01 THE TIME OF THE DARK d-1

by Barbara Hambly

  After a little time she recovered enough to disengage the flask she wore at her belt, draw the stopper, and take a tentative sip-the stuff made white lightning taste like lemonade. "The captain at the Keep gave me this," she explained, passing it over.

  He took a drink without turning a hair. "I knew there was an ultimate reason in the cosmic scheme of things for you to accompany me," he said, and smiled through the ice in his beard. "Now that makes twice you've saved my life."

  Over their heads in the rocks, the roaring of the wind increased to a kind of cold, keening shriek, and a great gust of snow blew down on them. Gil drew herself closer to Ingold's side. "About how far above the Arrow are we now?"

  "Two or three miles. We would be able to see it, but for the winding of the road. That's what worries me, Gil; if they had passed the bridge in safety, we would have met them before this."

  "Might the storm have slowed them down?"

  "Possibly, But it won't really hit until about sundown. It would be suicide for them to stop now."

  "Can't you do anything about the storm?" she asked him suddenly. "Didn't you say once that wizards can call and dismiss storms?"

  He nodded. "And so we can," he replied, "if that is what we wish to do." As he spoke she noticed that, instead of gloves, he was wearing mittens-old and frayed now, like everything about him, but, by the intricacy of their design, clearly knitted for him by someone who cared very much for the old man. "We can send storms elsewhere, or call them to serve us-all except the ice storms of the plains, which strike without warning and make this-" He gestured at the whirling snow flurries. "-resemble a balmy spring breeze. But I think I pointed out to Rudy once, and I may have mentioned to you as well, that the Dark will not attack under a storm. So it may be that in doing nothing about the storm, we will be choosing the lesser of two evils."

  He rose to go, wrapping his muffler tighter around his neck and drawing his hood down to protect his face. He was helping Gil to her feet when they heard on the road below them the muffled clop of hooves and the jingling of bits, echoes thrown into the sheltered pocket of boulders and dried grass that a moment ago had hidden all sound of the troop's coming. Beyond the boulders, Gil saw them come into view, a weary straggle of refugees. She recognized, in the lead, the big, scarred man on a brown horse whose head drooped with exhaustion. She and Ingold exchanged one quick, startled glance. Then the wizard was off, scrambling down the rocks to the road, calling, "Tirkenson! Tomec Tirkenson!" The landchief straightened in his saddle and threw out his hand as a signal to halt

  Gil followed Ingold with more haste than seemliness down to the road. The landchief of Gettlesand towered over them in the leaden twilight, looking like a big, gaunt bandit at the head of his ragged troop of retainers. Glancing down the road, Gil could see that his followers-a great gaggle of families, a substantial herd of bony sheep and cattle, a gang of tough-looking hard-cases riding pointguard-were hardly a sixth of the main convoy.

  "Ingold," the landchief greeted them. He had a voice like a rock slide in a gravel pit and a face to match. "We were wondering if we'd run into you, Gilshalos," he greeted her with a nod.

  "Where did you leave the rest of the convoy?"

  Tirkenson grunted angrily, his light, saddle-colored eyes turning harsh. "Down by the bridge," he grumbled. "They're making camp, like fools."

  "Making camp?" The wizard was aghast "That's madness!"

  "Yes, well, who said they were sane?" the landchief growled. "I told them, get the people across and to hell with the wagons and the luggage, we can send back for that... "

  Ingold's voice was suddenly quiet. "What happened?"

  "Holy Hell, Ingold." The landchief rubbed a big hand over his face wearily. "What hasn't happened? The bridge came down. The main pylons went under the weight of those carts of Alwir's, took the whole kit and caboodle down with them-"

  "And the Queen?"

  "No." Tirkenson frowned, puzzling over it "She was afoot, for some reason, up at the head of the train. Walking with the Prince slung on her back, like any other woman. I don't know why-but I do know if she'd been in a cart, there would've been no saving her. So what's Alwir do but start salvaging operations, hauling the stuff up out of the gorge, and rigging rope pontoons across the river down below. Then the Bishop says she won't abandon her wagons, and they start breaking them down to carry them across in pieces, and half the people are cut off on one side of the river and half on the other, and squabbling about getting baggage and animals across, and before you know it, everybody's saying they'll settle there for the night. I tried to tell them they'd be froze blue by morning, sure as the ice comes in the north, but that pet conjurer of Alwir's, that Bektis, says he can hold off the storm, and by the time Alwir and the Bishop got done slanging one another, they said it was too late to go on anyway. So there they sit." He gestured disgustedly and leaned back into the cantle of his saddle.

  Ingold and Gil exchanged a quick look. "So you left?"

  "Oh- Hell," Tirkenson rumbled. "Maybe I should have stayed. But Alwir tried to commandeer that big wagon of the Bishop's, the one she's dragging the Church records in, and you never heard such jabber in your life. She threatened to excommunicate Alwir, and Alwir said he'd slap her in irons-you know how she is about these damn papers of hers-and people were taking sides, and Alwir's boys and the Red Monks were just about pulling steel over the argument. I told them they were crazy, with the camp split and the storm and the Raiders and the Dark all around them, and they got into it again about that, and I'd had enough. I got my people and whoever else wanted to come with us to Gettlesand and we pulled out. It might not have been the right thing to do, but staying another night in the open sure as hell looked like the wrong thing to do. We figure we can make the Keep before midnight."

  Ingold glanced briefly at the sky, as if able to read the time by the angle of an unseen sun above the roof of clouds. The sky was no longer gray but a kind of vile yellowish brown, and the snow smell was unmistakable. "I think you did right," he said at last. "We're going on down, and I'll try to talk them into moving on. You'll have to fight the weather before you reach the Vale, but if you can, get them to open the gates and build bonfires on both sides of them, frame them in fire, and guard them with every man in the train. With luck, we'll be there sometime tonight."

  "You'll need luck," the landchief grumbled. "I'll see you at the Keep." He raised his hand in the signal to go on. The train began to move like some great beast dragging itself along in the last stages of exhaustion. Tirkenson reined away from where Ingold and Gil stood, clicking encouragement to his tired horse. Then he paused and turned back, looking down on the two pilgrims in the frozen road.

  "One more thing," he said. "Just for your information. Watch out for the Bishop. She's got it around that you and Bektis are leagued with the Devil-and Alwir, too, just coincidentally by association, you understand-and she's got Hell's own support in the train. I never held with it-wizards trading their souls for the Power-but people are scared. They see Alwir's helpless. You might say the powers of this world are helpless. So if they're gonna die anyway, they're gonna die on the right side of the line. Stands to reason. But scared people will do just about anything."

  "Ah, but so will wizards." Ingold smiled. "Thank you for your warning. Good riding and a smooth road to you all."

  The landchief turned away, cursing his exhausted mount and threatening to rowel him to dogmeat if he didn't get a move on. Gil glanced from the big man's wicked, star-shaped spurs to the untouched flanks of the tired horse and knew, without quite knowing how, that Ingold's parting blessing had contained in it spells to avert random misfortune, to shake straight the tangled chains of circumstance, and to aid the landchief of Gettlesand and those under his loud-voiced and blasphemous care.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It was snowing in earnest when Gil and Ingold came within sight of the camp on the near bank of the Arrow. In the swirling grayness they could make out huddled shapes bunched around
the feeble yellow flickers of campfires, the dark milling of small herds of animals, the restless activity on the bank of the gorge, and the shadowy comings and goings around the broken bridge. Across the gorge more activity was visible, lights moving here and there around the farther camp, and the distant threnody of bleating goats and a child's wailing cries drifting on the intermittent veering of the wind. Between the two camps lay the gorge, a sheer-cut chasm of darkness, filled with the greedy roaring of the river. On either bank of the gorge, great tongues of broken stone thrust out over the void.

  "How deep is the gorge at that point?" Gil asked, squinting through the blurring gusts of snow.

  "About forty feet. It's a difficult climb down the side and up again, but the water itself isn't very deep. As you can see, they've swum most of the stock."

  Ingold pointed to where three men were driving a small herd of pigs up the trail. "From what you told me of your dream, it would seem that the Dark weakened the central pillars of the bridge, so that they gave way under the weight of the wagons-as pretty an attempt at murder as you're likely to see. And even though the attempt failed, Prince Tir is stranded in camp on the banks of the river tonight, cut off from most of the convoy, with the camp in confusion. Either way, the Dark could hardly have missed."

  Leaning on his staff, he started down the steep slope toward the fires.

  Rudy met them on the outskirts of camp. "What did you find?" he asked them.

  As they made their way through the dark chaos toward Alwir's massive tent, Gil filled him in on the valley of the Dark, Renweth, the Keep, and what Tomec Tirkenson had said. In the end, she asked, "Why wasn't Alde in her wagon?"

  "I talked her out of it," Rudy said. "I had a bad feeling they'd try something tonight, but I never thought about anything happening by daylight. We were only a couple feet in front of the section of the bridge that went."

  "And you still believe in coincidence," Ingold chided reprovingly. "I'm surprised at you."

  "Well," Rudy admitted, "not as much as I used to."

  Alwir's was one of the few tents left in the tram. It was pitched in the lee of some trees, out of the wind; in the darkening of the late afternoon, yellow lights could already be seen glowing within. Gil could make out a confusion of voices coming from it, Bishop Govannin's harsh halfwhisper, and now and then Bektis' light, mellifluous tenor.

  "... full ferocity of the storm is by no means upon us," the sorcerer was saying sententiously. "Nor will it be, for I will turn its force aside and keep it over the mountains to the north until such time as we can come to the Keep."

  "Turn it aside?" Govannin rasped. "Have you been to the camp across the river, my lord wizard? They are half-buried in the snow there and freezing."

  "Yet we cannot go on tonight," Alwir said and added, with smooth malice, "We have too few carts and horses to make good speed. What must be carried, must be carried on the backs of men. And if they will not rid themselves of what is useless... "

  "Useless!" the Bishop spat. "Useless to those who would dispose of all precedents for the legal position of the Church, perhaps. Mere technicalities to those who would rather forget their existence."

  Alwir protested, as sanctimonious as a preacher, "God's Church is more than a pile of mildewed paper, my lady. It lies in the hearts of men."

  "And in the hearts of the faithful it will always remain," she agreed dryly. "But memory does not lie in the heart, nor does law. Men and women have fought and died for the rights of the Church, and the only record of those rights, the only fruit of those spent lives, is in those wagons. I will not leave that to perish in the snow at the mere word of a baby King's running-dog."

  Ingold pushed aside the flap of the tent. Beyond him, Gil saw Alwir's face change and stiffen into a mask of silver, barred and streaked with ugly shadow, the mouth made of iron. The Chancellor lurched to his feet, his head brushing the bottom of the single hanging lamp, towering over the slight scarlet figure of the Bishop with clenched fist; for a moment it seemed that he might strike her where she sat. But she only looked up at him with flat black eyes, emotionless as a shark's, and waited in triumph for the blow to fall.

  "My lord Alwir!" Hoarse and unmistakable, the voice cut like a referee's whistle between them, breaking the tension with an almost audible snap. They both turned, and Ingold inclined his head respectfully. "My lady Bishop," he finished his greeting.

  Just perceptibly, the Bishop's taut body settled back into her chair. Alwir placed his fist upon his hip, rather than visibly unclench it at another man's word. "So you decided to come back," the Chancellor said.

  "Why did you make camp?" Ingold asked without preamble.

  "My dear Ingold," the Chancellor soothed, "as you can see, it has begun to grow dark... "

  "That," Ingold said acidly, "is what I mean. You could have pushed on, to reach the Keep sometime tonight, or gone back across the river, to be with the main body of the convoy. Isolated on this side of the river, you're nothing but bait."

  Patiently, Alwir said, "We have, as you may have noticed, a temporary bridge, across which we are slowly bringing the rest of the convoy, as well as sufficient troops to deal with any emergency that may arise in the night."

  "You think the Dark couldn't deal with that as easily as they deal with solid oak doors? As easily as they dealt with the stone pillars of the original bridge?"

  "The Dark had nothing to do with that," Alwir said rather sharply.

  "You think not?"

  Bektis' long fingers toyed with a huge solitaire cat's-eye he wore on his left hand. "You cannot pretend it anymore," he said rather pettishly. "You are not the only mage in the train, my lord Ingold, and I, too, have cast my powers of far-seeing here and there in the mountains. The only Nest that was ever in these parts was blocked with stone long ago, and you yourself know that we have felt no threat of the Dark since we have come to the high country." He raised heavy white lids and stared from under them at Ingold, defiance, resentment, and spite mingling in his dark, burning eyes.

  "So they have made it appear," Ingold replied slowly. "But I have come from that Nest and I tell you that it lies open."

  "And is this another of those things," the Bishop asked dryly, folding her fingers before her on the table, like a little pile of ivory spindles, "for which yours is the only word?"

  Lamplight glittered in the melting snow on his shoulders as he turned toward her. "It is. But there are things, like the commandments of God, which we must all take upon trust, my lady. Surely you yourself know that we have only one man's word on the true means of salvation and that those means are not what a reasonable man would logically conclude. For now mine-and, incidentally, Gil's-must be the only word you have that the Dark are in that valley, that they have held back from the train deliberately, and that they have broken the bridge in order to kill the Prince or isolate him on this side of the river."

  Govannin opened her mouth to speak, then shut it again thoughtfully.

  Ingold went on. "They will never allow Tir, with what he could become and the secrets he may hold, to reach the Keep. The storm has given us our chance, and I suggest that we take it and push on now, tonight, under its cover to the Keep."

  "Cover?" Alwir swung around to face him, his voice jeering. "Shroud, you mean. We'll freeze to death... "

  "You'll freeze just as quickly here," Ingold pointed out.

  Piqued, Bektis announced primly, "I am quite capable of holding off such a storm as this... "

  "And the Dark as well?" Ingold retorted.

  The sorcerer stared at him for a moment, hatred in his narrow face, and a watery flush of red crept up under his white cheeks.

  Without waiting for his reply, Ingold said, "Nor could I. There are limits to all power."

  "And to all endurance," the Bishop said imperturbably. "And I for one will not be stampeded by fear, like a sheep into the shambles. We can weather this storm and push on in the daylight."

  "And if the storm does not break until this time
tomorrow?"

  Alwir leaned a kid-gloved hand on the back of his carved chair. "Don't you think you're putting too much importance on this storm? I am agreeable to whatever may be voted, provided I can find cartage for the effects of the government... "

  Govannin's eyes blazed. "Not at the cost of-"

  "Don't be a pair of fools." The words were spoken quietly as the white embroidery of the tent-curtains rippled, and a girl stood framed in gleaming silk against the shadows of the room beyond. Minalde's face was very white against the raven blackness of her unbound hair. She was wrapped for warmth in a star-decorated quilt, holding Tir against her under its folds. The child's eyes, wide and wandering in fascination over the lamplit ulterior of the tent, were a jewel-blue echo of his mother's and of Alwir's own.

  "You are both acting like fools," she went on in a low voice. "The tide is rising, and you are arguing about who will be the first one into the boat."

  Alwir's aristocratic nostrils flared in annoyance, but he only said, "Minalde, go back to your room."

  "I will not," she replied in that same quiet voice.

  "This is none of your affair." His was the voice of a man to a recalcitrant child.

  "It is my affair." She kept her words soft, but Alwir and Rudy both stared at her, more astonished than if she had burst forth into colorful profanity. All the breath went out of Alwir as if she'd kicked him; he had obviously never even considered that his gentle and acquiescent little sister would defy him. Rudy, who remembered how she'd shoved a torch into his face on the haunted stairs at Karst, was less surprised.

  "Tir is my son," she continued. "Your stubbornness could get him killed."

  The Chancellor's impassive face flushed; he looked ready to tell her to mind her tongue before her elders and betters. But she was, after all, Queen of Darwath.

  "If what my lord Ingold says is true," he said.

  "I believe him," she said. "And I trust him. And I will go on with him to the Keep tonight, if I go alone."