Darwath 3 - The Armies Of Daylight (29 page)

Alwir appeared to be considering.

Rudy added. “And it wouldn't do any good, anyway, I tell you! The Dark Ones can make the air explode!”

“Don't be stupid,” Alwir snapped irritably.

“He ain't being stupid,” Tirkenson put in unexpectedly. “That's just what it looked like happened. The flame throwers went off, and it looked as if all the air in the cavern caught fire. I lost my eyebrows; if I'd been two steps closer, I'd have lost my life.”

The Chancellor's mouth hardened. Before he could speak, however, another explosion shook the ground, a hollow roaring followed by the rending crack of stone and a ground wave that jerked Rudy's feet from under him and threw him, staggering, into the Gettlesand troops in the cavern below. Wet dust and fumes rolled from the tunnel's darkness, and from the warriors in the cavern came another cry as the Dark Ones streamed down upon them again.

The retreat from the Nest was a nightmare. Dazzled by the blinding alternation of light and darkness, his smarting sword arm aching and weak where it had been wrenched, Rudy clung to the little knot of Guards that surrounded the fallen King's makeshift litter as it crawled through that chattering storm of malice, acid, and death. He recalled what Ingold had said once back at the Keep—that he had no hope of defeating the Dark, but would go and hazard his own life once again within the Nest in order that as many survivors as possible might be saved. It was only now that Rudy understood fully what this meant.

It was Ingold who held the blazing barriers of light against the pressing darkness, Ingold who, when the light was swamped, stood foremost in the line of defenders, his sword a chill splinter of brightness in the smothering murk. He left them twice, taking squads of men back into the deeper tunnels to reunite pockets of warriors who had been cut off from the main column, and it seemed to Rudy that their forward progress slowed to a crawl until he returned.

In the tunnels, the going was worse, and the ground was choked with the bodies of the slain. The battle had spread, as rockslides and explosions had cut the column; out of winding, crossing shafts in the blackness, Rudy could hear the din of voices and see the white magelight flaring, reflected in the unspeakable muck of the floors and against the dripping walls. In some places the way was blocked by fires, as pockets of the brown moss burned with a searing, yellow glare; in other places Rudy could see the evidence of the gas traps—shattered, twisted corpses and weapons melted in the heat. Once Ingold vanished, to come back up the tunnel at the head of a column of black-skinned warriors from the deepest jungles of Alketch, their eyes glaring whitely through the charred blood that covered their faces.

And always there were the Dark, tearing at the edges of the column when it passed through open spaces or streaming down from the fissures in the roof to swamp the light of the wizards in the close-pressed confines of the tunnels. Rudy wondered dully why he didn't simply hide himself in a cloaking-spell. The mere effort to maintain even a grayish light exhausted him and slowed his reflexes, so that he could barely lift the sword. Yet somehow he never gave in to the temptation.

He saw Gil go down when the Dark Ones blew the roof of the tunnel almost over their heads and saw the other Guards pick her up, with blood streaming from her snarled black hair. In another seared-out gas trap, he recognized the body of the Raider shaman Shadow of the Moon, but only by the bones tangled in the crisped remains of her braids. He wondered how many other mages had perished.

Exhaustion blinded him and confused him; how Ingold kept his sense of direction in the black mazes of the tunnels, Rudy could not imagine. Rockslides and cave-ins turned them aside. They scrambled over broken boulders still hot from the shattering violence of the explosion, through the streaming mud and filthy water of half-flooded tunnels, and through screaming hells of the dead and dying. The counter-spells of the Dark Ones tugged at Rudy's mind and seemed almost to weight his limbs, dragging him farther and farther back.

Then somehow they were on the stairs. The King and the wounded were carried up; the wretched remnant of the army streamed past Rudy, staggering and gray-faced with shock. The Dark Ones harried them in the steep and twisting seam, and men and women who had fought their way to the limit of the human penetration of the Nest and back again died on the road to the earth's surface, their crumpled bodies or half-melted bones tripping the feet of their erstwhile comrades. Rudy hung back, staying close to Ingold, for he sensed that the wizard was near the end of his strength. As they battled to get out, step by step up that endless flight, he could see how wan the magelight that surrounded the old man had grown, how again and again the Dark killed the light altogether, and how the intervals of fighting in blackness grew longer before the light flickered into existence once more.

Rudy found himself among the rear guard, a mixed rabble of rangers, Church troops, and a handful of the Alketch halberdier corps, fighting in darkness on stairs clogged with the fallen. The Dark Ones were everywhere. Light had failed utterly, and his wizard's sight showed him slashed, dirty faces, eyes staring with fatigue, and the blades of swords striking almost at random in the moving storm of darkness and air. Above him, he could see only the straggling line of the column, fighting as it retreated up the choked steps; below was only the blackness of the shaft, the single flashing sliver of white light that was Ingold's sword, and a glimmer on the squamous backs of the things that surrounded him.

They turned a corner. Something from the darkness tore at Rudy's cheek; he heard the whine of a badly aimed sword from the steps above and behind and ducked as a flailing blade struck him on the back of the head. Heavy arms caught him as he staggered and dragged him up and backward over the broken stairs, the bodies, the treacherous, sliding footing, and the dropped weapons of the slain. There were more stairs—endless stairs. The Gettlesand rangers who half-dragged, half-carried him quickened their pace as the fighting around them slacked. Faintly, far up the inky shaft of the stairs, he heard someone cheer.

Then, up ahead of him, he saw Alwir, filthy with the mess of battle. The dim reflection of distant daylight glittered in the jewels he wore. Rudy gasped, struggling through the press of men and women, all of them fighting toward that dim promise like drowning men striving toward the air. It was still dark all around him, but the Dark Ones were falling back…

Then swirling wind struck his face. Behind and above him, he glimpsed the Dark, pouring down like smoke from a ceiling shaft. The warriors who hemmed him in redoubled their efforts toward the light; the Dark were behind them.

and, after what the defenders had been through, there were few who would turn back to risk re-entering Hell.

Rudy twisted around, pulled backward by the mob. He yelled, “Ingold!” But he doubted that the wizard heard him. The Dark Ones had cut off the rear guard. Only forty feet or so of stairway separated them, but the little knot of Alketch troops around the wizard was barely visible through the shifting turmoil of darkness. The Dark were all around them. Rudy saw the wizard get his back to the wall as, one by one, the men around him fell. The white flame of his sword flashed in the smothering blackness. Still the Dark Ones streamed down from above. Rudy fought against the tide of flight that bore him along with it, his head buzzing and his hands empty of weapons, determined that the old man should not fight alone.

At the turn of the stairway, Alwir still watched, unmoving, looking down into the pit of the deeper shaft at the trapped figure against the wall. Then he glanced back at the guard of his own red-clad troopers who stood around him and said, “There are too many. Pull back.”

Sobbing, Rudy fought against the tide. Hands gripped his elbows. Someone said something to him about being off his head with shock; he was dragged back by an iron grip. Through a momentary gap in the ranks, he could see the light of Ingold's blade like a misty white fire; by its reflected brilliance, he glimpsed the wizard's face, cool and filled with determination to sell the flesh off his bones at the highest possible price.

Rudy saw before Ingold did the sinuous whip of tentacle that lashed from the shadows, wrapping the wizard's two wrists where he held the sword. Ingold made a desperate attempt to pull free; another whiplike tail snagged his ankle and pulled him off his feet and away from the wall. The gleaming sword rang on the stairs as it fell, and the light of it died.

The picture was retreating, dreamlike, as Rudy was pulled back up the stairs and the darkness below him thickened. He saw Ingold twist in another futile effort to break free of the things that caught at him now from all sides. Like a half-heard, strangled cry, he felt the wizard's last, desperate attempt to call light.

A spark flickered in the darkness and died. In the daylight at the top of the stairs, Alwir, in his dark velvet cloak, looked down and watched as Ingold was dragged out of sight into the darkness.

“Gil?”

Rudy let the tent flap fall, shutting out the whining howl of the wind. He spoke softly, his voice barely audible over the rattle of the rain on the leather roof of the hospital-tent, so as not to wake the others lying there. He knew that Gil would not be sleeping.

He saw the gleam of her open eyes. She was regarding the tent ceiling dispassionately, as she had done all of yesterday, after she had wakened there and Brother Wend had told her as gently as he could that Ingold was dead.

Then the gray eyes shifted and met his. “Hi, punk,” she said in a perfectly normal tone, as if she were meeting him by chance in a parking lot, and Rudy's heart sank within him.

“You okay?”

She shrugged. “Compared with about half the people who went down that hole, I'm fantastic.” She folded her arms across her chest, and the little light that leaked from under the shade of the glowstone showed him the side of her face all streaked with rock-splinter cuts and a grimy black bandage torn from somebody's surcoat covering the abraded wound on her temple. By the look of her eyes, he could not see that she had shed any tears—which was more than could have been said of him.

After a moment she returned that flat, cool gaze to the ceiling. “They say Eldor will make it, too,” she added conversationally. “Which is damn ironic, when you think of it.”

Rudy shut his eyes against the burn of tears and looked away. The shattered chain of bodies across the floor of the gas trap seemed to be etched into the backside of his eyelids. “Gil, what are we gonna do?” he whispered.

“Depends on your priorities,” she said, her light voice half-drowned by the torrential roar of the rain. “I'd say the smartest thing to do is send an expedition to the Nest in the Vale of the Dark for moss and make some kind of nitroglycerine-based defensive weapons against the White Raiders. You could probably also use the nitrogen base for fertilizer for the hydroponics gardens—”

“Goddam it, Gil!” he sobbed out of a blinding vortex of grief. “How can you just sit there and—and talk about defensive weapons and—and fertilizer… ?” The light, sexless, reasonable voice sickened him. “I always knew you were the most heartless woman I'd ever met, but… He's dead, Gil! Can't you understand that?”

“Sure,” Gil said cheerfully. “Just because I don't shove my pain off onto you doesn't mean I don't feel any.”

He was silent, his face burning with shame.

She moved her head a little on the bundled cloak that served her for a pillow. In the reflection of the half-drowned torches outside the tent, her eyes looked as gray as weathered ice and about as feeling. “You asked me what we're gonna do,” she pointed out in a milder voice. “I'd say, just offhand, what we better do is settle ourselves down for a nice, long stay.”

It was the beginning of the most hideous time that Rudy had ever endured.

The weeks that followed the decimated army's return to the Keep of Dare ran together in his mind into a single, endless hell of misery, grief, and fear. Rudy kept for the most part to his own cell or to the desolate Corps commons, and the surviving mages knew enough to let him be. Gil occasionally brought him news of what passed in the rest of the Keep—of Eldor's slow recovery, of the Alketch troops that occupied most of the second level, of the bitter infighting between the King and the Church—but Rudy heard it all without caring.

Gil had changed. Rudy often wondered what had happened to her when Ingold died. The gawky shyness, the scholarliness, the sensitivity, were gone. Now and then he heard her refer to the old man's death in passing without so much as a change of inflection in her light, sarcastic voice. But there was a fey quality lurking in those frozen eyes that frightened him.

Aide he saw only once.

Gil said that she never left the Royal Sector, though whether by her own choice or Eldor's compulsion, Gil did not know. Kara, who helped Thoth and Brother Wend nurse the King in the days after his shrouded litter was brought back from Gae, said that Alde kept much to her room after her first interview with Eldor when he regained consciousness. Kara said that Alwir and Bektis—the only mage who did not participate in the invasion of the Nest—were much with the King.

Even had Alde been free to go about the Keep, Rudy would seldom have seen her, but the lethargy that had settled around his heart alternated with a longing for her of a desperate intensity that nothing would allay. It was a desire he fought against, knowing the depths of Eldor's jealousy. Even to be caught trying to see her might trigger retaliation upon them both. Yet the longing grew on him, like a junkie's cravings for a drug, to the point where he was toying with the notion of slipping past the Alketch troops by means of a cloaking-spell and chancing a meeting when Eldor, who Gil said was able to get about now, was gone.

That night he waited until the start of the deep-night watch and called her image in the crystal.

The filtered pink glow of the night light showed him the room they had shared so many nights, the tumbled shadows of the bed, with her dark braids lying like tasseled black ropes against the iridescent gleam of the starry quilt, the soft, waxy sheen of the table, and the thin edge of gilt on the strapwork of her jewel box. The spindle-carved foot of Tir's bed had its heavy curtains looped back to reveal the downy, dark head on the pillow within.