"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 Aide'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.