Darwath 3 - The Armies Of Daylight by Barbara Hambly Read Free Book Online

representative of the Empire of Alketch, Alwir's prospective ally. Minalde… Rudy did not want to think of Aide, though he had done little else for seven wretched days. And Gae sprawled, like the maggot-riddled corpse of a beautiful woman, with the bones starting to work up through discolored and falling flesh.
    The wizards had entered the city at dawn, shadows in the dark mists that rose from the ice-scummed marshes. The swollen loops of the Great
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     River had engulfed the lower town, and even the upper, landward quarters bore foul evidence of the winter's floods. Fungi and mosses slimed the fallen walls; the square below the shadows of the crumbling turrets of the gate was a steaming, knee-deep slough, stretching as far as Rudy's eyes could penetrate the chill, pearlescent fog. In all that filthy, shrouded world, the only sounds seemed to be the distant drip of water and the cries of unseen rooks, quarreling over horrid prey.
    Aide loved this town, he thought, surveying the leprous desolation before him. She was raised here; it was part of the life she loved, before the Dark… and before me.
    Rudy hoped she would never have to see it as it was now.
    He shifted his staff to his other hand—the six-foot, crescent-pronged staff that had once belonged to the Archmage Lohiro—and checked the weapon that hung holstered at his side. It was the only one of its kind, like a glass and gold Flash Gordon zap-gun—a hand flame thrower that could spit a thirty-foot column of fire. If he must enter the realm of the Dark, Rudy had resolved to enter it prepared.
    The silence that hung over the town was frightening. Fog covered it like pewter darkness, masking the broken walls and fallen columns in opal veils of mystery. But it was not a dead silence that prickled Rudy's hair and made him strain his eyes to pierce the mists. It was a silence that lived and watched.
    Like a thickening of smoke, Ingold faded into being at his side. “This way,” he murmured, his voice scarcely louder than the skittering of rats' feet on the broken stones before them. “Kara tells me the main path to the Palace is blocked. We can go by way of the Street of Oleanders.”
    Other forms materialized—Kara of Ippit and the withered little hermit Kta, who had included himself, over Ingold's protests, in the expedition at the last minute. Kara whispered, “I didn't like the look of that street. It looked almost as if—as if a wall had been built across it out of rubble.”
    Ingold nodded. “It could be that it had.” The wraith of his breath drifted for a moment like smoke about his head, then dissipated into the cloudy whiteness that surrounded the group. Within the shadows of his hood, his eyes had an over-bright, fagged look to them, the look of a man living on his nerve endings. Then he turned away, and chill, smoky darkness once more enveloped the wizards.
    As they moved through the ruined town, Rudy came to understand the old man's insistence that the party be accompanied by one who knew Gae. No map could have gotten them through the back-doubling alleys that avoided the open ground of the fog-locked marketplace or could have guided them through the leaden darkness to the weed-hung colonnades and shopping arcades whose denser shadows lent the wizards cover from seeking eyes. Ingold led them easily through ruined courtyards where tangled mats of vines ran riot over the charred commingling of stones and human bones, down half-flooded alleys whose walls were thick with pullulant green-black moss, and through the frost-furred muck of empty mews that skirted the wealthier parts of the town. Twice, as the milky vapors around them lightened toward dawn, Rudy glimpsed little bands of dooic, slipping through the vine-tangled side streets, half-obscured by fog. And once, as they passed the hoared bowl of a frozen fountain in what had been a fashionable square, he heard a baby cry somewhere close by, a fitful, helpless wailing that filled him with