The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,53

fought the Wall of Ice, and drove it back to make the Sea of Grass for his people to dwell on, and caught the birds of the air in his hands, to make the horses for us to ride."

Gil frowned as some thought snagged at the back of her mind. Something in that soft, husky voice... something that Tomec Tirkenson had grumbled in the bitter snowfall of Sarda Pass. The hills of Gae above an arbor of tropical flowers... the dusty sole of a sandal, found in a midden in a cave.

She felt a stirring in her, a quickening, as images coalesced in her mind-the warm, putrid vapors of the Vale of the Dark and Minalde's night-blue eyes, tear- filled, gazing into the horrors of an earlier life...

Gil stopped, staring out into the gray, cold distance with unseeing eyes, as knowledge broke like an exploding star within her.

She saw it whole, a pattern resolving from meaningless shapes, and the understanding smote her like a blow. As surely as she knew her own name, Gil knew why the Dark had risen.
Chapter Eight
"The ice in the north," Ingold said quietly, folding his scarred fingers together and gazing into the distances beyond the walls of his narrow cell. "Lohiro spoke of it as he lay dying. The bitterest winter in human memory..." He glanced up at Gil, the movement of his shadow making the gold-leaf embellishments of his manuscripts flicker like autumn stars. "It is... a fantastic explanation. Can you prove it?"

"I don't know!" Gil threw up her hands in despair. Her explanation to him had taken some time, for the old man had not been familiar with the concept involved, but when she finished, his face was grave. "I know it's true. It's the only explanation that covers everything-why the Nests were deserted in the North, why they haven't risen in the South. I can't point to a single source and say, This is why.' But-I know."

The muscles of Ingold's jaw grew taut under the white scrub of his beard. She thought that he looked tired these days, driven and vulnerable, as if he lived with some knowledge or dread that he could scarcely endure. "Alwir won't want to hear it," he said at last. "Can you prove it, before the Winter Feast?"

"I can try."

In the days that followed, Gil was little to be seen by anyone in the Keep of Dare. Her friends in the Guards-the Icefalcon, Seya, Melantrys-spoke with her at training, which she still attended, though Janus had given her leave from regular duty. Sometimes Alde came to the little room that Gil had taken for her study in the midst of the Corps complex and spoke to her while she herself waited for Rudy to emerge from his work in the labs. Rudy visited her, too, bringing the slim ration of stew and bread from the Corps kitchen at mealtimes, and reminded her to eat. But they all found her distracted, her mind elsewhere.

Ingold helped her, as much as he was able. He was often to be found in her study, sitting cross-legged on the rug with one of the Quo chronicles on his knees, taking notes by the flickering gleam of St. Elmo's fire that burned above his head. But more often Gil worked alone, hearing the watches change in the corridors outside without much idea of whether they were day or deep-night.

Occasionally she would be seen in the Corps common room, talking to the tall Raider shaman. Shadow of the Moon, or to Ungolard, the diffident, black-skinned professor who had left the University of Khirsrit to answer Ingold's summoning. Once she buttonholed Caldern, a big, brawny north-countryman in the Guards, and asked him questions regarding his childhood; once she spent most of an evening in the fourth-level Church, where Maia ruled his gaudy slums of garlic-eating Penambrans, taking notes and listening while that lanky, gentle prelate told her things without asking why she wished to know.

One evening while the other mages were playing ball-and-ring-toss with moving fireballs in the commons, she took Kta aside, and he told her, in his rambling, piping voice, of certain strange matters that he had seen with his own eyes during the endless years of silence in the Gettlesand deserts, or of things that the dooic had told him.

"I didn't know that dooic could tell anyone anything," Gil said, looking up, startled, from her notes.

"No more can they," Dame Nan's voice crackled from the curtained doorway of the kitchen. The old