The Time Of The Dark

Hell of a joke on Alwir! Rudy slumped back against the clustered pilasters framing the open archway from the villa's main reception-hall out to its entryway and shut his eyes. But nothing could block out the wild glare of the torches, the screaming that went through his head like a hacksaw, and the dizzy sickness of fatigue. That whole sales pitch about everything being hunky-dory and let's make Karst capital of the new Realm had gone down the tubes. And Ingold, whatever the hell they did with him, was right all along.

He opened his eyes again, the sensory burn-out of the hall stabbing body and brain like crimson knives. It was like the waiting room of Judgment Day. The hall and entryway on either side of the fluted arch were mobbed wall to wall with people, refugees driven in from the woods and the town square who had taken shelter here when the defense lines around the town had caved in. People were weeping, praying, cursing, all at the tops of their lungs; they were milling like panic-stricken sheep when the wolf was in the fold. The jackhammer din was like the final set of a rock concert, so deafening that no single sound was audible, and the faces illuminated by the bleeding torchlight seemed to mouth senselessly. The packed heat of the room was smothering, the air foul with smoke and human fear. Detachedly, Rudy wondered if he were involved in one of Gil's nightmares. But he was too hungry to be asleep for one thing; and for another, it looked as if he'd started at the wrong end of the dream and couldn't remember going to bed. He wondered if the end of the world was going to be this noisy. He hoped not.

Like Satan in the chaos of the fire, Alwir stood in the middle of the room, blood from his cut cheek making a red track in the sweaty slime of his face. One hand rested on the pommel of his sword, the other gestured, black and eloquent-he was speaking with Commander Janus and Bishop Govannin, who stood leaning on her drawn sword, her robe girded up for fighting. Under the marks of battle, that thin skull-face of hers was calm. Rudy reflected dryly to himself that it looked as if everybody in town knew how to handle a sword except him. Alwir suggested something, and the Bishop shook her head in somber denial. The angry, insistent sweep of the Chancellor's gesture took in all the room. Rudy had a bad feeling that he knew what the problem was.

The villa was indefensible.

It was obvious. They'd been driven there when the defenses around the square had crumbled, when darkness like a fog had sapped the light of the fires. One minute, it seemed, Rudy had been standing in the line of armed men, awkwardly gripping the hilt of a sword somebody had shoved into his hands, backed by the wind-whipped, flaring blaze of dozens of bonfires and the yammering cries of the unarmed civilians who were crowding in the square for protection and watching with uneasy terror the restless stirrings in the darkness beyond the light. Then the darkness had begun to draw closer, the shifting suggestion of nebulous bodies growing increasingly clear. Looking behind him, Rudy had seen the bonfires pale and weaken, the flames robbed of their light. And then he'd been caught in the blind stampede for walls to hide behind, for any shelter against that encroaching terror. He'd been one of the lucky ones. The square and the streets outside were littered with the unlucky.

And the irony of it was, Rudy thought, surveying the scarlet confusion before him, that this place which they'd trampled over each other to reach was about as defensible as a bird cage.

It was a summer palace. A man didn't have to study architecture to guess that one. The whole place was designed to let in light and air and summer breezes. Colonnades joined to open galleries; dainty, trefoiled arches opened into long vistas of wide-windowed rooms; and the long double stairway rising from the entry-hall to his left terminated in a balcony gallery that communicated with the rest of the villa by a series of airy, unwalled breezeways. The whole thing would be as much use as a lace tablecloth in a hurricane. If he hadn't been half-blind with exhaustion and within kissing distance of a horrible death, Rudy could have laughed.

Janus offered some other plan. Alwir shook his head. Nix on anything that means going outside, Rudy thought. Blackness seemed to press like a bodiless entity against the long windows that ran the length of one wall. A few minutes ago, the orange reflection of firelight had been visible through them. Now there was only darkness. The multivoiced baying of the fugitives had begun to fade, men and women making little forays into the murky dimness of the entry-hall beyond the arch, as if seeking a safer room for their hiding, but unwilling to leave the main crowd to do so. Alwir pointed downward, to the floor or, Rudy guessed, to the cellars of the villa. The Bishop asked him something that made his eyes flash with anger.

But before he could reply, a rending crash sounded from somewhere in the deeps of the house, the violence of it shaking the stone walls on their foundations.

In the hush that followed, Janus' voice could be heard to the far corners of the hall. "East gallery," he said briefly.

A woman began to scream, a steady, unwavering note. A few feet from him, Rudy saw a young woman of about his own age tighten her clutch on a gaggle of smaller children who clung to her skirts for courage... A fat man with a garden rake for a weapon hopped to his feet and began to glare around, as if expecting the Dark to come rushing down from the throbbing air. The mob in the room packed tighter, as if they could conceal themselves from the Dark by doing so.

Their voices climbed to a crescendo of wild terror through which Alwir's trained bass battle voice cut like a cleaver. "With me! We can defend the vaults!"

Someone began howling. "Not the vaults! Not underground!"

Rudy scrambled to his feet, cursing, narrowly missing cutting off his own fingers with the sword he still held. He personally didn't care where they holed up, as long as it had nice thick walls and only one door. People were yelling, swaying, surging after Alwir through the arched doorway at the far end of the tall. Torches were being pulled down from the walls, the flailing red light throwing the room into a maelstrom of jerking shadow.

Someone shoved against Rudy in the mob, fighting against the current to go the other way, and he caught at a familiar arm.

"Where the hell are you going?"

Minalde's hair had come unbraided and hung against her torn and dirty white gown. "Tir's up there," she said fiercely. "I thought Medda had brought him down." Shoulders jostled them, throwing them close together. In the whiteness of her face, her eyes were iris-colored in the torchlight.

"Well, you can't go up there now!" As she pulled angrily at his grip, Rudy added, "Look, if the door's locked and there's some kind of light in the room, they'll miss him, he'll be fine. There's a zillion people down here for them to get."

"They know who he is," she whispered desperately. "It's him they want." With a swift jerk she freed her arm and plunged toward the stairs, slipping between the crowding bodies like an eel.

"You crazy female, you're gonna get killed!" Rudy shoved his way after her, his larger size hampering him, the crowd dragging him inexorably along. He saw Alde stop by the foot of the stairs and take a torch from its holder. Elbowing and struggling frantically, he reached the place moments later, snatched another torch, and dashed up after her into the darkness. He caught her at the top and grabbed her arm in a grip that would leave bruises.

"You let me go!"

"The hell I will!" he yelled back at her. "Now you listen... "

With an inarticulate sob of fury she thrust her torch into his face. He leaped back, barely catching himself from going backward down the stairs, and she was gone, a flicker of white fluttering down the wind-searched gallery, her torch streaming in her wake like a banner. Rudy followed profanely.

In spite of the Dark, she left the nursery door open for him. He stumbled through and slammed it shut behind him, gasping with exertion and terror and rage.

"You're insane, do you know that?" he shouted at her. "You could get the both of us killed! You didn't even know if the kid was still alive-"

She wasn't listening. She bent over the gilded cradle and gathered the child in her arms. Tir was awake, but silent, as he had been in that dilapidated shack in the orange groves of California, dark-blue eyes wide with understanding fear. The girl shook back the waves of hair from her face and smoothed the child's round cheek with her fingers. Rudy could see that her hands were shaking.

"Here," he said roughly, and pulled a shawl from the table beside the crib. "Make a sling and tie the kid to you. You're gonna need your hands free to carry the torches." She obeyed silently, not meeting his eyes. "I don't know whether I shouldn't brain you myself. It might knock some sense into your head."

She took her torch from the wall holder where she'd placed it and turned back to him, her eyes defiant. Rudy grunted in an unwilling and inarticulate concession to her courage, if not to her brains. "You're gonna have to tell me how to find these vaults they're talking about."

"Down the stairs, through the arch at the end of the big hall, down the steps to the right," she said in a small voice. "It will be the main vault, where they store the wine. That's the only room large enough."

He took up his own torch again and glanced briefly around that small octagonal room with its dull gold hangings and filigreed ebony fixtures. Then he looked back at the girl, her face as white as her gown in the flickering shadows. "Yeah, well, if we get killed... " he began to threaten, then stopped. "Aah," he growled. "I still think you're crazy." He handed her his torch and edged to the door of the room, gripping the sword hilt in both hands, as he had seen Ingold do. Alde stood back from him without a word.

"You ready?"

"Yes," she said softly.

He muttered, "Here goes nuthin', sweetheart," and took a step forward. In one quick movement, he kicked the door open and slashed. The Dark One that dropped through like an inky storm of protoplasm split itself on the brightness of the blade, splattering the three of them with stinking liquid; the second, immediately following the first, withdrew almost instantly on an aimless swirl of wind. No shapes were visible in the dark corridor stretching before them-only a restless sense of movement down at the -far end. He caught Alde by the arm and ran.

Fluttering shadows pursued them down the hall, monster shapes of himself, the girl, and the child. The torchlight briefly illuminated the open arches to their left; but beyond, sight failed in an endless abyss of blasphemous night. Rudy could sense the Dark all around them, watching them with a queer, horrible intelligence, waiting only for the unguarded moment to pounce. From the top of the stairs they looked down at the chasm of the hall, where a dropped torch, burning itself out on the floor, revealed a ruin of filth, torn clothes, discarded shoes, and smashed furniture trampled in the flight. Around the far archway and dimly visible in the hall beyond, a straggle of bones and bloodless, crumpled bodies showed what had happened moments after he'd followed Alde up the stairs; and beyond that archway, slipping over the bodies, a gliding shifting darkness seemed to flow.

Rudy's breath strangled in his throat. Exposed as they were at the top of the stairs, nothing could have induced him to descend to that hall, to try to cross that floor. Beside him Alde gasped, and he looked where she pointed. Four or five things like black snail shells clung to the great arched ceiling of the room, long tails hanging down, wavering in the moving air. The dim torchlight played over the chitinous gleam of their shiny backs, and picked out claws and spines and the glittering drool of acid that ran from their tucked mouths down the stone ribbing of the wall. Then, one by one, they released their hold, dropping down into the air, changing shape-changing size-melting into the shadows. Though he'd watched them as they let go, Rudy had no idea where they'd gone.

Alde whispered, "There's another way into the vaults. It's back this way. Hurry!"

Needless waste of words, Rudy thought, striding beside her down the gallery, the soft evil winds stirring in his long hair. How many of the things did it take to kill the light of a fire? A dozen? Half a dozen? Four? His T-shirt and denim jacket were clammy with sweat; his hand ached on the hilt of the sword. The shadows all around them seemed to be moving, pressing closer upon them. The torchlight reflected darkly in Tir's watching eyes. A doorway opened on a corridor, wind-searched and smelling of the Dark. There was a sense of something that followed, soft-breathing and always out of sight. Alde's breath came like a swift-breaking series of sobs; his own footsteps seemed eerily loud. A small black doorway led to the sudden, twisting spiral of a lightless corkscrew stair, down and down, steep as a ladder and perilously slippery; the amber flicker of the torches gilded stone walls barely a yard apart.

Then they reached the bottom and smelled all around them the damp, nitrous odor of underground.

"Where the hell are we?" Rudy whispered. "The dungeons?" Dampness gleamed like phosphorus on the rough walls and pooled among the lumpy stones of the floor.

Alde nodded and pointed down the corridor. "That way."

Rudy took one of the torches from her and held it low, so as not to brush the stone ceiling with the flame. "These were really the dungeons?"

"Oh, yes," the girl said softly. "Well, way back in former days, of course. Every great House of the Realm kept its own troops and had law over its own people. The High Kings, the Kings at Gae, changed all that; any man can appeal from a landchief's or a lord's court to the King's now. That's for civil crimes, of course; the Church still judges its own." She hesitated at a branching of the ways. The dungeons were a black labyrinth of cramped wet passageways; Rudy wondered how she could be so confident. "Down here, I think."

They passed along the narrow way, the light of their torches touching briefly on shut doors, hewn heavy oak strapped in bronze and iron, sometimes on a level with the crude flagstones of the passage, sometimes sunk several moss-slippery steps below it. Most of the doors were bolted, a few sealed with ribbon and lead. One or two were bricked up, with a hideous finality of judgment that made Rudy's palms clammy. It was brought back to him that he was in another universe, a world totally alien to his own, with its own society, its own justice, and its own summary ways of dealing with those who tried to buck the system.

Alde stumbled, catching at his arm for support. Stopping to let her steady herself, Rudy felt the shifting, the movement of the air, the smell that breathed on his face.

He could see nothing in the corridor ahead. The close-hemmed walls narrowed to a rectangle of darkness that the torchlight seemed unable to pierce, a darkness stirred by wind and filled with a terrible waiting. Wind licked at the flames of his torch, and he became suddenly aware of the darkness filling the passage at his unprotected back. It might have been only the over-stretched tension of his nerves, the strain of keeping his senses at fever-pitch for endless nightmare hours-but he thought that he could see movement in the darkness before him.

Half- paralyzed, he was surprised he could even whisper. "We've got no business here, Alde," he murmured. "See if you can find one of those doors that isn't locked."

He never took his eyes from the shadows. By the change in the torchlight behind him, he knew she was edging backward, checking door after door. The light of his own torch seemed pitifully feeble against the pressing weight of the darkness all around him. Then he heard her whisper, "This one's bolted, not locked," and he moved back slowly to join her.

The door stood at the bottom of three worn steps, narrow and forbidding, its massive bolts imbedded in six inches of stone. Rudy handed Alde his torch and stepped down to it, his soul shrinking from the trap of that narrow niche, and used his sword to cut the ribbons that bound the great lead seals to the iron. The metal was disused and stiff, scraping in shrill, rusty protest as he worked back the bolt; the hinges of the narrow door screaked horribly as he pushed it ajar.

From what he could see in the diffuse glow from Alde's torches, the place was empty, little more than a round hole of darkness with a black, empty-eyed niche let into the far wall and a small pile of moldy straw and bare, dusty bones. The queer, sterile smell of the air repelled him, and he stepped inside cautiously, straining his eyes to pierce the intense gloom.

But even half-ready as he was, the rush of darkness struck too swiftly for him to make a sound. Between one heartbeat and the next, he was seized by the throat, and a weight like the arm of death hurled him against the wall, driving the breath from his body. His head hit the stone, his yell of warning strangling under the crushing pressure of a powerful forearm; he felt the sword wrenched from his hand and the point of it prick his jugular. From the darkness that closed him in, a voice whispered, "Don't make a sound."

He knew that voice. He managed to croak, "Ingold?"

The strangling arm lessened its force against his windpipe. He could see nothing in the darkness, but the texture of the robe that brushed his hand was familiar. He swallowed, trying to get his breath. "What are you doing here, man?"

The wizard snorted. "At the risk of belaboring the obvious, I am breaking jail, as your friends would so vulgarly put it," the rusty, incisive voice snapped. "Is Gil with you?"

"Gil?" He couldn't remember when he'd last seen Gil. "No, I-Jesus, Ingold," Rudy whispered, feeling suddenly very lost and alone.

Strengthening light shifted in the dark arch of the door, shadows fleeing crazily over the uneven stone of the walls. Minalde stepped through the door and stopped, her eyes widening with surprise at the sight of the wizard. Then she lowered her gaze, and a slow flush of shame scalded her face, turning it pink to the hairline. She wavered, as if she would flee into the corridor again, though she obviously could not. In her confusion, she looked about to drop one or both torches and plunge them all in darkness.

Rudy was still recovering from his surprise at this reaction when the old man crossed the room to her and gently took one of the flares from her hand. "My child," he said to her softly, "a gentleman never remembers anything a lady says to him in the heat of anger-or any other passion, for that matter. Consider it forgotten."

This only served to make her blush redder. She tried to turn away from him, but he caught her arm gently and brushed aside the black cloak of her hair that half-hid the silent infant slung at her breast. He touched the child's head tenderly and looked back into the girl's eyes. There was no tone of question in his voice when he said, "So they have come, after all."

She nodded, and Ingold's lips tightened under the scrubby forest of unkempt beard. As if reminded of their danger, Alde slipped from his grasp, her hand going to the door to close it.

Ingold said sharply, "Don't."

Her eyes went from him to Rudy, questioning, seeking confirmation.

Ingold went on. "If you close that door it will disappear, and we may all be locked in here forever." He gestured toward the foot of the little wall-niche, where a skull stared mournfully from the shadows. "There are spells laid on this cell that even I could not work through."

"But the Dark are out there, Ingold," Rudy whispered. "There must be hundreds of people dead in the villa upstairs-thousands in the square, in the woods. They're everywhere, like ghosts. It's hopeless, we'll never... "

"There is always hope," the wizard said quietly. "With the seals on the door of this cell, there was no way I could have left it-but I knew that someone would come whom I could overpower, if necessary. And someone did."

"Yeah, but that was just a-" Rudy hesitated over the word. "A coincidence."

Ingold's eyes glinted with an echo of their old impish light. "Don't tell me you still believe in coincidence, Rudy." He handed back the sword. "You'll find a seal of some kind hung over the bolts of the door. Remove it and place it there in the niche for the time being. I'll shut you in when I leave. Here, at least, in all the town of Karst, you will be safe until I can return for you or send someone to get you out. It's drastic," he went on, seeing Minalde's eyes widen with fear, "but at least I can be sure the Dark will not come here. Will you stay?"

Rudy glanced uneasily at Alde and at the skull in the dark niche. "You mean," he asked warily, "once that door is shut, we can't get out?"

"Precisely. The door is invisible from the inside."

Open, the door looked perfectly ordinary; it was the shadow-haunted darkness of the corridor beyond that worried Rudy. The dim yellow torchlight edged the massive iron of its bindings and revealed the roughness of the ancient smoke-stained oak slabs. Wind stirring down the corridor made the lead seal hanging from the bolts move, as if with a restless life of its own. Rudy noticed that, though Ingold stood close to the door, his torch upraised in one hand, he would not touch it.

"Quickly," the wizard said. "We haven't much time."

"Rudy." Alde's voice was timid, her eyes huge in the torchlight. "If I will be safe here-as safe as anywhere in

this town tonight-I would rather you went with Ingold. In case something-happened-I'd feel better if two people knew where we were, instead of only one."

Rudy shivered at the implications of that thought. "You won't be afraid here alone?"

"Not any more afraid than I've been."

"Get the seal, then," Ingold said, "and let us go."

Rudy stepped gingerly to the door, the smoldering yellow light from within the cell illuminating the narrow slot of the opening and no farther. The seal still dangled from its cut black ribbons, a round plaque of dull lead that seemed to absorb, rather than reflect, the light. It was marked on either side with a letter of the Darwath alphabet; as he reached to touch it, he found himself repelled by a loathing he could put no name to. There was something deeply frightening about the thing. "Can't we just leave it here?"

"I cannot pass it," Ingold said simply.

The horror, the irrational vileness, concentrated in that small gray bulla were such that Rudy never thought to question him. He simply lifted the thing by its black ribbons and carried it at arm's length to throw deep into the shadows of the niche. He noticed Alde had stepped back as he'd passed with it, as if the aura radiated from it was like the smell of evil.

Alde fitted the end of her torch into a crack in the stonework of the wall and turned back to him, cradling the child in both arms.

"We'll send someone back for you," Rudy promised softly. "Don't worry."

She shook her head and evaded Ingold's glance; the last Rudy saw of her was a slender white figure cloaked in her tangled hair, the child in her arms. The darkness of the doorway framed them like a gilded votive in a shrine. Then he shut the door and worked home the rusty iron of the bolts.

"What was that thing?" he whispered, finding himself unwilling even to touch the bolts where it had hung.

"It is the Rune of the Chain," Ingold said quietly, standing on the top of the worn steps to scan the corridor beyond. "The cell itself has Power worked into its walls, so that no one within may find or open the door. With the Rune of the Chain spelled against me, even if I could have found the door, I could not have gone through. Presumably I would have been left here until I could be formally banished-or, just possibly, until I starved."

"They- couldn't do that, could they?" Rudy asked queasily.

Ingold shrugged. "Who would have stopped them? Ordinarily, the wizards look out for their own, but the Archmage has vanished, and the City of Wizards lies sunk in the rings of its own enchantments. I am very much on my own." Seeing the look on Rudy's face, compounded of horror and shocked proprieties, Ingold smiled, and some of the grimness left his eyes. "But, as you see, I would have gotten out, magic or no magic. I am glad that you brought Alde and the baby with you. It was by far the best thing you could have done. Here, at least, they will be safe from the Dark."

He raised his torch, the sickly glow of it barely penetrating the obscurity of the passage. "This way," he decided, indicating the direction in which Rudy and Alde had been headed before.

"Hey," Rudy said softly as they started down that dark and wind-stirred corridor. The wizard glanced back over his shoulder. "What was that all about with her?"

Ingold shrugged. "At our last meeting the young lady threatened to kill me-the reason isn't important. She may repent the sentiments or merely the social gaffe. If one is going to... "

And then a sound rocked the vaults, a deep, hollow booming, like the blow of a monster fist, and the shock of it shivered in the very walls. Ingold paused in his stride, his eyes narrowing to a burning glitter of concentration as he listened; then he was striding down the corridor, Rudy following behind with drawn sword. As they turned the corner, Rudy saw the wizard shift the torch in his hands, and the rough wood seemed to elongate into a six-foot staff, the fire at its tip swelling and whitening to the diamond brilliance of a magnesium torch, searing like a crystal vibration into every crack of those stained and ancient walls. Holding the blazing staff half like a lamp, half like a weapon, the wizard moved ahead of him, shabby cloak billowing in his wake like wings. Rudy hurried after, the darkness falling back all around them and closing in behind.

Somewhere very close to them, a second blow resounded, shaking the stone under their feet like the smash of a piston driven by an insanely giant machine. Cold and hollow with hunger and fatigue, Rudy wondered shakily if they'd be killed, but the thought of it was strangely impersonal. Corridors converged, widening the darkness where they trod; he could now smell water and mold, and all around them the stone-acid stink of the dark. Somewhere, all that was left of the mob who had taken refuge in Alwir's villa-the handful of Guards and the scarlet Church troops, the fat man with his garden rake and the young woman with her attendant mob of children, and all the other faces that had swum in the glaring maelstrom above-stairs-were cowering in the dark, jumping shadows of the vaults, watching with horrified eyes the might of the Dark Ones hammering the barred iron doors, the only line of defense, from their massive hinges.

The might of the Dark! Rudy felt it, like a blow in the face, as the third explosion rocked the foundations of the villa; he felt the contraction of the air, and the evil intelligence watching them as they passed. The winds had begun to whip through the passageways like the rising forerunners of a gale, fluttering in Ingold's mantle and twisting at his own long hair. The light from the staff in the wizard's hand broadened to a blaze like hot noon, scorching out the secrets of the darkness, and in its blinding glare they turned a corner into a major thoroughfare and saw through the heavy shadows that blotted the air like smoke the great doors that lay at the end.

Though Rudy could see no single form, no shape in the darkness, he sensed the malevolence that beat the air with the movement of a thousand threshing wings. Their power seemed to stretch across the corridor like a wall; beyond it, barely visible in the clotted shadows, he could see the broad line of torchlight under the barred doors. There were no sounds from the people behind those doors. Those who had made it to that last covert in the vaults faced the Dark in silence.

He felt the change in the Dark, the sudden surge of that terrible alien power, and the thunder of that explosive sound roared in his ears as he saw the doors buckle and collapse, breaking inward in a flying hurricane of splintering wood. Sickly failing torchlight showed him faces beyond the broken doors and silhouetted smoky forms taking sudden shape in the darkness.

Into that darkness Ingold flung himself without so much as breaking stride, the cold light hurling around him like the explosion of a bursting star. Rudy followed, clinging to the light as to a mantle, and for one brief, terrible instant it seemed that the darkness streamed back on them, covering and smothering that brilliant burning light.

Whether it was exhaustion playing tricks on his mind or some magic of the Dark, Rudy did not know. He did not think he had shifted or closed his eyes and knew he hadn't looked away. But for one instant, there was the darkness, pouring down over the light. And the next moment, there was only light, white and chill, surrounding the strong, shabby form of the old man who stalked down that empty corridor. Streaming through the broken doors, the white light fell on waxy, pinched faces, was reflected from terrified eyes, and edged the steel in the hands of the thin line of troops stretched between the packed mob of surviving refugees and the doors. Then the light faded, shrinking naturally from the blinding glow to the yellow splotch of simple torch flame.

Rudy knew that the Dark were gone. He sensed it in some way he could not be sure of. There were none in the vaults, none left in the villa over their heads. Following Ingold down toward the doors, their footfalls echoing hollowly in the empty shadows of the corridor, he could feel the emptiness stretching around and behind him into the darkness. Whether the Dark had drawn off before the wizard's wrath or simply faded away, sated with their night's kill, he didn't know. In a way it didn't matter. All that mattered was that they were gone. He was safe. He had survived the night.

At the realization of it, a weariness came over him, as if all strength had been suddenly drained from his body. He stumbled and caught the wall for support. Ingold moved on to the broken threshold, where three figures had detached themselves from the line of Guards and stood framed in the ruin of wood and iron. Under the filth and slime of battle, Rudy recognized Alwir, Janus, and Bishop Govannin.

Without a word, the Commander of the Guards of Gae stepped forward, dropped to one knee before the wizard, and kissed his scarred hand. At this gesture of fealty the Chancellor and the Bishop exchanged a glance of enigmatic distrust and disapproval over the Guard's bowed back. The echoes of the empty corridor murmured back the Commander's words: "We thought you'd gone."

Ingold touched the man's bent red head, then raised him, his eyes on Alwir's. "I swore I would see Tir to a place of safety," he replied calmly, "and so I will. No, I had not gone. I was merely-imprisoned."

"Imprisoned?" Janus' thick brows met over russet, animal eyes. "On whose orders?"

"The detention order was unsigned," the wizard said in his mildest voice. "Merely sealed with the King's mark. Anyone who had access to it could have done so." The light of the guttered torch in his hand flared in the hollows of exhaustion-shadowed eyes. "The cell was sealed with the Rune of the Chain."

"The use of such things is illegal," Govannin commented, folding thin arms like a skeleton's, her black, lizard eyes expressionless. "And it would have been a fool's act to order such a thing at such a time."

Alwir shook his head. "I certainly sealed no such order," he said in a puzzled voice. "As for the Rune-There was said to be one somewhere in the treasuries of the Palace at Gae, but I always thought it merely a legend. I am only thankful that you seem to have effected your escape in time to come to our aid. Your arrest was obviously a mistake on someone's part."

The wizard's gaze went from the Chancellor's face to the Bishop's, but all he said was, "Obviously."

Much later in the morning, Rudy backtracked their steps to the doorless cell, empty now and standing open, with the intention of taking that dark seal and dropping it quietly down a well. But, though he found the place all right, and searched through the dusty bones of the niche, someone else had clearly been there before him, for he could find no trace of it anywhere.