The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,26

will become degenerate villagers, ignorant and brutal, prey to the stronger and the better-armed. And that I will never permit." His eye touched them all: Melantrys, her delicate nostrils flared as if against the stink of Ambassador Stiarth's perfumes; Aide, still looking down at her hands in angry silence; the Bishop of Penambra in his patched red cloak and scavenged brocades. "I will let nothing interfere with it. Believe me, there is nothing-and no one-that I would not sacrifice to bring about a lasting alliance with the Empire."

"Including yourself, my lord?" a new voice inquired, a flawed, mellow voice that spoke from the dense shadows of the barracks door. Gil looked up at the sound of it, warmth kindling in all her veins.

Alwir swung around, recognizing, as they all did, that shabby form in the darkness. "So you've returned," he said.

The firelight glittered on flecks of sleet that clung to Ingold's stained mantle. As he stepped into the light of the room and pushed back his hood, Gil was shocked at how old he looked. Behind him, Rudy and Kara emerged from the darkness and they, too, were mud-splattered and silent, weary past caring about anything. Gil saw Alde look up and Rudy turn his face away, as if he could not bear to meet the joy that shone in her eyes.

"Did you think I would not return, my lord?" Ingold set down the satchel that he carried. From within it, Gil heard the faint click of wax tablets. Janus was already on his feet, his shadow blotting the light of the hearth as he bent to pour a cup of so-called guardroom wine from the small kettle that was warming beside the fire.

"No," Alwir said at last. "No, you have shown yourself proof against most calamities, my lord wizard."

"Or able to avoid them," Govannin remarked acidly.

"It is the secret of my indecently long life," Ingold agreed with a small smile. "Thank you, Janus-this is the other secret of my indecently long life." He sipped the steaming liquid, which was not wine at all, but a horrible compound of hot water and homemade gin.

The Commander of the Guards steered him to a seat on one of the rough benches at the table, and Alde moved her heavy skirts aside so that he might sit. Rudy and Kara took seats on the raised brick hearth beside Melantrys, their thawing garments steaming and dripping unnoticed in the heat. Where Kta had vanished to, none of them could have said, but he was found later, peaceably warming his skinny hands by the kitchen fire in the Wizards' Corps complex, eschewing the councils of the mighty.

"My lord," Ingold said at length, "are you still set upon this invasion?"

The Chancellor's voice was brisk, but there was an edge of wariness in it. "Of course I am still set upon it," he said. "Can it be done?"

The wizard's eyes glinted in their discolored hollows. "Rudy believes that it can."

"Indeed?" Alwir's eyebrows quirked. "And I collect you hold a different opinion, my lord wizard?"

"It is folly," Ingold said simply.

The Chancellor's thin smile broadened, without increasing its warmth by a single degree. "Well," he murmured, "fortunately for us all, you are no longer the sole source of information on the subject, are you? Was it folly that enabled Dare of Renweth to defeat the Dark?"

Ingold made no reply to this baiting. With a sneer, Alwir turned away. "Rudy? Are those magical devices of yours the answer to this riddle, after all?"

Rudy looked up, as if startled out of some private, terrible dream. "I don't know whether they were Dare's solution to the problem or not," he said in a voice thick with fatigue. "But we can damage the Nest badly, maybe so badly they'd have to abandon it completely."

And haltingly, half-numbed with exhaustion, he told them of what he had found in the Nest-the vast complexity of that dark and filthy realm, the ability of the Dark Ones to damp light or fire, and the curiously flammable properties of the dried, leprous brown moss.

"That will be our strength," he concluded. "If we sent a strike force down each of the two main branches of the Nest, to cover the firesquad as far down as the nurseries, the fires would spread in the moss as the army retreated. I think that would do it."

"Especially if the mosses themselves are the nitrogen fixers for the whole ecosystem of the Nests," Gil added unexpectedly. "If that's so-and that's what it sounds