The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,52
he is, believe me, my sister, he will pray for even half the poison that he dumped into my food that night in the river valley."
"I wondered how he'd done it," she said after a time.
The Raider sniffed. "I am not certain whether he meant me to die of the dose, or whether it was only to make me sleep. In the open ground in the valleys, it makes no odds." The colorless eyes glittered suddenly, like dirty ice. "He had been better to make sure of his job."
Gil sighed. She would not say so, for she knew that the Icefalcon had brushed sleeves with death, but it was in her mind that if Stiarth were to die, Vair na Chandros would be the leader of the Alketch troops. This doesn't concern me . she told herself despairingly. I'm getting out of here before the invasion, and what happens afterward is their problem . But she remembered the hatred in Vair's eyes as he had spoken to Ingold before the doors of the Keep, and she shivered.
"You'd think Stiarth would have made sure you were dead," she remarked. "If he brought poison on the trip in the first place, he must have planned to use it."
"Not necessarily." The Icefalcon skirted a steep place in the track, leaping down a snow-covered boulder to avoid the mud-wallow made by the slipping horses of the Southerners.
"Things are very different in the South. A man in Stiarth's position carries poison as a matter of course."
For some reason, the graceful, bejeweled people of the crystal came to her mind, flirting through the ceremonies on the ancient water-stairs. Had they, too been a race of poisoners? "Tell me about the South," she said.
He shrugged. "You have seen the men. The South is a land of all colors. The people dress like popinjays. There are flowers there, orange ones with stripes or purple ones like something you see in fever dreams. Even the ants are all hues of the rainbow." His light, terse voice formed the images curiously clearly to her mind, against this snowy waste of dreary mud and somber trees.
"The Round Sea is warm; Alketch is a land of jungles, palm trees, and mile after mile of untouched white beaches. There are high mountains, like a wall in the west." His hand sketched their mist-hung skyline. "The people are all colors, too -black and red and gold. They put too much spice in their food, stink of depilatories, and treat their women like cattle. There are no Dark Ones in the South."
"Why is that?"
He shrugged again. "Ask the Dark. Ask Ingold. Ask our lady Govannin, for that matter. She will tell you it is because the Church rules the Empire, where their Straight God is better honored. There are rumors in places-but there are always rumors. Rumors of people who have disappeared, or of matters that someone else saw. But all those I spoke to in the South seem to think of the Dark Ones as a sort of plague that has befallen the North."
Gil was silent as she slopped through the shadowy woods, suddenly troubled by the half-memory of something Ingold had once said. "Yeah," she protested, "but Ungolard-the old scholar from Alketch who joined the Wizards' Corps- says there was what he thought was a Nest buried under the ruins of an old city in the jungle near his home. And he says that historically the earliest records of civilization in his part of the world don't go back much farther than they do in this one."
The pale eyebrows quirked. The Icefalcon had little use for chronicles and books. "How long does parchment last?" he asked her. "Even words carved on stone can be broken to make way for a king's pleasure garden. The South is a warm land, and records perish easily there."
"How far back do records of your people go?" Gil countered, and he smiled.
"To the days of the gods," he replied softly. In his breathless voice she caught the echo of campfire light and shamans' songs, the taste of tundra and ice fields on the wind. His voice sank, half-chanting the words, as if they came from the distant memories of his wild boyhood among his own people. "To the days when the rain fell upon the grasses, and men stepped forth from the growing seed. To the days when the Long Songs were not made, and the List of Heroes was short. To the days when the Sun Chief