01 THE TIME OF THE DARK d-1

by Barbara Hambly

  On the other hand, he realized he didn't have much choice. It was a jailbreak in the dark or spending the night and God alone knew how many other nights besides in this world. Even standing in the quiet of the dark lane, Rudy had begun to feel nervous. "Okay," he said, with as much cheerfulness as he could muster under the circumstances. "Meet you back at the Town Hall in an hour."

  They parted, Rudy hurrying back toward Alwir's garden gate, running over in his mind how he'd go about getting on the right side of Alde and, more importantly, Medda, in order to get in and search the villa.

  Gil and the Icefalcon headed in the other direction, instinctively hugging the wall for protection, guided by the reddish reflection of the fires in the town square. It was fully dark, a bitter overcast night, and Gil shivered, feeling the trap of the lane, aware of how restricted it was on the sides and how open from above. Cloak and sword tangled around her feet, and she had to hurry her steps to catch up with the long strides of the young man before her.

  They were within sight of the firelit crowds in the square when the Icefalcon stopped and raised his head to listen like a startled beast. "Do you hear it?" His voice was a whisper in the darkness, his face and pale hair a blur edged in the rosy reflection of the bonfires. Gil stopped also, listening to the cool quiet of the night. Pine-scented winds blew the sounds from beyond the town, far-off sounds changed by the darkness, but unmistakable. From the dark woods that ringed the town, the wind carried up the sounds of screaming.

  The Dark Ones had come to Karst!

  There was no battle at Karst-only a thousand rearguard actions fought in the haunted woods by companies of Guards, of Church troops, and of the private troops of the households of noble and landchief. Patrols made sorties from the blazing central fortress of the red-lit town square and brought in huddled clusters of terrified refugees, the scattered stragglers who had survived that first onslaught.

  Gil, who found herself, sword in hand, hunting with the Icefalcon's company, remembered that first chaotic nightmare in Gae and wondered that she had thought it frightening. At least then she had known where the danger lay; in Gae there had been torchlight and walls and people. But here the nightmare drifted silently through wind-touched woods, appearing, killing, and departing with a kind of hideous leisure. Here there was no warning, only a vast floating darkness that fell upon the torches between one eyeblink and the next; soft mouths gaping wide, like canopies of acid-fringed parachutes; claws reaching to tear and to hold. Here there were the victims; a pile of stripped, bloody bones among the sticks of a half-built campfire or the blood-dewed shrunken mummy of a man sucked dry while a yard away his wife knelt screaming in helpless horror at the sight.

  Naturally coldhearted, Gil was made neither helpless nor, after the first few victims, sick. Rather, she was filled with a kind of cool and lightheaded rage, like a cat that kills with neither fear nor remorse.

  In those first chaotic minutes, she and the Icefalcon doubled back to the Guards' Court at a run. There they found a wild confusion of men arming, companies forming, Janus' deep booming voice cutting through the holocaust of sound, demanding volunteers. Since she was wearing a sword, somebody shoved her into a company-they were halfway out of town, armed with torches and pitifully few to meet the Dark, when she fought her way up to the front of the patrol and yelled to the Icefalcon, "But I don't know how to use a sword!"

  He gave her a cold stare. "Then you shouldn't wear one," he retorted.

  Someone else caught her by the shoulder-the woman Seya she'd met that morning by the carts-and drew her back. "Aim at the midline of the body," she instructed Gil hastily. "Cut straight down, or straight sideways. There's a snap to the wrists, see? Hilt in both hands-not like that, you'll break both thumbs. You have to go in close to kill, if they're bigger than you are, which they will be, outside like this. Got that? You can pick up the rest later. Stay in the center of the group and don't take on anything you can't handle."

  Watchword for the night, Gil thought wryly. But it was surprising, the first time those dark, silent bulks materialized out of the misty darkness between the trees, how much of that hasty lesson she could put into practice. And she learned the first principle of any martial art-that surviving or not surviving an encounter is the ultimate test of any system, lesson, or technique.

  In one sense it was easy, for those nebulous bodies offered little resistance to the razor-sharp metal. Precision and speed counted rather than strength; for all their soft bulk, the Dark Ones moved fast. But Seya had not mentioned that the Dark Ones stank of rotting blood, nor had she described the way the cut pieces folded and trailed and spattered everything with human blood and blackish liquid as they disintegrated. This Gil found out in that crimson pandemonium of fire and dark trees, death and flight and war. And she found out, too, that there was less fear in the attack than in the defense and that, no matter how little sleep or food you have had in the last forty-eight hours, you could always fight for your life. She fought shoulder to shoulder with the black-uniformed Guards of Gae and ragged volunteers in homespun. She ran in the wake of the fighters as they moved through the woods like a wolfpack, gathering lost and terrified fugitives and shepherding them back toward Karst. The cold electricity of battle-lust filled her like fire and drove out weariness or fear.

  In time, the dozen or so warriors of the Icefalcon's company rounded up some fifty refugees. They circled them in a loose cordon and gave torches to as many of them as were capable of carrying such things; most persisted in holding to possessions, money, and food, and a good thirty were women carrying children in their arms. For the third time that night, they started back for Karst. Woods and sky were utterly black, the dark trees threshing in the wind. All around them could be heard screaming and wailing. It was a Dantean scene, lit by the jerky glare of torches.

  Someone behind her cried out. Looking up, Gil saw the Dark materializing in the inky air, with a sudden drop of slobbering wings and the slash of a thorned wire tail. She stepped into it, sword whining as she swung, aware of Seya on her right, someone else on her left. Then she was engulfed in darkness, wind, and fire, cutting blindly. The fugitives behind her were packing closer and closer together like sheep, the children shrieking, the men crying out. Shredded veils of disintegrating protoplasm slithered to the ground all around her. She saw the man on her left buckle awkwardly to his knees, dry and white and dewed all over with blood as the Dark One rose off him like some giant, flopping, airborne blob. Wave after wave of darkness came pouring from the woods.

  The Icefalcon raised his light voice to a harsh rasp. "This will be the last trip, my sisters and brothers. There are more now than there were. We'll have to hold the town."

  In the momentary lull, as the Dark Ones gathered like a lightless roof of storm overhead, a Guard's voice cried bitterly, "Hold that town? That collection of wall-less chicken-runs?"

  "It's the only town we have. Now, run!"

  And they ran, through the black nightmare of alien pursuit, with the winds stirring after them like the breath of some unspeakable abyss. It was a nightmare of woods, darkness, sinuous half-seen forms, flame, and stumbling terror. They ran toward the refuge of Karst, and the Dark Ones followed.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Hell of a joke on Alwir! Rudy slumped back against the clustered pilasters framing the open archway from the villa's main reception-hall out to its entryway and shut his eyes. But nothing could block out the wild glare of the torches, the screaming that went through his head like a hacksaw, and the dizzy sickness of fatigue. That whole sales pitch about everything being hunky-dory and let's make Karst capital of the new Realm had gone down the tubes. And Ingold, whatever the hell they did with him, was right all along.

  He opened his eyes again, the sensory burn-out of the hall stabbing body and brain like crimson knives. It was like the waiting room of Judgment Day. The hall and entryway on either side of the fluted arch were mobbed wall to wall with people, refugees driven in from the woods and the town sq
uare who had taken shelter here when the defense lines around the town had caved in. People were weeping, praying, cursing, all at the tops of their lungs; they were milling like panic-stricken sheep when the wolf was in the fold. The jackhammer din was like the final set of a rock concert, so deafening that no single sound was audible, and the faces illuminated by the bleeding torchlight seemed to mouth senselessly. The packed heat of the room was smothering, the air foul with smoke and human fear. Detachedly, Rudy wondered if he were involved in one of Gil's nightmares. But he was too hungry to be asleep for one thing; and for another, it looked as if he'd started at the wrong end of the dream and couldn't remember going to bed. He wondered if the end of the world was going to be this noisy. He hoped not.

  Like Satan in the chaos of the fire, Alwir stood in the middle of the room, blood from his cut cheek making a red track in the sweaty slime of his face. One hand rested on the pommel of his sword, the other gestured, black and eloquent-he was speaking with Commander Janus and Bishop Govannin, who stood leaning on her drawn sword, her robe girded up for fighting. Under the marks of battle, that thin skull-face of hers was calm. Rudy reflected dryly to himself that it looked as if everybody in town knew how to handle a sword except him. Alwir suggested something, and the Bishop shook her head in somber denial. The angry, insistent sweep of the Chancellor's gesture took in all the room. Rudy had a bad feeling that he knew what the problem was.

  The villa was indefensible.

  It was obvious. They'd been driven there when the defenses around the square had crumbled, when darkness like a fog had sapped the light of the fires. One minute, it seemed, Rudy had been standing in the line of armed men, awkwardly gripping the hilt of a sword somebody had shoved into his hands, backed by the wind-whipped, flaring blaze of dozens of bonfires and the yammering cries of the unarmed civilians who were crowding in the square for protection and watching with uneasy terror the restless stirrings in the darkness beyond the light. Then the darkness had begun to draw closer, the shifting suggestion of nebulous bodies growing increasingly clear. Looking behind him, Rudy had seen the bonfires pale and weaken, the flames robbed of their light. And then he'd been caught in the blind stampede for walls to hide behind, for any shelter against that encroaching terror. He'd been one of the lucky ones. The square and the streets outside were littered with the unlucky.

  And the irony of it was, Rudy thought, surveying the scarlet confusion before him, that this place which they'd trampled over each other to reach was about as defensible as a bird cage.

  It was a summer palace. A man didn't have to study architecture to guess that one. The whole place was designed to let in light and air and summer breezes. Colonnades joined to open galleries; dainty, trefoiled arches opened into long vistas of wide-windowed rooms; and the long double stairway rising from the entry-hall to his left terminated in a balcony gallery that communicated with the rest of the villa by a series of airy, unwalled breezeways. The whole thing would be as much use as a lace tablecloth in a hurricane. If he hadn't been half-blind with exhaustion and within kissing distance of a horrible death, Rudy could have laughed.

  Janus offered some other plan. Alwir shook his head. Nix on anything that means going outside, Rudy thought. Blackness seemed to press like a bodiless entity against the long windows that ran the length of one wall. A few minutes ago, the orange reflection of firelight had been visible through them. Now there was only darkness. The multivoiced baying of the fugitives had begun to fade, men and women making little forays into the murky dimness of the entry-hall beyond the arch, as if seeking a safer room for their hiding, but unwilling to leave the main crowd to do so. Alwir pointed downward, to the floor or, Rudy guessed, to the cellars of the villa. The Bishop asked him something that made his eyes flash with anger.

  But before he could reply, a rending crash sounded from somewhere in the deeps of the house, the violence of it shaking the stone walls on their foundations.

  In the hush that followed, Janus' voice could be heard to the far corners of the hall. "East gallery," he said briefly.

  A woman began to scream, a steady, unwavering note. A few feet from him, Rudy saw a young woman of about his own age tighten her clutch on a gaggle of smaller children who clung to her skirts for courage... A fat man with a garden rake for a weapon hopped to his feet and began to glare around, as if expecting the Dark to come rushing down from the throbbing air. The mob in the room packed tighter, as if they could conceal themselves from the Dark by doing so.

  Their voices climbed to a crescendo of wild terror through which Alwir's trained bass battle voice cut like a cleaver. "With me! We can defend the vaults!"

  Someone began howling. "Not the vaults! Not underground!"

  Rudy scrambled to his feet, cursing, narrowly missing cutting off his own fingers with the sword he still held. He personally didn't care where they holed up, as long as it had nice thick walls and only one door. People were yelling, swaying, surging after Alwir through the arched doorway at the far end of the tall. Torches were being pulled down from the walls, the flailing red light throwing the room into a maelstrom of jerking shadow.

  Someone shoved against Rudy in the mob, fighting against the current to go the other way, and he caught at a familiar arm.

  "Where the hell are you going?"

  Minalde's hair had come unbraided and hung against her torn and dirty white gown. "Tir's up there," she said fiercely. "I thought Medda had brought him down." Shoulders jostled them, throwing them close together. In the whiteness of her face, her eyes were iris-colored in the torchlight.

  "Well, you can't go up there now!" As she pulled angrily at his grip, Rudy added, "Look, if the door's locked and there's some kind of light in the room, they'll miss him, he'll be fine. There's a zillion people down here for them to get."

  "They know who he is," she whispered desperately. "It's him they want." With a swift jerk she freed her arm and plunged toward the stairs, slipping between the crowding bodies like an eel.

  "You crazy female, you're gonna get killed!" Rudy shoved his way after her, his larger size hampering him, the crowd dragging him inexorably along. He saw Alde stop by the foot of the stairs and take a torch from its holder. Elbowing and struggling frantically, he reached the place moments later, snatched another torch, and dashed up after her into the darkness. He caught her at the top and grabbed her arm in a grip that would leave bruises.

  "You let me go!"

  "The hell I will!" he yelled back at her. "Now you listen... "

  With an inarticulate sob of fury she thrust her torch into his face. He leaped back, barely catching himself from going backward down the stairs, and she was gone, a flicker of white fluttering down the wind-searched gallery, her torch streaming in her wake like a banner. Rudy followed profanely.

  In spite of the Dark, she left the nursery door open for him. He stumbled through and slammed it shut behind him, gasping with exertion and terror and rage.

  "You're insane, do you know that?" he shouted at her. "You could get the both of us killed! You didn't even know if the kid was still alive-"

  She wasn't listening. She bent over the gilded cradle and gathered the child in her arms. Tir was awake, but silent, as he had been in that dilapidated shack in the orange groves of California, dark-blue eyes wide with understanding fear. The girl shook back the waves of hair from her face and smoothed the child's round cheek with her fingers. Rudy could see that her hands were shaking.

  "Here," he said roughly, and pulled a shawl from the table beside the crib. "Make a sling and tie the kid to you. You're gonna need your hands free to carry the torches." She obeyed silently, not meeting his eyes. "I don't know whether I shouldn't brain you myself. It might knock some sense into your head."

  She took her torch from the wall holder where she'd placed it and turned back to him, her eyes defiant. Rudy grunted in an unwilling and inarticulate concession to her courage, if not to her brains. "You're gonna have to tell me how to find these vaults they're talking abo
ut."

  "Down the stairs, through the arch at the end of the big hall, down the steps to the right," she said in a small voice. "It will be the main vault, where they store the wine. That's the only room large enough."

  He took up his own torch again and glanced briefly around that small octagonal room with its dull gold hangings and filigreed ebony fixtures. Then he looked back at the girl, her face as white as her gown in the flickering shadows. "Yeah, well, if we get killed... " he began to threaten, then stopped. "Aah," he growled. "I still think you're crazy." He handed her his torch and edged to the door of the room, gripping the sword hilt in both hands, as he had seen Ingold do. Alde stood back from him without a word.

  "You ready?"

  "Yes," she said softly.

  He muttered, "Here goes nuthin', sweetheart," and took a step forward. In one quick movement, he kicked the door open and slashed. The Dark One that dropped through like an inky storm of protoplasm split itself on the brightness of the blade, splattering the three of them with stinking liquid; the second, immediately following the first, withdrew almost instantly on an aimless swirl of wind. No shapes were visible in the dark corridor stretching before them-only a restless sense of movement down at the -far end. He caught Alde by the arm and ran.

  Fluttering shadows pursued them down the hall, monster shapes of himself, the girl, and the child. The torchlight briefly illuminated the open arches to their left; but beyond, sight failed in an endless abyss of blasphemous night. Rudy could sense the Dark all around them, watching them with a queer, horrible intelligence, waiting only for the unguarded moment to pounce. From the top of the stairs they looked down at the chasm of the hall, where a dropped torch, burning itself out on the floor, revealed a ruin of filth, torn clothes, discarded shoes, and smashed furniture trampled in the flight. Around the far archway and dimly visible in the hall beyond, a straggle of bones and bloodless, crumpled bodies showed what had happened moments after he'd followed Alde up the stairs; and beyond that archway, slipping over the bodies, a gliding shifting darkness seemed to flow.