Barbara Hambly - 01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

Softly, the wizard said, "Don't leave them, Rudy." Rudy had the sudden, uncomfortable feeling that the old man knew about his giving up, his lying down to die and leaving the others to their own devices. He felt himself flush.

"I'm sorry," he mumbled.

Wind stirred around his feet. He swung about, scanning the darkness beyond. He felt a counterspell, like the cold touch of an alien hand, slipping into his mind from the darkness. He felt the light dimming, looked up, and saw that Ingold's staff, too, had begun to flicker unsteadily. At the same time he smelled the cold, bitter, acid stink of the Dark. Steel whined as Gil drew her sword; all around them was the muted flashing of blades as the Guards closed in an outward-facing ring.

What instinct warned him he never knew, but he ducked, drew and turned, and slashed in one movement, almost before he was aware of the thing that fell suddenly on him out of the night. He heard Alde scream and got a confused glimpse of Gil, with a face of stone and a blade of fire, cleaving darkness in a long side-on cut that seemed to cover them all in an explosion of blood and slime. The witchlight dimmed to gray, and the Guards pressed back, defending as best they could against the slimy onslaught. The counterspell sucked at him, draining his power as if from a cut artery, and for a time he saw nothing, knew nothing but that he must keep between the Dark and the woman at his back.

Then, without warning, they were gone, and the strength of the witchlight was renewed. Somebody yelled, "Come on!" and Rudy found himself grasping Alde's right arm while Gil held her left, hurrying over the slime-spattered muck of the snow, the light of his staff brightening over the mess of mud and bloody bones, with the Guards closing around them in a tight flying wedge. Ingold strode ahead, white breath smoking in the light that showed the snow all around them trampled by stampedes of fleeing feet and strewn with the discarded bundles of the refugees. Groggily, Rudy tried to keep up with him, leaden with cold and fatigue and stumbling in the drifted mess, trying to keep his eyes on the brilliant square of orange light in the distance that marked the end of this nightmare road. He could make out movement there clearly now, small shapes in those great doors. He could sense the Dark massing above them like storm clouds and felt the touch of their spells again, drawing and sapping at his strength.

Then the soft, sinister shadows dropped like vultures from above, a half-seen cloudy death that filled the night. Rudy's sword seemed to be weighted with lead, his arm shot full of Novocain. He knew that if he hadn't been in the center of the pack, he would have been killed at once. Seeing Gil slash and dodge in the gray darkness and step in under the whining arc of a spined whip half again as long as she was, he understood why Gnift flayed the bodies and souls of his Guard students and why Gil and the others trained the way they did, doggedly, through injuries, cold, and fatigue. It was only their training that saved them now.

Thin winds ruffled mockingly around them, and the Dark were gone. Rudy, gasping for breath, hung onto his staff for support, holding the half-fainting Alde with his other arm and wondering if he'd have the strength to drag her as far as the Keep. Though they were less than a mile off, the roaring glow of the gate-fires could barely be seen through the massed, cloaking shadows that filled the night. The Guards closed up again. "Now," Ingold said quietly. "Go. Go quickly." Horrified, Janus protested, "They're all around us, they'll never let us through."

The wizard was panting with exertion, and the pallid light showed his hands cut and noisome with slime. "They will if you go now. Hurry, or-"

"You're not staying!" the Commander cried.

"But- " Rudy began, stupefied.

"Do as I say!" the wizard thundered, and Rudy stepped back a pace, shocked. Ingold drew his sword in a single gleaming movement, the blade flashing in the dark. "Go!"

Janus looked at him for a long moment, as if he might, at the last, disobey. Then abruptly he turned and strode off through snow and darkness; after a momentary, uncertain pause, Rudy and the others followed, he and Gil half-dragging Minalde between them. He could feel the spells of the Dark shifting aside from the light he bore and could sense their malice concentrated elsewhere. Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw Ingold standing where they had left him, a dark form in the burning aureole of the light, his head cocked to listen to the sounds of the night, blood dripping from his gashed knuckles to stain the snow at his feet.

The wizard waited until the little party of Guards had gone almost two hundred yards from him. Then Rudy, turning again to look back, saw him throw down his staff in the snow. The light went out. The sword blade swung in a searing, phosphorescent arc. Rudy knew that the Dark had closed in on the old man.

They ran on. Tir had begun to wail, his cries thin and muffled with exhaustion, within the shelter of his mother's cloak. There was no other sound; but looking across Alde once, Rudy got a glimpse of Gil's face, a pale-eyed mask of pain. The blazing gates seemed to get no nearer, though he could now clearly distinguish the shapes grouped on the steps in the glare of the bonfires, with the Runes of Guarding and Law looming behind them, reflected in the bloody light. One dark shape he knew must be Tomec Tirkenson; another, he thought, was Govannin. There seemed to be something wrong with his perception of distance. The air was still, without movement or scent or breath, without even the sensation of the nearness of the Dark-though he knew he had to be wrong about that; it must be only the effect of his senses slipping gradually away. The Dark had to be following, waiting the moment to strike. Twice he looked back over his shoulder and saw the firefly movement of Ingold's blade in the darkness. He wondered dizzily why the wizard had sent them on and wondered, with all the strength left in him to wonder, if they'd make it as far as the gates before the Dark finally fell on them from above. The ground steepened; he seemed to be moving through a knee-deep sea of slush, struggling to keep to his feet.

Then from above them, the wind streamed down-not the winds of the Dark, but the storm winds, swirling snow down on them as they fled toward the blazing Hell-mouth of the gates. The howl of the rising gale was like the keening of wolves on the kill. The storm winds that hit them with a force that made Rudy stagger were blinding, freezing, raging over them with wild, malicious glee. He struggled on, seeing before him the towering darkness of some vast, somber cliff, the storm winds driving the flames into thirty-foot maypoles of fire. He tripped on something in the darkness and fell, Alde's arm sliding from his grasp. Looking up, he saw before him the blazing gates; he had fallen on the steps. He could see Gil dragging Alde up the steps, framed in a wild coruscation of snow and fire, the wind mixing their dark hair into a single streaming cloud.

Someone came down to him and hauled him up and into that red inferno. Sick and half-fainting, he could see only that the hand that gripped his arm was covered by a black velvet glove glittering with rubies, like droplets of newshed blood.

When his eyes cleared, he was lying on the floor just within the gates, half-covered in blowing snow. Men and women were coming inside, staggering with cold and exhaustion-children, too, he saw, and realized Gil had been right. His surrender to fate back in the snowy darkness had been an act of cowardice that an eight-year-old could have bettered. Beyond them, silhouetted against the ruddy light, he saw Govannin, a skull with live coals in the eye sockets, a sword in her skeleton hand. Alwir was a dark tower, his sister leaning on the strength of his mighty arms, her child sobbing exhaustedly at her breast. Alwir's eyes were not on either of them, but looking beyond, into the dark cave of the Keep itself, calculating the dimensions of his new kingdom. And past them was Gil, her coarse, witchy hair fluttering in the backwash of the storm as she stood at the gates, looking out into the darkness. But in all that waste of ice and bitter wind, Rudy could see no trace of any moving light.