Barbara Hambly - 01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

The blue eyes glittered under the heavy brows. "I know Alketch, you see," the wizard went on quietly. "The southern Empire has long coveted these northern lands. I know Alketch-and I know the Dark.

"Alwir finds a great deal to say about the number of things for which mine is the only word. He is right. About the Dark, mine is the only word, now that Eldor is gone and the sole male heir of the House of Dare is too young to speak. And I know that an invasionary force to the Nests will surely fail.

"I have been to a Nest. I have seen the Dark in their cities beneath the ground."

The wizard leaned back against the wall behind him. The room was sinking in shadow all around. His voice was quiet, distant, leading his listeners to another place and time.

"A long time ago I was the local spell-weaver for a village, oh, way over in Gettlesand. It was a good-sized village, but not so large that the Lord of Gettlesand would think to look for me there. I was, in fact, hiding out, but that is part of another tale.

"The dooic run wild in tribes in that part of the country. They prefer the empty plains, but they do hide in the hills, and they have sometimes been known to carry off small children. One of the children of the mayor of my village had vanished, and I tracked her and her tribe of kidnappers for a night and a day, back into the hills. It was in a cave, in a ridge of foothills beneath a desert mountain range, that I first saw one of the Dark Ones. It was night. The creature dropped from the ceiling of the cave where it had been clinging and devoured an old male dooic which had taken shelter there. It was not aware of my presence.

"Now I had learned about Dark Ones in old books that I had read, and from the ancient legends handed down to me, like this jewel, from my master Rath. I realized this must be a surviving Dark One, and it occurred to me that isolated groups of these creatures, which had once overwhelmed mankind and then vanished from the face of the earth, might still be hiding in the fastnesses of mountain and desert. And because I am, and always have been, incurably inquisitive, I followed it back through the darkness, down tunnels so steep I had to cling to the walls and floor to keep myself from sliding headlong into the blackness. I remember thinking to myself at the time that the numbers of the Dark Ones had shrunk so badly that they lived thus for their own protection; a wretched remnant of a force that had once dominated the face of the world and changed the courses of civilization.

"I followed the little Dark One-for it was crawling along the floor, and only about so big-" He gestured with his hands. "-deeper and deeper into the heart of the earth, crawling and climbing and scrambling to keep up with it. And do you know, at that point I was almost sorry for the vanished Dark Ones in what I supposed to be their exile. Then I saw the tunnel widen ahead of me and I looked out into their-city."

The quality of the old man's voice was hypnotic, and his eyes had the faraway look of seeing nothing in that small twilit room. "It was completely dark, of course," he went on. "I do see clearly in the dark. The cavern below me must have run on for almost a mile, stretching downward and back and farther down into the earth. The tunnel in which I lay overlooked it, and I could scarcely see the other end of the cave, lost as it was in shadows. The stalactites of the ceiling, as far back as I could see, were crawling with the Dark, covered with them, black with their bodies; the rattle of their claws on the limestone was like the sound of hail. And down the wall to my right, at floor level, there was an entrance to another passageway, about as high as a man could walk through. There was a stream of them, coming and going from deeper underground. I knew that under that cavern there was another one, as large or larger; and below that, possibly another. That was only one city, situated miles from anywhere, in the midst of the deserts, probably not even their largest city." Memory of the horror deepened the lines that age and hard living had scrawled in his face; he looked like some Old Testament prophet, gifted with the sure knowledge of civilization's downfall and helpless to prevent it. Rudy knew that he saw, not them, not this room, but the endless cavern of darkness, and felt afresh the impact of that first realization that unguessably vast hordes of the Dark Ones still lived beneath the surface of the earth-not in exile, not out of necessity, hut because it was their chosen habitat. And there was nothing to prevent them from rising, as they had risen once before.

Rudy's voice broke the quiet that had followed the wizard's account. "You say they were all across the ceiling of the place," he said. "What was on the floor?"

Ingold's eyes met his, darkened with the memory and almost angry that Rudy should have asked-angry that he'd already half-guessed. "They have their-flocks and herds," he said unwillingly, and would have left it at that, but the young man's eyes challenged him to say it. "Mutated, adapted, inbred after countless generations of living in the dark. I knew then, you see, that human beings were their natural prey."

"That's why the stairways," Rudy said thoughtfully. The Dark don't need stairs-they haven't got any feet. They could drive dooic... "

"These weren't dooic," Ingold said. "They were human-of a sort." He shuddered, repelled by the memory. "But you see, my children, all the armies in the world would be hardly enough for what Alwir proposes. All that an invasion will do is cripple the existing fighting force of the Realm and leave too few men to guard the doors of their homes against the Empire of Alketch-or against the Dark.

"The alternative, retreating to the Keeps and letting civilization die around us in the hopes that one day the Dark will pass, is hardly a more appealing proposition; but at this point I literally cannot see a third course. Even Alwir has been forced to recognize that we cannot simply flee them, and it is not likely that the Dark Ones will spontaneously become vegetarians.

"So you see," he concluded quietly, "I must find Lohiro and find him quickly. If I do not, we are faced with a choice of disasters. Wizardry has long garnered its knowledge in an isolated tower on the shores of the Western Ocean, apart from the world, teaching, experimenting, balancing itself in the still center of the moving cosmos-power working for the perfection of power, knowledge for the perfection of knowledge. Nothing is fortuitous-there are no random events. It may be that the whole history of wizardry from Forn on was for this end only: to save us from the Dark."

"If it can," Rudy said softly, and handed him back his jewel.

"If it can," Ingold agreed.

Darkness had fallen. Thin gray rain slanted down on the wreckage of the town of Karst, flurrying the dark slickness of the puddles in the soupy mud of the court, staining the timber and thatch of the lean-to sheds. Bitter winds blew down off the mountains, whipping Gil's wet cloak around her ankles as she and Rudy crossed the court.

"Three months," Rudy murmured, raising his head under the downpour to survey the ruin of the town, the ruin of the civilization that had built it. "Christ, if the Dark don't get us, we'll freeze to death in that time."

Distant thunder boomed, like far-off artillery. Gil sought shelter from the rain in the darkness of the lean-to barracks, watching Rudy as he crossed the court to where the glow of a sheltered fire marked the common pot. Guards were moving around it, dark ghostly shapes, the brotherhood of the sword, their stained black tunics marked with the white quatrefoil emblem of their company. The sounds of men talking drifted through the sodden drumming of the rain.

Strong hands slipped over her shoulders from behind. A colorless voice purred, "Gilshalos?" She glanced at the hands, close by her cheek; long and thin, the fingers calloused and knotted from the discipline of the sword. Past the black shape of a tunic and the tasseled ends of white braids, she saw a thin face and cool, disinterested eyes. In a flanking maneuver, two other forms appeared and made themselves at home on either side of her.