Barbara Hambly - 01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

They did not speak for some time, but trudged down the road in silence. Then Rudy asked, "They don't get over it, do they?"

"No." The wizard's voice came disembodied from the shadows of his hood. A harmless old man, Rudy thought. A charming old lunatic. No wonder people are afraid of him.

"No," Ingold went on. "If they are indoors they generally starve. If they are outdoors they die of exposure."

"Uh- anybody ever take care of one, to see if his mind might come back?"

Ingold shrugged. "Not easy when you're fleeing the Dark yourself. Up in Twegged in the north, at the start of all this trouble, it was tried. The victim lasted two months."

"What happened after two months?"

"Her caretakers killed her." The wizard added, in a tone of explanation, "They were the victim's husband and daughter, you see."

Rudy looked back over his shoulder. The evening mists were coming down heavily, shadow and darkness covering the land. Still, he thought he could see in the distance the curve of the road, the ditch, and the whitish blur against the darker ground.

The night fell, and for miles up and down the Great

South Road the refugees sought what sleep they could. Watch fires threaded the darkness like a glittering necklace on both sides of the road, and all who could bear arms took their turn at them. In the low ground, the puddled rain turned to ice.

Alde came to Rudy's watch fire in the night, with Medda escorting her like a stout, disapproving shadow. She was shy with him, and they did not speak of what had passed between them at Karst, but Rudy felt a joy in her presence he had never known with any other human being. As they sat together with their backs to the fire, not touching, talking of Tir or of the small doings of the road, the intimacy between them was as close and warm as if they shared a cloak.

The morning dawned clear and freezing cold. The wind had broken the overcast and piled the clouds in the south, like the immeasurable slopes of achingly white mountains against the soaring blue of the morning sky. Word came down the line that wolves had attacked the horse herd belonging to the Church and had been driven off by the Red Monks; four night guards had been found dead by their watch fires, bloodless victims of the Dark. Nevertheless, Bishop Govannin gave a cart-tail service of thanksgiving, and those who had survived the night thanked their God that it had been no worse.

They came into a rolling country now, the great road looping through the gray-green hills. To their right, the distant heads of the western mountains were sometimes glimpsed, plum and blue and gray, or covered in the lour of clouds. It was a land of streams, ice-rimed in the morning, that flowed down toward the green, lush bottom lands in the east. These streams were sometimes crossed by narrow stone bridges, but often the road simply led to shallow fords, so that everyone was perpetually half-wet and shivering. Rudy, stiff and aching in every joint, took Ingold's advice and cut a straight sapling from the next grove of trees they passed, to trim into a walking stick. He had never been much good at botany, but the Icefalcon told him the wood was ash.

Toward noon they crossed a broad saddle of land that lay between two hills, and from it a vista spread before them of all the countryside down to the river, the long grass rippling palely in the wan light of a heatless sun. The red-clothed trooper leading the mules of Minalde's cart paused there to breathe them, and Rudy came up close at her side. Many people stood there, having stopped to rest in the neck of that miniature pass and look down on the lands below. Alde turned to him and smiled. "How are you?" she asked quietly, a little shy at speaking to him in the light of day.

"Sore as hell." Rudy leaned on his staff, not caring if it made him look like an old man. "How in God's name do you people stand it? I feel like I'm fixing to die."

"So do most of these people," Alde said. "So would I, if I didn't have a cart to ride in because I'm the Queen. We've been passing women all day, with children as young as Tir. Carrying them. They'll carry them clear to Renweth, unless they die on the road." She tucked the blankets closer around the child she held propped at her side. Tir made a little noise of protest and a determined effort to divest himself of the blankets and, Rudy guessed, to roll off the seat. The kid was going to be a real pest when he started to walk.

"Die?" he said uneasily. He remembered things people had said about those who straggled from the caravan...

"Of cold," Alde said. "Or hunger. We're doing all right for food now, but when we get out of the farm country, there won't be nearly enough. Not for the children or for the old people or for those who are sick-"

She broke off, startled, lifting her head to stare off across the hills, and Rudy followed her gaze down the smooth, falling curves of the gray-green land. Far off he could see huge brown forms stalking the distant pastures, swaying like monstrous animated haystacks-impossibly large, monsters in the icy distance.

"What are they?" he asked, shading his eyes. Then he glanced back at Alde and saw the worry on her face. "Are they... "

"Mammoths," Alde said, and her tone was puzzled and surprised. "Mammoths this side of the mountains... "

"Mammoths?"

She glanced down at him, hearing but misinterpreting the shock in his voice. "Woolly elephants," she explained. "They're common on the northern plains, of course, but they haven't been seen in the river valleys since-oh, for hundreds of years. And never this far south. They must have come over the passes of the mountains for some reason."

But mammoths were not the only things to come over the passes of the mountains.

That night, as he and Alde sat talking quietly under Medda's disapproving chaperonage by the watch fire, Rudy thought he heard the distant thunder of hooves, an unlikely sound in the convoy where horses were few and precious, guarded more carefully than a miser guards his hoard. After a time, the night wind brought him the faint, damp drift of smoke and a sound that reminded him of the howling of wolves, although there was a difference to this sound. In the morning he rode out with Ingold and the slim handful of Guards whom the convoy could afford to mount to look for the source of the sound.

They found it long before the sun had managed to burn off the thick, white river mist. The charred hulk of a gutted farmhouse loomed in the opal fog, haunted by the gliding black shapes of spectral crows and the smell of roasted flesh. They found some of the farm family a little ways from the house. At first Rudy didn't register that the body staked to the ground was human; when he did, he came as close to fainting as he ever had in his life. He looked away, his face clammy with sweat and the taste of vomit in his mouth. He heard Janus' boots squishing in the mushy grass and the faint, restless jingling of bridle-bits as the horses tossed their heads in alarm. He heard Janus say, "Not the Dark," and Ingold, skirting on foot the trampled weeds beyond him, reply, "No."

Faintly, another Guard's voice drifted to him. "Dooic? Gone feral or-or mad?"

Another responded. "On horses? Be serious."

Ingold returned, materializing like a specter from the mist, holding in his hand a strip of rawhide trimmed with chips of colored glass, from which a long feather dangled, its end tipped in blood. "No," he said, his voice calm in spite of the butchered horror lying in the grass nearby. "No, I fear this is the work of the White Raiders."

"On this side of the mountains?" Janus asked nervously, looking around him.

Ingold nodded and held out to him the rawhide, the spinning feather brushing his wrist and marking the flesh with blood. "Lava Hills People," he identified briefly, and gestured toward the grisly evidence, scattered over several square yards of grass. "It's a sacrifice, a-propitiation. An offering to something they fear."