Barbara Hambly - Darwath 3 - The Armies of Daylight

VIP免费

2024-12-07 0 0 674.29KB 386 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Image

Scanned by Highroller.

Proofed more or less by Highroller.

Made prettier by use of EBook Design Group Stylesheet.

The Armies of Daylight

by Barbara Hambly

PROLOGUE

When the wizard Ingold crossed the Void between worlds to save the infant

Prince Tir from the destruction of Gae, Gil Patterson and Rudy Solis tried to help

him. But one of the monstrous, evil Dark crossed behind him, and they were all

forced to flee back to the world of magic from which the wizard came.

It was a world where magic worked and where the loathsome Dark were

destroying humanity, after having lain almost forgotten in underground lairs for

three thousand years. And it was a world where the only hope for mankind lay in

the distant, ancient stone Keep of Dare, built to resist the previous ravages of the

Dark.

The King had fallen in Gae. Now Chancellor Alwir was the Regent, as brother to

young Queen Minalde. Vying for power was the Bishop Govannin, fanatic

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Hambly,%20Barbara%20-%20D...The%20Arnies%20of%20Daylight%20(v1.0)%20(html).html (1 of 386)22-12-2006 20:37:08

Image

leader of the Straight Faith. And both Alwir and the Bishop feared Ingold.

The road to the Keep was a hell of cold and danger, with both the Dark and the

barbarian White Raiders taking toll on those who struggled through the freezing

mud. But Gil found herself accepted as one of the Guards. Rudy won the love of

Minalde and discovered that he had wizard powers. He became a student of

Ingold.

Once the remnant of humanity was established precariously in the Keep, Ingold

and Rudy set out for Quo, the city where the wizards ruled and protected all their

ancient lore. There had been no word from that city, and no magic of Ingold's

could reach through the veils of illusion guarding it. But when they reached Quo,

after two thousand miles of marching through hardship and danger, they found

the city in ruins—the Dark had been there. Of the wizards, only Lohiro remained

to meet them. And Lohiro was possessed by the Dark. In a bitter struggle, Ingold

managed to destroy Lohiro.

Ingold sent out a desperate mental summons for any wizards of any degree of

ability. Then he and Rudy began the long struggle back to the Keep.

During their absence, Gil had used her training as a scholar to investigate the old

records, looking for some clue as to how the ancient Dare of Renweth had

defeated the Dark. Together with Minalde, who had a touch of the mysterious

memory of past events that was supposedly inherited by only a few men, she

found the ancient workshops of the wizard-engineers who had built the Keep.

And she found artifacts of all lands, most without apparent use.

When Ingold and Rudy returned, they found a ragtag assembly of wizards, half-

trained witches, and village healers waiting to become the Wizards' Corps under

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Hambly,%20Barbara%20-%20D...The%20Arnies%20of%20Daylight%20(v1.0)%20(html).html (2 of 386)22-12-2006 20:37:08

Image

them. Ingold realized that the crystals Gil had found were the ancient source of

artificial light. And Rudy seized upon a collection of parts which he assembled

into a flame thrower, a possible weapon against the Dark.

Alwir used the discovery as an excuse to determine that the wizards must spy out

the Nest of the Dark at Gae. Ingold, knowing the folly of the plan but unable to

deter Alwir, began trying to create a cloaking-spell that might protect the

wizards against the Dark.

PART ONE

THE QUESTION AND THE ANSWER

CHAPTER ONE

The night was still. The wind that had beaten with such violence down the ice-

locked mountains to the north had fallen at about sunset to an uneasy murmuring

in the dark pines that filled the twisting Vale of Renweth. By midnight, even that

had ceased. The black branches hung motionless from one end of the Vale to the

other, slowly furring with frost in the deepening cold. A man's breath, barely

visible in the soulless glimmer of the few remote and haughty stars, would hang

like a diamond cloud about his face or freeze in white hoarfrost to his lips. In

that piercing cold, not even the wolves were abroad; the silence ran from cliff to

lightless cliff, an almost tangible property in that frozen and desolate world.

Yet beneath the dark trees, something had stirred.

Rudy Solis was sure of it. He glanced behind him for the fourth time in as many

minutes, fear creeping along his spine and prickling at the nape of his neck like

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Hambly,%20Barbara%20-%20D...The%20Arnies%20of%20Daylight%20(v1.0)%20(html).html (3 of 386)22-12-2006 20:37:08

Image

tiny teeth. Yet he saw nothing there, only the thin sheen of starlight frosting the

unmarked snow.

He looked back to the darkness of the trees. He stood some fifty feet from the

forest's edge, his shadow a misty blur on the old broken snow around his feet, his

breath a tiny smear of steam against the darkness. Even wrapped in the thickness

of his buffalohide coat, he shivered, though not entirely with cold. He knew that

it would be warmer in the protection of the forest and, look as he would, he

could sense no movement there. It was undoubtedly perfectly safe, and

sheltering there would be a damnsight more intelligent than standing in the open

listening to the ice crystallize in his lungs.

But neither hope of Heaven nor fear of Hell would have induced him to seek the

shelter of those shadowed woods.

A wind touched his face like a clammy, seeking hand. It took all his strength not

to whirl, to face the unseen foe. But he had been told not to run. In the open

ground of a still mountain night, flight would mean instant death. The cloaking-

spell that covered him, like all cloaking-spells, depended upon diverted

attention; the wizard who used one must do nothing to call attention to himself,

lest the illusion fail. And in any case, Rudy knew that no human being could

ever hope to outrun the Dark.

This is stupid, he told himself desperately. What if Lohiro was wrong? Or worse,

what if he was lying? The Dark possessed his mind for weeks. How the hell do

we know he was telling the truth when he said they'd let him go? This spell of

Ingold's is to cloak against a collective, rather than an individual, intelligence—

but how do we know that will overcome the reason human magic never worked

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Hambly,%20Barbara%20-%20D...The%20Arnies%20of%20Daylight%20(v1.0)%20(html).html (4 of 386)22-12-2006 20:37:08

Image

against the Dark Ones? What if it was all a trap?

The unbearable terror returned again, as if some vast, dark bulk were creeping

slowly toward his back. But he could see nothing there, no movement in the

stark white emptiness of the snow-covered meadow, and could hear no sounds

but the hiss of his own breath in his lungs and the hot, too-swift pounding of his

heart. The years he'd spent on the fringes of the motorcycle gangs, among the

tough guys and would-be tough guys of smog-bound Southern California, had

given him a kind of bar-fight courage sufficient for his survival. But the waiting

in terror for an unknown danger was different. His every perception, sharpened

by wizardry to detect what others found invisible, was keyed to a fever pitch for

the warning of danger. And in his heart, he was sure that no warning would save

him.

Cold, directionless winds breathed upon him, like the draught from a primordial

abyss of darkness which had never seen light. At the touch of it, his heart seemed

to lurch, then hammer chokingly. His intelligence screamed at his instinct to run,

telling him that, even if he ran, even if he made the half-mite dash through the

ice-locked drifts of the buried meadow to the windowless Keep of Dare, they

would never let him in. Once the cyclopean doors were sealed at sunset, Keep

Law forbade that any should open them before dawn.

So he drew the veils of alien illusion more firmly about him and prayed that they

all were right—Lohiro, Ingold, and Thoth—when they said that this kind of spell

would guard his body from the inhuman hungers of the Dark.

He could feel the Dark Ones coming closer; he sensed their coming in the

change of the air. Close by him a little skiff of snow whirled up, as if stirred by

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Hambly,%20Barbara%20-%20D...The%20Arnies%20of%20Daylight%20(v1.0)%20(html).html (5 of 386)22-12-2006 20:37:08

Image

wind, but no wind riffled now in the fur of his collar. In all directions the snowy

landscape rolled like a frozen, silver sea; yet from the corner of his eye, he

glimpsed movement, a sudden flurry that vanished, as things did in dreams. In

the shadows of the trees before him, he thought he saw something shift, though

not a branch stirred.

They were all around him—he knew it, but their illusions screened them from

his eyes as he prayed that his own covered him. He felt their stirring, though

there was nothing that he could fix his eye upon—just a gleam of starlight on

something that pulsed wetly and the sudden glitter of acid on chitinous claws.

There was a buzzing, humming sensation in his brain… a drift of wind that stank

of rotten blood…

Then suddenly it was above him, a delirium-vision of an obscene, squamous

bulk, fifteen feet from the tucked, slobbering tentacles of that drooling mouth to

the wriggling tip of the spined cable of tail. Huge, clawed legs dangled down,

like the feet of a wasp; from them, acid dripped to smoke on the snow.

Rudy shut his teeth hard on a scream. Sweat was freezing on his face, and every

muscle in his body fought to remain still against the instincts that shrieked at him

to run. The effort and the revulsion at the nearness of that filthy dripping thing

brought nausea burning to his throat. More than its evil, more than the terrible

danger that breathed like smoke over him, he was filled with sickened loathing

of its otherness—its utter alien ness to the world of the visible, the material. . the

sane.

Then it was gone. The wind of its departure kicked a stinging gust of snow over

him as he slowly folded to his knees in the drifts.

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Hambly,%20Barbara%20-%20D...The%20Arnies%20of%20Daylight%20(v1.0)%20(html).html (6 of 386)22-12-2006 20:37:08

Image

How long he knelt there in the darkness he didn't know. He was trembling

uncontrollably, his eyes shut, as if to blot out the memory of that hideous,

slobbering bulk swimming against the stars. Stupidly, he recalled a night last

spring, a warm California evening, when he and his sister had been headed down

the Harbor Freeway in downtown Los Angeles, and the old Chevy had a blowout

in the fast lane of the interchange. His sister had managed to pull the veering car

under control, to force it out of the hammering madhouse of sixty-mile-an-hour

traffic and over onto the shoulder. Then she'd gotten out, calmly checked to see

if the rim had been damaged, asked him if he was okay—and folded up on the

car's steaming hood and gone into violent hysterics.

Rudy suddenly found himself in sympathy with how she had felt.

Something brushed his face, and he swung around, the cold searing his gasping

lungs.

Behind him stood Ingold Inglorion, looking quizzically down at him in the faint

blue starlight.

"Are you all right?"

Rudy collapsed slowly back to a sitting position, his gloved hands pressed tightly

together to lessen their shaking. He managed to stammer, "Yeah, fantastic. Just

give me a minute, then I'll go leap a tall building at a single bound."

The wizard knelt beside him, the full sleeves of his patched brown mantle

brushing against him again, warm and rough and oddly reassuring. In spite of the

cold, Ingold had pushed the mantle's hood back from his face, and his white hair

and scrubby, close-clipped white beard gleamed like frost in the ghostly light.

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Hambly,%20Barbara%20-%20D...The%20Arnies%20of%20Daylight%20(v1.0)%20(html).html (7 of 386)22-12-2006 20:37:08

Image

"You did very nicely," the old man said, in a voice whose mellow beauty was

overlaid by a grainy quality, scratchy without being harsh, and pitched, as a

wizard's voice could be, for Rudy's ears alone.

"Thanks," Rudy croaked shakily. "But next time I think I'll let you test out your

own new spells."

The white eyebrows quirked. Ingold's face as a whole was totally nondescript,

redeemed only by the heavy erosion of years and by the curious, uncannily

youthful appearance of his eyes.

"Well, I'm certainly not out here because it's the proper phase of the moon for

harvesting slippery elm."

Rudy colored a little. "Scratch that," he mumbled. "You shouldn't be out here at

all, man. You're the one the Dark Ones have been after."

"All the more reason for me to come," the old man said. "I can't remain walled in

the Keep forever. And if it is true, as I suspect, that somehow I hold the key to

the defeat of the Dark Ones, at some time or another I shall have to come forth

and meet them. I had best assure myself of the efficacy of my cloaking-spells

before that time."

Rudy shivered, awed at that matter-of-fact calm in Ingold's tone. Rudy feared the

Dark Ones, as all humankind must fear them: the eaters of the flesh and of the

mind, the eldritch spawn of the hideous night below the ground; and arcane

intelligence beyond human magic or human comprehension. But at least he was

reasonably certain that they did not know him—his name, his essence. He knew

that he was not the target of their specific malice. It was not his personal flesh

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Hambly,%20Barbara%20-%20D...The%20Arnies%20of%20Daylight%20(v1.0)%20(html).html (8 of 386)22-12-2006 20:37:08

Image

they sought. He stammered, "But Christ, Ingold, you didn't have to come and

check out the spell yourself. I mean, hell, if it works for me, it should work for

you."

"Possibly," Ingold agreed. "But that is something that no one can ever wholly

know." He drew his mantle closer about him. In the dim light, Rudy could see

that the wizard was armed; the billowing folds of his outer garment broke over

the long, hard line of the sword that he wore belted underneath. His right hand in

its faded blue mitten was never far from the sword's grip-smoothed hilt.

"Do you remember how," he went on in his mild voice, "in the mazes of illusion

that surrounded the City of Quo, you asked me once for a spell to break the wall

of fog?"

"You told me the one I was using already would work just fine," Rudy recalled.

"I can't say I was real pleased."

Calmly, the old man removed a speck of snow from his frayed sleeve. "If it is

ever my aim to please you, Rudy, shall certainly ask you what methods I should

employ." The gleam of mischief in his eyes turned his bearded face absurdly

young. "But what I told you then was true. The strength of any spell is the

strength of your magic—your spirit. Your power is shaped by your essence. You

are your spells."

Rudy was silent, understanding this for the truth as he had not understood it in

the mazes of the trackless Seaward Mountains. It was the key to human magic—

perhaps the key to all things human.

"Do you feel sure of this spell, Rudy?" the wizard asked quietly. "Could you use

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Hambly,%20Barbara%20-%20D...The%20Arnies%20of%20Daylight%20(v1.0)%20(html).html (9 of 386)22-12-2006 20:37:08

Image

it again?"

"Yeah," Rudy said slowly, after long thought. "Yeah, I think so. I was scared to

death, but…"

"But you kept your head," Ingold said. "And you kept your hold over the spell."

Crusted frost gleamed in his scrubby beard as he nodded his head. "Do you think

you could do so in the Nest of the Dark itself?"

The thought was like a hypo filled with ice water, injected directly into Rudy's

heart. "Christ, I don't know! It's…" Then he saw the intentness, the calculation,

in those crystal-blue eyes. "Hey, you mean—realty in the Nest of the Dark? I

mean, that wasn't just a—a hypothetical question?"

The frost crackled a little as Ingold smiled. "Really, Rudy, you should know me

well enough by this time to know that I seldom deal in hypotheses."

"Yeah," Rudy agreed warily. "And that's probably the scariest thing about you."

"It is the most frightening thing about any wizard. A hypothesis to anyone else is

merely an overwhelming temptation to a wizard. Do you think you would be

able to handle yourself in the Nest of the Dark?"

Rudy swallowed hard. "I think so." The vivid imagination which was the

mainspring and curse of the mageborn sent a series of chills scampering up his

spine. "That's what this is all about, isn't it?"

Ingold's eyes returned to focus from some private, inner reverie. In the starlight,

they seemed bright and preternaturally clear. "The Chancellor Alwir cannot hope

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Hambly,%20Barbara%20-%20...he%20Arnies%20of%20Daylight%20(v1.0)%20(html).html (10 of 386)22-12-2006 20:37:08

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

ImageScannedbyHighroller.ProofedmoreorlessbyHighroller.MadeprettierbyuseofEBookDesignGroupStylesheet.TheArmiesofDaylightbyBarbaraHamblyPROLOGUEWhenthewizardIngoldcrossedtheVoidbetweenworldstosavetheinfan PrinceTirfromthedestructionofGae,GilPattersonandRudySolistriedtohelphim.Butoneofthemonstrous,e...

展开>> 收起<<

Barbara Hambly - Darwath 3 - The Armies of Daylight.pdf

共386页,预览10页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Barbara Hambly - Darwath 3 - The Armies of Daylight

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: