Barbara Hambly - 01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

The light, spare voice was uninflected, unexplaining, but the scenario sprang to Rudy's mind. The Guards backed Ingold and would have rushed to help; the people in the square would go after the food; all the pent-up violence of the day would condense in rage and fear and terror of the night. The town would go up like gunpowder. He'd been in enough small-scale riots at the Shamrock Bar in Fontana to know how that went. But what was all right in the safety of a steel-mill town on Friday night would be death and worse than death on a large scale, played for keeps out of hunger and fury and frustration. Bitterly, he remarked, "They sure knew their man. Who nailed him, do you know?"

"Church troops, from Gil's description," the Icefalcon said. "The Red Monks. The Bishop's men, but they could have acted on anyone's orders."

"Which anyone?" Rudy demanded, his glance shifting from Gil to the Icefalcon in the dimness of the shadowy lane. "Alwir? When he couldn't push him out at the council last night?"

"Alwir always feared Ingold's power over the King," the Guard said thoughtfully.

"His men wear red, too," Gil added.

The Icefalcon shrugged. "And the Bishop certainly doesn't relish the thought of an agent of Satan that close to the throne."

"A what?" Gil demanded angrily, and Rudy briefed her on the local Church stand on wizardry. Gil's comment was neither scholarly nor ladylike.

"The Bishop is very strong in her faith," the Icefalcon said in his soft neutral voice, the tone as colorless as his eyes. "Or-the Queen could have put out the order for his arrest. From all accounts she has never trusted Ingold, either."

"Yeah, but the Queen's out on a Section Eight these days," Rudy said unkindly. "And whoever popped him, we've got to find where they're keeping him, if we don't want to end up spending another night here."

"Not to mention the next fifty years, if they decide to wall him up in some dungeon and forget about him," Gil added, her voice sharp with fear.

"Yeah," Rudy agreed. "Though I personally wouldn't want to be the one in charge of putting that old duffer out of the way permanently."

"Look," the Icefalcon said, "Karst isn't that big a town. They will have put him in the Town Hall jail, in the vaults below Alwir's villa, or in the Bishop's summer palace somewhere. Divided, we can find him within the hour. Then you can do-whatever you will do."

The shift in inflection of that soft, breathless voice made Rudy's nerves prickle with the sudden premonition of disaster, but the inscrutable frost-white eyes challenged him to read meaning into the words. Alde had said that the Guards were all crazy. Crazy enough to jailbreak a wizard out from under the noses of the Powers That Be? They were Ingold's-and now, by the look of it, Gil's-allies. Rudy wondered if he wanted to mess with the whole thing.

On the other hand, he realized he didn't have much choice. It was a jailbreak in the dark or spending the night and God alone knew how many other nights besides in this world. Even standing in the quiet of the dark lane, Rudy had begun to feel nervous. "Okay," he said, with as much cheerfulness as he could muster under the circumstances. "Meet you back at the Town Hall in an hour."

They parted, Rudy hurrying back toward Alwir's garden gate, running over in his mind how he'd go about getting on the right side of Alde and, more importantly, Medda, in order to get in and search the villa.

Gil and the Icefalcon headed in the other direction, instinctively hugging the wall for protection, guided by the reddish reflection of the fires in the town square. It was fully dark, a bitter overcast night, and Gil shivered, feeling the trap of the lane, aware of how restricted it was on the sides and how open from above. Cloak and sword tangled around her feet, and she had to hurry her steps to catch up with the long strides of the young man before her.

They were within sight of the firelit crowds in the square when the Icefalcon stopped and raised his head to listen like a startled beast. "Do you hear it?" His voice was a whisper in the darkness, his face and pale hair a blur edged in the rosy reflection of the bonfires. Gil stopped also, listening to the cool quiet of the night. Pine-scented winds blew the sounds from beyond the town, far-off sounds changed by the darkness, but unmistakable. From the dark woods that ringed the town, the wind carried up the sounds of screaming.

The Dark Ones had come to Karst!

There was no battle at Karst-only a thousand rearguard actions fought in the haunted woods by companies of Guards, of Church troops, and of the private troops of the households of noble and landchief. Patrols made sorties from the blazing central fortress of the red-lit town square and brought in huddled clusters of terrified refugees, the scattered stragglers who had survived that first onslaught.

Gil, who found herself, sword in hand, hunting with the Icefalcon's company, remembered that first chaotic nightmare in Gae and wondered that she had thought it frightening. At least then she had known where the danger lay; in Gae there had been torchlight and walls and people. But here the nightmare drifted silently through wind-touched woods, appearing, killing, and departing with a kind of hideous leisure. Here there was no warning, only a vast floating darkness that fell upon the torches between one eyeblink and the next; soft mouths gaping wide, like canopies of acid-fringed parachutes; claws reaching to tear and to hold. Here there were the victims; a pile of stripped, bloody bones among the sticks of a half-built campfire or the blood-dewed shrunken mummy of a man sucked dry while a yard away his wife knelt screaming in helpless horror at the sight.

Naturally coldhearted, Gil was made neither helpless nor, after the first few victims, sick. Rather, she was filled with a kind of cool and lightheaded rage, like a cat that kills with neither fear nor remorse.

In those first chaotic minutes, she and the Icefalcon doubled back to the Guards' Court at a run. There they found a wild confusion of men arming, companies forming, Janus' deep booming voice cutting through the holocaust of sound, demanding volunteers. Since she was wearing a sword, somebody shoved her into a company-they were halfway out of town, armed with torches and pitifully few to meet the Dark, when she fought her way up to the front of the patrol and yelled to the Icefalcon, "But I don't know how to use a sword!"

He gave her a cold stare. "Then you shouldn't wear one," he retorted.

Someone else caught her by the shoulder-the woman Seya she'd met that morning by the carts-and drew her back. "Aim at the midline of the body," she instructed Gil hastily. "Cut straight down, or straight sideways. There's a snap to the wrists, see? Hilt in both hands-not like that, you'll break both thumbs. You have to go in close to kill, if they're bigger than you are, which they will be, outside like this. Got that? You can pick up the rest later. Stay in the center of the group and don't take on anything you can't handle."

Watchword for the night, Gil thought wryly. But it was surprising, the first time those dark, silent bulks materialized out of the misty darkness between the trees, how much of that hasty lesson she could put into practice. And she learned the first principle of any martial art-that surviving or not surviving an encounter is the ultimate test of any system, lesson, or technique.

In one sense it was easy, for those nebulous bodies offered little resistance to the razor-sharp metal. Precision and speed counted rather than strength; for all their soft bulk, the Dark Ones moved fast. But Seya had not mentioned that the Dark Ones stank of rotting blood, nor had she described the way the cut pieces folded and trailed and spattered everything with human blood and blackish liquid as they disintegrated. This Gil found out in that crimson pandemonium of fire and dark trees, death and flight and war. And she found out, too, that there was less fear in the attack than in the defense and that, no matter how little sleep or food you have had in the last forty-eight hours, you could always fight for your life. She fought shoulder to shoulder with the black-uniformed Guards of Gae and ragged volunteers in homespun. She ran in the wake of the fighters as they moved through the woods like a wolfpack, gathering lost and terrified fugitives and shepherding them back toward Karst. The cold electricity of battle-lust filled her like fire and drove out weariness or fear.