The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,36

Brother Wend whom he and Ingold had met in Gettlesand, the village priest who had refused to risk his soul, as he believed, by acknowledging himself a mage.

He looked thinner in the harlequin shadows of the Aisle than he had in the little fire-lit cell in the back of the Church. He had left off shaving his head and face, and both were covered in a uniform black stubble that glistened with flecks of ice. His eyes, as he faced Ingold in silence, were the eyes of a man who had crossed half a continent to seek his own damnation-haunted, weary, empty of all but despair.

Ingold stepped forward, his face filled with compassion. "So you came," he said quietly.

After a long moment the priest whispered, "After you spoke with me that night I -I could not stay away. I tried. But if-if mages are needed for the defeat of the Dark, I will become one, though it costs me my soul."

All around them, the Aisle was a jostling sea of weary bodies, lit by crazily bounding torchlight and raucous with soldiers' raillery and quartermasters' curses. But for an instant of time, it seemed to Rudy that these two stood alone, wizard and priest. The silence between them seemed stronger than the noise that rang on all sides.

Then, like a steel file, the voice of Bishop Govannin grated furiously into that silence. "You cannot!" She took a step forward in a billow of flame-colored vestments, her cobra eyes black with hate. "Apostate!" she cried.

Wend flinched, white-faced, from the balefire that seemed to burn in her face.

"Let the damned look to their own! You belong to the Church!" Her voice shook with livid rage-rage that any would desert the ranks of the Faithful, no matter what the stakes involved. She advanced upon Wend like a death-angel, and Ingold quietly stepped between them, meeting her scorching gaze with eyes that were at once utterly mild and utterly immovable.

"I should have known it would come to this!" she spat at him. "That, in your arrogance, you would rob what belongs to the Church! What belongs to me!" She was literally trembling with fury, her knuckles white under the thin skin of her clenched, skeletal hands.

"Well, he is yours, Ingold Inglorion," she whispered in a dry voice that bit like broken glass. "You are his seducer. On your head lies the damnation of his soul."

The little priest looked away, hands fluttering to cover his gray lips, but Ingold did not move. The Bishop's wrath broke over him like a wave on a rock.

"We damn our own souls, my lady," he replied quietly. "Or save them."

"Heretic!" Her rasping whisper was more violent, more terrible, than a shriek. "The time will come when God will judge you for what you have done today."

"God has judged me all my life," the wizard said. "But that is God's privilege, my lady. It is not yours."

For a moment she faced him, her lips drawn back, the aura of her anger consuming her like a terrible heat. Then she turned and swept away into the confusion of the Aisle, leaving Rudy, Aide, and Tirkenson all feeling that they had been scorched by their proximity to her wrath.

Night had fallen. Rudy and Kara of Ippit were standing together in the doorway of the large, square chamber just off the Wizards' Corps common room where the younger mages generally engaged in their more strenuous pastimes like invisible tag or dazzledart, watching Gil and Ingold fence.

The room before them was flooded with soft, brilliant witchlight, which showed every crack and strain on its grimy walls with merciless clarity. In that even, shadowless light, the old man and the girl circled each other, balanced to strike, with long, split-cane practice swords in their hands. Ingold's white robe was blotched with dark patches of sweat, and his silky hair was stringy and dripping, but he moved on his feet as lightly as a dancer. He sideslipped Gil's attack effortlessly, turned to let the hissing blade whine past him, and tapped his way through her guard with neither force nor haste.

"Gently, Gil," he urged and turned the plane of his body a few degrees, so that, without taking a step, he was no longer in the path of her rush. "Why tire yourself out? You care too much about it."

Gil muttered a curse. Rudy knew that she had practiced with the Guards earlier in the evening and he considered this additional training certifiable proof of lunacy. She