Barbara Hambly - 01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

"The Dark?" the Commander asked. He took and examined the rawhide tag.

"Doubtless," Ingold said slowly, and looked around him at the burned trees, the scorched remains of the outbuildings, and the fallen house surrounded by a hideously suggestive cloud of screeching carrion-birds. "Doubtless. Though if the Dark were their principal fear-why did they cross the mountains? The danger of the Dark is thickest in the valleys of the river."

"Possibly they didn't know."

"Possibly." The wizard's tone was still dubious, and he moved restlessly along the trampled verge of the grass, scanning the flat opaque whiteness of a countryside turned two-dimensional with fog, as if sniffing the wind for the scent of unknown danger. "In any case, it puts us in a bad position. You see, the hoof-tracks here are shod, which means they're already short of horses, stealing what they can find from the valley farms. My guess is that they're too few to protect their herds from wolves. They'll be turning on the convoy soon."

"Would they?" Janus asked doubtfully.

"If they thought they could get away with it, yes." Ingold came back to him, brushing the dew from his sleeves. He walked, Rudy noticed, with an instinctive cat-footed care that left hardly a mark in the sodden grass. "The combined force of the Guards, Alwir's troops, the Church troops, and the remains of the Army, plus Tirkenson's men, outnumber the Raiders at least twenty to one. But the convoy is nearly seven miles long on the march; four miles, bunched up to camp. They could strike us like a spearhead at any point."

The Guards were mounting to go. Only Janus and Ingold remained afoot, talking in low voices, the red-haired Commander of the Guards towering over the smaller form of the wizard. From his uneasy perch on the restless horse, Rudy looked down at the pair of them, wondering about the friendship that was so evident, despite the Church strictures against wizards. It occurred to him that, apart from himself and Gil, Janus seemed to be the only friend Ingold had in the convoy. People, ordinary people following the road to the myth of refuge in the south, treated the old man with a combination of awe, distrust, and outright fear, as something completely uncanny; even Minalde, whose life and child he had saved from certain doom, was timid and silent in his presence. Rudy wondered what the bond was between the wizard and the Guards.

"And how much danger are we in, from the Dark?"

In the diffuse light Ingold's face was thoughtful, his gaze going past the Commander to scan the landscape that was slowly revealing itself as the mists dissolved into pale and heatless daylight. Far off, a dark sense of movement along the bases of the round hills marked the road, with its endless chain of pilgrims; closer, crows hunched in the bare black trees and watched the Guards with bright, inquiring eyes. All around them, north and south and west, lay a desolation of sun-silvered grass. Rudy felt he had never seen a land so empty.

"More than we think," the wizard said quietly. "We had a good moon last night, but I could sense them, far off, masses of them. There was a Nest of them at one time, blocked long ago, at the foot of the mountains. The road will run quite close to it."

Janus' glance cut sharply back to him, but Ingold did not elaborate. He only said, "Right now, speed is our ally, and the weather. We must reach the Keep and quickly; every day on the road heightens our danger. It may be that, when we reach it, we will have to hold the Keep against more than the Dark."

A fever of uneasiness seemed to spread down the convoy. The unseen presence of the White Raiders dogged them by day, as the threat of the Dark dogged them by night, and all that day and the next Rudy felt it, following the endless road. He heard it in the snatches of conversation he caught and picked it up, unsaid, from the people he talked to during the days; he saw it in the movements of the refugees who still clung, a vast tattered horde, to the nucleus of what had been the government of the greatest Realm in the West of the World. Little groups and families would accelerate past him, a man pushing an impossibly piled wheelbarrow, cursing an exhausted woman with a child in her arms and a goat on a frayed rope behind her to hurry, hurry, get a little farther down the road before something-the Dark, the wolves, the invisible Raiders-got them. Later Rudy would pass them, sitting in a tired huddle on a worn milestone, the child wailing hungrily while the man and woman looked over their shoulders at the empty lands beyond. Tempers shortened. At the crossing of the Mabigee River, its bridge flooded out by unseasonable storms in the mountains, Alwir and Bishop Govannin came to bitter words over the cartloads of ecclesiastical records that the Bishop had brought from Gae. The records could be left behind-the carts were needed for the sick, the injured, the very old and very young whose strength was failing them due to poor food and exhaustion.

The Bishop bit back at him, "Yes, and then all record of precedent, which puts the dominion of God above the commands of man, may be left behind, too, when we reach the Keep."

"Don't be a fool, woman!" Alwir snarled. "God would rather have souls than a load of moldy paper!"

"He has their souls," the Bishop snapped, "or should. If it's souls that concern you, my lord Chancellor, turn out your tame mirror of Satan, your pet conjurer, and let your precious sick ride in his place. A man who takes the advice of wizards should be the last to talk of souls."

The river crossing left the refugees soaked and exhausted, and no one traveled more than a few miles onward after that. The main body of the convoy halted in an abandoned village and took shelter in the stone houses that were half-falling into ruin, scorched by the fires their defenders had lit against the attacking Dark, or caved in by the power of the Dark themselves. Those parties that could not fit into the houses spread out like water across a flood plain all around, making a great tangled city of tents and makeshift shelters, ringed in the far-flung watch fires of its bright perimeter against the coming of the night.

Rudy's campfire was built in a little dip in the ground a hundred yards from the building farthest from the road. He'd found a tiny dugout cabin nested into the side of a kill that, in better days, had been used for a wood store and still contained ample sticks for his fire. The hill itself, facing away from the road and the camp, made a fair windbreak against the bitter, searching winds from the west.

All that day the mountains had been visible, growing perceptibly in the west and south. Now, in the last of the sunset, they hung like a black wall against the cloudheaped sky of evening, their heads wreathed in storms and, when the wind cleared the cover a little, white with the mantle of winter. He had been told that Sarda Pass lay high in those mountains. Rudy thought of snow and shivered. He had grown used to being wolf-hungry all the time, and, to his surprise, his body seemed to be adapting to days of walking and the weariness of night guard. But since his coming to the Realm of Darwath, he had always been conscious of being cold. He wondered if he would ever get warm again.

When the night was fully dark, Alde and Medda appeared, bringing him some mulled wine. Rudy sipped it thankfully, reflecting to himself that he'd rather have had about six cups of the foulest black truck-driver coffee and a handful of caffeine tablets. Still, he reasoned, looking across the gold rim of the cup at the girl's dark eyes, it proved she cared, or at least felt something for him. Alde, Minalde, he thought despairingly, you're the goddam Queen of Darwath and I'm a bum passing through, and why does this have to happen to me? His desire for her was palpable, urgent, but they could not so much as touch hands. Medda sat, a stout bundle of silent disapproval, on the other side of his fire, far enough away so as not to overhear their conversation, if they kept their voices low. For the rest, her mere presence lent them a respectability without which Alde would not have been able to see him at all.