The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,138

swaying slightly on his feet with weariness. In their bruised and darkened hollows, his eyes were heavy with fatigue, yet still serene. Rudy had not seen such peace in them since he and Ingold had set forth to seek the Archmage at Quo.

"And just what is it, Rudy, that you believe I have done?"

Rudy blinked at him, his face blank with surprise.

The wizard faltered unsteadily on his feet. Gil, who had stood in taut silence, stepped quickly to catch his arm. Their eyes met, and Rudy thought he saw a lightening, like a smile far back in the drugged blue depths, answering Gil's look of tormented doubt. Then Ingold sighed and turned to Rudy.

"You were very fond of your world, Rudy. But, given the infinite number of parallel universes, the Dark would hardly choose a place so-relatively-chilly and so extravagantly over-illuminated." His hand tightened suddenly on Gil's supporting shoulder.

"Come," he said quietly. "I am dying of cold and, at the moment, I doubt I have the strength even to call fire."

In the hollow below Trad's Hill, Rudy removed the spells of ward from their hidden camp and kindled a fire there. Gil brought out the walking staff that she had used on the journey from Renweth and returned it to Ingold as he sat beside the blaze.

"I saved it, along with your other things," she explained.

He smiled up at her as he took it. "You couldn't have known you would have the opportunity to return it to me," he said.

"No," she told him matter-of-factly. "I planned to bury you with it, after I killed you."

An impish lightness flickered for a moment in his eyes, and, rather to Rudy's surprise, he took her hand and lightly kissed her fingers. "That's my Gil."

Then Rudy realized what had been wrong. In all the battle and pursuit through the slimy, fogbound ruins of Gae, he had never seen in Ingold's eyes the inhuman emptiness that had characterized Lohiro's. Throughout that day and through the eerie horrors of the night, the wizard had been frightening, but he had never been other than Ingold.

"That's why they wanted you, wasn't it?" Rudy asked softly.

"Yes," the old man murmured and held out unsteady hands to the warmth of the blaze. "They-wanted to talk to me. I think they would have come and fetched me eventually, wherever I was."

Above the trampled crest of Trad's Hill and the broken skeleton of Gae, the sky was now stained with lavender, a soft dove color that infused the earth from horizon to horizon and lent an ashy pallor to the old man's white face.

"Did they take over your mind?" Rudy asked.

Ingold kept his eyes steadily on the fire. "In a manner of speaking," he replied. "They are not exactly one being, but they speak from mind to mind in a fashion that we would find-rather horrible. It was only when Lohiro, in an act of foolhardy desperation, gave his mind to the Dark that they realized communication with us was possible in any fashion at all." The lacerated flesh around his eyes puckered suddenly as he closed them, as if to shut out some hideous vision. "I fought them endlessly," he went on. "I don't know how long." A shiver racked his body, and he bowed his head, his forehead resting on suddenly clenched knuckles. "Of course it was stupid," he whispered. "They knew they had only to wait until I tired."

Gil's hand gently touched his bent shoulder, and gradually the shivering ceased.

At length he raised his head again. "The Dark were in desperate straits, you see. They are a farsighted race, with understanding of things whose mere existence we ourselves have barely guessed. You were only partially right, Gil, when you spoke of a-a weather cycle. The deep cold spell of three thousand years ago was only a small fluctuation in a much longer, deeper cycle. This one-the one that began this autumn, after what I suppose could only be called a warning flutter twenty years ago-will last uncountable years of time. The Dark Ones said that the ice in the north will spread until it covers much of the world. It may be possible for humankind to survive the cold, they said-but the herds of the Dark would not last another two years. The famine in the Nest had already reached proportions far more severe than ever in the past, and there was no hope of salvaging the herds in the deepest caverns and waiting for the cold to pass.