The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,44
into the room beyond.
They saw his shadow, moving against the streaming brightness of his staff. Then he called out, "Come and see this, my children."
"They lived here?" Alde straightened up as she came through the low door and gazed around the wide, smooth-floored chamber. The twofold glare of the lights had scattered the ancient darkness. Eight monstrous shadow shapes lurched and reeled across the frost-crusted walls as the lights of the wizards' staffs moved. Aide's voice, quieter than was even her usual soft-spoken wont, echoed queerly against the walls of that huge, hollow place.
"Evidently." Gil bent down to touch with cautious fingers what looked like a bundle of grayed, dust-covered rags heaped near the wall. They crumbled to powder, but she said, "See underneath here? Broken dishes. And bones of some kind-rabbit or chicken..."
"Rabbit," Rudy said, looking over her shoulder. He had spent a good portion of his time crossing the desert in learning to identify bones. He moved off, the glowing crescent of his staff throwing a bobbing black shadow close around his feet. "Look, here's a niche where somebody stored something-old bottles, I think." He dropped to one knee and carefully ran the lighted end of the staff into a water-scooped hollow in the wall near the floor. "Yeah, there's broken glass at the back, under a lot of dust and leaves. You notice there are no signs of animals having lived here?"
"It would be more surprising if we did find such signs," Ingold commented from the far end of the cave. He was standing next to what had been a long fissure in the stone, a fissure that had been sealed with a wall of the same black, glassy material that formed the Keep. The wall was pierced by a single locked metal door. "From the looks of this cave, it was carved by the action of an ancient river. These caves lie in a series, walled and locked from one another-a sensible precaution, if there was no telling where and when the Dark Ones might break in. Any crack to the outside, or even to another cave, must of necessity have been sealed off." He came back to where they knelt, his hair shining like sunlit snow in the white dazzle of his staff.
"They sure didn't leave much," Rudy muttered. He moved a few feet off and looked down at the floor, his forehead creased in a sudden frown. "Is that-oil stains?"
"Sure looks like the floor of my mechanic's," Gil observed, following him to where the floor was blotched with round, dark smears. "Look, there are scratches on the floor, and on the wall as well. They stored some kind of machinery here."
"Yeah, but I thought they lived here..."
"They were very crowded," Alde pointed out, tucking her hands for warmth into the rippling black fur of her cloak. Beneath the curve of her braided hair, her eyes had that disquieting remoteness of expression. Rudy felt almost that she might have said, "We were very crowded." She went on. "Thousands made their way up here from the river valleys. There was barely space for them, or food. They lived wherever they could."
"And stored things wherever they could," Gil added thoughtfully, kneeling by another dusty old cache that proved to contain nothing more than crumbling, unrecognizable rags and the broken fragments of several glowstones. "From where the scratches are on the floor, I'd guess this stuff was shoved under a piece of machinery. Look!" she said, turning as she sat on her heels and pointing. "They had something bolted to the ceilings as well." She went back to investigating her dusty midden, clotted with hardened oil and resins, brittle and falling to pieces even under her delicate touch. Ingold came back, holding his staff aloft to illuminate the intermittent double line of bolt-holes in the rock above. Gil went on digging, unearthing stiffened and decayed rags, more broken glowstones, tiny bones, a kettle with holes in its corroded bottom, and, rather surprisingly, two of the frosted gray glass polyhedrons like those they had found in such baffling numbers in the Keep, almost buried under a drift of nameless dust and the mummified sole of a broken sandal.
Rudy traced the stains and scratches along the wall. It was clear that quite a bit of machinery had been stored here. "You know what's funny?" he remarked, turning back to where Ingold. Aide, and Gil remained grouped around Gil's cache. "There's not so much as a scrap of paper."