The Time Of The Dark

Once they were out of the valley, the winds began, searingly cold, ripping at their grip on the precarious handholds with active malice. At times they were far over the timberline, scrambling perilously over goat trails slippery with old snow, at others working their way through knots of vegetation, or clinging for support to the wind-flayed roots of twisted acrobat trees, trusting to their strength over a sightless abyss. Gil and Ingold moved through a world whose only elements were cold, rock, wind, and the distant roaring of water, where they could not have stopped if they had wanted to, for there was nowhere to rest. Without the threads of witchlight Ingold had thrown to outline the ledges, Gil was certain they would not have survived the climb; even so, looking back on it later, she felt only a land of dull astonishment that she had done it at all.

They slept, finally, in the crevices of the bare rock slopes, locked together for warmth; it was the first sleep Gil had had in close to forty hours. In the deeps of the night she felt the weather change and, in her dreams, smelled the far-off threat of snow.

In the morning the going was easier, not much worse than a rough backpacking trip. By noon Ingold found the ghost of a trail-head and followed it down the sheer, tree-covered western face of the Rampart Range, to reach, by mid-afternoon, the cold, winding Vale of Renweth.

Gil shaded her eyes and squinted into the long, bright distance. "What the hell?" The cold winds that snaked down the valley tore her breath away in rags and rippled in patterns like swift-pouring water over the knee-deep fjord of colorless grass. "What is it?"

"It's the Keep of Dare." Ingold smiled, folding his arms to keep warm and shivering slightly in spite of it. "What did you expect?"

Gil wasn't sure what she'd expected. Something smaller, anyway. Something more medieval. Not that trapezoidal monolith of black stone that rose, bone of the mountain's bone, on the great knoll at the foot of those distant dark-browed cliffs. Its roof was taller than the pine trees that grew on the ridge behind. Thin, powdery snow blew in clouds from the Keep's flat roof, but none lodged anywhere on its sides, which were as bare and smooth as unflawed glass.

"Who the hell built that thing?" Gil whispered, awed. "How big is it?" She could believe, now, that in it humankind had withstood the Dark. The might of the Dark Ones, which could shatter stone and iron, would find this fortress impregnable. With a sense of surprise, she realized that there was, after all, a place of refuge in this dark and cold and terrible world into which she had been unwillingly cast.

"Dare of Renweth built it," Ingold's voice said at her side, "using the last of the technology and power of the ancient Realms, power which is far beyond our means today. In it he sheltered those of his people who survived the first onslaught of the Dark, and from it he and his line ruled this valley and Sarda Pass and all that was left of an empire whose name, bounds, and nature have been utterly lost to human memory. As to how big it is-" He gazed into the distance, surveying the black monolith that guarded the twisting expanses of the valley beyond. "It is small. It can hold some eight thousand souls in some sort of comfort, and the valley can be cultivated to support almost twice that many. The records no longer exist, if they ever existed, as to how many it has actually sheltered at any one time."

As they waded toward it through the champagne grass of the Vale, the thing seemed to grow in size, shadowless in the cold overcast of the day. Gil looked around her at the Vale as well, a walled series of upland meadows scattered with stands of aspen, birch, and cottonwood, their leaves glittering restlessly in the winds that whined down from the peaks above. There was a hard, bright beauty to the place, first heartland of the Realm and last, cradle and grave. Her bones ached, even muscles trained to the endurance of swordsmanship burning with the lingering effects of that tortuous climb.

As a place to be cooped up in for years on end, she thought, it isn't bad. Still, familiar as she had been with petty neighborhood bitchery, she had recognized its seeds already in the gossip that even a twenty-four-hour state of crisis hadn't eliminated from the refugee train, and she saw where it would lead-a small town, cramped in an impenetrable fort with the same people, bound together year in and year out, and nowhere to go.

"The Keep has stood a long time," Ingold said as they came at last to the roadway that led up past the Keep toward Sarda Pass, the same road where, miles below, Alwir led his people along in their quest for semi-mythical safety. "Yet the Runes of Power are still on the Keep doors, marked there by the wizards who helped in the building of the place-Yad on the left, and Pern on the right, the Runes of Guarding and Law. Only a wizard can see them, like a gleaming tracery of silver in the shadows. But after all this time, the spells of the builders still hold power."

Gil turned her eyes from the towering masses of the mountains that rose, wall on wall of black, tree-enshrouded gorges cut with the distinct, shallow notch of Sarda Pass, to view again the looming shadow of the Keep. She could see nothing of the Runes, only great panels of iron, hinged and strapped in steel, and untouched for centuries.

The great gates stood open. Waiting in their shade were the assembled members of the small garrison Eldor had sent down years before to ready the place as an eventual refuge, when Ingold had first spoken of the possibility of the rising of the Dark. The captain of the garrison, a petite blonde woman with the meanest eyes Gil had ever seen, greeted Ingold with deference and seemed unsurprised at the news that Gae had fallen and its refugees were but a few days off.

"I feared it," she said, looking up at the wizard, her gloved fingers idling on the hilt of her sword. "We've had no messages from anywhere in over a week, and my boys report seeing the Dark Ones drifting along the head of the valley almost every night." She pursed her lips into a wry expression. "I'm only glad so many as you say got clear. I remember, when I was in Gae, people were laughing at you in the streets about your warnings, calling you an alarmist crackpot and making up little songs."

Gil made a noise of indignation in her throat, but Ingold laughed. "I remember that. All my life I wanted to be immortalized in ballads, but the poetry of the things was so bad that they were completely unmemorable."

"And," the captain said cynically, "most of the people who made them up are dead."

Ingold sighed. "I'd rather they were still alive to go on singing about what a fool I am, every day of my life," he said. "We'll be here the night. Can you feed us?"

The captain shrugged. "Sure. We have stock... " She gestured to mazes of cottonwood-pole corrals that stretched out beyond the knoll, where a gaggle of horses and half a dozen milk cows stood rubbing their chins on the top rail of the fences, staring at the strangers with mild, stupid eyes. "We even have a still over in the grove there; some of the boys brew Blue Ruin out of gaddin bark and potatoes."

Ingold shuddered delicately. "At tunes I see Alwir's point about the horrors of uncivilized existence." And he followed her up the worn steps to the gates.

"By the way," the captain said as the other warriors of the garrison grouped up behind them, "we have Keep Law here."

Ingold nodded. "I understand."

They entered the Keep of Dare, and Gil was struck silent with awe.

Outside, the Keep had been intimidating enough. Inside, it was crushing, frightening, dark, monstrous, and unbelievably huge; the footfalls of the Guards echoed in its giant sounding-chamber like the far-off drip of distant water, the torches they bore dwindling to fireflies. The monstrous architecture with its blending of naked planes had nothing to do with the gothic liveliness of Karst-nothing to do with human scale at all. The technology that had wrought this place out of stone and air was clearly far beyond anything else in this world or, Gil guessed, in her own. She gazed down the length of that endless central cavern, where the small bobbing candles of torchlight were reflected in the smooth black of the water channels in the floor, and shivered at the cold, the size, and the emptiness.

"How was this place built?" she whispered, and the chamber picked up her voice and sighed her words to every corner of that towering hall. "What a shame it couldn't have been the chief architect's memory that got passed on, as well as the Kings'."

"It is," Ingold said, his voice, too, ringing family in the unseen vaults of the ceiling. "But heritable memory is not governed by choice-indeed, we have no idea what does govern it." He moved like a shadow at Gil's side, following the diminishing torches. Gazing around her, Gil could see, as far as the torchlight reached, that the towering walls of the central hall were honeycombed with dark little doorways, rank on rank of them, joined sometimes by stone balconies, sometimes by rickety catwalks that threaded the wall like the webs of drunken or insane spiders. Those dark little doors admitted onto a maze of cells, stairways, and corridors, whose haphazard windings were as dark as the labyrinths below the earth.

"As to how it was built-Lohiro of Quo, the Master of the Council of Wizards, has made a study of the skill of that time from such records that survived, and he says that the walls were wrought and raised by magic and machinery both. The men of those days had skills far beyond our own; we could never create something like this."

They crossed a narrow bridge over one of the many straight channels that led water from pool to pool down the length of the echoing hall. Gil paused for a moment on the railless span, looking down into the swift, black current below. "Was that why he made such a study?" she asked softly. "Because he knew the skill might be needed again?"

Ingold shook his head. "Oh, no, that was years ago. Like all wizards, Lohiro seeks understanding for its own sake-for his own amusement, as it were. Sometimes I think that is all wizardry is-the lust for knowledge, the need to understand. All the rest-illusion, shape-craft, the balance of the minds and elements around us, the ability to save or change or destroy the world-are mere incidentals, and come after that central need."

"The trouble with this," Ingold grumbled much later, after they had shared the meager supper of the Guards and been shown to a tiny cell next to those of the garrison, "is that I can only look for what I know. It's absolutely useless for what I don't know." He glanced across at Gil, the pinlight-sparkle of triangular lights thrown by his scrying crystal scattering like stars across the roughness of his scarred face. They had kindled a small fire on the tiny hearth to take the chill off the cell. To Gil's surprise, no smoke came into the room itself-the place must be ventilated like a high-rise. Her respect for its builders increased.

Ingold had sat watching the crystal for some time now. Gil, fortified with porridge and warmth, was sitting with her back to the corner, meticulously sharpening her dagger in the manner the Icefalcon had shown her, sleepy and content in the wizard's presence. From the first, she had felt that she had always known him. Now it was impossible to conceive of a time when she had not. She held the blade up critically to the light and tested it with an inexperienced thumb. For all the terror she had undergone, for all the burden of constant physical weariness and the unending pain in her half-healed left arm, for all her exile from the only world she had known and the only thing she had ever truly wanted to do, she realized that there were compensations. She never felt the weight of her exile when she was with him.

And soon he'd be gone. She'd be here for endless weeks while he pursued his solitary quest across the plains to Quo, in search of the wizards, his friends, the only group of people who really understood him. She wondered what he would find there. She wondered, with a chill, if he'd even return.

He will, she told herself, looking across at the old man's still profile and calm, intent eyes. He's tough as an old boot and slippery as a snake. He'll make it back all right, and the other wizards with him.

She shifted the ball of her wadded-up cloak a little more comfortably behind her aching shoulders and blinked out at the room. After last night's trek over the bare backbone of the world, even a watch fire by the road would have looked good; this nine-by-seven cell in which she could hardly stand was a little corner of Paradise.

The place, viewed by more critical eyes, would have been called dingy; the warm gold of the firelight probing into the cracks of the rough-plastered walls and flagged floor cruelly revealed the unevenness, the shoddy workmanship, the patina of stains and soot-blackening, and the dents and scratches of hundreds of generations of continuous habitation and a thousand years of neglect. The cell would be awfully crowded for a family, Gil reflected. Unbidden to her mind leaped Rudy's picture of his own boyhood home, shrill with the bickering of acrimonious female voices. She grinned as she wondered what the incidence of sibling murder had been in the Keep's heyday.

The shadows by the fire shifted as Ingold put aside his crystal and lay down across the other end of the room, drawing his mantle over him as a blanket. Gil prepared to do likewise, asking him as she did so, "Could you see the convoy?"

"Oh, yes. They're settling in for the night, under double guard. I don't see any sign of the Dark. Incidentally, the crystal shows the Nest in the valley of the Dark as being still blocked."

"They like that, don't they?" Gil drew her cloak over her, watching the changing patterns of flame and shadow playing across the rickety wall that had long ago partitioned this cell off from a larger one. Her thoughts idled over the world enclosed within those narrow walls, over the great black monolith of the Keep, guarding its darkness, its silence, its secrets-secrets that had been forgotten even by Ingold, even by Lohiro, Archmage of all the wizards in the world. Those dark, heavy walls held only darkness within.

She rolled over onto her side and propped her head on her arm. "You know," she said dreamily, "this whole place-it's like your description of the Nests of the Dark."

Ingold opened his eyes. "Very like," he agreed.

"Is that what we've come to?" she asked. "To living like them, to be safe from them?"

"Possibly," the wizard assented sleepily. "But one might then ask why the Dark Ones live as they do. And when all else is considered, here we are, safe; and so we shall remain, as long as the gates are kept shut at night." He rolled over. "Go to sleep, Gil."

Gil bunked up at the reflection of the fire, thinking about that for a moment. It occurred to her that if once the Dark came into this place, the safety here would turn to redoubled peril. In the walls of the Keep was lodged eternal darkness, like the mazes of night at the center of the earth, which no sunrise could ever touch. She said uneasily, "Ingold?"

"Yes?" There was a hint of weariness in his voice.

"What was the Keep Law that the captain talked about? What did that have to do with our spending the night here?"

Ingold sighed and turned his head toward her, the dying firelight doing curious things to the lines and scars of his face. "Keep Law," he told her, "states that the integrity of the Keep is the ultimate priority; above life, above honor, above the lives of family or loved ones. Anything that does not require the presence of human beings after dark is left outside the gates, and when the gates are shut at night, it is, and always must be, the ruling of the Keep that no one will pass them until sunrise. In ancient days the penalty for opening the doors-on any excuse whatsoever-between the setting and the rising of the sun was to be chained between the pillars that used to surmount the little hill that faces the doors across the road, to be left there at night for the Dark. Now go to sleep."

This time he must have laid a spell on the words, for Gil fell asleep at once, and the wizard's words followed her down into the darkness of her dreams,

The Dark hunted. She could feel them, sense them, sense the dark shifting of movement through spinning, primordial blackness, the vague stirrings in unspeakable chasms that light had never touched. Groggily, through a leaden fog of sleep, Gil tried to remember where she was-the Keep, Dare's Keep. Fleeting, tangled images came to her of slipping through nighted corridors and converging on a chosen prey. She could sense that eyeless, waiting malevolence, smell, as they smelled, the hot pulse of blood, and sense, through the thick gloom of vibrating, purple darkness, the glow of the prey, the centerpoint of a whirling vortex of lust and hate... But it wasn't the closeness of the Keep at all that surrounded her, but wind, utter bone-piercing cold, the roaring of water among pillars of stone, the white surge and fleck of spray, and the freezing touch of the air above the flood. Greedy power gnawed at stone, greedy minds counted out glowing beads on a four-mile chain of tangled sleep and laughed with a gloating laughter that never emerged to sound.

Her eyes snapped open, and sweat drenched her face at the memory of that gloating laughter. She whispered, "Ingold... " almost afraid to make a sound, for fear they might hear.

The wizard was already awake, his white hair tousled with sleep, his eyes alert, as if he listened for some distant sound that Gil could not hear. A dim blue ball of witchlight hung above his head; the fire in the cell had long grown cold. "What is it?" he asked her gently. "What did you dream?"

She drew a deep breath, grasping at the fast-fading rags of sensation, of things she'd heard and smelled. "The Dark... "

"I know," he said softly. "I felt it, too. What? And where?"

She sat up, drawing her cloak around her shoulders, as if that would still her shivering. "I don't know where it was," she said, a little more calmly. "There was water rushing, and-stone-hewn stone, I think, pillars. They were tearing pieces of stone out of pillars, throwing them into rushing water-and-and laughing. They know where Tir is, Ingold," she added, her voice low and urgent.

He came across the room to her and put an arm around her shoulders for comfort, though for her the worst was past. His voice was grim as he said, "So do I. He's with his mother, half a day's journey below the stone bridge that crosses the gorge of the Arrow River."

Somewhere above the inky overcast, the sky might have been lightening, preparatory to the breaking of day; but if so, Rudy Solis could see little indication of it. The canyon through which the road at this point wound was like a black wind tunnel, the smell of the wind strong and somehow earthy, its sound like the roar of the sea in the pines above the road. He prowled restlessly through the rousing camp, unable to account for his uneasiness, threading through little knots of bundled-up fugitives huddled around their breakfast fires, making his way almost subconsciously back to the wagons he had stealthily quitted before the camp was astir.

The fires there had been built up and threw an uneasy flickering glow over the camp. Alde was awake, feeding Tir on bread soaked in milk in the little island of shelter at the back of her wagon. On the other side of the fire, a handful of troopers of the House of Bes were wolfing down their meager rations in silence. Farther out among the wagons, another woman, a servant of the household, was ordering two small children about as she fed a baby smaller than Tir, while her husband fed the ox teams in sullen silence. Overhead, the banners cracked like bullwhips in the icy stream of the wind.

Rudy shook his head and grinned down at Alde, leaning his shoulder against the uprights that supported the wagon's roof. "You know, what amazes me about this trip is how many kids have survived. You see them all over the camp. Look at that one there. He looks as if the first stiff wind would blow him away."

"It's a she," Alde replied calmly, watching the child in question playing tag with herself under the feet of the wagon teams. The little girl's mother saw what she was doing and called her back to the fire with a screech like a parrot's, and the child, with the sublime unconcern of those who have only recently learned to walk, came running happily back out of danger, arms open, a treasury of broken straws in her hands.

Rudy reached out to stroke Tir's downy hair absentmindedly. He'll grow up like that, he found himself thinking. Learning to run in the dark labyrinth of the Keep of Dare, learning swordsmanship from the Guards... Strange to think of Alde and Tir going on living for years in that fortress Rudy had never seen, long after he was gone.

If they make it there. And he shivered, not entirely from the cold.

"And it isn't so unusual," Minalde went on, a glimmer of timid mischief in her blue eyes. "If you've noticed, it isn't the women and children who sit down by the roadside and die. If a wagon breaks down, the man will moan and despair-the woman will start pushing. Watch sometime."

"Oh, yeah?" he said, suspicious that she was baiting him.

She gave him a sidelong, teasing glance. "Seriously, Rudy. Women are tougher. They have to be, to protect the children."

He remembered the wind-stirred gallery at Karst, the flutter of the white dress of a girl who was running down the hall in darkness. "Aaah-" he conceded ungraciously, and she laughed.

More children eddied into the circle of the fire, the gaggle of camp orphans with the slim young girl they'd taken as their guardian carrying the youngest in her arms. The girl and the servant woman stopped to speak. Seeing them together, Rudy was reminded of the way he'd seen Alde and Medda that first day on the terrace of the villa at Karst.

A new thought crossed his mind, and he frowned suddenly. "Alde?" She looked up quickly, getting milk all over her fingers. "How do the Dark Ones know who Tir is?"

Slim brows drew together in thought. "I don't know," she said, startled by the question. "Do they?"

"Yeah. They went after him at Karst, anyway, and at Gae. There were beaucoup kids in the villa at Karst. As far as they should have known, he could have been any one of them. But they were right on the spot outside his nursery."

She shook her head, puzzled, the cloak of her unbound hair slipping across her shoulders. "Bektis!" she called out, seeing the tall figure crossing the camp to his own wagons.

He came forward and gave her a gracious bow. "My lady pleases?"

The Sorcerer of the Realm didn't look any the worse for two weeks in the open; like Alwir, he was fastidious to the point of foppishness, and there wasn't so much as an untoward wrinkle in his billowing gray robe.

Rudy broke in. "How do the Dark Ones know where to find Tir? I mean, they haven't got eyes, they can't tell he looks different or anything. Why do they know to come after him?"

The sorcerer hesitated, giving the matter weighty consideration-probably, Rudy guessed, to cover the fact that he was stumped. At length he said, "The Dark Ones have a knowledge that is beyond human ken." He is stumped. "Perhaps my lord Ingold could have told you, had he not chosen this time to disappear. The sources of the knowledge of the Dark-"

Rudy cut him off. "What I'm getting at is this. Do the Dark Ones really know it's Tir, or are they just going after any kid in a gilded cradle? If Alde went on foot with the kid in her arms, like every other woman in this train, wouldn't she be safer than being stuck in the wagon?"

Bektis looked down his long nose at this grimy upstart outlander who, he had been informed, had presumed to show signs of being mageborn. "Perhaps," he said loftily, "were we presently in any danger from the Dark. Yet it has been noted that no alarm of their presence has occurred since we reached the high ground... "

"Oh, come on! You saw how well that high ground stuff worked at Karst!"

"... and," the sorcerer grated, with an edge to his high, rather light voice, "I have seen in an enchanted crystal the only Nest of the Dark known in these mountains, and I assure you that it is blocked, as it has been blocked for centuries. Naturally my lady may do as she pleases, but for reasons of her own comfort and health, and on account of her state and prestige, I doubt that my lord Alwir will permit my lady to walk in the back of the train like a common peasant woman." Turning on his heel, the old man stalked back toward his wagon, his fur cape swirling behind him like a thundercloud.

Minalde sat in unhappy silence for a time, rocking her child against her breast as if to protect him from unseen peril. Distantly, the sounds of the camp's breaking came to them, the braying of mules and the creak of harnesses, the splash and hiss of doused fires. Somewhere quite close, voices raised in anger, Alwir's controlled and cutting as a lash, and after, the dry, vituperative hiss of Bishop Govannin's.

Alde sighed. "They're at it again." She kissed Tir's round little forehead, following up the mark of affection with a businesslike check of the state of his diaper, and proceeded to tuck him up in his multiple blankets again; the morning seemed to be growing colder instead of warmer. "They say we should reach the Keep tonight," she went on in a low voice, excluding from hearing any but the man who stood beside her in the shadows of the wagon. "Sometimes it has seemed that we'd travel forever and never reach the place. So Bektis is probably right."

Rudy leaned his elbow on the wagon-tail. "You think so?"

She didn't reply. Beyond, there was the clatter of trace-chains and the sound of troopers talking casually among themselves as they harnessed the oxen. "Will we reach the Keep in daylight, or will we have to push on after sundown?"

Her hands paused in their restless readying of the wagon for travel. In a low voice she said, "After sundown, I think."

Ingold slumped back exhaustedly against a boulder and rested his elbows on his drawn-up knees. "I am very much afraid, my dear," he said tiredly, "that we are not going to make it."

Gil, who for the last several hours had been aware of very little beyond the form of the wizard, who had always seemed to be walking farther and farther ahead of her, could only nod. The little bay among the rocks above the road where they had taken shelter offered no protection from the increasing cold, but at least they were out of the wind. They had fought the wind all day, and, like a wolf, it had torn at their cloaks and mauled their exposed faces with savage violence. Gil could sense on it now the smell of the storm moving down from the glaciers on the high peaks. Even in this comparative shelter, hard bits of mealy snow had begun to fly. It was now late afternoon; there was no chance, she knew, of reaching the Arrow Gorge before the convoy did. Whatever the Dark Ones had done to the bridge there, it was beyond her power or Ingold's to warn the people of it.

After a little time she recovered enough to disengage the flask she wore at her belt, draw the stopper, and take a tentative sip-the stuff made white lightning taste like lemonade. "The captain at the Keep gave me this," she explained, passing it over.

He took a drink without turning a hair. "I knew there was an ultimate reason in the cosmic scheme of things for you to accompany me," he said, and smiled through the ice in his beard. "Now that makes twice you've saved my life."

Over their heads in the rocks, the roaring of the wind increased to a kind of cold, keening shriek, and a great gust of snow blew down on them. Gil drew herself closer to Ingold's side. "About how far above the Arrow are we now?"

"Two or three miles. We would be able to see it, but for the winding of the road. That's what worries me, Gil; if they had passed the bridge in safety, we would have met them before this."

"Might the storm have slowed them down?"

"Possibly, But it won't really hit until about sundown. It would be suicide for them to stop now."

"Can't you do anything about the storm?" she asked him suddenly. "Didn't you say once that wizards can call and dismiss storms?"

He nodded. "And so we can," he replied, "if that is what we wish to do." As he spoke she noticed that, instead of gloves, he was wearing mittens-old and frayed now, like everything about him, but, by the intricacy of their design, clearly knitted for him by someone who cared very much for the old man. "We can send storms elsewhere, or call them to serve us-all except the ice storms of the plains, which strike without warning and make this-" He gestured at the whirling snow flurries. "-resemble a balmy spring breeze. But I think I pointed out to Rudy once, and I may have mentioned to you as well, that the Dark will not attack under a storm. So it may be that in doing nothing about the storm, we will be choosing the lesser of two evils."

He rose to go, wrapping his muffler tighter around his neck and drawing his hood down to protect his face. He was helping Gil to her feet when they heard on the road below them the muffled clop of hooves and the jingling of bits, echoes thrown into the sheltered pocket of boulders and dried grass that a moment ago had hidden all sound of the troop's coming. Beyond the boulders, Gil saw them come into view, a weary straggle of refugees. She recognized, in the lead, the big, scarred man on a brown horse whose head drooped with exhaustion. She and Ingold exchanged one quick, startled glance. Then the wizard was off, scrambling down the rocks to the road, calling, "Tirkenson! Tomec Tirkenson!" The landchief straightened in his saddle and threw out his hand as a signal to halt

Gil followed Ingold with more haste than seemliness down to the road. The landchief of Gettlesand towered over them in the leaden twilight, looking like a big, gaunt bandit at the head of his ragged troop of retainers. Glancing down the road, Gil could see that his followers-a great gaggle of families, a substantial herd of bony sheep and cattle, a gang of tough-looking hard-cases riding pointguard-were hardly a sixth of the main convoy.

"Ingold," the landchief greeted them. He had a voice like a rock slide in a gravel pit and a face to match. "We were wondering if we'd run into you, Gilshalos," he greeted her with a nod.

"Where did you leave the rest of the convoy?"

Tirkenson grunted angrily, his light, saddle-colored eyes turning harsh. "Down by the bridge," he grumbled. "They're making camp, like fools."

"Making camp?" The wizard was aghast "That's madness!"

"Yes, well, who said they were sane?" the landchief growled. "I told them, get the people across and to hell with the wagons and the luggage, we can send back for that... "

Ingold's voice was suddenly quiet. "What happened?"

"Holy Hell, Ingold." The landchief rubbed a big hand over his face wearily. "What hasn't happened? The bridge came down. The main pylons went under the weight of those carts of Alwir's, took the whole kit and caboodle down with them-"

"And the Queen?"

"No." Tirkenson frowned, puzzling over it "She was afoot, for some reason, up at the head of the train. Walking with the Prince slung on her back, like any other woman. I don't know why-but I do know if she'd been in a cart, there would've been no saving her. So what's Alwir do but start salvaging operations, hauling the stuff up out of the gorge, and rigging rope pontoons across the river down below. Then the Bishop says she won't abandon her wagons, and they start breaking them down to carry them across in pieces, and half the people are cut off on one side of the river and half on the other, and squabbling about getting baggage and animals across, and before you know it, everybody's saying they'll settle there for the night. I tried to tell them they'd be froze blue by morning, sure as the ice comes in the north, but that pet conjurer of Alwir's, that Bektis, says he can hold off the storm, and by the time Alwir and the Bishop got done slanging one another, they said it was too late to go on anyway. So there they sit." He gestured disgustedly and leaned back into the cantle of his saddle.

Ingold and Gil exchanged a quick look. "So you left?"

"Oh- Hell," Tirkenson rumbled. "Maybe I should have stayed. But Alwir tried to commandeer that big wagon of the Bishop's, the one she's dragging the Church records in, and you never heard such jabber in your life. She threatened to excommunicate Alwir, and Alwir said he'd slap her in irons-you know how she is about these damn papers of hers-and people were taking sides, and Alwir's boys and the Red Monks were just about pulling steel over the argument. I told them they were crazy, with the camp split and the storm and the Raiders and the Dark all around them, and they got into it again about that, and I'd had enough. I got my people and whoever else wanted to come with us to Gettlesand and we pulled out. It might not have been the right thing to do, but staying another night in the open sure as hell looked like the wrong thing to do. We figure we can make the Keep before midnight."

Ingold glanced briefly at the sky, as if able to read the time by the angle of an unseen sun above the roof of clouds. The sky was no longer gray but a kind of vile yellowish brown, and the snow smell was unmistakable. "I think you did right," he said at last. "We're going on down, and I'll try to talk them into moving on. You'll have to fight the weather before you reach the Vale, but if you can, get them to open the gates and build bonfires on both sides of them, frame them in fire, and guard them with every man in the train. With luck, we'll be there sometime tonight."

"You'll need luck," the landchief grumbled. "I'll see you at the Keep." He raised his hand in the signal to go on. The train began to move like some great beast dragging itself along in the last stages of exhaustion. Tirkenson reined away from where Ingold and Gil stood, clicking encouragement to his tired horse. Then he paused and turned back, looking down on the two pilgrims in the frozen road.

"One more thing," he said. "Just for your information. Watch out for the Bishop. She's got it around that you and Bektis are leagued with the Devil-and Alwir, too, just coincidentally by association, you understand-and she's got Hell's own support in the train. I never held with it-wizards trading their souls for the Power-but people are scared. They see Alwir's helpless. You might say the powers of this world are helpless. So if they're gonna die anyway, they're gonna die on the right side of the line. Stands to reason. But scared people will do just about anything."

"Ah, but so will wizards." Ingold smiled. "Thank you for your warning. Good riding and a smooth road to you all."

The landchief turned away, cursing his exhausted mount and threatening to rowel him to dogmeat if he didn't get a move on. Gil glanced from the big man's wicked, star-shaped spurs to the untouched flanks of the tired horse and knew, without quite knowing how, that Ingold's parting blessing had contained in it spells to avert random misfortune, to shake straight the tangled chains of circumstance, and to aid the landchief of Gettlesand and those under his loud-voiced and blasphemous care.