Barbara Hambly - 01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

There were simply too many people. Gil and Ingold were right, whatever the Chancellor liked to say. Contrary to the assertions of most of his teachers in public school, Rudy was not stupid, merely lacking in appreciation for the public school system. He'd listened to the council last night-with as little room as there was in the hall, it would have been hard to help eavesdropping-and had seen today what was happening in Karst. He'd walked through the camps in the woods, trashy, filthy, lawless. He'd witnessed seven fights-three over allegations of food theft, two over water, and two for no discernible reason at all. He'd heard the stump preachers and soapbox orators propounding different solutions to the problem, from suicide to salvation, and had seen one ugly old man stoned by a pack of children and several of their elders because he was supposed to be in league with the Dark-as if anyone could get anywhere near the Dark Ones to be in league with them. Mostly Rudy sensed the tension that underlay the town like a drawn wire and had felt, with an uneasy shock, that closeness to that line that divided a land of law from a land without it. He'd seen the handful of Guards left in town trying to keep some kind of order among far too many people. Though it was a new sensation for him to have sympathy for the fuzz, he found he did. He wouldn't have wanted to play cop to that madhouse.

The smoke of cook fires turned the air into a stagethree smog alert, wherever he wandered in the town or in the woods. Now, as he headed back toward the square, shadows began to move up the rock walls of the little lane, and the distant clamor of voices in the square was muffled by the walls, muted to a meaningless murmur like the far-off sounding of church bells. In spite of hunger, the crowds, the threat of plague, and the fear of the Dark, Rudy found himself oddly at peace with the world and with his own soul.

Beyond the wall to his right he heard voices, a woman's and a girl's. The woman was saying, "And don't you go let him be putting things in his little mouth."

The girl's voice, gentle and demure, replied, "No, ma'am."

"And don't you be letting him wander away and hurt hisself; you keep a sharp eye on him, my girl."

Rudy recognized the emblem on the half-open grille of rusty iron at the gap in the wall, the three black stars that someone had said belonged to the House of Bes, the House ruled by Chancellor Alwir. Rudy paused in the gate. If this was Alwir's villa, then the women were probably talking about Tir.

Beyond the gap in the wall he could see the sloping garden, brown with cold and coming frost, and beyond that the rock wall of a terrace that backed the massive, gray shape of a splendid mansion. He was right; two women stood in the huge arched door of the house, spreading out, of all things, a bearskin rug in the last of the pale golden sun. The fat woman in red was doing this, with much bustle and huffing, while the slender girl in white stood, in the classic pose of women everywhere, with the baby riding her hip.

The fat woman continued to scold. "You see he doesn't get chilled."

"Yes, Medda."

"And don't you get chilled, neither!" The fat woman's voice was fierce and commanding. Then she went bustling back into the dark shadows of the door and was gone.

Rudy ducked through the gateway and made his way up silent paths fringed with sere brown hedges. Overhead, arthritic yellow leaves trembled in the watery blue of the air. Even moribund with autumn, the garden was immaculate. Rudy, pausing in its mazes to orient himself toward the haughty bulk of the villa, wondered whom they got to trim the hedges every day.

The baby sitter had settled herself down on the corner of the bearskin next to the Prince. She looked up, startled, as Rudy swung himself over the balustrade to join them. "Hello," she said, a little timidly.

Rudy gave her his most charming smile. "Hi," he said. "I'm glad to see you've got him out here-I was afraid I'd have to ask permission from every Guard in the house to see how he is."

The girl relaxed and returned his smile. "I should be taking him in before long," she apologized, "but it's probably one of the last warm days we'll have." She had a low voice and an air of shyness; Rudy put her age at somewhere between eighteen and twenty. Her crow-black hair was braided down past her hips.

"Warm?" Like most Californians, Rudy was thinblooded. "I've been freezing to death all afternoon. What do you people consider cold?"

Startled, she raised her eyes to his; hers were dark, luminous blue, like Crater Lake on a midsummer afternoon. "Oh!" She smiled. "You're the companion of Ingold, one who helped him rescue Tir."

And, indeed, Tir was making his way purposefully over to Rudy across the bearskin, tangling himself in the black and white silk of his gown. Rudy folded up to sit crosslegged beside the girl and gathered the child into his lap. "Well-" he said, a little embarrassed by that awe and gratitude in her eyes. "I just kind of stumbled into that. I mean, it was either come with him or die, I guess-we didn't have much choice."

"But still, you had the choice to be with him in the first place, didn't you?" she reminded him.

"Well- yeah," he agreed. "But believe me, if I'd known what it was all about, I'd still be running."

The girl laughed. "Betrayed into heroism," she mocked his assertion gently.

"Honey, you don't even know." Rudy extricated Tir's exploring hands from his collar and dug in his pocket for his key ring, which the child, in blissful fascination, proceeded to try to eat. "You know," he went on after a few minutes, "what floors me about this whole thing is that the kid's fine. After all he's been through from the time Ingold got him out of Gae until we got him back here, you'd think he'd be in shock. Is he? Hardly! Babies are so little, you'd think they'd break in your hands, like-like kittens, or flowers."

"They're tough." The girl smiled. "The human race would have perished long ago if babies were as fragile as they look. Often they're tougher than their parents." Her fingers made absent-minded ringlets of the black, downy hair on Tir's tiny pink neck.

Rudy remembered things said in the hall and other talk throughout the day. "How's his mom?" he asked. "I heard she-the Queen-was sick. Will she be okay?"

The girl hesitated, an expression of-what? Almost grief-altering the delicate line of her cheek. "They say the Queen will recover," she answered. him slowly. "But I don't know. I doubt she will ever be as she was." The girl shifted her position on the rug and put the long braid of her hair back over her shoulder. Rudy stopped, another question unspoken on his lips, wondering suddenly how and under what circumstances this girl had made her own escape from Gae.

"And your friend?" The girl made an effort, and withdrew her mind from something within her that she would rather not have looked at. "Ingold's other companion?"

"Gil?" Rudy asked. "I guess she went with the Guards to Gae this morning. That's what they tell me, anyway. You wouldn't get me within a hundred miles of that place."

"You're within ten," the girl said quietly.

Rudy shivered. "Well, I can tell you I'll be farther away before sundown. Food or no food, you'd have to be crazy to go back there."

"I don't know," the girl said, toying with the end of her braid. "They say the Guards are crazy, that you have to be crazy, to be a Guard. And I believe that. I would never go back, not for anything, but the Guards-they're a rare breed. They're the best, the finest corps in the West of the World. It's their life, fighting and training to fight. The Guards say it's like nothing else, and for them there is nothing else. I don't understand it. But then, nobody does. Only other Guards."

Pro ballplayers would, Rudy thought. Heavy-duty martial artists would. He remembered some of the karate black belts he knew back home. Aloud, he said, "God help anyone or anything that takes on a bunch of people like that. Ingold's with them, too."