Barbara Hambly - 01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

Ingold smiled. "You're wise," he said. "You two alone have the option to leave this world. With what will come, believe me, you are to be envied." And he was gone, moving up the long stairway as lightly as if he hadn't been without sleep for two nights, and was swallowed by the shadows at the top.

The first sensation in Gil's mind, as she stepped from the dark slot of the postern door into soft pearl daylight and bone-chilling morning cold, was relief. She had made it, somehow, through the bizarre terrors of the night; she had lived to see dawn. She could not remember when she had ever taken such conscious pleasure in simple daylight.

The second sensation was dismay. As she came out on the top step, the noise and stink hit her like a wall. People were quarreling, arguing, yelling at the tops of their voices, demanding where food could be found, squabbling over the possession of ragged and frightened animals, and clustering in an arm-waving group around the doorways of buildings already jammed to the rafters with refugees demanding admittance; others were milling around the half-drained town fountain, bickering over water in voices sharp with the anger bred of fear. The growing light showed Gil faces pale and taut, wary eyes shifting like those of rats. They were physically and mentally angling for a toehold of position in this slipping world. The ice-breeze of the mountains bore on its cold breath the drifting stench of untended waste.

Jesus, Gil thought, appalled, they're setting themselves up for cholera, plague... you name it. How much do these people know about sanitation and disease anyway?

And her third sensation, as she stood shivering at the top of the steps in the biting cold, was ravenous hunger. She gave the matter some thought. The Commander of the Guards seemed to be on Ingold's side, and could probably be talked into giving her something to eat on the basis of her connection with the wizard. She made her way down the steps, having to pick her path around a middle-aged man in soiled broadcloth who seemed to have set up camp on the lowest step with every intention of staying there, to where half a dozen men and women in the black uniform of the City Guards were readying the transport carts to join the convoy to Gae. They were evidently under the command of a tall young man with ivory-blond braids that hung to his waist, who was currently engaged in a heated argument with a knot of civilians in dirty homespun. The chief of the civilians was shaking his head emphatically, the Guard gesturing to the mob in the square. As she came close, he dismissed the men in disgust and swung around to face her, regarding her from under colorless brows with eyes as light and cold as polar ice.

"Can you drive?" he demanded.

"A horse?" Gil asked, startled, her mind going to cars.

"I don't mean geese. If you can't drive, will you lead on foot? Or ride the bloody thing. I don't care."

"I can ride," Gil told him, suddenly aware of why she was being asked. "And I don't fear the Dark."

"You're a fool, then." The captain stared down at her, those haughty white-blond brows drawing slightly together as he took in her alien clothes. But he said nothing of it, only turned to call to a grizzle-haired woman in a shabby black uniform. "Seya! Get this one a cart with riding reins." He turned back to Gil. "She'll take care of you." Then, as Gil started to go with Seya, he asked, "Can you fight?"

Gil stopped. "I've never used a sword."

"Then if we're ambushed, for God's sake stay out of the way of those who can." He turned away, calling out orders to someone else, as concise and cold as a hunting cat. The woman Seya came up to Gil, wry amusement on her deeplined face, her sword slapping at her soft booted feet.

"Don't let him fret you," she said, glancing after his slim, retreating figure. "He'd put the High King himself to driving a cart if we were short, with never a by-your-leave. There, look."

Gil followed the gesture of the woman's hand and saw Janus and Ingold standing in the middle of the ruckus at the foot of the steps, surrounded by quarreling drivers, gesturing Guards, and rickety carts. The tall captain was talking to them, gazing down the length of his aristocratic nose. Janus looked shocked, Ingold amused. The wizard swung himself up into the nearest cart, settled down on the driver's seat, and gathered the reins into his hands as deftly as a coachman.

The sun cleared the spiky peaks in the east as they were leaving the last houses of Karst behind them, brightening the scene without dispersing the white mist lying so thickly among the trees. Gil was mounted uncomfortably on the narrow harness-saddle of a fat roan, drawing a cart close to the head of the convoy. She could see that most of the vehicles in town had been commandeered, far more than could be provided with civilian drivers who were willing to return to the haunted city of Gae. Many were driven by Guards, and a thin, straggling line of them walked on either side of the train-men and women both, she saw, mostly young, though there were gray or balding heads visible up and down the line as well. They moved restlessly, and she could see the marks of strain and exhaustion clearly on their faces. These were the fighters who had borne the brunt of the defense of Gae.

As the light grew, Gil could make out little camps of refugees in the woods, straggling out along the road and far back among the trees. There were refugees on the road, too, men and women in wrinkled and dirty clothes, carrying awkward bundles of blankets and cooking pots on their backs, pushing makeshift wheelbarrows, or dragging crude travois. Now and then a man would be leading a donkey, or a woman drawing an unwilling cow at the end of a rope. Mostly they did not stop and gave only scant attention to the winding file of carts and their ragged line of escorts. They were too weary with flight and fear to have any thought but for the refuge ahead.

Eventually, the road dipped and bent. Beyond the thin screen of brown-leaved trees, Gil felt the wind freshen and change. She looked up to see the land fall away on one side of the road, to show her the city of Gae.

Recognition caught at her heart. It lay in the distance, surrounded by its many walls, held in the crook of the river's arm, facing out across a plain turned tawny gold with autumn and latticed with the white of the city roads. It was almost as if she had lived there, walked those close-angled streets, and known from childhood that skyline of turrets and branches. Against the morning sky, six spires of stone rose up, flying buttresses bereft of the walls they had supported, stretching like the bony fingers of a skeleton hand into the whiteness of the air.

"The trees are bare," a man's light, breathless voice said beside her. "In summer it was a garden."

She looked down. By her knee, pacing with the jogging of the cart, walked the pale-haired captain, his eyes reflecting the flat white light of the sky. She said, "I know."

The light eyes shifted back to her face. "You're Ingold's far traveler."

She nodded. "But I've been in Gae."

Again there were no questions, only a docketing of information in his mind. He was spare and loose-boned; in the mingling shadows of the trees, she saw that he was younger than she'd first supposed-in his early twenties, possibly a few years younger than she was. It was the toughness, the sheath of self-sufficiency, that aged him-that and the long wrinkles scored by weather around his pale eyes. After a moment he said, "I am called the Icefalcon of the Guards."

"My name is Gil," she said, ducking as they passed beneath the overhanging branches of a huge oak. Gae was lost to them once more behind the woods of rust and silver and opal mist. The sound of the cart wheels mingled with the crackle of the dead leaves underfoot.