Barbara Hambly - 01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

Rudy knew that the Dark were gone. He sensed it in some way he could not be sure of. There were none in the vaults, none left in the villa over their heads. Following Ingold down toward the doors, their footfalls echoing hollowly in the empty shadows of the corridor, he could feel the emptiness stretching around and behind him into the darkness. Whether the Dark had drawn off before the wizard's wrath or simply faded away, sated with their night's kill, he didn't know. In a way it didn't matter. All that mattered was that they were gone. He was safe. He had survived the night.

At the realization of it, a weariness came over him, as if all strength had been suddenly drained from his body. He stumbled and caught the wall for support. Ingold moved on to the broken threshold, where three figures had detached themselves from the line of Guards and stood framed in the ruin of wood and iron. Under the filth and slime of battle, Rudy recognized Alwir, Janus, and Bishop Govannin.

Without a word, the Commander of the Guards of Gae stepped forward, dropped to one knee before the wizard, and kissed his scarred hand. At this gesture of fealty the Chancellor and the Bishop exchanged a glance of enigmatic distrust and disapproval over the Guard's bowed back. The echoes of the empty corridor murmured back the Commander's words: "We thought you'd gone."

Ingold touched the man's bent red head, then raised him, his eyes on Alwir's. "I swore I would see Tir to a place of safety," he replied calmly, "and so I will. No, I had not gone. I was merely-imprisoned."

"Imprisoned?" Janus' thick brows met over russet, animal eyes. "On whose orders?"

"The detention order was unsigned," the wizard said in his mildest voice. "Merely sealed with the King's mark. Anyone who had access to it could have done so." The light of the guttered torch in his hand flared in the hollows of exhaustion-shadowed eyes. "The cell was sealed with the Rune of the Chain."

"The use of such things is illegal," Govannin commented, folding thin arms like a skeleton's, her black, lizard eyes expressionless. "And it would have been a fool's act to order such a thing at such a time."

Alwir shook his head. "I certainly sealed no such order," he said in a puzzled voice. "As for the Rune-There was said to be one somewhere in the treasuries of the Palace at Gae, but I always thought it merely a legend. I am only thankful that you seem to have effected your escape in time to come to our aid. Your arrest was obviously a mistake on someone's part."

The wizard's gaze went from the Chancellor's face to the Bishop's, but all he said was, "Obviously."

Much later in the morning, Rudy backtracked their steps to the doorless cell, empty now and standing open, with the intention of taking that dark seal and dropping it quietly down a well. But, though he found the place all right, and searched through the dusty bones of the niche, someone else had clearly been there before him, for he could find no trace of it anywhere.

"Will she be all right?"

"If the arm doesn't fester."

The voices came distinctly to Gil, like something heard in a dream; as in a dream, she could identify them without being clearly able to say why. As if she lay at the bottom of a well, she could look up and see, a long way away, the tall shape of Alwir, blotting the sun like a cloud; beside him was the Icefalcon, light and cool as wind. But the water of the well she lay in was pain; crystal-clear, shimmering, acid pain.

Alwir's melodious voice went on. "If it festers she'll lose it."

And the Icefalcon asked, "Where's Ingold?"

"Who knows? His talent is for timely disappearances."

Curse him, Gil thought blindly. Curse him, curse him, curse him... Alwir moved away, and a bar of sunlight fell on her eyes, like the stab of a knife. She twisted her head convulsively aside, and the movement wrenched at the sodden mass of pain wrapped around the bones of her left arm. She wept in agony and despair.

In her delirium she dreamed, and in her dream she saw him. From the dark place where she stood, she could look into her lighted kitchen, back in the apartment on Clarke Street; a stale litter of old coffee cups and papers was on the table, and the half-finished research was strewn about the room like blown leaves in autumn. It seemed as if she had only to step down to reach it, as if a few strides would take her from this place to home, to the university, to the quiet life of scholarship and the friends and security of her own time and place. Dimly she heard the phone ringing there and knew it was one of her women friends calling, as they had been calling for two days now. They would be worried-soon they would begin to search. The thought of their pain and fear for her hurt Gil almost as much as her injured arm, and she tried to go into the kitchen to answer the phone, but she found that Ingold stood in her way. Hooded, his sword gleaming like foxfire, he rose before her, a dark shape blown and wavering on the wind. No matter how she turned and shifted, he was always in her way, always turning her back. She began to cry, "Let me go! Let me go!" in helpless fury. Then wind caught at him, swirling his brown mantle into a black cloud of shadow, and in his place a Dark One rode the twisting air. She tried to run, and it was upon her; she tried to fight with the sword she suddenly found in her hands, but as she cut at it, its huge, slobbering mouth snatched at her, leaving a trail of acid down her arm that seared into the flesh until she cried out in pain.

She saw her arm, bone and torn flesh, then. She saw the hand that touched it, molding and kneading at the ripped ruin of muscle. In her dreaming, she was reminded of a man molding putty or seaming together colored clays. It was Ingold's hand, nicked and marked with old scars, and calloused from the grip of a sword-and there he was, tired and shabby, eyes bright in circles of black exhaustion. She struck at him with her good hand, sobbing weak obscenities at him because he wouldn't let her go back, because he had trapped her here, cursing him and fighting against his strong, sure touch. Then that part of the dream faded also, and utter darkness took her.

From the Town Hall steps, Rudy watched what remained of the powers in the Realm coming to council. It was early afternoon now, and bleak clouds had begun to gray the light of the day, piling heavily over the mountains like the threat of doom. He had eaten, slept, and helped the Guards and those survivors of last night's horrors who were still capable of directed action in the gruesome task of cleaning the bloodless corpses and stripped bones out of the gory mud of the square. Now he was cold, weary, and sickened in his soul. Even with the worst of the mess-the hopeless, twisted wrecks that had once been living people-out of the way, the square wore a look of absolute desolation. Strewn and trampled in the mud were the pitiful remains of flight-clothes, cook pots, books torn and sodden with mud, salvage from Gae whose owners would have no further use for it. During burial detail that morning, Rudy had found what he judged to be a small fortune in jewels, mixed with the churned slush in the square-precious things dropped unheeded in last night's desperate, futile scramble for refuge.

Karst was a town of the dead. People moved about its streets blindly, stumbling with weariness or shock or grief. Half-heard through the town, the muffled wailing of sobs was as prevalent today as the woodsmoke and stench had been yesterday. The places that had been so crowded were three-quarters empty. People passed in the streets on their blind errands and looked at one another, but did not ask, because they did not dare, What now?

Good question, Rudy thought dryly.

What now, when the Dark Ones were everywhere, when he was an exile in an alien universe, hiding and dodging until something-the Dark, the cold, starvation, the plague, or whatever-got him before he could make it back to the safety of his own? And who knew how long that was going to be? Maybe even Ingold didn't. Anyway, what if somebody jailed Ingold again, and this time nobody came? Or what if somebody jailed him? It was possible-he was a stranger, unfamiliar with the customs, ignorant of the laws that could get him dumped into one of those bricked-up slammers he'd passed last night. Hell, he didn't even know the language, if anyone wanted to get technical about it.