woman fascinating.

Ingold stood before her for a long moment, his hands empty at his sides. Framed by the long, dirty mane of white hair, his face was haggard, the bones seeming to stand out through colorless flesh, but for an instant Rudy found it impossible to believe that this man was anything other than the