Barbara Hambly - 01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

"You call that business last night not being attacked?"

Ingold smiled ruefully. "That was an exception," he apologized, "and unavoidable. I knew that I could draw the Dark away from Tir and hold them off long enough to let you get close to the gates. There weren't very many of them left by that time, too few to split up and still have enough power among themselves to work counterspells against me."

"I don't understand," Gil said, tossing the end of her braid back over her shoulder. "I know there weren't a lot of them-but why did they let us go? They've been following Tir clear the hell down from Karst. They know what the Keep is and they knew last night was their last chance to get at him. But they turned back and went after you. Why?"

He didn't answer at once. He lay watching the curl of the steam rising from the cup in his bandaged hands, his face in repose suddenly old and tired. Then his dark-circled eyes shifted to meet hers. "Do you remember," he said slowly, "when I almost became-lost-in the vaults at Gae? When you called me back from the stairways of the Dark?"

Gil nodded soundlessly; it had been the first day, she remembered, that she had held a sword in her hand. The darkness came back to her, the stealthy sense of lurking fear, the old man standing alone on the steps far below her, listening to a sound that she could not hear, the white radiance of his staff illuminating the shadows all around him. It had been the last day she had been a scholar, an outworlder, the person she had once been. The memory of that distant girl, alone and armed with a borrowed sword and a guttering torch against all the armies of the Dark, brought a lump to her throat that she thought would choke her.

He went on. "I guessed, then, what I know now-that Prince Tir is not their first target. Oh, they'll take him if they can get him-but, given a choice, as I gave them a choice last night, it isn't Tir they want.

"It's me."

"You?" Rudy gasped.

"Yes." The wizard sipped his tea, then set it aside. From beyond the curtain, Gnift's voice bitingly informed someone that he had less stance than a wooden-legged ice skater. "I can evidently be of more ultimate harm to them than Tir can. I suspected it before, and after last night there can be no other explanation."

"But how- I mean-your magic can't touch them," Rudy said uneasily. "To them you're just another guy with a sword. You don't know any more about the Time of the Dark than anybody else. I mean, Tir's the one who'll remember."

"I've wondered about that myself," Ingold said calmly. "And I can only conclude that I know something that I'm not yet aware that I know-some clue that hasn't fallen into place. They know what it is, and they're concerned lest I remember."

Rudy shuddered wholeheartedly. "So what are you going to do?"

The wizard shrugged. "What can I do? Take elementary precautions. But it might be well for you to reconsider your offer to accompany me to Quo."

"To hell with that," Rudy reconsidered. "You're the one who should reconsider."

"Who else can go?" Ingold reasoned. "And if I were afraid of getting myself killed, I should never have taken up this business in the first place. I should have stayed in Gettlesand and grown roses and cast horoscopes. No-all that I can do now is stay a few steps ahead of them and hope that I realize what the answer is before they catch me."

"You're crazy," Rudy stated unequivocally.

Ingold smiled. "Really, Rudy, I thought we'd long settled the question of my sanity."

"You're all crazy!" Rudy insisted. "You and Gil and Alde and the Guards... How the hell come I always end up completely surrounded by lunatics?"

The old man settled comfortably back among the blankets and picked up his tea again, the steam wreathing his face like smoke from the altar of a battered idol. "The question is the answer, Rudy-always provided you want an answer that badly."

Considering it in that light, Rudy was not entirely sure that he did.

Alde was waiting for him in the outer room. Most of the Guards had gone. Beyond the black, narrow arch of the doorway, Janus' voice could be heard in the next room, still arguing with the same merchants. In a corner, the Icefalcon had fallen asleep, relaxed and self-absorbed as a cat. But for him, they were alone.

"Alde... " Rudy began, and she stood up from the bunk where she had been sitting and put a finger to his lips.

"I heard," she said softly.

"Listen... " he tried to explain.

Again she shushed him. "Of course you should go with him." Her fingers closed, cool and light, over his. "Was there any question of your not going?"

He laughed softly, remembering his own apprehensions. "I guess-not to me. But I sure didn't think you'd understand." They stood together, as close as they had on the road when they'd been accustomed to share a cloak on watch at night. The ebbing yellow glow of the fire masked them in dun, pulsing shadow, and he could smell the sweetgrass braided into her hair. "I didn't think anybody would understand or could understand. Because I sure as hell don't."

She chuckled with soft laughter. "He's your master, Rudy," she said. "And your need is to learn. Even if I wanted to, I could never stop you from it." But she moved closer to him in the shadows, belying her own words.

We all have our priorities, Rudy thought, and brushed aside the dark silk of her hair to kiss her lips. If It came to a choice between me and Tir, I know damn well who'd get left out in the cold. She, too, had her choices between loves.

The embers in the hearth whispered a little and collapsed in on themselves, sending up a spurt of yellow flame and almost immediately cloaking them both in deeper shadow. From outside the room, the constant murmur of voices from the hall beyond came to them like the mingling of a stream. Rudy was finding already that he had grown used to the Keep, the noises, the shadows, the smells. He could feel the weight of that mountain of stone pressing down around them, as it had pressed for thousands of years. But as he kissed her again, holding her slenderness tight against him, he reflected that there was a great deal to be said for stillness and silence and love without fear.

Her breath a whisper against his lips, she murmured, "I understand, Rudy-but I will miss you,"

His arm tightened convulsively about her shoulders. Scraps of conversations drifted back to his memory, things said in Karst and in the night camps all down that perilous road. She had lost the world she had known and everyone in it she had loved, except her son. And now he, Rudy, was leaving her, too. Yet she hadn't said, Don't go.

What kind of love , he wondered, understood that need and tried to make easier the separation it would cause?

None that he'd ever run into.

Alde, you're a lady in a million. I wish to hell you weren't the Queen. I almost wish I weren't going back, or that I could take you and Tir back with me when I go.

But either course was impossible.

As she slipped away from him, gathering her cloak about her shoulders as she vanished through the darkness of the far doorway, it occurred to him that she hadn't even asked him that other thing- Will you miss me, too?

Against the blurred gleam that backed the grimy door curtain, Gil watched the shadows of man and woman embrace, meld, and separate. In the stillness of the room, she heard Ingold sigh. "Poor child," he said softly. "Poor child."

She glanced across at him, invisible but for the glitter of his eyes In the darkness and his bandaged hands folded on his breast. "Ingold?"

"Yes, my dear?"

"Do you really believe there's no such thing as coincidence?"

The question didn't seem to surprise him, but then, few things did. Gil had known people-her mother, for one-who would have replied, "What a question to ask at a time like this!" But it was a question that could be asked only at such times, when all the daylight trivialities had been put aside, and there was only the understanding of people who knew one another well.