Barbara Hambly - 01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

Rudy shook his head and grinned down at Alde, leaning his shoulder against the uprights that supported the wagon's roof. "You know, what amazes me about this trip is how many kids have survived. You see them all over the camp. Look at that one there. He looks as if the first stiff wind would blow him away."

"It's a she," Alde replied calmly, watching the child in question playing tag with herself under the feet of the wagon teams. The little girl's mother saw what she was doing and called her back to the fire with a screech like a parrot's, and the child, with the sublime unconcern of those who have only recently learned to walk, came running happily back out of danger, arms open, a treasury of broken straws in her hands.

Rudy reached out to stroke Tir's downy hair absentmindedly. He'll grow up like that, he found himself thinking. Learning to run in the dark labyrinth of the Keep of Dare, learning swordsmanship from the Guards... Strange to think of Alde and Tir going on living for years in that fortress Rudy had never seen, long after he was gone.

If they make it there. And he shivered, not entirely from the cold.

"And it isn't so unusual," Minalde went on, a glimmer of timid mischief in her blue eyes. "If you've noticed, it isn't the women and children who sit down by the roadside and die. If a wagon breaks down, the man will moan and despair-the woman will start pushing. Watch sometime."

"Oh, yeah?" he said, suspicious that she was baiting him.

She gave him a sidelong, teasing glance. "Seriously, Rudy. Women are tougher. They have to be, to protect the children."

He remembered the wind-stirred gallery at Karst, the flutter of the white dress of a girl who was running down the hall in darkness. "Aaah-" he conceded ungraciously, and she laughed.

More children eddied into the circle of the fire, the gaggle of camp orphans with the slim young girl they'd taken as their guardian carrying the youngest in her arms. The girl and the servant woman stopped to speak. Seeing them together, Rudy was reminded of the way he'd seen Alde and Medda that first day on the terrace of the villa at Karst.

A new thought crossed his mind, and he frowned suddenly. "Alde?" She looked up quickly, getting milk all over her fingers. "How do the Dark Ones know who Tir is?"

Slim brows drew together in thought. "I don't know," she said, startled by the question. "Do they?"

"Yeah. They went after him at Karst, anyway, and at Gae. There were beaucoup kids in the villa at Karst. As far as they should have known, he could have been any one of them. But they were right on the spot outside his nursery."

She shook her head, puzzled, the cloak of her unbound hair slipping across her shoulders. "Bektis!" she called out, seeing the tall figure crossing the camp to his own wagons.

He came forward and gave her a gracious bow. "My lady pleases?"

The Sorcerer of the Realm didn't look any the worse for two weeks in the open; like Alwir, he was fastidious to the point of foppishness, and there wasn't so much as an untoward wrinkle in his billowing gray robe.

Rudy broke in. "How do the Dark Ones know where to find Tir? I mean, they haven't got eyes, they can't tell he looks different or anything. Why do they know to come after him?"

The sorcerer hesitated, giving the matter weighty consideration-probably, Rudy guessed, to cover the fact that he was stumped. At length he said, "The Dark Ones have a knowledge that is beyond human ken." He is stumped. "Perhaps my lord Ingold could have told you, had he not chosen this time to disappear. The sources of the knowledge of the Dark-"

Rudy cut him off. "What I'm getting at is this. Do the Dark Ones really know it's Tir, or are they just going after any kid in a gilded cradle? If Alde went on foot with the kid in her arms, like every other woman in this train, wouldn't she be safer than being stuck in the wagon?"

Bektis looked down his long nose at this grimy upstart outlander who, he had been informed, had presumed to show signs of being mageborn. "Perhaps," he said loftily, "were we presently in any danger from the Dark. Yet it has been noted that no alarm of their presence has occurred since we reached the high ground... "

"Oh, come on! You saw how well that high ground stuff worked at Karst!"

"... and," the sorcerer grated, with an edge to his high, rather light voice, "I have seen in an enchanted crystal the only Nest of the Dark known in these mountains, and I assure you that it is blocked, as it has been blocked for centuries. Naturally my lady may do as she pleases, but for reasons of her own comfort and health, and on account of her state and prestige, I doubt that my lord Alwir will permit my lady to walk in the back of the train like a common peasant woman." Turning on his heel, the old man stalked back toward his wagon, his fur cape swirling behind him like a thundercloud.

Minalde sat in unhappy silence for a time, rocking her child against her breast as if to protect him from unseen peril. Distantly, the sounds of the camp's breaking came to them, the braying of mules and the creak of harnesses, the splash and hiss of doused fires. Somewhere quite close, voices raised in anger, Alwir's controlled and cutting as a lash, and after, the dry, vituperative hiss of Bishop Govannin's.

Alde sighed. "They're at it again." She kissed Tir's round little forehead, following up the mark of affection with a businesslike check of the state of his diaper, and proceeded to tuck him up in his multiple blankets again; the morning seemed to be growing colder instead of warmer. "They say we should reach the Keep tonight," she went on in a low voice, excluding from hearing any but the man who stood beside her in the shadows of the wagon. "Sometimes it has seemed that we'd travel forever and never reach the place. So Bektis is probably right."

Rudy leaned his elbow on the wagon-tail. "You think so?"

She didn't reply. Beyond, there was the clatter of trace-chains and the sound of troopers talking casually among themselves as they harnessed the oxen. "Will we reach the Keep in daylight, or will we have to push on after sundown?"

Her hands paused in their restless readying of the wagon for travel. In a low voice she said, "After sundown, I think."

Ingold slumped back exhaustedly against a boulder and rested his elbows on his drawn-up knees. "I am very much afraid, my dear," he said tiredly, "that we are not going to make it."

Gil, who for the last several hours had been aware of very little beyond the form of the wizard, who had always seemed to be walking farther and farther ahead of her, could only nod. The little bay among the rocks above the road where they had taken shelter offered no protection from the increasing cold, but at least they were out of the wind. They had fought the wind all day, and, like a wolf, it had torn at their cloaks and mauled their exposed faces with savage violence. Gil could sense on it now the smell of the storm moving down from the glaciers on the high peaks. Even in this comparative shelter, hard bits of mealy snow had begun to fly. It was now late afternoon; there was no chance, she knew, of reaching the Arrow Gorge before the convoy did. Whatever the Dark Ones had done to the bridge there, it was beyond her power or Ingold's to warn the people of it.

After a little time she recovered enough to disengage the flask she wore at her belt, draw the stopper, and take a tentative sip-the stuff made white lightning taste like lemonade. "The captain at the Keep gave me this," she explained, passing it over.

He took a drink without turning a hair. "I knew there was an ultimate reason in the cosmic scheme of things for you to accompany me," he said, and smiled through the ice in his beard. "Now that makes twice you've saved my life."

Over their heads in the rocks, the roaring of the wind increased to a kind of cold, keening shriek, and a great gust of snow blew down on them. Gil drew herself closer to Ingold's side. "About how far above the Arrow are we now?"