The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,47

covering it with both her hands, and repeated in a clear, painstaking voice the words that Minalde had spoken in her trance, the words of unlocking. The sharp edges of the polygon pressed into her palms as she leaned forward to look into the table's faintly glowing core.

For a moment she saw nothing but the edge of her own huge shadow lying across the table and the dim reflected gleam of the light of the single glowstone she'd brought here with her. Around her, the black walls of the observation chamber formed a narrow circle of darkness. The silence was absolute. She cleared her mind, as Ingold had instructed her, stared into the angles of the crystal's heart, and waited.

Then something glittered deep below her, a flash of brightness that resolved itself into the blinding flicker of sunlight on water. Like dark knife blades, oars broke the blazing wake, and she saw a barge, carved over every inch of its surface and riding low in the smooth water under the weight of its own gilding. The oars stroked again, and the sun smote Gil's eyes. The colors seemed to intensify. Bright-hued birds flew up in startled explosions from the lotus patches that grew thick on the marshy shores. The barge put about, banking neatly before water-stairs of black-veined pink marble.

There was movement on the stairs, eerily silent, of men and women naked to the waist, their bronzed shoulders darkly gleaming under jeweled collars and pectorals. The breeze from across the lagoon rippled in the elaborate frills and tuckings of long gauze skirts and shifted the rainbow-dyed curls of servants who bore a carrying chair whose design Gill half-recognized. The style was sinuous, carved with winding lines of hearts, eyes, and diamonds, like the furniture she and Alde had found in the most ancient storerooms in the Keep.

Gil was not sure whether this was an intelligence report, a documentary, a manual, or the opening chapters of a novel, or what the date was, or the historical context. But she knew that she looked into the Times Before.

A haughty bishop descended from the barge, the Earth Cross of the Faith embroidered in bullion and sardonyx on the edges of his frilled white loincloth. Jewels flashed from white, unworked hands and from the earlobes and nostrils; people moved about, amid a bobbing of ostrich plumes; some kind of rite was clearly in progress. Gil noted that, though the bishop was shaven bald, all the others wore their hair as long as they could, braided into elaborate coiffures such as Minalde wore on ceremonial occasions, plumed, flowered, or jeweled. Beneath the eye paint and rouge, the faces of the audience on the steps looked bored to death, and Gil saw that they flirted among themselves whenever the bishop's head was turned, or else covertly eyed one another's outfits.

Govannin's words came back to her, with the memory of soft chanting among the tiered darkness of the great Sanctuary. I have heard that the men of the Times Before were evil and that in their pride and their splendor they practiced abominations ... One man in a padded, sunshine-yellow silk loincloth produced an ivory eyebrow comb and made minute adjustments with the aid of a mirrored ring on his little finger. A youth with lilies coiled in his blue-dyed hair noticed him and blew him a kiss. Sunlight glittered on the waters of the lagoon; parrots fluttered among the garlands that hung the marble colonnade along the shore. Gold flashed on the bishop's white, upraised hands.

Beyond the pillars, past the myrtle trees and arbors of roses, Gil had a glimpse of mountains, blue and close and shawled with a thin lace of snow...

Mountains she had seen before.

Where?

It was difficult to be sure because of the trees and the domes and turrets of the city in the distance. But a sense of familiarity pulled at her-a memory of ruined streets, of fallen and smoke-blackened walls, and of the buzzing, crawling stink of decay. Hadn't she turned to look over her shoulder once, her bones aching with the jarring jog of the exhausted cart horse she rode? Hadn't she glimpsed those mountains, standing just so, above the corpse of a despoiled city?

Those were the mountains that stood above the plain of Gae.

Frowning, Gil turned her eyes from the crystal at the center of the table, and the bright images before her died.

She sat for a long moment, staring into the darkness that seemed to press upon her from