01 THE TIME OF THE DARK d-1

by Barbara Hambly

  "I think I spoke of it earlier," Ingold said quietly. "The Dark Ones devour the mind as well as the flesh-which is why, I suspect, they prey upon human beings and not upon beasts. As well as human flesh and human blood, the Dark Ones devour the psychic energy, the intelligence-the mind, if you will. Perhaps to them that is the most important of the three."

  Reaching out, Ingold shut the eyes of the man with his thumb and forefinger and, closing his own eyes, meditated for a moment in silence. The man's knees buckled abruptly, and Ingold stepped lightly back from him as he splashed noisily into the rain-thrashed water and lay face down. Rudy was still staring, aghast, at the corpse when Ingold touched each of the girls in turn. They fell and lay with their flowered hair floating around them in the dirty water of the ditch. The wizard turned away and, leaning on his staff, clambered up the bank again. Rudy followed him, water dripping soggily from the hem of his mantle, cold and shivering and shocked at what he was pretty sure Ingold had done.

  They did not speak for some time, but trudged down the road in silence. Then Rudy asked, "They don't get over it, do they?"

  "No." The wizard's voice came disembodied from the shadows of his hood. A harmless old man, Rudy thought. A charming old lunatic. No wonder people are afraid of him.

  "No," Ingold went on. "If they are indoors they generally starve. If they are outdoors they die of exposure."

  "Uh- anybody ever take care of one, to see if his mind might come back?"

  Ingold shrugged. "Not easy when you're fleeing the Dark yourself. Up in Twegged in the north, at the start of all this trouble, it was tried. The victim lasted two months."

  "What happened after two months?"

  "Her caretakers killed her." The wizard added, in a tone of explanation, "They were the victim's husband and daughter, you see."

  Rudy looked back over his shoulder. The evening mists were coming down heavily, shadow and darkness covering the land. Still, he thought he could see in the distance the curve of the road, the ditch, and the whitish blur against the darker ground.

  The night fell, and for miles up and down the Great

  South Road the refugees sought what sleep they could. Watch fires threaded the darkness like a glittering necklace on both sides of the road, and all who could bear arms took their turn at them. In the low ground, the puddled rain turned to ice.

  Alde came to Rudy's watch fire in the night, with Medda escorting her like a stout, disapproving shadow. She was shy with him, and they did not speak of what had passed between them at Karst, but Rudy felt a joy in her presence he had never known with any other human being. As they sat together with their backs to the fire, not touching, talking of Tir or of the small doings of the road, the intimacy between them was as close and warm as if they shared a cloak.

  The morning dawned clear and freezing cold. The wind had broken the overcast and piled the clouds in the south, like the immeasurable slopes of achingly white mountains against the soaring blue of the morning sky. Word came down the line that wolves had attacked the horse herd belonging to the Church and had been driven off by the Red Monks; four night guards had been found dead by their watch fires, bloodless victims of the Dark. Nevertheless, Bishop Govannin gave a cart-tail service of thanksgiving, and those who had survived the night thanked their God that it had been no worse.

  They came into a rolling country now, the great road looping through the gray-green hills. To their right, the distant heads of the western mountains were sometimes glimpsed, plum and blue and gray, or covered in the lour of clouds. It was a land of streams, ice-rimed in the morning, that flowed down toward the green, lush bottom lands in the east. These streams were sometimes crossed by narrow stone bridges, but often the road simply led to shallow fords, so that everyone was perpetually half-wet and shivering. Rudy, stiff and aching in every joint, took Ingold's advice and cut a straight sapling from the next grove of trees they passed, to trim into a walking stick. He had never been much good at botany, but the Icefalcon told him the wood was ash.

  Toward noon they crossed a broad saddle of land that lay between two hills, and from it a vista spread before them of all the countryside down to the river, the long grass rippling palely in the wan light of a heatless sun. The red-clothed trooper leading the mules of Minalde's cart paused there to breathe them, and Rudy came up close at her side. Many people stood there, having stopped to rest in the neck of that miniature pass and look down on the lands below. Alde turned to him and smiled. "How are you?" she asked quietly, a little shy at speaking to him in the light of day.

  "Sore as hell." Rudy leaned on his staff, not caring if it made him look like an old man. "How in God's name do you people stand it? I feel like I'm fixing to die."

  "So do most of these people," Alde said. "So would I, if I didn't have a cart to ride in because I'm the Queen. We've been passing women all day, with children as young as Tir. Carrying them. They'll carry them clear to Renweth, unless they die on the road." She tucked the blankets closer around the child she held propped at her side. Tir made a little noise of protest and a determined effort to divest himself of the blankets and, Rudy guessed, to roll off the seat. The kid was going to be a real pest when he started to walk.

  "Die?" he said uneasily. He remembered things people had said about those who straggled from the caravan...

  "Of cold," Alde said. "Or hunger. We're doing all right for food now, but when we get out of the farm country, there won't be nearly enough. Not for the children or for the old people or for those who are sick-"

  She broke off, startled, lifting her head to stare off across the hills, and Rudy followed her gaze down the smooth, falling curves of the gray-green land. Far off he could see huge brown forms stalking the distant pastures, swaying like monstrous animated haystacks-impossibly large, monsters in the icy distance.

  "What are they?" he asked, shading his eyes. Then he glanced back at Alde and saw the worry on her face. "Are they... "

  "Mammoths," Alde said, and her tone was puzzled and surprised. "Mammoths this side of the mountains... "

  "Mammoths?"

  She glanced down at him, hearing but misinterpreting the shock in his voice. "Woolly elephants," she explained. "They're common on the northern plains, of course, but they haven't been seen in the river valleys since-oh, for hundreds of years. And never this far south. They must have come over the passes of the mountains for some reason."

  But mammoths were not the only things to come over the passes of the mountains.

  That night, as he and Alde sat talking quietly under Medda's disapproving chaperonage by the watch fire, Rudy thought he heard the distant thunder of hooves, an unlikely sound in the convoy where horses were few and precious, guarded more carefully than a miser guards his hoard. After a time, the night wind brought him the faint, damp drift of smoke and a sound that reminded him of the howling of wolves, although there was a difference to this sound. In the morning he rode out with Ingold and the slim handful of Guards whom the convoy could afford to mount to look for the source of the sound.

  They found it long before the sun had managed to burn off the thick, white river mist. The charred hulk of a gutted farmhouse loomed in the opal fog, haunted by the gliding black shapes of spectral crows and the smell of roasted flesh. They found some of the farm family a little ways from the house. At first Rudy didn't register that the body staked to the ground was human; when he did, he came as close to fainting as he ever had in his life. He looked away, his face clammy with sweat and the taste of vomit in his mouth. He heard Janus' boots squishing in the mushy grass and the faint, restless jingling of bridle-bits as the horses tossed their heads in alarm. He heard Janus say, "Not the Dark," and Ingold, skirting on foot the trampled weeds beyond him, reply, "No."

  Faintly, another Guard's voice drifted to him. "Dooic? Gone feral or-or mad?"

  Another responded. "On horses? Be serious."

  Ingold returned, materializing like a specter from the mist, holding in his hand a strip of rawhide trimmed
with chips of colored glass, from which a long feather dangled, its end tipped in blood. "No," he said, his voice calm in spite of the butchered horror lying in the grass nearby. "No, I fear this is the work of the White Raiders."

  "On this side of the mountains?" Janus asked nervously, looking around him.

  Ingold nodded and held out to him the rawhide, the spinning feather brushing his wrist and marking the flesh with blood. "Lava Hills People," he identified briefly, and gestured toward the grisly evidence, scattered over several square yards of grass. "It's a sacrifice, a-propitiation. An offering to something they fear."

  "The Dark?" the Commander asked. He took and examined the rawhide tag.

  "Doubtless," Ingold said slowly, and looked around him at the burned trees, the scorched remains of the outbuildings, and the fallen house surrounded by a hideously suggestive cloud of screeching carrion-birds. "Doubtless. Though if the Dark were their principal fear-why did they cross the mountains? The danger of the Dark is thickest in the valleys of the river."

  "Possibly they didn't know."

  "Possibly." The wizard's tone was still dubious, and he moved restlessly along the trampled verge of the grass, scanning the flat opaque whiteness of a countryside turned two-dimensional with fog, as if sniffing the wind for the scent of unknown danger. "In any case, it puts us in a bad position. You see, the hoof-tracks here are shod, which means they're already short of horses, stealing what they can find from the valley farms. My guess is that they're too few to protect their herds from wolves. They'll be turning on the convoy soon."

  "Would they?" Janus asked doubtfully.

  "If they thought they could get away with it, yes." Ingold came back to him, brushing the dew from his sleeves. He walked, Rudy noticed, with an instinctive cat-footed care that left hardly a mark in the sodden grass. "The combined force of the Guards, Alwir's troops, the Church troops, and the remains of the Army, plus Tirkenson's men, outnumber the Raiders at least twenty to one. But the convoy is nearly seven miles long on the march; four miles, bunched up to camp. They could strike us like a spearhead at any point."

  The Guards were mounting to go. Only Janus and Ingold remained afoot, talking in low voices, the red-haired Commander of the Guards towering over the smaller form of the wizard. From his uneasy perch on the restless horse, Rudy looked down at the pair of them, wondering about the friendship that was so evident, despite the Church strictures against wizards. It occurred to him that, apart from himself and Gil, Janus seemed to be the only friend Ingold had in the convoy. People, ordinary people following the road to the myth of refuge in the south, treated the old man with a combination of awe, distrust, and outright fear, as something completely uncanny; even Minalde, whose life and child he had saved from certain doom, was timid and silent in his presence. Rudy wondered what the bond was between the wizard and the Guards.

  "And how much danger are we in, from the Dark?"

  In the diffuse light Ingold's face was thoughtful, his gaze going past the Commander to scan the landscape that was slowly revealing itself as the mists dissolved into pale and heatless daylight. Far off, a dark sense of movement along the bases of the round hills marked the road, with its endless chain of pilgrims; closer, crows hunched in the bare black trees and watched the Guards with bright, inquiring eyes. All around them, north and south and west, lay a desolation of sun-silvered grass. Rudy felt he had never seen a land so empty.

  "More than we think," the wizard said quietly. "We had a good moon last night, but I could sense them, far off, masses of them. There was a Nest of them at one time, blocked long ago, at the foot of the mountains. The road will run quite close to it."

  Janus' glance cut sharply back to him, but Ingold did not elaborate. He only said, "Right now, speed is our ally, and the weather. We must reach the Keep and quickly; every day on the road heightens our danger. It may be that, when we reach it, we will have to hold the Keep against more than the Dark."

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A fever of uneasiness seemed to spread down the convoy. The unseen presence of the White Raiders dogged them by day, as the threat of the Dark dogged them by night, and all that day and the next Rudy felt it, following the endless road. He heard it in the snatches of conversation he caught and picked it up, unsaid, from the people he talked to during the days; he saw it in the movements of the refugees who still clung, a vast tattered horde, to the nucleus of what had been the government of the greatest Realm in the West of the World. Little groups and families would accelerate past him, a man pushing an impossibly piled wheelbarrow, cursing an exhausted woman with a child in her arms and a goat on a frayed rope behind her to hurry, hurry, get a little farther down the road before something-the Dark, the wolves, the invisible Raiders-got them. Later Rudy would pass them, sitting in a tired huddle on a worn milestone, the child wailing hungrily while the man and woman looked over their shoulders at the empty lands beyond. Tempers shortened. At the crossing of the Mabigee River, its bridge flooded out by unseasonable storms in the mountains, Alwir and Bishop Govannin came to bitter words over the cartloads of ecclesiastical records that the Bishop had brought from Gae. The records could be left behind-the carts were needed for the sick, the injured, the very old and very young whose strength was failing them due to poor food and exhaustion.

  The Bishop bit back at him, "Yes, and then all record of precedent, which puts the dominion of God above the commands of man, may be left behind, too, when we reach the Keep."

  "Don't be a fool, woman!" Alwir snarled. "God would rather have souls than a load of moldy paper!"

  "He has their souls," the Bishop snapped, "or should. If it's souls that concern you, my lord Chancellor, turn out your tame mirror of Satan, your pet conjurer, and let your precious sick ride in his place. A man who takes the advice of wizards should be the last to talk of souls."

  The river crossing left the refugees soaked and exhausted, and no one traveled more than a few miles onward after that. The main body of the convoy halted in an abandoned village and took shelter in the stone houses that were half-falling into ruin, scorched by the fires their defenders had lit against the attacking Dark, or caved in by the power of the Dark themselves. Those parties that could not fit into the houses spread out like water across a flood plain all around, making a great tangled city of tents and makeshift shelters, ringed in the far-flung watch fires of its bright perimeter against the coming of the night.

  Rudy's campfire was built in a little dip in the ground a hundred yards from the building farthest from the road. He'd found a tiny dugout cabin nested into the side of a kill that, in better days, had been used for a wood store and still contained ample sticks for his fire. The hill itself, facing away from the road and the camp, made a fair windbreak against the bitter, searching winds from the west.

  All that day the mountains had been visible, growing perceptibly in the west and south. Now, in the last of the sunset, they hung like a black wall against the cloudheaped sky of evening, their heads wreathed in storms and, when the wind cleared the cover a little, white with the mantle of winter. He had been told that Sarda Pass lay high in those mountains. Rudy thought of snow and shivered. He had grown used to being wolf-hungry all the time, and, to his surprise, his body seemed to be adapting to days of walking and the weariness of night guard. But since his coming to the Realm of Darwath, he had always been conscious of being cold. He wondered if he would ever get warm again.

  When the night was fully dark, Alde and Medda appeared, bringing him some mulled wine. Rudy sipped it thankfully, reflecting to himself that he'd rather have had about six cups of the foulest black truck-driver coffee and a handful of caffeine tablets. Still, he reasoned, looking across the gold rim of the cup at the girl's dark eyes, it proved she cared, or at least felt something for him. Alde, Minalde, he thought despairingly, you're the goddam Queen of Darwath and I'm a bum passing through, and why does this have to happen to me? His desire for her was palpable, urgent, but they could not so much as touch hands. Medda s
at, a stout bundle of silent disapproval, on the other side of his fire, far enough away so as not to overhear their conversation, if they kept their voices low. For the rest, her mere presence lent them a respectability without which Alde would not have been able to see him at all.

  "Would Alwir be mad if he knew you were coming out like this?" Rudy asked, without taking his eyes from the darkness. It was a soldier's trick the Icefalcon had taught him, not to look at the campfire. It blinded the eyes to the movements of the night.

  "Oh- " Her voice was unwilling. "Probably. He half knows. Alwir worries about me."

  "If you were my sister, I'd want to keep an eye on you, too."

  "Not that way, silly." She smiled at him. "He's concerned about my 'state.' So is Medda, for that matter."

  Rudy glanced briefly across the fire and met the fat woman's disdainful eyes. She'd given him dirty looks whenever their paths had crossed these last five days, and tonight he sensed the silence between Alde and Medda that spoke louder than any words. He guessed she'd said something to her charge, the beautiful young woman who had once been her little girl, about going out alone at night to see a man, a mere Guard and an outworlder at that. He could feel in that frosty silence how that conversation had gone; he knew that Medda had reminded Alde of her station in life and had had the words thrown back in her face.

  "If it will make you trouble... " he began.

  She shook her head, the great cloudy mass of her unbound hair sliding on the fur collar of her cloak. "I'd only lie awake, nights," she said. And her eyes met his, knowledge passing between them.

  So they were quiet for a tune, sitting side by side, not too close, not touching, only comfortable in each other's presence. He watched the darkness beyond the ring of the firelight and judged, with his ears, the noises of the night. In the distance he saw a dark shape walking back toward the camp along the line of the wide-spaced fires and knew it was Ingold, Ingold who seldom slept now, but divided his nights between a solitary, silent patrol and long hours of watching, staring into the heart of his enchanted crystal, in the cold time before dawn.