Ingold rasped, "Touch her, and I swear you will never leave this city alive."
Rudy stopped, blinking, wondering for a dizzied second whether Ingold had placed some kind of spell of gnodyrr upon Gil with those few words he had murmured to her when he lay with her dagger at his throat. The old man's ragged breath was the only sound to pierce the uncanny stillness of the cellar. His blue eyes, pale and bright within the rings of cut and blackened flesh, went warily from one to the other.
Then in a strained voice, Ingold said, "Neither of you should be in this city. Get out of here. Get as far away as you can."
"I won't leave you," Gil said quietly.
He rounded on her, his eyes widening with sudden and blazing fear. "You'll do as I say! Get out! Get out now!"
"The hell we will!" Rudy yelled, and Ingold swung back toward him, his borrowed sword flashing in the pale light. "You've been a prisoner of the Dark..."
The wizard moved back a step into the bar of sunlight, his long, matted hair glistening like seaweed. The light around him dimmed. Looking up, Rudy could see, through the crazy tangle of broken timbers and charred stone, the soft coils of white fog beginning to blur the day.
"And what?" Ingold asked softly.
Rudy cried out, "Why did they want you?"
"You'll learn that in time." The wizard retreated another step, the blade poised before him, orienting himself, his red-rimmed eyes growing used to daylight again. Rudy took a hopeless step toward him, and Ingold shifted a little, readying himself for an attack, his body moving with the old, deadly lightness.
Then Gil cried, " Rudy !" Her voice was sharp with terror. He whipped around and saw her blink in surprise, like someone just waked from a trance...
... and turning back, he saw that Ingold was gone.
Cursing, he plunged up the red stone steps toward the waning daylight. Gil hurried at his heels, stammering, "I'm-I'm sorry. I don't know why I yelled..."
"You yelled because he wanted you to!" Rudy stormed at her, his voice rough with anger that was three parts fear. He stopped and caught her arms, facing her in the mottled shadows of a broken doorway among leaf drifts and rotted bones. "Christ, Gil, why did you stop me?" he whispered. "I understand how you couldn't do it, but-"
"No," she interrupted quietly. Her eyes were swollen but perfectly calm. "If he had been possessed by the mind of the Dark, I would have cut his throat. But he wasn't."
"Fantastic!" Rudy sighed in disgust. "That's all I need to-"
"I don't know what's going on," she continued, unruffled, "but his mind is his own. I know it."
"How the hell would you know it?" Rudy yelled passionately. "He's had you wrapped around his finger from day bloody one! The Dark have had him. He's been their prisoner. There's no way they would have let him go-not after they hunted him from one end of the continent to the other!"
"I know it because I know him!" she lashed back at Rudy, jerking her arms free of his grip and striding on ahead of him up the stairs. Above their heads, the broken vaults of the Palace showed the sky a chill and smoky white, and Rudy could see that Gil was shivering with the cold seeping through her frayed homespun shirt.
He stormed after her. "And just where the hell do you think you're going?"
"I'm going to find him, you jackass!" she flung back over her shoulder. She slipped through a half-fallen arch, her boots slurring thickly in the knotted mats of half-burned creepers that swamped the halls. "He wants us out of town because he's in some kind of danger himself."
"He wants us out of town so we won't stop him from heading back to the Keep and opening the gates some dark night!" Rudy's foot snagged on a coil of vine, and he fell sprawling. Cursing, he scrambled to his feet again. "It's up to us-"
Gil whirled so suddenly he all but impaled himself on the dagger that appeared like a splinter of ice in her hand. "You harm a hair of his head, punk..."
Cold stirrings of wind blew a thin mist over them and muttered in the blackened tangles of half-dead vegetation. The air felt suddenly weighted with the presence of the Dark. Even in the daylight, both of them looked around, as if expecting to see blackness stealing from the murky shadows of the fallen Palace. It occurred to Rudy how very alone they were.
Through dry lips, he managed to say, "We can't split up, Gil. We've got to stay together."
Slowly, she lowered the knife. "All right," she said.
It was on his lips to say, "If we meet him, don't kill me from behind," but something in those gray, cool eyes forbade it. He remembered that she had given
Ingold her sword.
Though it was almost noon, the light was graying. Fog was rising from the scummed marshes of the drowned lower town, spreading clammy, ubiquitous tendrils throughout the dripping streets. Gil and Rudy moved cautiously through the broken, silent Palace, past empty chambers teeming with eruptions of mosses or slithering with vines, and over crazy, tilting pavements where the rotting tapestries whispered with a horrible suggestion of rodent life. Skulls grinned at them from under chairs, veiled in the white stirring of ground fog. Through the broken barrel vaults of one chamber, gray mists leaked like some kind of heavy gas, to flow like water around their feet.
Rudy paused, feeling the touch of a counterspell on his mind. Heart hammering, he looked around the empty hall and out past crumbling archways to the buckled and subsided pavements of a courtyard flooded with brown, filthy pools.
"Gil," he whispered. "Gil, listen to me, please. You know what's happened to him."
She stopped for a fraction of a second, then turned her face away and moved on.
"Dammit, Gil, if you can't help me, at least-at least stay out of it," he pleaded. "I need your help, for God's sake! I'm not a warrior and I'm not a hero! I can't do it."
"Can't," Ingold's soft voice chided from the smoky deeps of the mist. "If you say can't enough, you will end up convincing yourself of it, Rudy."
Rudy whirled, his throat seeming to tie itself into knots. It took him a long moment to realize that Ingold was standing beside the arch that led into the court, his hoary rags stirred by the faint winds that moved the mist.
For an instant they faced each other, and Rudy felt as if he were trapped between love and death. His feeling for the old man struggled against his terror of the wizard's power, his memories of another battle in a ruined city against another Archmage, and his knowledge of what would happen to Tir and Alde if Ingold lived. With a wrench of almost physical pain, he broke the hold that seemed to be closing over his mind and hauled his flame thrower clear of its holster and fired.
The column of flames roared glaringly bright into the dull grays of that monochrome world. Ingold made no move to avoid the blast; the fire splattered against the wall a few feet to his left. Steam hissed and curled from the damp stone. Cursing his aim, Rudy fired again and heard Gil's frantic footsteps running toward them. He missed again, the lichens searing from the ruined pillar of the arch beside which Ingold stood. Just before Gil's hands tore at his wrist, he fired a third time and realized what was happening.
Never fight when you can pass unseen , Ingold had said to him out in the windy plains. He wouldn't put it past the old man to fox his aim. In fact, there wasn't much he'd put past the old man at all. As Gil hung panting on his unresisting arm, his eyes met the wizard's. Under the weedy tangle of beard, Ingold's smile broadened. He lifted Gil's sword in salute and walked out into the mist-enshrouded court without another word.
With a strength born of desperation, Rudy shook Gil off him and slammed the useless flame thrower back into its holster. With his staff held before him like a spear, he plunged into the milky vapors of the court. He stopped, panting, scanning the wall of mist before him, his hair hanging wetly in his eyes. Some sign-some clue...