Barbara Hambly - 01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

"In the old language of the Wath, gil means ice," he said absently. "Gil-shahs-a spear of ice, an icicle. I had a hunting hawk by that name once."

Gil looked down at him curiously. "Then your own name would be-Gil-something-or-other."

He shook his head. "In the language of my people, we call the icefalcon Nyagchilios, Pilgrim of the Sky. Why did you come with us?"

"Because you ordered me to," Gil replied.

The Icefalcon raised colorless eyebrows. But he did not ask further, and she could not have answered if he had done so. She only knew that she had felt drawn to these calm and competent warriors; asked to join them, she could not have stayed away.

They broke from the woods and came down out of the foothills, riding through the lion-colored grasses of the plain as if swimming in a lake of soft, blown gold, the sun small and remote in a colorless morning sky. They passed more refugees, straggling family or neighborhood groups, wretched single men and women carrying the last of their possessions on their backs, confused gangs of children, the older herding the younger like geese. The edges of the road were scattered with the flotsam of flight-books, bedding, and in one place a silver bird cage, dainty as lace, on whose open door-frame a pink, ornamental finch sat chirping fearfully in the sky-wide freedom of the winds. The Icefalcon pointed out Trad's Hill, the round promontory in the middle of the golden plain, crowned with its lichened cross, but Gil's eyes went past it to the walls of Gae. She saw towers mounting spire on shattered spire, arch and corbel and crenelations as fine as hand-tooled miniatures, with woven trellises of bare branches, and above it all, the broken, arching ribs of the buttresses that were all that remained of the Palace.

And as surely as she knew her name, Gil knew that somewhere in that city there was a square whose steps were guarded by statues of malachite, where bronze doors lay broken among the rubble. Somewhere was a vault with the red porphyry Stair, an odd slab in the smooth basalt of the floor, and a shadow-crowded archway into an empty and ruined street. Cold wind stung her chapped hands on the duty leather of the riding reins; the jog of the slow-moving cob between her knees and the squeal of cart wheels came like elements of waking into an uncertain world of dreams; and with them came the mellow, rusty voice that floated back along the line of march, like a breath of mist on the wind, talking with the Commander of the Guards.

Gae stank of death. Gil had not been prepared for it, and it took her by the throat like a strangler's hand. Her otherworld life had encompassed enough bus stations, rock concerts, and weekends in the desert to have in some measure inured her to the stench of Karst, but the fetor that hung like a cloud over the ruined city was the miasma of rot, dead rot that her world was wont to hide or incinerate.

The streets lay empty to the sunlight, the echoes of hooves and booted feet and the creaking wheels of the carts ringing back off bare walls. House after house bore signs of burning-caved-in upper storeys, charred timbers jutting like the broken ribs of picked carcasses, barricaded doors and windows with the telltale crawling of soot reaching halfway up the walls above them. Gil saw how some of the walls had been broken inward; in other places, little slides of rubble spewed down into the street, mixed with stripped, rat-chewed bones. The hollow shadows rustled with the suggestion of a rodent population released from its old war with man and gorged on the spoils of victory. From the tops of broken walls, wild scrawny cats watched them with mad eyes. Gil held the short riding reins of her fat carthorse and tried not to be sick.

"Three days ago it was going," a man's soft voice said beside her, and she almost jumped. "And now it is gone." Ingold had drawn up his cart next to her, blinking in the sharp changes of the barred and broken sunlight.

Something unwholesome rustled and flicked out of sight behind a garden wall. Gil shivered, feeling unclean. "You mean the city?"

"In a sense." A branch cracked under the wheels. The Icefalcon, scouting alongside, turned sharply at the sound. Gil could see they all felt it, all sensed the foulness of those buzzing, crawling streets. What must it be, she wondered, to be coming back now, after having known it, grown up with it, as it was?

Her eye traveled slowly down the broken lines of a graceful colonnade that bordered the street, picking out sophisticated motifs of mathematics and flowers, the gaiety and balance of its multiple interwoven friezes. She remembered again the furnishings of Tir's nursery, museum pieces of inlaid ivory and ebony. All that was rich and beautiful of this civilization, all the good things that could be had, could once have been found here. She turned her horse's head a little to avoid the black ruin of a doorway in which the body of a woman lay sprawled in shadow, one gnawed white arm trailing limply in the sun, diamonds sparkling on the wrist among crawling flies.

Even for those who had survived, there was no going back. She wondered if the people up at Karst had realized this yet.

Ingold did. She saw it in the hard set of his mouth, in the line of pain that had appeared between his brows. Janus did. The Commander of the Guards looked white and ill; but beyond that, strange on a pug face that would look more at home above a Coors T-shirt and a six-pack of beer, was a look of a deep, quiet, and aching regret. His expression was that of a man who looked on tragedy and understood the meaning of what he saw. The Icefalcon-It was hard to tell. That enigmatic young man picked his fastidious way through the ruins of human civilization with the single-minded wariness of an animal, uncaring for anything beyond his personal safety and the accomplishment of his job.

Under her, the horse let out a sudden, frightened squeal and threw up its head with white, rolling eyes. Almost beneath their hooves, two shambling, misshappen things broke cover from a ruined doorway and fled down the lane at a scrambling run. Gil had a horrified glimpse of flat, semihuman faces under snarling manes of reddish hair, of hunched bodies and trailing, apelike arms. She stared after them, shocked and breathless, until she heard Ingold say softly, "No, let them go." Turning, she saw that the Icefalcon had taken bow and arrow from one of the carts, preparatory to shooting the creatures down. At Ingold's command he paused, one pale eyebrow raised inquiringly, and in those few instants the creatures, whatever they were, had vanished down the lane.

The Icefalcon shrugged and replaced his weapons. "They're only dooic," he stated, as a self-evident fact.

Ingold's face was expressionless. "So they are."

"We'll have them all around the carts, once we get the food." He might have been speaking of rats.

The wizard turned back to his own business and flicked the reins of his mismated team. "We can deal with them then." The convoy started forward again, jostling in the cold shadows of the narrow streets. After a moment the Icefalcon shrugged again and slipped back, catlike, to his place in the Guard line.

"What are they?" Gil asked of the Guard nearest her, a fair-haired young man with the shining face of an apprentice Galahad, walking at her other side. "Are they-people?"

He glanced up at her, shading his eyes against the sunlight that fell through the breaks in the buildings. "No, they're only dooic," he repeated the Icefalcon's excuse. "Don't you have dooic in your land?"

Gil shook her head.

"They do look like people," the Guard went on casually. "But no, they're beasts. They run wild in most of the wastelands of the West-the plains beyond the mountains are crawling with them."

"Your people might call them Neanderthal," Ingold's soft voice said at her side. "If they're caught they're put to work in the south cutting cane, or in the silver-mines of Gettlesand, but many people train them for household tasks as well. They're said to make useful slaves, but evidently no one considered them worth taking when their owners fled."