The Armies of Daylight - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,94
him, cries and curses began; far off, across the distance of that suddenly silent cavern, he heard distant wailing and the clash of fighting. But from the vast snake of charred and twisted bodies that littered the seared moss of the cavern floor there came no sound at all-only the sudden, hurricane rush of the winds of the Dark.
Rudy stared out into the utter blackness, fascinated, watching as the Dark poured down through the fissures in the cavern's roof in a kind of slow motion. They were truly the Dark Ones, not merely the illusion that had drawn someone's panic fire in the gas trap. A welling wave of them built into a falling wall that he watched with a kind of drained detachment, too numbed with horror at the carnage below to feel terror or surprise.
Someone shoved him aside and threw himself from the shelter of the tunnel to where Eldor's body lay crumpled in the protection of the broken rocks. Rudy saw that it was Ingold, blue rags of witchlight fluttering around his head as he bent down, oblivious to the storm of darkness descending upon him like a giant black wing. Rudy saw the wizard's scarred hands press the sticky ruin of the King's face and the bony breast that heaved suddenly with the gasp of returning life.
Gil and the Icefalcon reached Ingold instants before the Dark Ones did. The old man never looked up at them; his whole strength was bent to holding and tying the life of his friend to the burned body. Other Guards crowded out of the tunnel's refuge; belatedly, Rudy gathered a handful of his strength and made a feeble attempt to call light.
The earth shook again, nearer this time. Melantrys caught her balance and raised her flame thrower to fire into the darkness. Rudy screamed, " Don't use it.'" in a voice that hardly sounded like his own. With his calling of the light, he had laid himself open to the counterspells of the Dark; he could feel them drawing on him like leeches.
Dimly, he could hear Alwir yelling, "Come back, you fools!" He knew that panic had set in among those who had made it to the tunnel before the explosion. They were breaking and fleeing foolishly into the darkness. Other voices cried that the tunnel was blocked and that the Dark had exploded the ceiling on them.
Alwir grabbed Rudy by the arm. "Is there a way around?" He looked ghastly with strain and shock; the jewels that he wore even in battle glinted like blood through the slime that covered his armor. "We can use the flame throwers to fight our way to the bottom..."
"No!" Rudy yelled desperately over the rising din of the battle in the tunnel mouth. "If we use the flame throwers, we'll have another explosion! The Dark Ones are using explosive gas!"
"Gas?" the Chancellor shouted furiously. "What is this gas ? Talk sense, boy!"
For the first time in his life, Rudy wished he had some understanding of Aristotelian physics. Gil seldom had problems coming up with flat-earth answers. "Uh-it's a vapor. Fiery vapor." He had to shout the words over the clashing of swords, the screams, the curses, and the harsh, echoing buzzing of the Dark. "It explodes in the air-it's invisible!"
Seeing the mulish set to Alwir's jaw, he cried, "For God's sake, you don't think just the flame throwers exploding could have wiped out everyone in the cavern!"
Another earthquake shook the ground, jarring them almost off their feet; the noise of it seemed to vibrate in the bones of Rudy's skull. A choking cloud of dust rolled from some passage nearby, and he heard the dull clatter of falling pebbles...
He felt the hold of the counterspells slacken, and light blossomed more strongly in the tunnel and around the defenders at its mouth. The cries and curses turned to cheers, and over all he heard the bass roar of Tomec Tirkenson's voice. White light surrounded then). Men dragged Eldor's gasping body back into the shelter of the tunnel. Ingold was still gripping the twisted remains of one of the King's hands. Behind them, others poured up the slope, and the landchief of Gettlesand clutched Alwir's hand in sticky greeting, heedless of their earlier enmity.
"We've got to get the hell out of here," he rasped. "They're blowing down the roofs of tunnels behind us. We've been cut off in two places already. If we stay, we'll be trapped like pigs in a slaughtering pen."