Barbara Hambly - 01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

In time, the dozen or so warriors of the Icefalcon's company rounded up some fifty refugees. They circled them in a loose cordon and gave torches to as many of them as were capable of carrying such things; most persisted in holding to possessions, money, and food, and a good thirty were women carrying children in their arms. For the third time that night, they started back for Karst. Woods and sky were utterly black, the dark trees threshing in the wind. All around them could be heard screaming and wailing. It was a Dantean scene, lit by the jerky glare of torches.

Someone behind her cried out. Looking up, Gil saw the Dark materializing in the inky air, with a sudden drop of slobbering wings and the slash of a thorned wire tail. She stepped into it, sword whining as she swung, aware of Seya on her right, someone else on her left. Then she was engulfed in darkness, wind, and fire, cutting blindly. The fugitives behind her were packing closer and closer together like sheep, the children shrieking, the men crying out. Shredded veils of disintegrating protoplasm slithered to the ground all around her. She saw the man on her left buckle awkwardly to his knees, dry and white and dewed all over with blood as the Dark One rose off him like some giant, flopping, airborne blob. Wave after wave of darkness came pouring from the woods.

The Icefalcon raised his light voice to a harsh rasp. "This will be the last trip, my sisters and brothers. There are more now than there were. We'll have to hold the town."

In the momentary lull, as the Dark Ones gathered like a lightless roof of storm overhead, a Guard's voice cried bitterly, "Hold that town? That collection of wall-less chicken-runs?"

"It's the only town we have. Now, run!"

And they ran, through the black nightmare of alien pursuit, with the winds stirring after them like the breath of some unspeakable abyss. It was a nightmare of woods, darkness, sinuous half-seen forms, flame, and stumbling terror. They ran toward the refuge of Karst, and the Dark Ones followed.

Hell of a joke on Alwir! Rudy slumped back against the clustered pilasters framing the open archway from the villa's main reception-hall out to its entryway and shut his eyes. But nothing could block out the wild glare of the torches, the screaming that went through his head like a hacksaw, and the dizzy sickness of fatigue. That whole sales pitch about everything being hunky-dory and let's make Karst capital of the new Realm had gone down the tubes. And Ingold, whatever the hell they did with him, was right all along.

He opened his eyes again, the sensory burn-out of the hall stabbing body and brain like crimson knives. It was like the waiting room of Judgment Day. The hall and entryway on either side of the fluted arch were mobbed wall to wall with people, refugees driven in from the woods and the town square who had taken shelter here when the defense lines around the town had caved in. People were weeping, praying, cursing, all at the tops of their lungs; they were milling like panic-stricken sheep when the wolf was in the fold. The jackhammer din was like the final set of a rock concert, so deafening that no single sound was audible, and the faces illuminated by the bleeding torchlight seemed to mouth senselessly. The packed heat of the room was smothering, the air foul with smoke and human fear. Detachedly, Rudy wondered if he were involved in one of Gil's nightmares. But he was too hungry to be asleep for one thing; and for another, it looked as if he'd started at the wrong end of the dream and couldn't remember going to bed. He wondered if the end of the world was going to be this noisy. He hoped not.

Like Satan in the chaos of the fire, Alwir stood in the middle of the room, blood from his cut cheek making a red track in the sweaty slime of his face. One hand rested on the pommel of his sword, the other gestured, black and eloquent-he was speaking with Commander Janus and Bishop Govannin, who stood leaning on her drawn sword, her robe girded up for fighting. Under the marks of battle, that thin skull-face of hers was calm. Rudy reflected dryly to himself that it looked as if everybody in town knew how to handle a sword except him. Alwir suggested something, and the Bishop shook her head in somber denial. The angry, insistent sweep of the Chancellor's gesture took in all the room. Rudy had a bad feeling that he knew what the problem was.

The villa was indefensible.

It was obvious. They'd been driven there when the defenses around the square had crumbled, when darkness like a fog had sapped the light of the fires. One minute, it seemed, Rudy had been standing in the line of armed men, awkwardly gripping the hilt of a sword somebody had shoved into his hands, backed by the wind-whipped, flaring blaze of dozens of bonfires and the yammering cries of the unarmed civilians who were crowding in the square for protection and watching with uneasy terror the restless stirrings in the darkness beyond the light. Then the darkness had begun to draw closer, the shifting suggestion of nebulous bodies growing increasingly clear. Looking behind him, Rudy had seen the bonfires pale and weaken, the flames robbed of their light. And then he'd been caught in the blind stampede for walls to hide behind, for any shelter against that encroaching terror. He'd been one of the lucky ones. The square and the streets outside were littered with the unlucky.

And the irony of it was, Rudy thought, surveying the scarlet confusion before him, that this place which they'd trampled over each other to reach was about as defensible as a bird cage.

It was a summer palace. A man didn't have to study architecture to guess that one. The whole place was designed to let in light and air and summer breezes. Colonnades joined to open galleries; dainty, trefoiled arches opened into long vistas of wide-windowed rooms; and the long double stairway rising from the entry-hall to his left terminated in a balcony gallery that communicated with the rest of the villa by a series of airy, unwalled breezeways. The whole thing would be as much use as a lace tablecloth in a hurricane. If he hadn't been half-blind with exhaustion and within kissing distance of a horrible death, Rudy could have laughed.

Janus offered some other plan. Alwir shook his head. Nix on anything that means going outside, Rudy thought. Blackness seemed to press like a bodiless entity against the long windows that ran the length of one wall. A few minutes ago, the orange reflection of firelight had been visible through them. Now there was only darkness. The multivoiced baying of the fugitives had begun to fade, men and women making little forays into the murky dimness of the entry-hall beyond the arch, as if seeking a safer room for their hiding, but unwilling to leave the main crowd to do so. Alwir pointed downward, to the floor or, Rudy guessed, to the cellars of the villa. The Bishop asked him something that made his eyes flash with anger.

But before he could reply, a rending crash sounded from somewhere in the deeps of the house, the violence of it shaking the stone walls on their foundations.

In the hush that followed, Janus' voice could be heard to the far corners of the hall. "East gallery," he said briefly.

A woman began to scream, a steady, unwavering note. A few feet from him, Rudy saw a young woman of about his own age tighten her clutch on a gaggle of smaller children who clung to her skirts for courage... A fat man with a garden rake for a weapon hopped to his feet and began to glare around, as if expecting the Dark to come rushing down from the throbbing air. The mob in the room packed tighter, as if they could conceal themselves from the Dark by doing so.

Their voices climbed to a crescendo of wild terror through which Alwir's trained bass battle voice cut like a cleaver. "With me! We can defend the vaults!"