The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,139

In a very short time the Dark Ones would have cracked the last citadels of humankind, devoured its final representatives-and themselves perished."

"Could they have?" Rudy asked doubtfully. "They tried to break the Keep at the beginning of winter..."

"They could," Ingold said somberly. "Believe me, Rudy, they could. I know the Dark-now.

"They saw no alternative to the annihilation of both races until this autumn, when I crossed the Void to speak to you, Gil. Then they became aware of the Void. When I rescued Tir from the destruction of the Palace at Gae, one of them crossed it... And they have hunted for me ever since."

He folded his hands and sat gazing into the fire. Around them, the wet, slushy plain was emerging from obscurity, gray sheets of ice lying in all directions, pricked with black friezes of branches and sedge. The mournful cry of rooks grated faintly into the dawn air.

"They wanted me to find them a new world," the wizard went on softly, as if scarcely aware now of either his surroundings or his listeners. "A world such as this one was eons ago, when the Dark first built their eldritch cities in swamps whose very memory is no more than stratum of pebbles in the bed of a desert stream. A warm world, dark and marshy, where they could tend their herds, build new cities, and dream."

Against the paling sky, the broken walls of Gae were clearly visible, a black crenelation against the gray of filthy waters. It was a city wholly empty now, except for the rats that fed on jewel-circled bones. As if in a vision, Rudy saw again the mists rolling back from the ruins of Quo and heard the dim boom of the breakers at the foot of Forn's shattered Tower. Dull anger burned in his heart for the greedy callousness that had crushed and wasted this world and then passed on, unscathed and unavenged.

"So they made you their slave," Rudy said quietly, "and left the rest of us to pick up the pieces."

Ingold glanced sideways at him. Life seemed to be stirring back into the wizard. The sunken, corpselike weariness was passing from his face. "Oh, I was never their slave," he murmured. "Merely their-collaborator."

Rudy looked up sharply.

"The Dark Ones never took over my mind," Ingold explained gently. "They couldn't do that-not if they wanted me to retain the knowledge of how the Void operates. If I were their slave, do you think I would have tried to get you out of town before you were caught up in the spells of the Dark and drawn along with the herds through the Void?"

In a dull voice, Rudy said, "Then after all they did- destroyed your world and murdered your friends-you helped them willingly."

Annoyance sparkled deep in the azure eyes. "Hardly willingly."

When Rudy still sat in smoldering silence at the unfairness of it, Ingold asked, "If you are in a fight and your opponent knocks you down and then walks away, do you call him back to hit you again, in the hope of defeating him?"

"Well- " Rudy said grudgingly. "Some people do."

"And that, Rudy, is how some people get noses like yours," the wizard retorted. "As for the rest-it is finished."

"You know they rose in the Alketch?" Gil said, after a moment's silence.

"I was informed when it happened."

"Did you know Eldor is dead?"

The wizard sighed, and it seemed that his broad shoulders sagged a little, as if at bad news long expected. He shook his head wearily. "But it hardly surprises me. He did not want to live very badly. As you yourselves have no doubt found, the world into which we have all been thrust is a poor trade for the security and comfort of civilized life." He looked up from the fire, the cool pallor of dawn now clearly visible about them. "And that, my children," he said, "brings us all to the time that I have come to dread. We are where we should have been many months ago, had not politics and the chances of fortune intervened."

He took Gil's hand and rose haltingly to his feet. Behind him, the first warmth of the sun infused the neutral landscape with color, tinting the rocks that protruded through the dirty snow with the richness of rust and indigo, edging the broken ice in burnished gold. Looking down suddenly, Gil could see in the protected hollows of the rocks that surrounded their camp the first green threads of grass and the hardy