Darwath 3 - The Armies Of Daylight (28 page)

Yet Rudy followed, as they all followed, stumbling in the crumbly mosses of the cavern floor. Against the darkness that seemed to crowd so thickly around them, Ingold's sword gleamed as he pointed the way toward the tunnels he and Rudy had taken in their earlier exploration of the Nest. The smell there was intolerable, fetid and sweet. Powder from the decaying mosses clogged Rudy's nostrils. In the open cavern, the magelight did not penetrate the darkness of the ceiling, but it threw horrible leaping shadows of the warriors among the knobbled pillars and across the inky pits of the floor.

In the descending tunnel, Rudy felt the awareness of the Dark, stronger and stronger, like a thin sound sawing its way through his skull. In the cavern beyond, it was worse. Blind, squeaking things fled before the light, their chittering echoing down the tunnels. In spite of the coolness of the air, Rudy's face was wet with sweat; he could see more sweat gleaming on the faces of the Guards packed so closely around him. As he stumbled over the soft wetness of the floor, he could feel and taste the malice of the Dark, pressing on him like the millions of tons of earth and rock above his head.

Ingold stopped in the black mouth of the next tunnel, swinging around as if startled by some noise or movement. At first Rudy thought that the old man's foxfire sword had begun to burn brighter. Then he realized that the soft, white magelight around them was dimming.

Alwir looked up into the shadows of the cavern ceiling. “Can we use the flame throwers?”

“Not unless we wish to risk cutting ourselves off from the lower Nests,” the wizard whispered. In the fading glare, Rudy noted how pale he looked and how the sweat glittered on his face. “We have some three miles of tunnel to cover from here.”

All about him, Rudy could hear the fearful murmuring of the Guards. Swords flashed in the graying light as the column moved into defense formation. He put out his strength into the light-spell but felt it sapped, drawn by what he knew to be magic, yet was incapable of comprehending enough to fight. As the light waned, he could see that some of the mosses were palely phosphorescent—more of Gil's nitrogen compounds, he thought—and moreover, there was a kind of a smell in the air, bitter and metallic, that he had never smelled before, overpowering in the enclosed spaces of the caves.

Eldor barked a hoarse command. The column moved on again, down a half mile or so of tunnel where the air seemed clearer, though the light continued to weaken. By the glow of Ingold's sword, the King's face looked harsh and terrible, a thin little smile playing about his lips.

He knows what's coming
, Rudy thought, shivering with the effort of maintaining even a feeble glow. He knows…

Then blackness slammed down over them all like the fall of night. Screaming burst along the tunnel, the echoes drumming into Rudy's ears. All his strength was put into the light, yet darkness covered him; he heard the sudden, roaring buzz that the Dark Ones made when they flew underground and he felt the hissing slash of a sword that just missed his ear. He flung himself against the rock wall, the acid in the moss stinging his bare hands, and spread a cloaking-spell over himself.

Winds howled by him; something hot and wet splattered his face. Then up ahead, white light burst into being again around Ingold and the Guards; the colors of tunic and mail, of human skin and stripped, bloody bones, were shocking in the refulgent glare. But he himself was still in darkness. Dimly, he could see struggling forms, swords, faces, and the sinewy, drifting glide of dark shapes. He tried to call light and found he hadn't the strength for both spells.

He bent and pulled the gory sword from the handbones of a corpse at his feet. Then, in a single instant of time, he slashed at the Dark One nearest him, dropped the cloaking-spell, and threw everything he had into a burst of searing, white light that exploded with radiance into the blackness.

All around him there was shrieking, buzzing, clawing wind. The light that encircled Rudy grew and flickered, the Dark Ones vanishing before it, leaving the tunnel a shambles of bodies and bones half-sunk in trampled, unspeakable filth. Then darkness surged down on them again, and he struck at the things that came for him in it, the thin, black slime from their slashed bodies splattering his hands. The effort of fighting the counterspells against the magelight exhausted him; it was all he could do to defend himself. If he had not had his back to the wall and been ringed by the Guards, he knew he could never have stood a chance.

Eldor's harsh voice cut the chaos of noise like acid; the column moved forward, struggling against that inky tide. From the darkness, a spined cable as big around as his wrist caught Rudy's sword arm and dragged him upward toward the darkness that hid the roof of the tunnel with a force that all but dislocated his arm. He felt his feet leave the floor and glimpsed a slobbering black maw in the midst of swirling illusion…

He must have screamed, for his throat hurt from it as the Icefalcon pulled him to his feet from the trampled muck of the tunnel floor where he'd fallen. The whiplike tail was already disintegrating away from his arm, its cut end still pulsing faintly where the Raider's sword had sheared it. He felt weak with shock, sickened at the hideous strength of the thing that had seized him.

The Icefalcon dragged him along with the moving column until he could find his feet. As the Raider let go, he said, “Don't let that happen again. You're the only light source this part of the column has.”

Even as the Icefalcon spoke, Rudy could feel the counter-spells slacking and the light growing stronger. As the Dark swirled away in clouds of illusion, he could see that an immense cave stretched before them, the slimy mosses of its walls and floor glittering faintly in the reflected witchlight and in the wan phosphorescence that seemed, in places, to emanate from the mosses themselves. The light grew as Eldor, Ingold, and the advance guard sprang down the slippery slope to the cavern floor, leading the straggling column that was like a long and tortuous snake. The darkness above them seemed to be alive with the chittering buzz of the Dark, dripping with their stench, yet Rudy felt their spells growing more and more distant. He hastened his steps, trying to catch up with the wizard and the King.

He had almost done so when a faint, hollow booming noise echoed through the cave, like a distant explosion, muffled by the twisting of the tunnels. The ground jarred beneath his feet, and all around him rose an outcry of doubt and terror. Men stopped, looking about into the inky vastness, as if to see the source ofthe sound, though Rudy could tell it was some distance off; others cried out that they must turn back and were cursed by those who said that the only hope lay forward. Ahead of them, Rudy could see the faint glimmer that was Ingold's sword as the old man scrambled up a rockfall to the mouth of the next tunnel. He heard Eldor's commands rapped out to those around him. And there was something wrong…

That smell
, Rudy thought. Stronger now. much stronger … He looked around him, seeking a source, but he saw nothing—only the emptiness of the high-ceilinged cavern, the magelight stretching to its farthest ends. Where the hell are the Dark?

The ground shook again, farther off, and Rudy decided that whatever the hell the smell was, he didn't like it. There was movement in the air, not the directionless swirling of the Dark Ones, but a kind of steady draft, although, now that he looked, he could see no other entrances into the cavern except the one that was still disgorging troops and the black hole where the Guards stood grouped around their commanders. On the cavern floor, confusion was spreading— Rudy could see already how badly the column was straying. Most of 'em must still be back in the tunnel, he thought as he ran for the knot of Guards. Hell of a place to get off.

He stumbled on the slope up to the farther tunnel. He was gasping, his head feeling strangely light. The air was clearer here, blown by the faint drafts from below…

Gas
, he thought. Of course—the Dark Ones can use gas in an enclosed cavern. Looking back, he could see the isolated, straggling knots of warriors, the dull gleam of swords, and the flash of glass barrels and gold among the dozen or so firesquad members still down there. Those who scrambled up beside him toward the tunnel mouth seemed to sense it, too; he saw the Icefalcon stagger and half-fall through the dark hole beyond. He remembered Gil's words about nitrogen compounds. Was nerve gas some kind of nitric… nitrous…

Or was the gas for something else?

He stumbled through the tunnel entrance, his hands slipping in the black, squishy moss as he fell. He heard Ingold's voice, farther back in the darkness. Then, out in the cavern, he heard someone scream.

Past the entrance he saw it—a wall of darkness falling on the column. He blinked, watching the faint lights left in the cavern die before it… wondered what was wrong…

There were no Dark Ones in the cavern!

Rudy knew it, felt it. The massive storm of blackness that rushed like the sea over the straggling line of defenders was purely illusion. Yet those Guards still standing around Eldor at the top of the slope cried out in terror or warning; two or three of them crowded back into the safety of the tunnel mouth. Deep in the ground, another reverberating earthquake shook the Nest, and Rudy lost his footing. He fell face down in a pocket of squishy moss, just as he glimpsed the red-gold glint of the flame throwers from the darkness of the cavern.

The air in the cavern exploded.

An impact-wave of heat slammed Rudy into the softness of the moss, the force of it rolling over him like a thunderclap of death. For a moment, wrapped in wet blackness, he wondered if he had been deafened as well. Then, in the tunnel around him, cries and curses began; far off, across the distance of that suddenly silent cavern, he heard distant wailing and the clash of fighting. But from the vast snake of charred and twisted bodies that littered the seared moss of the cavern floor there came no sound at all—only the sudden, hurricane rush of the winds of the Dark.

Rudy stared out into the utter blackness, fascinated, watching as the Dark poured down through the fissures in the cavern's roof in a kind of slow motion. They were truly the Dark Ones, not merely the illusion that had drawn someone's panic fire in the gas trap. A welling wave of them built into a falling wall that he watched with a kind of drained detachment, too numbed with horror at the carnage below to feel terror or surprise.

Someone shoved him aside and threw himself from the shelter of the tunnel to where Eldor's body lay crumpled in the protection of the broken rocks. Rudy saw that it was Ingold, blue rags of witchlight fluttering around his head as he bent down, oblivious to the storm of darkness descending upon him like a giant black wing. Rudy saw the wizard's scarred hands press the sticky ruin of the King's face and the bony breast that heaved suddenly with the gasp of returning life.

Gil and the Icefalcon reached Ingold instants before the Dark Ones did. The old man never looked up at them; his whole strength was bent to holding and tying the life of his friend to the burned body. Other Guards crowded out of the tunnel's refuge; belatedly, Rudy gathered a handful of his strength and made a feeble attempt to call light.

The earth shook again, nearer this time. Melantrys caught her balance and raised her flame thrower to fire into the darkness. Rudy screamed, “Don't use it.'” in a voice that hardly sounded like his own. With his calling of the light, he had laid himself open to the counterspells of the Dark; he could feel them drawing on him like leeches.

Dimly, he could hear Alwir yelling, “Come back, you fools!” He knew that panic had set in among those who had made it to the tunnel before the explosion. They were breaking and fleeing foolishly into the darkness. Other voices cried that the tunnel was blocked and that the Dark had exploded the ceiling on them.

Alwir grabbed Rudy by the arm. “Is there a way around?” He looked ghastly with strain and shock; the jewels that he wore even in battle glinted like blood through the slime that covered his armor. “We can use the flame throwers to fight our way to the bottom…”

“No!” Rudy yelled desperately over the rising din of the battle in the tunnel mouth. “If we use the flame throwers, we'll have another explosion! The Dark Ones are using explosive gas!”

“Gas?” the Chancellor shouted furiously. “What is this gas? Talk sense, boy!”

For the first time in his life, Rudy wished he had some understanding of Aristotelian physics. Gil seldom had problems coming up with flat-earth answers. “Uh—it's a vapor. Fiery vapor.” He had to shout the words over the clashing of swords, the screams, the curses, and the harsh, echoing buzzing of the Dark. “It explodes in the air—it's invisible!”

Seeing the mulish set to Alwir's jaw, he cried, “For God's sake, you don't think just the flame throwers exploding could have wiped out everyone in the cavern!”

Another earthquake shook the ground, jarring them almost off their feet; the noise of it seemed to vibrate in the bones of Rudy's skull. A choking cloud of dust rolled from some passage nearby, and he heard the dull clatter of falling pebbles…

He felt the hold of the counterspells slacken, and light blossomed more strongly in the tunnel and around the defenders at its mouth. The cries and curses turned to cheers, and over all he heard the bass roar of Tomec Tirkenson's voice. White light surrounded then). Men dragged Eldor's gasping body back into the shelter of the tunnel. Ingold was still gripping the twisted remains of one of the King's hands. Behind them, others poured up the slope, and the landchief of Gettlesand clutched Alwir's hand in sticky greeting, heedless of their earlier enmity.

“We've got to get the hell out of here,” he rasped. “They're blowing down the roofs of tunnels behind us. We've been cut off in two places already. If we stay, we'll be trapped like pigs in a slaughtering pen.”

“Ingold?” Alwir said.

The wizard lifted fatigue-blackened eyes.

“Could you get us to the center of the Nest from here?”

The old man wiped at the blood that trickled into his beard, his sleeve leaving a smear of charred slime on his cheek. “I could,” he said quietly. “But not out again. The tunnels get fewer as they descend. I can take us out of here—I think—from where we are now. Deeper in, it would take very little to trap the entire army.”