The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,19
had never even imagined possible and which would never, he feared, be wholly eradicated from his mind.
The Dark Ones were everywhere. They crowded the walls and ceilings of measureless caverns of darkness, the clicking of their claws on the slick-polished limestone a constant chattering background to his sickness and dread. His wizard's sight showed him the wet gleam of their massed backs and the glitter of the foul fluid that dripped continually from those gelid surfaces. The stink of them, sharp and somehow metallic, clogged his nostrils, and he felt a mounting horror of being discovered and buried alive under those squirming, slithering beings.
That first enormous cavern, where he parted from the other wizards at the foot of the drop-off and the spelled rope, was the worst, for the Dark Ones crawled not only over ceiling and walls but across the floor as well, scurrying like monster roaches through the dry and crumbling brown moss, their long whiplike tails hissing through the withered vegetation and leaving trails of sticky wetness behind. Elsewhere they seemed to travel mostly on the ceilings of the tunnels, crawling among the stalactites and folded veils of stone as cavern succeeded cavern, the drip of their noisome slime tapping viscously on the mossy floors. Never having been subject to the terror and loathing of spiders and snakes, Rudy had not understood that morbid dread of simply being touched by something abominable. He understood it now.
He had thought that custom would acclimate him to their presence in time, so that he could have confidence in the spells that guarded him and walk more easily. But it never did. Nor did it dull the smothering horror of the darkness itself or the unreasonable sensation of the weight of all those miles of earth and stone pressing down upon him. Only those who had never been trapped in the darkness below the ground could compare the mazes of the lightless Keep of Dare with the realms of the Dark. For all its pressing darkness, its weight of enchanted steel and stone, the Keep was finite. But the darkness here was infinite. The weight was the weight of the earth. The crawling horrors populating this place were likewise infinite, as inescapable as this darkness that had never seen light.
Only now did he understand Ingold's warnings and conviction that an invasion of the Nests could never succeed. The tunnels were endless, twisting down and back into the black bowels of the earth, incomprehensible mazes that could swallow a dozen armies. Nauseated despair took him, as he wandered farther and farther in that sightless realm, along with a sense of black hopelessness. He wondered how any army, even with the technology such as Dare of Renweth had had at his disposal, could have made so much as a dent against the numbers and power of the Dark.
But he had been sent to observe. Through the panic, the loathing, and the numbing despair, certain details stood out absurdly clear. Rudy noticed that the Nests were warm, and a flow of warmer air marked the downward-leading tunnels, even where the Dark Ones did not come crawling forth like round-headed, filthy beetles from holes in the putrefying moss. He 'saw that different kinds of moss grew in different places. Heavy carpets of velvet green-black in many places-whole caverns, sometimes-were crumbling to brown and withered dust. In other places, clubbed, knobby growths infested the floors like stumpy, unspeakable forests. Whitish mosses hung like curtains of slimy seaweed down the dripping walls. The herds of the Dark fed greedily upon them all.
The herds of the Dark affected Rudy strangely. He found his loathing of those bandy-legged, bulge-eyed humanoids almost as intense as his horror of the Dark Ones themselves. He had known they were close to human, but had expected creatures like the dooic of the plains-hairy and apelike, trapped Neanderthals. But the creatures that shuffled through the withering beds of moss or squatted to lap at the bottomless pools of onyx waters were smaller, more delicate, and larger of skull; their chittering squeals as they fled, blinking, from any movement in the air sounded horribly analogous to speech.
They were not the only ones chewing bits of moss in their soft little teeth and staring about in the darkness with huge, terror-stricken eyes. In a cavern so vast that his eyes could not reach its end, Rudy found herds of men and women in torn and soiled rags, stumbling about and feeding on moss, muttering endlessly in