The Time Of The Dark

A fever of uneasiness seemed to spread down the convoy. The unseen presence of the White Raiders dogged them by day, as the threat of the Dark dogged them by night, and all that day and the next Rudy felt it, following the endless road. He heard it in the snatches of conversation he caught and picked it up, unsaid, from the people he talked to during the days; he saw it in the movements of the refugees who still clung, a vast tattered horde, to the nucleus of what had been the government of the greatest Realm in the West of the World. Little groups and families would accelerate past him, a man pushing an impossibly piled wheelbarrow, cursing an exhausted woman with a child in her arms and a goat on a frayed rope behind her to hurry, hurry, get a little farther down the road before something-the Dark, the wolves, the invisible Raiders-got them. Later Rudy would pass them, sitting in a tired huddle on a worn milestone, the child wailing hungrily while the man and woman looked over their shoulders at the empty lands beyond. Tempers shortened. At the crossing of the Mabigee River, its bridge flooded out by unseasonable storms in the mountains, Alwir and Bishop Govannin came to bitter words over the cartloads of ecclesiastical records that the Bishop had brought from Gae. The records could be left behind-the carts were needed for the sick, the injured, the very old and very young whose strength was failing them due to poor food and exhaustion.

The Bishop bit back at him, "Yes, and then all record of precedent, which puts the dominion of God above the commands of man, may be left behind, too, when we reach the Keep."

"Don't be a fool, woman!" Alwir snarled. "God would rather have souls than a load of moldy paper!"

"He has their souls," the Bishop snapped, "or should. If it's souls that concern you, my lord Chancellor, turn out your tame mirror of Satan, your pet conjurer, and let your precious sick ride in his place. A man who takes the advice of wizards should be the last to talk of souls."

The river crossing left the refugees soaked and exhausted, and no one traveled more than a few miles onward after that. The main body of the convoy halted in an abandoned village and took shelter in the stone houses that were half-falling into ruin, scorched by the fires their defenders had lit against the attacking Dark, or caved in by the power of the Dark themselves. Those parties that could not fit into the houses spread out like water across a flood plain all around, making a great tangled city of tents and makeshift shelters, ringed in the far-flung watch fires of its bright perimeter against the coming of the night.

Rudy's campfire was built in a little dip in the ground a hundred yards from the building farthest from the road. He'd found a tiny dugout cabin nested into the side of a kill that, in better days, had been used for a wood store and still contained ample sticks for his fire. The hill itself, facing away from the road and the camp, made a fair windbreak against the bitter, searching winds from the west.

All that day the mountains had been visible, growing perceptibly in the west and south. Now, in the last of the sunset, they hung like a black wall against the cloudheaped sky of evening, their heads wreathed in storms and, when the wind cleared the cover a little, white with the mantle of winter. He had been told that Sarda Pass lay high in those mountains. Rudy thought of snow and shivered. He had grown used to being wolf-hungry all the time, and, to his surprise, his body seemed to be adapting to days of walking and the weariness of night guard. But since his coming to the Realm of Darwath, he had always been conscious of being cold. He wondered if he would ever get warm again.

When the night was fully dark, Alde and Medda appeared, bringing him some mulled wine. Rudy sipped it thankfully, reflecting to himself that he'd rather have had about six cups of the foulest black truck-driver coffee and a handful of caffeine tablets. Still, he reasoned, looking across the gold rim of the cup at the girl's dark eyes, it proved she cared, or at least felt something for him. Alde, Minalde, he thought despairingly, you're the goddam Queen of Darwath and I'm a bum passing through, and why does this have to happen to me? His desire for her was palpable, urgent, but they could not so much as touch hands. Medda sat, a stout bundle of silent disapproval, on the other side of his fire, far enough away so as not to overhear their conversation, if they kept their voices low. For the rest, her mere presence lent them a respectability without which Alde would not have been able to see him at all.

"Would Alwir be mad if he knew you were coming out like this?" Rudy asked, without taking his eyes from the darkness. It was a soldier's trick the Icefalcon had taught him, not to look at the campfire. It blinded the eyes to the movements of the night.

"Oh- " Her voice was unwilling. "Probably. He half knows. Alwir worries about me."

"If you were my sister, I'd want to keep an eye on you, too."

"Not that way, silly." She smiled at him. "He's concerned about my 'state.' So is Medda, for that matter."

Rudy glanced briefly across the fire and met the fat woman's disdainful eyes. She'd given him dirty looks whenever their paths had crossed these last five days, and tonight he sensed the silence between Alde and Medda that spoke louder than any words. He guessed she'd said something to her charge, the beautiful young woman who had once been her little girl, about going out alone at night to see a man, a mere Guard and an outworlder at that. He could feel in that frosty silence how that conversation had gone; he knew that Medda had reminded Alde of her station in life and had had the words thrown back in her face.

"If it will make you trouble... " he began.

She shook her head, the great cloudy mass of her unbound hair sliding on the fur collar of her cloak. "I'd only lie awake, nights," she said. And her eyes met his, knowledge passing between them.

So they were quiet for a tune, sitting side by side, not too close, not touching, only comfortable in each other's presence. He watched the darkness beyond the ring of the firelight and judged, with his ears, the noises of the night. In the distance he saw a dark shape walking back toward the camp along the line of the wide-spaced fires and knew it was Ingold, Ingold who seldom slept now, but divided his nights between a solitary, silent patrol and long hours of watching, staring into the heart of his enchanted crystal, in the cold time before dawn.

Wind moved the clouds down from the west, obscuring the brightness of the moon. The camp was far enough away, behind the sheltering hill, to give them a greater illusion of privacy than they had ever had before, while the moon gave enough light between the clouds for Rudy to be sure nothing was sneaking up on them. He was less afraid of the Dark Ones than of the White Raiders or the wolves, though in all that dim world he saw nothing move, nor heard any howling nearer than the far-off river. So they drank the spiced wine Alde had brought and spoke of everything and nothing, of their childhoods and their past lives, trading memories like a couple of children trading marbles. More clouds gathered, and the darkness surrounding them deepened, the firelight warming and bright on their faces.

The brief downpour, when it rushed without warning from the sky, took them completely unawares. Hand in hand, they ran for the dugout cabin, with Medda grumbling behind and stopping to pick up the discarded wine cup and a stick from the fire. They fell, laughing, through the door. From inside, they could just barely see Medda, leaning over the torch to protect it from the rain and stumping grumpily through the long grass. But for the moment they were alone in the damp, earth-smelling dimness of the little house.

The realization that this was the first time they had been alone together out of anyone's sight came to both of them, and their laughter faded. In the darkness of the shack, he could hear Alde's breathing and he sensed that she was afraid of something she had never felt before, something to which she was not yet ready to give herself. She did not move when he put his hand up to push aside her unbound hair. Her cheek was cold under his touch. He could feel her trembling, feel her breath grow quick and uneven against his face. She put her hands against his chest, resisting as he pulled her to him, and the cloak slid from her shoulders and fell with a soft thud around their feet. He took her mouth, forcing it open with his own. Though she made a small noise of denial in her throat, she did not pull away from him. She went limp against him, shaking as his hands molded her body under the soft texture of the gown, her arms sliding up around his shoulders, his neck, uncertain at first and then clinging tighter and tighter, as if she would never let him go. Through the burning urgency of his own desire, his common sense told him that Medda would be there soon-that the old nurse could probably see them already and would be clucking her shocked disapproval of them.

Releasing Alde's searching mouth from his, he raised his head and looked out. The rain was easing to a gentle shower, and a sliver of moon had broken through a hole in the clouds. By its light, he saw Medda.

She stood less than four feet away. She wasn't looking at them. Though her eyes were open and staring, she wasn't looking at anything. The wine cup dangled forgotten from one nerveless hand, and the torch had gone out in a puddle at her feet. All this Rudy saw across Alde's shoulder in a split second of time, and he felt a chill, directionless wind ruffle across his face from somewhere in the darkness.

With a violence born of the pure reflex of terror, he slung Alde into the back of the dugout and jerked the door shut with a slam like a gunshot. She fell against the wall, catching at it for balance, her eyes dilated with fear and, he suspected, misinterpretation of the situation. "Get me one of those sticks," he commanded roughly. Warned by something in his voice, she obeyed immediately. He used it to bolt the door and found another to use as a wedge for good measure, his hands shaking with shock.

"There's a Dark One out there," he told her quietly. She said nothing, but in the dim light of the cabin's single window, he could see her eyes get wider. "It-got Medda."

"Oh!" she whispered.

"Do you have anything to make a fire with?"

She shook her head, a tiny gesture, stunned. Then suddenly she turned, looking around the almost lightless interior of the room. "There's wood all along the back here," she said, her voice low and tense. "Your fire outside... "

"It's a long way to my fire," Rudy said shortly, "and the rain probably put it out. I wouldn't leave you alone here, anyway." The ceiling of the tiny place was barely high enough for him to stand. He waited, drawn sword in hand, before the door, trying desperately to think what to do next. Behind him Alde gathered sticks together and made a competent little arrangement of them, with dead leaves and twigs for tinder, working swiftly, without display of the fear that must have been screaming inside her. Still tensed to spring, Rudy knelt down and fingered the wood. Soft and splintery. Did one need a special kind of wood, to make fire by rubbing two sticks together? Anyhow for sure, this trash wouldn't work. He examined the hilt of his sword. Steel. Flint and steel. Was it worth it to try to get a spark from the steel blade of the sword, at the risk of ruining the thing for fighting purposes? Anyhow, the walls of the dugout were made of wattle-and-daub, not stone, let alone flint.

The rain now drummed lightly and steadily on the front wall. The moon must be hidden again, since he could see almost nothing in the darkness. But he felt suddenly that same chill wind creeping around the edges of the door. It stirred in the tinder, made a thin, dry whispering among the leaves, and closed off the breath in his throat with the strangling grip of fear.

Flint, he thought through his panic. We've got to strike a spark somehow.

"Are you wearing any jewelry? Any stones at all?" She shook her head, her eyes wide.

What the hell, I probably wouldn't know what to do with flint if it jumped out and bit me ... "Well, after this you're going to have a gold ring made with a hunk of flint as big as a walnut set in it, and you're going to wear it all the time, you understand?"

"All right," she whispered breathlessly.

What the hell am I talking about? There's not going to be anything after this.

Alde crouched back, keeping out of his way so as not to encumber his sword arm, though her terror cried for the comfort of his touch. High up, near the top of the door, Rudy heard a soft bumping noise, like a testing finger tapping, and then a faint scratching on the heavy glass of the window. His heart slamming sickeningly against his ribs, Rudy thought, All I can do is take a swing straight down at whatever comes through that door. What's stone? What's flint? What will make a spark? I wish to Christ Ingold were here. He could make a fire just by looking at the wood.

Wonder if I could do that?

Ingold's words came back to him, spoken in the darkness of the gatehouse, the light glowing up from his empty palm. You know what it is... by its true name you call it ... Rudy looked at the tiny pile of wood, the dried leaves and tinder scattered beneath. That would catch, he knew it would. Its true name... Maybe there was some kind of a magic name for fire. But whatever you called it, fire was fire. The smell of it was the same, the brightness. He thought how it would smell as it caught off those twigs, sort of sweet and sharp. It would give off snappy, sputtery little gold sparks, little crackly sounds... He called them to mind, the shape and smell and brightness, straining eyes and mind to see the tinder in the deepening darkness. He saw only that the room was fading; even his consciousness of Alde kneeling beside him and his chilled fear of the death that waited outside the door began growing less important than the fire, the fire purely for its own sake. He could see it, hear it, smell it; he knew how it would splutter out of that tinder.

The dry leaves fluttered a little in the wind. From far off, he could see Alde press her knuckles to white lips, all the while without a sound. Detachedly, he saw the fire in his mind, in the first instant of its sparking, and knew exactly how it would be. He could see it, just couldn't touch it yet. He felt his mind and body relax, withdrawing to some great distance, his perspective on the world altering, narrowing to only the dry shapes of leaf and twig and wood that he could see, quite clearly, in the utter darkness. The wood, the dry little heap of leaves, the tiny gold sparks like stars... Without moving, he reached his mind across from where he was to where the fire was, as easily as picking a flower that grew on the other side of a fence.

There was a sudden, bright crackle of little gold sparks, and the sharp, sweet smell of dry leaves catching. Rudy bent forward, still detached from himself, calm, halfwondering if it could be a hallucination, but calmly certain that it was not, and fed one twig and then another to the fire, real fire where no fire had been before. The light spread quickly into the room, threw gleeful shadows across his face, and danced flickering, crazy jigs of triumph that reflected in tiny points of light in Alde's eyes as she brought up more and bigger sticks without a word.

And then it hit him, like a blow from a club. I did that , he thought. I did that . The warmth scorched his trembling fingers and seeped into the cold flesh of his palms and face. The wind that had rustled so evilly at the door faltered, then waned and ceased, and all outside the dugout became terribly still, except for the faint drizzling of the last of the rain.

Rudy's mind echoed like a thunderclap with the shock, and rocked wildly with surging triumph. One part of him, it seemed, was screaming , I did it! I did it! I called the fire, and the fire came , and another was saying, I shouldn't have been able to do that . But more real than either, deeper, within his true heart, there was only a calm knowledge, clear and small like a little light-the memory of that first crackle of flame in the dry leaves and the knowing that he could do this.

Then he looked up and met Alde's terrified eyes. They were wild with fear, a fear tinged with hysteria and relief and superstitious terror, fear of the Dark, of the fire, of him. He saw that newfound power reflected in her eyes, saw it as others would see it, alien and terrible and uncanny. She couldn't speak the wild question in her eyes, nor could he have answered, and for a moment they could only stare at each other in the firelight, as once before they had stared in the shocked, shared knowledge of their desire. Then, with a sob that seemed to rip her soul from her body, she threw herself into his arms, weeping wildly, holding onto him as if he were her last hope of life itself. Magic and terror and death released him, the tension breaking with an almost physical shock, and he clutched the slender girl in his arms with a grip that seemed to drive her bones into his and buried his face in her dark hair. Desperately they took one another beneath their shared cloaks on the floor, while the fire threw its shadow dance across the low rafters.

Afterward Alde slept, terror exhausted in passion, and Rudy lay awake, sword close to his hand, watching the fire and letting his thoughts of past and future have their way with him, until the rain outside stopped, and dawn came.

"You think that's fighting?" Gnift roared in a voice that cut like the steel of his grip-worn sword. "Get him! Get him!" The Icefalcon, armed with an eighteen-inch wooden stick, feinted warily at his opponent, a massive Guard wielding three feet of split bamboo that could draw blood like metal. The young captain was marked with it, face and hands; Rudy, sitting on the sidelines, shuddered. Gil, he noticed, watched beside him with an alert interest. She looked as if she'd already had her turn at this game, and gotten the worst of it.

Stubborn broad , he thought. They'll have to kill her before she'll give it up.

Gnift yelled, "Attack him, you puling coward! Don't make love to him!"

The big man swung, and the Icefalcon shifted back out of range. Exasperated, Gnift stepped forward under the arc of the wooden blade, grabbed the back of the captain's black tunic, and shoved him into the fray. The result was bloody, painful, and exhausting for both combatants.

Rudy said thoughtfully, "One of these days somebody's gonna take a poke at that little bastard."

"Gnift?" Gil raised her split eyebrow in amused surprise. "Not bloody likely." Rudy remembered seeing Gnift sparring with Tomec Tirkenson, the big landchief of Gettlesand, yesterday evening about this time, in the last of the daylight after the long march. Maybe Gil was right.

They watched for a time more, sitting side by side on the square of groundcloth just off the makeshift training floor. Around them, the camp was settling itself down for the night once again. It would soon be time to collect their meager rations and make for the watchfires. Rudy noticed that Gil looked drawn and exhausted, a thin, almost sexless shadow with a great straggling mane of black hair. He knew that in addition to marching and guard duty she was training this way nightly, on starvation rations, with the mess of her half-healed arm wound, as if deliberately driving herself to collapse.

Wind sneered down off the mountains and washed over the camp like incoming tide. The mountains loomed above them now, hugely close, blacking the western sky, a sheer wall, like the Rockies. That morning they had passed the crossroads, which were watched over by a crumbling stone cross, and set their feet on the great road that ran up to Sarda Pass. It was colder here in the shadows of the foothills and desolate of all habitation.

In the wan twilight before them, the Icefalcon was holding his own, retreating before the great swinging strokes of his opponent's sword. Sweat bathed his face, white in the frame of ivory hair, and his pale eyes were desperate with exhaustion. Cursing, reviling, Gnift circled the fighters, finally stepping lightly up behind the captain and hooking his feet out from under him with a deft sweep of one leg. The Icefalcon went down, his opponent dropping on him like grim death from above. There was a confused blur of movement. The younger man came up under the arc of the longer sword with a clean slash across the big Guard's belly and turned the end of the movement into a circle-throw that hurled his attacker over his head and flat on the Guard's back in the mud. He got both swords and scrambled to his feet, gasping. The bigger man lay on the ground, puffing and cursing. Gnift yelled, "When you get your man down, do something, don't just take his sword and stand there like a fool. If you did that... "

Rudy, who'd been tremendously impressed with this last maneuver, whispered, "Do all warriors have to do that? I mean, Alwir's Guards and the Church troops?"

"The method is much the same," Ingold's mild voice remarked behind them. "Gnift is stricter than most, and the Guards have the reputation of having the best instruction in the West of the World. Methods differ in different modes of combat, of course. In Alketch, for instance, they train their famous cavalry by chaining a slave by one wrist to an iron post in the middle of the exercise hall, putting a sword in his free hand, and having the cavalry trainees practice their saber-charges on horseback against him."

"What's their budget for replacements?" Rudy wanted to know. "Somebody remind me never to visit Alketch."

Gil glanced sideways, from the old shackle gall on the wizard's wrist to his serene face, and said, "Somebody told me once that you used to be a slave in Alketch."

"Did they?" Ingold's eyes twinkled. "Well, I have been and done many things in the course of my misspent life. Rudy, if you could spare me a moment, I would like to talk with you in private." He rose and led the way through the orange-lit confusion of the settling camp with Rudy tagging at his heels. At a distance they passed Alwir's wagons, and Rudy recognized the sable standards of the House of Dare and knew that Minalde was there with her son.

He had hardly spoken to Alde during the day. She had turned away from him, silent and more shy than before, as if withdrawing herself after the shattering intimacy of last night. Rudy was puzzled but not surprised; they had taken each other in the passion that followed tension and terror; such things could change drastically come morning. It could be grief at Medda's death, though she must have known, after the Guards led the poor, stumbling zombie who had been her oldest companion out of the camp, that there was no way to bring her along with the train. It could be shame, either at the act of sex itself or at its implicit betrayal of her dead King. Rudy wondered about that. Alde seldom spoke of Eldor and shied almost visibly at the mention of his name. It might be shame that she'd lain with a commoner-though from remarks about history that Gil had dropped in passing, that wasn't something that seemed to bother female royalty much-or, more likely, fear and a kind of revulsion that she'd lain with a wizard. Alde was a good daughter of the Church. Rudy remembered the look in her eyes, awe and a wild kind of horror, staring into his across the new brightness of the flames.

But whatever her reasons, he sensed in her no anger toward him, only a terrible emotional confusion. And he knew, looking back at the square gray silhouette of the wagon top against the fading salmon of the sky, that he must bide his time. Rudy had been around enough to know that sleeping with someone once could happen to and with literally anybody. It was the second time, and those after, that had meaning. Impatient as he was to be with her again, he was aware that to rush her would be fatal. He knew Alde and knew that behind her deceptive gentleness lay a core of steel. For all her quiet diffidence, she was not a woman who could be bullied into bed.

And that would be fine, he thought, as his breathing suddenly constricted, if she were the only one involved.

He forced himself to turn his eyes away.

"Now." Ingold halted on the grassy open ground that lay between the edge of the camp proper and the guard line where the watch fires were being kindled. Here they were alone, camp and lines both fading into the featureless gray of the evening. The wind blew the cold rain-smell down around them, surging through the grass and over the bare patches of stony ground beneath their feet. "You told me this morning how you called fire at need last night. Show me what you did."

Rudy gathered a few sticks together that had been dropped from the making of the watch fires and found a patch of dry ground. With his thumbnail he peeled enough dry bark to make a little tinder and sat cross-legged beside that small pinch of wood, his cloak wrapped about him. He relaxed his body and mind, shutting out the smells of the camp, the smoke and scent of wet grass, and the lowing of the cattle. He saw only the twigs and the bark, and how the stuff would catch. Smokier than last night's leaves, he thought. A little spot, like one made with a magnifying glass in the sun... a different smell from the leaves...

The fire came much more quickly than it had come before.

There was a hint of triumph mixed with anxiety in the glance Rudy gave Ingold. The older wizard watched the new flames impassively for a moment, then without moving put them out. He produced the stump of a candle from somewhere about his person and held it a few feet from Rudy's eyes.

"Light the candle," he instructed.

Rudy did.

Ingold blew it out thoughtfully and regarded him for a moment in silence through the whitish drift of the smoke. Then he set it aside. From a pouch in his belt he fished a piece of string with a dangling bit of lead on it like a fishing-sinker. He held the string before him and steadied the suspended weight to stillness with his free hand.

"Make it move."

It was like starting the fire, only different.

"Hmm." Ingold gathered the plumb weight into his hand again and put it away without speaking.

A little ripple of evening wind stirred the grasses beside them. Rudy fidgeted, his mind shying from the implications of what he had done. "What is it?" he asked nervously. "I mean-how can I do this?"

The wizard straightened his sleeves. "You know that," he said. "Better than I do." Their eyes met and held. Between them passed the understanding of something known only to those who had felt what it was. There were not even words for it among those who did not know already. "The question is the answer, Rudy. The question is always the answer. But as to your Power, I'd say you were born with it, as we all are."

We, Rudy thought. We. He stammered, knowing Ingold must be right, his mind fighting the nets of the impossible. "But-I mean-I never could do this before."

"In your own world you couldn't," Ingold said. "Or possibly you could-did you ever try?"

Rudy shook his head mutely, helpless. It had never occurred to him past his childhood. But unbidden images invaded his mind, images of dreams he had had as a very small child, before he started school. Things he was not sure whether he had done or only dreamed of doing. The memory of the need in him struck like an arrow, a need deeper than his love for Alde, a wordless yearning so deeply buried he had never sensed its loss in all his aimless life. The need for something they had taken away from him when he was far too young to fight back. And, like the child he had been, he felt the tears choke him.

"Never?" Ingold whispered, and his eye was like a dragon's that holds and reflects, a mirror that swallows the soul. In it Rudy saw his own memory of the spark leaping from the dried leaves, the dark, terrified gaze of deep blue eyes into his. He saw the scattered pictures from childhood dreams, and felt the utter grief he had felt when he had first learned that they were impossible. Ingold's voice held him like a velvet chain. "You have talent, Power. But even your little power is dangerous. Do you understand that?"

Rudy nodded, hardly able to breathe. "Will I-can I-" Was there some kind of etiquette about it, some way of asking? "Will the Power grow, if I learn how to use it right?"

The old man made a slight movement of assent, sky-blue eyes remote and cool as water.

"Will you teach me?"

The voice was now very soft. "Why do you want to learn, Rudy?"

He felt then for the first time the terrifying extent of the old man's power. The blue gaze pinned his brain like a spear, so that he could neither answer nor deny. He saw his own thoughts, stripped before that watching power, a mushy jumble of half-formed longings and a selfish, disproportionate indulgence of his own passing emotions, pettiness, indolence, sensuality, a thousand sloppy, stupid errors past and present, murky shadows he had turned his back on, probed by glass-edged light. "I don't know," he whispered.

"That's no answer."

Rudy tried desperately to think, to express more to himself than to the old man that terrible need. This, he understood suddenly, was what Gnift did to your courage, your spirit, your body, making you understand your own truth before you could manifest it to another. He understood then why Gil trained with the Guards, understood the bond of commitment and understanding that lay between Ingold and the Commander. And he knew he had to answer and answer right, or Ingold would never consent to be his teacher.

But there is no right answer! the other half of his mind cried. It's nothing-it's only that calm. It's only knowing that it's right, and I have to do it. It's only that I wasn't surprised when I could call the fire. But it's different for everyone, everything.

And suddenly Rudy knew, understood, as if something had been turned within him and the truth of his own soul had focused. Tell the truth, he told himself. Even if it's stupid, it is the truth. He whispered, "If I don't, nothing will mean anything. If I don't learn-about that-there won't be any center. It's the center of everything, only I didn't know it."

The words made sense to him, though they were probably utter Greek to the wizard. He felt as if some other person were speaking through him, drawn out of his immobilized mind by the hypnotic power of that depthless gaze.

"What's the center?" Ingold pressed him, quiet and inescapable as death.

"Knowing- not knowing something, but just knowing. Knowing the center is the center; having a key, one thing that makes sense, is sense. Everything has its own key, and knowing that is my key."

"Ah."

Being released from that power was like waking up, but waking up into a different world. Rudy found he was sweating, as if from a physical shock or some great exertion. He wondered how he could ever have thought Ingold harmless, how he could ever have not been half-afraid, awed, loving the old man.

Dryly amused fondness briefly crossed the old man's face, and with slow illumination, Rudy came to realize the vast extent of Ingold's wizardry, seeing its reflection in the potential of his own. "You understand what it is," the wizard said after a moment. "Do you understand what it means?"

Rudy shook his head. "Only that I'll do whatever I have to. I have to do it, Ingold."

At that, Ingold smiled to himself, as if remembering another very earnest and extremely young mage. "And that means doing whatever I tell you to," he said. "Without question, without argument, to the best of your ability. And only you know what that best is. You will have to memorize thousands of things that seem to have no meaning, foolish things, names and riddles and rhymes."

"I'm not very good at memorizing stuff," Rudy admitted shamefacedly.

"Then I suggest that you get good, and quickly." The eyes turned cold again, distant, and in the clipped, decisive tone Rudy could feel once more the flash of that terrible power. "I am not a kindergarten teacher; I have my own work. If you wish to learn, Rudy, you will learn as and how and when I choose to teach you. Is that clear?"

For a split second, Rudy wondered what would happen if he said, What if I can't? But if the question was the answer, the answer would surely be. Then you can't . It was entirely his choice. And though he would be as friendly as before, Ingold would never mention the subject again.

Rudy saw his own future, made suddenly clear, and what the commitment would mean: a change, enormous, all-encompassing, irrevocable, and terrifying, in everything he was, everything he would do or be. The choice was being thrust violently into his shaky, unprepared hands, a decision that he must make, could never back out of, and would never, ever be able to make again.

How come stuff like this always happens to me?

The question was the answer. Because you want it.

He swallowed hard and found his throat aching with strain. "Okay," he said weakly. "I'll do it. I'll do the best I can, I mean."

Night had fallen around them. Ingold folded his arms, a dim, cloaked shadow against the distant glitter of the camp lights. Thin, translucent ground mist had risen, and the sounds and smells of the camp were obscure behind them; Rudy had the sense of being isolated in a wet, cold world of nothingness, as if he had been kneeling there in the damp grass for hours, wrestling with some terrible angel.

And he had won. His soul felt light and empty, without triumph or anxiety, as if he could drift upon the wind.

Then Ingold smiled and was nothing but a shabby little man in a stained and rusty brown robe. "That," he said pleasantly, "is what I shall expect of you at all times. Even when you are bored, and tired, and hungry; when you're afraid of what I tell you to do; when you think it's dangerous, or impossible, or both; when you're angry with me for prying into what you consider your trivial personal life. You will always do the best you can; for only you understand what it is. God help you!" He stood up, shaking the damp grass and stray twigs from his rough robe. "Now get back to camp," he said, not unkindly. "You still have your shift of watch to stand."

Cold wind keened down the foothills, whining in the canyons surrounding the refugee camp that lay strung out along the road. It flattened Rudy's little fire to thin yellow streamers that paralleled the ground and sent chill fingers through cloak and tunic and flesh, searching out his bones. The first hard, mealy, little flakes of snow had begun to fall.

Alde had not come.

Rudy knew why and was sorry. What had happened last night had changed things between them. That, too, was irrevocable; if she was not his lover, she could no longer be his friend, either. And, good daughter of the Church that she was, she would be no wizard's woman.

He would miss Minalde. His body hurt for her, but the longing was deeper than that, a loneliness, a need for her company, for the sound of her soft voice. It brought home to him with a painful little stab that he was now an outsider, as he would be an outsider for the rest of his life. In this world, or in his own, he had cut himself off from all hope of communication with those who did not understand. It would be worse when he went home-that much he knew already. But having seen the center, the focus, the key of his own life, he knew there was no way he could not pursue it. Even when he left the peril-fraught world of the Dark and returned to the electric jungles of Southern California, he knew he would be driven to seek it there. And he knew that somehow, some way, seeking, he would find.

The wind stung his face, carrying with the snow the mourning of the wolves. Behind him he sensed the camp slipping into its dark sleep, and the endless road behind him, down the foothills and out onto the plains, marked on both sides by a broken chain of watch fires.

He cast his mind back to his interview with Ingold earlier in the evening, trying to recall that reflected glimpse he'd had of his own mind, or soul, or the center of his own being. The memory was hazy, like the memory of intense pain. He could recall seeing it, but could not call back clearly what it had been-only the grip, the cold, of Ingold's thought on his, and the clear certainty, for the first time in his life, of knowing what he was.

He hadn't known then that it would cost him Minalde. He hadn't known it would cost him everything that he was, for that was what it amounted to. But if the question is the answer, it wouldn't have mattered if I knew or not. He only knew that if he had turned away, he would always have been sure that he'd had it within his grip and let it go. He knew that he couldn't have let it be taken from him a second time.

The fire crackled, the wood sighing as it broke and fell. Rudy took a stout branch and rearranged it. The shower of ascending sparks glittered like fireworks among the spitting snow. He huddled deeper into his cloak, then glanced back in the direction of the camp. By the renewed light of the fire he could see a dark figure walking toward him, wrapped from head to heel in fur. Her black cloud of hair blew about her in the wind, and the firelight, when she drew near him, laid blue and golden shadows across her violet eyes.