The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,71

and astrological charts formed a kind of tapestry, half-obscured by braids of drying herbs. On the hearth, the marmalade torn, the biggest of the Corps cats, was licking his paws and studiously ignoring the pans of bread which Kara had set to rise among the warm ashes.

Gil could see Alwir's gaze travel over that homey and unprepossessing room and over the faces of those who sat around the table-old men, young girls, foreigners, heathens, and vagabonds-before coming to rest on his sister. His nostrils flared with contempt.

"Then you have a damned queer way of going about it. But after yesterday, I don't suppose I have a right to be surprised by anything you choose to do." He did not trouble to hide the bitterness in his voice. "Suppose you tell me.

then, since you are my Chief of Intelligence. How did humankind defeat the Dark? Or is that going to stay one of the things that only you know?"

Ingold sighed. "Often, my lord," he said after a moment's pause, "when an answer seems impossible to find, the best thing to do is to see if the proper question was asked. In this case, the question should not have been: How did humankind defeat the Dark? It should have been simply: Did humankind defeat the Dark?"

Alwir seemed to rear in his seat. "Of course it did! Else why did the Dark depart?"

"Another very good question, my lord-and one closer to the heart of the matter. Perhaps the real question should be, not why they departed, but why they rose."

Ill- concealed anger grated in Alwir's words. "Of what earthly good would it be to know that? It doesn't matter why they rose! If that was all you asked me here to tell me-"

"That," the wizard said quietly, "and other things. I believe I was the first human to see the Dark Ones begin to hunt on the surface of the earth, the year I was hiding in the deserts of Gettlesand, playing spellweaver and astrologer in a little farming village, with the High King's price on my head. I followed the Dark One back to its city-not a paltry hive of a defeated remnant, but a teeming metropolis of creatures to whom humankind was of no more moment that wild cattle."

Gil shivered as Ingold told of it, his voice casting its spell over those who listened. His words dislimned the shabby common room around them and drew them into the frozen blueness of that starlit desert night and to the smothering blackness of underground. Even the mulish look about Alwir's mouth faded somewhat as the old man drove home to them the horror of what he had first realized then-that the Dark did not live in that fashion because they had been driven to it, but because they had chosen it for their own.

"I had lived for five years in Gae," Ingold went on, "for three of them in the Palace, as tutor to Prince Eldor, the High King's son. I knew of the stairway in the lower vaults-more than one, some said. They were thought to be part of the old Citadel of Wizards that once stood upon the spot or part of some heathen temple out of bygone years. All that the Masters at Quo could tell me was that there were other stairways in various parts of the world, that they had the property of distorting magic, so that no mage who had ever descended one could communicate with others after he was out of sight, and that no one who had ever gone down had returned. They were thought to be curiosities, like the gray lands in certain parts of the world where time is unaccountably distorted or like those spots in the mountains where you can stand and hear voices speaking in tongues unknown to the West of the World. But no more than that.

"Yet after I had seen that unspeakable city, I was frightened; and in the years that followed, years in which I learned and read and traveled, I heard an occasional tale that frightened me still more. A chieftain of the White Raiders told me of a man who had vanished in open country on a moonless night. In a village close to the ice, there had lately been a wave of superstitious dread of the night-people could not be induced to leave their houses after dark, though they would not say why this was. I began to investigate any story that came my way