The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,86

obscure army before him in the fog-shrouded dawn. Alde stood, head up, chin set, as the King strode down to join the commanders with never a backward glance.

The horns blew again, the rawness of the sound muffled oddly by the fog. Banners unfurled in the smoky dawn-the gold eagle of Darwath, the black stars of the House of Bes, the unrelieved blood color of the Church. Like distant thunder, the kettledrums boomed farther down the Vale. Eldor reined his horse from the Keep and moved on down the road between the ranks, his commanders following behind. Beside Rudy, Ingold pulled his shabby mantle tighter about him and led the wizards after them, leaning on his staff like a half-frozen beggar in the snow.

The army had begun to move. As he turned to follow the Corps, Rudy looked back, his eyes seeking the lighted doors of the Keep once more. The Bishop and the Inquisitor had gone; someone had shut one side. In the long, narrow rectangle of saffron light, a single form still stood, proud and slender and shivering in its black fur cloak. He looked back twice more, and each time she was still there, until the road, the fog, and the army hid her from his view.

It was a bitter road to Gae. Rudy had scouted it, going and coming, on their first reconnaissance of the Nest, and even then he had found it terribly changed from the way taken by the refugees from Karst. In the low ground, the original road had been flooded out, and leaden marshes or the still sheets of pewter lakes covered the land, their silver ice prickled with the rotting limbs of drowned trees. Where the road hugged the foothills closer to Renweth, the going was not as bad. But as they progressed north, through what had been the green heartland of the Realm, the land was a desolation of waters, and the army sought the path that the wizards had marked, over what had been the summits of tall hills.

The days were gray and freezing; by night, blinding storms howled down from the mountains, surrounding the camp in a whirlwind of spitting rain and snow. The bitter cold of these storms was made no easier by the knowledge that the wizards themselves were responsible, using the storms as a shield against the Dark. Once, after such a storm, they came upon a little family of beggars, gypsies, in the pitiless land, dead of exposure in the lee of a hill.

"They would have died in any case in this cold," Thoth judged, standing on the road above the huddled bodies and surveying the dripping rags that covered the blue, emaciated flesh.

"All things die in any case," Ingold replied quietly. "Nevertheless, the thing was our doing."

Brother Wend, who was with them, turned away in tears; Rudy was silent, confused and unable to speak. Most of the army passed by without even seeing what lay in that hollow by the road.

Rudy saw very little of Gil during that journey, for she stayed with the Guards. Twice, crossing the camp at night in the black fury of the winds, he thought he glimpsed her bony figure with its trailing scarf pacing along at Ingold's side as the wizard made his restless rounds of the camp. But Ingold did not speak of it; indeed, the wizard spoke very little these days at all. By day, he kept among the wizards, and Rudy found himself thinking that it was odd that he did not ride with the commanders of the expedition. By night, as he had done on the road down from Karst, he wandered the camp through the rising gales, doing what he could with his spells of ward and guard. Between grief and terror of what he knew was to come, Rudy often sat awake far into the night in the outer cubicle of the two-room tent they shared, playing his harp in the darkness. But he seldom was awake when the old man came in.

The armies pitched their tents in the fields before the gates of Gae, in the shadow of Trad's Hill. The stump of the cross that had once surmounted its summit had been broken and eroded away, yet none pitched their tents in the place where it had been. As the sun bloodied the torn western clouds, Maia of Penambra held battle services there, with his sword belted at his waist. Northern or southern, the troops darkened the frosted ground in