"Eldor?" Rudy frowned. "But Eldor was nuts when he came back. It wouldn't be the same if you went back to your own world..."
Gil sighed and looked up at him. "Punk, there was nothing wrong with Eldor that a couple of years with a good therapist wouldn't have taken care of. But as for going back..." She shrugged. "They ever teach you about the old Greek myths in school?"
"Some," he assented doubtfully.
"You remember the one about the Goddess of Spring, who was carried off by the King of the Dead? She wouldn't eat or drink anything while she was in Hell, but just before she got bailed out, he tricked her into tasting a pomegranate. And because she'd eaten something in his domain, she had to stay there, at least part of the time.
"We're the same way, Rudy. We've eaten the pomegranate. Even if Ingold had lived, neither of us could have gone back."
He folded his hands over the curve of the harp "I knew from the start that I never could," he told her. "I didn't know you felt the same."
She wiped the dagger and slid it back into its sheath with a vicious little snick. "I was afraid when we couldn't go back right away," she said softly. "And after that... It does something to you when you kill someone, Rudy. And you improve with practice. I knew I was going to kill Alwir, weeks before it happened. I just didn't know how or when. But I'm not the same person I was." She looked across the fire at him, the shadows dancing over the half-healed sword cut on her face.
She picked up a stick and began to rearrange the fire, the light reddening to blood the white emblem of the Guards on her surcoat. Rudy's hands returned to their music, shaping hesitantly, like a long and flashing chain of diamonds, the air of a dance. After a time he asked her, "Why did you decide to kill Alwir?"
The reflection of the flame sparkled in the tears that flooded her eyes as she raised her head. After two false starts, she said, "I loved Ingold, Rudy. I loved him with all my heart, from the moment I first saw him."
"Yeah," Rudy said softly. "I knew that."
Her breath came raggedly as she fought to calm her trembling voice. "I told myself it was stupid, but it didn't do any good, you know. I told myself I had my own life, my own plans, and they sure as hell didn't include falling in love with a man who was forty years older than me and a wizard in another universe to boot. I told myself he'd never look twice at a skinny, ugly, crazy weirdo like me..."
"You were wrong about that one," Rudy said quietly.
Gil sighed. "I told myself all kinds of stuff. It didn't matter. I loved him. I still do," she added brokenly. "I still do."
"Were you lovers?"
She shook her head. "I think we would have been from the start, you know, if he hadn't been afraid of-of doing just what happened, of tying a part of me to this world. And then, he knew that his love would make me a target of the Dark, too." Tears were still streaming down her face, a torrent of all the wretched grief that had been pent behind her cool, ironic facade.
Her sorrow hurt him as sharply as his own, for he recalled how it had felt to know that he must lose both love and magic forever. But she would not tolerate his touch, so he only said, "I'm sorry."
She shook her head. "It's all right," she said in a calmer voice from which all that flat, cool, conversational tone had vanished. "I know why you asked me to come. If the Dark have taken his mind, we can't let him live. It sounds crazy, but I'd rather it was me who did it. And you don't have to worry about my bursting into tears and refusing to hurt him or anything. I'd hate you if you killed him."
"Lady," Rudy said softly, "there's damn little chance that I could even touch the guy."
Her fingers shook as she pushed the straggling hair away from her face. In the aftermath of the storm, her features were more relaxed than he had ever seen them, the odd beauty of that thin, overly sensitive face emerging from behind the glacial reserve. "I don't hold a lot of hope that I'll be able to," she admitted, brushing the tears from her long lashes. "You may have seen him fight-but I've fought him. He's stainless-steel lightning, Rudy."
She lay down and drew her cloak and worn blanket over her. In a few minutes, Rudy heard her breathing even out into the dreamless rhythm of deep sleep. He himself sat awake far into the night, a prey to unwilling memories, playing bits and pieces of music on the harp.
The quick touch of Gil's hand brought him out of sleep into the black pit of predawn darkness. He tapped her arm soundlessly, signaling his wakeful ness, then sat up in his blankets and looked out toward the beaten paleness of the road. Mist had risen from the nearby lake, swathing the world in damp, intense darkness that even his wizard's sight was hard put to penetrate, but he could hear a kind of slipping, snuffling tread as someone or something hurried furtively south. After a moment's concentration, he made them out-twelve or more men and women, pale, unhealthy, and stinking, their faded silk rags glittering with jeweled embroidery.
In a subvocal whisper, he breathed, "Ghouls."
Gil was kneeling beside him; he felt her hair brush his arm us she nodded. Even to one not mageborn, there could be little question when a shifting of the air brought their fetid carrion stench up to the camp. "But why are they leaving Gae?"
As softly as she had whispered, one of the ghouls halted, raising his head, weasel eyes glinting in the gloom. Their utter filth and the greed in those slobbery faces angered Rudy suddenly, and he drew to him a breath of illusion, a suggestion of directionless wind in the fog and the metallic, acid stink of the Dark Ones.
At this, the ghouls flinched and fled down the road, squeaking like spooked rabbits in the darkness. It seemed for a time that their reek lingered in the vaporous air.
"I don't know why they left Gae," Rudy whispered, settling down into his blankets again. "But I can guess."
In the two days that followed, his guess grew to certainty as every step brought them nearer to the haunted city of Gae. The louring consciousness of the Dark Ones was everywhere, like a sickness of the air that had spread from the city to engulf the gray desolation of the country around. Rudy sensed their presence, far off but in unthinkable numbers, and the dread of them seemed to stalk the sodden road at his elbow, even in what passed for daylight under the thick boil of wet, low-hanging clouds.
When they reached Trad's Hill before the gates of Gae in the vile darkness of early evening, Rudy looked down from its bare crown to the city. Horror congealed in his heart, not at anything he saw, but at things felt and half-seen. The presence of the Dark was like a marsh mist that hung over the whole town, and the shifting ripple of their illusion made the broken towers and groping, matted trees quiver in his wizard's sight, like a heat dance. Evil, violence, terror, and the lust to suck dry the squeaking rind of the human body rose to his senses like a reek from that dark cloud that seemed to hang above the slimy streets. Peering through the darkness, he sensed the maggotlike movement that teemed in the city's cellars, even before he noticed the flickering white shapes that wandered in the murk, picking vainly for forage among the frozen weeds-the herds, of course. He and Gil had found their stripped bones or frozen bodies everywhere in the surrounding countryside. But he barely noticed them. Over all the city seemed to lie a hideous doom, a waiting darkness, a terrible vortex of unspeakable malice and power.
At the center of that vortex, he knew, was the man whom he and Gil must kill.
Even the next morning's daylight could not dispel the murky horror that filled and covered Gae like a sour, dismal swamp. The sunlight strove weakly against the whitish overcast, brighter than it had been in days. But in Gae it was filtered, as if through a mist, into a dozen hideous perversions of unknown color. By that ghastly light, the city seemed foully unreal, its walls and towers sinking to the earth under the weight of unnaturally riotous vines, as if the stone itself were softened or had the life sapped from it by those obscene roots. The snow that lay in the streets appeared to have melted, though it was piled thick outside the limits of the city, and it was pulped by the churning of thousands of crooked little feet.