The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,14

helplessly. Before Quo , he thought. Before the desert. Before I knew what I was, and called fire from cold wood and darkness .

"Then it is well," the Chancellor said contentedly. "And when Minalde marries again..."

"Marries?"

"She is, after all, only nineteen," Alwir pointed out suavely. "I should hope, for the sake of your relationship, that you know her well enough to know that she cannot hold power by herself, particularly not in the sort of world which we are now entering. Even after the Dark are defeated, we will face a long war against them. It will be a time when the strong take what they can get. She cannot hold power under those circumstances-but a man could hold it through her."

"As you do," Rudy said bitterly.

Alwir shrugged. "I am her brother. Naturally, I would prefer that she remain single, but it is hardly fair to her. And I have no intention of letting her develop an affair with someone-wholly unsuitable."

Or strong enough to make trouble for you , Rudy thought through a daze of misery. Oh, Christ, Aide, what have I done to put you in his power like this ? In helpless rage, he cried, "Why can't you just let her alone?"

"My dear Rudy." Alwir chuckled softly. "You must know by this time that those who by their very existence hold power are never let alone by anyone. What have you to lose? I understand that your little affair is temporary and I have no objections to its continuing as such. But what happens after you have left her is no concern of yours. So what will you have lost?"

Only everything , Rudy thought, the stunned, empty numbness beginning to give way to a cold despair, like the touch of death upon his bones. Magic and love. Hope. Things that I found after never thinking I would have them . Like a well of inconceivable grief, the future yawned at his feet, the bleak, desolate world of car paint and barflies made a thousand times worse by the awareness of what he would lose. Since he had come to this world, he had often been in fear of death, but this was a fate that he had never even imagined-to be raped of the only two things that mattered in his life and condemned to live on without them in a world where they did not exist, and never had existed.
Chapter Three
The most beautiful city in the West of the World-that was how Minalde had spoken of Gae.

A garden, the Icefalcon had called it.

But the Icefalcon was said to be dead, murdered by the representative of the Empire of Alketch, Alwir's prospective ally. Minalde... Rudy did not want to think of Aide, though he had done little else for seven wretched days. And Gae sprawled, like the maggot-riddled corpse of a beautiful woman, with the bones starting to work up through discolored and falling flesh.

The wizards had entered the city at dawn, shadows in the dark mists that rose from the ice-scummed marshes. The swollen loops of the Great Brown River had engulfed the lower town, and even the upper, landward quarters bore foul evidence of the winter's floods. Fungi and mosses slimed the fallen walls; the square below the shadows of the crumbling turrets of the gate was a steaming, knee-deep slough, stretching as far as Rudy's eyes could penetrate the chill, pearlescent fog. In all that filthy, shrouded world, the only sounds seemed to be the distant drip of water and the cries of unseen rooks, quarreling over horrid prey.

Aide loved this town , he thought, surveying the leprous desolation before him. She was raised here; it was part of the life she loved, before the Dark... and before me .

Rudy hoped she would never have to see it as it was now.

He shifted his staff to his other hand-the six-foot, crescent-pronged staff that had once belonged to the Archmage Lohiro-and checked the weapon that hung holstered at his side. It was the only one of its kind, like a glass and gold Flash Gordon zap-gun-a hand flame thrower that could spit a thirty-foot column of fire. If he must enter the realm of the Dark, Rudy had resolved to enter it prepared.

The silence that hung over the town was frightening. Fog covered it like pewter darkness, masking the broken walls and fallen columns in opal veils of mystery. But it was not a dead silence that prickled Rudy's hair and made him strain his eyes