01 THE TIME OF THE DARK d-1

by Barbara Hambly

  "How was this place built?" she whispered, and the chamber picked up her voice and sighed her words to every corner of that towering hall. "What a shame it couldn't have been the chief architect's memory that got passed on, as well as the Kings'."

  "It is," Ingold said, his voice, too, ringing family in the unseen vaults of the ceiling. "But heritable memory is not governed by choice-indeed, we have no idea what does govern it." He moved like a shadow at Gil's side, following the diminishing torches. Gazing around her, Gil could see, as far as the torchlight reached, that the towering walls of the central hall were honeycombed with dark little doorways, rank on rank of them, joined sometimes by stone balconies, sometimes by rickety catwalks that threaded the wall like the webs of drunken or insane spiders. Those dark little doors admitted onto a maze of cells, stairways, and corridors, whose haphazard windings were as dark as the labyrinths below the earth.

  "As to how it was built-Lohiro of Quo, the Master of the Council of Wizards, has made a study of the skill of that time from such records that survived, and he says that the walls were wrought and raised by magic and machinery both. The men of those days had skills far beyond our own; we could never create something like this."

  They crossed a narrow bridge over one of the many straight channels that led water from pool to pool down the length of the echoing hall. Gil paused for a moment on the railless span, looking down into the swift, black current below. "Was that why he made such a study?" she asked softly. "Because he knew the skill might be needed again?"

  Ingold shook his head. "Oh, no, that was years ago. Like all wizards, Lohiro seeks understanding for its own sake-for his own amusement, as it were. Sometimes I think that is all wizardry is-the lust for knowledge, the need to understand. All the rest-illusion, shape-craft, the balance of the minds and elements around us, the ability to save or change or destroy the world-are mere incidentals, and come after that central need."

  "The trouble with this," Ingold grumbled much later, after they had shared the meager supper of the Guards and been shown to a tiny cell next to those of the garrison, "is that I can only look for what I know. It's absolutely useless for what I don't know." He glanced across at Gil, the pinlight-sparkle of triangular lights thrown by his scrying crystal scattering like stars across the roughness of his scarred face. They had kindled a small fire on the tiny hearth to take the chill off the cell. To Gil's surprise, no smoke came into the room itself-the place must be ventilated like a high-rise. Her respect for its builders increased.

  Ingold had sat watching the crystal for some time now. Gil, fortified with porridge and warmth, was sitting with her back to the corner, meticulously sharpening her dagger in the manner the Icefalcon had shown her, sleepy and content in the wizard's presence. From the first, she had felt that she had always known him. Now it was impossible to conceive of a time when she had not. She held the blade up critically to the light and tested it with an inexperienced thumb. For all the terror she had undergone, for all the burden of constant physical weariness and the unending pain in her half-healed left arm, for all her exile from the only world she had known and the only thing she had ever truly wanted to do, she realized that there were compensations. She never felt the weight of her exile when she was with him.

  And soon he'd be gone. She'd be here for endless weeks while he pursued his solitary quest across the plains to Quo, in search of the wizards, his friends, the only group of people who really understood him. She wondered what he would find there. She wondered, with a chill, if he'd even return.

  He will, she told herself, looking across at the old man's still profile and calm, intent eyes. He's tough as an old boot and slippery as a snake. He'll make it back all right, and the other wizards with him.

  She shifted the ball of her wadded-up cloak a little more comfortably behind her aching shoulders and blinked out at the room. After last night's trek over the bare backbone of the world, even a watch fire by the road would have looked good; this nine-by-seven cell in which she could hardly stand was a little corner of Paradise.

  The place, viewed by more critical eyes, would have been called dingy; the warm gold of the firelight probing into the cracks of the rough-plastered walls and flagged floor cruelly revealed the unevenness, the shoddy workmanship, the patina of stains and soot-blackening, and the dents and scratches of hundreds of generations of continuous habitation and a thousand years of neglect. The cell would be awfully crowded for a family, Gil reflected. Unbidden to her mind leaped Rudy's picture of his own boyhood home, shrill with the bickering of acrimonious female voices. She grinned as she wondered what the incidence of sibling murder had been in the Keep's heyday.

  The shadows by the fire shifted as Ingold put aside his crystal and lay down across the other end of the room, drawing his mantle over him as a blanket. Gil prepared to do likewise, asking him as she did so, "Could you see the convoy?"

  "Oh, yes. They're settling in for the night, under double guard. I don't see any sign of the Dark. Incidentally, the crystal shows the Nest in the valley of the Dark as being still blocked."

  "They like that, don't they?" Gil drew her cloak over her, watching the changing patterns of flame and shadow playing across the rickety wall that had long ago partitioned this cell off from a larger one. Her thoughts idled over the world enclosed within those narrow walls, over the great black monolith of the Keep, guarding its darkness, its silence, its secrets-secrets that had been forgotten even by Ingold, even by Lohiro, Archmage of all the wizards in the world. Those dark, heavy walls held only darkness within.

  She rolled over onto her side and propped her head on her arm. "You know," she said dreamily, "this whole place-it's like your description of the Nests of the Dark."

  Ingold opened his eyes. "Very like," he agreed.

  "Is that what we've come to?" she asked. "To living like them, to be safe from them?"

  "Possibly," the wizard assented sleepily. "But one might then ask why the Dark Ones live as they do. And when all else is considered, here we are, safe; and so we shall remain, as long as the gates are kept shut at night." He rolled over. "Go to sleep, Gil."

  Gil bunked up at the reflection of the fire, thinking about that for a moment. It occurred to her that if once the Dark came into this place, the safety here would turn to redoubled peril. In the walls of the Keep was lodged eternal darkness, like the mazes of night at the center of the earth, which no sunrise could ever touch. She said uneasily, "Ingold?"

  "Yes?" There was a hint of weariness in his voice.

  "What was the Keep Law that the captain talked about? What did that have to do with our spending the night here?"

  Ingold sighed and turned his head toward her, the dying firelight doing curious things to the lines and scars of his face. "Keep Law," he told her, "states that the integrity of the Keep is the ultimate priority; above life, above honor, above the lives of family or loved ones. Anything that does not require the presence of human beings after dark is left outside the gates, and when the gates are shut at night, it is, and always must be, the ruling of the Keep that no one will pass them until sunrise. In ancient days the penalty for opening the doors-on any excuse whatsoever-between the setting and the rising of the sun was to be chained between the pillars that used to surmount the little hill that faces the doors across the road, to be left there at night for the Dark. Now go to sleep."

  This time he must have laid a spell on the words, for Gil fell asleep at once, and the wizard's words followed her down into the darkness of her dreams,

  The Dark hunted. She could feel them, sense them, sense the dark shifting of movement through spinning, primordial blackness, the vague stirrings in unspeakable chasms that light had never touched. Groggily, through a leaden fog of sleep, Gil tried to remember where she was-the Keep, Dare's Keep. Fleeting, tangled images came to her of slipping through nighted corridors and converging on a chosen prey. She could sense that eyeless, waiting malevolence, smell, as they smelled, the hot pulse of blood, and sense, th
rough the thick gloom of vibrating, purple darkness, the glow of the prey, the centerpoint of a whirling vortex of lust and hate... But it wasn't the closeness of the Keep at all that surrounded her, but wind, utter bone-piercing cold, the roaring of water among pillars of stone, the white surge and fleck of spray, and the freezing touch of the air above the flood. Greedy power gnawed at stone, greedy minds counted out glowing beads on a four-mile chain of tangled sleep and laughed with a gloating laughter that never emerged to sound.

  Her eyes snapped open, and sweat drenched her face at the memory of that gloating laughter. She whispered, "Ingold... " almost afraid to make a sound, for fear they might hear.

  The wizard was already awake, his white hair tousled with sleep, his eyes alert, as if he listened for some distant sound that Gil could not hear. A dim blue ball of witchlight hung above his head; the fire in the cell had long grown cold. "What is it?" he asked her gently. "What did you dream?"

  She drew a deep breath, grasping at the fast-fading rags of sensation, of things she'd heard and smelled. "The Dark... "

  "I know," he said softly. "I felt it, too. What? And where?"

  She sat up, drawing her cloak around her shoulders, as if that would still her shivering. "I don't know where it was," she said, a little more calmly. "There was water rushing, and-stone-hewn stone, I think, pillars. They were tearing pieces of stone out of pillars, throwing them into rushing water-and-and laughing. They know where Tir is, Ingold," she added, her voice low and urgent.

  He came across the room to her and put an arm around her shoulders for comfort, though for her the worst was past. His voice was grim as he said, "So do I. He's with his mother, half a day's journey below the stone bridge that crosses the gorge of the Arrow River."

  Somewhere above the inky overcast, the sky might have been lightening, preparatory to the breaking of day; but if so, Rudy Solis could see little indication of it. The canyon through which the road at this point wound was like a black wind tunnel, the smell of the wind strong and somehow earthy, its sound like the roar of the sea in the pines above the road. He prowled restlessly through the rousing camp, unable to account for his uneasiness, threading through little knots of bundled-up fugitives huddled around their breakfast fires, making his way almost subconsciously back to the wagons he had stealthily quitted before the camp was astir.

  The fires there had been built up and threw an uneasy flickering glow over the camp. Alde was awake, feeding Tir on bread soaked in milk in the little island of shelter at the back of her wagon. On the other side of the fire, a handful of troopers of the House of Bes were wolfing down their meager rations in silence. Farther out among the wagons, another woman, a servant of the household, was ordering two small children about as she fed a baby smaller than Tir, while her husband fed the ox teams in sullen silence. Overhead, the banners cracked like bullwhips in the icy stream of the wind.

  Rudy shook his head and grinned down at Alde, leaning his shoulder against the uprights that supported the wagon's roof. "You know, what amazes me about this trip is how many kids have survived. You see them all over the camp. Look at that one there. He looks as if the first stiff wind would blow him away."

  "It's a she," Alde replied calmly, watching the child in question playing tag with herself under the feet of the wagon teams. The little girl's mother saw what she was doing and called her back to the fire with a screech like a parrot's, and the child, with the sublime unconcern of those who have only recently learned to walk, came running happily back out of danger, arms open, a treasury of broken straws in her hands.

  Rudy reached out to stroke Tir's downy hair absentmindedly. He'll grow up like that, he found himself thinking. Learning to run in the dark labyrinth of the Keep of Dare, learning swordsmanship from the Guards... Strange to think of Alde and Tir going on living for years in that fortress Rudy had never seen, long after he was gone.

  If they make it there. And he shivered, not entirely from the cold.

  "And it isn't so unusual," Minalde went on, a glimmer of timid mischief in her blue eyes. "If you've noticed, it isn't the women and children who sit down by the roadside and die. If a wagon breaks down, the man will moan and despair-the woman will start pushing. Watch sometime."

  "Oh, yeah?" he said, suspicious that she was baiting him.

  She gave him a sidelong, teasing glance. "Seriously, Rudy. Women are tougher. They have to be, to protect the children."

  He remembered the wind-stirred gallery at Karst, the flutter of the white dress of a girl who was running down the hall in darkness. "Aaah-" he conceded ungraciously, and she laughed.

  More children eddied into the circle of the fire, the gaggle of camp orphans with the slim young girl they'd taken as their guardian carrying the youngest in her arms. The girl and the servant woman stopped to speak. Seeing them together, Rudy was reminded of the way he'd seen Alde and Medda that first day on the terrace of the villa at Karst.

  A new thought crossed his mind, and he frowned suddenly. "Alde?" She looked up quickly, getting milk all over her fingers. "How do the Dark Ones know who Tir is?"

  Slim brows drew together in thought. "I don't know," she said, startled by the question. "Do they?"

  "Yeah. They went after him at Karst, anyway, and at Gae. There were beaucoup kids in the villa at Karst. As far as they should have known, he could have been any one of them. But they were right on the spot outside his nursery."

  She shook her head, puzzled, the cloak of her unbound hair slipping across her shoulders. "Bektis!" she called out, seeing the tall figure crossing the camp to his own wagons.

  He came forward and gave her a gracious bow. "My lady pleases?"

  The Sorcerer of the Realm didn't look any the worse for two weeks in the open; like Alwir, he was fastidious to the point of foppishness, and there wasn't so much as an untoward wrinkle in his billowing gray robe.

  Rudy broke in. "How do the Dark Ones know where to find Tir? I mean, they haven't got eyes, they can't tell he looks different or anything. Why do they know to come after him?"

  The sorcerer hesitated, giving the matter weighty consideration-probably, Rudy guessed, to cover the fact that he was stumped. At length he said, "The Dark Ones have a knowledge that is beyond human ken." He is stumped. "Perhaps my lord Ingold could have told you, had he not chosen this time to disappear. The sources of the knowledge of the Dark-"

  Rudy cut him off. "What I'm getting at is this. Do the Dark Ones really know it's Tir, or are they just going after any kid in a gilded cradle? If Alde went on foot with the kid in her arms, like every other woman in this train, wouldn't she be safer than being stuck in the wagon?"

  Bektis looked down his long nose at this grimy upstart outlander who, he had been informed, had presumed to show signs of being mageborn. "Perhaps," he said loftily, "were we presently in any danger from the Dark. Yet it has been noted that no alarm of their presence has occurred since we reached the high ground... "

  "Oh, come on! You saw how well that high ground stuff worked at Karst!"

  "... and," the sorcerer grated, with an edge to his high, rather light voice, "I have seen in an enchanted crystal the only Nest of the Dark known in these mountains, and I assure you that it is blocked, as it has been blocked for centuries. Naturally my lady may do as she pleases, but for reasons of her own comfort and health, and on account of her state and prestige, I doubt that my lord Alwir will permit my lady to walk in the back of the train like a common peasant woman." Turning on his heel, the old man stalked back toward his wagon, his fur cape swirling behind him like a thundercloud.

  Minalde sat in unhappy silence for a time, rocking her child against her breast as if to protect him from unseen peril. Distantly, the sounds of the camp's breaking came to them, the braying of mules and the creak of harnesses, the splash and hiss of doused fires. Somewhere quite close, voices raised in anger, Alwir's controlled and cutting as a lash, and after, the dry, vituperative hiss of Bishop Govannin's.

  Alde sighed. "They're at it ag
ain." She kissed Tir's round little forehead, following up the mark of affection with a businesslike check of the state of his diaper, and proceeded to tuck him up in his multiple blankets again; the morning seemed to be growing colder instead of warmer. "They say we should reach the Keep tonight," she went on in a low voice, excluding from hearing any but the man who stood beside her in the shadows of the wagon. "Sometimes it has seemed that we'd travel forever and never reach the place. So Bektis is probably right."

  Rudy leaned his elbow on the wagon-tail. "You think so?"

  She didn't reply. Beyond, there was the clatter of trace-chains and the sound of troopers talking casually among themselves as they harnessed the oxen. "Will we reach the Keep in daylight, or will we have to push on after sundown?"

  Her hands paused in their restless readying of the wagon for travel. In a low voice she said, "After sundown, I think."

  Ingold slumped back exhaustedly against a boulder and rested his elbows on his drawn-up knees. "I am very much afraid, my dear," he said tiredly, "that we are not going to make it."

  Gil, who for the last several hours had been aware of very little beyond the form of the wizard, who had always seemed to be walking farther and farther ahead of her, could only nod. The little bay among the rocks above the road where they had taken shelter offered no protection from the increasing cold, but at least they were out of the wind. They had fought the wind all day, and, like a wolf, it had torn at their cloaks and mauled their exposed faces with savage violence. Gil could sense on it now the smell of the storm moving down from the glaciers on the high peaks. Even in this comparative shelter, hard bits of mealy snow had begun to fly. It was now late afternoon; there was no chance, she knew, of reaching the Arrow Gorge before the convoy did. Whatever the Dark Ones had done to the bridge there, it was beyond her power or Ingold's to warn the people of it.