The Time Of The Dark

"Will she be all right?"



"If the arm doesn't fester."



The voices came distinctly to Gil, like something heard in a dream; as in a dream, she could identify them without being clearly able to say why. As if she lay at the bottom of a well, she could look up and see, a long way away, the tall shape of Alwir, blotting the sun like a cloud; beside him was the Icefalcon, light and cool as wind. But the water of the well she lay in was pain; crystal-clear, shimmering, acid pain.



Alwir's melodious voice went on. "If it festers she'll lose it."



And the Icefalcon asked, "Where's Ingold?"



"Who knows? His talent is for timely disappearances."



Curse him, Gil thought blindly. Curse him, curse him, curse him... Alwir moved away, and a bar of sunlight fell on her eyes, like the stab of a knife. She twisted her head convulsively aside, and the movement wrenched at the sodden mass of pain wrapped around the bones of her left arm. She wept in agony and despair.



In her delirium she dreamed, and in her dream she saw him. From the dark place where she stood, she could look into her lighted kitchen, back in the apartment on Clarke Street; a stale litter of old coffee cups and papers was on the table, and the half-finished research was strewn about the room like blown leaves in autumn. It seemed as if she had only to step down to reach it, as if a few strides would take her from this place to home, to the university, to the quiet life of scholarship and the friends and security of her own time and place. Dimly she heard the phone ringing there and knew it was one of her women friends calling, as they had been calling for two days now. They would be worried-soon they would begin to search. The thought of their pain and fear for her hurt Gil almost as much as her injured arm, and she tried to go into the kitchen to answer the phone, but she found that Ingold stood in her way. Hooded, his sword gleaming like foxfire, he rose before her, a dark shape blown and wavering on the wind. No matter how she turned and shifted, he was always in her way, always turning her back. She began to cry, "Let me go! Let me go!" in helpless fury. Then wind caught at him, swirling his brown mantle into a black cloud of shadow, and in his place a Dark One rode the twisting air. She tried to run, and it was upon her; she tried to fight with the sword she suddenly found in her hands, but as she cut at it, its huge, slobbering mouth snatched at her, leaving a trail of acid down her arm that seared into the flesh until she cried out in pain.



She saw her arm, bone and torn flesh, then. She saw the hand that touched it, molding and kneading at the ripped ruin of muscle. In her dreaming, she was reminded of a man molding putty or seaming together colored clays. It was Ingold's hand, nicked and marked with old scars, and calloused from the grip of a sword-and there he was, tired and shabby, eyes bright in circles of black exhaustion. She struck at him with her good hand, sobbing weak obscenities at him because he wouldn't let her go back, because he had trapped her here, cursing him and fighting against his strong, sure touch. Then that part of the dream faded also, and utter darkness took her.



From the Town Hall steps, Rudy watched what remained of the powers in the Realm coming to council. It was early afternoon now, and bleak clouds had begun to gray the light of the day, piling heavily over the mountains like the threat of doom. He had eaten, slept, and helped the Guards and those survivors of last night's horrors who were still capable of directed action in the gruesome task of cleaning the bloodless corpses and stripped bones out of the gory mud of the square. Now he was cold, weary, and sickened in his soul. Even with the worst of the mess-the hopeless, twisted wrecks that had once been living people-out of the way, the square wore a look of absolute desolation. Strewn and trampled in the mud were the pitiful remains of flight-clothes, cook pots, books torn and sodden with mud, salvage from Gae whose owners would have no further use for it. During burial detail that morning, Rudy had found what he judged to be a small fortune in jewels, mixed with the churned slush in the square-precious things dropped unheeded in last night's desperate, futile scramble for refuge.



Karst was a town of the dead. People moved about its streets blindly, stumbling with weariness or shock or grief. Half-heard through the town, the muffled wailing of sobs was as prevalent today as the woodsmoke and stench had been yesterday. The places that had been so crowded were three-quarters empty. People passed in the streets on their blind errands and looked at one another, but did not ask, because they did not dare, What now?



Good question, Rudy thought dryly.



What now, when the Dark Ones were everywhere, when he was an exile in an alien universe, hiding and dodging until something-the Dark, the cold, starvation, the plague, or whatever-got him before he could make it back to the safety of his own? And who knew how long that was going to be? Maybe even Ingold didn't. Anyway, what if somebody jailed Ingold again, and this time nobody came? Or what if somebody jailed him? It was possible-he was a stranger, unfamiliar with the customs, ignorant of the laws that could get him dumped into one of those bricked-up slammers he'd passed last night. Hell, he didn't even know the language, if anyone wanted to get technical about it.



Rudy was well aware that he hadn't spoken a word of English since he'd been here. How he understood, let alone spoke, the Wathe, the common tongue of the Realm, he wasn't even prepared to guess. But Ingold had said something about arranging it, back in California when he'd still regarded the old man as a harmless lunatic. Rudy guessed that was damn big medicine for somebody Alwir talked about as a kind of conjuring tramp.



He saw Ingold and Alwir crossing the square together, an uneasy partnership for sure. The Chancellor was striding amid the swirl of his flame-cut crimson cloak, rubies glittering like blood on the doeskin of his gloves; Ingold walked beside him, leaning on his staff like a tired old man. God knew how, but the wizard had reacquired both staff and sword.



His voice, strong and raspy with that characteristic velvet break in its tone, drifted to Rudy as the two men mounted the steps. "... staring us in the face, all of us. Our way of life, our entire world, is changed, and we would be fools to deny it. All the structures of power are altered, and by no kind of machinations, magic, might, or faith can we keep what we have held."



Alwir's deep, mellow tones replied. "And you, my friend. Wizardry has failed, too. Where is your Archmage now? And the Council of Quo? That boasted magic... "



They passed within, the crimson shape and the brown. He's got a point there, Rudy thought tiredly. I may be ignorant, but I'm not dumb. As a refugee camp or a rallying-point for civilization, this burg has had it. He surveyed the silent square. Yesterday real estate could have been sold here at fifty dollars a square foot. It was a bust market now, the mud compounded of earth, rain and spent blood.



He recognized some of the others coming across the square, making for the council meeting. They were the nobles or notables of the Realm whom people had pointed out to him-Christ, was it only yesterday?-as he'd bummed around Karst, not a care in the world, checking out the lay of the land. He recognized a couple of the landchiefs of the Realm who'd ridden up to Gae to aid the late King and subsequently refugeed to Karst-a young blond surfer-type and a big, scarred old buffer who looked like John Wayne playing the Sheriff of Nottingham-Janus of the Guards, in a clean black uniform but beat-up as an Irish cop after a Friday night donnybrook, with a black eye and a red welt down the side of his face; the Bishop Govannin, leaning on the arm of an attendant priest; and a couple of depressed-looking local merchants who'd been trading off a black market in food and water while there was still a shortage to kick up the prices.



Rudy glanced at the angle of the shadow cast by the fountain. The council could last most of the afternoon-they had to figure out their next course of action before night fell again. Rudy wondered if he could catch up with Ingold after it was over, maybe see if there were some way he could get back without letting all the Dark Ones in the world through the Void after him. Maybe the Archmage, Lohiro of Quo, would have some ideas on that-he was, after all, Ingold's superior-if they could find the guy, that is.



But then he caught sight of a familiar face across the square, and the thought dropped from his mind. She wore black velvet now instead of the plain white gown of yesterday; with her hair braided and coiled in elaborate gleaming loops, she looked a few years older. She reminded him of a young apple tree in its first blossom, delicate and poised and graceful as a dancer.



He got to his feet and came down the steps to her. "I see you're all right," he said. "I'm sorry I didn't come back for you myself, but at that point all I wanted to do was find some quiet corner and fall asleep in it."



She smiled shyly at him. "It's all right. The men Alwir sent had no trouble finding the place. And after all you'd done last night, I think I would have been ashamed of myself if you'd lost sleep to come after me and make sure I didn't get into any more trouble." She looked tired and strained, more fragile than she had last night; Rudy felt he could have picked her up in one hand. She went on. "I owe you my life, and Tir's twice over."



"Yeah, well, I still say it was a crazy stunt to pull in the first place. I ought to have my head examined for going after you."



"I said once before you were brave." She smiled, teasing. "You can't deny it now."



"Like hell." Rudy grinned.



The corners of the girl's blue-violet eyes crinkled with laughing skepticism. "Even when you followed me up the stairs?"



"Oh, hell, I couldn't let you go by yourself." He looked down at her gravely for a moment, remembering the terror of that wind-searched open gallery and the stygian mazes of the vaults. "You must care a lot for the kid, to go back for him that way."



She took his hand, her fingers slim and warm in the brief touch. "I do," she said simply. "Tir is my son. If I alone had died last night, it might have made no difference to anyone, anymore. But I shall always thank you for saving him."



She turned and mounted the steps, moving with a dancer's quicksilver lightness. The Guards at the door bowed to her in an elaborate salute as she passed between them, and she vanished into the shadows of the great doors, leaving Rudy standing open-mouthed with astonishment in the mud of the square.



The Guards' Court at the back of the town had once been the stableyard of some great villa. To Gil's trained eye, the overly intricate coats of arms over gatehouse and window-embrasure whispered of new money and the vast inferiority complex of the parvenu. In the cold afternoon light, most of the court was visible from where she lay on a scratchy bed of hay and borrowed cloaks, aching with weariness and the aftermath of pain, looking out from the dim blue shadows of the makeshift barracks.



Daylight wasn't kind to the place. The lean-to that ran around three sides of the stone courtyard wall had been roughly converted into barracks, and the mail, weapons, and bedrolls of some seventy Guards were heaped haphazardly among the bales of fodder. The mud in the center of the court was slippery and rank. In a corner by a fountain, someone was cooking oatmeal, and the drift of smoke on the wind cut at Gil's eyes. In the mucky space of open ground, thirty or so Guards were engaged in practice, muddy to the eyebrows.



But they were good. Even to Gil's inexperienced eye, their quickness and balance were obvious; they were professional warriors, an elite corps. Lying here, as she had lain most of the day, she had seen them come in from duty; she knew that all of them had fought last night and, like her, bore the wounds of it. She had noticed in the confusion of last night that very few of the dead were Guards, and now she saw why; the speed, stamina, and unthinking reactions were trained into them until the downward slash-duck-parry motion of attack and defense was as automatic as jerking a burned finger from flame. They trained with split wood blades like the Japanese shinai, weapons that would neither cut nor maim but which left appalling bruises-nobody was armored and there wasn't a shield in the place. Gil watched them with an awe that came from the glimmerings of understanding.



"What do you think?" a cool voice asked. Looking up, she saw the Icefalcon standing beside her, indistinct in the murky shade.



"About that?" She gestured toward the moving figures and the distant clacking of wooden blade on blade. He nodded, pale eyes aloof. "You need it, don't you, to be perfect," she said, watching the quick grace of the warriors that was almost a dance. "And that's what it is. Perfect."



The Icefalcon shrugged, but his eyes had a speculative gleam in their silvery depths. "If you have only one blow," he remarked, "it had better be perfect. How's your arm?"



She shook her head wearily, not wanting to think about the pain. "It was stupid," she said. The bandages showed a kind of grubby brown through the torn, ruined sleeve of the shirt that had been part of a corpse's gown. "I was tired; it shouldn't have happened."



The tall young man leaned against the wall and hooked his thumbs in his swordbelt in a gesture common to the Guards. "You didn't do badly," he told her. "You have a knack, a talent that way. I personally didn't think you'd make it past the first fight. Novices don't. You have the instinct to kill."



"What?" she exclaimed, more startled than horrified, though on reflection she supposed she should have been more horrified than she was.



"I mean it," the Icefalcon said in that colorless, breathy voice. "Among my people that is a compliment. To kill is to survive the fight. To kill is to want very much to live." He glanced out into the gray afternoon, his long, thin hands folding over his propped knee. "In the Realm they consider that such ideas are crazy. Perhaps your people do, too. So they say that the Guards are crazy; and by their lights, perhaps they are right."



Perhaps, Gil thought. Perhaps.



It would look that way from the outside, certainly. That striving, that need, was seldom understood, any more than Rudy had understood why she would turn away from her home and family for the sake of the terrible and abstract joys of scholarship. In its way, it was the same kind of craziness.



A little, bald-headed man was moving through the mazes of the combatants, watching everything with beady, elfbright brown eyes. He stopped just behind Seya, scratching his close-clipped brown beard and observing her efforts against another Guard of about her size and weight. She cut and parried; as she moved forward for another blow, he stepped in lightly and hooked both her legs from under her, dumping her unceremoniously in the mud. "Stronger stance," he cautioned her, then turned and walked away. Seya climbed slowly to her feet, wiped the goop from her face, and went back to her bout.



"There are very few," the Icefalcon's soft voice went on, "who understand this. Very few who have this instinct for life, this understanding for the fire of perfection. Perhaps that is why there have always been very few Guards." He glanced down at her, the light shifting across the narrow bones of his face. "Would you be a Guard?"



Gil felt the slow flush of blood rise to her face and the quickening of her pulse. She waited a long time before she answered him. "You mean, stay here and be a Guard?"



"We are very short of Guards."



She was silent again, though a kind of eager tension wired its way into her muscles and a confusion into her heart. She watched the little, bearded, bald man in the square step unconcernedly between swinging blades to double up a tall Guard with a blow in mid-stroke, step lightly back with almost preternatural timing, and go on to correct his next victim. Finally she said, "I can't."



"Indeed," was all the Icefalcon said.



"I'm going back. To my own land."



He looked down at her and raised one colorless brow.



"I'm sorry," she muttered.



"Gnift will also be sorry, to hear that," the Icefalcon said.



"Gnift?"



He gestured toward the bald man in the square. "He is the instructor of the Guards. He watched you in the vaults at Gae and last night. He says you could be good."



She shook her head. "If I stayed," she said, "it would only be a matter of time until I died."



"It is always," the Icefalcon remarked, "only a matter of time. But you are right." He looked up as another shadow loomed beneath the low, shingled roof.



"Hey, Gil." Rudy took a seat on the hay bale beside her. "They said you were hurt. Are you okay?"



She shrugged, the movement making her wince in spite of herself. "I'll live." In the dimness Rudy looked shabby and seedy, his painted jacket a ruin of mud and charred slime, his long hair grubby with sweat, though he'd managed to come up with a razor from someplace and was no longer as unshaven as he'd been yesterday. Still, she reflected, she couldn't look much better.



"Their council meeting's broken up," he informed her, scanning the wet, dreary court before him with interested eyes. "I figure Ingold should be around someplace, and it's high time we talked to him about going back."



Across the court a small group emerged from the shadows of the tall gatehouse. Alwir, Govannin of Gae, Janus of the Guards, and the big, scarred landchief someone had said was Tomec Tirkenson, landchief of Gettlesand in the southwest. The Chancellor's cloak made a great bloody smear of crimson against the grayness of the murky day, and his rich voice carried clearly to the three in the shadows of the barracks: "... woman will believe anything, rather than that she left her own child to die. I am not saying that he did substitute another child for the Prince, if the Prince were killed by the Dark-only that he could have done so easily."



"To what end?" the Bishop asked, in that voice like the bones of some animal, bleached by desert sun. Under the white of the bandage, Janus' face reddened. Even at that distance, Gil could catch the dangerous gleam in that rufous bear-man's eyes.



Alwir shrugged. "What end indeed?" he said casually. "But the man who saved the Prince would have far greater prestige than the man who failed to save him, especially since it is becoming obvious that his magic has little effect upon the Dark. A Queen's gratitude can go far in establishing a man's position in a new government. Counselor of the Realm is quite a step for a man who started life as a slave in Alketch."



Anger flaring clearly in his face, Janus began to speak, but at that instant the Icefalcon, who had detached himself from the shed and made his way unhurriedly over to the group, touched the Commander's sleeve and turned his attention from what could have been a dangerous moment. They spoke quietly, Alwir and Govannin listening with mild curiosity. Gil saw the Icefalcon's long, thin hand move in her direction.



Alwir raised graceful eyebrows. "Going back?" he asked, surprised, his deep, melodious voice carrying clearly across the open court. "This is not what I have been told."



There was no need to ask of whom they spoke. Gil felt herself grow cold with shock. She threw off the cloaks under which she lay and got to her feet, crossing the court to them stiffly, her arm throbbing at every step. Alwir saw her and waited, a look of thoughtful calculation in the cornflower depths of his eyes.



"What have you been told?" Gil asked.



The eyebrows lifted again, and the cool gaze took her in, shabby and dirty and bedraggled beside his immaculate height, wordlessly expressing regret at the type of people Ingold chose as friends. "That Ingold cannot, or will not, let you return to your own land. Surely he spoke to you of it."



"Why not?" Rudy demanded. He had come hurrying, unnoticed, in Gil's wake.



Alwir shrugged. "Ask him. If he is still in Karst, that is-sudden arrivals and departures are his specialty. I have seen nothing of him since he left the meeting, quite some tune ago."



"Where is he?" Gil asked quietly. It was the first time she had spoken with Alwir, the first time, in fact, that she could remember the tall Chancellor taking even a passing notice of her, though there was an uneasiness in her mind associated with him, quite apart from her suspicions about who had ordered Ingold's arrest.



"My child, I haven't the slightest idea."



"He's been staying in the gatehouse," landchief Tirkenson grunted, his big, grimy hand gesturing toward the narrow fortification that overspanned the court gate. "I haven't heard he's left town yet."



Gil turned on her heel, making for the tiny door of the gatehouse stair without a word.



"Gilshalos!" Alwir's voice called her back. In spite of herself, she stopped, compelled by the command in his tone. She found she was breathing fast, as if she had been running. Wind stirred the tall man's cloak, and the blood rubies glittered on his hands. "No doubt he will have good reasons for what he does-he always does, my child. But beware of him. What he does, he does for his own purposes."



Gil met Alwir's eyes for the first time, as if she had never before seen his face clearly, studying the proud, sensual features as if she would memorize them, the droop of the carved lips that showed his disdain for those beneath him, the arrogance in the set of the jaw, and the ruthless selfishness in the glint of the eyes. She found herself shivering with a pent-up rage, and her hands remembered their grip on the hilt of a sword. "All men have their purposes, my lord Alwir," she said quietly. She swung about and left him, with Rudy following.



Alwir watched them go, vanishing into the black slit of the gatehouse door. He recognized Gil's hatred for what it was, but he was used to the hatred of his inferiors. He shook his head sadly and dismissed her from his mind.



Neither Gil nor Rudy spoke as they climbed the black, twisting stair. It led them to a room, hardly wider than a hallway, situated over the gate itself; warped windows of bull's-eye glass admitted only the cool whiteness of the light and blurred swimming impressions of color and shape. The place had been built as the quarters for the gate porter, but was now used for the storage of the Guards' food. Sacks of flour and oatmeal lined the walls like sandbags on a levee, alternating with wax-covered wheels of scarlet cheese. Over a low pile of such provisions at the far end of the room a blanket and a fur rug had been thrown; a small bundle of oddments, including a clean robe, a book, and a pair of knitted blue mittens, was rolled up at the foot of this crude bed. Ingold sat in the room's single chair next to the south window, as unmoving as stone. The cold white window-light made him look like a black and white photograph, etched mercilessly the deep lines of age and wear that ran back from the corners of his heavy-lidded eyes to his shaggy temples, and marked with little nicks of shadow the scars on his hands.



Gil started to speak, then saw that he was looking into a jewel that he had set down on the windowsill, staring into the gem's central facet as if seeking some image in the heart of the crystal.



He looked up at them and smiled. "Come in," he invited.



They picked their way cautiously through the clutter of the room to the small patch of clear floor space by the wizard's bed. They found seats on sacks and firkins.



Gil said, "Alwir tells me you're not sending us back."



Ingold sighed but did not look away from the bitter challenge in her face. "I'm afraid he's right."



She drew in a deep breath, pain, fear, and dread twisting together within her. Crushing emotion under an inner silence that she could not afford to break, she asked quietly, "Ever?"



"Not for some months," the wizard said.



Her breath leaked out again, the slow release of it easing nothing. "Okay." She rose to go.



His hand closed over her wrist like a snake striking. "Sit down," he said softly. She tried to pull her arm away, without replying, but his hand was very strong. "Please." She turned back, cold and angry; then looking down she saw something in his blue eyes that she'd never expected to see-that he was hurt by her anger. It shook her to the heart. "Please, Gil."



She stood apart from him for a moment, drawn back to the length of her arm. His fingers were locked around her wrist as if he feared that if he released her, he might never see her again. And maybe, Gil thought, he'd be right. She saw again the vision of her delirium: warm, bright images of some other life, another world, friends and the scholarship she had hoped to make her life, distant from her and guarded by some dark, terrible form that might have been the Dark and might have been Ingold; she saw projects, plans, research, and relationships falling into a chasm of absence, beyond her power to repair. Rage filled her like dry, silent heat.



Behind her, Rudy said uneasily, "Months is a long time to play tag with the Dark, man."



"I'm sorry," Ingold said, but his eyes were on Gil.



Trembling with the effort, she let go of the rage. Without it to sustain her, all the tension left her body. Ingold drew her gently to sit on the bed beside him. She did not resist.



"I should have spoken to you before the council," Ingold said quietly. "I was afraid that this would happen."



Gil still could say nothing, but Rudy ventured, "You said something about that yesterday morning, when you were taking off for Gae with the Guards. About how, if the Dark showed up, we maybe couldn't get back."



"I did," Ingold said. "I feared this all along. I told you once before, Gil, that our worlds lie very close. Close enough for a dreamer to step inadvertently across the line, as you did. Close enough for me to step quickly from one world to the next, like a man stepping behind the folds of a curtain. In time this closeness will become less, as the conjunction between worlds comes to its end. At that time, Dark or no Dark, it will be safe enough for me to send you back through.



"I am aware of the Void, always and subliminally, as I am aware of the weather. The first time I crossed it, to speak to you in your apartment, I was aware of a weakening all through its fabric in the vicinity of the gate, that I had made. Even then, I began to fear. The Dark Ones do not understand the Void, but I think then they were first aware that it exists. And after that, they watched. The second time I crossed, escaping the battle in the Palace at Gae, I felt the single Dark One follow me across. The opening that I made caused a whole series of breaks in the Void. Most of them would not have admitted a human, but the Dark, with their different material being, were able to use at least one. That was why I tried to get you away from the cabin, Gil. But naturally, you were both too stubborn to go."



"I was stubborn?" Gil began indignantly. "You were the one who was stubborn... "



"Hey, if you'd told me the truth, man... "



"I did tell you the truth," the wizard said to Rudy. "You simply didn't believe me."



"Yeah, well... " His grumbles trailed off into silence.



Ingold went on. "I felt that sending you back yesterday would be marginally safe, with the Dark Ones fifteen miles off in Gae. But now it's out of the question. The single Dark One who crossed with me increased their awareness of the Void. And they know, now, that humans exist in the world on the other side."



"How do you figure that?" The barrel staves creaked as Rudy changed position, bringing his feet up to sit crosslegged, leaning acid-stained elbows on his knees. "The one that followed you got fried on the other side. He never made it back to report."



"He didn't have to." Ingold turned to Gil. "You saw last night how the Dark Ones fight, the speed with which their bodies maneuver and change position. How the communication between them works I'm not sure, but what one learns, I believe, they all then know. If we weaken the fabric of the Void, so that several of them pass through behind you and Rudy-if, as I suspect it may be, their knowledge of events is simultaneous rather than cumulative-it would be only a matter of time before they learned to operate the gates through the Void themselves.



"As Guardian of the Void, I am responsible. At this time, I cannot endanger your world by sending you back."



In the silence that followed his words, the drift of Janus' voice from the court below was faintly audible, along with the clear metallic tap of hooves on cobbles. Somewhere a dog barked. The light in the room faded as twilight drew down on the stricken town.



Rudy asked, "So what can we do?"



"Wait," Ingold said. "Wait until the turn of the winter, when our worlds will have drawn apart far enough to permit safe crossing. Or wait until I can speak with the Archmage Lohiro."



Gil looked up. "You've talked about him before."



The wizard nodded. "He is the Master of the Council of Quo, the leader of all the world's wizardry. His understanding is different from mine and his power greater. If anyone can help us, he can.



"Before the Dark Ones broke forth at Gae, before the night I spoke with you, Gil, I spoke with Lohiro. He told me that the Council of Wizards, and indeed all the mages of the West of the World, were coming together at Quo. Wizardry is knowledge. Piecing together all wizardry, all knowledge, all power, we might come to a way to defeat the Dark. And until that time, he said, 'I shall ring Quo in the walls of air, and make of it a fortress that no darkness can pierce. Here we shall be safe, and from this fortress, my friend, we shall come in light.' " As he quoted these words, Ingold's eyes lost some of their sharpness, and his voice shifted, picking up the inflection and tone of another man's voice.



"And since that time, my children, I have heard nothing. I have sought... " He touched the crystal that lay on the sill next to his elbow, and its facets flashed dimly in the light. "At times I think I can make out the shape of the hills above the town, or the outlines of Forn's Tower rising through the mists. But I have had no word, not from Lohiro nor from any of the wizards. They are surrounded in spells, ringed in illusion. And so they must be sought-and only a wizard can seek them."



Gil said softly, "Then you'll be leaving us?"



Ingold's eyes flickered back to her, growing brighter and more present again. "Not at once," he said. "But we will be leaving Karst. At dawn tomorrow, Alwir is leading the people south to the old Keep of Dare at Renweth on Sarda Pass. You may have heard us speak of it in council-it was the old fortress-hold built against the Dark by the men of the Old Realms, many thousands of years ago, at the time of the Dark's first rising. It will be a long trek, and a hard one. But at Renweth you will be safe, as safe as you would be anywhere in this world.



"I shall be going with the train to Renweth. Though I am no longer considered a member of the Regents, I am still held to the vow I made Eldor before his death. I promised to see Prince Tir to a place of safety and that I will and must do, whether Alwir wishes me to or not. I am afraid, my children, that you have leagued yourselves with an outcast."



"Alwir can go to hell," Gil said shortly.



Ingold shook his head. "The man has his uses," he said. "But he finds me-unbiddable. On the road to Renweth, Tir will be in constant danger from the Dark. I cannot leave him. But Renweth will be, for me, only a stopping place, the first stage of a greater journey."



"Well, look," Rudy said after a moment's thought. "If we went with you to Quo, couldn't you send us back from there? If it's so safe, it would be the one place where the Dark Ones couldn't get through."



"True," Ingold agreed. "If you made it to Quo. I wouldn't recommend the trip. In the height of the Realm's power, few people would venture to cross the plain and the desert in winter. It's close to two thousand miles, through desolate lands. In addition to the Dark, we would be in danger from the White Raiders, the barbarian tribesmen who have waged bloody war on the outposts of the Realm for centuries."



"But you're going," Rudy pointed out.



Ingold's blunt, scarred fingers toyed with the crystal on the windowsill. "And you might be safe, traveling with me. But believe me, your chances of seeing your own world again are far greater if you remain in the Keep of Dare."



Gil was silent, her bony hands folded on her knee, staring into the murky gloom of the gatehouse. She tried to picture that fortress among the mountains, tried to picture weeks and months there alone, knowing no one, isolated as she had always been isolated. Her jaw tightened. "You will come back for us, though, won't you?"



"I brought you into this world against your will," Ingold said quietly. He laid his hands over hers, the warmth of his touch going through her, warming her, as it always did, by its vitality. "If for no other reason than that, I am responsible for you. Lohiro may have a better answer than I can give you. It may even be that he will be able to return with me to the Keep."



"Yeah," Rudy said dubiously. "But what if you can't find the wizards? What if they're locked up so tight even you can't get in? What if-Suppose the Archmage is dead?" He hadn't wanted to say it, since Ingold seemed to be operating on the assumption that Lohiro was alive, but Ingold's frown was one of consideration rather than of anxiety or annoyance.



"It's a possibility," Ingold said slowly. "I had thought of it, yes, but-I would know if Lohiro were dead." The last of the twilight glinted on his bristling white eyebrows as they drew down over his nose. 'The spells that surround Quo might mask it-but I think I would know. I know I would."



"How?" Rudy asked curiously.



"I just would. Because he is the Archmage, and I am a wizard."



"Is that why Alwir kicked you out of the council?" Gil asked, remembering the cold eyes of the Bishop and the way Alwir had spoken of Ingold at the gate below. "Because you're a wizard?"



Ingold smiled and shook his head. "No," he said. "Alwir and I are enemies of long standing. He never approved of my friendship with Eldor. And I fear he will never forgive me for being right about the dangers of coming to Karst. Alwir, as you may have guessed, has never thought much of the idea of retreating to the Keeps. The Keeps are fortresses, safe for the most part from the Dark, but limited in scope. To retreat into them will fracture the Realm beyond hope of repair and destroy thousands of years of human civilization. Such a fate is inevitable, in an isolated society, where transportation and communication are limited to the duration of the daylight; culture will wane, narrow-mindedness set in; the human outlook will shrink from urbane tolerance of all human needs to a kind of petty parochialism that cannot see beyond the bounds of its own fields. As you know from your own studies, Gil, private law begets a host of its own abuses. Decentralized, the Church will degenerate, its priests and theologians degraded into sanctified scribes and passers-out of the sacraments to a squabbling, superstitious peasantry. I fear that wizardry, too, will suffer, becoming more and more polluted with little magics, losing sight of the mainstream of its teachings. Anything that requires an organized body of knowledge will vanish-the universities, medicine, training in any form of the arts.



"Eldor was a scholar, and saw this; he knew what had happened before, through his own memories of the long years of superstition and darkness and the mean-minded fears of men to whom the unknown was always threatening. Alwir and Govannin see it coming, and know that once they let their hold on centralized power slip, nothing can get it back.



"And so, Quo could be our only hope."



Rudy cocked his head curiously. "Didn't Alwir talk about some plan-about getting allies to invade the Nests of the Dark? Is that still coming off?"



"It is," Ingold said thinly. "He has sent south, to the great Empire of Alketch, for help in this endeavor, and I do not doubt he shall get it."



The flat, repressive note in his voice startled Rudy, who looked up from idly turning the crystal in his fingers, angling it to what remained of the waning light. "Sounds like not a bad idea," he admitted.



Ingold shrugged. "It would not be," he said, "but for two things. The first is that, deny it though we might, our civilization is all but broken. Even if we drive back the Dark, to what new world of Light will we come? I have seen in the crystal, and by other means, that the depredations of the Dark are far lighter in the south than they are here. The Empire of Alketch is a strong realm still. They can help us in Alwir's invasion; and then, when the remains of the forces of the Realm have taken the brunt of the casualties, they will be on the spot, ready to take the land left depopulated and defenseless in the aftermath. Alwir will have exchanged death for slavery-and there are varying opinions on which is the worse fate."



The blue eyes glittered under the heavy brows. "I know Alketch, you see," the wizard went on quietly. "The southern Empire has long coveted these northern lands. I know Alketch-and I know the Dark.



"Alwir finds a great deal to say about the number of things for which mine is the only word. He is right. About the Dark, mine is the only word, now that Eldor is gone and the sole male heir of the House of Dare is too young to speak. And I know that an invasionary force to the Nests will surely fail.



"I have been to a Nest. I have seen the Dark in their cities beneath the ground."



The wizard leaned back against the wall behind him. The room was sinking in shadow all around. His voice was quiet, distant, leading his listeners to another place and time.



"A long time ago I was the local spell-weaver for a village, oh, way over in Gettlesand. It was a good-sized village, but not so large that the Lord of Gettlesand would think to look for me there. I was, in fact, hiding out, but that is part of another tale.



"The dooic run wild in tribes in that part of the country. They prefer the empty plains, but they do hide in the hills, and they have sometimes been known to carry off small children. One of the children of the mayor of my village had vanished, and I tracked her and her tribe of kidnappers for a night and a day, back into the hills. It was in a cave, in a ridge of foothills beneath a desert mountain range, that I first saw one of the Dark Ones. It was night. The creature dropped from the ceiling of the cave where it had been clinging and devoured an old male dooic which had taken shelter there. It was not aware of my presence.



"Now I had learned about Dark Ones in old books that I had read, and from the ancient legends handed down to me, like this jewel, from my master Rath. I realized this must be a surviving Dark One, and it occurred to me that isolated groups of these creatures, which had once overwhelmed mankind and then vanished from the face of the earth, might still be hiding in the fastnesses of mountain and desert. And because I am, and always have been, incurably inquisitive, I followed it back through the darkness, down tunnels so steep I had to cling to the walls and floor to keep myself from sliding headlong into the blackness. I remember thinking to myself at the time that the numbers of the Dark Ones had shrunk so badly that they lived thus for their own protection; a wretched remnant of a force that had once dominated the face of the world and changed the courses of civilization.



"I followed the little Dark One-for it was crawling along the floor, and only about so big-" He gestured with his hands. "-deeper and deeper into the heart of the earth, crawling and climbing and scrambling to keep up with it. And do you know, at that point I was almost sorry for the vanished Dark Ones in what I supposed to be their exile. Then I saw the tunnel widen ahead of me and I looked out into their-city."



The quality of the old man's voice was hypnotic, and his eyes had the faraway look of seeing nothing in that small twilit room. "It was completely dark, of course," he went on. "I do see clearly in the dark. The cavern below me must have run on for almost a mile, stretching downward and back and farther down into the earth. The tunnel in which I lay overlooked it, and I could scarcely see the other end of the cave, lost as it was in shadows. The stalactites of the ceiling, as far back as I could see, were crawling with the Dark, covered with them, black with their bodies; the rattle of their claws on the limestone was like the sound of hail. And down the wall to my right, at floor level, there was an entrance to another passageway, about as high as a man could walk through. There was a stream of them, coming and going from deeper underground. I knew that under that cavern there was another one, as large or larger; and below that, possibly another. That was only one city, situated miles from anywhere, in the midst of the deserts, probably not even their largest city." Memory of the horror deepened the lines that age and hard living had scrawled in his face; he looked like some Old Testament prophet, gifted with the sure knowledge of civilization's downfall and helpless to prevent it. Rudy knew that he saw, not them, not this room, but the endless cavern of darkness, and felt afresh the impact of that first realization that unguessably vast hordes of the Dark Ones still lived beneath the surface of the earth-not in exile, not out of necessity, hut because it was their chosen habitat. And there was nothing to prevent them from rising, as they had risen once before.



Rudy's voice broke the quiet that had followed the wizard's account. "You say they were all across the ceiling of the place," he said. "What was on the floor?"



Ingold's eyes met his, darkened with the memory and almost angry that Rudy should have asked-angry that he'd already half-guessed. "They have their-flocks and herds," he said unwillingly, and would have left it at that, but the young man's eyes challenged him to say it. "Mutated, adapted, inbred after countless generations of living in the dark. I knew then, you see, that human beings were their natural prey."



"That's why the stairways," Rudy said thoughtfully. The Dark don't need stairs-they haven't got any feet. They could drive dooic... "



"These weren't dooic," Ingold said. "They were human-of a sort." He shuddered, repelled by the memory. "But you see, my children, all the armies in the world would be hardly enough for what Alwir proposes. All that an invasion will do is cripple the existing fighting force of the Realm and leave too few men to guard the doors of their homes against the Empire of Alketch-or against the Dark.



"The alternative, retreating to the Keeps and letting civilization die around us in the hopes that one day the Dark will pass, is hardly a more appealing proposition; but at this point I literally cannot see a third course. Even Alwir has been forced to recognize that we cannot simply flee them, and it is not likely that the Dark Ones will spontaneously become vegetarians.



"So you see," he concluded quietly, "I must find Lohiro and find him quickly. If I do not, we are faced with a choice of disasters. Wizardry has long garnered its knowledge in an isolated tower on the shores of the Western Ocean, apart from the world, teaching, experimenting, balancing itself in the still center of the moving cosmos-power working for the perfection of power, knowledge for the perfection of knowledge. Nothing is fortuitous-there are no random events. It may be that the whole history of wizardry from Forn on was for this end only: to save us from the Dark."



"If it can," Rudy said softly, and handed him back his jewel.



"If it can," Ingold agreed.



Darkness had fallen. Thin gray rain slanted down on the wreckage of the town of Karst, flurrying the dark slickness of the puddles in the soupy mud of the court, staining the timber and thatch of the lean-to sheds. Bitter winds blew down off the mountains, whipping Gil's wet cloak around her ankles as she and Rudy crossed the court.



"Three months," Rudy murmured, raising his head under the downpour to survey the ruin of the town, the ruin of the civilization that had built it. "Christ, if the Dark don't get us, we'll freeze to death in that time."



Distant thunder boomed, like far-off artillery. Gil sought shelter from the rain in the darkness of the lean-to barracks, watching Rudy as he crossed the court to where the glow of a sheltered fire marked the common pot. Guards were moving around it, dark ghostly shapes, the brotherhood of the sword, their stained black tunics marked with the white quatrefoil emblem of their company. The sounds of men talking drifted through the sodden drumming of the rain.



Strong hands slipped over her shoulders from behind. A colorless voice purred, "Gilshalos?" She glanced at the hands, close by her cheek; long and thin, the fingers calloused and knotted from the discipline of the sword. Past the black shape of a tunic and the tasseled ends of white braids, she saw a thin face and cool, disinterested eyes. In a flanking maneuver, two other forms appeared and made themselves at home on either side of her.



The swordmaster Gnift took her hand and pressed it to his breast in a good imitation of passion. "O Pearl of my Heart," he greeted her, and she laughed and pulled her hand away. She had never spoken to the instructor, and indeed had been rather awed, watching him coach the Guards. But his teasing took away her shyness and eased the bitterness in her heart. On her other side, Seya was silent, but the woman's thin, lined face smiled. She was evidently long familiar with Gnift's mock flirtations.



"What do you want?" Gil asked, still grinning, shy with them and yet feeling strangely at home. In the brief time she had known them, Seya and the Icefalcon-and now, evidently, Gnift as well-had accepted her for what she was. She had rarely felt so comfortable, even among the other scholars at the university.



Distant firelight reddened the smooth dome of Gnift's head-his baldness was like a tonsure, the hair around the sides growing thickly down almost to his collar. Under the overhanging jut of his brows, his brown eyes were bright, quick, very alive. He said quietly in answer, "You."



And with a flourish he produced the bundle he'd been half-hiding at his side. Unwrapping it, Gil found a faded black tunic, homespun shirt and breeches, a surcoat, and a belt with a dagger. All were marked with the white quatrefoil sign of the Guards.