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

horror.
    He reached to touch the wizard's mantle. “Do you hear that?”
    The sound had been quenched as suddenly as it had begun.
    Kara glanced behind her nervously, her big hands tightening over the long-bladed halberd that she carried instead of the customary staff; Kta's bright little bird-black eyes were sharp with interest. In the cold pewter light, Ingold's face was impassive, but Rudy thought he looked rather white around the lips.
    “Did you think that Gae was deserted, Rudy?” he asked softly. The steam curling from the fetid pool of ice-crusted brown water in the court blew between them, blurring him momentarily to a flat gray shape, featureless but for the glitter of his eyes.
    Rudy whispered, “Dooic babies don't cry like that. I've heard them, out in the plains.” When Ingold did not reply, he asked, “Do you know who it is? I thought there was nobody alive in Gae.”
    “Nobody?” The wizard's voice was soft; behind it, Rudy detected other sounds, distorted by the fog—squishing footfalls and the wet drag of something heavy over stone. He sensed the sudden change in the air and felt the fog condense around them, drawn by Ingold to shield them from hostile eyes. The pinprickle sensation of a cloaking-spell tingled on his skin. “Nobody whom we would recognize as human, perhaps.”
    “You mean—the ones whose minds the Dark have eaten?” Rudy's hand felt clammy on his staff; he groped for the flame thrower at his belt. “But I thought they became zombies and died—of exposure or starvation…”
    “They do.” Ingold's voice was a flicker of breath, blurring into the scritch of the vines on the wall at their backs. “Less innocent than that, I'm afraid. These, Rudy, will be ghouls.”
    They came into sight out of the mists near the broken fountain bowl—slumped, repulsive, stinking. It was more than the putrid stench of corruption that clung to their gaudy, tattered clothes; the reek of what they were poured about them like a fog of filth. There were five of them, two men and three women. One of the women was swollen-bellied with child; another was hardly more than a girl. Their hair was matted with scum and old blood; their clothes— brocades and velvets, stitched with gold and tipped with ermine—were filthy and wrinkled, as if they had been slept in, eaten in, fornicated in, and worn to slaughter some small and violently struggling animal. The ghouls moved at a furtive trot, glancing constantly over their shoulders; two of them were armed with cleavers, and the leader carried a jewel-encrusted sword.
    They passed within a few feet of the wizards, murmuring among themselves, their glances flitting here, there, and everywhere but toward the spot where the wizards stood. Rudy heard the leader whisper, “That mothereating scout said the downriver people had moved up into this neighborhood someplace.” The pregnant woman enlarged on the subject of the scout in terms that would have brought blushes to the cheeks of some Hell's Angels Rudy had known. Close to them, holding his breath against their reek, he could see that none of them looked very healthy. The youngest girl's face was blotched all over with savage scars—like huge vaccination marks, he thought stupidly, then realized that they must be from smallpox. The smaller of the two men sniffled and blew his nose on his already dripping sleeve; the other cursed him and told him to shut up if he didn't want to end up in the pot himself.
    As the white vapors swallowed them once again, Rudy grasped who these must be.
    They were the citizens of Gae who had not followed Alwir's convoy to the south—who had remained in Gae to loot the empty houses and live in wealth among the ruins. They'd taken the weapons from the charred hands of corpses buried under the wreck of the Palace—weapons that, as in the case of King Eldor, had proved the only means of identifying the burned bodies—and robbed the clothes from the backs of those dead in the cellars