The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,29

"Nah," he said softly, "they wouldn't have let you marry some old wizard's apprentice anyway. And besides, when you were sixteen, I bet you were flat-chested and pimply."

"I never had pimples," she argued, choking on tears and unexpected laughter. "Stop it! You make me laugh."

"That's not all I'll make you," he murmured through her lips.

"You all right?"

Ingold nodded without opening his eyes. Against the black fur of the very grubby bearskins on which he lay-the only blankets his narrow cot boasted- his face looked suddenly white under the weatherburning. Gil paused, irresolute, a cupful of smoking tea in her hands. Then she stooped to set it on the floor where he could reach it and turned to go. "You'll have a helluva time falling asleep," she remarked over her shoulder at him, "unless you take off your sword belt and your boots."

Still the wizard did not open his eyes. He merely murmured, "You're wrong about that."

But a flicker of witchlight glimmered into existence over his head and slowly spread and strengthened through the room. It picked out the delicate marquetry of the desk that she and Alde had scrounged for him from a distant storeroom on the fifth level, its pearl and pearwood surface invisible under piles of old parchment scrolls, dingy with smudged ink and greasy with lanolin. Jewel-clasped books salvaged from the ruin of Quo lay with their open pages a counterpane of red and blue and shimmering gold leaf. Among and between everything lay wax note tablets, like the tiles of a Brobdingagian Scrabble game. The mess overflowed the desk to litter the floor; the heaped books, scattered tablets, and twinkling gray glass of those enigmatic crystal polyhedrons surrounded the desk like a pool that spread itself along the wall almost to the foot of the hard, narrow cot. Gil paused, then came back and began to pull off the wizard's boots.

"The other mages will be in for dinner soon," she told him as she did so. "If I wanted to risk an amphibian future, I'd try to talk Kara's mother out of something for you now."

Outside in the common room, the harsh, screechy voice of the little witchwife Dame Nan could be heard, accusing someone-probably Dakis the Minstrel-of being a pestilent food thief, deserving of every ailment from cold sores to piles, and threatening to inflict him with the same if he dared to violate her kitchen again. Kara's reproving "Mother!" sounded faintly from another room.

Ingold smiled and shook his head. "Thank you, child," he said softly as Gil dumped the sodden boots beside the door. Then she thought he had fallen asleep, for he lay unmoving, his eyes closed and his hands resting limply at his sides. But oddly enough, Gil did not leave. She stood in the doorway looking down at him, her wide, chill gray eyes curiously blue in the fading glow of the witchlight.

"Ingold?" Her voice was barely audible against the rising chatter in the common room behind her.

"Yes, child?"

"Did you mean what you said? About its being hopeless?"

His eyes opened. For a moment, he considered her, thin and gawky, like a teenage boy in her outsize surcoat. "Hopeless or not," he murmured, "you at least will have returned to the safety of your own world by the time the army marches. But no," he added, seeing the look of grief that crossed her face, "there is always hope."

"But you don't think that in this case it lies with Rudy's flame throwers," Gil finished for him. "But, dammit, Ingold, the Dark were defeated once and driven back underground. The forces that did it can't have been much more numerous than we are here. And the Dark seem to think that you know the answer."

His eyelids drooped closed again, and he gave a faint, tired chuckle. "The answer to what question?" He sighed. "If the memory of how the Dark Ones were defeated has come down to Tir, it may very well be useless by the time he gets old enough to understand it. The Dark Ones' fear is that I will remember sooner, or that I already know."

He laughed again, a dry, weary sound. "The irony of it all is that I haven't the slightest idea what it is that they believe I know.

"I thought that, like Minalde, I might recognize what I could not remember independently. The memories that she inherited through the House of Bes could only be triggered by something she had seen before, but they were no less