Barbara Hambly - 01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

"That's no answer."

Rudy tried desperately to think, to express more to himself than to the old man that terrible need. This, he understood suddenly, was what Gnift did to your courage, your spirit, your body, making you understand your own truth before you could manifest it to another. He understood then why Gil trained with the Guards, understood the bond of commitment and understanding that lay between Ingold and the Commander. And he knew he had to answer and answer right, or Ingold would never consent to be his teacher.

But there is no right answer! the other half of his mind cried. It's nothing-it's only that calm. It's only knowing that it's right, and I have to do it. It's only that I wasn't surprised when I could call the fire. But it's different for everyone, everything.

And suddenly Rudy knew, understood, as if something had been turned within him and the truth of his own soul had focused. Tell the truth, he told himself. Even if it's stupid, it is the truth. He whispered, "If I don't, nothing will mean anything. If I don't learn-about that-there won't be any center. It's the center of everything, only I didn't know it."

The words made sense to him, though they were probably utter Greek to the wizard. He felt as if some other person were speaking through him, drawn out of his immobilized mind by the hypnotic power of that depthless gaze.

"What's the center?" Ingold pressed him, quiet and inescapable as death.

"Knowing- not knowing something, but just knowing. Knowing the center is the center; having a key, one thing that makes sense, is sense. Everything has its own key, and knowing that is my key."

"Ah."

Being released from that power was like waking up, but waking up into a different world. Rudy found he was sweating, as if from a physical shock or some great exertion. He wondered how he could ever have thought Ingold harmless, how he could ever have not been half-afraid, awed, loving the old man.

Dryly amused fondness briefly crossed the old man's face, and with slow illumination, Rudy came to realize the vast extent of Ingold's wizardry, seeing its reflection in the potential of his own. "You understand what it is," the wizard said after a moment. "Do you understand what it means?"

Rudy shook his head. "Only that I'll do whatever I have to. I have to do it, Ingold."

At that, Ingold smiled to himself, as if remembering another very earnest and extremely young mage. "And that means doing whatever I tell you to," he said. "Without question, without argument, to the best of your ability. And only you know what that best is. You will have to memorize thousands of things that seem to have no meaning, foolish things, names and riddles and rhymes."

"I'm not very good at memorizing stuff," Rudy admitted shamefacedly.

"Then I suggest that you get good, and quickly." The eyes turned cold again, distant, and in the clipped, decisive tone Rudy could feel once more the flash of that terrible power. "I am not a kindergarten teacher; I have my own work. If you wish to learn, Rudy, you will learn as and how and when I choose to teach you. Is that clear?"

For a split second, Rudy wondered what would happen if he said, What if I can't? But if the question was the answer, the answer would surely be. Then you can't . It was entirely his choice. And though he would be as friendly as before, Ingold would never mention the subject again.

Rudy saw his own future, made suddenly clear, and what the commitment would mean: a change, enormous, all-encompassing, irrevocable, and terrifying, in everything he was, everything he would do or be. The choice was being thrust violently into his shaky, unprepared hands, a decision that he must make, could never back out of, and would never, ever be able to make again.

How come stuff like this always happens to me?

The question was the answer. Because you want it.

He swallowed hard and found his throat aching with strain. "Okay," he said weakly. "I'll do it. I'll do the best I can, I mean."

Night had fallen around them. Ingold folded his arms, a dim, cloaked shadow against the distant glitter of the camp lights. Thin, translucent ground mist had risen, and the sounds and smells of the camp were obscure behind them; Rudy had the sense of being isolated in a wet, cold world of nothingness, as if he had been kneeling there in the damp grass for hours, wrestling with some terrible angel.

And he had won. His soul felt light and empty, without triumph or anxiety, as if he could drift upon the wind.

Then Ingold smiled and was nothing but a shabby little man in a stained and rusty brown robe. "That," he said pleasantly, "is what I shall expect of you at all times. Even when you are bored, and tired, and hungry; when you're afraid of what I tell you to do; when you think it's dangerous, or impossible, or both; when you're angry with me for prying into what you consider your trivial personal life. You will always do the best you can; for only you understand what it is. God help you!" He stood up, shaking the damp grass and stray twigs from his rough robe. "Now get back to camp," he said, not unkindly. "You still have your shift of watch to stand."

Cold wind keened down the foothills, whining in the canyons surrounding the refugee camp that lay strung out along the road. It flattened Rudy's little fire to thin yellow streamers that paralleled the ground and sent chill fingers through cloak and tunic and flesh, searching out his bones. The first hard, mealy, little flakes of snow had begun to fall.

Alde had not come.

Rudy knew why and was sorry. What had happened last night had changed things between them. That, too, was irrevocable; if she was not his lover, she could no longer be his friend, either. And, good daughter of the Church that she was, she would be no wizard's woman.

He would miss Minalde. His body hurt for her, but the longing was deeper than that, a loneliness, a need for her company, for the sound of her soft voice. It brought home to him with a painful little stab that he was now an outsider, as he would be an outsider for the rest of his life. In this world, or in his own, he had cut himself off from all hope of communication with those who did not understand. It would be worse when he went home-that much he knew already. But having seen the center, the focus, the key of his own life, he knew there was no way he could not pursue it. Even when he left the peril-fraught world of the Dark and returned to the electric jungles of Southern California, he knew he would be driven to seek it there. And he knew that somehow, some way, seeking, he would find.

The wind stung his face, carrying with the snow the mourning of the wolves. Behind him he sensed the camp slipping into its dark sleep, and the endless road behind him, down the foothills and out onto the plains, marked on both sides by a broken chain of watch fires.

He cast his mind back to his interview with Ingold earlier in the evening, trying to recall that reflected glimpse he'd had of his own mind, or soul, or the center of his own being. The memory was hazy, like the memory of intense pain. He could recall seeing it, but could not call back clearly what it had been-only the grip, the cold, of Ingold's thought on his, and the clear certainty, for the first time in his life, of knowing what he was.

He hadn't known then that it would cost him Minalde. He hadn't known it would cost him everything that he was, for that was what it amounted to. But if the question is the answer, it wouldn't have mattered if I knew or not. He only knew that if he had turned away, he would always have been sure that he'd had it within his grip and let it go. He knew that he couldn't have let it be taken from him a second time.

The fire crackled, the wood sighing as it broke and fell. Rudy took a stout branch and rearranged it. The shower of ascending sparks glittered like fireworks among the spitting snow. He huddled deeper into his cloak, then glanced back in the direction of the camp. By the renewed light of the fire he could see a dark figure walking toward him, wrapped from head to heel in fur. Her black cloud of hair blew about her in the wind, and the firelight, when she drew near him, laid blue and golden shadows across her violet eyes.