The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,43

into the darkness of the chamber beyond. Pale light burned off its tip, illuminating curving, water-worn walls and a sandy floor strewn with dead leaves and the frosted bones of some small animal, mauled by foxes. At the far end, the light flashed on the metalwork of a small door, locked as the Keep doors were locked with inner bolts and a ring. The hinges were deep-sunk into the living rock of the walls; the metal was black, hard, and unrusted.

For a moment there was nothing anyone could say. Rudy looked sideways and saw by the wan reflection of the daylight that Aide's eyes were filled with sudden tears.

Then he looked back to that dark door whose memory had faded from all minds but one. The light of Ingold's staff slid coldly over the locking ring as the wizard advanced cautiously into the room and touched the thread-fine runes marked on the black steel that only a wizard could see.

"Well, I'll be damned."

"Govannin certainly thinks so," Gil remarked, following Ingold into the deep, shifting gloom. Alde quickly wiped her eyes and crossed the shadowy threshold, with Rudy bringing up the rear, staff in one hand and flame thrower in the other. Their voices echoed eerily against the low ceiling.

"Sure is lucky for our side," Gil added judiciously, poking at the fox mess in a corner of the cave, "that we didn't find a grizzly holed up here for the winter."

Rudy sniffed scornfully. "If we had, Ida slayed it with mah bowie knife. Then you wimmenfolk coulda skinned it."

"Aaah, you lie like a rug, white man."

"Hey!" he protested, turning. "I'll have you remember I slayed a dragon. Not bad," he added, "for a poor boy who was borned on a mountaintop in Tennessee."

Gil paused in her investigation of the smoke-blackened ceiling and looked at him with new respect. "Even if it is the greenest state in the land of the free," she agreed, nodding gravely. "Was you raised in the woods, then?"

"Gil I knew every tree," Rudy asserted proudly.

"Do you know what they're talking about?" Alde asked quietly of Ingold, who was listening to this interchange in mystified astonishment.

Bemused, the wizard shook his head.

"It's the ancient lore of our people," Gil explained and came to join them beside the locked door, her feet scuffing in the thin sand of the cave floor. "Is the door spelled shut?"

Ingold's mittened hand caressed the smooth steel ring. "Not unbreakably so." In the half-light his face was grave, the ice crystals glittering in his frosted beard. "But these caves have been sealed for centuries. At the time they were in use, they were presumably proof against entrance by the Dark Ones. But that is no guarantee that they have not been entered since."

Gil glanced nervously around her at the murky twilight of the cave. The light at the tip of Ingold's staff began to burn with a stronger, fiercer glow, throwing their shadows black and harsh against the gleaming door.

"You and Alde go back and stand in the light from the cave mouth. Rudy..."

Rudy shook back his long hair from around his face, then bowed his head, standing silently, like something carved of weathered oak, the snow like chips of glass on the bison fur of his collar and cuffs. He had holstered his flame thrower; in his other hand, the razor-edged crescent that tipped his staff began to burn with a white, clear radiance. The brightness drowned the pale daylight, threw sharp blue shadows that outlined Rudy's high cheekbones and broken nose, and cast into prominence the scars and lines that scrawled over Ingold's face like a map of his endless journeyings. In the doubled light of the two staffs, everything had two shadows, darker blue and lighter, midnight and cobalt, and the white glare that beat on those two faces stamped them with sudden, uncanny resemblance.

Ingold reached forward and touched the metal of the door. His blue eyes were half-shut as his hands passed over the shining surface. In the cave's icy cold, the breaths of the two wizards mingled like a dust of diamonds in the searing light. Then with a sudden movement, Ingold's mittened hand closed over the locking ring, twisted it with visible effort, and thrust the door open and inward.

A black hole stared at them, like the eye-pit of Hell. But nothing emerged, neither darkness nor beast not even the cloud of bats that Gil had half-expected. The wizard bent his head to pass the low doorsill and vanished