The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,33

his will, were like a needle of ice and lightning, piercing to the bottom of Rudy's startled brain.

Then, with a shock as palpable as the cutting of a straining rope, he was released, and had to catch his balance on the edge of the table, for all the strength seemed to have gone out of his legs. The shadows in the stark, rectangular lab had deepened. Rudy realized that his own witchlight had been quenched and that the only illumination in the room was that which burned like searing ball lightning above Ingold's uncut, silky white hair. He found his hands were unsteady, his face drenched in sudden, icy sweat.

"Master- spells," the old man explained gently.

"Ingold." Alde straightened up from retrieving a dust-blackened Tir from beneath the workbench. "Could you work this-this gnodyrr -on me?" Her voice was halting, as if her own audacity terrified her. "I have no-no Master-spells. But I am descended from the House of Dare.

"We have all talked of the heritable memories of the House of Dare," she went on hesitantly, clasping the grimy and repulsively dirty scion of that House in her arms. "Eldor had them. Maybe Tir has them. My grandfather had them. And I can recognize things that my ancestors must have seen, here in the Keep, though I can't remember independently, as-as Eldor used to. But-why do we remember at all?"

Gil's head came up, her gray eyes suddenly sharp and hard.

"You see," Alde continued, her fingers plucking nervously at the cobwebs trailing from Tir's dress, "Gil and looked all over the Keep for records. Anything , to tell us how the Dark Ones may have been defeated. And there's nothing, nothing at all. But-but maybe the old wizards, the engineers who raised the Keep, knew that records do get lost, especially when, as you said, fire is the principal weapon."

Gil's finger stabbed out like a sword. "They tied the memory to the bloodline, and that was their record! A record that wouldn't get lost and couldn't be destroyed!"

"Could they do that?" Rudy asked doubtfully.

"I wouldn't put it past them."

Rudy glanced through the half-open door of the laboratory, past the blue-white bar of light with its diamond mist of dust motes, and out to the blackness of the hidden levels of the Keep beyond where lay hundreds of thousands of square feet of sunken hydroponics tanks filmed with dust, sealed labs and enigmatic storerooms, and pumps which had operated for a score of centuries on power sources that were still unknown.

When he thought about it, he wouldn't put much of anything past them.

"It seems that women remember these things differently from men," Alde said, gently thwarting Tir's attempts to escape her arms and investigate the frost-gray crystals that twinkled so invitingly on the workbench beside him. "But could what I half-remember be brought to the surface by- by gnodyrr ?"

"It could," the wizard said slowly, his voice low and very grave. "But at what cost to yourself, my lady? Gnodyrr is black magic. But more than that, in certain places, local Church rulings have condemned the subject of the spell as well to imprisonment, banishment, or death."

Aide's eyes seemed to get huge in her pale face.

Indignant, Rudy cried, "How come?"

"Don't speak of it so loudly," Ingold said. He leaned upon the workbench, his blunt, thick hands folded on the dark metal of its shining surface. The witchlight threw a curiously sinister glitter into his eyes. "Suppose I were to use gnodyrr on Minalde and instruct her to-oh, three years hence-put ground glass into her brother's food. Then I go away and don't return until Alde has been executed for murdering her brother, leaving the Regency open..."

"The Regency!" Gil gasped, as Aide's arms tightened involuntarily around her child's body. Indignant at such treatment and oblivious to the dangers that surrounded him, Tir demanded rather unintelligibly to be released at once to pursue his quest among the litter of the table.

Rudy felt suddenly cold all over.

Aide whispered, "But you wouldn't..."

"No," the old man agreed. "But the law is based upon the possibility that I might." His scarred fingers brushed the thick coils of hair that veiled her ashen cheeks. "If Alwir learned of it, the consequences to you would be unthinkable, my child. An expensive risk to run, for something that might not be among your memories at all."

No more was said on the matter that morning, and Rudy returned to his experiments with the flame throwers. Alde and her overly venturesome son remained after