Barbara Hambly - 01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

"The place lies always under a kind of shadow. No reflection of sky or stars touches that polished stone. And in the middle of that darkness, like the mouth of a tomb, there is the deeper darkness of the entrance itself. But I can see that it is blocked, and the heaped earth and rock there are covered over with straggling weeds."

Staring into the fire, Gil could see nothing-only the play of colors, topaz and rose and citrine, and the curling heat shivering over the rocks that enclosed the pit, revealing, like frost-traceries, the ghostly patterns of fossil ferns printed in the fabric of the rock. But his rusty voice put the images in her mind, the way the darkness clotted in those too-thickly twined trees, the stirring in the shadows of the mountain that no wind could account for. The sense of eldritch horror was latent in the whispering night.

"I don't like it," Gil said softly.

"Neither do I," Ingold replied. "I don't trust that vision, Gil. We are three days from the Keep. The Dark must make their attempt, and make it soon."

"Can we go there?"

He raised his head and looked around him at the silent, sleeping camp. Clouds were building above the mountains, killing the stars; it seemed as if deeper darkness were settling over the land. "I don't see," he said, "that we have any choice."

The Dark were all around them. Gil could feel them, sense their presence in the still, sour miasma that overlay the daylight. She stopped on the edge of one of the innumerable tangled woods that snarled the valley like the thick-grown webs of monstrous spiders, looking northward on the rising slant of that unholy land, and found herself firmly repeating in her heart that it was broad daylight and she was with Ingold.

But she knew they were there.

The climb had been an easy one. Too easy, she caught herself thinking-an odd thing to think. The broad, round, shallow-walled valley through which Ingold had led her most of the morning was smooth-floored, with an easy grade that would have made considerably better walking than the road below, were it not so badly overgrown. The wind that had tormented them on the long miles down from Karst was cut off here. The walls of the canyon, cliffs marching steadily back toward a tumbled pile of talus slopes and the sudden, dark ramparts of sky-gouging peaks, protected the place. In their shelter the air was warmer than she had encountered anywhere in the West of the World. But, though she was warm now for the first time in days, Gil found that the valley disconcerted her. The woods were too thick to be healthy, the air was too heavy, and the ground was too even underfoot. The clumps of dark, sullen trees that scattered the broad length of the valley seemed to hem her in with a labyrinth of shadow, guarding beneath their entangling boughs thin shreds of a night that never lifted.

"They're here," she whispered. "I know they are."

Beside her, all but invisible in the shadows of the trees, Ingold nodded. Though it was not long after noon, the akin this valley seemed to play tricks with the sunlight. The thickness of the atmosphere dragged on Gil's lungs and, she had thought once or twice, on her mind as well.

"Can they be a danger to us even by daylight?"

"We know very little about the Dark, my dear," Ingold replied quietly. "All power has its limits, and we have seen that the power of the Dark grows with their numbers. We walk on a layer of ice that covers the depths of Hell. Tread carefully." Drawing his hood over his face, he moved forward, a wraith in the vaporous, leaden air.

As they climbed the valley, this sense that they were tampering in evil far beyond human ken grew upon her. There was something hellishly symmetrical about the valley, some persistent wrongness in the geology of the crowding, stratified rock of the cliffs that whispered warnings to Gil's mind. The land under their feet smoothed its way up over a great fault that cut the valley in half, with wild grape and a particularly tough-fibered species of ivy tangling over the break and the natural causeway that bridged it. Fossils Gil had seen on the stones of last night's campfire repeated themselves, peeking from broken rock-huge ferns, long-fingered marine weed, and the crawling things of times long past, trilobite and brachiopod, imprinted forever in the stamp of the slate. The ground seemed leveled by the passing feet of millions, hard as an ancient roadbed among its pathless labyrinth of crowding trees.

Ingold paused and turned to check their backtrail for what seemed like the hundredth time that day. Gil rubbed her aching eyes; she had snatched a few hours of sleep before setting out from the camp before dawn, but the lack of it was beginning to tell. Not, she reflected wryly, that she had gotten whole bunches of that particular commodity since this trail drive started. Some anomaly in the lay of the ground caught her attention, a stream bed that did not lie as it ought, a formation of rocks...

Looking back, she found she was alone. Momentary panic seized her. Even a few weeks ago she would have thrown caution to the winds and yelled for Ingold, even on the very doormat of the Dark. But living like a winter wolf and associating with the Icefalcon had altered her reactions, and she stood perfectly still, scanning the too regular landscape.

A hand touched her shoulder and she swung around. Ingold caught her wrist as her sword was half out of its scabbard. "Where did you go?" she whispered.

The wizard frowned. "I didn't go anywhere." His hand still on her wrist, he looked around them doubtfully.

"You sure as hell weren't here a minute ago."

"Hmm." He scratched thoughtfully at his scrubby beard. "Wait here," he said finally, "and watch me." With these words he released Gil's arm and walked away, his feet making barely a sound in the knee-deep jungles of undergrowth. Gil tried her best to watch him. Tired as she was with the weariness that seemed to have settled around her bones, she was certain she hadn't moved or shut her eyes. But somehow she lost sight of the wizard, in open ground, in the sunlight, without an inch of cover in yards.

She blinked and rubbed her eyes again. There was something, she thought, in the air of this place, some foulness, an invisible game of blindman's bluff. Then she looked back and saw Ingold standing about twenty feet off at the end of the track of flattened ivy, as if he had always been there. As he came back to her, she had no trouble following his movements.

Gil shook her head. "I don't understand." She hitched her cloak up on her shoulder, a gesture that was quickly becoming automatic, like straightening her sword belt. Always before, the cloak had never provided quite enough protection from the cold, but in this place, with its stifling air, it seemed hot and heavy. She was acutely aware of the wrongness of this place. "Do you know what's going on?"

"I'm afraid I do," Ingold said slowly. "The power of the Dark is strong here, very strong. It seems to be interfering with the cloaking spell I've had over both of us, which is a pity, because that probably means I'll have to dispense with it."

"You mean," Gil said in surprise, "we've been under a spell all along?"

"Oh, yes." He smiled at her startled face. "I've been keeping a number of spells on the convoy all the way down from Karst. Mostly ward and guard, aversion and protection. They wouldn't hold back a concerted attack, but they have served to deflect random misfortune."

She flushed, annoyed at herself. "I never knew that."

"Of course not. It's the mark of a good mage that he's never seen doing anything at all." She glanced suspiciously at him to see if he were teasing her, but he seemed perfectly serious-as serious as Ingold ever looked.

"But would a-a cloaking spell protect us from the Dark in the first place?"

"Probably not here in their own valley," Ingold replied casually. "But the White Raiders have been following us since we left the road. If the cloaking spell is unreliable, we're going to have a devil of a time getting back."