The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,37

looked sick with fatigue, her soaked hair straggling around a taut face. But she moved with a deadly lightness before which he personally wouldn't have wanted to find himself on the receiving end.

"Take your own death as a given," Ingold told her. "Forget about it. It's your opponent's death you want." And he attacked her with sudden viciousness, taking her off balance and driving her with brutal force to the wall. Rudy saw the split cane sting her flesh and winced, for he had seen the bruises that the practice swords could leave. The wizard's face never lost its serene expression, but in his eyes was an almost inhuman intensity that Rudy had seen only once before, in the rain-slashed ruins of Quo. Ingold cut his way through Gil's defenses and always seemed to be a step ahead of her dodges. Her back to the wall, she hacked against his greater strength, droplets of sweat flying from the ends of her hair. Finally she faked, parried, and slipped through his guard and past him, out into the center of the room, gasping for breath.

"Good." The old man smiled as if he hadn't been all but bludgeoning her to death a moment before. "But breathe lightly, smoothly; exhale on your cuts and let the inhaling take care of itself. Else your opponent will outwind you." He swept in with a snarling cut that Gil was barely ready for, the blades momentarily tangling, and the tip of Gil's weapon broke through his guard to brush his retreating ribs.

"You're a woman," Ingold chided. "You haven't a man's strength. A woman's attack is in and out, before he has time to touch you... So."

"In a way," Kara's voice said softly in Rudy's ear, "I could almost be glad that- all this-came to pass. For I would have remained all my life in Ippit, were it not for the rising of the Dark. I would never have been able to study magic under him, as I have done here."

From the commons behind them, the warm reflection of the firelight woke mosaic fragments of color in the shawl she wore and glimmered like cornsilk in its long fringes. Rudy could not remember having seen that shawl before. Its oddly primitive embroidery looked like Gettlesand work.

"He said something like that once," Rudy remarked quietly. " Nothing is fortuitous ... There's no such thing as coincidence."

"He's right," Kara agreed. Rudy felt and heard, rather than saw, the movement of her gray dress as she leaned against the wall beside him. "Ingold had left Quo by the time I studied there. He was pointed out to me once at a distance,.

but I never had the nerve in those days to go up and speak to him. But I was always sorry I never had the chance to learn from him."

Rudy was silent, thinking of the learning that he would be leaving. His heart felt sick within him. "Was he a member of the Council, then?" he asked her. "I always thought he was kind of a maverick, but... There are times when I don't know what he is." The terrible strength of the Master-spell still lingered like a disquieting echo in his mind.

When she didn't answer, he looked back at her in the gloom and saw that her eyes were wide, startled and half-amused at his ignorance. "Ingold Inglorion," Kara said, "is the greatest wizard and swordsman in this age of the world. He was the Archmage of Quo and Master of the Council for twelve years-he retired in favor of his student Lohiro and turned over the Master-spells to him- oh, five, six years ago now. Even before the destruction of Quo, there was no one alive to equal him; there have been legends about him ever since he came out of the desert. He never told you?"

Rudy shut his mouth, which had unfortunately come open, and felt the hot color rise to his face. He felt like a fool. He had seen the way the others treated Ingold, even the haughty Thoth.

His eyes returned to the lighted room before him-to Gil, pursuing the wizard with genuine battle fury in her pale eyes, and to Ingold, parrying, sidestepping, drawing her on. Below his rolled-up sleeves, the wizard's forearms were heavy with muscle and striped with whitened scars. Rudy remembered the duel at Quo and how, even in the worst of the battle, Ingold had never feared Lohiro's magic.

There was a quick ghost of a smile in Kara's voice.