Then there was another long and terrible silence, with no sound but the sobbing of the wind. The harsh voice spoke again, jagged and bitter, like a broken thing. "You knew about them," he rasped. "You knew about them from the first. He is your disciple."
In the even longer silence that followed, Rudy knew that the wizard could not meet his accuser's eyes. When Ingold spoke, his words were almost inaudible. "Not from the first. It was done before I learned of it."
"But you never spoke."
"What would I have said? You were dead, Eldor, and she was alone and very frightened. She needs love, and at that point even the illusion of love would have served. He was good to her. I feared for them, yes. But I have never commanded anyone as to what they could and could not do."
"Then don't command me now!" Eldor shouted furiously. "You were swift enough to command Alwir to let her and her lover be!"
In the bitter pause that followed, a thousand other things could have been said- and possibly were understood.
"After tomorrow he may have her, for all of me, if he survives. I shall see you at dawn."
Footsteps retreated suddenly; there was the scrape of icy ground, the swift, muffled whisper of robes, and Rudy was reminded of how quickly Ingold could move. Then icy, terrible silence was broken by Eldor's cold, grating voice. "Let me go."
"For God's sake, Eldor-" Ingold pleaded, and was cut off by a harsh bark of laughter.
"God!" the King choked. "God! Do you know how many times, my dearest, oldest, most loyal friend, I called upon God, squatting in the moss in the darkness? How I pleaded and prayed for a deliverer?"
"And you were, in fact, delivered," the wizard returned quietly.
"By whom and to what? By the man who had been tumbling my wife within two weeks of my reported death? I suppose you could call it just payment, if you had a sense of humor."
"Maybe. But no one could call it sufficient reason to lead loyal men and women deliberately to their death, when you know the nature of the danger that will destroy them."
"No?" There was a sudden crack to that voice, a faint sliding up the scale onto the edge of shrillness, that brought sweat to Rudy's face. "But life is very unjust, is it not, Ingold Inglorion?"
Cold and the wail of the wind streamed briefly into the tent in the wake of the King's going. A moment later Rudy heard those quick, striding steps retreating in the direction of the royal shelter. He lay awake waiting for Ingold to come in to sleep, frightened of tomorrow and frightened of that cracked, mad note in Eldor's voice; but when he drifted into sleep a few hours before dawn, he had still heard no sign of movement in the room beyond.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The armies of humankind entered Gae at first light.
Though the icy mists thinned away before them, revealing broken walls and flooded pavements, the ruined town still lay in the grip of that brooding desolation; there was not a man or woman of the ranks who would dare to speak above a whisper. The echoes of voices rang too hollowly in those dripping streets. Those who had known Gae in its prime or those who had spoken loudest of reoccupying the town, once the Dark had been driven forth, spoke not at all.
Among them Rudy trudged, sick with apprehension and terror, close enough to
Eldor's nervous white mare to see the thin, unpleasant smile that curved the King's harsh lips as he looked around him at what had been the most beautiful city in the West of the World.
Rudy found himself thinking how easy it would be simply to throw a cloaking-spell over himself, find a comfortable seat on one of the ruined benches in the stinking swamp of the Palace courtyard, and sit this one out. But he saw Ingold break ranks and go to speak to a thin, gawky Guard; and though the dissolving mists still hung about the great courtyard of the Palace, he saw her shrug and shake her head.
Coward and quitter , she had called him once.
It didn't do any good to tell himself that he knew for a fact their cause was lost. He suspected that Gil knew it, too.
Ingold certainly did.
How the hell come I always end up associating with maniacs ? he demanded despairingly, watching as the forces separated in the vast, half-frozen morass of the court. The sappers moved up to lead position with their cleated ladders; directly behind them, Eldor took his place on foot among a squad of Guards. The other prong of the strike force drew aside, a glittering serpent of Alketch forces, with Vair like a deadly, jeweled idol at their head. Rudy recognized Maia and his Penambrans among those ranks, along with Kara, Kta, a dozen or more of the other wizards, and half the firesquad.
Ingold joined the ranks at the head of the line near Eldor. For a moment his eyes met the King's; then Eldor's lips twisted in a sneer, and he turned away and gave the signal to descend.
The creeping horror of that descent was like the prelude to an evil dream. Through the vine-choked upper vaults, through the forest of pillars whose straight, inky shadows reeled and turned to the movement of the white magelight, Rudy could feel the watchfulness of the Dark Ones growing upon him. Like the warning prickle of hot breath on the nape of his neck, like a soft footfall in a room that should be empty, he could sense the touch of counterspells on the magic of the light he had summoned. In the narrow confines of the ancient stairway itself, it was a thousand times worse. He was aware of the Dark as he had never been aware of them before-the probing of that monstrous intelligence at the edges of his magic, the greedy nibbling at its weak points.
The stairway seemed to descend forever. The witchlight around him etched the faces of the Guards in harsh chiaroscuro and glittered on the weapons of the firesquad. Far below him, Rudy could see that Ingold's drawn sword had begun to burn with a chill, white light of its own.
Though there was no sign of the Dark, he could feel the pressure of their minds, their power, and the haunting evil of their presence. He scanned the gnawed rock of the walls, smooth as glass below eye level, where millions of jostling bodies had polished it over uncounted years, rough and sparkling with stray glints of quartz above. It was unbroken by crack or fissure. They would not be attacked from above.
Would the Dark lie in wait for them, he wondered, in the huge cavern below the drop-off of the stair? Or would the Dark give way before them, luring them on, to circle around behind them in the uncharted mazes of the passages?
The grip of his flame thrower felt clammy in his hand, and he found himself wishing he'd spent the backbreaking hours that Gil had spent in learning to use a sword. Unless he planned to cut off the army's retreat by prematurely starting tires in the moss, he couldn't even use the damn thing until they were deep in the Nest. He cursed his stupidity. And still they descended.
Wind licked his cheek, startling him almost to death. A murmur went through the crowding ranks that hemmed him in. Sweat ran from the faces that looked suddenly gray in the hard, pitiless glare, and he heard the faint whispering rattle of weapons gripped in tightening hands. But of the Dark themselves there was no sign.
The tunnel walls widened before them. The stair abruptly ended. From the cavern below, a faint breeze soughed, thick with the harsh stink of the Nest. As the white light streamed forth, revealing the world that had been hidden since the founding of the Nests, Rudy heard the whisper of awe that wound back and back through the ranks on the stair behind. Pillars and chasms and hanging teeth of stone glistened wetly with acid and nacre; dark pools in the carpets of brown, rolling moss caught the light in hard onyx surfaces. The putrid air seemed to press into Rudy's skull, weighted with the malice of unseen watchers. But in all that shadowy vastness, nothing moved.