The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,21

arms and legs. Rudy was cursing, and the fugitive was gasping in surprise and despair. Rudy twisted himself free as the swarming plasmoid bodies descended on them both, soft coils of tentacles unfurling like dripping snakes.

Wyatt Earp himself couldn't have cleared leather faster.

The flame thrower belched light and fire, streamers of chrome-yellow flame pouring from its thick barrel, unbearably brilliant in the eternity of the underground dark. The fire flowed up over those slick backs in a licking torrent of searing gold.

By the first blast of the light, Rudy had a confused glimpse of the fugitive's face, an emaciated skull between hanks of grayed, dirty hair. Then the man screamed, covering his eyes that had not seen light since the fall of Gae, and the Dark were on them again.

But the fire was spreading among them; they blundered into one another like a flock of Hindenburgs in the confined space of the tunnel. Conflicting winds swept up from below, and Rudy whirled, bracing his feet on the slippery floor and firing downward, the noise of the flame a smothering roar. At the same instant, the spiny cable of a lashing tail grabbed at him from above, and he fired as he turned, the leaping column of silken heat brushing the withered moss of the cavern mouth beyond.

It went up like torched paper. Rudy blinked and flinched away in shock as the fires spread, rushing back into the empty cave below with a velocity that was horrifying. Stalactites, columns, twisting alabaster veils, and clumped masses of crystals leaped into ruddy visibility, their colors dazzling-bronze, rose, and cream-all smeared with the ruddy dye of the flame. He had a confused vision of Dark Ones falling in writhing clouds from the unseen ceiling, twisting about in agony at the brightness, splattering acid as they fell and were consumed by the greedy roar of the flame.

Then he fled, all hope of concealment shattered, and felt the winds of the Dark swirling on his back.

He was plunged again into darkness as he hit the wider tunnel beyond, staggering in the noisome muck of the steep floor. His traced, invisible runes beckoned; he turned, and the flame thrower spewed fire at the Dark Ones in his wake. The massed blackness erupted into flames, twisting and thrashing as they blazed, sparks sizzling in the wet, black mosses of the floor. Channeled by the tunnel walls, the winds raged around him, and he ran blindly from mark to mark, turning every now and then to fire at his pursuers or to clear the path before him. Where the sparks fell on the patches of brown and withered moss that blotched the walls like mildew, they exploded into violent flame.

Blind, white semihumans fled shrieking through the fire, covering huge, rudimentary eyes against the light. Men and women in rags ran past him, screaming in terror and confusion. Walls and ceiling were bursting into flame all around him, and he remembered with sudden horror that the last cavern before the one that contained stair and rope was covered in the brown, dried moss. The knowledge was like an electrified spur. It would take only a single spark to set the whole thing off, and if he were halfway across it at the time...

The upper caverns were a choked confusion of smoke, darkness, and half-lights. He stumbled where the ground was slippery and fought against the screaming humans and almost-humans who blundered against him, grabbing at his arm, shrieking unintelligible words. Columns of smoke burned his eyes, thrashed by the winds of the Dark. Rats streamed around his feet, fleeing the inferno below.

In the last cavern, there was nothing but a wild storming of darkness. Rudy could feel the power of the Dark Ones already reaching out, damping the flames as they damped light. He felt the immense might and will that throbbed in the swirling air. Brown moss and old bones crunched under his feet. The light of the fire streamed up from the tunnels behind him, touched the limestone lace with sulfurous glory, and outlined the billows of the smoke. Black, shining bodies poured through the passage that led upward, a torrent of dripping slime and gaping mouths. They streamed like a river toward the fire in the passageway, putting out their power to quench it, to damp it. Rudy flung himself up the rockslide toward the next tunnel just as one of the hapless herd-creatures, burning and shrieking as it ran, fled blindly into the cavern, stumbled, and