Darwath 3 - The Armies Of Daylight (35 page)

“Gil,” he said softly, “listen to me. You've saved my life—I'll never be able to pay off that debt. But I need your help. I need it bad.”

She frowned, puzzled. Stripped to her shirt sleeves in the deep cold of the night, she had begun to shiver.

Rudy sighed and tried to pull himself to a sitting position. He sank back with a stifled moan, the packed snow buckling suddenly under the hand that he dropped to catch himself. He was only barely aware of the cold of it. “Gil,” he went on, “I can't go to Gettlesand just yet. There's something I have to do first, and I can't do it alone. I…” He fell silent, his eyes going past her to the moon-washed steps of the Keep.

Alwir stood there, as dark as the shadows of the Dark Ones, his great sword gleaming naked in his hand.

He came lightly down the steps, the moon's sheen like pewter on the folds of his velvet cloak. As he crossed the road and came up the path that Eldor's Guards had trampled to the top of the execution hill, Rudy could hear his boots squeak on the dry powder snow. Gil stood up as he came near, clots of snow clinging to the darkness of her worn breeches and tattered gloves.

Alwir stopped. “Get away from him, Gil-Shalos,” he said, his voice deep and musical in the hard, crystal air. “I may even be willing to pretend that I never saw you. But I am afraid, Rudy, that I cannot allow you to leave Renweth.”

He took a step nearer. Gil's sword hissed from its sheath and caught the moonlight like a flicker of pale lightning. Faint contempt glinted in Alwir's eyes.

“What the hell does it matter?” Rudy demanded, struggling unsuccessfully to rise and slipping suddenly on the icy, treacherous surface. “I thought you wanted me to leave the Keep, for Chrissake! Eldor will never know the difference.”

“There are risks that a wise man never takes,” the Chancellor replied smoothly. “Allowing for the possible return of a mageborn royal lover who holds a grudge against me is one of those risks.” He moved the sword. Light slithered along the blade like luminous blood.

“But I won't ever return!” Rudy argued frantically. “You don't have to unless Eldor dies.” Gil's light, cool voice held no trace of cynicism. Her body swayed with the slight movement of the armed shadow before her; there was a tautness in her, a tension that all but crackled the air around her, a readiness that had nothing to do with either anger or fear. “Isn't that right, Alwir?”

Rudy looked from one to the other, seeing the comprehension and shared knowledge between them. “I don't understand,” he stammered.

“Come on, Rudy,” Gil said roughly. “A King who's lost his Realm and his honor and everything he ever knew— wouldn't you think he'd have had enough after he found his wife in the arms of his best friend's disciple? What did you give him, Alwir? Poppy juice? Or did your pal Vair slip you something a little stronger before he left?”

“You've grown quick,” the big man said with a thin, ironic smile. “His Majesty has taken poppy to help him sleep every night since his return from below the ground. Bektis always mixes it for him. And it is well known that the dosage is a chancy thing. Stay where you are, Rudy.” He shifted, as if to counter Rudy's clumsy effort to rise. He took another step forward, his footing cautious on the packed and slippery snow. A brief gleam of silvery moonlight caught in the jewels he wore and along the killing edge of his poised sword.

Gil moved forward to meet him, the tip of her blade raised and thinly glittering. Rudy saw that her face was calm; her eyes were as expressionless as snow water—and as cold.

Alwir sneered. “As you will,” he said. “I can no longer afford to deal with a madman or with the whims of a love-struck chit of a girl. It has become necessary for me to clear my way of them, once and for all.”

Like an avalanche, he struck. Steel whined on steel as Gil caught his blade on her own, parried it in a single whipping motion, and slid from beneath its burning arc, her arms half-numbed from the force of his blow. He was both heavier than she and more experienced—he knew how to use his weight against a lighter opponent. Nevertheless, she squared off, gauging the dark bulk of his massive shape against the cruel glitter of the packed snow of the path. Curiously, she felt no fear, for she had neither the hope nor the intention of saving her own life, and this freed her. She was fighting purely for the pleasure of revenge.

“My dear child,” Alwir said pityingly, “I was killing men with a sword before you were born.”

He rushed her with a great swinging blow like an ax stroke, driving her back before him. Her feet skidded on the powder snow that lay fresh and unbroken beyond the trampled ring about the pillars. As she ducked and sidestepped she felt the hot trickle of blood down her face and the stinging burn of the air in the opened flesh. She sprang back again, parrying, and Alwir floundered, his greater weight breaking the snow beneath him and all but throwing him to his knees. But as Gil swept in, he was up again, parrying, striking, driving. The weight of his blows jarred the bones of her wrists and grated on all the old wounds she bore in shoulder and collarbone. He struck at her again, his rushing drive slowed by the depth of the drifts. The snow creaked under Gil's boots as she sprang back, but it gave no more than an inch.

Her breath rasped in her throat like an icy saw. In and out, before he has time to touch you, Ingold had said. It was her only defense against the driving strength that smashed her sword aside and razored a gash several inches long in the flesh of her side. The blades sang against each other, moonlight searing down their stained edges, and Gil drove in, bringing blood from the big man's thigh.

Alwir cursed, lunging after her, hard specks of snow whirling about him as he surged free of the drifts and foundered again. He came after her nevertheless, slowed by the snow but never faltering in the treacherous footing, hacking at her with heavy cuts that crumpled her lighter attacks. She felt his blade rip her flesh like a talon of fire; as she twisted clear of him, she was struck by the sick weakness of blood loss and shock. She danced back, her feet slipping in the icy drifts, with darkness closing around her vision as she skidded and stumbled.

Wet cold bit her knees. Aching, she staggered to her feet, propelled by the memories of thousands of hours of Gnift the swordmaster's drills; her eyes cleared as she ducked and spun away from Alwir's floundering stroke. In spite of the intense cold, she saw how his face glittered with sweat in the moonlight, saw how the breath rolled from his mouth in great steaming clouds of white.

She thought. He's rusty. He's breathing like a bellows. She herself was exhausted by fighting for footing; Alwir must be half-dead with it.

As she backed, she saw the dark, splattering trail of her blood on the snow. Alwir was driving her, knowing her to be weakening; she saw his mouth twist with ugly fury and frustration as the ever-deepening snow underfoot slowed him down with his own weight. She sprang back before his cuts, then in, sweeping his blade aside, the metal whipping in a tight circle before he threw hers off and cut, floundering in a drift. She angled for position. He blocked her feint, surged up out of the drift in a flying storm of crystals, and slashed in great whirling strokes. Back again, then in, parrying and striking, faster and faster, their feet sliding on the hard crust. She retreated, cutting, her muscles burning with fatigue, watching for the one opening in his guard that she would buy at the cost of her own life.

Feint, parry, dodge! Her wrists were numb with the force of his blows. The roar of his breath and her own filled the night around her. Strike and counterstrike! The world narrowed to the dark bulk of his body. Flounder, slip, recover, and counterattack. Move back, drawing him toward the deeper drifts—dodge under the staggering force of his blows—back, then in! She was conscious of nothing but the burn of air in her lungs and the light, cold joy of battle.

He struck her blade aside, floundering clear of a drift, his sword cleaving the darkness as he fell upon her. She sprang back, then in—and kept on moving in.

His blood erupted out over her hands, unexpectedly hot in the freezing air of the night. For a moment, impaled on her blade, he simply stared at her, incredulous. Then the astonishment fixed on his face as his eyes turned back, and his body began to slump. She jerked the blade free and stepped back, crimson-handed, to let him fall at her feet, and he lay dead before her in the trampled drifts, a great black shadow of spread velvet and pooling blood.

The night silence seemed for a time to fill the earth. Gil stood above him, looking down at that still form and the black puddles that were already seeping into the snow, lost in a kind of detached wonderment. She had won a fight which she had not even expected to survive. She was avenged and alive. For a time it seemed to her that she felt nothing, neither joy nor gratification, only a deep, impossibly brilliant consciousness of how beautiful the night was, how the moon edged each footprint in the trampled snow with a transparent fringing of diamonds, and how clear was each single star above the ice-edged glimmer of the black mountains. Chill sweat was already freezing on her face, but the blood still warmed her hands; in them, the weight of her sword seemed suddenly immense. It was a quick-burning ecstasy that left her detached, relaxed, and filled with an indescribable sense of peace.

Rudy's voice broke that magical stillness. “Hell,” he said rather shakily. “I wanted to do that.”

Gil drew a deep breath, as if she were waking up, then expelled it in a tremulous laugh. She bent and cleaned her hands in the snow, wiping her blade on the corner of her dead foe's cloak. By the time she reached Rudy, she was trembling uncontrollably.

“Can you walk?” she asked him.

“Christ, lady, I should be asking you that!”

She pulled him to his feet, staggering a little at his weight against her. He drew the cloak around both their shoulders; under the sweat-drenched, blood-daubed shirt, he felt her flesh like ice. A moment ago she had been almost terrifying to him, a coldhearted, deliberate killer; but now he felt protective of her as she nestled gawkily against his side beneath the warmth of the cloak.

“How long has it been since I was put out here?” he asked.

Gil frowned, her concentration bent on negotiating the slippery snow of the hill. “Three hours or so.”

“Then I might still be able to save Eldor, if I can get hold of some medicines.”

She looked up at him, startled. “But the gates won't be opened until dawn.”

“You think so?”

Color rushed into her bone-white cheeks. Keep Law was knitted into her nerve endings. It had never occurred to her that Alwir would have violated it. But she didn't even need to follow Rudy's gaze to the darker slit among the shadows of the Keep's western face to know the truth. “That—” she began, and continued at length. Rudy noted that swordsmanship wasn't all Gil had learned in her training with the Guards. Looking back toward the prostrate body, she delivered the final, crushing judgment. “It figures. Let's go, punk. We've been lucky so far. If…”

Her words stuck in her throat. At the same instant Rudy turned, knowledge and awareness like a chill smoke twining around his heart. Around them, the moonlight failed.

Gil's arm tightened around his body, not in fear, but in a businesslike effort to drag him toward the Keep before they were overtaken. Rising wind whirled at their hair, and it seemed that all the trees in the Vale began to toss and whisper. As they stumbled across the road, the sense of the awful numbers of the Dark Ones rose like the rising tide. Over his shoulder Rudy could see the river of illusion and death pouring down from the somber trees that hid Sarda
Pass; unguessable numbers of the Dark Ones swirled the snow in glittering eddies, killing the light.

His feet caught on the edge of the lowest step and he fell, bringing Gil down with him. His every muscle cried out at the jarring blow. After that fight, she wouldn't be in much better shape than he was, he thought as they both struggled to rise. The winds stung his face, the smell of them harsh, acid, metallic…

… and looking up, he saw the Dark Ones turn aside.

Within a dozen yards of the half-open gates of the Keep they flowed, filling the earth, covering the sky like a cloud. But they paused for nothing, howling past the silent fortress and away like an elemental storm.

“What's happening?” Gil whispered, kneeling on the snow-covered steps above him, her fingers nerveless on the hilt of her sheathed sword. “I didn't know there were that many Dark Ones in the Nests of Gettlesand. You don't think the—the wizards—had anything to do…”

“No,” Rudy said softly. “No wizard in that group, or all of them together, could touch the Dark.”

“Then what is it?” she murmured as the directionless winds tore at the cloak they shared and stung their faces with blown snow. “Where are they going?”

With a wizard's understanding, Rudy knew the answer, though he shuddered to think of the reasons for what he knew. He glanced sideways at Gil and replied unwillingly.

“They're going to Gae.”

“Christ, I wish I knew more about healing.” Rudy stood against the light of the banked glowstones, looking down at the fevered body that writhed on the narrow bed. Without the mask, Eldor's face was hideous, not only from the sunken masses of shiny, twisted scars but from the marks of the last extremities of suffering. “I'll tell you one thing, though—poppy wouldn't do anything like that.” He knelt beside the King and felt the racing pulse under the hot flesh of the wrist. Eldor regarded him unknowingly, the glazed eyes half-hidden under lashless lids. His breath came in a fast, steady whine through his teeth.

“Where did Alde go?”

Gil shook her head. “When I told her what was going on, she stuck around only long enough to wrap up Tir before she took off at a run.”

“Can't say I blame her,” Rudy muttered. He dragged the covers away from the restless body. “You know where Bektis keeps his medicines?”

She glanced up from the hearth, where she had been setting a kettle of water to heat. The firelight glittered on the half-dried blood on her drawn face. “The Inquisition destroyed everything of his,” she said, and Rudy muttered something savagely about the Inquisition. She added, almost shyly, “But I have all of Ingold's stuff. It's—it's under my bunk, where I stashed your harp. I'll go get it.” She rose to her feet, brushing ashes from her hands.