The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,16
slaughter some small and violently struggling animal. The ghouls moved at a furtive trot, glancing constantly over their shoulders; two of them were armed with cleavers, and the leader carried a jewel-encrusted sword.
They passed within a few feet of the wizards, murmuring among themselves, their glances flitting here, there, and everywhere but toward the spot where the wizards stood. Rudy heard the leader whisper, "That mothereating scout said the downriver people had moved up into this neighborhood someplace." The pregnant woman enlarged on the subject of the scout in terms that would have brought blushes to the cheeks of some Hell's Angels Rudy had known. Close to them, holding his breath against their reek, he could see that none of them looked very healthy. The youngest girl's face was blotched all over with savage scars-like huge vaccination marks, he thought stupidly, then realized that they must be from smallpox. The smaller of the two men sniffled and blew his nose on his already dripping sleeve; the other cursed him and told him to shut up if he didn't want to end up in the pot himself.
As the white vapors swallowed them once again, Rudy grasped who these must be.
They were the citizens of Gae who had not followed Alwir's convoy to the south -who had remained in Gae to loot the empty houses and live in wealth among the ruins. They'd taken the weapons from the charred hands of corpses buried under the wreck of the Palace-weapons that, as in the case of King Eldor, had proved the only means of identifying the burned bodies-and robbed the clothes from the backs of those dead in the cellars and streets. They'd clung to the city rather than trade it for the hardships of the road, making rats' burrows of homes in the majestic remains of the villas of the rich and fighting the former dooic slaves and one another for the dwindling supplies of food that were left.
It occurred to Rudy, as the mists swirled suddenly around Ingold's abrupt departure, that, if the old man had known the town in its heyday, he might just have recognized one of the ghouls as someone he had once known.
Rudy moved off after him, torn between revulsion and pity.
They crossed another court and turned down an alley that was so choked with the vines that seemed to have overtaken whole districts of the city that it was only with difficulty they could move through the persistently tangling mat at all. Elsewhere they had to cut through a veritable wall of them, and Rudy found himself wondering, as he struggled with the clinging, knotty stems, what this place would be like when darkness fell, with these ubiquitous snares slowing their flight. Then Ingold halted at the mouth of a narrow street beyond which could be seen only a wall of opal mist. In the growing light, his face was a harsh medley of planes and shadows; as in a certain type of art, the only spark of color lay in his eyes. He touched Rudy's sleeve, pointed across the court before them, and whispered, "There."
Rudy blinked, frowning into the mists. After a moment he realized that what he had taken for a darkening in the fog was the opaque bulk of some vast building, a suggestion of broken roof lines and sagging towers, of charred rafters, and of decay. Winds stirred at the billowing veils, smelling of water, corruption, and wet earth. The fogs were infused with the sudden, weak light of the sun; watery colors became slowly visible through the shimmering gauze. Edges seemed to step forth from obscurity. Piece by piece, pillar and pavement and pierced frieze of stone, the Palace of Gae manifested itself to them, like the many-colored corpse of a dead dragon, its bare ribs arching high into the milky air.
So this, Rudy thought, was where Eldor had left his bones in the flaming ruins. Where the Dark Ones had dragged Alde away, captive, and the Guards of Gae had rescued her on the edge of the chasm. Where Ingold had deserted the last battle, to carry Eldor and Minalde's infant son Tir across the cosmic Void and into the temporary safety of the mild and sunny realm of California.
This was where it all started.
And this, he realized with a foreboding chill, was where, somehow, now or later, it was destined to end.
The court lay bare and empty before them, a mud-smeared expanse of broken green and scarlet inlays, half-sheeted