The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,39

saw alarm in her eyes, the desperate resolve melting suddenly into fears inculcated in her since childhood. He leaned down and kissed her icy lips. "Don't worry," he said softly.

"Ingold won't-won't really take over my mind-will he?"

"As stubborn as you are, I don't see how he could." Rudy helped Alde to her feet and led her toward the moving shadows of the lighted room next door.
Chapter Six
"Minalde?" Ingold's voice was gentle, but, like the shadowy aura of his power, it seemed to fill the tiny room. "Do you hear me?"

In a toneless voice, she replied, "I hear you." In the dim blue phosphorescence that illuminated the underground observation chamber. Aide's face looked white but relaxed; her open eyes were empty.

Sitting with Gil, like a couple of silent watchdogs by the door, Rudy thought how fragile Alde looked and how helpless. Ingold's power seemed to engulf her -the power of the Archmage that Rudy himself had felt through the strength of the Master-spell, bone-shaking for all its quietness. That terrible magic seemed to isolate the two figures, the old man in his patched robe and the girl whose face was like a lily against the smoke of her unbound hair, in a world where the only reality was Ingold's voice and the enchantment that seemed to shiver in the air like a bright cloud about them.

No wonder the Church fears him , Rudy thought. There are times when I fear him myself .

"Minalde?" the wizard said softly. "Where are you?"

"Here," she answered him, her eyes staring unseeingly into the circumscribed shadows that pressed so closely upon them. "In this room."

It had been Ingold's idea to undertake the gnodyrr in the old observation chamber, hidden in the depths of the subterranean labs. It was as safe a place as could be found within the crowded Keep, and Ingold said that not even a mage with a crystal could spy upon them there.

"You sure about that?" Rudy had asked him as they made their way through the dusty reaches of the abandoned hydroponics chambers.

"Of course," the wizard replied. "Every civilization which involves magic has its countermeasures. It is a relatively easy matter to weave shielding-spells into the stone and mortar of walls, so that what passes within them is hidden from divination. Rudy, you yourself know of the existence of rooms in which no magic can be worked at all- in fact, there are said to be several within the Keep."

Rudy had shivered at the memory of the vaults of Karst and the doorless cell with its queerly null, sterile smell... Nervously, he had drawn Alde closer to him, and she had returned the pressure of his arm gratefully, for she walked just then with her own fears. The heavy darkness of the lab levels seemed to press somehow more thickly about them.

"Why is that?" Rudy had asked. "Why would they make rooms like that? I mean, wizards built the Keep, for Chris-sake."

Gil, pacing along on Ingold's other side, had said, "It stands to reason. Govannin told me about-about renegade mages, wizards who used their powers for evil. You'd have to have some way to hold them in check. Even the Council of Wizards would have to agree to that."

Rudy thought about that now, watching the old man and the girl who was held in such absolute power. He understood now why gnodyrr was a forbidden spell, its teaching ringed around with the most terrible of penalties. The only thing that protected Alde from utter enslavement to Ingold was Ingold himself-his reverence for the freedom of others and his innate kindliness. What would Alwir be , Rudy wondered suddenly, if he had that kind of power? Or Govannin ?

"Minalde," Ingold's warm, scratchy voice said. "Look beyond the walls of this room. Tell me what you see."

She blinked, her slender brows puckering over those inward-looking cornflower eyes. Then her lips parted and her face flooded with joy, as if at a vision of startling delight. She whispered, "Gardens."

Beside him, Rudy heard the swift hiss of Gil's intaken breath.

"Tell me about these gardens."

In the blue, glimmering light, her eyes were wide, luminous with wonderment. "They're-they're like a floating jungle," she stammered. "Fields planted on the waters. Room after room, filled with leaves-dark leaves, fuzzy like gray-green velvet, or bright and hard and shiny. Everywhere you can smell the growing." Her face tilted upward, as if her eyes followed the thick, trailing vines over walls and ceilings that had for ages been as dry as a