The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,30

true. I have meditated on it; I have cudgeled my brains and combed the records of all things touching upon my research and Lohiro's that I could bring from the library at Quo..." His scarred fingers moved toward the heaped books that strewed the desk at Gil's elbow. "And there is nothing. No reason at all for the Dark Ones to fear me."

"If they don't fear you," Gil asked, "why do they want you?"

He lay silent for a long time, and again Gil wondered if he might have fallen asleep. But in the dark, heavy fur of the blankets, his hand clenched suddenly, and for an instant his brow furrowed, as if with pain. Then, just as suddenly, his expression smoothed again, and he said, "I haven't the foggiest idea. Tell me why that one party of mages returned prematurely from exploring the Nest in the Vale of the Dark."

Gil did a mild double take at the swift change of subject. "How did you know about that?"

His mouth moved a little under his beard-he might have been smiling. "I should be a poor mage indeed if I couldn't follow the doings of my colleagues in my crystal," he said. "Shadow of the Moon-the Raider shaman-was in charge of that party. I expected they should be the first to return to the Keep, since the Vale of the Dark is only a day's journey away, but they returned so quickly that I think they never went down that Nest at all."

"They didn't," Gil said, leaning her bony shoulders against the doorframe. "But then, I expected they wouldn't be able to. When you look down on the Vale from above, you can see how the outlines of the old city of the Dark there have been changed by the gradual movement of the earth. The pavement in which the stairway is located is so badly displaced that I'm not surprised the stairs themselves will no longer admit humans."

"Indeed?" The blue eyes opened, suddenly sharp and alert. "You guessed that?"

Gil nodded and folded her arms. "It would stand to reason, if these mountains are geologically active enough to have displaced the pavement. Those ruins are old- older than our conceptions of time. The Dark formed and shaped that Vale among the older rocks of the foothills, but they couldn't stop the subsequent lift of the earth enough to keep their stair open."

The wizard considered this for a moment, looking intently into the shadows of the ceiling over his head. Then he rolled painfully up onto one elbow and reached for his cup of tea.

"Interesting," he said quietly. In the half-darkness of the alcove, the witchlight falling on his white hair was like strong moonlight on mountain snow; his face, below it, was plunged in shadow. "You once asked me, child, why you were here -why it had been you, and not someone else, whom circumstances had thrust into exile from all you knew and wanted."

Gil looked down at her knobbed and bony hands, lying on the frayed black homespun of her sleeves, and said nothing, but her lips tightened.

"What do you know about the moss in the Nests?"

She jerked her head up, thoroughly startled by what seemed like a whole new topic of conversation, to meet the old man's intent, curious gaze. "Nothing," she said.

"But you guess something about it," Ingold pursued. "You said as much back in the guardroom."

Ruefully, she chuckled. "Oh, that. It isn't important. It's just that I flashed onto something from my college biology course which would explain why the moss is flammable, that's all. It's nothing that has anything to do with the Dark."

"Isn't it?" the wizard murmured. "I wonder. Do you remember, Gil, when you and I visited the Vale of the Dark, how you looked back from the mountain above and saw by the slant of the evening light the pattern of the ancient walls that told you there had once been a city there? I would never have taken those changes in the colors and thickness of vegetation for anything but a rather curious pattern in the valley floor."

"Well, of course." Gill shrugged. "You didn't sit through three Historiography 10-B lectures on the subject of aerial photography, either."

Ingold smiled. "No. Instead, I devoted a considerable portion of my brilliantly misspent life learning how to cast horoscopes-an interesting pastime, but not much to the point. What I am getting at is this: The answer to the question of how the Dark were defeated-how they might be