Steel whined, and he barely parried as the sword whipped down from behind. Ingold had merely stepped to one side of the arch, letting Rudy pelt out past him into the open. The blade snarled thinly against the metal of the staff's sharpened crescent, brushing it aside. Rudy moved back, staggering in the icy water and narrowly avoiding the loss of his staff. He attacked the sword, trying to catch it between the crescent's points and wrench it from his opponent's hands, as he had seen Lohiro do. But he had neither the former Archmage's tuning nor his precision of eye. The sword nicked away. Rudy sprang clear of its slash and sank to his knees in something under the surface of the waters that shifted and bubbled horribly.
Parrying frantically, he backed to higher ground. Ingold had a far better sense of footing than he and drove him relentlessly, exhausting him in a defensive battle that left him no opportunity for riposte. Slimy things clung to his ankles as he scrambled to a ridge of dry pavement. The wizard cut at him out of the darkness of the fog. He felt the staff parried, the prongs knocked aside, and heard the sheering whisper of the descending blade. In desperation he caught the sword on the iron-hard shaft, up close to the hilt. For a split second of locked strength, he stood almost breast to breast with the vagabond specter he fought and found himself looking into those blue, brilliant, disconcerting eyes.
There's something wrong , he thought suddenly. Lohiro... Lohiro ...
Then Ingold smiled, though his face was white with strain. An instant later, he reached out one heel to hook Rudy's braced foot from beneath him. Rudy toppled backward with a sickening plouf ! into the squishy waters of the slough, and Ingold was gone, flitting like a wraith into the smoky darkness.
Gil emerged from the fog a second later and helped him to his feet, dripping and shivering and utterly filthy. She picked up his fallen staff and handed it to him. "There," she whispered, pointing into the murk. "Can you see him?"
Something moved in the opaque mists that filled a broken gateway. The mists stirred, as if brushed by the torn hem of a mantle.
Rudy picked a rotting weed stem from the matted fur of his coat collar, streaming dirty liquid at every move. "Let's go," he muttered.
At times in that horrible pursuit, Rudy remembered bitterly that Ingold had originally led the reconnaissance to Gae because of his knowledge of the alleys and byways of the ruined town. He hunted the old man through broken and abandoned mansions, filled with the rotting loot of the city and stinking of ghouls and foxes, and along streets and courtyards where the thickening veils of fog wreathed impassable tangles of rope-tough vines. Sometimes Rudy found the mark of the wizard's boot in the smeared mud by a cracked marble cistern or printed in the frost that furred the broken cobbles. He traced his quarry in the stirring of water, in the slurred track of Ingold's cloak over the dew that beaded the greenish mats of filthy mosses like silver carpets of diamonds, and in the matted, overgrown bushes broken by the passage of his body. And always Rudy thought, There's something wrong here. I'm missing something important. Lohiro ...
A rustling sound caught his attention, the slip of feet over stone. He stopped, his eyes struggling to pierce the cloudy miasma that seemed thicker there than it had appeared elsewhere in the ruined city. He thought he saw a dark doorway in a wall, set between molded pillars leprous with moss and festooned with the brown, knotted cables of clutching vines.
Beside him, Gil paused, her boots scrunching softly in the twisted mats of half-dead vegetation. She caught his sleeve as he stepped toward the door and whispered, "Can't you feel it?"
All around them, the nearness of the Dark Ones was like a buzzing heaviness in the air. The day was far spent. In the dense, gray mist that shrouded the city, it was impossible to guess the hour, but Rudy knew that the light would soon fade. In darkness, Ingold would be utterly beyond his power.
Cautiously, he advanced toward the door. The crescent end of his staff began to burn with a pale, smoky light, blurred by fog. By it, he could see the peering gargoyle faces carved in the pillars and the darkness of a broken stairwell beyond them, its walls bulging under the thrust of young tree roots. A drift of warmer air touched his face and stirred the fog around him.
A footfall rustled; a heavy boot crunched in the dried snarls of the ubiquitous vines. Rudy whirled, and the white glow of his staff, barely penetrating the slaty darkness that engulfed them, showed him Ingold standing a few feet away.
Rudy's nerve snapped. White light streamed from the tip of his staff as he lunged at the wizard. The old man parried the thrusts, casually sidestepping the whining steel that missed his eyes by inches. The cold phosphorescence of the staff illuminated the honed steel, but Ingold himself was all but invisible in fog and darkness. Rudy pressed his attack, sobbing, exhausted, his chilled muscles cramping, and the wizard faded before him. Somewhere in the boil of vapors behind him, he could sense Gil moving, keeping on the fringes of the fight.
Vines seemed to knot themselves around his ankles, and he tripped, barely keeping hold of his staff as he fell. He heard Ingold retreating through the tangles of foliage and scrambled hastily to his feet, wading after the wizard through the oddly persistent creepers. Darkness hid Ingold from him, but he heard the old man pause.
A paving- stone tilted under Rudy's feet, pitching him into the rubble that choked an abandoned gateway. Hands lacerated, heedless of anything but his frantic need to finish his quarry before darkness permitted Ingold to take on the form of the Dark Ones, Rudy plunged after the wizard, down a long tunnel of black fog and shadows.
In the open ground outside the city walls, the darkness seemed less pressing. The leaden mists cleared a bit, showing Rudy the wizard moving off downhill, his stain-mottled mantle blending into the colors of the fog. Rudy threw all of his strength into a clearing-spell, a wind to scatter the mists, and felt on his mind the cold grip of counterspells that strangled his power into silence. The mists wrapped tighter around him, a dun burial shroud, and he broke into a run, feverish with terror at what should happen if he met Ingold and what should happen if he did not.
He found himself stumbling blindly through a gray, steaming world, his way blocked at every turn. The stunted corpses of dead trees loomed before him in the darkness. Roots snagged at his feet, pitching him headlong into slimy patches of mud and scum. The skirts of his sodden coat slapped wetly at his thighs, his streaming boots felt weighted down with mud and water, and his body was chilled and aching to the bone. Lost, half-frozen, and gummed to the eyebrows with mud, he stumbled on alone through a nightmare of darkness and fog.
Then, wholly unexpectedly, he burst into a clearing in the mists. He staggered to a halt, the flickering light of his staff casting a wan illumination over the scene before him.
He saw Ingold and Gil standing, facing each other, close enough that the magelight mingled their two shadows into a single pool of indigo blue on the rock-hard ground. The sword Ingold held gleamed in his hand as he turned it and offered its hilt to Gil.
She took it and tested its familiar weight. Her long hair was half-unraveled around her face, and her eyes were gentler than he had ever seen them; for the first time since Rudy had known her, he could understand how a man could find this scholarly, violent, and entirely contradictory woman fascinating.
Ingold stood before her for a long moment, his hands empty at his sides. Framed by the long, dirty mane of white hair, his face was haggard, the bones seeming to stand out through colorless flesh, but for an instant Rudy found it impossible to believe that this man was anything other than the charming old wizard that he and Gil loved in their separate ways.