THE ARMIES OF DAYLIGHT

Book 3 of the Darwath Series

Barbara Hambly

Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1985

Copyright © Barbara Hambly 1983

Cover illustrations © Nakonechnyi Jaroslav

Cover design by Andrew Davis © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Barbara Hambly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008378745

Ebook Edition © February 2020 ISBN: 9780008378752

Version: 2020-02-25

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Map

Prologue

PART ONE: The Question and the Answer

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

PART TWO: The Faceless King

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

About the Author

Also by Barbara Hambly

About the Publisher

Map

PROLOGUE

WHEN THE WIZARD INGOLD crossed the Void between worlds to save the infant Prince Tir from the destruction of Gae, Gil Patterson and Rudy Solis tried to help him. But one of the monstrous, evil Dark crossed behind him, and they were all forced to flee back to the world of magic from which the wizard came.

It was a world where magic worked and where the loathsome Dark were destroying humanity, after having lain almost forgotten in underground lairs for three thousand years. And it was a world where the only hope for mankind lay in the distant, ancient stone Keep of Dare, built to resist the previous ravages of the Dark.

The King had fallen in Gae. Now Chancellor Alwir was the Regent, as brother to young Queen Minalde. Vying for power was the Bishop Govannin, fanatic leader of the Straight Faith. And both Alwir and the Bishop feared Ingold.

The road to the Keep was a hell of cold and danger, with both the Dark and the barbarian White Raiders taking toll on those who struggled through the freezing mud. But Gil found herself accepted as one of the Guards. Rudy won the love of Minalde and discovered that he had wizard powers. He became a student of Ingold.

Once the remnant of humanity was established precariously in the Keep, Ingold and Rudy set out for Quo, the city where the wizards ruled and protected all their ancient lore. There had been no word from that city, and no magic of Ingold’s could reach through the veils of illusion guarding it. But when they reached Quo, after two thousand miles of marching through hardship and danger, they found the city in ruins – the Dark had been there. Of the wizards, only Lohiro remained to meet them. And Lohiro was possessed by the Dark. In a bitter struggle, Ingold managed to destroy Lohiro.

Ingold sent out a desperate mental summons for any wizards of any degree of ability. Then he and Rudy began the long struggle back to the Keep.

During their absence, Gil had used her training as a scholar to investigate the old records, looking for some clue as to how the ancient Dare of Renweth had defeated the Dark. Together with Minalde, who had a touch of the mysterious memory of past events that was supposedly inherited by only a few men, she found the ancient workshops of the wizard-engineers who had built the Keep. And she found artifacts of all kinds, most without apparent use.

When Ingold and Rudy returned, they found a ragtag assembly of wizards, half-trained witches, and village healers waiting to become the Wizards’ Corps under them. Ingold realized that the crystals Gil had found were the ancient source of artificial light. And Rudy seized upon a collection of parts which he assembled into a flame thrower, a possible weapon against the Dark.

Alwir used the discovery as an excuse to determine that the wizards must spy out the Nest of the Dark at Gae. Ingold, knowing the folly of the plan but unable to deter Alwir, began trying to create a cloaking-spell that might protect the wizards against the Dark.

PART ONE

ONE

THE NIGHT WAS STILL. The wind that had beaten with such violence down the ice-locked mountains to the north had fallen at about sunset to an uneasy murmuring in the dark pines that filled the twisting Vale of Renweth. By midnight, even that had ceased. The black branches hung motionless from one end of the Vale to the other, slowly furring with frost in the deepening cold. A man’s breath, barely visible in the soulless glimmer of the few remote and haughty stars, would hang like a diamond cloud about his face or freeze in white hoarfrost to his lips. In that piercing cold, not even the wolves were abroad; the silence ran from cliff to lightless cliff, an almost tangible property in that frozen and desolate world.

Yet beneath the dark trees, something had stirred.

Rudy Solis was sure of it. He glanced behind him for the fourth time in as many minutes, fear creeping along his spine and prickling at the nape of his neck like tiny teeth. Yet he saw nothing there, only the thin sheen of starlight frosting the unmarked snow.

He looked back to the darkness of the trees. He stood some fifty feet from the forest’s edge, his shadow a misty blur on the old broken snow around his feet, his breath a tiny smear of steam against the darkness. Even wrapped in the thickness of his buffalohide coat, he shivered, though not entirely with cold. He knew that it would be warmer in the protection of the forest and, look as he would, he could sense no movement there. It was undoubtedly perfectly safe, and sheltering there would be a damnsight more intelligent than standing in the open listening to the ice crystallize in his lungs.

But neither hope of Heaven nor fear of Hell would have induced him to seek the shelter of those shadowed woods.

A wind touched his face like a clammy, seeking hand. It took all his strength not to whirl, to face the unseen foe. But he had been told not to run. In the open ground of a still mountain night, flight would mean instant death. The cloaking-spell that covered him, like all cloaking-spells, depended upon diverted attention; the wizard who used one must do nothing to call attention to himself, lest the illusion fail. And in any case, Rudy knew that no human being could ever hope to outrun the Dark.

This is stupid, he told himself desperately. What if Lohiro was wrong? Or worse, what if he was lying? The Dark possessed his mind for weeks. How the hell do we know he was telling the truth when he said they’d let him go? This spell of Ingold’s is to cloak against a collective, rather than an individual, intelligence – but how do we know that will overcome the reason human magic never worked against the Dark Ones? What if it was all a trap?

The unbearable terror returned again, as if some vast, dark bulk were creeping slowly toward his back. But he could see nothing there, no movement in the stark white emptiness of the snow-covered meadow, and could hear no sounds but the hiss of his own breath in his lungs and the hot, too-swift pounding of his heart. The years he’d spent on the fringes of the motorcycle gangs, among the tough guys and would-be tough guys of smog-bound Southern California, had given him a kind of bar-fight courage sufficient for his survival. But the waiting in terror for an unknown danger was different. His every perception, sharpened by wizardry to detect what others found invisible, was keyed to a fever pitch for the warning of danger. And in his heart, he was sure that no warning would save him.

Cold, directionless winds breathed upon him, like the draught from a primordial abyss of darkness which had never seen light. At the touch of it, his heart seemed to lurch, then hammer chokingly. His intelligence screamed at his instinct to run, telling him that, even if he ran, even if he made the half-mile dash through the ice-locked drifts of the buried meadow to the windowless Keep of Dare, they would never let him in. Once the cyclopean doors were sealed at sunset, Keep Law forbade that any should open them before dawn.

So he drew the veils of alien illusion more firmly about him and prayed that they all were right – Lohiro, Ingold, and Thoth – when they said that this kind of spell would guard his body from the inhuman hungers of the Dark.

He could feel the Dark Ones coming closer; he sensed their coming in the change of the air. Close by him a little skiff of snow whirled up, as if stirred by wind, but no wind riffled now in the fur of his collar. In all directions the snowy landscape rolled like a frozen, silver sea; yet from the corner of his eye, he glimpsed movement, a sudden flurry that vanished, as things did in dreams. In the shadows of the trees before him, he thought he saw something shift, though not a branch stirred.

They were all around him – he knew it, but their illusions screened them from his eyes as he prayed that his own covered him. He felt their stirring, though there was nothing that he could fix his eye upon – just a gleam of starlight on something that pulsed wetly and the sudden glitter of acid on chitinous claws. There was a buzzing, humming sensation in his brain … a drift of wind that stank of rotten blood …

Then suddenly it was above him, a delirium-vision of an obscene, squamous bulk, fifteen feet from the tucked, slobbering tentacles of that drooling mouth to the wriggling tip of the spined cable of tail. Huge, clawed legs dangled down, like the feet of a wasp; from them, acid dripped to smoke on the snow.

Rudy shut his teeth hard on a scream. Sweat was freezing on his face, and every muscle in his body fought to remain still against the instincts that shrieked at him to run. The effort and the revulsion at the nearness of that filthy dripping thing brought nausea burning to his throat. More than its evil, more than the terrible danger that breathed like smoke over him, he was filled with sickened loathing of its otherness – its utter alienness to the world of the visible, the material … the sane.

Then it was gone. The wind of its departure kicked a stinging gust of snow over him as he slowly folded to his knees in the drifts.

How long he knelt there in the darkness he didn’t know. He was trembling uncontrollably, his eyes shut, as if to blot out the memory of that hideous, slobbering bulk swimming against the stars. Stupidly, he recalled a night last spring, a warm California evening, when he and his sister had been headed down the Harbor Freeway in downtown Los Angeles, and the old Chevy had a blowout in the fast lane of the interchange. His sister had managed to pull the veering car under control, to force it out of the hammering madhouse of sixty-mile-an-hour traffic and over onto the shoulder. Then she’d gotten out, calmly checked to see if the rim had been damaged, asked him if he was okay – and folded up on the car’s steaming hood and gone into violent hysterics.

Rudy suddenly found himself in sympathy with how she had felt.

Something brushed his face, and he swung around, the cold searing his gasping lungs.

Behind him stood Ingold Inglorion, looking quizzically down at him in the faint blue starlight.

“Are you all right?”

Rudy collapsed slowly back to a sitting position, his gloved hands pressed tightly together to lessen their shaking. He managed to stammer, “Yeah, fantastic. Just give me a minute, then I’ll go leap a tall building at a single bound.”

The wizard knelt beside him, the full sleeves of his patched brown mantle brushing against him again, warm and rough and oddly reassuring. In spite of the cold, Ingold had pushed the mantle’s hood back from his face, and his white hair and scrubby, close-clipped white beard gleamed like frost in the ghostly light. “You did very nicely,” the old man said, in a voice whose mellow beauty was overlaid by a grainy quality, scratchy without being harsh, and pitched, as a wizard’s voice could be, for Rudy’s ears alone.

“Thanks,” Rudy croaked shakily. “But next time I think I’ll let you test out your own new spells.”

The white eyebrows quirked. Ingold’s face as a whole was totally nondescript, redeemed only by the heavy erosion of years and by the curious, uncannily youthful appearance of his eyes.

“Well, I’m certainly not out here because it’s the proper phase of the moon for harvesting slippery elm.”

Rudy colored a little. “Scratch that,” he mumbled. “You shouldn’t be out here at all, man. You’re the one the Dark Ones have been after.”

“All the more reason for me to come,” the old man said. “I can’t remain walled in the Keep forever. And if it is true, as I suspect, that somehow I hold the key to the defeat of the Dark Ones, at some time or another I shall have to come forth and meet them. I had best assure myself of the efficacy of my cloaking-spells before that time.”

Rudy shivered, awed at that matter-of-fact calm in Ingold’s tone. Rudy feared the Dark Ones, as all humankind must fear them: the eaters of the flesh and of the mind, the eldritch spawn of the hideous night below the ground; and arcane intelligence beyond human magic or human comprehension. But at least he was reasonably certain that they did not know him – his name, his essence. He knew that he was not the target of their specific malice. It was not his personal flesh they sought. He stammered, “But Christ, Ingold, you didn’t have to come and check out the spell yourself. I mean, hell, if it works for me, it should work for you.”

“Possibly,” Ingold agreed. “But that is something that no one can ever wholly know.” He drew his mantle closer about him. In the dim light, Rudy could see that the wizard was armed; the billowing folds of his outer garment broke over the long, hard line of the sword that he wore belted underneath. His right hand in its faded blue mitten was never far from the sword’s grip-smoothed hilt.

“Do you remember how,” he went on in his mild voice, “in the mazes of illusion that surrounded the City of Quo, you asked me once for a spell to break the wall of fog?”

“You told me the one I was using already would work just fine,” Rudy recalled. “I can’t say I was real pleased.”

Calmly, the old man removed a speck of snow from his frayed sleeve. “If it is ever my aim to please you, Rudy, I shall certainly ask you what methods I should employ.” The gleam of mischief in his eyes turned his bearded face absurdly young. “But what I told you then was true. The strength of any spell is the strength of your magic – your spirit. Your power is shaped by your essence. You are your spells.”

Rudy was silent, understanding this for the truth as he had not understood it in the mazes of the trackless Seaward Mountains. It was the key to human magic – perhaps the key to all things human.

“Do you feel sure of this spell, Rudy?” the wizard asked quietly. “Could you use it again?”

“Yeah,” Rudy said slowly, after long thought. “Yeah, I think so. I was scared to death, but …”

“But you kept your head,” Ingold said. “And you kept your hold over the spell.” Crusted frost gleamed in his scrubby beard as he nodded his head. “Do you think you could do so in the Nest of the Dark itself?”

The thought was like a hypo filled with ice water, injected directly into Rudy’s heart. “Christ, I don’t know! It’s …” Then he saw the intentness, the calculation, in those crystal-blue eyes. “Hey, you mean – really in the Nest of the Dark? I mean, that wasn’t just a – a hypothetical question?”

The frost crackled a little as Ingold smiled. “Really, Rudy, you should know me well enough by this time to know that I seldom deal in hypotheses.”

“Yeah,” Rudy agreed warily. “And that’s probably the scariest thing about you.”

“It is the most frightening thing about any wizard. A hypothesis to anyone else is merely an overwhelming temptation to a wizard. Do you think you would be able to handle yourself in the Nest of the Dark?”

Rudy swallowed hard. “I think so.” The vivid imagination, which was the mainspring and curse of the mageborn, sent a series of chills scampering up his spine. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”

Ingold’s eyes returned to focus from some private, inner reverie. In the starlight, they seemed bright and preternaturally clear. “The Chancellor Alwir cannot hope to reconquer Gae from the Dark without reconnaissance of their Nest there,” he said quietly. “He has chosen Gae, partly because of its importance as the capital of the Realm and partly because it lies at the center of communications.

“But time is short. Our allies, from the Empire of Alketch and from the various landchiefs of the Realm, will be assembling here in the not-too-distant future. You will be leaving for Gae within a day or so.”

“Okay,” Rudy agreed shakily, with valiant mental adjustments. “Uh – just me?”

Ingold snorted. “Yes, just you, all by yourself,” he snapped gruffly. “Of course not! For one thing, Gae is a flooded ruin – you could never hope to find your way through its streets to reach the Nest.”

A drift of wind stirred his mantle and ruffled Rudy’s long hair. Rudy’s muscles locked at the touch of it, but he made no move. A moment later he saw the flickering shadow of a little whirlwind dancing away over the snow. He let his breath out in a shimmer of silvery smoke.

“Of the mages who survived the coming of the Dark Ones,” the wizard continued quietly, “less than a dozen have powers strong enough for me to have made this test on them. They, too, are abroad in the Vale tonight. Of those, only two hail from Gae – Saerlinn, who was a healer in the lower part of town, and me.”

Rudy nodded. He’d become acquainted in the last week with the other survivors of the world’s wizardry. Saerlinn was a fair-haired, rather nervous young man, a few years older than his own twenty-five. He was unusual not only in the fact that he wore spectacles – uncommon enough among mages, who could generally adjust their own senses and faculties – but also because he’d managed to preserve them unbroken on the long and desperate trek from Gae to the Vale of Renweth.

“At one time I considered leading the Gae reconnaissance myself,” the old man went on, and Rudy cast him a startled, protesting glance. “But aside from the fact that, as the head of the Wizards’ Corps, I could ill be spared, I do take a rather academic and refined interest in the preservation of my own skin. Since the Dark are hunting me – for whatever reason – I would be in twice the danger of detection within the Nest. It would be folly to tempt them.”

“It would be sort of pointless to get yourself killed on a routine mission,” Rudy admitted.

Ingold smiled. “Precisely,” he agreed. “I’m sending Thoth to head the reconnaissance of Penambra – he knows that city from his early days as a healer there. And I’m having the Raider shaman, Shadow of the Moon, take a couple of scouts to the Nest in the Vale of the Dark, some twenty miles north of here. She knows woodcraft – among other things.”

In the black wall of woods to their right, branches stirred suddenly, rustling in dark, aimless winds. Clouds were moving down from the glacier-locked mountains that loomed above them to the west, swallowing the few remaining stars. Cold cut through Rudy’s coat like a skinning knife.

“Kara of Ippit will go with you and Saerlinn to Gae,” Ingold went on. “She’s had the most formal training as a mage. Unless one counts the Chancellor Alwir’s Court Mage Bektis, of course.”

Rudy sniffed. He did not like Bektis. “If he’s out here tonight, I’ll eat my boots without even scraping the mud off ’em.”

“If that’s the case, I regret to inform you that you’re going to miss a meal.” Ingold sighed. “Bektis knows Gae, too. But I’m sure that his ever-pressing duties will not permit …”

He looked up suddenly, the words dying on his lips. A scream split the mountain stillness, a hopeless, echoing shriek that scaled up to a frenzied pitch of horror, then jarred and broke. Rudy sprang to his feet, the hair prickling on his neck, and was instantly arrested by the iron grip on his arm.

“Be still, you fool.”

A figure broke from the edge of the woods on the far side of the valley, black and tiny against the hoarfrost landscape. A man, Rudy thought, watching the way he ran, young and slender, stumbling over his own cloak in his terrified haste.

A swirl of darkness passed like a whirlwind over the snow. The fugitive screamed again as he ran, his arms outstretched, plunging blindly down the hill toward the black monolith of the Keep of Dare. Darkness swelled from the trees behind him, a strange shifting of images that even the dark-sight of a wizard could not pierce. Something flashed, wet and sticky, and a last piercing cry rang out, as if ripped from the dissolving flesh. Then there was silence, and something scattered over the half-melted snow.

Even at this distance, Rudy could smell the blood on the backwash of the erratic winds.

“Who was it?” Rudy asked.

His voice was pitched low, audible only to certain beasts, or to another wizard. But still his words sounded sacrilegiously loud in the horrible stillness of the hillside.

Ingold straightened up from the sodden, stinking mess in the torn snow. Even the bones they had found had not only been stripped of flesh but seemed strangely deformed, as if the bone tissue itself had been melted. Nauseated, Rudy looked away from the black, half-liquefied remains, to Ingold’s impassive face. Darkness masked the wizard’s features, but mageborn eyes could penetrate ordinary night; Rudy could see no change of expression in that lined, nondescript countenance.

But then, he supposed, after what had taken place in the ruins of the City of Wizards, it was not likely that the old man would ever be shaken up by much of anything again.

“We shall come out with the others, when the sun is in the sky, to burn what remains,” Ingold said quietly. “To do so now would only bring the Dark Ones once more upon us.”

He dropped what he held in his hand back onto the fetid little heap. Round, discolored lenses flashed in the starlight in their twisted frames. Ingold said, “It seems that I shall be visiting the Dark Ones at Gae, after all.”

Dawn was just thinning the stygian overcast of the night when Rudy and Ingold again reached the gates of the Keep. Against a charcoal sky, the ebony mass reared like a small mountain, close to a hundred feet from the top of the rock knoll on which it stood to its flat, snow-powdered roof and nearly half a mile in length. Its black, windowless walls faintly mirrored the trampled snow and dark trees that lay below it. Only its western face was broken by a gate and a short flight of broad steps. From a distance, the torchlight flickering in the square opening gave it the appearance of a single, small, baleful eye in the midst of an otherwise utterly featureless face.

As Rudy climbed the muddy path past the goat pens and ramshackle workshops that surrounded the Keep in a vast zone of trash, he could see most of the Wizards’ Corps assembled on the icy steps. He could pick out those who, like himself, had spent the night outside. Kara of Ippit, tall and homely, in her threadbare mantle and the two cardigans her mother had recently knitted for her. Thoth the Scribe, called the serpentmage, sole survivor of the massacre at Quo, austere as a bald vulture-god of antiquity, his topaz eyes illuminating his narrow white face like a jack-o-lantern’s. Dakis the Minstrel. A little fourteen-year-old witch-child from the north called Ilae, her dark eyes peering from behind a mane of red tangles. Others, a pitiful few, it seemed, huddling in the shadows like refugees in an old photograph of Ellis Island. And behind them stood those survivors of the massacre by the Dark who had been judged too lacking in power to participate in this trial of spells: itinerant conjurers, spellweavers, weatherwitches, and goody wives, the lower end of the spectrum of power that had not answered the dead Archmage’s fatal summons to the City of Quo.

Rudy’s heart sank at the sight of them. So few, he thought. And what the hell can we do, anyway, against the might of the Dark?

Other shadows appeared in the firelit tunnel that pierced the wall, leading from the outer gates to the inner, their forms ghostlike in the steam where the warmer air within came in contact with the outer cold – the day watch of the Guards, rubbing their bruises from the morning’s weapons practice and cursing one another and their deceptively elfin instructor good-naturedly. The Keep herdkids went tearing out in an enthusiastic boiling of infant energy to throw snowballs and milk goats. Soap boilers, hunters, woodcutters, and tanners emerged, men and women plying what trades they could from the scanty resources of this bitter and isolated valley.

And among them were a dark-haired girl in a black fur cloak and a peasant woman’s rainbow skirts and a tall, rather gawky woman some five years older, dressed in an outsize black uniform and white quatrefoil emblem of the Guards.

Minalde brushed the sable hood from her dark hair as she ran down the steps to meet Rudy, the rich fur of her cloak rippling glossily in the gray light. In sunlight, her eyes were the unearthly blue of a volcanic lake on a midsummer afternoon; shadowed as they were now, they were velvet-blue, almost black, and wide with anxiety. She caught Rudy’s hands. “They told me they’d heard a scream,” she said.

Rudy fought the urge to put a comforting arm around her shoulders, as he would have done had they met alone. She’s the Queen, he told himself, the Regent and the mother of the heir, for all she’s nineteen years old and scared. There are too many people watching.

“Glad to see it wasn’t you, punk,” Gil Patterson added, bringing up the rear, her long sword tapping at her ankles as she walked. Since she had joined the Guards of Gae, her former shy defensiveness had been gradually replaced by a toughness that, Rudy reflected, wasn’t any easier to see through. Those pale schoolmarm’s eyes still forbade any inquiries into the true state of her feelings, but she did look pleased that he’d survived.

At his side, Alde whispered, “Who was it?”

“Saerlinn. I don’t know if you knew him.”

She nodded, tears starting in her eyes. Alde knew, and was friends with, almost everyone in the Keep. Again Rudy struggled with his instinct to hold her, to offer her silent reassurance. “It puts us in a bad place,” he admitted quietly. “When we go to scout the Nest at Gae …”

“You?” Fear widened her eyes. “But you can’t—” She bit off her words, and a slow flush rose to her cheeks. “That is – it isn’t just for that,” she added with a soft-voiced dignity that made Rudy smile. “What about your experiments with the flame throwers, Rudy? You said you’d be able to create weapons to hurl fire from the things that Gil and I found in the old laboratories. You can’t …”

“They’ll just have to wait,” Rudy said quietly. “I’ll put one together for myself to take to Gae; the rest can wait till I return.” He put his hands on her shoulders and smiled at her frightened, woebegone face. “And I will return,” he promised her.

She looked down, her eyes veiled, and she nodded.

Gil’s voice cut sharply into the silence between them. “You think you’ll really be able to put working flame throwers together, then?”

He looked up, startled at her tactlessness, and saw what she had seen – the tall form of the Chancellor of the Realm, Alwir, Minalde’s brother, standing watching them in the mist and firelight of the gates. Rudy backed quickly away from Alde and took a few steps up the path toward the Keep.

“You bet,” he bragged in his best Madison Avenue voice. “Hell, in a month we’ll make swords obsolete.”

“That would be to your advantage,” Gil commented, “since you can’t pick one up without cutting yourself.”

But in spite of the banter, Rudy was acutely conscious of Alwir’s cold gaze on him as he rejoined Ingold among the mages at the foot of the Keep steps.

Alwir came down toward them, “a gleaming edifice of sartorial splendor,” as Alde had once joked, dominating those around him with his size, his elegance, and his haughty, unbending will. Like his sister, he was cloaked in black, a velvet mantle that billowed like wings behind him. The chain of sapphires that lay over his broad shoulders and breast were not bluer or harder than his eyes. He was trailed by the obsequious Bektis, his Court Mage, who alternately rubbed his long white hands together or stroked his waist-length, blue-silver beard as if in a self-congratulatory caress.

The Chancellor came to a halt on the lowest step and looked down at Ingold with an impassive face. “So your information was correct,” he said, in his rich, well-modulated voice. “The thing can be done.”

“By those with the strength,” Ingold returned quietly. “Yes.”

“And the reconnaissance?”

“We shall leave this time tomorrow morning.”

Alwir gave a satisfied little nod. Beyond them, the rising of the cloud-veiled sun had cast a kind of sickly, diffuse light upon the snowy wastes of the Vale, bringing forth from shadows the tangled grubbiness of the barricaded food compounds and the chain-hung pillars on the hill of execution across the road from the Keep.

“And these?” The Chancellor’s careless gesture took in the other mages – old women, young men, solemn black Southerners, and ice-white shamans from the plains.

“Believe me, my lord,” Ingold said, and there was a flicker of anger in his shadowed eyes, “whether or not it is decided to undertake this invasion, these people constitute your chief defense against the Dark Ones. Do not treat them lightly.”

Alwir’s eyebrows went up. “An unprepossessing lot,” he commented, scanning them, and Rudy felt that those enigmatic, speedwell-blue eyes lingered for a moment on where he had returned again to Alde’s side. “But perhaps more dangerous than they look.”

“Far more dangerous, my lord.” The new voice drew Rudy’s eyes and, half against his will, Alwir’s as well. In the suffused pallor of the dawn, the Guards on the steps had doused their torches in the snow, but within the gate passage above them fires still reflected redly on the polished walls. Against that reflection stood the red-robed shape of the Bishop of Gae, Govannin Narmenlion, her bald head and narrow, delicately jointed hands giving her the appearance of a skeleton wrapped in a crimson billow of flame.

“If you undertake your invasion using the Devil’s tools, my lord,” she warned, in a voice as dry and deadly as famine winds, “they will be its downfall. They are excommunicates, who have traded their souls to Evil for the powers they possess.”

Anger stained the big man’s cheeks, but he kept the melodious calm of his voice. “Perhaps if the Straight Faith were as dependent upon a centralized government as the Realm is, you would be even at this moment showering them with blessings,” he commented sardonically.

The fine-chiseled nostrils flared in amused scorn. “Such words tell more about the speaker than they do about their subject,” she remarked, and Alwir’s flushed face reddened further. “Better your precious invasion should fail than that you should bring yourself under the wrath of the Church by harboring such as these. Having commerce with the mageborn – the magedamned! – fouls the soul like clinging mud, until all the Faithful can see it, and cast you out. Even to converse with them taints you.”

Rudy felt Alde’s icy fingers close over his and, glancing sidelong at her, he saw the shame struggling in her taut face. She had been a good daughter of the Faith until the rainy night on the road from Karst when he had found his power – and they had become lovers.

Alwir grated, “That didn’t prevent you from coming out to see how they had fared!”

The Bishop’s dry voice was silky with menace. “It pays to count one’s enemies, my lord Alwir.”

There was silence on the steps, save for the rising whine of the icy wind in the trees. The Guards watched this confrontation uneasily. They had long grown used to the swift, vicious arguments between Bishop and Chancellor, but there was never any telling when one might suddenly escalate into civil war.

Then Alwir’s eyebrow canted mockingly. “And do you count me so, my lady?”

“You?” The gray light slipped along the curve of her shaven skull as she looked him up and down, austere scorn in the curve of her delicate lips. “You care not whether you are numbered among the godly or the wicked, my lord, as long as you can command what you call your niceties of life. You would sup in Hell with the Devil, were the food good.”

So saying, she turned in a swirl of scarlet and vanished into the darkness of the gate passage, her ringing footfalls dying away across the vast, empty spaces of the Aisle beyond toward the dark mazes where the Church kept unsleeping domain.

Alde whispered, “Rudy, I’m afraid of her.”

Hidden by the folds of her heavy cloak, his hand pressed hers. Talk had surged up again around them. Two of the junior weatherwitches had been offering to send the coming snowstorm elsewhere until Saerlinn’s body could be burned, and Thoth’s harsh, academic voice was saying, “To do so is to presume upon the laws of the Cosmos that bid the winds blow where they will.” There was some argument, but all of them, with the exception of Ingold and a withered little hermit named Kta, were terrified of the Scribe of Quo.

Under cover of the talk, Rudy said softly, “What can she do, babe? You’re the Queen. Even if she knew about us – which she doesn’t – we aren’t doing anyone any harm.”

“No,” she murmured. But her fingers trembled in his.

TWO

“INGOLD?”

Gil paused in the narrow doorway, all but invisible in the harlequin shadows that spangled the room. One of the other mages, the wizened little guru Kta, had told her that he was here, in a tiny chamber hidden deep within the secret levels of the Keep – the subterranean levels of whose very existence nine Keep dwellers out of ten were ignorant. Looking into the room, Gil saw that it was a miniature version of the “observation chamber” up on the second level, in whose stone and crystal table Rudy had once seen the possessed Archmage from afar.

Ingold was sitting on the edge of the circular, black stone table, looking into the changeable brightness that flowed upward from its heart. He raised his head at the sound of her voice, his face checkered with light and shadow; then he held out his hand to her, and the white light faded.

“I was on the point of sending for you,” he said quietly as she took a seat on the table’s edge beside him. Then, seeing the tautness of her mouth and the way her long, hilt-blistered fingers fidgeted with the buckle of her sword belt, he asked, “What is it, my dear?”

“Is it true what Rudy said?” she demanded. “That you’re going to lead the reconnaissance to Gae?”

For a moment he studied her in silence. It seemed to Gil that, as the cold brightness of the light faded, the lines of his battered face deepened momentarily. “After Saerlinn’s death, I am the only one who can lead it,” he replied.

She cried in despair, “You’re going to be killed!”

At that the blue eyes lightened. Ingold’s smile was a curious thing, for it transformed him as sunlight could transform a Highland landscape, making what was grim and angular suddenly young and wild. “You wound me, Gil,” he chided. “My very own cloaking-spell …”

“This isn’t a joking matter.” In Gil, concern for others had always taken the form of anger. Her voice was rough and harsh as she spoke. “The Dark Ones took Lohiro, and he was the goddam Archmage.”

“Lohiro went to them willingly,” pointed out the man who had loved the Archmage as a son. Against the chill, shifting luminosity of the crystal’s light, the scar he’d taken in killing Lohiro stood out jaggedly raw on the flattened corner of his cheekbone.

“Well, if they could hold him as their prisoner,” Gil snapped, “they sure as hell won’t have any problems killing you.”

An echo of that wild lightness still lingered in his eyes. “They’ll have to catch me first.”

Gil looked across the flickering fountain of light at him for a moment, struggling with anger and caring. Then she sighed, disarmed. “Well, all I’ve got to say is, you have the flakiest way of hiding out from them that I’ve ever seen, but that isn’t any of my business.”

“Ah.” Ingold smiled regretfully. “But it is your business, Gil. I have rather effectively made it your business, by bringing you to this world against your will and by getting you trapped here.”

Gil shook her head. “That wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known the Dark Ones would try to get through the gap in the Void.”

“It’s kind of you to say so. But I should have reasoned it out earlier than I did.” Amid the darkness of the wall, his huge shadow stooped forward like a giant as he took her hand and drew her to his side. “I knew of the possibility. But at the time I rescued Prince Tir, flight into your world seemed to be my only recourse, and I needed a confederate on the other side of the Void. And believe me, it has been a grim lesson to me about the inadvisability of tampering with worlds beyond my own.”

Gil shrugged. “If you hadn’t tampered, Rudy would still be painting bikes for the Hell’s Angels. You can’t say that was just coincidence.”

“I don’t believe that there is such a thing as coincidence,” Ingold said, and for a moment their eyes met. “And in any case,” he went on, “if I had not tampered, you would not have been dragged from the life you were working to build for yourself at the university, your research, and your friends. If it had not been for the danger that the Dark could follow you back across the Void and devastate your world as it has destroyed ours, you would have returned to all that long ago. And that, my dear,” he concluded quietly, “is why I came here tonight.” He drew her forward. Light pulsed suddenly in the crystal inset in the table’s center, bathing them in a white kaleidoscope of brightness. “Look into the crystal, Gil.”

She obeyed him, bending over it and blinking against that coruscating glare. “I – I don’t understand,” she stammered.

The brightness drew her sight, blinding her to the room, the shadows, and the robed figure at her side. Though there was a silence, she felt as if she were looking at music; only the faint buzzing throb of the machinery in the nearby pump rooms broke the utter stillness of the vision in which she was caught.

“It is – not easy to explain,” that deep, grainy voice at her side said. “This observation chamber, like the one up on the second level, was originally built to monitor the defenses of the Keep – a logical expedient, considering the miles of corridor involved. But, as Rudy learned, magic crystals have many uses. What you are seeing now is a construct, a simple visible expression of ideas too vast to be comprehended by ordinary means.”

Gil frowned, as her eyes slowly adjusted to the brilliance of that river of light that seemed to pour up around her.

For a time she was not certain that she even saw what she thought she saw, for she had no consciousness of the crystal itself. She thought that she looked down through an infinity of space, bathed in burning whiteness, and that, like bubbles in shining solution, gold spheres were moving, circling one another in the slow patterns of an unknowable dance. Their opalescent surfaces swam with colors that she neither recognized nor comprehended, revealing stars, galaxies, ages – cosmic vistas of something that was neither space nor time. The spheres grew infinitely smaller with distance, though there was neither horizon nor wall to break her line of sight; as far as she could see in that blazing ether, they were moving, merging, parting, and drifting around one another in endless patterns whose meaning whispered at the verges of her understanding. They shimmered like oiled gold as they touched, pressed together like the hands of joining dancers in those veils of light, and then, with infinite slowness, parted.

Ingold spoke again, his words seeming to her to come from some great distance. “What you see is the Void, Gil, the Void between universes – the Void that you crossed to come here. The spheres are worlds – universes – eons of time – each one a limitless cosmos of matter and energy, entropy and life. This is the closest I can come to explaining it to you, and it bears about as much relationship to reality as a child’s five-point drawing bears to the wonder and complexity that is an actual star. Do you see the joined spheres that lie closest to us?”

She nodded. “Are they—? They look as if they’re moving apart.”

“So they are,” he murmured. “They are your world and mine, Gil. Last summer they had been drifting together, until they lay so close that the curtain between them thinned. It is possible for one who understands the nature of the Void as I do to travel from this world to any other. But on the night that I first spoke to you, in the courtyards of Gae at the first quarter moon of autumn, they lay so close that a sleeper, a dreamer, could be drawn across unknowingly, as you were. It is this closeness that has prevented me from sending you back, for any rent in the tenuous fabric that divides your world from mine would set off a series of gaps through which the Dark Ones could find their way – as, in fact, one did.

“But our worlds are parting, drifting out of their cosmic conjunction. In six weeks or so, at the time of the Winter Feast, it will be safe for me to open the gate in the Void and return you to your world, without endangering the civilization that gave you birth.”

When he spoke of her return, she looked quickly up from that shining well to meet his eyes.

“And that, my dear, is why I am here tonight,” he repeated, as gently as he could. “For you are right. I do not know what awaits me in Gae. Danger, certainly, and perhaps my death. I had hoped to return you to your own world tonight, lest you should be trapped here forever.”

Gil whispered, “Tonight?” She was shocked at the suddenness of it, the fact that she might eat her dinner in the bleak Vale of Renweth and finish the evening with a midnight snack at a cafe on Westwood Boulevard. Indefinable emotions beat upon her, and she could only stare at him with blank, startled, stinging eyes.

Ingold took her hands gently and said, “I am sorry, Gil. Was that why you sought me out?”

She could not reply. Beside her, his voice went on. “Since the night the Dark Ones tried and failed to break the gates of the Keep, you know that they have haunted the Vale of Renweth. It may be that they are waiting for our guard to slacken or that they look for the opportunity to trap me outside the walls. But it could be that they are waiting for me to tamper again with the fabric of the universe, to open a gate through the Void. And that I dare not do.”

Still she remained silent. Below her, the crystal had gone dark, and the room was drowned in shadow. But it seemed to her that she still could see vague infinities of dark spheres and the suggestion of slow, turning movement through blackness. Quietly, she said, “It’s all right.”

His hands rested upon her shoulders, warm and comforting, banishing fear as they always had the power to do. “I am sorry,” he said again.

“It isn’t that.”

Out of the darkness that surrounded them, a faint thread of bluish light flickered into being. As Ingold helped her to her feet, the gleam widened and strengthened, showing the room small, black, and Spartan, the crystal plug set in the center of the table opaque and sparkling, a faint and frosted gray. The light drifted along above Ingold’s head, and their shadows lumbered, black and sprawling, about their feet as they went through the narrow door. It illuminated the gray fog of dust stirred by their feet as they passed through the deserted corridors of the empty hydroponics chambers. It winked on the disassembled components of flame throwers beyond the shadowed doorway of Rudy’s laboratory. Like a vagrant ball of foxfire, it preceded them up the narrow stair to the inhabited levels of the Keep and through the dark succession of closets, doorways, and interconnecting halls that made up the headquarters of the Wizards’ Corps.

The Corps common room was deserted, its only light the dim apricot glow that pulsed from the embers that lay, like a heap of jewels, on the wide hearth. Their two shadows moved clumsily through the greater darkness of that long room, passing, like the shadows of clouds, over the paraphernalia of habitation there: the jewel-bound books, salvaged from the wreck of Quo or shamelessly stolen from the archives of the Church; Kara of Ippit’s satin pincushion, sparkling like a diamond hedgehog among a great tumble of homespun cloth; the knuckly, knobby braids of herbs and onions hanging above the hearth; and the silver rainfall that was the strings of Rudy’s harp. The round, gold eyes of the headquarters cats flashed at them from every gloomy corner.

Ingold sighed, breaking his bitter silence, and there was a note in his voice that she had never heard before. “I had never meant to put you in such peril, Gil. It is said that wizards, among their many faults, have a horrible way of endangering their friends. I only hope to get you safely away from here, back to your own world, before disaster strikes. Those who are close to me seem to have a shocking rate of mortality.”

The beaten regret in his voice shocked her. “That isn’t true,” she said.

In the darkness he was only a darker shape, edged with the tawny colors of the fire. “You think not?” With his face hidden, the pain and irony of his words sounded all the clearer. “Rudy has inherited the staff of one of my dearest friends, child, and the widow of another.”

“That had nothing to do with you.”

“No?” Like a spark rising, his eyebrow was tipped with reflected gold. “One of them I deserted in the hour of his death; another I killed with my own hands. I don’t see how much more I could have had to do with it.”

“Either of them would have commanded you to do what you did, and you know it.” When he tried to turn away from her, she caught at his robe, the rough homespun bunched in her fist. “You were all trapped together by forces you couldn’t control,” she whispered savagely. “Don’t torture yourself because you were the survivor.”

Still he was silent, except for the thick draw of his breath. In the fading ember light, he was only a dim shape to her, but she was aware of him as she had never been aware of anyone or anything in her life. The touch of the patched wool clenched in her hand, the scent of sweet herbs and soap and woodsmoke that permeated the cloth, the stippling of fire outlining the edge of his white hair – with a heightened consciousness, she felt that she would have known him anywhere, without sight or hearing, merely by his nearness alone. When he raised his fingers to touch her wrist, she felt it like an electric shock.

In a softer voice, she said, “Quit tearing at yourself, Ingold. None of it was your fault.”

“But your death here would be.”

“Do you think that matters to me?”

“It matters to me.” Then suddenly her hand was empty. She heard the dry swishing of the curtain that covered the door of the alcove where he slept, but her eyes could not pierce the gloom at that end of the room. His grainy voice came to her as a disembodied murmur from the shadows. “Good night, Gil. And good-bye. Forgive me, if I should not return from Gae.”

Elsewhere in the Keep, other good-byes had been said.

The hour was late. Rudy thought he had heard the changing of the deep-night watch some time ago; but though he was more aware than most people of the span of time that had elapsed since then, it cost him conscious effort to translate it mentally into hours and minutes. He knew, in one sense, that it was two-thirty or so in the morning. But this was something that had lost its importance. He had lost his impulse to check the time, just as he no longer automatically felt for a light switch when he walked through a door.

The calling of light was an easy matter, like whistling. Seeing in the dark was easier still.

He trod the lightless corridors of the second level soundlessly, taking his memorized turnings as surely as he had once known that you got off the San Bernardino Freeway at Waterman Avenue, and two right turns got you to Wild David Wilde’s Paint and Body Shop. He threaded his way along a black, dusty passage between the cells that housed Alwir’s private guards and a storeroom where he was sure the Chancellor was illegally storing undeclared food for one of his merchant buddies. He passed through a closetlike cell that had been partitioned off an old scriptorium and turned down a cutoff through a dark, disused latrine.

Alde had shown him this route after he’d returned from Quo. It was the quickest way from the Wizards’ Corps commons to her rooms, allowing for a detour to avoid Church territory. Alde and Gil had spent weeks exploring the Keep, digging out the mysteries of its building, and either of them could get through the stygian warrens of jerry-built walls, spiraling mazes of old brick and grimy plaster and up and down the drunken spiderweb stairways with the swift, unthinking ease of a second-grader getting through the Pledge of Allegiance. As for the mysteries whose answers they had sought, they had uncovered no answers, but only more mysteries.

They had found fuelless, everlasting lamps and the component parts of flame throwers; they had found the ancient machinery that the Keep’s builders, the wizard-engineers, had used to power the air and water pumps; they had found riddles as enigmatic as the frosted gray polyhedron crystals that littered the lower labs in such useless numbers. But they had discovered no evidence that the vast hydroponics gardens had ever been used, no records of the early days of the Keep, and no sign of how the wizard-engineers had so suddenly vanished.

There was no evidence of how Dare of Renweth, builder of the Keep and founder of the line of High Kings, had defeated the Dark – nothing at all as to why the Dark Ones had ceased their ancient depredations upon humankind and returned to the black abysses that had spawned them.

Rudy stepped cautiously around an oblique corner and through a dark complex of cells where, even at this late hour, a soft flicker of greasy yellow lamplight winked through a crack in a door and quarreling voices brushed his awareness like wind as he passed. Rodent eyes sparked redly at him from the murk; somewhere a chicken clucked loudly, followed by the sodden thump of a thrown boot.

Had it been the flame throwers that defeated the Dark?

He didn’t think so; the pieces he’d found in the labs were few and incomplete. Besides, the Dark had been around for centuries after Dare’s time. Had some other champion of humankind arisen, some other warrior who had dealt the Dark Ones so crippling a blow as to render them unwilling to continue the attack?

How had humankind defeated the Dark?

The question is the answer, Ingold always said.

The question is always the answer.

But Rudy had cudgeled his brains over all possible answers and had found himself faced with only that question.

Maybe Tir would remember how. Maybe his father Eldor would have remembered eventually, had he not perished in the blazing ruin of the Palace at Gae. Though Tir was yet too young to speak, the baby prince gave evidence of having inherited that terrible and mysterious legacy common among the descendants of Dare of Renweth, not only from his father, but – by carrier, as it were – from Minalde as well. Her memories were vague – recognition rather than recall – but if the flame throwers were the answer, wouldn’t she have known it?

And if not the flame throwers, what?

White light gleamed palely before Rudy, reflecting against the slick, black stone of the walls. He passed the head of one of the main stairways of the Keep, its smooth construction announcing that it had been built at the time of the founding of that colossal maze itself. In a cage over it hung a single glowstone, a warning to the unwary.

How else had humankind defeated the Dark? Had the wizard-engineers stood at the top of those hellish stairways that led down to their hideous domains and dumped barrels of glowstones into that chasm?

Unlikely. Early experiments had shown that sufficient numbers of the Dark Ones could damp the light of glow-stones, just as they killed fires or sucked the strength from a wizard’s spell of light.

Some other weapon, buried in the deeps of time? Something Ingold might have learned of in his years of study and wandering? Some piece of knowledge that lay like an unexploded bomb in the depths of that complex mind?

Rudy would have swapped several of his younger siblings for the answer to that one.

A drift of warmer air rose from the stairway, stirring his long hair. It bore on it the soft, musical chanting of the night offices of the Church, and Rudy turned away, uneasy at the thought of the minor empire that filled the first-level warrens around that fluted Sanctuary. He had heard too many tales from the other mages in the Corps – rumors of rooms where magic would not operate and where a wizard could be imprisoned, as Ingold had been imprisoned in the doorless cell of Karst. There were whispers of black magic or such things as the Rune of the Chain, which bound and crippled a wizard’s power and left him helpless to his ancient, ecclesiastical foes.

Rudy had seen the Rune of the Chain. The memory was not a pleasant one.

He turned down another corridor, past a guardroom where voices hummed above the rattle of a dice cup. For a moment the haughty, intolerant face of Bishop Govannin floated through his memory, as he had seen her in the dawn light on the steps. It pays to count one’s enemies.

There was one he sure as hell didn’t need a magnifying glass to find. But what, after all, could she do?

He found what he’d been seeking – a jury-rigged, ladderlike stairway leading down to a back corridor of the level below, at a healthy distance from the Church. Not even a glowstone marked it, for few people came this way; below lay only a chasm of darkness, stinking of dust and mice. The crazy rungs creaked under his weight. Steadying himself against the splintery wood, he jumped the last few feet to the floor.

It was only when he landed that he saw movement. His wizard’s sight caught the glint of velvet and jewels; then, as faint as a whiff of the orris root perfume, he heard the unmistakable clink of a sword hilt on a belt buckle and the slurring whisper of a heavy cloak.

A rich, mellow voice spoke from the shadows. “Don’t be so apprehensive, my dear boy. I have no intention of doing you harm.”

Rudy let his breath out slowly. “That’s nice to know,” he remarked. “I mean, you know, halfway through the deep-night watch, you kind of wonder about the people you meet wandering around the back corridors.”

“Indeed you do.” Alwir opened a single pane of the lantern he bore, and dim, dappled white light filtered through the fretwork slides that surrounded the enchanted stone within. “You have let Ingold make you suspicious.” He set the lantern on a ledge of projecting bricks and turned back to face Rudy, his handsome, fleshy face very white within the raven masses of his hair. “Yes,” he continued, “one cannot but wonder about those who walk in the night.”

Rudy realized, with a sudden chill in the pit of his stomach, that Alwir had been waiting for him. There was nothing that he could possibly reply; the smell of Minalde’s perfume clung to his clothes. On the last night before we split, he thought, Alwir knew he’d be able to intercept me. Not that he’d have had much problem any other night since we got back from Quo. Rudy wiped his clammy hands on his breeches and waited in silence for what Alde’s brother would say.

“They tell me you’ve made excellent progress in the arts of magic,” Alwir went on in a conversational tone. “Your work on the flame throwers will, of course, be invaluable to us when we march against the Dark. Is it your belief that Dare of Renweth used something of the kind to invade the Nests?”

Rudy swallowed, put off balance by the small talk but unable to do anything except play along. “Uh – I don’t know. We’ve never even found evidence that Dare did invade the Nests.”

“Oh, come,” Alwir chided patronizingly. “We both know he must have done so. The Dark were defeated somehow. I feel sure that your reconnaissance to Gae will reveal to us exactly how it was done – and how we, allied with the armies of Alketch, may do likewise.”

“Yeah,” Rudy said warily, still trying to understand this cat-and-mouse game. “There are good odds, anyway.”

Alwir’s smile was wide and false and cold, like something he’d stapled on. “And afterward?”

“If I’m alive afterward,” Rudy replied, picking his words carefully, “we’ll see.”

“Indeed.” Alwir was still smiling, but the lobelia-blue eyes would have scratched diamonds. As if to change the subject, he said, “I assume your liaison with my sister is a well-kept secret? Not that I don’t understand her feelings,” he hastened to add, cutting off Rudy’s flaring words. “After all, she is young and lonely. She was grateful to you for saving her son’s life – as were we all, of course. And she could hardly have fallen in love with Gil or Ingold.” He sighed. “I would have prevented this if I could have. But the affair seems to have begun behind my back and was, I believe, well advanced by the time we arrived here. Was it not?”

His voice strained, Rudy asked, “What do you want?”

“My dear young friend.” The Chancellor sighed, his face never losing that determined smile. “I am not trying to trap you. But a man has a right to do a little plain speaking with the man who is lying with his sister. I wonder if you have considered the consequences to her?”

When Rudy made no reply, Alwir shook his head with mingled patience and disappointment. “Presumably, as a wizard, you can prevent her conceiving by you – or if that hasn’t occurred to you, I assume that she can get advice from her women friends among the Guards. And as far as I know, my sister was quite faithful to poor Eldor, and Altir is indeed the late King’s child.”

“As far as you know!” Rudy lashed, furious at the insult. “She worshipped him, dammit!”

“And mourned him intensely, I’m sure,” Alwir purred. Rudy felt his face redden. Alwir went on. “It would be putting it mildly indeed to say that her reputation would suffer, were the news to come out among the people that their Queen was less than two weeks replacing their – worshipped – lord in her bed. I could probably protect her from actual harm,” he mused, “but without a doubt she would be excommunicated.”

Govannin’s fanatic eyes seemed to glitter before Rudy. He swallowed, “You couldn’t …”

Alwir’s curved eyebrows lifted. “For lying with a wizard? In the South she would be burned for it.”

Rudy stared at him in shock. “You’re kidding.”

“Don’t treat yourself to false comfort at her expense,” the Chancellor told him mildly. “If the scandal became open, she would certainly be excommunicated and, as such, would no longer be able to hold the Regency or to have custody of her son.”

The words fell on Rudy’s ears without meaning at first; then understanding came and the slow kindling of fury deep within him. He was surprised at how steady his own voice sounded. “Which you would get.”

“Of course.” Alwir sounded amazed that there would be any question. He laid a patronizing hand on Rudy’s shoulder. “But believe me,” he went on, his voice low and grave, “I have no desire to create such a scandal.”

Through his teeth, Rudy said, “That’s nice.”

“I am quite fond of Minalde, you know. She’s a dear child, for all she’s headstrong; and I admit to a certain weakness for pretty young girls.”

Rudy remembered the agonies of remorse Alde had passed through, fighting her instinctive loyalty to her brother, and the disillusionment that stemmed from the strength of her love for him. He found himself literally trembling with rage, overwhelmed with a primal urge to smash the smirking big man’s teeth down his throat – not that that would help Alde any.

Alwir continued pleasantly, “But, you see, it is in my own best interests to protect her reputation, as well as her son’s creditability, which scandal would certainly damage. I hope you appreciate my position.”

What Rudy appreciated, at the moment, was how someone could see red and do murder in blind passion. He fought for calm, then asked, “And what is your position?”

Alwir raised his brows. “Why, to offer you my protection, of course,” he said, as if the matter were self-evident. But his calculating eyes were on Rudy’s face, gauging that startled break in his anger. “To ‘cover’ for you, as I believe the vulgar say,” the Chancellor went on in a friendly voice, “until you depart from here to return to your own world.”

Rudy looked stupidly at him, like a man looking at his own spilled guts before it dawned on him that he was dead. Numbed, Rudy could only listen to that smooth, casual voice run on.

“I can countenance my sister’s passion for you, since it harms no one. It does not affect the succession and will in any case soon be at an end. Indeed, I think it good for a woman to have something to occupy her. Though I cannot approve of her actions, of course, it is better than mourning and brooding. And you did, in fact, always intend to make your stay among us temporary, did you not?”

“Yeah,” Rudy whispered helplessly. Before Quo, he thought. Before the desert. Before I knew what I was, and called fire from cold wood and darkness.

“Then it is well,” the Chancellor said contentedly. “And when Minalde marries again …”

“Marries?”

“She is, after all, only nineteen,” Alwir pointed out suavely. “I should hope, for the sake of your relationship, that you know her well enough to know that she cannot hold power by herself, particularly not in the sort of world which we are now entering. Even after the Dark are defeated, we will face a long war against them. It will be a time when the strong take what they can get. She cannot hold power under those circumstances – but a man could hold it through her.”

“As you do,” Rudy said bitterly.

Alwir shrugged. “I am her brother. Naturally, I would prefer that she remain single, but it is hardly fair to her. And I have no intention of letting her develop an affair with someone – wholly unsuitable.”

Or strong enough to make trouble for you, Rudy thought through a daze of misery. Oh, Christ, Alde, what have I done to put you in his power like this? In helpless rage, he cried, “Why can’t you just let her alone?”

“My dear Rudy.” Alwir chuckled softly. “You must know by this time that those who by their very existence hold power are never let alone by anyone. What have you to lose? I understand that your little affair is temporary and I have no objections to its continuing as such. But what happens after you have left her is no concern of yours. So what will you have lost?”

Only everything, Rudy thought, the stunned, empty numbness beginning to give way to a cold despair, like the touch of death upon his bones. Magic and love. Hope. Things that I found after never thinking I would have them. Like a well of inconceivable grief, the future yawned at his feet, the bleak, desolate world of car paint and barflies made a thousand times worse by the awareness of what he would lose. Since he had come to this world, he had often been in fear of death, but this was a fate that he had never even imagined – to be raped of the only two things that mattered in his life and condemned to live on without them in a world where they did not exist, and never had existed.

THREE

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CITY in the West of the World – that was how Minalde had spoken of Gae.

A garden, the Icefalcon had called it.

But the Icefalcon was said to be dead, murdered by the representative of the Empire of Alketch, Alwir’s prospective ally. Minalde … Rudy did not want to think of Alde, though he had done little else for seven wretched days. And Gae sprawled, like the maggot-riddled corpse of a beautiful woman, with the bones starting to work up through discolored and falling flesh.

The wizards had entered the city at dawn, shadows in the dark mists that rose from the ice-scummed marshes. The swollen loops of the Great Brown River had engulfed the lower town, and even the upper, landward quarters bore foul evidence of the winter’s floods. Fungi and mosses slimed the fallen walls; the square below the shadows of the crumbling turrets of the gate was a steaming, knee-deep slough, stretching as far as Rudy’s eyes could penetrate the chill, pearlescent fog. In all that filthy, shrouded world, the only sounds seemed to be the distant drip of water and the cries of unseen rooks, quarreling over horrid prey.

Alde loved this town, he thought, surveying the leprous desolation before him. She was raised here; it was part of the life she loved, before the Dark … and before me.

Rudy hoped she would never have to see it as it was now.

He shifted his staff to his other hand – the six-foot, crescent-pronged staff that had once belonged to the Archmage Lohiro – and checked the weapon that hung holstered at his side. It was the only one of its kind, like a glass and gold Flash Gordon zap-gun – a hand flame thrower that could spit a thirty-foot column of fire. If he must enter the realm of the Dark, Rudy had resolved to enter it prepared.

The silence that hung over the town was frightening. Fog covered it like pewter darkness, masking the broken walls and fallen columns in opal veils of mystery. But it was not a dead silence that prickled Rudy’s hair and made him strain his eyes to pierce the mists. It was a silence that lived and watched.

Like a thickening of smoke, Ingold faded into being at his side. “This way,” he murmured, his voice scarcely louder than the skittering of rats’ feet on the broken stones before them. “Kara tells me the main path to the Palace is blocked. We can go by way of the Street of Oleanders.”

Other forms materialized – Kara of Ippit and the withered little hermit Kta, who had included himself, over Ingold’s protests, in the expedition at the last minute. Kara whispered, “I didn’t like the look of that street. It looked almost as if – as if a wall had been built across it out of rubble.”

Ingold nodded. “It could be that it had.” The wraith of his breath drifted for a moment like smoke about his head, then dissipated into the cloudy whiteness that surrounded the group. Within the shadows of his hood, his eyes had an over-bright, fagged look to them, the look of a man living on his nerve endings. Then he turned away, and chill, smoky darkness once more enveloped the wizards.

As they moved through the ruined town, Rudy came to understand the old man’s insistence that the party be accompanied by one who knew Gae. No map could have gotten them through the back-doubling alleys that avoided the open ground of the fog-locked marketplace or could have guided them through the leaden darkness to the weed-hung colonnades and shopping arcades whose denser shadows lent the wizards cover from seeking eyes. Ingold led them easily through ruined courtyards where tangled mats of vines ran riot over the charred commingling of stones and human bones, down half-flooded alleys whose walls were thick with pullulant green-black moss, and through the frost-furred muck of empty mews that skirted the wealthier parts of the town. Twice, as the milky vapors around them lightened toward dawn, Rudy glimpsed little bands of dooic, slipping through the vine-tangled side streets, half-obscured by fog. And once, as they passed the hoared bowl of a frozen fountain in what had been a fashionable square, he heard a baby cry somewhere close by, a fitful, helpless wailing that filled him with horror.

He reached to touch the wizard’s mantle. “Do you hear that?”

The sound had been quenched as suddenly as it had begun.

Kara glanced behind her nervously, her big hands tightening over the long-bladed halberd that she carried instead of the customary staff; Kta’s bright little bird-black eyes were sharp with interest. In the cold pewter light, Ingold’s face was impassive, but Rudy thought he looked rather white around the lips.

“Did you think that Gae was deserted, Rudy?” he asked softly. The steam curling from the fetid pool of ice-crusted brown water in the court blew between them, blurring him momentarily to a flat gray shape, featureless but for the glitter of his eyes.

Rudy whispered, “Dooic babies don’t cry like that. I’ve heard them, out in the plains.” When Ingold did not reply, he asked, “Do you know who it is? I thought there was nobody alive in Gae.”

“Nobody?” The wizard’s voice was soft; behind it, Rudy detected other sounds, distorted by the fog – squishing footfalls and the wet drag of something heavy over stone. He sensed the sudden change in the air and felt the fog condense around them, drawn by Ingold to shield them from hostile eyes. The pinprickle sensation of a cloaking-spell tingled on his skin. “Nobody whom we would recognize as human, perhaps.”

“You mean – the ones whose minds the Dark have eaten?” Rudy’s hand felt clammy on his staff; he groped for the flame thrower at his belt. “But I thought they became zombies and died – of exposure or starvation …”

“They do.” Ingold’s voice was a flicker of breath, blurring into the scritch of the vines on the wall at their backs. “Less innocent than that, I’m afraid. These, Rudy, will be ghouls.”

They came into sight out of the mists near the broken fountain bowl – slumped, repulsive, stinking. It was more than the putrid stench of corruption that clung to their gaudy, tattered clothes; the reek of what they were loured about them like a fog of filth. There were five of them, two men and three women. One of the women was swollen-bellied with child; another was hardly more than a girl. Their hair was matted with scum and old blood; their clothes – brocades and velvets, stitched with gold and tipped with ermine – were filthy and wrinkled, as if they had been slept in, eaten in, fornicated in, and worn to slaughter some small and violently struggling animal. The ghouls moved at a furtive trot, glancing constantly over their shoulders; two of them were armed with cleavers, and the leader carried a jewel-encrusted sword.

They passed within a few feet of the wizards, murmuring among themselves, their glances flitting here, there, and everywhere but toward the spot where the wizards stood. Rudy heard the leader whisper, “That mothereating scout said the downriver people had moved up into this neighborhood someplace.” The pregnant woman enlarged on the subject of the scout in terms that would have brought blushes to the cheeks of some Hell’s Angels Rudy had known. Close to them, holding his breath against their reek, he could see that none of them looked very healthy. The youngest girl’s face was blotched all over with savage scars – like huge vaccination marks, he thought stupidly, then realized that they must be from smallpox. The smaller of the two men sniffled and blew his nose on his already dripping sleeve; the other cursed him and told him to shut up if he didn’t want to end up in the pot himself.

As the white vapors swallowed them once again, Rudy grasped who these must be.

They were the citizens of Gae who had not followed Alwir’s convoy to the south – who had remained in Gae to loot the empty houses and live in wealth among the ruins. They’d taken the weapons from the charred hands of corpses buried under the wreck of the Palace – weapons that, as in the case of King Eldor, had proved the only means of identifying the burned bodies – and robbed the clothes from the backs of those dead in the cellars and streets. They’d clung to the city rather than trade it for the hardships of the road, making rats’ burrows of homes in the majestic remains of the villas of the rich and fighting the former dooic slaves and one another for the dwindling supplies of food that were left.

It occurred to Rudy, as the mists swirled suddenly around Ingold’s abrupt departure, that, if the old man had known the town in its heyday, he might just have recognized one of the ghouls as someone he had once known.

Rudy moved off after him, torn between revulsion and pity.

They crossed another court and turned down an alley that was so choked with the vines that seemed to have overtaken whole districts of the city that it was only with difficulty they could move through the persistently tangling mat at all. Elsewhere they had to cut through a veritable wall of them, and Rudy found himself wondering, as he struggled with the clinging, knotty stems, what this place would be like when darkness fell, with these ubiquitous snares slowing their flight. Then Ingold halted at the mouth of a narrow street beyond which could be seen only a wall of opal mist. In the growing light, his face was a harsh medley of planes and shadows; as in a certain type of art, the only spark of color lay in his eyes. He touched Rudy’s sleeve, pointed across the court before them, and whispered, “There.”

Rudy blinked, frowning into the mists. After a moment he realized that what he had taken for a darkening in the fog was the opaque bulk of some vast building, a suggestion of broken rooflines and sagging towers, of charred rafters, and of decay. Winds stirred at the billowing veils, smelling of water, corruption, and wet earth. The fogs were infused with the sudden, weak light of the sun; watery colors became slowly visible through the shimmering gauze. Edges seemed to step forth from obscurity. Piece by piece, pillar and pavement and pierced frieze of stone, the Palace of Gae manifested itself to them, like the many-colored corpse of a dead dragon, its bare ribs arching high into the milky air.

So this, Rudy thought, was where Eldor had left his bones in the flaming ruins. Where the Dark Ones had dragged Alde away, captive, and the Guards of Gae had rescued her on the edge of the chasm. Where Ingold had deserted the last battle, to carry Eldor and Minalde’s infant son Tir across the cosmic Void and into the temporary safety of the mild and sunny realm of California.

This was where it all started.

And this, he realized with a foreboding chill, was where, somehow, now or later, it was destined to end.

The court lay bare and empty before them, a mud-smeared expanse of broken green and scarlet inlays, half-sheeted with ice and already infected by the long, searching runners of the vines. Ingold shifted the weight of the coiled rope he carried over his shoulder and whispered, “We’ll cross one at a time. Kara, keep an eye on Kta.” He gripped the staff in his hand and stepped into the open ground of the court.

A movement caught Rudy’s attention, along the wall to his left. He whirled, his hand going to his flame thrower, but all he saw was a huge rat, sliding insolently among the matted compost of dirt and vines and bones. When he looked back to the court, Ingold was gone.

There was no sign of him in all that bleached expanse. Not even a footprint marked the frost-fuzzed moss of the broken pavement.

Then he saw the wizard in the dense shade of the arch at the far side of the courtyard, barely visible in the dappling shadows of filigreed marble and dead vines. Ingold moved a hand, signaling Rudy to follow.

He obeyed, with a hopeless sense of nakedness in the open ground. But though he half-expected Ingold to greet him with a mild query about whether he intended to send out a crier to announce his presence as well, the wizard said nothing. It was borne upon Rudy that the time for his education in wizardry was past. He was what he was, and it was up to him to keep himself out of trouble.

Kara followed. Rudy had a quick impression of the gray ripple of a homespun cloak and the touch of a skirt hem on frozen vines. Once, where the tessellated pavements were cracked, he saw the brief shadow of a tall woman and the glint of wan daylight on the blade of a halberd. Then Kara was beside him, her face pale under her hood.

Ingold had moved off, scouting the porch. The mists held thicker here, stirring faintly about his feet like pallid ground fog; sometimes it was only that vague shifting movement that allowed him to be seen at all. His brown cloak seemed to blend with the gloom, melting indistinguishably into the thicker shadows of the broken archways. Rudy glanced back across the moss-splotched court, seeing its smeared and dirty pavements with their brave colors all but hidden beneath the soupy scum of mud and ash and leaves.

“Where did Kta go?”

Kara, who was likewise looking out across the court, shook her head. “He was going to follow me,” she whispered.

Rudy cursed his own stupidity. “One of us should have gone after him,” he whispered back. “He may be tough as an old sagebrush root, but I don’t think he was mageborn. If he was, I’ve certainly never seen him work anything resembling a spell.” Which was true; as far as anyone could tell, the withered little mummy was totally illiterate and untaught, though he took a childlike joy in the spells of the younger mages. Most of the other wizards in the Corps tended to regard him as a curiosity, rather than an asset to the Corps. But Rudy had tried to keep up with the little fossil’s untiring footsteps for seven days’ hard slogging through the foul, flooded river valleys that lay between Gae and Renweth, and had come to the conclusion that not only did Kta neither eat nor sleep, but that he only sat down to rest at night out of consideration for the frailty of his companions.

Kara murmured, “Should one of us go back for him? Ingold would never forgive us if we lost …”

Her voice trailed off. Ingold and Kta materialized from the shadows behind them, Ingold whispering in an exasperated voice, “… and since you insisted upon including yourself in this expedition to begin with, the least you can do is accept my judgment as its leader.”

“Ah?” the little hermit said, not at all concerned. He was hopping along at Ingold’s side with a birdlike gait, tiny and incredibly fragile-looking, like some worn macrame made of rags.

“You have to admit you’re too old for active fieldwork. I’ve permitted you to come this far, but you will not go down with us into the Nest.”

The older man straightened his back as much as was possible and peered up at Ingold with bright little black eyes. “I will be unseen,” he replied in his piping voice.

“I’m only concerned for your safety, Kta,” Ingold insisted. “You know—”

The tiny creature rounded upon him, almost tripping him with the quickness of his movement, and jabbed a skinny pink forefinger up at him. “Always this concern for others’ safety,” he accused shrilly, “whether they wish to hold safe or not.”

“You know you couldn’t fight your way out of a trap,” Ingold told him gently.

“Neither could you, for all your skill with that fearsome meatchopper you carry.”

Ingold looked miffed, and Kta turned and hobbled ahead, toward the vast, broken doorway that opened into the darkness of the vaults. As he clambered up the weed-choked rubble of stone and shattered bronze, he half-turned and flung smugly over his shoulder, “And it is not me whom the Dark Ones pursue from one end of the world to the other.”

Ingold opened his mouth to retort, but Kta was gone, hopping calmly into the terrible shadows below. Rudy and Kara fell into step beside Ingold as he hurried to catch up with Kta, where he waited in that anteroom of Hell. Rudy said softly as they passed into the clustered shadows of the vault doors, “He’s got you there.” It was the first time he’d ever seen Ingold lose an argument with anyone.

The wizard glanced over at him sharply. “Nonsense,” he snapped. “He’s too old to undertake the exploration of the Nest with us and too stubborn to admit it.”

And you love him too much, Rudy thought, to want to see him killed trying. But he wisely refrained from tackling the issue of stubbornness with Ingold and walked after him in silence through the wan, dappled grayness of the broken upper levels.

Here the ruin was greater, as if this semisubterrene antechamber to the vaults had been transformed into a kind of borderland of darkness. The vines here grew thicker, festooning the burned rafters in impenetrable curtains, insolently forcing apart the very stones of the walls. Darkness seemed to lurk in every corner; the walls and floor had a slimy glitter, and the fetid stink of netherworld vegetation clogged in the nostrils and collected like a film on the tongue. Rudy found himself prey to a growing uneasiness, a feeling of being snared; the vines and the paving-stones they had tilted seemed to snag at his feet deliberately. He wondered how quickly a man could run from this place.

“There,” Ingold said quietly. Half-hidden by the mats of vegetation, another doorway gaped, black and terrible, over a bone-littered threshold. “That leads down to the lower vaults, where we will find the stairway to the Darkness itself. You all know the spell that will cloak you against the awareness of the Dark—” He vouchsafed not a glance at Kta. “—but remember also that you must use a double spell and avoid likewise the notice of their herds. Also,” he went on, glancing sharply from Rudy’s face to Kara’s, “we must not let ourselves be seen by any human prisoners. The Dark have been taking prisoners from the beginning of their rising. It is not our business to free them, no matter how much compassion we may feel. To do so would jeopardize not only our mission but also our lives. There is just so much that a cloaking-spell will cover; if we do anything to bring ourselves to the attention of the Dark, we are lost.”

Easy for you to tell us that, Rudy thought as he followed the dark, cloaked form down the red porphyry stairs that led to the vault. None of us knew Gae. You’re the only one likely to see anyone you know.

Afterward, he read the wax tablets he had sketched with the maps of the Nest, registering the various tunnels and caverns he had wandered through, and what he saw surprised him, for he did not remember most of them singly. The greater part of his memories of the Nest he forced down below the levels of consciousness, only to have them surface, like bloated corpses from black waters, in his dreams. The hours he spent below the ground had a surreal quality; in that unending night, time became meaningless. Terror, shock, and disgust further clouded his sense of the passage of hours. He lost even his own sense of self, for he walked hidden in his wreaths of illusion, invisible to all around him.

After they parted in the topmost cavern with an agreement and a common spell to mark the limits of their time, he walked alone, like a ghost haunting a world as alien and incomprehensible as it was revolting and horrifying. It was a world of darkness, of slimy moisture and ever-present, hideous danger, a world whose existence he had never even imagined possible and which would never, he feared, be wholly eradicated from his mind.

The Dark Ones were everywhere. They crowded the walls and ceilings of measureless caverns of darkness, the clicking of their claws on the slick-polished limestone a constant chattering background to his sickness and dread. His wizard’s sight showed him the wet gleam of their massed backs and the glitter of the foul fluid that dripped continually from those gelid surfaces. The stink of them, sharp and somehow metallic, clogged his nostrils, and he felt a mounting horror of being discovered and buried alive under those squirming, slithering beings.

That first enormous cavern, where he parted from the other wizards at the foot of the drop-off and the spelled rope, was the worst, for the Dark Ones crawled not only over ceiling and walls but across the floor as well, scurrying like monster roaches through the dry and crumbling brown moss, their long whiplike tails hissing through the withered vegetation and leaving trails of sticky wetness behind. Elsewhere they seemed to travel mostly on the ceilings of the tunnels, crawling among the stalactites and folded veils of stone as cavern succeeded cavern, the drip of their noisome slime tapping viscously on the mossy floors. Never having been subject to the terror and loathing of spiders and snakes, Rudy had not understood that morbid dread of simply being touched by something abominable. He understood it now.

He had thought that custom would acclimate him to their presence in time, so that he could have confidence in the spells that guarded him and walk more easily. But it never did. Nor did it dull the smothering horror of the darkness itself or the unreasonable sensation of the weight of all those miles of earth and stone pressing down upon him. Only those who had never been trapped in the darkness below the ground could compare the mazes of the lightless Keep of Dare with the realms of the Dark. For all its pressing darkness, its weight of enchanted steel and stone, the Keep was finite. But the darkness here was infinite. The weight was the weight of the earth. The crawling horrors populating this place were likewise infinite, as inescapable as this darkness that had never seen light.

Only now did he understand Ingold’s warnings and conviction that an invasion of the Nests could never succeed. The tunnels were endless, twisting down and back into the black bowels of the earth, incomprehensible mazes that could swallow a dozen armies. Nauseated despair took him, as he wandered farther and farther in that sightless realm, along with a sense of black hopelessness. He wondered how any army, even with the technology such as Dare of Renweth had had at his disposal, could have made so much as a dent against the numbers and power of the Dark.

But he had been sent to observe. Through the panic, the loathing, and the numbing despair, certain details stood out absurdly clear. Rudy noticed that the Nests were warm, and a flow of warmer air marked the downward-leading tunnels, even where the Dark Ones did not come crawling forth like round-headed, filthy beetles from holes in the putrefying moss. He saw that different kinds of moss grew in different places. Heavy carpets of velvet green-black in many places – whole caverns, sometimes – were crumbling to brown and withered dust. In other places, clubbed, knobby growths infested the floors like stumpy, unspeakable forests. Whitish mosses hung like curtains of slimy seaweed down the dripping walls. The herds of the Dark fed greedily upon them all.

The herds of the Dark affected Rudy strangely. He found his loathing of those bandy-legged, bulge-eyed humanoids almost as intense as his horror of the Dark Ones themselves. He had known they were close to human, but had expected creatures like the dooic of the plains – hairy and apelike, trapped Neanderthals. But the creatures that shuffled through the withering beds of moss or squatted to lap at the bottomless pools of onyx waters were smaller, more delicate, and larger of skull; their chittering squeals as they fled, blinking, from any movement in the air sounded horribly analogous to speech.

They were not the only ones chewing bits of moss in their soft little teeth and staring about in the darkness with huge, terror-stricken eyes. In a cavern so vast that his eyes could not reach its end, Rudy found herds of men and women in torn and soiled rags, stumbling about and feeding on moss, muttering endlessly in the dark. They did not move like those miserable zombies whose brains the Dark had devoured, but Rudy wondered how many of them could be called sane. This single chamber seemed to house a dozen good-sized bands, whose members had formerly owned shops, raised families, and promenaded the arcaded streets of the broken town above. Maybe they still had relatives up there, Rudy thought in a puzzled confusion of nausea and loathing; maybe they had husbands, or wives, or children in the Keep of Dare.

He drew back to avoid touching a woman who crawled past him on her hands and knees, seeking the edge of the pool by which he stood. She had long blond hair and had probably once been very beautiful, Rudy thought, looking with numbed dispassion at her emaciated face and bloated, sagging belly. She groped for the water in the darkness and mumbled, “Water fifty-five steps from the wall, water fifty-five steps from the wall,” in a dulled, mechanical recitation.

It could have been Alde, Rudy thought, and the idea brought nausea burning up into his throat. Maybe it was a friend of hers. Hadn’t Janus said that the Dark carried off large numbers of the defenders from that last battle in the Palace? Rudy shut his eyes, his head swimming suddenly; it could just as easily have been any one of them at the Keep.

But, as Ingold had said, it was not to pity or to rescue that they had come. It was to map, and map Rudy did, marking the immense caverns and the endless bowels of black tunnels crawling with filthy life as he followed the windings of the Nest deeper and deeper into the pressing earth. He found caverns flooded with black, oily water, through which stalactites rose like pillars from a floor of glass. He found cavern after cavern filled with bones – ages old and crumbling to dust or fresh and slithering with hideous rodent and insect life. He found the nurseries, the breeding grounds of the Dark, and the sight brought him as close as he had ever come to fainting in his adult life.

If I have to come back myself with a book of matches, he promised himself, hefting the gleaming weight of his flame thrower in his hand, I will see that place burned out.

He rested at last in a rock crevice, his sweating face cooled by the rising drift of air. He had marked the wall, tracing upon it with his fingertip a silvery rune that only he could see. The thought of going forward, further into that endless domain of darkness and smothering horror, was almost more than he could bear. He was weary, but he felt no hunger. After the nurseries, he doubted he would ever be hungry again.

Time had no meaning in the realms of the Dark, so it was with a sense of surprise that he glanced at the back of his hand and saw that the red rune Hlal, which Ingold had drawn there before they parted, had darkened almost to black. Time sure goes fast when you’re having fun, he told himself cynically and got to his feet. Decaying moss crumbled to brittle dust where he put his hand against the wall, filtering into the air to choke him. He holstered his flame thrower, wiped his filthy hand on the skirts of his filthy coat, and prepared himself for the long, ugly journey to the surface.

Wind struck him, chill and sudden. It poured down over him from the tunnel above – the swirling, directionless breath of the Dark. Deep in the cavern he had just left, he heard the thud-thud-thud of running feet and a man’s hoarse, labored gasp. Making for here, Rudy thought, glancing up from the narrow rock slit where he was hidden toward the tunnel, then back at the cavern again. Winds were flowing from that direction, too, pursuing the man who ran toward him in the darkness.

Fantastic, Rudy thought, and debated which way to flee, for he had no intention of being trapped between the Dark and their prey. But before he could move, the winds rushed over him like a torrent of water, rasping in the dry moss all around him. The running man blundered with arms outstretched through the entrance of the crevice and fell, stumbling almost into Rudy’s arms.

The Dark were instants behind. They poured down the top end of the tunnel as the runner and Rudy fell in a blundering tangle of arms and legs. Rudy was cursing, and the fugitive was gasping in surprise and despair. Rudy twisted himself free as the swarming plasmoid bodies descended on them both, soft coils of tentacles unfurling like dripping snakes.

Wyatt Earp himself couldn’t have cleared leather faster.

The flame thrower belched light and fire, streamers of chrome-yellow flame pouring from its thick barrel, unbearably brilliant in the eternity of the underground dark. The fire flowed up over those slick backs in a licking torrent of searing gold.

By the first blast of the light, Rudy had a confused glimpse of the fugitive’s face, an emaciated skull between hanks of grayed, dirty hair. Then the man screamed, covering his eyes that had not seen light since the fall of Gae, and the Dark were on them again.

But the fire was spreading among them; they blundered into one another like a flock of Hindenburgs in the confined space of the tunnel. Conflicting winds swept up from below, and Rudy whirled, bracing his feet on the slippery floor and firing downward, the noise of the flame a smothering roar. At the same instant, the spiny cable of a lashing tail grabbed at him from above, and he fired as he turned, the leaping column of silken heat brushing the withered moss of the cavern mouth beyond.

It went up like torched paper. Rudy blinked and flinched away in shock as the fires spread, rushing back into the empty cave below with a velocity that was horrifying. Stalactites, columns, twisting alabaster veils, and clumped masses of crystals leaped into ruddy visibility, their colors dazzling – bronze, rose, and cream – all smeared with the ruddy dye of the flame. He had a confused vision of Dark Ones falling in writhing clouds from the unseen ceiling, twisting about in agony at the brightness, splattering acid as they fell and were consumed by the greedy roar of the flame. Then he fled, all hope of concealment shattered, and felt the winds of the Dark swirling on his hack.

He was plunged again into darkness as he hit the wider tunnel beyond, staggering in the noisome muck of the steep floor. His traced, invisible runes beckoned; he turned, and the flame thrower spewed fire at the Dark Ones in his wake. The massed blackness erupted into flames, twisting and thrashing as they blazed, sparks sizzling in the wet, black mosses of the floor. Channeled by the tunnel walls, the winds raged around him, and he ran blindly from mark to mark, turning every now and then to fire at his pursuers or to clear the path before him. Where the sparks fell on the patches of brown and withered moss that blotched the walls like mildew, they exploded into violent flame.

Blind, white semihumans fled shrieking through the fire, covering huge, rudimentary eyes against the light. Men and women in rags ran past him, screaming in terror and confusion. Walls and ceiling were bursting into flame all around him, and he remembered with sudden horror that the last cavern before the one that contained stair and rope was covered in the brown, dried moss. The knowledge was like an electrified spur. It would take only a single spark to set the whole thing off, and if he were halfway across it at the time …

The upper caverns were a choked confusion of smoke, darkness, and half-lights. He stumbled where the ground was slippery and fought against the screaming humans and almost-humans who blundered against him, grabbing at his arm, shrieking unintelligible words. Columns of smoke burned his eyes, thrashed by the winds of the Dark. Rats streamed around his feet, fleeing the inferno below.

In the last cavern, there was nothing but a wild storming of darkness. Rudy could feel the power of the Dark Ones already reaching out, damping the flames as they damped light. He felt the immense might and will that throbbed in the swirling air. Brown moss and old bones crunched under his feet. The light of the fire streamed up from the tunnels behind him, touched the limestone lace with sulfurous glory, and outlined the billows of the smoke. Black, shining bodies poured through the passage that led upward, a torrent of dripping slime and gaping mouths. They streamed like a river toward the fire in the passageway, putting out their power to quench it, to damp it. Rudy flung himself up the rockslide toward the next tunnel just as one of the hapless herd-creatures, burning and shrieking as it ran, fled blindly into the cavern, stumbled, and fell into the crumbling moss.

It seemed to Rudy, shielding his smoke-filled eyes, that the monstrous cavern, which could have swallowed the entire Keep and still had room to spare, was engulfed not so much by spreading flame as by a single explosion, so rapidly did the moss go up. He gasped at the sudden vacuum of oxygen, his head turning light and giddy. For a moment he feared he would pass out and fall backward down the rocks into the roaring hell of the fire. As he ran on, staggering, he felt the flesh of his right cheek blistered and the backs of his hands scorched by the tremendous heat. It seemed to him as if all the Dark Ones in the Nest were streaming past him over his head, putting out their magic to kill the flames, while he fled beneath them, seeking the magic rope, with the weight of his flame thrower dragging at his blistered hand.

Then he was falling, and consciousness left him.

He came to slowly, and in the dark.

He tasted rock and water and smelled slime and stone. Both his hands were empty.

With a cry of despair he sat up, and a strong hand pushed him down again. Something wet and shockingly cold smeared his burned cheek.

“Sit still,” Ingold’s voice said, not unkindly. “I believe you’ve caused quite enough trouble for one evening.”

Slowly, his dark-sight came into focus.

They were in a small stone room like a vault. Its single entrance looked out onto a tiny garden close where half a dozen apricot trees huddled like crones in a train station, heads down against the bitter cold. Above the stink of acid and the gritty taste of dust and powdered moss in his nostrils, Rudy could smell old snow mixed with dirt and the chill scent of bad weather to come. Just visible, outlined in darkness against the door, Kara of Ippit was making additional notes on one of her tablets, her halberd leaning against the wall at her side. The unscarred profile of her face was turned toward him, and Rudy decided that, if a man were in love with her, and didn’t mind cheekbones that made him think of an outcrop of granite on a desert hillside, she’d be almost pretty to him. Rudy’s pronged staff, which he had somehow kept hold of during the chaos in the Nest, was propped up nearby, its points glinting dully in what wan light managed to leak from the overcast darkness of the night sky. In a corner of the little chamber, Kta was curled up asleep, like the rag-bound mummy of an Inca child.

Rudy sighed and relaxed into the not uncomfortable bed of old leaves on which he lay. They made a tired mushing sound under the single blanket spread over them and sent up a moldery, melancholy smell. “Christ,” he whispered. “I’d hoped to hell you were all three out of the Nest before the fires got out of hand.”

Ingold smiled and went back to mixing herbed grease between his hands. In the dim, filtered light from outside, Rudy could make out a broken pot or bowl on the floor beside the wizard, half-filled with ice-cold well water that glittered faintly as it leaked down onto the rough stone floor. “If I hadn’t stopped to fight a rearguard action against the Dark,” the old man replied mildly, “I would have been in that last cavern when it exploded into flame. You didn’t see me?”

Rudy’s eyes widened with horror and guilt. “Jesus, no. I’m sorry, man …”

“I suppose I should be galvanized with delight that the cloaking-spell works so effectively … Hold still, I’m not going to brand you. It’s only burn medicine and it’s good for you. Fortunately, there was a fairly straightforward tunnel that detoured around the cavern, and I did make it out – though I had to leave the rope at the stairs.”

“How come?”

“Because I was carrying you.” He sat back, wiping his hands on the corner of Rudy’s blanket. His rough brown mantle reeked of smoke and of all the foulness of the Nest. In the shadows of his cowl, his eyes were amused and kind. “I trust your experiment with the flame thrower proved satisfactory?”

Rudy laughed shakily, and Ingold joined in – the first time, now that Rudy thought of it, that he had heard the wizard laugh in quite some time. The driven tension had faded from his eyes, leaving only an elusive, slightly haunted expression, like an echo of what he had seen in the Nest of the Dark. Rudy was later to know that look in the eyes of those who had been a part of the reconnaissance.

The memory of that putrid darkness returned to him, and he sobered. Quietly, he said, “It’s going to be rough.”

Ingold flashed him a quick, sideways glance. “You believe it can be done at all?”

Rudy frowned. “Of course. We’ll need a heavy covering force to get the flame thrower squad to the bottom of the Nest, but once we’re there, we can burn our way backward. If we can knock out the nurseries and damage as little as fifty percent of the Nest, we can make Gae safe for human habitation again.”

“And you believe that a human force can damage as much as half the Nest?”

“That moss burns like paper, man.” Rudy moved a little and winced. His muscles were already stiffening. “You don’t think so?”

The old man was silent a moment, staring down at his own cut, blistered hands. Then he glanced toward the doorway. “Kara? Are you taking the first watch?”

“If it’s all right,” she said in her queer, deep voice.

Rudy struggled to a sitting position, surprised at how sore he was. His hands and face smarted under the sticky paste of Ingold’s medicines. “I’ll arm-wrestle you for it.” he offered. “Or let’s have the three of us draw straws. Short straw has to go to sleep. God knows how Kta manages it,” he added feelingly.

“Kta’s a hundred years old,” Ingold reasoned mildly. “If there is anything he hasn’t seen, I don’t know what it could be.”

Kara’s smile was brief and hesitant, an expression that flickered out of existence almost before Rudy realized she’d been amused; it was as if at some time in her childhood she had been punished for laughing. She sat forward from the wall and put away the tablets she’d been working on, wrapping them in her old satchel. Like Gil, Rudy saw, she took her note on the wax with a sharpened hairpin, which she now carefully stuck through the lapel of her cloak, its tiny lily of diamonds twinkling like a star against the coarse gray fabric. Even the most precious jewels and trinkets were common coin among those who had survived the massacres of Gae and Karst. “Why couldn’t we just pack up and leave the city now?” she asked quietly. “I don’t think any of us is in any shape to sleep.”

Ingold lay down in the shadows next to Kta and pulled his blanket over his mantle. “No,” he decided softly. “We shouldn’t be moving about Gae at night. There are other things besides the Dark abroad. And we are all exhausted. It would be fatally easy to make mistakes. It isn’t many hours until dawn.” He turned his face to the shadows of the wall, but Rudy wasn’t going to take any bets on whether he would sleep or not.

Rudy got stiffly to his feet and drank what was left of the water in the leaky pot. It was cold and tasted of stone and of Ingold’s herbs, but he felt parched with thirst. Then he limped to the door and settled himself opposite Kara in the broken doorframe. The thought of the dreams that sleep would bring made him wonder if he were in for a lifetime of insomnia. “Scoot over,” he said. “You and me can tell each other ghost stories all night for jollies.”

Again that fugitive smile appeared, going no farther than her eyes. Wind rattled in the branches of the court trees, a thin clattering, like the dangling bones of hanged men. Little spits of rain scampered over the wet ground and stung Rudy’s burned cheek. Over the broken turrets of the city, he thought he heard a child crying again – or perhaps it was only the moaning challenge of a tomcat.

“Rudy?” Kara asked softly. “What did you see in the nurseries?”

“You didn’t see them?”

She shook her head, “I explored sideways rather than down. I never reached them.”

“Count your blessings.” Rudy pulled his old coat a little tighter about him as a tongue of wind licked at his flesh. The curly wool of the collar felt stiff against his jaw.

“Were they so horrible?”

He was silent, staring out into the darkness of the frozen court. Kara blew on her knuckles and rubbed them, her dark eyes never leaving his face. Finally he said, “You grew up in the desert.”

She nodded, “Yes.”

“You know what a tarantula-wasp is?”

“Of course,” Kara said, a little surprised at this non sequitur.

“Then don’t ask me about what I saw in the nurseries.”

He waited for a moment while she thought that one through. She made a dreadful, stifled noise in her throat and relapsed into sickened silence.

FOUR

“IT SCARCELY MATTERS when they return, my lord Chancellor,” Bishop Govannin said quietly, looking across the laced fingers of her white, bony hands. “In some ways it might be better if they never did.”

Chancellor Alwir did not turn his head; but, from where she sat on the corner of the barracks hearth, Gil could see the white gleam of the glowstones dart across his brocaded shoulders as his muscles stiffened. On the other side of the hearth, the captain of the new-formed firesquad, Melantrys, stopped in the midst of her exposition of flame throwers to a group of her fellow Guards. At the room’s long, central table, Minalde, who had been talking with the Keep’s other Bishop, the lanky, ragged leader of the Penambran refugees, turned her head sharply. Conversation in the main room of the Guards’ barracks was suddenly stilled.

Govannin continued with silky malice. “You cannot pretend that the powers that rule the Empire of Alketch will agree to lend their might to an endeavor led and counseled by wizards.”

Slowly and deliberately, Alwir regarded the prelate where she sat in the room’s single, carved armchair, with her white hands linked before her and the hearth fires dancing in the purple depths of her episcopal ring. “Ingold Inglorion, my lady,” he declared quietly, “neither leads nor counsels in this fortress. I have appointed him chief of the Wizards’ Corps, since that is where his talents lie. And I might point out to you that the Church has yet to produce either reconnaissance, protection, or weapons to aid us against the Dark.”

Govannin’s chin went up. “And of what merit is any wizard’s work against the salvation of souls?”

“You know more about the salvation of our souls than I, my lady,” Melantrys said in her low, sweet voice. “But these devices are going to be the salvation of our hides, and no mistake.” Her small, dainty hand caressed the looping rigs of wire and tubing that festooned the flame thrower’s glass bubbles. She shook back her barley-gold hair. Under soot-black, impossibly long lashes, her eyes were as pitiless as a hawk’s. Rudy had left two rifle-sized flame throwers with Melantrys, with instructions to organize the firesquad among those born with the lesser magical powers capable of wielding the weapons. The lovely captain had taken him at his word. “The troops of Alketch won’t quibble with magic on those terms,” she added.

“The ignorant won’t,” the Bishop replied softly. “The godless won’t. But ignorant and godless warriors march in all armies. Sometimes they even command them.”

Alwir swung around, bristling, and met only that close-lipped, reptilian smile. With determined cheerfulness, he said, “Surely it would be flying in the face of providence to reject weapons that have come down to us, miraculously preserved, from the Times Before. Exactly how Dare of Renweth’s forces defeated the Dark Ones and drove them back underground is a secret regrettably lost to us, for the last scion of his House is an infant, and Tir’s father perished in the ruins of Gae. But I am convinced that Dare used weaponry of this kind – and as such, he must have had a trained corps of firebringers to wield them. Their success may be gauged by the centuries of respite humankind had from the Dark.”

The Bishop’s ivory fingers flicked. “Wizards’ work,” she snorted disdainfully. “Work that fouls the hands of any who touch it, your precious Dare of Renweth along with the rest.” She cast a scornful glance across at Bektis, who sat with the amber colors of the hearth fire gleaming in the white silk of his beard, gravely examining a second flame thrower at the other end of the table. In the middle of the table, the Guards’ Commander Janus and the handful of poker players around him were keeping a wary eye on which way the muzzle was pointing.

Alwir’s smile remained resolutely pinned to his mouth. “I think we have heard enough of wizards for one evening, my lady Bishop.”

“You will hear enough and more than enough when the representatives of the Lord of Alketch arrive.” Her bitter eyes were like starlight on oily black water. “The Emperor of Alketch is a man of true faith.”

“He’s a priest-ridden bigot who had his own first wife burned for a witch,” the Penambran Bishop snapped, looking up from the misshapen knot of his crippled hands.

Govannin’s lip curled. “The fact remains, Maia of Thran,” she said, rolling the peasant form of his surname from her tongue with all the scorn of a descendant of the most ancient of noble Houses, “that in the South, where the Straight Faith is strong and unpolluted, there are no Dark Ones. Only in the North and in the plains where the heathen Raiders roam have the Dark Ones risen to scourge humankind.”

“According to Stiarth of Alketch,” Janus said. He spoke the name of the Imperial Ambassador as if it were wormwood in his mouth.

“Do you doubt him?” Govannin purred.

As Commander, Janus could say nothing, but Melantrys opened her mouth, and Alwir’s rich voice cut across her possibly unseemly reply.

“Of course not. There is an air about a man whose world has collapsed in ruins about him. You know it; you have all seen it. That, if nothing else, should have spoken to you all.” The Chancellor turned to survey them, haughty eyes challenging any of those ragged warriors in their frayed surcoats to deny what they all knew in their hearts. “He was clad richly and fed well – too richly and too well for a man whose world is a ruin. No,” Alwir went on, “whether it was by virtue of God’s will, or the Emperor’s merit, or purest chance and the fate of mankind, there are no Dark Ones in Alketch. We would be fools if we did not mold our policies accordingly.”

There was a murmuring, unrestful and wary. Melantrys folded her arms over the clumsy length of the weapon in her lap; Minalde, her mouth set at the memory of her battles with her brother over the preliminary negotiations with the Emperor’s Ambassador, looked down at her fingertips. Govannin settled back in her chair and tented her fingers again before her, an unpleasant glitter in her narrow eyes.

Alwir continued. “We have sent word to all the landchiefs of the Realm: to Harl Kinghead in the North and Tomec Tirkenson in Gettlesand; to Degedna Marina and her vassals in the Yellow River Country in the East. From none of them have we received a reply. The hand of the Dark lies heavy over the Realm. It may be that none will stir to fight. I have heard that the greatest of the landchiefs, the Prince of Dele, is dead; the others may have set themselves up as independent kinglets, each ruling from his own pitiful fortress, in spite of the vows he made to the High King of Gae.

“Therefore, we must work with our allies of Alketch and hold in check our prejudices and whatever grudges we may have formed in the past.” As if by chance, that chill, jewel-blue gaze touched the gaunt form of the Bishop of Penambra, who raised smoldering eyes in return. “We need that alliance,” the Chancellor continued grimly. “We need it, as a wounded limb needs a healthy body for its rejuvenation. The Empire of the South has all those things that we now lack – trade and commerce, education, arts, culture, the wherewithal to forge steel weapons, and the civilization to enforce laws.”

“Aye,” Janus murmured, leaning his great, red-furred forearms on the table. “But whose laws?”

In the momentary silence, Alwir’s face seemed to harden in the cross-grained shadows of the scattered glowstones and the leaping redness of the hearth.

Govannin said, “Written laws, my muscular friend. The sort that my lord Alwir has sought from the beginning to purge from the records.”

“The useless quibblings of Church legalists whose bones rot in the streets of Gae!” The Church records were a sore point with Alwir. “I swear by the ice in the north, woman, the paper they’re written on is of more use!”

“To write your own laws upon?”

“To keep census and records of the Keep!” he shouted, losing his temper. He made a move toward her, goaded past endurance, but then he saw her smile and struggled to master himself.

In the shadows of the guardroom, no one moved or spoke. Only Gnift the swordmaster slapped a greasy card on the table and crooned, “And eight lovely hearts for the charming lady in black.”

Alwir took a deep breath, his mouth clamping beneath flared nostrils. “I tell you, my lady Bishop – and I tell all of you – that, of all things, this alliance with Alketch is of the greatest importance to the Keep and to everyone within its walls. Without it, we lose our last hope of civilized existence. We will become degenerate villagers, ignorant and brutal, prey to the stronger and the better-armed. And that I will never permit.” His eye touched them all: Melantrys, her delicate nostrils flared as if against the stink of Ambassador Stiarth’s perfumes; Alde, still looking down at her hands in angry silence; the Bishop of Penambra in his patched red cloak and scavenged brocades. “I will let nothing interfere with it. Believe me, there is nothing – and no one – that I would not sacrifice to bring about a lasting alliance with the Empire.”

“Including yourself, my lord?” a new voice inquired, a flawed, mellow voice that spoke from the dense shadows of the barracks door. Gil looked up at the sound of it, warmth kindling in all her veins.

Alwir swung around, recognizing, as they all did, that shabby form in the darkness. “So you’ve returned,” he said.

The firelight glittered on flecks of sleet that clung to Ingold’s stained mantle. As he stepped into the light of the room and pushed back his hood, Gil was shocked at how old he looked. Behind him, Rudy and Kara emerged from the darkness and they, too, were mud-splattered and silent, weary past caring about anything. Gil saw Alde look up and Rudy turn his face away, as if he could not bear to meet the joy that shone in her eyes.

“Did you think I would not return, my lord?” Ingold set down the satchel that he carried. From within it, Gil heard the faint click of wax tablets. Janus was already on his feet, his shadow blotting the light of the hearth as he bent to pour a cup of so-called guardroom wine from the small kettle that was warming beside the fire.

“No,” Alwir said at last. “No, you have shown yourself proof against most calamities, my lord wizard.”

“Or able to avoid them,” Govannin remarked acidly.

“It is the secret of my indecently long life,” Ingold agreed with a small smile. “Thank you, Janus – this is the other secret of my indecently long life.” He sipped the steaming liquid, which was not wine at all, but a horrible compound of hot water and homemade gin.

The Commander of the Guards steered him to a seat on one of the rough benches at the table, and Alde moved her heavy skirts aside so that he might sit. Rudy and Kara took seats on the raised brick hearth beside Melantrys, their thawing garments steaming and dripping unnoticed in the heat. Where Kta had vanished to, none of them could have said, but he was found later, peaceably warming his skinny hands by the kitchen fire in the Wizards’ Corps complex, eschewing the councils of the mighty.

“My lord,” Ingold said at length, “are you still set upon this invasion?”

The Chancellor’s voice was brisk, but there was an edge of wariness in it. “Of course I am still set upon it,” he said. “Can it be done?”

The wizard’s eyes glinted in their discolored hollows. “Rudy believes that it can.”

“Indeed?” Alwir’s eyebrows quirked. “And I collect you hold a different opinion, my lord wizard?”

“It is folly,” Ingold said simply.

The Chancellor’s thin smile broadened, without increasing its warmth by a single degree. “Well,” he murmured, “fortunately for us all, you are no longer the sole source of information on the subject, are you? Was it folly that enabled Dare of Renweth to defeat the Dark?”

Ingold made no reply to this baiting. With a sneer, Alwir turned away. “Rudy? Are those magical devices of yours the answer to this riddle, after all?”

Rudy looked up, as if startled out of some private, terrible dream. “I don’t know whether they were Dare’s solution to the problem or not,” he said in a voice thick with fatigue. “But we can damage the Nest badly, maybe so badly they’d have to abandon it completely.”

And haltingly, half-numbed with exhaustion, he told them of what he had found in the Nest – the vast complexity of that dark and filthy realm, the ability of the Dark Ones to damp light or fire, and the curiously flammable properties of the dried, leprous brown moss.

“That will be our strength,” he concluded. “If we sent a strike force down each of the two main branches of the Nest, to cover the firesquad as far down as the nurseries, the fires would spread in the moss as the army retreated. I think that would do it.”

“Especially if the mosses themselves are the nitrogen fixers for the whole ecosystem of the Nests,” Gil added unexpectedly. “If that’s so – and that’s what it sounds like – the whole Nest must be saturated with nitrogen compounds.”

Everyone in the guardroom, Rudy included, stared at her with as little comprehension as if she had spoken Etruscan. Tardily reminding herself that she was dealing with a preindustrial worldview, Gil amended, “My studies have shown that this type of moss can be very flammable.”

“Indeed,” Alwir said thoughtfully. “I had no idea you were a scholar, Gil-Shalos. A curious pastime for a soldier. That is two of your students, my lord Ingold, who disagree with your findings.”

He turned back to Rudy. “So you think that, with men to guard the firesquad from the Dark and perhaps the wizards to surround the whole force in an aura of light, it would be feasible to burn out the Nest in the fashion you describe?”

“I think so,” Rudy said. “The drawback is that there would be no way of getting the human prisoners of the Dark out of there. Unless they fled in the army’s wake …”

“It is regrettable.” Alwir sighed. “But indeed, it might be better thus. After so long in the realms of the Dark, they can hardly be said to be sane.”

“You’re very sure of that for a man who has never seen them,” Ingold commented, raising his eyes from the gold-bossed rim of his cup. “For myself, I would not even inflict such a death upon the herds of the Dark, who are likewise innocent.”

“T’cha!” The Chancellor wrinkled his lip in disgust.

“Beyond that, you might give a thought to what would befall the Keep, should the invasion fail and the army that you send to destroy the Nest of the Dark perish in it. On our way up the road from the valleys, we found the remains of propitiation-sacrifices offered by the White Raiders, not two miles below the old watchtowers at the Tall Gates. And there are those in the valleys who would lay siege to the Keep if they were assured that its defenders were gone – not only brigands, but families banded together, embattled tribes, who would take shelter by force if they had to.”

“That,” Alwir returned, with a nasty sideways glance at the Bishop of Penambra, “we already know.”

“I will not argue with you, Alwir, for you will believe what you choose and act as you will,” the wizard said. As he raised his head, the firelight showed his face hollowed with exhaustion and his blue eyes glittering with anger. “I am tired, tired to death – we have fought the Dark for two nights running and I am all but perished with cold. If it is your will to invade the Nest of the Dark, the wizards will aid you, up to and including our lives, so that we may save what survivors we can from the wreck. But I feel in my bones that your plan is death – death for most, and worse than that for some.”

With an impatient gesture, he threw what remained of the Blue Ruin in his cup into the fire, and the alcohol exploded in a swift thunderclap of flame as it hit the hearth.

Then he was gone, his footsteps fading down the hall toward the Wizards’ Corps common room almost before anyone was aware that he had risen.

Alwir said softly, “The old fool.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. Everyone, from the card players to Bishop Govannin, looked uneasily at one another and then at the Chancellor, who stood with his arms folded beside the hearth.

Rudy sighed and rose to go. “He’s not a fool, though,” he said tiredly. He picked up his pronged staff from where he had rested it against the doorpost and turned back, all his movements stiff and weary. “Yeah, I think you can retake Gae. But what the hell are you going to do with it when you’ve got it? Most of the town’s under a couple of feet of water, and what isn’t is crawling with rats, ghouls, and the dooic slaves that got left behind and turned wild. With the Raiders in the valley and the Dark Ones by night, you’d never be able to keep up lines of communication with the Keep, let alone the rest of the Realm.”

Alwir’s eyes turned suddenly ugly, though his voice remained suave. “Let that be my affair,” he remonstrated. “Since you will, after all, be leaving to return to your own world after the initial invasion of the Nest, the matter hardly concerns you, does it?”

Rudy saw Alde’s sudden movement in the shadows; her face had gone white within its frame of crow-black hair. Sour, weary anger filled him as he realized that the blow had been deliberate, to punish him for speaking against the Chancellor’s plans.

In a toneless voice, he said, “No, it doesn’t.” Turning on his heel, he strode away into darkness.

“Rudy!” The desperation in Alde’s voice stopped him as he crossed the common room. Looking back, he saw that she had run after him, down shortcuts that only she and Gil could have found. Tears gleamed on her face, and the sight of them broke and drained the anger in him, leaving only grief and pity for her sake. He held out his arms to her without a word.

For a moment they could only hold each other in silence, her face buried in the damp, rough wool of his coatcollar, her scented hair tickling against his lips. Then they kissed, feverishly, as if trying to deny what they both knew to be true. The hot saltiness of her tears burned where they touched his chin.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Alde, I’m sorry.”

He felt her arms lock tighter about his body, felt through his grip the shuddering draw of her breath. He had not known her long, but already it seemed strange to him that he had ever known the feel of any other woman’s body in his arms.

She shook her head. “No,” she murmured. “Don’t be sorry, Rudy – not for this.” Her words were muffled against his chest.

In the hearth a log broke, and the sudden spurt of gold threw their shadows leaping on the opposite wall.

“It was always going to be temporary, wasn’t it? And then it seemed as if we both forgot it. But I wanted to forget. It seemed that you’d been here forever – and would be—” She stopped, and against his chest he felt the determined tightening of her jaw and the stifled trembling of her ribs. Then she shook her head again, the red flickering of the ember light tipping her hair with carnelian. She swallowed hard. “This world was never your own. You have no choice, have you?”

“No,” Rudy whispered bitterly. “No, I have no choice.”

She let out her breath in a long, thick sigh and rested her forehead against his shoulder. “Then there’s not much we can say, is there?” she murmured. “Sometimes I think we never have the choice. That no one has the choice. How long do we have?”

His voice was almost inaudible against the fragrance of her hair. “Until the Winter Feast. After the Feast, the army will leave for Gae. And after …”

She shook her head, the soft skin of her temple gritting on his unshaven jaw. “There won’t be any after,” she said. “It was all fate, wasn’t it? Fate that you came here, so you could discover how to make the flame throwers to use against the Dark. And after fate is done with you, you must return to your own world. Isn’t that how the universe works?”

His arms tightened around her body, feeling the smallness of her bones through gauze and velvet and soft flesh. “Ingold’s always saying there’s no such thing as chance. But for Chrissake, why did fate decide it had to work out this way?”

She looked up at him, shaking back her hair; the front part was braided, the back fell in a loose cascade over his hands where they rested upon her waist. “It worked out this way because I would have begged it to,” she whispered. “Rudy – better this little than nothing at all. I’ve been happier with you than I have ever been in my life. Do you know, you have spent more time with me between your journeyings with Ingold than Eldor ever did in the thirty months we were husband and wife? And I have never feared you, never felt helpless or stupid or like some gauche, stammering child in your presence. You’ve never expected me to be other than what I am …”

“What did Eldor expect you to be?”

“I don’t know!” she cried. The words broke from her like long-pent floodwaters. “But it was in his eyes when he’d look at me and then look away. I gave him all that I was, but since it wasn’t what he wanted, it was as if he didn’t know, or didn’t care, that it was everything. I was sixteen. I loved him. I worshipped him. If I had known you then …” She stumbled to a halt, her lashes beaded with tears like diamonds in the firelight.

Rudy bent his lips, kissing the glittering droplets. “Nah,” he said softly, “they wouldn’t have let you marry some old wizard’s apprentice anyway. And besides, when you were sixteen, I bet you were flat-chested and pimply.”

“I never had pimples,” she argued, choking on tears and unexpected laughter. “Stop it! You make me laugh.”

“That’s not all I’ll make you,” he murmured through her lips.

“You all right?”

Ingold nodded without opening his eyes. Against the black fur of the very grubby bearskins on which he lay – the only blankets his narrow cot boasted – his face looked suddenly white under the weatherburning. Gil paused, irresolute, a cupful of smoking tea in her hands. Then she stooped to set it on the floor where he could reach it and turned to go. “You’ll have a helluva time falling asleep,” she remarked over her shoulder at him, “unless you take off your sword belt and your boots.”

Still the wizard did not open his eyes. He merely murmured, “You’re wrong about that.”

But a flicker of witchlight glimmered into existence over his head and slowly spread and strengthened through the room. It picked out the delicate marquetry of the desk that she and Alde had scrounged for him from a distant storeroom on the fifth level, its pearl and pearwood surface invisible under piles of old parchment scrolls, dingy with smudged ink and greasy with lanolin. Jewel-clasped books salvaged from the ruin of Quo lay with their open pages a counterpane of red and blue and shimmering gold leaf. Among and between everything lay wax note tablets, like the tiles of a Brobdingnagian Scrabble game. The mess overflowed the desk to litter the floor; the heaped books, scattered tablets, and twinkling gray glass of those enigmatic crystal polyhedrons surrounded the desk like a pool that spread itself along the wall almost to the foot of the hard, narrow cot. Gil paused, then came back and began to pull off the wizard’s boots.

“The other mages will be in for dinner soon,” she told him as she did so. “If I wanted to risk an amphibian future, I’d try to talk Kara’s mother out of something for you now.”

Outside in the common room, the harsh, screechy voice of the little witchwife Dame Nan could be heard, accusing someone – probably Dakis the Minstrel – of being a pestilent food thief, deserving of every ailment from cold sores to piles, and threatening to inflict him with the same if he dared to violate her kitchen again. Kara’s reproving “Mother!” sounded faintly from another room.

Ingold smiled and shook his head. “Thank you, child,” he said softly as Gil dumped the sodden boots beside the door. Then she thought he had fallen asleep, for he lay unmoving, his eyes closed and his hands resting limply at his sides. But oddly enough, Gil did not leave. She stood in the doorway looking down at him, her wide, chill gray eyes curiously blue in the fading glow of the witchlight.

“Ingold?” Her voice was barely audible against the rising chatter in the common room behind her.

“Yes, child?”

“Did you mean what you said? About its being hopeless?”

His eyes opened. For a moment, he considered her, thin and gawky, like a teenage boy in her outsize surcoat. “Hopeless or not,” he murmured, “you at least will have returned to the safety of your own world by the time the army marches. But no,” he added, seeing the look of grief that crossed her face, “there is always hope.”

“But you don’t think that in this case it lies with Rudy’s flame throwers,” Gil finished for him. “But, dammit, Ingold, the Dark were defeated once and driven back underground. The forces that did it can’t have been much more numerous than we are here. And the Dark seem to think that you know the answer.”

His eyelids drooped closed again, and he gave a faint, tired chuckle. “The answer to what question?” He sighed. “If the memory of how the Dark Ones were defeated has come down to Tir, it may very well be useless by the time he gets old enough to understand it. The Dark Ones’ fear is that I will remember sooner, or that I already know.”

He laughed again, a dry, weary sound. “The irony of it all is that I haven’t the slightest idea what it is that they believe I know.

“I thought that, like Minalde, I might recognize what I could not remember independently. The memories that she inherited through the House of Bes could only be triggered by something she had seen before, but they were no less true. I have meditated on it; I have cudgeled my brains and combed the records of all things touching upon my research and Lohiro’s that I could bring from the library at Quo …” His scarred fingers moved toward the heaped books that strewed the desk at Gil’s elbow. “And there is nothing. No reason at all for the Dark Ones to fear me.”

“If they don’t fear you,” Gil asked, “why do they want you?”

He lay silent for a long time, and again Gil wondered if he might have fallen asleep. But in the dark, heavy fur of the blankets, his hand clenched suddenly, and for an instant his brow furrowed, as if with pain. Then, just as suddenly, his expression smoothed again, and he said, “I haven’t the foggiest idea. Tell me why that one party of mages returned prematurely from exploring the Nest in the Vale of the Dark.”

Gil did a mild double take at the swift change of subject. “How did you know about that?”

His mouth moved a little under his beard – he might have been smiling. “I should be a poor mage indeed if I couldn’t follow the doings of my colleagues in my crystal,” he said. “Shadow of the Moon – the Raider shaman – was in charge of that party. I expected they should be the first to return to the Keep, since the Vale of the Dark is only a day’s journey away, but they returned so quickly that I think they never went down that Nest at all.”

“They didn’t,” Gil said, leaning her bony shoulders against the stone of the doorframe. “But then, I expected they wouldn’t be able to. When you look down on the Vale from above, you can see how the outlines of the old city of the Dark there have been changed by the gradual movement of the earth. The pavement in which the stairway is located is so badly displaced that I’m not surprised the stairs themselves will no longer admit humans.”

“Indeed?” The blue eyes opened, suddenly sharp and alert. “You guessed that?”

Gil nodded and folded her arms. “It would stand to reason, if these mountains are geologically active enough to have displaced the pavement. Those ruins are old – older than our conceptions of time. The Dark formed and shaped that Vale among the older rocks of the foothills, but they couldn’t stop the subsequent lift of the earth enough to keep their stair open.”

The wizard considered this for a moment, looking intently into the shadows of the ceiling over his head. Then he rolled painfully up onto one elbow and reached for his cup of tea.

“Interesting,” he said quietly. In the half-darkness of the alcove, the witchlight falling on his white hair was like strong moonlight on mountain snow; his face, below it, was plunged in shadow. “You once asked me, child, why you were here – why it had been you, and not someone else, whom circumstances had thrust into exile from all you knew and wanted.”

Gil looked down at her knobbed and bony hands, lying on the frayed black homespun of her sleeves, and said nothing, but her lips tightened.

“What do you know about the moss in the Nests?”

She jerked her head up, thoroughly startled by what seemed like a whole new topic of conversation, to meet the old man’s intent, curious gaze. “Nothing,” she said.

“But you guess something about it,” Ingold pursued. “You said as much back in the guardroom.”

Ruefully, she chuckled. “Oh, that. It isn’t important. It’s just that I flashed onto something from my college biology course that would explain why the moss is flammable, that’s all. It’s nothing that has anything to do with the Dark.”

“Isn’t it?” the wizard murmured. “I wonder. Do you remember, Gil, when you and I visited the Vale of the Dark, how you looked back from the mountain above and saw by the slant of the evening light the pattern of the ancient walls that told you there had once been a city there? I would never have taken those changes in the colors and thickness of vegetation for anything but a rather curious pattern in the valley floor.”

“Well, of course.” Gill shrugged. “You didn’t sit through three Historiography 10-B lectures on the subject of aerial photography, either.”

Ingold smiled. “No. Instead, I devoted a considerable portion of my brilliantly misspent life learning how to cast horoscopes – an interesting pastime, but not much to the point. What I am getting at is this: The answer to the question of how the Dark were defeated – how they might be defeated again – may require, not a wizard, but a scholar. And that could be why you are here.”

“Maybe,” she agreed wryly. “But the fact remains that no record I’ve seen – either Govannin’s chronicles, the old books you salvaged from Quo, or what Alde and I found here in the storerooms – goes back to the Time of the Dark. Nothing gets within a thousand years of it.”

Ingold set his tea down and leaned gingerly back against his blankets. His white brows pulled together in a frown. “Why not?” he asked.

Gil started to reply, then left the words unsaid. The dog did nothing in the nighttime … and that, as Sherlock Holmes had once remarked, was the curious incident.

She returned to the barracks in a meditative mood.

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