The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,87

all directions as they knelt. As an excommunicate, Rudy did not attend, but the prelate's voice, oddly carrying for one so soft-spoken, could be heard wherever Rudy walked in the camp. He passed Kara and Tomec Tirkenson-another excommunicate-hand in hand on the fringes of the crowd around the cart-tail altar and saw at a distance Brother Wend, his face like a dying man's, watching the rites from the shelter of the tents.

The sun set and the winds rose. Endless as the winter nights were, it would be only a short time until dawn.

Rudy lay in the darkness of his sleeping cubicle, prey to a horrible case of funk.

It was not that he doubted the ability of the flame throwers- our side's secret weapon , he reminded himself wryly- to wreak havoc in the Nest. Nor did he doubt the necessity of the invasion itself. As far as he knew, the Dark Ones were still taking live prisoners to supplement their dwindling herds. If the Nests were not burned out, cauterized one by one, there was always the lingering chance that someone he cared for-Aide, Gil, or Tir when he got older-might end up there, exiled from light. He noticed the Eldor had not questioned the invasion.

Yet Rudy was mageborn enough, artist enough, to bear the curse of a vivid imagination. The thought of going into battle at all terrified him. To fight in the lightless mazes underground, to descend willingly into that hell of fire and darkness... Sweat iced his face at the thought.

He knew their losses would be high. The counterspells of the Dark Ones could damp magelight-maybe kill it entirely. And most of the mages were half-trained, their power weak. We could be trapped down there ...

He shoved the thought away. We ain't gonna be trapped and we ain't gonna be killed , he told himself stubbornly. We'll do what Dare of Renweth never did - attack the Nests of the Dark and wipe out their whole ecosystem so, even if we haven't the forces to reoccupy Gae , they won't have, either .

Lohiro, dying, had whispered of the moss, the herds, and the ice in the north. He had known then what Gil had puzzled out: that they were all bound together. Sleepily, Rudy's mind groped at the remains of his high-school biology class, ten years in the past and not much attended at the time.

Gil was right, of course. The moss was the - what had she called it ?- the nitrogen fixer of the whole Nest ecology. It was dying already, and flammable nitrogen compounds remained in the brown, dried decay. Burn off the moss and you'd knock the base out from under the whole food chain, just like those vaguely recalled diagrams of grass, antelopes, and lions ...

Rudy drifted toward slumber.

Ironic that the basis of the Nest ecosystem would be its destruction. The whole Nest must be saturated in nitrogen compounds, Gil had said.

What the hell was a nitrogen compound?

Just before he dozed off completely, it floated through Rudy's mind that the secret weapon was perhaps not as secret as he'd thought.

The Dark knew they were going to be attacked with fire.

Then he slept.

The cold drift of wind woke him as the outer door of the tent was opened on the other side of the separating curtain. Werelight flickered through the chinks. He heard the creak and clatter of battle gear, the clinking of buckle and spur. It was later in the night, he could tell-though nowhere near dawn. Eldor's harsh, rasping voice came to him, and Alwir's melodious drawl, along with the sinister purring of Vair and Ingold's scratchy, flawed, unmistakable tones. Their talk was of flame throwers and maps and guides, of where the companies would divide to cover the two main segments of the Nest, and of which mages would lead them down. Vair said stiffly that he would rely on maps, rather than on the directions of any servant of Satan; Ingold replied mildly that he was welcome to do so, of course, but unless he was planning to dispense with the wizards who would cover his advance with such light as they could summon, he might as well include one more as a guide. Alwir told the Alketch Commander not to be a fool.

Shortly after that, another blast of cold air seeped through the tent curtains; Rudy heard the voices saying good night.

Feet scrunched on the frosted ground, and Vair cursed a slave for dropping a torch. From the