The Armies of Daylight (Darwath #3) - Page 17

They were not able to leave the Keep until some forty-odd hours had passed.

Eldor's body was burned at sunset the following day, on the great meadowland where the dancing had been held for the Winter Feast and where he had first seen Alde in Rudy's arms. Supplies in the Keep did not permit much extravagance in the way of grave-goods-the embroidered coverlet that had been drawn over his body for his lying in state was removed before Thoth called the flames to life within the pyre. Burned at his feet upon the same pyre was Alwir's body, still crumpled together as Gil had left him. With the cold, the rigor had stayed in the corpse. As the flames rushed over both bodies, it was almost as if the Chancellor had prostrated himself to the ground at the feet of the man he had murdered.

Standing in the crowd between Thoth and Brother Wend, Rudy glanced up at the makeshift dais that had been built for the flame thrower demonstration and saw how composed Aide's features were in the scarlet light. Her son was weeping softly in her arms, more from cold or fear of the fire or from the solemnity of the occasion than from any real understanding of what took place. Watching her, Rudy saw something that he had observed with his many sisters: there was a moment when a girl's face changed, took on the indefinable quality of a woman's, and was a girl's no more.

The woman with whom Eldor had barely become acquainted turned from the ashes of his pyre and walked back to the Keep in the deepening gloom. Bishop Maia walked at her side-he had traded his grubby conglomerate of salvaged brocades for the blood-crimson of the official Church and looked for the first time like a Bishop of the Straight Faith instead of a refugee from the Haight-Ashbury. Between them her son toddled, an unrecognizable bundle of furs, and her people walked in solemn silence behind.

Govannin Narmenlion had gone. She had slipped out, some said, at sunrise and made off with a few retainers after the troops of Alketch. Bektis was gone, too, and Rudy suspected that the Bishop had coerced the mage with visions of a double trial for conspiracy and black magic and had gotten him to throw a cloaking-spell over them both.

Politics makes strange bedfellows, and conspiracy even stranger ones . He wondered what the Bishop and the Court Mage would find to talk about on the long road south.

That evening he went to bid Alde goodby.

She was in her cell, sitting at the table which she'd cleared as a kind of work space, surrounded by wax tablets, glow-stones, rolls of scribbled palimpsests, and an abacus. She'd tied her hair back in a thick bun at the nape of her neck, and wore the gaudy ski vest he'd made for her over the worn white gown that she'd first had on when he'd met her in Karst and mistaken her for her son's babysitter. He paused in the doorway, watching how the lamplight flickered on the jeweled stylus, on the splinter of silver that gleamed in her hair, and on the little worry wrinkle between her brows that, like Gil's scar, would forever mark her face. He did not know quite how to speak to her, for there was no mistaking her for anything but a Queen now.

Then she looked up and saw him, and happiness kindled in her eyes like the coming of spring. She held out her hands to him, hesitantly, as if she, too, were uncertain of where and how they stood.

"I wasn't sure I'd recognize you," he said.

She smiled. "I'm not sure that I recognize myself."

Gently he drew her to her feet and kissed her lips. It was the kiss of a friend, but she held him from parting from her and returned the kiss of longtime lovers whose love had gone deeper than passion or change or grief. There was tightness and magic in it, like coming home to warm firelight after a sleet-ridden night journey. The sheer joy of being with her again mingled with and magnified the knowledge that whatever happened, he would always have a loyal partner in this odd, quiet woman who ruled the Keep of Dare.

"I've come to tell you I'll be leaving in the morning."

Her hands tightened where they locked behind his back, but she only nodded, accepting, as women who loved wizards must do.

"We should be gone three weeks, maybe a little more."

"We?"

"There's something that Gil and I have to take care of in Gae."

She nodded, her brows deepening slightly over eyes that had grown suddenly grave. "You would not be going all that way," she said softly, "if the cause were not urgent. Is there anything you'll need?"

"Only supplies for the journey. I don't think we'll need a pack animal. With the wolves in the river valleys, it would be more of a hindrance than a help."

"All right."

Looking down into her eyes, he could see there her weariness and confusion, the tangled emotions of mourning men who had long ago died in her heart. He kissed her again, and this time she clung to his warmth, her face pressed to the woolly collar of his vest For a long time the scented silence of the room enfolded them, broken only by the faint sounds of the embers on the hearth.

"Will you be all right?" he asked at last.

She nodded, standing still in the circle of his arms. "The work is good for me," she said. "Gil says that a tough project is the best drug the soul can take-and I think she's right. Thank God, Alwir's chief clerk kept the books decently."

He chuckled a little in spite of himself at this matter-of-fact epitaph for the Chancellor. He saw that Alde had her own work now, her unschooled hands picking up the reins of responsibility and power. He could no more understand it, no more have done it, than he could understand or have emulated Gil's cold and rational violence; but he saw that, like Gil, Alde was going to be very good at what she did.

He wondered, very briefly, what would happen to her-to Tir, to all of them-if he and Gil were slain. He pushed the thought from his mind. Time enough for that later , he told himself. If there is a later .

"Rudy?"

Her doubtful voice called him back with a start.

"You aren't-you will be back, won't you?"

He felt an impulse to wipe the troubled fear from her upturned face with a heartening assurance, to protect her from unhappiness as he had often, not very successfully, tried to protect her from harm. But he owed their love more than that; and he could not drive from his mind the memory of the rain-slashed ruins of Quo and the knowledge of what he was going to Gae to meet.

So he bent to touch her lips again and whispered miserably, "Babe, I don't know."

The journey to Gae was wet and bitterly cold. Rudy and Gil followed the track the armies had left, through slushy bottom lands, iron-gray in the frozen grip of winter, or over the stumpy summits of submerged hills. On the fringes of the vast, pewter-colored meres, they found evidence of bands of White Raiders; and once, in a hollow between three rocky hills, Gil found signs of some other large band of what she thought might be dooic, over a thousand strong. One night wolves attacked their spell-cloaked camp, and Gil killed three of them before they drew off.

"Pity about the skins," she said regretfully. "I always did want a wolfskin rug in my study. It would impress the hell out of my Ph.D. advisor."

It was one of the few times she referred to the life before her exile, and it already seemed incredible to Rudy that Gil had attended UCLA; or indeed, that she had ever been anything but a Guard. When they were on the road, she didn't speak much at all.

When the nights closed over the gray, crow-haunted land, Rudy spelled the camp against the Dark Ones, against wolves, and against bandits, while Gil built a hidden little fire to cook their meager rations of pan-bread and salt meat. Afterward Rudy played the harp, or they talked-of their journey, of the small doings of the people they knew at the Keep, of the possibility of Aide's restarting the hydroponics gardens, or of Maia's changes in Church policy. They plotted scenarios for Raider attacks, or what they would do in the event of another major assault by the Dark. They seldom referred to California, and then only in passing, as of a mutual childhood, half-forgotten.

"You'll be staying at the Keep now?" Gil asked one night as Rudy sat softly weaving the glimmering strains of a haunting, half-familiar melody that Dakis had sung.

He nodded. Neither spoke the same thought-that a week from now they might both be dead, the Keep shattered, and Tir's and Aide's bones mixed with the bloody snow that blew in through its broken walls. "I'm going to get in touch with the Gettlesand wizards and see if maybe some of them could come back to help out Thoth and Wend."

Gil made a noise of assent, not looking up from the dagger she was whetting. She did not ask what good all the wizards in the world would do if Ingold returned to the Keep.

Rudy was silent in thought. Now and then he touched stray notes from the harp strings that dropped like silver coins into the dark well of the night. Across the shallow lakes of the valley, the wolves howled, and winds stirred the mists that curled from the waters' dirty surfaces.

"How long have we been here?" he asked at last.

"Six months, or a little longer," Gil replied, turning her dagger edge to catch the light. "It's round about the middle of March, though you wouldn't guess it from the weather." It had snowed last night, a thin, icy scum on the ground.

Rudy sighed. "As soon as the weather breaks, I'm taking the road."

She looked up, startled.

He went on. "I'm going back to Quo." He put his hand to stop the quavering of the harp strings and looked across them at Gil. "Ingold always said that he was the only person alive who understood how the Void works and how to create the gates from one universe to the next. But he had to have learned that from somewhere. I'm going to have a look at the library of Quo and see if I can find something about how to bridge the Void and get you home."

The knife whined once more against the whetstone, then stilled. Gil did not look up. "Don't knock yourself out over it, Rudy," she said. "We wouldn't have had any more luck returning than Eldor had."

"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.

The bones of the dead herds were everywhere, fresh or in varying stages of depredation by the petty carnivores of the deserted town-wild dogs, cats, and bold, red-eyed rats. The cold killed the smell of them, but Rudy felt queasy with a nausea compounded from stench and revulsion.

Almost as bad as the dead and the hideous feeling of being watched was Gil's remote calm. She waded through the putrid muck of Gae's overgrown streets with scarcely a batted eyelash, and the queer, leaden light of the vaporous sky lent a terrible expression to her frost-hard features.

After her single outburst of tears on the road, she had not mentioned Ingold or the upcoming battle to Rudy again. As he watched her in the Palace courtyard, methodically stripping off her cloak and surcoat and hanging them on the limbs of a burned tree, it came to him why this was.

Grief or pity would have blinded her, weakened her. She had made up her mind what she must do, Rudy realized; she had sealed whatever chinks in her defenses she could. There would be time enough to think after Ingold was finally dead.

The two remaining palace buttresses, stabbing like skeleton fingers into the white air, cast watery shadows over Gil's face as she removed her scabbard from her sword belt and turned to Rudy with the sheathed weapon in her hand. Wind flattened her shirt sleeves over thin, hard-muscled arms. "You ready?"

Rudy nodded and tightened his grip on his staff. He'd used it to help himself over the rough ground, all the way from Renweth, but its pronged, razor-edged crescent could serve as a weapon as well. Ironically, it was the very weapon Lohiro had used against Ingold at Quo.

Which didn't do him a helluva lot of good , Rudy thought dryly as he followed Gil over the blackened, sunken remains of the steps and down into the vaults.

The explosions that had torn the roofs from the underground tunnels and trapped the invaders had shaken the Palace above. Through riven roofs and crumbling beams, wan sunlight lay in bars and streaks of fallow gold. The upper level of the vaults was a smeared ocean of ash and muck, cracked stone and fallen groinings wallowing up through the mess like half-sunk hulks. The lower level, though foul with the stink of the herds, was empty, except for places where the clinging, ubiquitous vines had taken root in some fallen heap of stone and dirt overhead.

Through the gaping vaults, wan light checkered the floor, showing the crisscrossed tracks of the herds, like a spattering of clay on the black smoothness of the unbroken pavement. In spite of the miasmal light that slatted across Gil's figure from above and in spite of the cloaking-spell that lay around them both, Rudy found himself looking uneasily over his shoulders, waiting for the Dark Ones to attack.

Walking ahead of him, Gil seemed to fear nothing, feel nothing. Rudy could see that the hand that gripped the worn leather of the scabbard she carried was relaxed; when he glanced sideways at her, her face, surrounded by the ragged wisps that escaped from the thick braid of her hair, was calm. The shiny places in the hilt of her dagger winked in the occasional glints of sunlight. She never looked back at him, never hesitated, but wove her way through the broken forest of the limitless pillars and arches as if her feet had known that route from the beginning of time.

They emerged into a sort of clearing in the vaults, and Rudy recognized the red porphyry stair before them, down which the army had descended to the black stair of the Dark. Mud, dead leaves, ashes, and bones lay all about the place now. From a broken ceiling two levels above, a great aisle of straw-colored sunlight streamed, like an imperial carpet, to within ten feet of the utter blackness of the gaping pit.

Between darkness and light, crumpled on the pavement at the very lip of the abyss, was the body of a man, face down. The hooded brown mantle that covered him was streaked and bleached with the slime of the Dark, frayed by battle, and stained with smoke and blood. One reaching hand lay in the bar of light-a scarred, blunt-fingered warrior's hand.

He was unconscious and unarmed.

Gil sighed. "Stay here," she ordered and pulled her dagger from her belt.

There was something horrifying in her businesslike calm as she crossed that bright bar of light. It's better this way , Rudy thought hopelessly. If he had a chance to fight us, it would be all over, not only for us but for everyone in the Keep. It's our only hope of taking out the most powerful mage in the West of the World, whose mind is the mind of the Dark .

But tears blurred his eyes and ran, stinging, down his face.

Gil knelt beside the body, drew her sword, and set it aside, the hilt ready to her hand just in case. She shifted her grip on the hilt of the dagger, reached out to touch Ingold's shoulder, and carefully turned him over. Rudy saw the old man's face outlined against the light as the hood fell back from it, scored and shadowed with the tracks of sixty-odd very rough years. The light glinted in the rough, dirty silk of the white hair. He looked at peace, sleeping as Rudy could scarcely remember having ever seen him sleep-the profound sleep of exhaustion.

Do it , Rudy thought, fixing his gaze on the shining blade of the dagger. If he is what Lohiro was, a prisoner in his own body, let him go before he wakes to become what he fought so hard to escape !

But Gil made no move. She studied the sleeping wizard's features for an endless time, and Rudy saw the bright glitter of tears on her inhumanly still face. Light skated along the edge of the knife with the sudden trembling of her hand.

Do it , he cried silently, and for God's sake, have done !

At that moment the old man's eyes opened and looked up into Gil's.

The razor edge that lay against his throat did not move. He looked worse than he had in the desert, the horrible pallor of his face blotched and discolored with bruises and the small, vicious wounds of the Dark Ones' claws beneath a layer of bloody grime. He made no move; he only sighed, closed his eyes again, and said something softly to Gil, something that Rudy did not hear.

A stray beam of sunlight sprang from the blade as Gil's body was suddenly shaken with a convulsive shudder. With an abrupt movement, she hurled the dagger against the red stone of the steps that led up toward the light, her shoulders bowing as sob after sob racked her body. To Rudy's utter horror, he saw Ingold half-rise and reach out to her and Gil crumple forward into the wizard's arms.

With an inarticulate cry he sprang forward, the pronged gold of his staff flashing in the wan sunlight as he drove its points toward Ingold's unprotected back. Gil cried out a warning, and the old man twisted away from the blow, thrusting her out of danger as he staggered to his feet and raised his arm to shield his eyes from the unaccustomed glare of the light. Gritting his teeth, his own eyes half-blind with tears, Rudy drove the razor edge of the crescent on the end of his staff toward Ingold's throat.

Rudy had not reckoned on Gil. A pair of bony knees scissored his legs viciously from under him and he fell, the staff clattering on the stone floor. He groped for it, and Gil kicked it out of his hands. He looked up in time to see her scramble to her feet, snatch up her drawn sword from the floor, and fling it, glittering, into Ingold's waiting hands.

Sobbing, Rudy grabbed for the staff again, and this time Gil stepped back, tears pouring uncontrollably down her face. With a cry of frustrated fury, he took a step toward her, his own mind unclear as to what he intended.

Ingold rasped, "Touch her, and I swear you will never leave this city alive."

Rudy stopped, blinking, wondering for a dizzied second whether Ingold had placed some kind of spell of gnodyrr upon Gil with those few words he had murmured to her when he lay with her dagger at his throat. The old man's ragged breath was the only sound to pierce the uncanny stillness of the cellar. His blue eyes, pale and bright within the rings of cut and blackened flesh, went warily from one to the other.

Then in a strained voice, Ingold said, "Neither of you should be in this city. Get out of here. Get as far away as you can."

"I won't leave you," Gil said quietly.

He rounded on her, his eyes widening with sudden and blazing fear. "You'll do as I say! Get out! Get out now!"

"The hell we will!" Rudy yelled, and Ingold swung back toward him, his borrowed sword flashing in the pale light. "You've been a prisoner of the Dark…"

The wizard moved back a step into the bar of sunlight, his long, matted hair glistening like seaweed. The light around him dimmed. Looking up, Rudy could see, through the crazy tangle of broken timbers and charred stone, the soft coils of white fog beginning to blur the day.

"And what?" Ingold asked softly.

Rudy cried out, "Why did they want you?"

"You'll learn that in time." The wizard retreated another step, the blade poised before him, orienting himself, his red-rimmed eyes growing used to daylight again. Rudy took a hopeless step toward him, and Ingold shifted a little, readying himself for an attack, his body moving with the old, deadly lightness.

Then Gil cried, " Rudy !" Her voice was sharp with terror. He whipped around and saw her blink in surprise, like someone just waked from a trance…

… and turning back, he saw that Ingold was gone.

Cursing, he plunged up the red stone steps toward the waning daylight. Gil hurried at his heels, stammering, "I'm-I'm sorry. I don't know why I yelled…"

"You yelled because he wanted you to!" Rudy stormed at her, his voice rough with anger that was three parts fear. He stopped and caught her arms, facing her in the mottled shadows of a broken doorway among leaf drifts and rotted bones. "Christ, Gil, why did you stop me?" he whispered. "I understand how you couldn't do it, but-"

"No," she interrupted quietly. Her eyes were swollen but perfectly calm. "If he had been possessed by the mind of the Dark, I would have cut his throat. But he wasn't."

"Fantastic!" Rudy sighed in disgust. "That's all I need to-"

"I don't know what's going on," she continued, unruffled, "but his mind is his own. I know it."

"How the hell would you know it?" Rudy yelled passionately. "He's had you wrapped around his finger from day bloody one! The Dark have had him. He's been their prisoner. There's no way they would have let him go-not after they hunted him from one end of the continent to the other!"

"I know it because I know him!" she lashed back at Rudy, jerking her arms free of his grip and striding on ahead of him up the stairs. Above their heads, the broken vaults of the Palace showed the sky a chill and smoky white, and Rudy could see that Gil was shivering with the cold seeping through her frayed homespun shirt.

He stormed after her. "And just where the hell do you think you're going?"

"I'm going to find him, you jackass!" she flung back over her shoulder. She slipped through a half-fallen arch, her boots slurring thickly in the knotted mats of half-burned creepers that swamped the halls. "He wants us out of town because he's in some kind of danger himself."

"He wants us out of town so we won't stop him from heading back to the Keep and opening the gates some dark night!" Rudy's foot snagged on a coil of vine, and he fell sprawling. Cursing, he scrambled to his feet again. "It's up to us-"

Gil whirled so suddenly he all but impaled himself on the dagger that appeared like a splinter of ice in her hand. "You harm a hair of his head, punk…"

Cold stirrings of wind blew a thin mist over them and muttered in