"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.