He wondered suddenly if that was why the Dark Ones had wanted Ingold-for his charm, which made it impossible for anyone to close the gates against him for long.
Numbly, Rudy made a move toward them. Ingold raised his head, and for an instant his eyes met Rudy's-exhausted, driven, and yet curiously serene. Mists blew between them, momentarily obscuring Rudy's vision; when they cleared, only Gil stood on the barren hillslope, her sword in her hand. Not so much as a track marked the rocky ground.
She sheathed the blade as Rudy stumbled toward her. In their search of the Palace, Gil had long ago recovered her cloak and surcoat, but they were damp from the mists, and she shivered.
Quietly Rudy asked her, "Why, Gil?"
"He might have needed it."
Rudy wiped his numbed, stiffening fingers on his soggy coat. "You're crazy, do you know that?"
"Probably," she agreed.
He looked around him at the shifting wraiths of fog that hemmed them in. "So what do we do now?"
Gil shrugged. "Wait. If he survives whatever danger he's going to meet tonight, I think he'll be back for us."
"Oh, come on!" Rudy exploded, the calmness of her voice putting the finishing touches on the day's cold, terror, and exhaustion. "You don't still think he's out to have his final confrontation with the Dark tonight, do you? More likely he's hotfooting it back to the Keep..."
She folded her arms, huddling the cloak tighter about her thin shoulders. "If that's so, why didn't he kill me?"
Exasperated, he retorted, "Probably because you were more use to him alive!"
"Then why didn't he kill you?" she pointed out hotly. "And don't tell me he couldn't have carved you into hors d'oeuvres half a dozen times in the course of the day. Why did he let us track him-"
"That's it!" Rudy said suddenly. "Why did he let us track him, Gil? Ordinarily, nobody could track Ingold across a black floor sprinkled with flour. But if he was trying to lead us out of the city, why didn't he lead us the shortest way from the Palace, to the land gate opposite Trad's Hill? Why did he take all day and work us out to wherever we are now?"
Gil frowned. "Did he want to keep us away from that end of town?"
"Or from Trad's Hill? It's the biggest landmark outside the city."
She looked quickly around her. Rudy had begun to sense it, too-an uneasiness in the air, an electric dread, as if earth and fog had begun to stir with the power and malice of the Dark. For no reason, he looked behind him, half-expecting to see a shadow forming there, and felt his heartbeat quicken.
Gil whispered, "You think Trad's Hill is where he's going to meet the Dark?"
"Yeah," Rudy murmured. "But the question is: Why?"
It was full night when they reached Trad's Hill, black and icy, thunderous with the overwhelming sense of the presence of the Dark. Rudy had quenched the light that came from the end of his staff and, in the black overcast, he led Gil by the hand, picking his way cautiously over the rough ground of the plain. In spite of the cloaking-spell that covered them both, he felt smothered by the dread of the Dark. They were too close to Gae, he thought-they had followed its broken walls, barely visible in the fog-too close to the horrors that he sensed were welling from every cellar, every vault, and every passage of the endless, twisting mazes of the half-burned Nest. He felt almost stifled with fear and was shivering in the deep cold of the night.
Sudden and chill, wind whipped them, chasing the last wet rags of fog from the landscape. It flung his long, damp hair around his face and stung his abraded hands. He felt Gil's fingers tighten over his arm. The smoky veils cleared, revealing the long, irregular darkness of the walls of Gae and the paler shape of the land beneath the eerie glow of the stars.
Then he heard Gil gasp. Looking back at Gae, he saw the Dark. They rose above the broken roofline like the funnel of a monster tornado, a swirling column that spread to blacken the air. Their faint, chittering hum buzzed in his brain. The illusion they spread engulfed the cloud-splotched sky, drowning the world in stygian, all-encompassing darkness; the wind from them rushed like a hurricane over the sightless earth.
In the darkness, light flared at the top of Trad's Hill, white and strange, its reflection picking out the lines of Gil's temple and jaw, giving Rudy a brief, terrible impression of a skull within the whirling mane of her ragged hair. The mounting clouds of darkness loomed higher, blotting the invisible towers of Gae; the little spark of whiteness burst again, and this time Rudy could see, outlined in its thin glow, the black form of a man at the top of the hill, with the billowing rags of his torn mantle falling back to bare the sword-scarred, muscular arms.
Light sprang from Ingold's upraised hands, its reflection flickering in the blowing halo of weedy white hair and on the claw-cut, upturned face. The white spark broadened in the heavy air and lengthened to a twisting thread of fire that jerked and wavered in the sudden winds that swept down over the hill in a bitter, stinging wave of the smell of acid and stone. As the Dark poured down toward him, the light expanded to stretch from the hilltop to the louring blackness of the overcast sky.
Then Gil screamed, " No !" Turning, Rudy saw in those shock-stricken gray eyes a blinding understanding, horror, realization, grief-and the knowledge that she had, after all, been betrayed.
Torrents of cold brightness rained over them as the streak of light opened into a fluttering gap. It was as if earth and sky had been painted upon a curtain, and that curtain was pulled aside, drawing everything with it. Beyond lay only the misty whiteness, the colorless fires, and the vivid darkness of the Void.
Toward that enormous gap, all the assembled Dark Ones of the world swarmed in a howling river of doom.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
California , Rudy thought numbly. All the world that gave me birth. That was their target all along .
He did not know why he had not seen it earlier. They had all known that Ingold was the sole guardian of the secrets of the Void. The Dark Ones must have known it as well. It was to prevent just this thing from happening that he and Gil had voluntarily submitted to exile all those long and frozen months.
And for nothing , he thought. For nothing .
Though there was no possible way Gil could have stopped the wizard or closed the blazing wound in the fabric of the Cosmos, she flung herself up the hill at him, the glaring light of the Void bursting like nova fire from the edge of her drawn sword. Ingold swung around, a black, swirling shape framed in that blinding aura, and raised his hand; Gil fell to her knees in the muddy snow. He towered on the hillside over her, blazing with an Archmage's terrible power. Still near the foot of the hill, Gil bowed her head to her hands, and her single, hoarse cry of bitter despair splintered the spinning darkness of the night. Then she was silent.
Above her, the Dark ones poured around Ingold, through the gap in the Void, and to the world beyond.
They seemed to have no fear of the weird brilliance that streamed from the Void. Indeed, Rudy was aware that, while it had the appearance of light, it was not truly light as it was known in this world. Its cold brightness stabbed through those sleek and dripping bodies and showed that the Dark Ones were not dark at all, but as transparent as spring water, beings of crystal protoplasm threaded with clear ruby veins. From the millrace of shadows, a single creature detached itself, shrinking in size as it drifted down, to alight like some grotesquely beautiful glass insect upon Ingold's shoulder. Others followed it, pulsing, glittering, and sinking vicious, delicate claws into the folds of his mantle and his sleeve, their long, whiplike tails hanging like sparkling ropes down his back. The chill nonlight threw into stark prominence every line graven into his ravaged face, every protruding muscle and bone, and the tortured exhaustion of his haunted eyes.