01 THE TIME OF THE DARK d-1

by Barbara Hambly

  "Can you drive?" he demanded.

  "A horse?" Gil asked, startled, her mind going to cars.

  "I don't mean geese. If you can't drive, will you lead on foot? Or ride the bloody thing. I don't care."

  "I can ride," Gil told him, suddenly aware of why she was being asked. "And I don't fear the Dark."

  "You're a fool, then." The captain stared down at her, those haughty white-blond brows drawing slightly together as he took in her alien clothes. But he said nothing of it, only turned to call to a grizzle-haired woman in a shabby black uniform. "Seya! Get this one a cart with riding reins." He turned back to Gil. "She'll take care of you." Then, as Gil started to go with Seya, he asked, "Can you fight?"

  Gil stopped. "I've never used a sword."

  "Then if we're ambushed, for God's sake stay out of the way of those who can." He turned away, calling out orders to someone else, as concise and cold as a hunting cat. The woman Seya came up to Gil, wry amusement on her deeplined face, her sword slapping at her soft booted feet.

  "Don't let him fret you," she said, glancing after his slim, retreating figure. "He'd put the High King himself to driving a cart if we were short, with never a by-your-leave. There, look."

  Gil followed the gesture of the woman's hand and saw Janus and Ingold standing in the middle of the ruckus at the foot of the steps, surrounded by quarreling drivers, gesturing Guards, and rickety carts. The tall captain was talking to them, gazing down the length of his aristocratic nose. Janus looked shocked, Ingold amused. The wizard swung himself up into the nearest cart, settled down on the driver's seat, and gathered the reins into his hands as deftly as a coachman.

  The sun cleared the spiky peaks in the east as they were leaving the last houses of Karst behind them, brightening the scene without dispersing the white mist lying so thickly among the trees. Gil was mounted uncomfortably on the narrow harness-saddle of a fat roan, drawing a cart close to the head of the convoy. She could see that most of the vehicles in town had been commandeered, far more than could be provided with civilian drivers who were willing to return to the haunted city of Gae. Many were driven by Guards, and a thin, straggling line of them walked on either side of the train-men and women both, she saw, mostly young, though there were gray or balding heads visible up and down the line as well. They moved restlessly, and she could see the marks of strain and exhaustion clearly on their faces. These were the fighters who had borne the brunt of the defense of Gae.

  As the light grew, Gil could make out little camps of refugees in the woods, straggling out along the road and far back among the trees. There were refugees on the road, too, men and women in wrinkled and dirty clothes, carrying awkward bundles of blankets and cooking pots on their backs, pushing makeshift wheelbarrows, or dragging crude travois. Now and then a man would be leading a donkey, or a woman drawing an unwilling cow at the end of a rope. Mostly they did not stop and gave only scant attention to the winding file of carts and their ragged line of escorts. They were too weary with flight and fear to have any thought but for the refuge ahead.

  Eventually, the road dipped and bent. Beyond the thin screen of brown-leaved trees, Gil felt the wind freshen and change. She looked up to see the land fall away on one side of the road, to show her the city of Gae.

  Recognition caught at her heart. It lay in the distance, surrounded by its many walls, held in the crook of the river's arm, facing out across a plain turned tawny gold with autumn and latticed with the white of the city roads. It was almost as if she had lived there, walked those close-angled streets, and known from childhood that skyline of turrets and branches. Against the morning sky, six spires of stone rose up, flying buttresses bereft of the walls they had supported, stretching like the bony fingers of a skeleton hand into the whiteness of the air.

  "The trees are bare," a man's light, breathless voice said beside her. "In summer it was a garden."

  She looked down. By her knee, pacing with the jogging of the cart, walked the pale-haired captain, his eyes reflecting the flat white light of the sky. She said, "I know."

  The light eyes shifted back to her face. "You're Ingold's far traveler."

  She nodded. "But I've been in Gae."

  Again there were no questions, only a docketing of information in his mind. He was spare and loose-boned; in the mingling shadows of the trees, she saw that he was younger than she'd first supposed-in his early twenties, possibly a few years younger than she was. It was the toughness, the sheath of self-sufficiency, that aged him-that and the long wrinkles scored by weather around his pale eyes. After a moment he said, "I am called the Icefalcon of the Guards."

  "My name is Gil," she said, ducking as they passed beneath the overhanging branches of a huge oak. Gae was lost to them once more behind the woods of rust and silver and opal mist. The sound of the cart wheels mingled with the crackle of the dead leaves underfoot.

  "In the old language of the Wath, gil means ice," he said absently. "Gil-shahs-a spear of ice, an icicle. I had a hunting hawk by that name once."

  Gil looked down at him curiously. "Then your own name would be-Gil-something-or-other."

  He shook his head. "In the language of my people, we call the icefalcon Nyagchilios, Pilgrim of the Sky. Why did you come with us?"

  "Because you ordered me to," Gil replied.

  The Icefalcon raised colorless eyebrows. But he did not ask further, and she could not have answered if he had done so. She only knew that she had felt drawn to these calm and competent warriors; asked to join them, she could not have stayed away.

  They broke from the woods and came down out of the foothills, riding through the lion-colored grasses of the plain as if swimming in a lake of soft, blown gold, the sun small and remote in a colorless morning sky. They passed more refugees, straggling family or neighborhood groups, wretched single men and women carrying the last of their possessions on their backs, confused gangs of children, the older herding the younger like geese. The edges of the road were scattered with the flotsam of flight-books, bedding, and in one place a silver bird cage, dainty as lace, on whose open door-frame a pink, ornamental finch sat chirping fearfully in the sky-wide freedom of the winds. The Icefalcon pointed out Trad's Hill, the round promontory in the middle of the golden plain, crowned with its lichened cross, but Gil's eyes went past it to the walls of Gae. She saw towers mounting spire on shattered spire, arch and corbel and crenelations as fine as hand-tooled miniatures, with woven trellises of bare branches, and above it all, the broken, arching ribs of the buttresses that were all that remained of the Palace.

  And as surely as she knew her name, Gil knew that somewhere in that city there was a square whose steps were guarded by statues of malachite, where bronze doors lay broken among the rubble. Somewhere was a vault with the red porphyry Stair, an odd slab in the smooth basalt of the floor, and a shadow-crowded archway into an empty and ruined street. Cold wind stung her chapped hands on the duty leather of the riding reins; the jog of the slow-moving cob between her knees and the squeal of cart wheels came like elements of waking into an uncertain world of dreams; and with them came the mellow, rusty voice that floated back along the line of march, like a breath of mist on the wind, talking with the Commander of the Guards.

  Gae stank of death. Gil had not been prepared for it, and it took her by the throat like a strangler's hand. Her otherworld life had encompassed enough bus stations, rock concerts, and weekends in the desert to have in some measure inured her to the stench of Karst, but the fetor that hung like a cloud over the ruined city was the miasma of rot, dead rot that her world was wont to hide or incinerate.

  The streets lay empty to the sunlight, the echoes of hooves and booted feet and the creaking wheels of the carts ringing back off bare walls. House after house bore signs of burning-caved-in upper storeys, charred timbers jutting like the broken ribs of picked carcasses, barricaded doors and windows with the telltale crawling of soot reaching halfway up the walls above them. Gil saw how some of the walls had been broken inward; in
other places, little slides of rubble spewed down into the street, mixed with stripped, rat-chewed bones. The hollow shadows rustled with the suggestion of a rodent population released from its old war with man and gorged on the spoils of victory. From the tops of broken walls, wild scrawny cats watched them with mad eyes. Gil held the short riding reins of her fat carthorse and tried not to be sick.

  "Three days ago it was going," a man's soft voice said beside her, and she almost jumped. "And now it is gone." Ingold had drawn up his cart next to her, blinking in the sharp changes of the barred and broken sunlight.

  Something unwholesome rustled and flicked out of sight behind a garden wall. Gil shivered, feeling unclean. "You mean the city?"

  "In a sense." A branch cracked under the wheels. The Icefalcon, scouting alongside, turned sharply at the sound. Gil could see they all felt it, all sensed the foulness of those buzzing, crawling streets. What must it be, she wondered, to be coming back now, after having known it, grown up with it, as it was?

  Her eye traveled slowly down the broken lines of a graceful colonnade that bordered the street, picking out sophisticated motifs of mathematics and flowers, the gaiety and balance of its multiple interwoven friezes. She remembered again the furnishings of Tir's nursery, museum pieces of inlaid ivory and ebony. All that was rich and beautiful of this civilization, all the good things that could be had, could once have been found here. She turned her horse's head a little to avoid the black ruin of a doorway in which the body of a woman lay sprawled in shadow, one gnawed white arm trailing limply in the sun, diamonds sparkling on the wrist among crawling flies.

  Even for those who had survived, there was no going back. She wondered if the people up at Karst had realized this yet.

  Ingold did. She saw it in the hard set of his mouth, in the line of pain that had appeared between his brows. Janus did. The Commander of the Guards looked white and ill; but beyond that, strange on a pug face that would look more at home above a Coors T-shirt and a six-pack of beer, was a look of a deep, quiet, and aching regret. His expression was that of a man who looked on tragedy and understood the meaning of what he saw. The Icefalcon-It was hard to tell. That enigmatic young man picked his fastidious way through the ruins of human civilization with the single-minded wariness of an animal, uncaring for anything beyond his personal safety and the accomplishment of his job.

  Under her, the horse let out a sudden, frightened squeal and threw up its head with white, rolling eyes. Almost beneath their hooves, two shambling, misshappen things broke cover from a ruined doorway and fled down the lane at a scrambling run. Gil had a horrified glimpse of flat, semihuman faces under snarling manes of reddish hair, of hunched bodies and trailing, apelike arms. She stared after them, shocked and breathless, until she heard Ingold say softly, "No, let them go." Turning, she saw that the Icefalcon had taken bow and arrow from one of the carts, preparatory to shooting the creatures down. At Ingold's command he paused, one pale eyebrow raised inquiringly, and in those few instants the creatures, whatever they were, had vanished down the lane.

  The Icefalcon shrugged and replaced his weapons. "They're only dooic," he stated, as a self-evident fact.

  Ingold's face was expressionless. "So they are."

  "We'll have them all around the carts, once we get the food." He might have been speaking of rats.

  The wizard turned back to his own business and flicked the reins of his mismated team. "We can deal with them then." The convoy started forward again, jostling in the cold shadows of the narrow streets. After a moment the Icefalcon shrugged again and slipped back, catlike, to his place in the Guard line.

  "What are they?" Gil asked of the Guard nearest her, a fair-haired young man with the shining face of an apprentice Galahad, walking at her other side. "Are they-people?"

  He glanced up at her, shading his eyes against the sunlight that fell through the breaks in the buildings. "No, they're only dooic," he repeated the Icefalcon's excuse. "Don't you have dooic in your land?"

  Gil shook her head.

  "They do look like people," the Guard went on casually. "But no, they're beasts. They run wild in most of the wastelands of the West-the plains beyond the mountains are crawling with them."

  "Your people might call them Neanderthal," Ingold's soft voice said at her side. "If they're caught they're put to work in the south cutting cane, or in the silver-mines of Gettlesand, but many people train them for household tasks as well. They're said to make useful slaves, but evidently no one considered them worth taking when their owners fled."

  The dry distaste in his voice wasn't lost on the young Guard. "We could never afford to feed them," he protested. "Food's short enough in Karst." And he added to Gil, as if excusing himself, "I never liked them myself."

  The grain stores were in the vaults of the City Prefecture Building, a low, solid structure that formed one side of the great Palace square. As the convoy drew up before it, Gil saw that it had been little touched by fire, though clearly there had been looting going on-a trail of muddy tracks, torn grain sacks, and spilled corn led like a stream up the steps from the sunken doorway, to be dispersed among the general garbage of the square. The square itself she recognized, though she had last seen it from the window of a tower that had now fallen to flaming ruin: a broad expanse of patterned marble; wide gates of intricately worked iron; and trees whose bare gray branches were scorched from the inferno that had swallowed the last battle. The monumental shadow of the Palace reared to her left, storey upon storey of sliding ruin, the gutted belly that had been the Throne Hall of the Realm laid open to the day, half-buried under rubble and ash.

  This, then, was the Palace of Gae, she thought, viewing it dispassionately, sane and awake and by daylight, from the back of a fat, jittery carthorse, with her hands blistered from the reins and her eyes aching from lack of sleep. This was what she had come to see, the place where Eldor had died, the place she had known in dreams. This was where humankind had fought-and lost-its last organized battle against the Dark.

  By the look of those blackened ruins, it was very clear that the place had been looted before the ashes were cold.

  More voices, angry this time, rang against the stone walls of the square in faint derisive echoes. Turning from her silent contemplation, Gil saw that a little group of carters and Guards had formed before the wide, shallow steps that led down to the broken doors of the Prefecture, centering on Commander Janus and a big, brawny man in homespun whom Gil remembered vaguely as having driven the lead cart. The man was saying, "Well, this driver's not going down to fetch no grain. If the top level of the vaults has been cleared out like you say, that means going down the subcellar, and that's death, sure as the ice in the north."

  Someone else chimed in over the general din of agreement. "The vaults is haunted, haunted by the Dark. I said I'd drive a cart, but going against the Dark ain't in it."

  A Guard shouted back, "Well, who in hell did you think was going down for the stuff?"

  Janus, red-faced with anger, spoke quietly, his brown eyes cold. "Every man knows the value of his own courage. Those drivers brave enough to do so can help us fetch the food out. I have no use for cowards. Icefalcon, I'm leaving you in charge on top. Pick twelve Guards and shoot anyone or anything that comes near the food once we get it up here. Get it loaded and be ready to move out."

  From the back of the cart he had been driving, Ingold handed down a bundle of cold pitch torches, then stepped down himself, bringing with him a six-foot walking staff on which he leaned tiredly.

  The Commander disengaged a torch from the bundle and went on. "Gae isn't empty, by any means. It's dead, but every corpse has its maggots. There's danger above the ground as well as below." He turned and walked, torch in hand, toward the steps. Without a glance at him, Ingold made a slight gesture with his fingers; the cold torch in the Commander's hand burst into flame with a loud whoof! The other Guards, and over half the drivers, clustered around to get their own torches and light them from his.


  As Gil was picking up a torch from the bundle on the ground, Ingold stepped over to her and laid a hand on her shoulder. "That didn't apply to you, Gil. This is none of your affair."

  She looked up at him, then straightened to bring her eyes level with his. "You don't have to look after me specially," she said. "I'll stay with the Guards."

  He glanced back over his shoulder at the small group already descending to the vaults, then at the long train of empty carts that would have to be filled by afternoon. "I brought you here against your will," he said quietly. "You are in my charge. I won't demand that you put yourself in danger of death in another universe, when you're going back to your own tonight. This is no dream, Gil. To die here is to die."

  The ice- winds from the north pierced her thin jacket like a knife, and the heatless sun glared in her eyes without power to warm her. From the steps a woman's voice-Seya's, she thought-called out. "Gilshalos! You staying or coming?"

  She yelled back, "Coming!" Ingold caught her arm as she started to move off. To him she said, "I won't get in your hair, I promise."

  He smiled, the weary lines of his face lightening with a brief illusion of youth. "Like a bat, eh? As you will. But as you love your life, stay close to the others." And he walked with her to join the Guards.