The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,88

other chamber, Rudy heard the thick rustle and creak of the curtain falling and the rattle of the outer leather flap in the wind. Beneath the dividing curtain, the bluish light moved.

Ingold's voice said softly, "So you are determined to do this thing?"

"Don't start on it," Eldor's voice grated.

"What are you trying to do? Alwir's hoping for his own aggrandizement-at your expense, I should add-and that soulless Alketch tiger is out for whatever's left of the Realm, but you are King already. You have no need..."

"We all have a need." Rudy heard the creak of the chairbraces under shifting weight and the soft, restless crunch of frozen ground under pacing feet.

"You were down there, Eldor. You know what you're leading these people into.

Alwir thinks the Nest is something like a slightly larger version of his own wine cellars, but you know how much hope we have of..."

"Do you think I fool myself about it?" Rudy could almost see the taller man rounding on Ingold from the shadows. "After lying in the muck and eating wet moss and raw fish and fearing every second for my life, don't you think I know just how hopeless it is?" There was something akin to satisfaction in the voice- a pleasure in the justification of despair. "You forget, Ingold, that I remember . I remember-everything."

"I had four long months to think, in the dark of the Nest; and, as they tell me is the case of-my sweet wife, I had new sights to stir old memories. Dare of Renweth did lead a force down the stairways-twenty thousand men. The men of the Times Before were not more wise or foolish than they are now, and they could foresee what we have all foreseen-that their empires would not last five years. They had their flame thrower corps-oh, yes!-and other things besides. They had their wizards to cast light about them, for all the good it ever did. I know what happened to them down in the Nests. In the darkness I remembered it. When I returned to Dare's Keep, I could have laughed aloud to see how proudly our Alwir strutted his feathers like a dunghill cock. Dare's army was three times the size of this one. Do you know how many of them survived?"

For a long moment there was nothing, only that blazing, shocked, terrible silence. Lying in the darkness, Rudy knew that Ingold stared into the face of the man who had once been his friend and saw there only a stranger's hate.

When the wizard spoke, his voice was a whisper. "Why?"

The sound of pacing resumed, along with the click of scabbard buckles and the slurring whine of a cloak. "I remembered other things down there, Ingold. The Dark took none of it from me, though I prayed they would. I never forgot that I was High King of Darwath." As that harsh voice rose and fell, the long, light tread of the pacing increased, the shadow under the partition whirling and moving, as if with the unseen motion of an arm.

"I remembered how I used to sit up nights sweating out a judgment over which nobleman had what rights over the souls of his people," Eldor went on, in that low, harsh, terrible voice. "I remember endless councils and dickerings with the Church, with the Empire, with the merchants- going without sleep over the Raiders in the plains and the Alketch pirates in the Round Sea. And for what? So that I could end up squatting on my hunker-bones, chewing roots in the dark, with all the Church and Raiders and merchants scattered like the fragments of some meaningless dream. What was the use of it? Why had I bothered to sweat and worry at all? If I'd lived like my father and wenched and drunk and taken all the sweet pleasures of life, I would have ended up in exactly the same position. I had been King, and for what?"

"So what do you want?" Ingold demanded, his voice suddenly very angry. "Do you want to go out in a blaze of honored glory so that people can make songs about how great the last King of Darwath was? Do you want to die and take thousands of your followers with you, to make your death look a little more like heroism and a little less like suicide? Are you choosing to leave your people leaderless and defenseless, because you would rather die with an army at your back than demean yourself