The Time Of The Dark

A dying civilization. A land locked in fear. A world going down in a welter of hopeless chaos before an enemy that could not be fought. And, Rudy thought, strolling down the mossy cobbled streets of Karst through the cool sunshine of that mellow afternoon, one hell of a lot of people standing nose-deep in the sewer, with the tide coming in.

If it weren't jammed to the ceilings with people, Karst would be a pretty town, he reflected. That is, if you had indoor plumbing and some kind of central heating and streets you weren't likely to break your ankle on. This lane was relatively uncrowded and quiet, winding away from the town square to lose itself in the woods; it was paved in lumpy, fist-size cobbles that were high and dry along the walls on both sides and heavily upholstered with bright green moss down the center, through which a thread of silver water reflected the sky. Rudy had slept-badly-in a stuffy and flea-infested closet on the third floor of the Town Hall, and had spent what was left of the morning and most of the afternoon poking around Karst, trying to scrounge food and water, scraping acquaintance with refugees and Guards and some of the Bishop's people, and checking out the town. He'd come to the conclusion that if Alwir didn't get his act together fast, they'd all be dead in short order.

There were simply too many people. Gil and Ingold were right, whatever the Chancellor liked to say. Contrary to the assertions of most of his teachers in public school, Rudy was not stupid, merely lacking in appreciation for the public school system. He'd listened to the council last night-with as little room as there was in the hall, it would have been hard to help eavesdropping-and had seen today what was happening in Karst. He'd walked through the camps in the woods, trashy, filthy, lawless. He'd witnessed seven fights-three over allegations of food theft, two over water, and two for no discernible reason at all. He'd heard the stump preachers and soapbox orators propounding different solutions to the problem, from suicide to salvation, and had seen one ugly old man stoned by a pack of children and several of their elders because he was supposed to be in league with the Dark-as if anyone could get anywhere near the Dark Ones to be in league with them. Mostly Rudy sensed the tension that underlay the town like a drawn wire and had felt, with an uneasy shock, that closeness to that line that divided a land of law from a land without it. He'd seen the handful of Guards left in town trying to keep some kind of order among far too many people. Though it was a new sensation for him to have sympathy for the fuzz, he found he did. He wouldn't have wanted to play cop to that madhouse.

The smoke of cook fires turned the air into a stagethree smog alert, wherever he wandered in the town or in the woods. Now, as he headed back toward the square, shadows began to move up the rock walls of the little lane, and the distant clamor of voices in the square was muffled by the walls, muted to a meaningless murmur like the far-off sounding of church bells. In spite of hunger, the crowds, the threat of plague, and the fear of the Dark, Rudy found himself oddly at peace with the world and with his own soul.

Beyond the wall to his right he heard voices, a woman's and a girl's. The woman was saying, "And don't you go let him be putting things in his little mouth."

The girl's voice, gentle and demure, replied, "No, ma'am."

"And don't you be letting him wander away and hurt hisself; you keep a sharp eye on him, my girl."

Rudy recognized the emblem on the half-open grille of rusty iron at the gap in the wall, the three black stars that someone had said belonged to the House of Bes, the House ruled by Chancellor Alwir. Rudy paused in the gate. If this was Alwir's villa, then the women were probably talking about Tir.

Beyond the gap in the wall he could see the sloping garden, brown with cold and coming frost, and beyond that the rock wall of a terrace that backed the massive, gray shape of a splendid mansion. He was right; two women stood in the huge arched door of the house, spreading out, of all things, a bearskin rug in the last of the pale golden sun. The fat woman in red was doing this, with much bustle and huffing, while the slender girl in white stood, in the classic pose of women everywhere, with the baby riding her hip.

The fat woman continued to scold. "You see he doesn't get chilled."

"Yes, Medda."

"And don't you get chilled, neither!" The fat woman's voice was fierce and commanding. Then she went bustling back into the dark shadows of the door and was gone.

Rudy ducked through the gateway and made his way up silent paths fringed with sere brown hedges. Overhead, arthritic yellow leaves trembled in the watery blue of the air. Even moribund with autumn, the garden was immaculate. Rudy, pausing in its mazes to orient himself toward the haughty bulk of the villa, wondered whom they got to trim the hedges every day.

The baby sitter had settled herself down on the corner of the bearskin next to the Prince. She looked up, startled, as Rudy swung himself over the balustrade to join them. "Hello," she said, a little timidly.

Rudy gave her his most charming smile. "Hi," he said. "I'm glad to see you've got him out here-I was afraid I'd have to ask permission from every Guard in the house to see how he is."

The girl relaxed and returned his smile. "I should be taking him in before long," she apologized, "but it's probably one of the last warm days we'll have." She had a low voice and an air of shyness; Rudy put her age at somewhere between eighteen and twenty. Her crow-black hair was braided down past her hips.

"Warm?" Like most Californians, Rudy was thinblooded. "I've been freezing to death all afternoon. What do you people consider cold?"

Startled, she raised her eyes to his; hers were dark, luminous blue, like Crater Lake on a midsummer afternoon. "Oh!" She smiled. "You're the companion of Ingold, one who helped him rescue Tir."

And, indeed, Tir was making his way purposefully over to Rudy across the bearskin, tangling himself in the black and white silk of his gown. Rudy folded up to sit crosslegged beside the girl and gathered the child into his lap. "Well-" he said, a little embarrassed by that awe and gratitude in her eyes. "I just kind of stumbled into that. I mean, it was either come with him or die, I guess-we didn't have much choice."

"But still, you had the choice to be with him in the first place, didn't you?" she reminded him.

"Well- yeah," he agreed. "But believe me, if I'd known what it was all about, I'd still be running."

The girl laughed. "Betrayed into heroism," she mocked his assertion gently.

"Honey, you don't even know." Rudy extricated Tir's exploring hands from his collar and dug in his pocket for his key ring, which the child, in blissful fascination, proceeded to try to eat. "You know," he went on after a few minutes, "what floors me about this whole thing is that the kid's fine. After all he's been through from the time Ingold got him out of Gae until we got him back here, you'd think he'd be in shock. Is he? Hardly! Babies are so little, you'd think they'd break in your hands, like-like kittens, or flowers."

"They're tough." The girl smiled. "The human race would have perished long ago if babies were as fragile as they look. Often they're tougher than their parents." Her fingers made absent-minded ringlets of the black, downy hair on Tir's tiny pink neck.

Rudy remembered things said in the hall and other talk throughout the day. "How's his mom?" he asked. "I heard she-the Queen-was sick. Will she be okay?"

The girl hesitated, an expression of-what? Almost grief-altering the delicate line of her cheek. "They say the Queen will recover," she answered. him slowly. "But I don't know. I doubt she will ever be as she was." The girl shifted her position on the rug and put the long braid of her hair back over her shoulder. Rudy stopped, another question unspoken on his lips, wondering suddenly how and under what circumstances this girl had made her own escape from Gae.

"And your friend?" The girl made an effort, and withdrew her mind from something within her that she would rather not have looked at. "Ingold's other companion?"

"Gil?" Rudy asked. "I guess she went with the Guards to Gae this morning. That's what they tell me, anyway. You wouldn't get me within a hundred miles of that place."

"You're within ten," the girl said quietly.

Rudy shivered. "Well, I can tell you I'll be farther away before sundown. Food or no food, you'd have to be crazy to go back there."

"I don't know," the girl said, toying with the end of her braid. "They say the Guards are crazy, that you have to be crazy, to be a Guard. And I believe that. I would never go back, not for anything, but the Guards-they're a rare breed. They're the best, the finest corps in the West of the World. It's their life, fighting and training to fight. The Guards say it's like nothing else, and for them there is nothing else. I don't understand it. But then, nobody does. Only other Guards."

Pro ballplayers would, Rudy thought. Heavy-duty martial artists would. He remembered some of the karate black belts he knew back home. Aloud, he said, "God help anyone or anything that takes on a bunch of people like that. Ingold's with them, too."

"Oh," the girl said quietly.

"Do you know Ingold?"

"Not- not really. I-I've met him, of course." She frowned slightly. "I've always been a little bit afraid of him. He's said to be tricky and dangerous, all the more so because he appears so-so harmless. And, of course, wizards-there are those who believe that wizards are the agents of evil."

"Evil? Ingold?" Rudy was startled and a little shocked. A more harmless old man he could never hope to find.

"Well- " She hesitated, twining the end of her braid through her fingers. Tir, having misplaced or forgotten the keys, caught at the soft black rope with tiny hands. "The Church teaches us that the Devil is the Lord of Illusion, the Prince of Mirrors. Illusion is the wizards' stock in trade; they trade their souls for the Power, when they go to that school in Quo. The Council of Wizards owes allegiance to no one. There is no check on what they might do."

So that explained the Bishop, Rudy thought, and her watchful dark gaze that slid so disapprovingly over the wizard at that hurried council last night. A witch hunter, no error.

The girl went on. "Of course he was a friend and counselor of-of the King-"

There was something, some catch, in her voice that made Rudy look over at her quickly, and it occurred to him to wonder what the late, great King Eldor had had to do with his son's nanny on the sly. Not that he blamed Eldor, he thought.

"But Ingold had his-purposes," she continued quietly. "If he saved Tir, it was because of the-the inherited memories of the Kings of Darwath, the store of knowledge within him that may one day be used against the Dark. Not because Tir was only a child, helpless and in danger." Her eyes were down, considering the bent head of the child nuzzling around on the bearskin before her. Her voice was shaky.

She really cares for Pugsley, Rudy thought suddenly. Hell, since Queens-at least in his muzzy democratic understanding of the matter-don't take care of their own babies, she probably raised the little rug-rat. She wouldn't see him as a Prince-or even as King of Darwath, since Eldor had died-but only as a child she loved, as Rudy loved his baby brother. It changed her in his eyes.

"You really believe that?" he asked softly. She didn't answer, nor did she look at him. "Hell, when you come right down to it, it's his job. If he's the resident wizard, he's got to do stuff like that. But I think you're wrong."

For a time she didn't speak, and the silence came over the garden again, a contented silence, bred of the long afternoon light and what might be the last golden day of autumn. The sun had already slipped through a milky film of cloud on the western peaks; the blue shadow of the villa marked off the cracks in the terrace pavement like a sundial, creeping steadily up on the bearskin and its three occupants. Looking out over the austere brown and pewter patchwork of the frost-rusted garden beds, Rudy felt the peace of the place stealing over his spirit, an archaic, heartbreaking beauty, a silence of old stone and sunlight, of something seen long ago and far away, like a lost memory of what had never been, something as distant as the reflections in still water, yet clear, clear as crystal. Every pale stone of the terrace, every silken grass blade thrust between them and turned gold now with the year's turning, contained and preserved that magic light like the final echo of dying music. It was a world that yesterday he had never known and, after tomorrow, would never see again, but the present moment seemed to have been waiting for him since the day of his birth.

"Alde!" A sharp voice cut that silver peace, and the girl whirled, startled and guilty as a child with her hand in the cookies. The fat woman in red stood in the doorway, hands on her broad hips fisted and face lumpy and red with annoyance. Rudy scrambled to his feet as she bawled out, "Sitting on the cold pavement! You'll catch your death! And his Little Majesty, to be sure!" She came bustling out, clucking and scolding like a mother hen with one chick. "Take him inside, child, and yourself-the air's grown nippy... "

But for all that she flustered around him as if he weren't there, Rudy knew the real problem was that Alde wasn't supposed to be wasting her time talking with some stranger instead of watching the baby as she was supposed to. The girl gave him a helpless, half-amused shrug of her eyebrows, and Rudy gallantly stooped to gather the bearskin in his arms. The thing weighed a ton.

"What's she think I'm gonna do, kidnap him?" he asked in a whisper as the older nurse waddled back into the house, baby in arms.

Alde smiled ruefully. "She worries," she explained unnecessarily. She bent to retrieve the motorcycle keys, which had fallen from the folds of the rug. She wiped the slobber off them with a corner of her skirt and tucked them back in his pocket for him.

"She boss you around like that all the time?" he asked. "I thought for a minute she was gonna spank you."

Alde's smile widened, and she ducked her head. She was laughing. "Medda just thinks of Tir as her baby. Nobody can look after him the way she can, not even his own mother."

Rudy had to smile, too. "Yeah, my aunt Felice is like that. To hear her carry on with my mother, you'd never think Mom had raised seven kids all by herself. But you just got to let them do it."

"Well, you certainly can't change them," Alde agreed. "Here-I can take that rug. Medda would faint if you came inside. She knows what's due to the House of Bes... No, it's all right, I've got it."

They paused, arms mutually entwined in the moth-eaten red fur. "Your name's Alde?" he asked.

She nodded. "Short for Minalde," she explained. "Someone told me yours. If... "

"Alde!" Medda's shout came from within the villa.

"Take care of yourself," Rudy whispered. "And Pugsley."

She smiled at the nickname and ducked her head again as if to hide the smile. "You also." Then she turned and hurried through the great doors, the claws of the bearskin clinking softly on the polished floor.

The sky overhead had lost the paleness of day. The sun was long gone past the mountain's rim, and swift twilight had come down. All that afternoon's peace and beauty notwithstanding, Rudy had no intention of spending another night in this world. Besides which, he realized he was painfully hungry, and food was notoriously hard to come by. He made his way down the dead garden and through the rusted gate. He found the lane beyond almost totally dark, though the sky above still held a little of the day, like the sky above a canyon. As the shadows moved up the mountain toward Karst, he began his hunt for the wizard and the way home.

"Rudy!" He turned, startled to see Gil materialize out of the gloom, striding quickly toward him, followed by a tall young man with white Viking braids who wore the already-familiar uniform of the City Guards. He noticed that Gil had scrounged a cloak from somewhere and wore a sword belted over her Levi's. The outfit made him grin. This was a long way from the lady and scholar of yesterday afternoon...

"Where's Ingold?" he asked as they drew near.

Gil answered shortly. "He's been busted."

"Busted?" For a minute he couldn't take it in. "You mean arrested?"

"I saw it," Gil said tightly.

Close up now, Rudy saw that she looked exhausted, drawn, those cold gray-blue eyes sunk in purple smudges in a face that had gotten pointy and white. It didn't do much for her looks, he thought. But there was a hardness in her eyes now that he wouldn't have wanted to tangle with.

She went on. "A bunch of troops came and got him on the Town Hall steps while the Guards were busy unloading the supplies."

"And he just went with them?" Rudy asked, aghast and disbelieving.

The tall Guard nodded. "He knew that it was go or fight. The fight would trigger a riot."

The light, spare voice was uninflected, unexplaining, but the scenario sprang to Rudy's mind. The Guards backed Ingold and would have rushed to help; the people in the square would go after the food; all the pent-up violence of the day would condense in rage and fear and terror of the night. The town would go up like gunpowder. He'd been in enough small-scale riots at the Shamrock Bar in Fontana to know how that went. But what was all right in the safety of a steel-mill town on Friday night would be death and worse than death on a large scale, played for keeps out of hunger and fury and frustration. Bitterly, he remarked, "They sure knew their man. Who nailed him, do you know?"

"Church troops, from Gil's description," the Icefalcon said. "The Red Monks. The Bishop's men, but they could have acted on anyone's orders."

"Which anyone?" Rudy demanded, his glance shifting from Gil to the Icefalcon in the dimness of the shadowy lane. "Alwir? When he couldn't push him out at the council last night?"

"Alwir always feared Ingold's power over the King," the Guard said thoughtfully.

"His men wear red, too," Gil added.

The Icefalcon shrugged. "And the Bishop certainly doesn't relish the thought of an agent of Satan that close to the throne."

"A what?" Gil demanded angrily, and Rudy briefed her on the local Church stand on wizardry. Gil's comment was neither scholarly nor ladylike.

"The Bishop is very strong in her faith," the Icefalcon said in his soft neutral voice, the tone as colorless as his eyes. "Or-the Queen could have put out the order for his arrest. From all accounts she has never trusted Ingold, either."

"Yeah, but the Queen's out on a Section Eight these days," Rudy said unkindly. "And whoever popped him, we've got to find where they're keeping him, if we don't want to end up spending another night here."

"Not to mention the next fifty years, if they decide to wall him up in some dungeon and forget about him," Gil added, her voice sharp with fear.

"Yeah," Rudy agreed. "Though I personally wouldn't want to be the one in charge of putting that old duffer out of the way permanently."

"Look," the Icefalcon said, "Karst isn't that big a town. They will have put him in the Town Hall jail, in the vaults below Alwir's villa, or in the Bishop's summer palace somewhere. Divided, we can find him within the hour. Then you can do-whatever you will do."

The shift in inflection of that soft, breathless voice made Rudy's nerves prickle with the sudden premonition of disaster, but the inscrutable frost-white eyes challenged him to read meaning into the words. Alde had said that the Guards were all crazy. Crazy enough to jailbreak a wizard out from under the noses of the Powers That Be? They were Ingold's-and now, by the look of it, Gil's-allies. Rudy wondered if he wanted to mess with the whole thing.

On the other hand, he realized he didn't have much choice. It was a jailbreak in the dark or spending the night and God alone knew how many other nights besides in this world. Even standing in the quiet of the dark lane, Rudy had begun to feel nervous. "Okay," he said, with as much cheerfulness as he could muster under the circumstances. "Meet you back at the Town Hall in an hour."

They parted, Rudy hurrying back toward Alwir's garden gate, running over in his mind how he'd go about getting on the right side of Alde and, more importantly, Medda, in order to get in and search the villa.

Gil and the Icefalcon headed in the other direction, instinctively hugging the wall for protection, guided by the reddish reflection of the fires in the town square. It was fully dark, a bitter overcast night, and Gil shivered, feeling the trap of the lane, aware of how restricted it was on the sides and how open from above. Cloak and sword tangled around her feet, and she had to hurry her steps to catch up with the long strides of the young man before her.

They were within sight of the firelit crowds in the square when the Icefalcon stopped and raised his head to listen like a startled beast. "Do you hear it?" His voice was a whisper in the darkness, his face and pale hair a blur edged in the rosy reflection of the bonfires. Gil stopped also, listening to the cool quiet of the night. Pine-scented winds blew the sounds from beyond the town, far-off sounds changed by the darkness, but unmistakable. From the dark woods that ringed the town, the wind carried up the sounds of screaming.

The Dark Ones had come to Karst!

There was no battle at Karst-only a thousand rearguard actions fought in the haunted woods by companies of Guards, of Church troops, and of the private troops of the households of noble and landchief. Patrols made sorties from the blazing central fortress of the red-lit town square and brought in huddled clusters of terrified refugees, the scattered stragglers who had survived that first onslaught.

Gil, who found herself, sword in hand, hunting with the Icefalcon's company, remembered that first chaotic nightmare in Gae and wondered that she had thought it frightening. At least then she had known where the danger lay; in Gae there had been torchlight and walls and people. But here the nightmare drifted silently through wind-touched woods, appearing, killing, and departing with a kind of hideous leisure. Here there was no warning, only a vast floating darkness that fell upon the torches between one eyeblink and the next; soft mouths gaping wide, like canopies of acid-fringed parachutes; claws reaching to tear and to hold. Here there were the victims; a pile of stripped, bloody bones among the sticks of a half-built campfire or the blood-dewed shrunken mummy of a man sucked dry while a yard away his wife knelt screaming in helpless horror at the sight.

Naturally coldhearted, Gil was made neither helpless nor, after the first few victims, sick. Rather, she was filled with a kind of cool and lightheaded rage, like a cat that kills with neither fear nor remorse.

In those first chaotic minutes, she and the Icefalcon doubled back to the Guards' Court at a run. There they found a wild confusion of men arming, companies forming, Janus' deep booming voice cutting through the holocaust of sound, demanding volunteers. Since she was wearing a sword, somebody shoved her into a company-they were halfway out of town, armed with torches and pitifully few to meet the Dark, when she fought her way up to the front of the patrol and yelled to the Icefalcon, "But I don't know how to use a sword!"

He gave her a cold stare. "Then you shouldn't wear one," he retorted.

Someone else caught her by the shoulder-the woman Seya she'd met that morning by the carts-and drew her back. "Aim at the midline of the body," she instructed Gil hastily. "Cut straight down, or straight sideways. There's a snap to the wrists, see? Hilt in both hands-not like that, you'll break both thumbs. You have to go in close to kill, if they're bigger than you are, which they will be, outside like this. Got that? You can pick up the rest later. Stay in the center of the group and don't take on anything you can't handle."

Watchword for the night, Gil thought wryly. But it was surprising, the first time those dark, silent bulks materialized out of the misty darkness between the trees, how much of that hasty lesson she could put into practice. And she learned the first principle of any martial art-that surviving or not surviving an encounter is the ultimate test of any system, lesson, or technique.

In one sense it was easy, for those nebulous bodies offered little resistance to the razor-sharp metal. Precision and speed counted rather than strength; for all their soft bulk, the Dark Ones moved fast. But Seya had not mentioned that the Dark Ones stank of rotting blood, nor had she described the way the cut pieces folded and trailed and spattered everything with human blood and blackish liquid as they disintegrated. This Gil found out in that crimson pandemonium of fire and dark trees, death and flight and war. And she found out, too, that there was less fear in the attack than in the defense and that, no matter how little sleep or food you have had in the last forty-eight hours, you could always fight for your life. She fought shoulder to shoulder with the black-uniformed Guards of Gae and ragged volunteers in homespun. She ran in the wake of the fighters as they moved through the woods like a wolfpack, gathering lost and terrified fugitives and shepherding them back toward Karst. The cold electricity of battle-lust filled her like fire and drove out weariness or fear.

In time, the dozen or so warriors of the Icefalcon's company rounded up some fifty refugees. They circled them in a loose cordon and gave torches to as many of them as were capable of carrying such things; most persisted in holding to possessions, money, and food, and a good thirty were women carrying children in their arms. For the third time that night, they started back for Karst. Woods and sky were utterly black, the dark trees threshing in the wind. All around them could be heard screaming and wailing. It was a Dantean scene, lit by the jerky glare of torches.

Someone behind her cried out. Looking up, Gil saw the Dark materializing in the inky air, with a sudden drop of slobbering wings and the slash of a thorned wire tail. She stepped into it, sword whining as she swung, aware of Seya on her right, someone else on her left. Then she was engulfed in darkness, wind, and fire, cutting blindly. The fugitives behind her were packing closer and closer together like sheep, the children shrieking, the men crying out. Shredded veils of disintegrating protoplasm slithered to the ground all around her. She saw the man on her left buckle awkwardly to his knees, dry and white and dewed all over with blood as the Dark One rose off him like some giant, flopping, airborne blob. Wave after wave of darkness came pouring from the woods.

The Icefalcon raised his light voice to a harsh rasp. "This will be the last trip, my sisters and brothers. There are more now than there were. We'll have to hold the town."

In the momentary lull, as the Dark Ones gathered like a lightless roof of storm overhead, a Guard's voice cried bitterly, "Hold that town? That collection of wall-less chicken-runs?"

"It's the only town we have. Now, run!"

And they ran, through the black nightmare of alien pursuit, with the winds stirring after them like the breath of some unspeakable abyss. It was a nightmare of woods, darkness, sinuous half-seen forms, flame, and stumbling terror. They ran toward the refuge of Karst, and the Dark Ones followed.