Barbara Hambly - 01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

They reached the place in mid-afternoon. Gil felt it from afar, horror coalescing in her veins. She knew without being told that this was the place that Ingold had seen reflected in the depths of the fire. The ground was unnaturally even, tipped at a steep angle, with a great slanting slab of basalt jammed into the foundations of the mountain behind it, its farther end rising like the hull of a heeled wreck; one corner was buried in the valley floor as if driven there by some unspeakable cataclysm lost in the abysses of time. The slanted angle showed how deep the slab was founded; though it had been displaced upward a good thirty feet, there was no sign of bottom. And in the midst of it gaped the black hole of its stairway, the plunging road down into the chasm of the Dark.

The stairway was open. Little trace of the earth and rock Ingold had seen in the shadow image of the fire remained anywhere near that hideous gulf. A great scattering of stones, like the fan-trail of a volcanic spew, littered the slope below, but Gil could see from the way the clutching, ubiquitous weeds grew over them that the stones had been blown from that hole many years since. Still she picked one up. On its side, she could see the dry ghost of a lush, obscene orchid, frozen in some primeval swamp a million years ago and fragmented by the violence of that ancient blast. Ingold, too, was examining the wide-flung pattern of the stones, working his way methodically toward the crazily tilted pavement and the hole that yawned like a silent scream at the day.

He paused at the place where the rank, overgrown ground ended and the black pavement began. Gil saw him stoop to pick up a stone and stand in thought for a moment, turning it over in his hands. Then he stepped cautiously onto the slick, canted surface of the stone and began his careful climb toward the stairway itself.

Though her whole being shrank from it, as it had on that other pavement in the vaults at Gae, Gil followed him. She struggled through the foliage that clung with such perverted persistence to her feet, scrambled up after the wizard onto the tilted pavement, and saw, ahead of her, Ingold pause to wait, his shadow lying small and leaden around his feet. Seen under the light of day, naked to the sky, the sheer size of the pavement awed her; from the corner buried in the weed-choked earth to the corner tilted upward and buried in the out-thrust knee of the mountain, it must have measured close to seven hundred feet. In its midst Ingold seemed very small and exposed. It was a tricky scramble up the smooth incline; when she reached his side, Gil was panting in the gluey, breathless air.

"So we were right," Ingold said softly. "The vision was a lie."

Below them stretched the stairway, open to the winds. A cool drift of damp air seemed to rise from it, making Gil's sweat-matted hair prickle on the back of her neck. There was nothing now between them and the Dark except the presence of the sun, and she glanced at the sky quickly, as if fearing to see the gathering of clouds.

"So what can we do?"

"Rejoin the convoy as quickly as possible. We do not yet know what they plan, but at least we know the direction of the attack. And in any case, it may be possible to thwart them and cover Tir's retreat to the Keep."

Gil glanced across at him. "How?"

"Something Rudy said once. If we-"

He broke off and caught her by the wrist. Gil followed the direction of his eyes along the smooth, tangled floor of the vale and spotted a stirring in the dark woods near one of those queer formations of black stone that dotted the valley. A movement was quickly lost to sight, but Gil knew what it was. There was only one thing that it could be.

She asked, "Have they seen us?"

"Doubtless. Though I should be surprised if they came any closer." Balancing himself carefully with his staff, Ingold began his cautious descent from the ramplike pavement, with Gil edging gingerly behind. When they reached the ground, Ingold scanned the valley again, but could see nothing further. "Which doesn't mean anything, of course," he said, turning to walk along the rising edge of the pavement. "Just because you don't see White Raiders doesn't mean they aren't there."

"So what are we going to do?"

Ingold pointed with his staff toward the narrowing maze of crevices and hanging valleys at the end of the vale of the Dark, a great ruinous confusion of old avalanche scars, split and faulted from the rock. "There should be a way up there," he said calmly, pausing in the vine-entangled shadows of the seamless black wall.

"You're kidding," Gil said, aghast.

"I never kid, my dear." He started off up the talus slope.

Gil stayed where she was for a time, watching him disappear up the curve of the land. The ground rose and buckled oddly around the featureless wall of the black foundation, but whatever upheaval had disrupted it had been so long ago that the geology of the valley had settled around it. That in itself bothered Gil-the thing was so old, so incredibly old. Eons had rolled by since some arcane power had founded it here, so that the very shape of the lands and seas had changed. More fossils caught her eyes. My God, she thought, this place was a tropical swamp when this was wrought. How long have the Dark Ones inhabited the earth, anyway?

Who could ever tell, since they didn't have a bone in their floating plasmoid bodies? And yet they had intelligence, the intelligence to sink shafts, to build these dark pavements at their heads and have them endure for millennia with very little appearance of decay. They were intelligent enough to work their own kind of magic, different from the nature of human magic, ungraspable by any human brain. They were intelligent enough to keep tabs on the convoy, to know where Tir was, and to know why he had to be put out of the way.

Arms folded, Gil stood for a while in the lengthening shadows and meditated on the Dark.

After a time she looked up and saw Ingold again, appearing and disappearing among the twisted confusion of boulders and huddled trees at the end of the valley. Some primordial cataclysm had broken the side of one of the guardian peaks of the valley, leaving a wilderness of split granite and bottomless chasms, and time had overlaid the ruin with plant life grown far too large for the vertical rocks. The result reminded her vaguely of a Chinese painting, with full-size trees sprouting unconcernedly from the sides of cliffs. But this was messier, fouler, darker; here dead trunks had fallen to rot in gullies bristling with dead white spikes below the crumbly footing above. She could see Ingold's brown mantle shifting along impossibly narrow rock ledges high on the faces of those cliffs,

Ingold saw her looking and paused, flattened to the rock behind him. "Come up," he called down to her, his voice echoing faintly among the rocks. "There's a trail."

What the hell , Gil sighed. You only die once .

Gil had never liked heights. Scrambling over the treacherous footing, she envied the wizard his six-foot staff, for in places the ledges narrowed to inches, and in others cascades of vines sprawled over the trail and masked any hint of the footing underneath. She found herself backtracking a dozen times, scrupulously avoiding looking up or down or anywhere but at her own scratched hands when a promising ledge petered out or a slit between two huge rock faces became too narrow to be passed, or too choked with rotting foliage that could house any number of creatures less Lovecraftian, but certainly as deadly, as the Dark. She wondered if there were rattlesnakes in this world-or, for that matter, poisonous snakes without rattles.

She finally caught up with him in the mouth of a dark slit in the rocks, after a precipitous scramble around the convex face of a boulder on a ledge over a nightmare maw of tangled thorn and broken stone. She was sweating and gasping in the afternoon heat and fighting for balance on the sandy, crumbling ground. The shift of the sun over the backbone of the Rampart Range had thrown the chasm into deep shadow. Ingold was barely visible but for the pale blur of face and beard and the bright glitter of his eyes.