Barbara Hambly - 01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

The wagon team halted, one ox managing a plaintive low. Boots scrunched in the squeaking snow all about him; somewhere leather creaked. He could hear his own breath and that of the woman beside him.

"What is it?" he whispered. "Has the storm let up?"

"Not like that, it wouldn't. Besides, you can still hear it overhead."

He blinked against the darkness and raised a shaking hand to scrape ice crystals from his eyes. "Then what... " Then he realized what must have happened. Shock and fear sent a jolt of adrenalin into his veins that cleared his groggy mind. "Oh, Christ," he whispered. "Ingold."

"He stopped the storm, didn't he?" Gil said softly. "They must have been losing too many people... "

"But you know what that means?" Rudy said urgently.

"It means the Dark will be coming now." He took an experimental step away from the wagon and found he could stand after a fashion by leaning on his staff. "We gotta get moving."

The Guards were closing in around them, some thirty strong; he could pick out their voices in the darkness. God only knew where the rest of the train was. They'd gotten so badly strung out in the storm, it was every man for himself. He flexed his right hand stiffly, trying to convince himself it was still really his; he heard Gil's voice speaking softly to the Guards around them and, brief and cold, the Icefalcon's breathless laugh. Gil came back to him. "Can you call up some light?" she asked. "The land flattens out from here on; we could lose the road completely. Look."

There was, in fact, only one thing to look at: a tiny square of orange light, distant and sharp in the wastelands of cold.

"Tomec Tirkenson's up at the Keep. That's the fire around the doors."

"Okay," Rudy said. "We can make for that, if nothing else." He tried several times to call light, but his fatigue-drugged consciousness was unequal to the task. They were moving again, heading steadily toward that tiny orange star, the going impossibly rough over the steep, uneven ground. From the wagon behind him, he heard Tir's thin, protesting wails and Alde's voice, softly shushing him. He trod on something hard that rolled sickeningly underfoot, stumbled, and put his hand on it in falling. It was an iron cook pot. Despite the cold and danger, he grinned-others had made it this far. The whole Vale was probably littered with discarded household goods, flung away in a last, desperate effort to keep on going. Well, if they could do it, he could do it.

And then he felt it-a breath of wind in the stillness, a wind not like the might of the storm, but a thin, directionless whisper that spoke of stone and damp, warm darkness, a faint stirring of air from above and behind and all sides. Turning, he saw the Dark.

How he saw them he wasn't sure-perhaps by some wizard-sense, grown from the exercise of his powers. They flowed over the snow toward the wagon, scarcely distinguishable one from the other or from the shifting river of illusion in which they swam. Whiplike tails steered and propelled, and they moved with a sinuous glide, the jointed legs tucked in folds like bamboo armor under the soft, dripping tentacles of the slobbering mouths. For a moment he stood hypnotized, fascinated by the changing shapes, now visible, now only wavering ghosts. He wondered in what sense they could be said to be material at all. What atoms and molecules made up those sleek, pulsing bodies? What brain, or brains, had conceived the stairways that led down to the blackness under the earth?

Then one of the oxen gave a great bellow of terror and tried to leap forward; it fell, pulling down its teammate in a tangle of harness and splintering the wagon tongue under its threshing weight.

"The Dark!" Rudy yelled in desperate warning, and tried to summon light, any light, for aid against the unseen foes. He heard Alde scream. Then from behind him a shattering blaze of witchlight pierced the darkness like a strobe, and that pouring river of shadow and illusion broke against it and swirled away like a great ring of smoke. Ingold came striding out of the unnatural stillness, his shadow thrown hard and blue onto the glittering snow at his feet.

"Cut that ox loose, get my lady out of the wagon, and get moving," he ordered briefly. By the burning light, the Guards came running to them, faces haggard under the crusting of frost. "Janus, do you think you can make it as far as the Keep?"

The Commander, barely recognizable under the ice that scaled his hair and cloak, squinted at the light in the distance, against which the tiny figures of men were now clearly visible. "I think so," he panted. "Again, you've saved us."

Ingold retorted, "It's about a mile and a half too soon to say that. My lady... "

He turned back to the wagon. The Icefalcon had cut the team loose, but the wagon was clearly beyond further use. From the curtains at the front, a white face looked out, framed in the darkness of a black fur hood and a cascade of crow-black hair.

Rudy stepped quickly over to the wagon. "We've got to run for it, babe," he said softly, and she nodded, turning unquestioningly back into the shadows of the cart to fetch Tir. She reappeared a moment later with the heavily muffled infant in her arms, her face pale in the light of Ingold's staff, her eyes wide with apprehension. Gil held out her arms and received the child awkwardly, while Rudy helped Minalde down over the broken wagon tongue. Even through two pairs of gloves and the burning numbness of his fingers, he was conscious of the touch of her hand.

"How far?" she whispered.

Gil nodded toward the distant orange gleam of the Keep doors. "About two miles."

Alde took the baby back, feeling as she did so the chill, prickly sensation she had known before, the subconscious awareness of the presence of the Dark. The Dark Ones had not been defeated by the advent of the light. They had merely drawn off to wait.

The wind still howled overhead, but near them the air was uncannily still. From all around them in the Vale they could hear voices, distorted by cold and distance, voices of fear, hope, despair. Refugees throughout the dark mountains were making for the lights of the Keep, unseen forms fighting their way through stillness and deep snow; but within the circle of light cast by Ingold's staff, the little group of Guards around the fallen wagon were alone. Coated with frost, they seemed to be some kind of fantastic ice-creatures, beaded with diamonds and breathing crystal smoke. And beyond them, invisible in the blue-black ocean of the night, that sense of restless motion stirred just out of the range of vision.

Ingold came over to the little group by the wagon tongue, his light harsh on their drawn, haggard faces. He was a man who imparted his own strength to others; Gil found she drew warmth from his presence, as from a fire, and saw that Rudy and Alde looked a little less deathly as well. He put a hand briefly to Alde's cheek and gazed sharply into her face. "Can you make it?"

"I have to," she said simply.

"Good girl. Rudy... "

Rudy stepped forward hesitantly.

"Channel your Power through your staff; that's what it's there for, not just to keep you from stubbing your toes."

Rudy looked in surprise at the six-foot walking stick he'd cut for himself miles up the road. "Uh-you mean, that's all? You don't have to do anything special to make a staff magic?"

Ingold appeared to pray briefly for patience. "All things are inherently magic," he said patiently. "Now... "

Tentatively, Rudy called light again, feeling the power of it through his hand, through the wood that had become smoothed to his grip by its use, through the air. Light began to burn smokily from the end of the staff, growing brighter and throwing doubled shadows, blue and black, on the spokes of the wagon wheels, on the thin, frightened faces of the two girls, on the dilapidated cart, and on the deep-set hollows of Ingold's eyes.