Barbara Hambly - 01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

The remark evidently didn't merit reply-Guards were already picking up the smoldered ends of doused torches and rekindling them from a little fire someone had lit in a corner of the court for warmth. Gil joined them as a matter of course, though she knew that there was no question of staying together for this search. Janus saw her as she was going down the steps and called out. "Gilshalos!" But before he could go to her, the fat carter caught him by the arm and started a long expostulation, about reaching Karst before night. Quietly, Gil slipped into the shadows.

It was different, entering the vaults alone. Her single torch called forth leaping, distorted shapes on the low groinings of the ceiling, her own footfalls multiplied eerily in the darkness, as if she were being stalked by a legion of goblins. The red gleams of wicked little eyes blinked momentarily from the impenetrable gloom around her, then were gone. All the stillness seemed to breathe. Some instinct warned her not to call out, and she continued alone in silence, scanning the maze of dark pillars for some sign of that bobbing white light or the soft tread of booted feet-though now that she thought of it, Ingold was a man who could move as noiselessly as a shadow. She left the trampled way the salvagers had taken and turned toward the deeper vaults, wandering down identical aisles of dark stone pillars, granite trees in a symmetrical forest, her torchlight calling no reflection from the smooth black basalt of the floor.

She felt it grow upon her gradually, imperceptibly; a sense of having passed this way before, a lingering sense of unnamed dread, an uneasy feeling of being watched from the dark by things that had no eyes.

How she could have helped Ingold she could not have said, for she was unarmed and less familiar than he with the haunts of the Dark. But she knew he had to be found and she knew that he was exhausted, pushed far past the limits of his endurance; she knew that, wizard or not, in such a state mistakes were fatally easy to make.

She had almost given up the hope of finding him when she saw the faint reflection of white light against the dark granite of the pillars. She hurried toward the light, coming at last to a cleared space in that stone forest, where her torchlight gleamed on the dark sweep of the red porphyry Stair that curved upward to the blown-out ruin of cyclopean bronze doors, with nothing but darkness beyond them. Among the rubble of disused furniture and dusty old boxes, she could make out the shapes of skeletons, bones scattered among the pillars, stripped of their flesh by the Dark. Almost at her feet, a sword-split box had disgorged its contents, and dried apples lay strewn among the skulls.

She knew the place; the familiarity of it made her heart pound and the blood din in her ears. But no granite slab broke the ancient regularity of the smooth basalt of the floor. Only a great rectangular hole gaped where it had lain, black and yawning, the blasphemous gate of the abyss. And down from the pavement black stairs led, unspeakably ancient, cold with the ruinous horror of uncounted millennia, looking as she knew they would look, even in her dreams-as they had looked since the beginning of time. The damp chill that breathed out of that darkness brushed her cheek like the echo of primordial chaos, an evil beyond comprehension by humankind.

And up from that unspeakable chasm, like the distant glow of a far-off lamp, shone the soft white light she had been seeking. It picked out the curves of the ceiling arches, echoed in the lines of a skull and the delicate roundness of the bone over the eye socket. Hands shaking, Gil stooped and picked up a long sword that lay on the floor amid a tumble of acid-eaten handbones. With the balanced weight of the hilt in her hand she felt better, steadier, and less afraid. She held the torch aloft and walked to the edge of the abyss.

Far down the stairs, outlined by the soft brightness of his staff's white radiance, she could see Ingold. He stood as unmoving as a statue some fifty steps below her, just at the point where the stairs curved and were lost to sight in the black throat of the earth. His face was intent, as if listening for some sound which Gil could not hear. He had sheathed his sword, and his right hand hung empty at his side. As she watched, he moved with the slow hesitance of one hypnotized, down one step, and then another, like a man in a trance following enchanted music. She knew that after another step or two she would lose sight of him utterly, unless she chose to follow him down. He took the next step, the shadows closing him around.

"Ingold!" she called out in despair.

He turned and looked Inquiringly up at her. "Yes, my dear?" His voice echoed softly, ringing against the darkness of the overarching walls. He stared around him, at the stairway and the walls, and frowned, as if a little surprised to find he had come that far down. Then he turned thoughtfully to look at the deeper chasm below him again, and Gil remembered with a shiver that he had once told her that curiosity was the leading characteristic of any wizard, and that a mage would pursue a riddle to the brink of his own grave. For a moment she had the terrible impression that he was toying with the notion of descending that eldritch stairs, of walking willingly into the trap to see of what it consisted.

But he turned away and came up toward her, the darkness seeming to fall back at the advent of his light. He emerged to stand beside her on the top step and asked quite calmly, "Do you hear it?"

Gil shook her head, mute and frightened. "Hear what?"

His blue gaze rested on her face for a moment, then moved away, back toward that endless dark. There was a slight frown between his white brows, as if his mind worried at a riddle, oblivious to the danger in which they stood. She sensed that danger all around them, watching and waiting in the shadows, pressing behind them as if it would drive them into the accursed pit. But when he spoke, his rusty voice was calm. "You don't hear anything?"

"No," Gil said softly. "What do you hear?"

He hesitated, then shook his head. "Nothing," he lied. "I must be more tired than I thought. I-I thought-I didn't think I had descended the stairs quite that far. I hadn't meant to."

That, more than anything else, shocked her-the note of exhaustion in his voice, the admission of how close he had come to being trapped. He frowned again, looking down at the darkness that gaped below his feet, puzzling at some new knowledge, disconcerted, not by the darkness, but by something else.

Then he sighed and let the matter go. "You came alone?" he asked.

She nodded, a curiously forlorn figure in her grubby jeans, with her guttering torch and the borrowed sword heavy in her hand. "The others are searching, too," she explained-no explanation, really, as to why she had come alone.

"Thank you," he said quietly, and laid a hand on her shoulder. "It's extremely likely that you just saved my life. I-I feel as if I have been under a spell, as if-" He broke off, and shook his head as if to clear it. "Come," he said at last. "This way out is quicker. Keep the sword," he added as she moved to lay it down where she had found it. "You may need it. Its owner never will again."

By the time the convoy reached Karst the air was cold, and the late, weary day was drawing down to evening. They traveled slowly, for the underfed horses were deadbeat and the road steep and foully muddy. The closer they got to the town, the more often they were stopped by men and women who had been camping in the woods and who came hurrying down the steep banks to them, begging for something to eat. Only a little-it was always only a little.

Janus, riding in the lead, shook his head. "There'll be shares given out at Karst."

"Bah!" A woman in a torn purple gown spat. "Karst-if you can get into the town! And them as are there'll be sure they get first pickings!"