The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,31
defeated again-may require, not a wizard, but a scholar. And that could be why you are here."
"Maybe," she agreed wryly. "But the fact remains that no record I've seen- either Govannin's chronicles, the old books you salvaged from Quo, or what Alde and I found here in the storerooms-goes back to the Time of the Dark. Nothing gets within a thousand years of it."
Ingold set his tea down and leaned gingerly back against his blankets. His white brows pulled together in a frown. "Why not?" he asked.
Gil started to reply, then left the words unsaid. The dog did nothing in the nighttime... and that, as Sherlock Holmes had once remarked, was the curious incident .
She returned to the barracks in a meditative mood.
Chapter Five
Oddly enough, it was Gil's mother who provided the clue to the unraveling of the riddle of the records of the Times Before.
Gil seldom dreamed about her mother; it had been months, indeed, since she had even thought of her. The two had never been close; Mrs. Patterson's relationship with her daughter had been largely based upon emotional blackmail, from which Gil's morbidly sensitive spirit had never recovered.
Yet she was not really surprised to find herself, dreaming, back in her mother's house, sitting on the sky-blue upholstery of the uncomfortable antique loveseat and listening to her mother chat with a podgy young medical student whom she had invited over "... to meet you, dear. I told him I had a daughter, and he said he would be so interested to get acquainted with you."
Gil reflected, in her dream, that her mother had not changed much at all. Spa-trim and tennis-golden, dainty and svelte in a designer suit of dusky rose, with not an electrum curl out of place, she did not look like a woman whose elder daughter had vanished without a trace and had been missing for months. As always, she monopolized the conversation with her vast fund of small talk, describing in detail how she had undergone the very newest thing in hypnosis therapy to stop smoking, and what wonders it had done for her-far more than any of the half-dozen other cures she had tried.
Feeling as gauche and tongue-tied as she always did, Gil looked down at her hands, wrapped around the thick crystal of a highball glass. She saw them as she knew them now, skeleton-thin and hard, nicked all over with the scars and blisters of sword practice. She saw that she was wearing her one rather unbecoming blue dress. Because her body had thinned with hardship and training, it fitted her less well than it ever had. Like a smear of dried ocher plastic, the scars she'd taken in her first fight with the Dark Ones showed below the line of her unfashionably short sleeve. She wore stockings and high heels, too; looking at her feet, she saw that one of the hose was developing a run.
"... of course, I do get tremendously nervous, what with my husband away so much and Gillian at school. What is it you're majoring in, dear?"
"History," Gil said quietly, and her mother's face blossomed into a smile as pretty as an arrangement of silk flowers.
"Of course. Do you know, dear, Dr. Armbruster here uses hypnosis for his psychiatric patients, too? Really, I found it so useful..." She lighted a cigarette, the California sunlight flashing off the gold of the lighter and the pink polish of her nails...
Gil opened her eyes. Down at the far end of the womens' barracks, the banked embers of the tiny hearth gave out a feeble glow; but other than that, the room was in darkness. In the mazes beyond the thin wall of the long cell, she could hear the measured tread of the deep-night watch going on its rounds.
She supposed, thinking about it later, that she should have felt some yank of sorrow at the sight of her parent and the world that she had lost. But for the moment her mind was preoccupied, and she lay, considering the barracks ceiling above her in the dark.
"Hypnosis?" Ingold said thoughtfully, his tongue unfamiliar on the English word. He leaned an elbow on the workbench in Rudy's lab and scratched one corner of his white mustache meditatively.
"Christ, I never thought of that!" Rudy exclaimed, turning from the mess of tubes, stocks, homemade sticky tape, and glittering glass bubbles that strewed the table before him to regard Gil with awe and delight. "You think it would work?"