The Time Of The Dark

A long time ago and perhaps in a previous incarnation, Rudy recalled seeing a movie called The Ten Commandments which, among other things, had contained a memorable scene of the Children of Israel getting their butts out of the Land of Egypt. Charlton Heston had lifted up his staff and they'd all been organized and ready to go, and the whole clear-out had taken about three minutes of screen time, goats and granddaddies and all, leaving not so much as a crumpled bread wrapper or a pile of dog droppings on the tidy streets of Thebes.



Karst had been stirring since several hours before dawn. Rudy, standing by the cart in which the rations earmarked for the Guards would be hauled, had a good view of most of the square, and it didn't look to him as if anybody would be going anywhere until damn near noon, if then. It had begun to rain again, and the ground was like porridge. The cart wheels bogged in it; people running back and forth on aimless errands churned it to ever-deeper ooze. Mud and rain covered everything, soaked Rudy's cloak and his clothing underneath, and plastered the clumped, dirty agglomerations of depressed-looking refugees who stood or sat around that scene of sodden chaos. Even Alwir, storming his elegant way among them, was beginning to look shopworn and dirty.



By midmorning, the square was a total confusion of people, goods, and makeshift transport. Children wandered from their parents and got lost. Escaping pigs had to be chased through the standing carts, pack beasts, and little mounds of personal belongings, upsetting everything in their flying path. The larger families and groups, and the households of minor nobles, were engaged in last-minute problem-solving sessions, among much cursing and the waving of arms, arguing whether to go north to the Keep of the landchief Harl Kinghead, south to Renweth in the mountains, following Alwir and the Council of Regents, or beyond that, over Sarda Pass, to Gettlesand, to risk the threat of the White Raiders in the minor Keeps of the landchief Tomec Tirkenson. Rudy could see Tirkenson, big, scarred, and ugly, cursing his followers into line with a vocabulary that would have curled a bullwhacker's hair.



Rudy himself could have left town at a moment's notice. From the leavings of the dead, he'd collected himself an outfit of warm clothes-a brown tunic, shirt, breeches, and boots, a hooded cloak that was too large, and a pair of gauntlet gloves stitched with gold and emeralds. His California clothes he carried in his pack, along with shaving things scrounged, like everything else, from those who had not survived the coming of the Dark to Karst, his American-made buck-knife, a horn spoon, and his big blue plastic comb. The unfamiliar weight of a sword dragged at his hip.



Leaning his shoulders against the tall wheel of the cart, shivering in the wind that drove the rain and tossed the dark trees that were visible above the black, gabled roofs, he surveyed the milling chaos before him. Mud-slathered people negotiated for space in two carts, tied dirty little bundles onto muleback or into crude wheelbarrows or travois, and argued about what to take and what to leave. Watching them, his face stinging in the icy wind, he remembered California as if his whole life there had been something that had happened to someone else.



"There," the cool, husky voice of the Icefalcon said at his elbow. He turned to see the tall captain pointing out to Gil the small train of wagons drawn up outside the Bishop's palace, adjacent to the Church on the opposite side of the square. Red-robed monks were loading two of them with chests that were obviously filled with something heavy, under the arrogant direction of the Bishop herself. "I find that typical," the Guard went on. "They claim to work for the salvation of souls, but from all I've seen, they only collect the tithe, and keep records of how much is owed and what souls have been born and baptized and confessed and died, like a miser counting gold. Fleeing for their lives, they will carry paper rather than food."



"They?" Gil echoed curiously, and glanced up at the tall young man with the incongruous pale braids lying rainslicked over his dark shoulders. "You're not of the Faith?"



A disdainful sniff was all the answer she got.



Past the Church wagons, Alwir's household and the remnants of the government of the Realm were holding what appeared to be a Chinese fire drill on the steps of the Town Hall. Rudy saw Alde seated in the front of one of the carts there, muffled in black fur, her eyes peeking from the shadows of her streaming hood. On her lap she cradled a great bundle of dark, trailing blankets, in which no round pink baby face was visible; but once he saw the blankets squirm. That would be Tir. Medda, her round face swollen with weeping, clambered up to take her place at the Queen's side. Alde turned her head, her gaze searching the crowd. Across the milling confusion she met Rudy's eyes, then quickly looked away, as if ashamed to be caught seeking sight of him. Beyond her, Bektis was climbing into another wagon, his narrow face framed in a great collar of expensive marten fur, looking down his elegant nose at the bedraggled mob in the square.



Then someone was calling out orders, Commander Janus' harsh, braying battle voice rising above the sluicing drum of the rain and the clamor of argument and preparation. Alwir appeared from around the corner of the Town Hall, mounted on a slim-legged sorrel mare. His great cloak flapped in the wind as he bent from the saddle to exchange last-minute instructions with someone on the ground. The Guards moved into line, a ragged double file on either side of the Chancellor's wagons. Like a kettleful of oatmeal coming at last to a boil, the people in the square, alone or by couples, families, or clans, caught up their few possessions and jostled for a place within that doubled line, or, failing that, as close to its protection as they could get. Those who weren't ready to go yet redoubled their preparations, hastening in the hope of catching up on the road. Whatever their ultimate goal, the north or Gettlesand or Renweth, sticking with an armed convoy was far preferable to taking that long road alone.



Rudy was a little surprised at what a mob there was, once they got out on the road. They moved almost without order, a vast confusion of provision wagons, transport carts for the furniture of Alwir's household and the records of the government of the Realm, small herds of cattle and sheep, here and there coveys of spare horses for those fortunate enough to be riding to Renweth, the shambling rabble of household servants, and the few remaining dooic slaves that an occasional wealthy family had brought out of the ruin of their world. Families straggled behind and around the main body of the royal wagons, with their crated chickens and barking dogs, their pigs and their milk goats; it was astonishing how many families had actually succeeded in holding together through the chaos of the last few weeks, though many of them, Rudy knew, were missing members. Fathers and mothers were carrying the bulk of the load, older children carrying those too young to walk, others leading or driving such livestock as they'd been able to save or acquire. There were not a few grannies and grandpas of startlingly venerable years, too-Rudy wondered how some of those old people had managed to run fast enough to escape the Dark. But they were there, leaning on walking sticks or on the shoulders of their grandchildren or great-grandchildren, chirping to one another with the equable calm of those who have long since ceased being surprised by fate. And as they departed from Karst, that great straggling mob passed an infinitely greater number of half-assembled households, still loading the last of their belongings onto donkey back or dog travois, or trying to sort out the least essential essentials, arguing and watching with apprehensive eyes as the convoy slopped past in the driving gray rain. By the looks of it, Rudy calculated, people would be drifting out of Karst all day.



A mud- spattered old man with a shabby bundle and a stout walking stick fell into step with Rudy as they passed the last outskirts of the town. The path dipped steeply in a treacherous slide of black muck. Rudy's feet slithered on it, and a strong hand grasped his elbow. "Cut yourself a staff from the woods," a familiar scratchy voice advised. "The roads aren't going to get any easier, once we reach the mountains around Renweth."



"We're leaving the mountains, though," Rudy said, picking his way more carefully in the wizard's tracks. "Are these the same mountains we're heading for, or different?"



"Different," Ingold said. "We're picking up the Great South Road outside Gae and following it down the valley of the Brown River, which runs through the heartlands of the Realm. The road up to Sarda Pass crosses it, and we'll take that up into the Big Snowies, the great wall of mountains that cuts the Realm, the lands of the Wath, in two, dividing the river valleys from the plains and the desert of Gettlesand. Renweth stands above Sarda Pass. Watch the ground."



Rudy scrambled over slippery autumn-yellow grasses around a noxious patch of black quicksand. The road from Gae up to Karst had been graded and cut so as to be easily negotiable in good weather, but the constant coming and going of the refugees, combined with the rains and the steady departures that had been taking place from the town since dawn, had reduced the way to a treacherous river of slop. Those refugees who waited until the afternoon to quit Karst would have to wade all the way to the plain. Rudy looked around at the darkness of the misty gray woods and pictured what the land would be like for those who got bogged in the road when night began to fall. He shivered.



"How far is it?" he asked suddenly. "How many nights are we going to have to spend in the open?"



"Close to a hundred and seventy miles," Ingold replied, making his way through the wet brush on the firmer ground at the edge of the roadbed. "Eight or ten nights, if the weather stays good and the Arrow River isn't too high to cross when we get there."



"You call this good?" Rudy grumbled. "I've been freezing my tail off since I came here. I don't think I'll ever dry out."



Ingold held out his hand, and the rain collected, a tiny lake, in his calloused palm. "It could be far worse," he said mildly. "We've had harsh winters these last ten years, with killing snows on the plains beyond the mountains driving the White Raiders, the barbarians of the plains, to attack the settlements out of pure famine. This winter promises to be the worst yet-"



"Fantastic."



"- but it has been noticed that the Dark Ones seem to attack less in foul weather. High winds, heavy rains, or snow seem to keep them underground. Few blessings or disasters come unmixed."



"Great," Rudy said, without enthusiasm. "So we've got a choice of the Dark Ones or pneumonia."



The old man raised his eyebrows, amused. "So which would you prefer?"



They turned a corner of the road, as Gil had done two days before, and the rusty woods seemed to part, revealing below them the dim, tawny plain and, half-hidden in the pearl of the river mist, the ruined city of Gae. Used to the megalopolis of Los Angeles, Rudy found the city very small, but there had been a grandeur to it, a walled unity with which the sprawling, featureless towns of his own experience could not compare. In his mind he pieced it together to put roofs on the burned walls of the close-set, half-timbered houses and leaves on the gray lace of bare branches. He remembered Minalde's low, gentle voice saying wistfully, "Now I'll always remember it in its beauty... "



That thought brought others, and he stood for some time, looking out over the pastel vista of ochre and silver-gray, until a dimming of the noise behind him alerted him to the passing of the convoy, and he thrashed back to the road and hurried to catch them up, plowing his way through torn black mud in which white chicken-feathers were caught like flakes of fallen snow.



Still more refugees joined them on the plain by the walls of Gae. The Karst-Gae road crossed the Great South Road a few miles from the multiple turrets of the city gates, in a great trampled circle amid the withered grass. Just north of the crossroads loomed Trad's Hill, named for some hero of ancient wars, the only prominence on that flat plate of land, and from that hill a lichenous cross of carved stone bestowed its arcane sanction on the joining of the ways. There they were met by a motley horde of fugitives from Gae itself, braver, or more foolish, or more conservative souls who had hung on in the looted ruin of the capital, hoping that the danger would somehow miraculously pass. They were far better provisioned and more heavily burdened than those who had fled to Karst earlier in the week; better clothed, leading carts and mules and horses, driving milk cows and pigs and chickens, carrying great satchels of books, money, spare bedding, and the family silver.



"Where'd they get the cows?" Rudy demanded of Gil, who happened to be walking close by him at the time. "They didn't keep all them animals in the city, for God's sake,"



Gil said, "People in New York, Boston, and Chicago kept cows and pigs clear up to the 1890s. How do you think you got milk if you lived in town?"



As the two parties converged, he heard the buzz of talk pass down the length of the swelling caravan. "Is that really her Majesty? Is her Majesty really well and safe? And his Little Majesty?" People crossed themselves thankfully and craned their necks to see. As an American, and not a particularly well-informed one at that, Rudy had expected the subjects of a monarchy to fear and resent those who had such absolute power over them, and it surprised him to see the reverence in which they held Alde and Tir. He remembered what she had said last night, about love and honor-that people needed a ruler they could love, as well as a law they could follow. Offhand, he couldn't think of any member of his own government he even respected, let alone one for whose survival he'd offer up prayers of joy. It caused him to look with new eyes at the tall, hide-topped cart with its drooping standards of black and red and to think about the dark-haired girl inside.



The day wore on, and they followed the Great South Road through the drenched green farmlands along the river. In contrast to the muddy track down the mountain, the road was wide and well-drained, with deep, weed-grown ditches on both sides and a pavement of worn, close-fitted hexagonal blocks of some kind of pale gray stone. As the centers of the blocks were more worn than the edges, they caught the rain in each separate hollow and turned the road into a shining scarf of fish-scale silver, stretching away into misty distance. The caravan left the wide sweep of the plain of Gae behind them and crossed a bridge beneath frowning, empty towers, to enter into the fertile bottom lands where the road sought its lazy way between meadow and farm and woods.



No countryman, Rudy was nevertheless impressed by the solid appearance of prosperity that lay over the land. The farmhouses were well-built, most of them boasting more than one room, with separate quarters for the animals-not always the rule in nonindustrial societies, Gil remarked cynically. But the emptiness of the land was chilling. They saw very few people-only the eyeless stare of vacant houses, the abandoned cattle, and mile after mile of half-harvested corn, rotting in the rain. Those people they did meet were the farm families, or the remnants of them, who came out to the road with all their worldly goods-plow, seed, and poultry-and the youngest baby of the household piled haphazardly into ox carts, to swell the ranks of the moving army of refugees, with children and servants and herd dogs driving little bunches of sheep and cows in their wake. As they passed through those desolate farmlands, the Guards, or the Red Monks, or men and women acting on their own left the train to forage in the ruined fields and the oddly crushed, deserted barns for what they could find, though Rudy noticed they seldom went into the houses that they passed. Sometimes they came back with wagonloads of seed and grain, or livestock, pigs, and bleating sheep, or the small cobby farm horses-beasts whose masters would take no further interest in husbandry.



And still it rained. The convoy had grown to an army, plodding along the silver road in the downpour. Rudy thought of the sheer number of miles involved-Hell, that's like walking from Los Angeles to Bakersfield-and wondered what the hell he was doing there. Above the dull overcast and slanting rain, the gray day was sickening toward twilight.



He shaded his eyes and squinted out across the wet landscape; he saw, as he had seen several times that day, a person-man or woman, he couldn't always tell-wandering aimlessly in the distance, driven by the cutting wind. He wondered about those people, for none of them had made any sign that they saw the passing convoy, and none of the company on the road spoke or waved to them. Sometimes alone, sometimes two or three together, they moved like zombies, stood staring listlessly at nothing, or lay on the ground in the fields, looking blankly into the hollow sky.



He grew more and more curious about these outcasts. Toward evening, when he saw a man and two young women standing at the bottom of the drainage ditch on the side of the road, gazing vacantly into space, he left the pavement and went scrambling down the side of the culvert, slithering through weeds and mud, and waded over to where they stood.



The man wore a loose white cotton shift, plastered to his soft, paunchy flesh by the rain. His hands and mouth were nearly blue with cold, but he seemed to take no notice of the ankle-deep ice water in which he stood. The girls wore dripping silk rags, wilted flowers and colored ribbons braided into their wet, snarled hair. Their lobotomized eyes followed his motions, but none of the three made a sound.



Rudy passed his hand cautiously across the man's line of vision. The eyes tracked, but registered no understanding of what they saw. The girls were the same-beautiful girls, dainty and sweet as lilies of the valley. Rudy would cheerfully have taken either or both of them to bed with him, except for the creeping horror of that empty stare.



"This," Ingold's voice said behind him, "is the other thing that the Dark Ones do."



Rudy swung around, startled; he hadn't heard the wizard approach, even through four inches of water. The old man's face looked taut and sick, barely visible in the shadows of his drawn-up hood. "We didn't see much of it at Karst; probably because the victims were trampled by those seeking safety, or lost in the woods around the town. But I know this from Gae. I daresay most people know it."



"What's wrong with them?" Rudy looked from the wizard to the three shivering, empty-eyed automatons and felt a creeping of his flesh that, for once, had little to do with the cold.



"I think I spoke of it earlier," Ingold said quietly. "The Dark Ones devour the mind as well as the flesh-which is why, I suspect, they prey upon human beings and not upon beasts. As well as human flesh and human blood, the Dark Ones devour the psychic energy, the intelligence-the mind, if you will. Perhaps to them that is the most important of the three."



Reaching out, Ingold shut the eyes of the man with his thumb and forefinger and, closing his own eyes, meditated for a moment in silence. The man's knees buckled abruptly, and Ingold stepped lightly back from him as he splashed noisily into the rain-thrashed water and lay face down. Rudy was still staring, aghast, at the corpse when Ingold touched each of the girls in turn. They fell and lay with their flowered hair floating around them in the dirty water of the ditch. The wizard turned away and, leaning on his staff, clambered up the bank again. Rudy followed him, water dripping soggily from the hem of his mantle, cold and shivering and shocked at what he was pretty sure Ingold had done.



They did not speak for some time, but trudged down the road in silence. Then Rudy asked, "They don't get over it, do they?"



"No." The wizard's voice came disembodied from the shadows of his hood. A harmless old man, Rudy thought. A charming old lunatic. No wonder people are afraid of him.



"No," Ingold went on. "If they are indoors they generally starve. If they are outdoors they die of exposure."



"Uh- anybody ever take care of one, to see if his mind might come back?"



Ingold shrugged. "Not easy when you're fleeing the Dark yourself. Up in Twegged in the north, at the start of all this trouble, it was tried. The victim lasted two months."



"What happened after two months?"



"Her caretakers killed her." The wizard added, in a tone of explanation, "They were the victim's husband and daughter, you see."



Rudy looked back over his shoulder. The evening mists were coming down heavily, shadow and darkness covering the land. Still, he thought he could see in the distance the curve of the road, the ditch, and the whitish blur against the darker ground.



The night fell, and for miles up and down the Great



South Road the refugees sought what sleep they could. Watch fires threaded the darkness like a glittering necklace on both sides of the road, and all who could bear arms took their turn at them. In the low ground, the puddled rain turned to ice.



Alde came to Rudy's watch fire in the night, with Medda escorting her like a stout, disapproving shadow. She was shy with him, and they did not speak of what had passed between them at Karst, but Rudy felt a joy in her presence he had never known with any other human being. As they sat together with their backs to the fire, not touching, talking of Tir or of the small doings of the road, the intimacy between them was as close and warm as if they shared a cloak.



The morning dawned clear and freezing cold. The wind had broken the overcast and piled the clouds in the south, like the immeasurable slopes of achingly white mountains against the soaring blue of the morning sky. Word came down the line that wolves had attacked the horse herd belonging to the Church and had been driven off by the Red Monks; four night guards had been found dead by their watch fires, bloodless victims of the Dark. Nevertheless, Bishop Govannin gave a cart-tail service of thanksgiving, and those who had survived the night thanked their God that it had been no worse.



They came into a rolling country now, the great road looping through the gray-green hills. To their right, the distant heads of the western mountains were sometimes glimpsed, plum and blue and gray, or covered in the lour of clouds. It was a land of streams, ice-rimed in the morning, that flowed down toward the green, lush bottom lands in the east. These streams were sometimes crossed by narrow stone bridges, but often the road simply led to shallow fords, so that everyone was perpetually half-wet and shivering. Rudy, stiff and aching in every joint, took Ingold's advice and cut a straight sapling from the next grove of trees they passed, to trim into a walking stick. He had never been much good at botany, but the Icefalcon told him the wood was ash.



Toward noon they crossed a broad saddle of land that lay between two hills, and from it a vista spread before them of all the countryside down to the river, the long grass rippling palely in the wan light of a heatless sun. The red-clothed trooper leading the mules of Minalde's cart paused there to breathe them, and Rudy came up close at her side. Many people stood there, having stopped to rest in the neck of that miniature pass and look down on the lands below. Alde turned to him and smiled. "How are you?" she asked quietly, a little shy at speaking to him in the light of day.



"Sore as hell." Rudy leaned on his staff, not caring if it made him look like an old man. "How in God's name do you people stand it? I feel like I'm fixing to die."



"So do most of these people," Alde said. "So would I, if I didn't have a cart to ride in because I'm the Queen. We've been passing women all day, with children as young as Tir. Carrying them. They'll carry them clear to Renweth, unless they die on the road." She tucked the blankets closer around the child she held propped at her side. Tir made a little noise of protest and a determined effort to divest himself of the blankets and, Rudy guessed, to roll off the seat. The kid was going to be a real pest when he started to walk.



"Die?" he said uneasily. He remembered things people had said about those who straggled from the caravan...



"Of cold," Alde said. "Or hunger. We're doing all right for food now, but when we get out of the farm country, there won't be nearly enough. Not for the children or for the old people or for those who are sick-"



She broke off, startled, lifting her head to stare off across the hills, and Rudy followed her gaze down the smooth, falling curves of the gray-green land. Far off he could see huge brown forms stalking the distant pastures, swaying like monstrous animated haystacks-impossibly large, monsters in the icy distance.



"What are they?" he asked, shading his eyes. Then he glanced back at Alde and saw the worry on her face. "Are they... "



"Mammoths," Alde said, and her tone was puzzled and surprised. "Mammoths this side of the mountains... "



"Mammoths?"



She glanced down at him, hearing but misinterpreting the shock in his voice. "Woolly elephants," she explained. "They're common on the northern plains, of course, but they haven't been seen in the river valleys since-oh, for hundreds of years. And never this far south. They must have come over the passes of the mountains for some reason."



But mammoths were not the only things to come over the passes of the mountains.



That night, as he and Alde sat talking quietly under Medda's disapproving chaperonage by the watch fire, Rudy thought he heard the distant thunder of hooves, an unlikely sound in the convoy where horses were few and precious, guarded more carefully than a miser guards his hoard. After a time, the night wind brought him the faint, damp drift of smoke and a sound that reminded him of the howling of wolves, although there was a difference to this sound. In the morning he rode out with Ingold and the slim handful of Guards whom the convoy could afford to mount to look for the source of the sound.



They found it long before the sun had managed to burn off the thick, white river mist. The charred hulk of a gutted farmhouse loomed in the opal fog, haunted by the gliding black shapes of spectral crows and the smell of roasted flesh. They found some of the farm family a little ways from the house. At first Rudy didn't register that the body staked to the ground was human; when he did, he came as close to fainting as he ever had in his life. He looked away, his face clammy with sweat and the taste of vomit in his mouth. He heard Janus' boots squishing in the mushy grass and the faint, restless jingling of bridle-bits as the horses tossed their heads in alarm. He heard Janus say, "Not the Dark," and Ingold, skirting on foot the trampled weeds beyond him, reply, "No."



Faintly, another Guard's voice drifted to him. "Dooic? Gone feral or-or mad?"



Another responded. "On horses? Be serious."



Ingold returned, materializing like a specter from the mist, holding in his hand a strip of rawhide trimmed with chips of colored glass, from which a long feather dangled, its end tipped in blood. "No," he said, his voice calm in spite of the butchered horror lying in the grass nearby. "No, I fear this is the work of the White Raiders."



"On this side of the mountains?" Janus asked nervously, looking around him.



Ingold nodded and held out to him the rawhide, the spinning feather brushing his wrist and marking the flesh with blood. "Lava Hills People," he identified briefly, and gestured toward the grisly evidence, scattered over several square yards of grass. "It's a sacrifice, a-propitiation. An offering to something they fear."



"The Dark?" the Commander asked. He took and examined the rawhide tag.



"Doubtless," Ingold said slowly, and looked around him at the burned trees, the scorched remains of the outbuildings, and the fallen house surrounded by a hideously suggestive cloud of screeching carrion-birds. "Doubtless. Though if the Dark were their principal fear-why did they cross the mountains? The danger of the Dark is thickest in the valleys of the river."



"Possibly they didn't know."



"Possibly." The wizard's tone was still dubious, and he moved restlessly along the trampled verge of the grass, scanning the flat opaque whiteness of a countryside turned two-dimensional with fog, as if sniffing the wind for the scent of unknown danger. "In any case, it puts us in a bad position. You see, the hoof-tracks here are shod, which means they're already short of horses, stealing what they can find from the valley farms. My guess is that they're too few to protect their herds from wolves. They'll be turning on the convoy soon."



"Would they?" Janus asked doubtfully.



"If they thought they could get away with it, yes." Ingold came back to him, brushing the dew from his sleeves. He walked, Rudy noticed, with an instinctive cat-footed care that left hardly a mark in the sodden grass. "The combined force of the Guards, Alwir's troops, the Church troops, and the remains of the Army, plus Tirkenson's men, outnumber the Raiders at least twenty to one. But the convoy is nearly seven miles long on the march; four miles, bunched up to camp. They could strike us like a spearhead at any point."



The Guards were mounting to go. Only Janus and Ingold remained afoot, talking in low voices, the red-haired Commander of the Guards towering over the smaller form of the wizard. From his uneasy perch on the restless horse, Rudy looked down at the pair of them, wondering about the friendship that was so evident, despite the Church strictures against wizards. It occurred to him that, apart from himself and Gil, Janus seemed to be the only friend Ingold had in the convoy. People, ordinary people following the road to the myth of refuge in the south, treated the old man with a combination of awe, distrust, and outright fear, as something completely uncanny; even Minalde, whose life and child he had saved from certain doom, was timid and silent in his presence. Rudy wondered what the bond was between the wizard and the Guards.



"And how much danger are we in, from the Dark?"



In the diffuse light Ingold's face was thoughtful, his gaze going past the Commander to scan the landscape that was slowly revealing itself as the mists dissolved into pale and heatless daylight. Far off, a dark sense of movement along the bases of the round hills marked the road, with its endless chain of pilgrims; closer, crows hunched in the bare black trees and watched the Guards with bright, inquiring eyes. All around them, north and south and west, lay a desolation of sun-silvered grass. Rudy felt he had never seen a land so empty.



"More than we think," the wizard said quietly. "We had a good moon last night, but I could sense them, far off, masses of them. There was a Nest of them at one time, blocked long ago, at the foot of the mountains. The road will run quite close to it."



Janus' glance cut sharply back to him, but Ingold did not elaborate. He only said, "Right now, speed is our ally, and the weather. We must reach the Keep and quickly; every day on the road heightens our danger. It may be that, when we reach it, we will have to hold the Keep against more than the Dark."