The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,60

half-shut eyelids.

Especially, he remembered Minalde, with Tir in her arms.

Ingold had stood at the far end of the meadow, with the heavy folds of his mantle thrown back to reveal the shabby homespun robes and beat-up sword belt underneath, picking little, brightly colored bubbles of illusion from the air with the sweeping gestures of a side-show magician.

Since Rudy was familiar with the rainy-day pastimes of younger wizards, this was nothing much to his eyes. But he heard the uneasy murmur of the crowd as Ingold tossed the small and gleaming colored spheres out into the air, and they grew in a twinkling to some two feet across and bobbed about him, green and purple and electric blue, like monster catfish trawling for garbage in the snow.

The firesquad had moved forward. At Ingold's wave of command, the bubbles had swirled upward like a torrent of blown leaves in autumn. Someone in the crowd gasped in horror; from the dais behind him, Rudy heard Vair whisper, "Devil!" The ludicrous rainbow toys moved in a precise imitation of the gliding, sinuous flight of the Dark Ones.

There was not a person in the meadow who had not seen at firsthand how the Dark attacked. When Melantrys whirled in mid-stride to pick off a quivering globe of scarlet that swooped down upon her from behind and above, there was a gust of applause, which quickly rose to a roar as more targets were hit. Against the drabness of the wintry afternoon, the leaping streaks of fire looked chill and rather pale. The moving targets flashed out of existence as soon as the flames touched them, and the cheering mounted to a thunderous shout, as if it were actually the Dark being destroyed. Up on the dais, Alwir and the peacock lords of Alketch were nodding to one another in grim satisfaction; down below, mages and Guards pounded one another on the back with tooth-jarring verve. Rudy found himself jostled, grabbed, patted, and congratulated by friends and total strangers. Even Thoth unbent enough to admit, "Impressive."

But it was the pride on Aide's face that stayed in Rudy's mind. In all his life, he could never recall anyone who had ever been proud of him.

Why doesn't she come?

There had been that look, that promise, in her eyes as their gazes had crossed, and for a moment they had been alone together in the midst of that ebullient crowd.

And time is so short , Rudy thought despairingly. The Winter Feast is three days from now! And after that ...

He pushed the thought from his mind, as he had resolutely kept it at bay these past weeks, so as not to cloud the halcyon days that they had. In a forlorn hope, he extended his awareness far into the mazes of the Keep, seeking for some sound of her coming in all that damp, inhabited darkness. He heard nothing- nothing but the slumberous murmur of a father soothing a crying child and the drip and trickle of water coursing through the Keep's stone veins.

Rudy was an old friend to the night sounds of the Keep. If nothing else, the Nest had cost him that. In dreams he wandered again in that dark, hideous world where staring, white-faced herds shuffled pathetically through the rotting mosses of endless caverns. He felt the clammy, hairless bodies and the touch of dark winds on his face; he saw the slimy, oozing things that infested the ceilings above. Sometimes he saw the tall, gray-haired prisoner again, running and gasping through that vibrating darkness, running nowhere...

Other dreams were more horrible. In them, the faces of the squeaking, pale things that fled his approach were familiar to him-Aide's, Ingold's, his own. The prisoner's eyes returned to him again and again, as he'd seen them for the single instant in the yellow reflection of the fire, wide, blind, and half-mad, the eyes of a beast that had forgotten what it was to be a man.

Then he would awaken and lie listening to the Keep's slumber.

He knew that others had less sleep than he. His own cell lay in the midst of the crowded complex that the mages had taken over. He could sometimes hear a breathing that he knew to be Kara's, when she woke with a cry from similar dreams; he could hear her sobs calm slowly into waking rhythm, but never deepen again into sleep. Occasionally he heard the faint clicking of Gil's wax tablets, or, from another corner of the complex, whispered giggles and