The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,59

"But Gyrfire was never rebuilt. I am probably the only man living who remembers where it stood. We wizards are a dangerous people, Gil," he finished, reaching to take her hand again. "We are hardly safe to know. The Icefalcon was right. Only the brave should befriend the wise."

She dismissed the Icefalcon with a shrug. "I don't believe that."

"Being brave, you wouldn't." He smiled at her.

"So that's why..." she began and stopped herself. "There are times when I wonder if you're as wise as you think." To her own surprise as well as his, she bent down and kissed him lightly on the forehead before she turned and hurried from the room.

After the dim firelight of Ingold's quarters, the dark in the common room was like being struck blind. With an automatic caution she had learned from the Icefalcon, Gil did not pause before the curtain to let her eyes adjust, but stepped to the side, her back to the wall, where even the little light that leaked through the weave would not show her up. Thus, when a dark form emerged from the blackness of one of the many hallways that led into the room Gil had only to press back against the wall and freeze to remain unseen.

She knew at once that this intruder was no wizard-a thin, white hand caught at the back of the same chair that she herself had stumbled over in the dark. A shadow passed in front of the winking embers; a cloak whispered against a tableleg. As the form turned, Gil had a vague impression of a white, beardless face and a shaven head showing up briefly against the thicker darkness of the door to the corridors beyond. The skeletal hand groped for the doorframe. For a moment it rested there, and a vagrant glint of a sparking ember called, like a candle in darkness, the answering gleam of purple from an amethyst ring.
Chapter Nine
The tensions built within the Keep until one night Minalde failed to come to Rudy's cell, as had been her custom.

He lay awake for hours in the darkness, listening for the sound of her step, the touch of slippered feet on the damp stone of the winding corridors whose mazes she knew so well, and the slurring whisper of the heavy fur of her cloak- sounds that only a wizard could hear. Some two hours had passed since he had heard the far-off, muffled commotion of the deep-night watch leaving the barracks on its rounds.

She had never been so late before.

And yet he knew- he knew -that she had planned to come to him.

The firesquad demonstration had taken place that afternoon. Most of the population of the Keep-with the exception of Gil, who, Rudy surmised, was so wound up in the pursuit of her mysterious research that she'd forgotten the day- and virtually all of the Alketch troops had been there. The frozen mud of the drilling ground in the meadow below the Keep walls had been darkened with a lake of humanity, crowding to see this weapon with which, rumor had it, Dare of Renweth had defeated the Dark Ones. A dais had been erected at the south corner of the meadow near the road, and on it the somber black and bloody crimson pennants of Realm and Church alternated with the gaudy, gold-stitched banners of the South.

Lying in the darkness of his cell, Rudy picked over the memories of the day, sorting them like jewel-bright photographs. He remembered how straight the ranks of the fire-squad had been, despite the wide range in their ages and origins -boys of ten or twelve on up to one old lady of eighty; the orange oriflamme that was their emblem had blazed brightly on the pale homespun of their uniforms. He remembered the gleam of sun on the looping rigs of their glass and gold weapons and the sharp bark of Melantrys' commands.

Other images came back to him: Vair and Stiarth, like a couple of refulgent tiger lilies in slashed doublets of orange and magenta, jewels twinkling among the extravagant ruffles of their sleeves; Bektis, at the foot of the dais among the other mages, sulking because he had not been given a place with the notables of the Realm-although Govannin would have excommunicated the entire government at the mere suggestion that she and Inquisitor Pinard be asked to share the platform with one who was mageborn; and Alwir's face, and the mingled glitter of wariness and contempt beneath his