01 THE TIME OF THE DARK d-1

by Barbara Hambly

  He paused at the place where the rank, overgrown ground ended and the black pavement began. Gil saw him stoop to pick up a stone and stand in thought for a moment, turning it over in his hands. Then he stepped cautiously onto the slick, canted surface of the stone and began his careful climb toward the stairway itself.

  Though her whole being shrank from it, as it had on that other pavement in the vaults at Gae, Gil followed him. She struggled through the foliage that clung with such perverted persistence to her feet, scrambled up after the wizard onto the tilted pavement, and saw, ahead of her, Ingold pause to wait, his shadow lying small and leaden around his feet. Seen under the light of day, naked to the sky, the sheer size of the pavement awed her; from the corner buried in the weed-choked earth to the corner tilted upward and buried in the out-thrust knee of the mountain, it must have measured close to seven hundred feet. In its midst Ingold seemed very small and exposed. It was a tricky scramble up the smooth incline; when she reached his side, Gil was panting in the gluey, breathless air.

  "So we were right," Ingold said softly. "The vision was a lie."

  Below them stretched the stairway, open to the winds. A cool drift of damp air seemed to rise from it, making Gil's sweat-matted hair prickle on the back of her neck. There was nothing now between them and the Dark except the presence of the sun, and she glanced at the sky quickly, as if fearing to see the gathering of clouds.

  "So what can we do?"

  "Rejoin the convoy as quickly as possible. We do not yet know what they plan, but at least we know the direction of the attack. And in any case, it may be possible to thwart them and cover Tir's retreat to the Keep."

  Gil glanced across at him. "How?"

  "Something Rudy said once. If we-"

  He broke off and caught her by the wrist. Gil followed the direction of his eyes along the smooth, tangled floor of the vale and spotted a stirring in the dark woods near one of those queer formations of black stone that dotted the valley. A movement was quickly lost to sight, but Gil knew what it was. There was only one thing that it could be.

  She asked, "Have they seen us?"

  "Doubtless. Though I should be surprised if they came any closer." Balancing himself carefully with his staff, Ingold began his cautious descent from the ramplike pavement, with Gil edging gingerly behind. When they reached the ground, Ingold scanned the valley again, but could see nothing further. "Which doesn't mean anything, of course," he said, turning to walk along the rising edge of the pavement. "Just because you don't see White Raiders doesn't mean they aren't there."

  "So what are we going to do?"

  Ingold pointed with his staff toward the narrowing maze of crevices and hanging valleys at the end of the vale of the Dark, a great ruinous confusion of old avalanche scars, split and faulted from the rock. "There should be a way up there," he said calmly, pausing in the vine-entangled shadows of the seamless black wall.

  "You're kidding," Gil said, aghast.

  "I never kid, my dear." He started off up the talus slope.

  Gil stayed where she was for a time, watching him disappear up the curve of the land. The ground rose and buckled oddly around the featureless wall of the black foundation, but whatever upheaval had disrupted it had been so long ago that the geology of the valley had settled around it. That in itself bothered Gil-the thing was so old, so incredibly old. Eons had rolled by since some arcane power had founded it here, so that the very shape of the lands and seas had changed. More fossils caught her eyes. My God, she thought, this place was a tropical swamp when this was wrought. How long have the Dark Ones inhabited the earth, anyway?

  Who could ever tell, since they didn't have a bone in their floating plasmoid bodies? And yet they had intelligence, the intelligence to sink shafts, to build these dark pavements at their heads and have them endure for millennia with very little appearance of decay. They were intelligent enough to work their own kind of magic, different from the nature of human magic, ungraspable by any human brain. They were intelligent enough to keep tabs on the convoy, to know where Tir was, and to know why he had to be put out of the way.

  Arms folded, Gil stood for a while in the lengthening shadows and meditated on the Dark.

  After a time she looked up and saw Ingold again, appearing and disappearing among the twisted confusion of boulders and huddled trees at the end of the valley. Some primordial cataclysm had broken the side of one of the guardian peaks of the valley, leaving a wilderness of split granite and bottomless chasms, and time had overlaid the ruin with plant life grown far too large for the vertical rocks. The result reminded her vaguely of a Chinese painting, with full-size trees sprouting unconcernedly from the sides of cliffs. But this was messier, fouler, darker; here dead trunks had fallen to rot in gullies bristling with dead white spikes below the crumbly footing above. She could see Ingold's brown mantle shifting along impossibly narrow rock ledges high on the faces of those cliffs,

  Ingold saw her looking and paused, flattened to the rock behind him. "Come up," he called down to her, his voice echoing faintly among the rocks. "There's a trail."

  What the hell , Gil sighed. You only die once .

  Gil had never liked heights. Scrambling over the treacherous footing, she envied the wizard his six-foot staff, for in places the ledges narrowed to inches, and in others cascades of vines sprawled over the trail and masked any hint of the footing underneath. She found herself backtracking a dozen times, scrupulously avoiding looking up or down or anywhere but at her own scratched hands when a promising ledge petered out or a slit between two huge rock faces became too narrow to be passed, or too choked with rotting foliage that could house any number of creatures less Lovecraftian, but certainly as deadly, as the Dark. She wondered if there were rattlesnakes in this world-or, for that matter, poisonous snakes without rattles.

  She finally caught up with him in the mouth of a dark slit in the rocks, after a precipitous scramble around the convex face of a boulder on a ledge over a nightmare maw of tangled thorn and broken stone. She was sweating and gasping in the afternoon heat and fighting for balance on the sandy, crumbling ground. The shift of the sun over the backbone of the Rampart Range had thrown the chasm into deep shadow. Ingold was barely visible but for the pale blur of face and beard and the bright glitter of his eyes.

  "Very good, my dear," he greeted her mildly. "We shall make a mountain climber of you yet."

  "The hell you will," she gasped, and looked back down behind her. If there was any kind of trail she'd come up, she was damned if she could see it now.

  "We should be able to follow this chasm up toward the top of that ridge there," he went on, pointing. "Once over the ridge, we should be nearly to the snow line and, I believe, out of reach of the Dark for the time being. With luck, we should be able to pick up another trail on the other side that will lead us down to the Vale of Renweth, and hence to the Keep of Dare."

  Gil calculated the distance as well as she could in the deceptive clarity of the mountain air. They seemed to have climbed above the drifting haze of the valley; things seemed blindingly clear up here, and the slanting shadows altered the apparent positions of peak and ridge. "I don't think we'll make it by dark," she stated doubtfully.

  "Oh, I don't either," Ingold agreed. "But we can hardly spend the night in the valley."

  Gil sighed resignedly. "You have a point there."

  The wizard jabbed his staff cautiously at the loose rock hiding the foot of the trail, and a boulder curtsied perilously, sending a little stream of gravel and sand down across their feet and over the edge of the trail. Muttering to himself about the advisability of taking along a rope next time, coupled with imprecations against the unseen Raiders in the valley below, he began to scout cautiously for an alternate route. While he did so, Gil turned to look back over the cliff, appalled anew at the suicidal ascent she'd just made. Her gaze wandered to the valley below them and was held there by a queer, cold feeling of shock.

  "Ingold," she called quietly. "Come and lo
ok at this."

  Something in the note of her voice brought him scrambling and sliding to her side. "What is it?"

  She pointed. "Look. Look out there. What do you see?"

  Viewed from above and behind, the land wore a different aspect, the angle of the sunlight westering on the mountains changing the perspective of that darkness-haunted place. From here the symmetry was obvious, the nuclei of the long-overgrown woods lying in some kind of pattern whose geometry was just beyond the range of human comprehension, the stream beds following courses that held the echoes of perverted regularity. The clinging mats of the ubiquitous vines took on a curious appearance from this angle, the shifts in their color and thickness disquietingly suggestive. Almost directly below them the great rectangle of pavement lay, and its position relative to the anomalous mounds of black stone that thrust through the foliage became suddenly, shockingly, clear to a woman trained in the rudiments of archaeology.

  Ingold frowned, staring down at the distorted counterpane beneath them. "It's almost-almost as if there were a city here at one time. But there never was, not in human history." His eye and finger traced the mathematical obscenity of a curved shadow in the weeds, the queerly obtuse angles faintly visible in the half-hinted relationships between stream and stone. "What causes that? It's as if the vines grow thinner in places... "

  "Buried foundations," Gil softly replied. "From the looks of it, foundations so deeply buried that they leave barely a trace. The trees are more stunted on that line because their roots cannot go so deep. Look, see the line of that stream? And yet-" She paused, confused. "It looks so planned, so regular, but it's not like any city I've ever seen. There's a layout-you can see that in the angle of the sunlight-but the layout's all wrong."

  "Of course," the wizard said mildly. "There are no streets."

  Their eyes met. The meaning of this came to her slowly, like a whisper from incomprehensible gulfs of time.

  "Come," Ingold said. "This is no place for us to remain once the sun has gone in."

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Once they were out of the valley, the winds began, searingly cold, ripping at their grip on the precarious handholds with active malice. At times they were far over the timberline, scrambling perilously over goat trails slippery with old snow, at others working their way through knots of vegetation, or clinging for support to the wind-flayed roots of twisted acrobat trees, trusting to their strength over a sightless abyss. Gil and Ingold moved through a world whose only elements were cold, rock, wind, and the distant roaring of water, where they could not have stopped if they had wanted to, for there was nowhere to rest. Without the threads of witchlight Ingold had thrown to outline the ledges, Gil was certain they would not have survived the climb; even so, looking back on it later, she felt only a land of dull astonishment that she had done it at all.

  They slept, finally, in the crevices of the bare rock slopes, locked together for warmth; it was the first sleep Gil had had in close to forty hours. In the deeps of the night she felt the weather change and, in her dreams, smelled the far-off threat of snow.

  In the morning the going was easier, not much worse than a rough backpacking trip. By noon Ingold found the ghost of a trail-head and followed it down the sheer, tree-covered western face of the Rampart Range, to reach, by mid-afternoon, the cold, winding Vale of Renweth.

  Gil shaded her eyes and squinted into the long, bright distance. "What the hell?" The cold winds that snaked down the valley tore her breath away in rags and rippled in patterns like swift-pouring water over the knee-deep fjord of colorless grass. "What is it?"

  "It's the Keep of Dare." Ingold smiled, folding his arms to keep warm and shivering slightly in spite of it. "What did you expect?"

  Gil wasn't sure what she'd expected. Something smaller, anyway. Something more medieval. Not that trapezoidal monolith of black stone that rose, bone of the mountain's bone, on the great knoll at the foot of those distant dark-browed cliffs. Its roof was taller than the pine trees that grew on the ridge behind. Thin, powdery snow blew in clouds from the Keep's flat roof, but none lodged anywhere on its sides, which were as bare and smooth as unflawed glass.

  "Who the hell built that thing?" Gil whispered, awed. "How big is it?" She could believe, now, that in it humankind had withstood the Dark. The might of the Dark Ones, which could shatter stone and iron, would find this fortress impregnable. With a sense of surprise, she realized that there was, after all, a place of refuge in this dark and cold and terrible world into which she had been unwillingly cast.

  "Dare of Renweth built it," Ingold's voice said at her side, "using the last of the technology and power of the ancient Realms, power which is far beyond our means today. In it he sheltered those of his people who survived the first onslaught of the Dark, and from it he and his line ruled this valley and Sarda Pass and all that was left of an empire whose name, bounds, and nature have been utterly lost to human memory. As to how big it is-" He gazed into the distance, surveying the black monolith that guarded the twisting expanses of the valley beyond. "It is small. It can hold some eight thousand souls in some sort of comfort, and the valley can be cultivated to support almost twice that many. The records no longer exist, if they ever existed, as to how many it has actually sheltered at any one time."

  As they waded toward it through the champagne grass of the Vale, the thing seemed to grow in size, shadowless in the cold overcast of the day. Gil looked around her at the Vale as well, a walled series of upland meadows scattered with stands of aspen, birch, and cottonwood, their leaves glittering restlessly in the winds that whined down from the peaks above. There was a hard, bright beauty to the place, first heartland of the Realm and last, cradle and grave. Her bones ached, even muscles trained to the endurance of swordsmanship burning with the lingering effects of that tortuous climb.

  As a place to be cooped up in for years on end, she thought, it isn't bad. Still, familiar as she had been with petty neighborhood bitchery, she had recognized its seeds already in the gossip that even a twenty-four-hour state of crisis hadn't eliminated from the refugee train, and she saw where it would lead-a small town, cramped in an impenetrable fort with the same people, bound together year in and year out, and nowhere to go.

  "The Keep has stood a long time," Ingold said as they came at last to the roadway that led up past the Keep toward Sarda Pass, the same road where, miles below, Alwir led his people along in their quest for semi-mythical safety. "Yet the Runes of Power are still on the Keep doors, marked there by the wizards who helped in the building of the place-Yad on the left, and Pern on the right, the Runes of Guarding and Law. Only a wizard can see them, like a gleaming tracery of silver in the shadows. But after all this time, the spells of the builders still hold power."

  Gil turned her eyes from the towering masses of the mountains that rose, wall on wall of black, tree-enshrouded gorges cut with the distinct, shallow notch of Sarda Pass, to view again the looming shadow of the Keep. She could see nothing of the Runes, only great panels of iron, hinged and strapped in steel, and untouched for centuries.

  The great gates stood open. Waiting in their shade were the assembled members of the small garrison Eldor had sent down years before to ready the place as an eventual refuge, when Ingold had first spoken of the possibility of the rising of the Dark. The captain of the garrison, a petite blonde woman with the meanest eyes Gil had ever seen, greeted Ingold with deference and seemed unsurprised at the news that Gae had fallen and its refugees were but a few days off.

  "I feared it," she said, looking up at the wizard, her gloved fingers idling on the hilt of her sword. "We've had no messages from anywhere in over a week, and my boys report seeing the Dark Ones drifting along the head of the valley almost every night." She pursed her lips into a wry expression. "I'm only glad so many as you say got clear. I remember, when I was in Gae, people were laughing at you in the streets about your warnings, calling you an alarmist crackpot and making up little songs."

  Gil made a noise of indi
gnation in her throat, but Ingold laughed. "I remember that. All my life I wanted to be immortalized in ballads, but the poetry of the things was so bad that they were completely unmemorable."

  "And," the captain said cynically, "most of the people who made them up are dead."

  Ingold sighed. "I'd rather they were still alive to go on singing about what a fool I am, every day of my life," he said. "We'll be here the night. Can you feed us?"

  The captain shrugged. "Sure. We have stock... " She gestured to mazes of cottonwood-pole corrals that stretched out beyond the knoll, where a gaggle of horses and half a dozen milk cows stood rubbing their chins on the top rail of the fences, staring at the strangers with mild, stupid eyes. "We even have a still over in the grove there; some of the boys brew Blue Ruin out of gaddin bark and potatoes."

  Ingold shuddered delicately. "At tunes I see Alwir's point about the horrors of uncivilized existence." And he followed her up the worn steps to the gates.

  "By the way," the captain said as the other warriors of the garrison grouped up behind them, "we have Keep Law here."

  Ingold nodded. "I understand."

  They entered the Keep of Dare, and Gil was struck silent with awe.

  Outside, the Keep had been intimidating enough. Inside, it was crushing, frightening, dark, monstrous, and unbelievably huge; the footfalls of the Guards echoed in its giant sounding-chamber like the far-off drip of distant water, the torches they bore dwindling to fireflies. The monstrous architecture with its blending of naked planes had nothing to do with the gothic liveliness of Karst-nothing to do with human scale at all. The technology that had wrought this place out of stone and air was clearly far beyond anything else in this world or, Gil guessed, in her own. She gazed down the length of that endless central cavern, where the small bobbing candles of torchlight were reflected in the smooth black of the water channels in the floor, and shivered at the cold, the size, and the emptiness.