Barbara Hambly - 01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

And soon he'd be gone. She'd be here for endless weeks while he pursued his solitary quest across the plains to Quo, in search of the wizards, his friends, the only group of people who really understood him. She wondered what he would find there. She wondered, with a chill, if he'd even return.

He will, she told herself, looking across at the old man's still profile and calm, intent eyes. He's tough as an old boot and slippery as a snake. He'll make it back all right, and the other wizards with him.

She shifted the ball of her wadded-up cloak a little more comfortably behind her aching shoulders and blinked out at the room. After last night's trek over the bare backbone of the world, even a watch fire by the road would have looked good; this nine-by-seven cell in which she could hardly stand was a little corner of Paradise.

The place, viewed by more critical eyes, would have been called dingy; the warm gold of the firelight probing into the cracks of the rough-plastered walls and flagged floor cruelly revealed the unevenness, the shoddy workmanship, the patina of stains and soot-blackening, and the dents and scratches of hundreds of generations of continuous habitation and a thousand years of neglect. The cell would be awfully crowded for a family, Gil reflected. Unbidden to her mind leaped Rudy's picture of his own boyhood home, shrill with the bickering of acrimonious female voices. She grinned as she wondered what the incidence of sibling murder had been in the Keep's heyday.

The shadows by the fire shifted as Ingold put aside his crystal and lay down across the other end of the room, drawing his mantle over him as a blanket. Gil prepared to do likewise, asking him as she did so, "Could you see the convoy?"

"Oh, yes. They're settling in for the night, under double guard. I don't see any sign of the Dark. Incidentally, the crystal shows the Nest in the valley of the Dark as being still blocked."

"They like that, don't they?" Gil drew her cloak over her, watching the changing patterns of flame and shadow playing across the rickety wall that had long ago partitioned this cell off from a larger one. Her thoughts idled over the world enclosed within those narrow walls, over the great black monolith of the Keep, guarding its darkness, its silence, its secrets-secrets that had been forgotten even by Ingold, even by Lohiro, Archmage of all the wizards in the world. Those dark, heavy walls held only darkness within.

She rolled over onto her side and propped her head on her arm. "You know," she said dreamily, "this whole place-it's like your description of the Nests of the Dark."

Ingold opened his eyes. "Very like," he agreed.

"Is that what we've come to?" she asked. "To living like them, to be safe from them?"

"Possibly," the wizard assented sleepily. "But one might then ask why the Dark Ones live as they do. And when all else is considered, here we are, safe; and so we shall remain, as long as the gates are kept shut at night." He rolled over. "Go to sleep, Gil."

Gil bunked up at the reflection of the fire, thinking about that for a moment. It occurred to her that if once the Dark came into this place, the safety here would turn to redoubled peril. In the walls of the Keep was lodged eternal darkness, like the mazes of night at the center of the earth, which no sunrise could ever touch. She said uneasily, "Ingold?"

"Yes?" There was a hint of weariness in his voice.

"What was the Keep Law that the captain talked about? What did that have to do with our spending the night here?"

Ingold sighed and turned his head toward her, the dying firelight doing curious things to the lines and scars of his face. "Keep Law," he told her, "states that the integrity of the Keep is the ultimate priority; above life, above honor, above the lives of family or loved ones. Anything that does not require the presence of human beings after dark is left outside the gates, and when the gates are shut at night, it is, and always must be, the ruling of the Keep that no one will pass them until sunrise. In ancient days the penalty for opening the doors-on any excuse whatsoever-between the setting and the rising of the sun was to be chained between the pillars that used to surmount the little hill that faces the doors across the road, to be left there at night for the Dark. Now go to sleep."

This time he must have laid a spell on the words, for Gil fell asleep at once, and the wizard's words followed her down into the darkness of her dreams,

The Dark hunted. She could feel them, sense them, sense the dark shifting of movement through spinning, primordial blackness, the vague stirrings in unspeakable chasms that light had never touched. Groggily, through a leaden fog of sleep, Gil tried to remember where she was-the Keep, Dare's Keep. Fleeting, tangled images came to her of slipping through nighted corridors and converging on a chosen prey. She could sense that eyeless, waiting malevolence, smell, as they smelled, the hot pulse of blood, and sense, through the thick gloom of vibrating, purple darkness, the glow of the prey, the centerpoint of a whirling vortex of lust and hate... But it wasn't the closeness of the Keep at all that surrounded her, but wind, utter bone-piercing cold, the roaring of water among pillars of stone, the white surge and fleck of spray, and the freezing touch of the air above the flood. Greedy power gnawed at stone, greedy minds counted out glowing beads on a four-mile chain of tangled sleep and laughed with a gloating laughter that never emerged to sound.

Her eyes snapped open, and sweat drenched her face at the memory of that gloating laughter. She whispered, "Ingold... " almost afraid to make a sound, for fear they might hear.

The wizard was already awake, his white hair tousled with sleep, his eyes alert, as if he listened for some distant sound that Gil could not hear. A dim blue ball of witchlight hung above his head; the fire in the cell had long grown cold. "What is it?" he asked her gently. "What did you dream?"

She drew a deep breath, grasping at the fast-fading rags of sensation, of things she'd heard and smelled. "The Dark... "

"I know," he said softly. "I felt it, too. What? And where?"

She sat up, drawing her cloak around her shoulders, as if that would still her shivering. "I don't know where it was," she said, a little more calmly. "There was water rushing, and-stone-hewn stone, I think, pillars. They were tearing pieces of stone out of pillars, throwing them into rushing water-and-and laughing. They know where Tir is, Ingold," she added, her voice low and urgent.

He came across the room to her and put an arm around her shoulders for comfort, though for her the worst was past. His voice was grim as he said, "So do I. He's with his mother, half a day's journey below the stone bridge that crosses the gorge of the Arrow River."

Somewhere above the inky overcast, the sky might have been lightening, preparatory to the breaking of day; but if so, Rudy Solis could see little indication of it. The canyon through which the road at this point wound was like a black wind tunnel, the smell of the wind strong and somehow earthy, its sound like the roar of the sea in the pines above the road. He prowled restlessly through the rousing camp, unable to account for his uneasiness, threading through little knots of bundled-up fugitives huddled around their breakfast fires, making his way almost subconsciously back to the wagons he had stealthily quitted before the camp was astir.

The fires there had been built up and threw an uneasy flickering glow over the camp. Alde was awake, feeding Tir on bread soaked in milk in the little island of shelter at the back of her wagon. On the other side of the fire, a handful of troopers of the House of Bes were wolfing down their meager rations in silence. Farther out among the wagons, another woman, a servant of the household, was ordering two small children about as she fed a baby smaller than Tir, while her husband fed the ox teams in sullen silence. Overhead, the banners cracked like bullwhips in the icy stream of the wind.