Barbara Hambly - 01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

"Two or three miles. We would be able to see it, but for the winding of the road. That's what worries me, Gil; if they had passed the bridge in safety, we would have met them before this."

"Might the storm have slowed them down?"

"Possibly, But it won't really hit until about sundown. It would be suicide for them to stop now."

"Can't you do anything about the storm?" she asked him suddenly. "Didn't you say once that wizards can call and dismiss storms?"

He nodded. "And so we can," he replied, "if that is what we wish to do." As he spoke she noticed that, instead of gloves, he was wearing mittens-old and frayed now, like everything about him, but, by the intricacy of their design, clearly knitted for him by someone who cared very much for the old man. "We can send storms elsewhere, or call them to serve us-all except the ice storms of the plains, which strike without warning and make this-" He gestured at the whirling snow flurries. "-resemble a balmy spring breeze. But I think I pointed out to Rudy once, and I may have mentioned to you as well, that the Dark will not attack under a storm. So it may be that in doing nothing about the storm, we will be choosing the lesser of two evils."

He rose to go, wrapping his muffler tighter around his neck and drawing his hood down to protect his face. He was helping Gil to her feet when they heard on the road below them the muffled clop of hooves and the jingling of bits, echoes thrown into the sheltered pocket of boulders and dried grass that a moment ago had hidden all sound of the troop's coming. Beyond the boulders, Gil saw them come into view, a weary straggle of refugees. She recognized, in the lead, the big, scarred man on a brown horse whose head drooped with exhaustion. She and Ingold exchanged one quick, startled glance. Then the wizard was off, scrambling down the rocks to the road, calling, "Tirkenson! Tomec Tirkenson!" The landchief straightened in his saddle and threw out his hand as a signal to halt

Gil followed Ingold with more haste than seemliness down to the road. The landchief of Gettlesand towered over them in the leaden twilight, looking like a big, gaunt bandit at the head of his ragged troop of retainers. Glancing down the road, Gil could see that his followers-a great gaggle of families, a substantial herd of bony sheep and cattle, a gang of tough-looking hard-cases riding pointguard-were hardly a sixth of the main convoy.

"Ingold," the landchief greeted them. He had a voice like a rock slide in a gravel pit and a face to match. "We were wondering if we'd run into you, Gilshalos," he greeted her with a nod.

"Where did you leave the rest of the convoy?"

Tirkenson grunted angrily, his light, saddle-colored eyes turning harsh. "Down by the bridge," he grumbled. "They're making camp, like fools."

"Making camp?" The wizard was aghast "That's madness!"

"Yes, well, who said they were sane?" the landchief growled. "I told them, get the people across and to hell with the wagons and the luggage, we can send back for that... "

Ingold's voice was suddenly quiet. "What happened?"

"Holy Hell, Ingold." The landchief rubbed a big hand over his face wearily. "What hasn't happened? The bridge came down. The main pylons went under the weight of those carts of Alwir's, took the whole kit and caboodle down with them-"

"And the Queen?"

"No." Tirkenson frowned, puzzling over it "She was afoot, for some reason, up at the head of the train. Walking with the Prince slung on her back, like any other woman. I don't know why-but I do know if she'd been in a cart, there would've been no saving her. So what's Alwir do but start salvaging operations, hauling the stuff up out of the gorge, and rigging rope pontoons across the river down below. Then the Bishop says she won't abandon her wagons, and they start breaking them down to carry them across in pieces, and half the people are cut off on one side of the river and half on the other, and squabbling about getting baggage and animals across, and before you know it, everybody's saying they'll settle there for the night. I tried to tell them they'd be froze blue by morning, sure as the ice comes in the north, but that pet conjurer of Alwir's, that Bektis, says he can hold off the storm, and by the time Alwir and the Bishop got done slanging one another, they said it was too late to go on anyway. So there they sit." He gestured disgustedly and leaned back into the cantle of his saddle.

Ingold and Gil exchanged a quick look. "So you left?"

"Oh- Hell," Tirkenson rumbled. "Maybe I should have stayed. But Alwir tried to commandeer that big wagon of the Bishop's, the one she's dragging the Church records in, and you never heard such jabber in your life. She threatened to excommunicate Alwir, and Alwir said he'd slap her in irons-you know how she is about these damn papers of hers-and people were taking sides, and Alwir's boys and the Red Monks were just about pulling steel over the argument. I told them they were crazy, with the camp split and the storm and the Raiders and the Dark all around them, and they got into it again about that, and I'd had enough. I got my people and whoever else wanted to come with us to Gettlesand and we pulled out. It might not have been the right thing to do, but staying another night in the open sure as hell looked like the wrong thing to do. We figure we can make the Keep before midnight."

Ingold glanced briefly at the sky, as if able to read the time by the angle of an unseen sun above the roof of clouds. The sky was no longer gray but a kind of vile yellowish brown, and the snow smell was unmistakable. "I think you did right," he said at last. "We're going on down, and I'll try to talk them into moving on. You'll have to fight the weather before you reach the Vale, but if you can, get them to open the gates and build bonfires on both sides of them, frame them in fire, and guard them with every man in the train. With luck, we'll be there sometime tonight."

"You'll need luck," the landchief grumbled. "I'll see you at the Keep." He raised his hand in the signal to go on. The train began to move like some great beast dragging itself along in the last stages of exhaustion. Tirkenson reined away from where Ingold and Gil stood, clicking encouragement to his tired horse. Then he paused and turned back, looking down on the two pilgrims in the frozen road.

"One more thing," he said. "Just for your information. Watch out for the Bishop. She's got it around that you and Bektis are leagued with the Devil-and Alwir, too, just coincidentally by association, you understand-and she's got Hell's own support in the train. I never held with it-wizards trading their souls for the Power-but people are scared. They see Alwir's helpless. You might say the powers of this world are helpless. So if they're gonna die anyway, they're gonna die on the right side of the line. Stands to reason. But scared people will do just about anything."

"Ah, but so will wizards." Ingold smiled. "Thank you for your warning. Good riding and a smooth road to you all."

The landchief turned away, cursing his exhausted mount and threatening to rowel him to dogmeat if he didn't get a move on. Gil glanced from the big man's wicked, star-shaped spurs to the untouched flanks of the tired horse and knew, without quite knowing how, that Ingold's parting blessing had contained in it spells to avert random misfortune, to shake straight the tangled chains of circumstance, and to aid the landchief of Gettlesand and those under his loud-voiced and blasphemous care.

It was snowing in earnest when Gil and Ingold came within sight of the camp on the near bank of the Arrow. In the swirling grayness they could make out huddled shapes bunched around the feeble yellow flickers of campfires, the dark milling of small herds of animals, the restless activity on the bank of the gorge, and the shadowy comings and goings around the broken bridge. Across the gorge more activity was visible, lights moving here and there around the farther camp, and the distant threnody of bleating goats and a child's wailing cries drifting on the intermittent veering of the wind. Between the two camps lay the gorge, a sheer-cut chasm of darkness, filled with the greedy roaring of the river. On either bank of the gorge, great tongues of broken stone thrust out over the void.