The Time Of The Dark (Darwath #1)

The Time Of The Dark (Darwath #1) Page 14

It was snowing in earnest when Gil and Ingold came within sight of the camp on the near bank of the Arrow. In the swirling grayness they could make out huddled shapes bunched around the feeble yellow flickers of campfires, the dark milling of small herds of animals, the restless activity on the bank of the gorge, and the shadowy comings and goings around the broken bridge. Across the gorge more activity was visible, lights moving here and there around the farther camp, and the distant threnody of bleating goats and a child's wailing cries drifting on the intermittent veering of the wind. Between the two camps lay the gorge, a sheer-cut chasm of darkness, filled with the greedy roaring of the river. On either bank of the gorge, great tongues of broken stone thrust out over the void.

"How deep is the gorge at that point?" Gil asked, squinting through the blurring gusts of snow.

"About forty feet. It's a difficult climb down the side and up again, but the water itself isn't very deep. As you can see, they've swum most of the stock."

Ingold pointed to where three men were driving a small herd of pigs up the trail. "From what you told me of your dream, it would seem that the Dark weakened the central pillars of the bridge, so that they gave way under the weight of the wagons-as pretty an attempt at murder as you're likely to see. And even though the attempt failed, Prince Tir is stranded in camp on the banks of the river tonight, cut off from most of the convoy, with the camp in confusion. Either way, the Dark could hardly have missed."

Leaning on his staff, he started down the steep slope toward the fires.

Rudy met them on the outskirts of camp. "What did you find?" he asked them.

As they made their way through the dark chaos toward Alwir's massive tent, Gil filled him in on the valley of the Dark, Renweth, the Keep, and what Tomec Tirkenson had said. In the end, she asked, "Why wasn't Alde in her wagon?"

"I talked her out of it," Rudy said. "I had a bad feeling they'd try something tonight, but I never thought about anything happening by daylight. We were only a couple feet in front of the section of the bridge that went."

"And you still believe in coincidence," Ingold chided reprovingly. "I'm surprised at you."

"Well," Rudy admitted, "not as much as I used to."

Alwir's was one of the few tents left in the tram. It was pitched in the lee of some trees, out of the wind; in the darkening of the late afternoon, yellow lights could already be seen glowing within. Gil could make out a confusion of voices coming from it, Bishop Govannin's harsh halfwhisper, and now and then Bektis' light, mellifluous tenor.

"... full ferocity of the storm is by no means upon us," the sorcerer was saying sententiously. "Nor will it be, for I will turn its force aside and keep it over the mountains to the north until such time as we can come to the Keep."

"Turn it aside?" Govannin rasped. "Have you been to the camp across the river, my lord wizard? They are half-buried in the snow there and freezing."

"Yet we cannot go on tonight," Alwir said and added, with smooth malice, "We have too few carts and horses to make good speed. What must be carried, must be carried on the backs of men. And if they will not rid themselves of what is useless... "

"Useless!" the Bishop spat. "Useless to those who would dispose of all precedents for the legal position of the Church, perhaps. Mere technicalities to those who would rather forget their existence."

Alwir protested, as sanctimonious as a preacher, "God's Church is more than a pile of mildewed paper, my lady. It lies in the hearts of men."

"And in the hearts of the faithful it will always remain," she agreed dryly. "But memory does not lie in the heart, nor does law. Men and women have fought and died for the rights of the Church, and the only record of those rights, the only fruit of those spent lives, is in those wagons. I will not leave that to perish in the snow at the mere word of a baby King's running-dog."

Ingold pushed aside the flap of the tent. Beyond him, Gil saw Alwir's face change and stiffen into a mask of silver, barred and streaked with ugly shadow, the mouth made of iron. The Chancellor lurched to his feet, his head brushing the bottom of the single hanging lamp, towering over the slight scarlet figure of the Bishop with clenched fist; for a moment it seemed that he might strike her where she sat. But she only looked up at him with flat black eyes, emotionless as a shark's, and waited in triumph for the blow to fall.

"My lord Alwir!" Hoarse and unmistakable, the voice cut like a referee's whistle between them, breaking the tension with an almost audible snap. They both turned, and Ingold inclined his head respectfully. "My lady Bishop," he finished his greeting.

Just perceptibly, the Bishop's taut body settled back into her chair. Alwir placed his fist upon his hip, rather than visibly unclench it at another man's word. "So you decided to come back," the Chancellor said.

"Why did you make camp?" Ingold asked without preamble.

"My dear Ingold," the Chancellor soothed, "as you can see, it has begun to grow dark... "

"That," Ingold said acidly, "is what I mean. You could have pushed on, to reach the Keep sometime tonight, or gone back across the river, to be with the main body of the convoy. Isolated on this side of the river, you're nothing but bait."

Patiently, Alwir said, "We have, as you may have noticed, a temporary bridge, across which we are slowly bringing the rest of the convoy, as well as sufficient troops to deal with any emergency that may arise in the night."

"You think the Dark couldn't deal with that as easily as they deal with solid oak doors? As easily as they dealt with the stone pillars of the original bridge?"

"The Dark had nothing to do with that," Alwir said rather sharply.

"You think not?"

Bektis' long fingers toyed with a huge solitaire cat's-eye he wore on his left hand. "You cannot pretend it anymore," he said rather pettishly. "You are not the only mage in the train, my lord Ingold, and I, too, have cast my powers of far-seeing here and there in the mountains. The only Nest that was ever in these parts was blocked with stone long ago, and you yourself know that we have felt no threat of the Dark since we have come to the high country." He raised heavy white lids and stared from under them at Ingold, defiance, resentment, and spite mingling in his dark, burning eyes.

"So they have made it appear," Ingold replied slowly. "But I have come from that Nest and I tell you that it lies open."

"And is this another of those things," the Bishop asked dryly, folding her fingers before her on the table, like a little pile of ivory spindles, "for which yours is the only word?"

Lamplight glittered in the melting snow on his shoulders as he turned toward her. "It is. But there are things, like the commandments of God, which we must all take upon trust, my lady. Surely you yourself know that we have only one man's word on the true means of salvation and that those means are not what a reasonable man would logically conclude. For now mine-and, incidentally, Gil's-must be the only word you have that the Dark are in that valley, that they have held back from the train deliberately, and that they have broken the bridge in order to kill the Prince or isolate him on this side of the river."

Govannin opened her mouth to speak, then shut it again thoughtfully.

Ingold went on. "They will never allow Tir, with what he could become and the secrets he may hold, to reach the Keep. The storm has given us our chance, and I suggest that we take it and push on now, tonight, under its cover to the Keep."

"Cover?" Alwir swung around to face him, his voice jeering. "Shroud, you mean. We'll freeze to death... "

"You'll freeze just as quickly here," Ingold pointed out.

Piqued, Bektis announced primly, "I am quite capable of holding off such a storm as this... "

"And the Dark as well?" Ingold retorted.

The sorcerer stared at him for a moment, hatred in his narrow face, and a watery flush of red crept up under his white cheeks.

Without waiting for his reply, Ingold said, "Nor could I. There are limits to all power."

"And to all endurance," the Bishop said imperturbably. "And I for one will not be stampeded by fear, like a sheep into the shambles. We can weather this storm and push on in the daylight."

"And if the storm does not break until this time tomorrow?"

Alwir leaned a kid-gloved hand on the back of his carved chair. "Don't you think you're putting too much importance on this storm? I am agreeable to whatever may be voted, provided I can find cartage for the effects of the government... "

Govannin's eyes blazed. "Not at the cost of-"

"Don't be a pair of fools." The words were spoken quietly as the white embroidery of the tent-curtains rippled, and a girl stood framed in gleaming silk against the shadows of the room beyond. Minalde's face was very white against the raven blackness of her unbound hair. She was wrapped for warmth in a star-decorated quilt, holding Tir against her under its folds. The child's eyes, wide and wandering in fascination over the lamplit ulterior of the tent, were a jewel-blue echo of his mother's and of Alwir's own.

"You are both acting like fools," she went on in a low voice. "The tide is rising, and you are arguing about who will be the first one into the boat."

Alwir's aristocratic nostrils flared in annoyance, but he only said, "Minalde, go back to your room."

"I will not," she replied in that same quiet voice.

"This is none of your affair." His was the voice of a man to a recalcitrant child.

"It is my affair." She kept her words soft, but Alwir and Rudy both stared at her, more astonished than if she had burst forth into colorful profanity. All the breath went out of Alwir as if she'd kicked him; he had obviously never even considered that his gentle and acquiescent little sister would defy him. Rudy, who remembered how she'd shoved a torch into his face on the haunted stairs at Karst, was less surprised.

"Tir is my son," she continued. "Your stubbornness could get him killed."

The Chancellor's impassive face flushed; he looked ready to tell her to mind her tongue before her elders and betters. But she was, after all, Queen of Darwath.

"If what my lord Ingold says is true," he said.

"I believe him," she said. "And I trust him. And I will go on with him to the Keep tonight, if I go alone."

From where she stood in Ingold's shadow by the corner of the tent, Gil could see that this girl, wrapped in stars and darkness, was trembling. It couldn't have been easy to defy a man who, by all accounts, had run her life for years; Gil's respect for Minalde, who had been up to this moment merely a name and a silhouette in the darkness, increased.

"Thank you for your trust, my lady," Ingold said quietly, and their eyes met for a moment. Gil knew from experience that the wizard's gaze could strip the spirit bare and defenseless; but whatever Alde saw in his eyes, it must have reassured her, for she turned away with a straight back and an air of resolution.

Alwir caught her arm, drew her to him, and said something that none of them could catch, but his face was intent and angry. Alde pulled her arm from his grip and went inside without a word. It was just as well that she did, for she did not see her brother's face, transformed by cold rage into the mask Gil had seen when first she'd entered the tent, a mask all the more inhuman because it was so impersonal. But when he turned back to them, his smile was deprecating. "It appears," he said, "that we are moving on tonight after all."

It was clear that this was the opening line to something else, but the Bishop cut him off so smoothly that the interruption had every appearance of being accidental. "If that is so," she said in her slow, dry voice, "I must go and make ready the wagons of the Church." And she was gone, far more quickly than anyone would have believed possible, before he could speak any command.

It was almost fully dark by the time the camp broke. Snow was coming down harder now, the wind whirling little flurries of grainy flakes into the ashes of the stamped-out fires and coating the churned mud in a thin layer of white. Word had been carried across the river over the makeshift bridge, and families were crossing slowly, men and women balancing precariously on the shaky spiderweb of rope and cottonwood poles, with their bundles on their shoulders. Oddly enough, when Rudy walked down to the jerry-built bridgehead with Ingold and Gil to see about the single wagon Alwir had negotiated from one of his merchant friends, he found that a spirit of optimism seemed to have seized the train, grossly at odds with the circumstances. The grumbling wasn't any less prevalent, and the curses were just as loud and vivid. Men and women packed up their few belongings, rubbing chapped hands in the flaying cold, snapping, bickering, and fighting among themselves-but something had changed. The bitter desperation of the early part of the march was gone. An aliveness crackled through the blinding air that had not been felt before-a hope. This was the last march, if they could make it. They were within striking distance of the Keep.

"That should do," Ingold remarked, watching Guards and Alwir's private troops dragging the half-disassembled wagon box up the crooked trail. "Granted, it should make Minalde and Tir a target, but in this case that's better than risking losing them in the snow. As for you two... " He turned to them and laid a hand on each of their shoulders. "Whatever you do, stay close to that wagon; it's your best hope of reaching the Keep alive. I'm going to be up and down the train; I may not see you. I realize none of this is any of your business-that you were hauled into it against your will, and neither of you owes me anything. But please, see that Alde and the child reach the Keep in safety."

"Won't you be there?" Gil asked uneasily.

"I don't know where I'll be," the wizard said. Snow lodged in his beard and on his cloak. In the failing light Gil thought he looked worn out. Not surprising, she thought. She herself was operating on nervous energy alone. "Take care of yourselves, my children. I'll get you safely out of this yet."

He turned and was gone, the stray ends of his muffler whipping like banners in the wind.

"He looks bad," Rudy said quietly, leaning on his staff as the snowy twilight swallowed the old man. "You guys must have had one hell of a trip."

Gil chuckled dryly. "Never doubt he's a wizard, Rudy. He has to be, to get people to follow him on crazy stunts like that."

Rudy gave her a sidelong, thoughtful glance. "Well, you know, even back in California I thought the setup was crazy, but I just about believed him. You do. You have to."

And Gil understood. Ingold had a way of making anything seem possible, even feasible-that an aimless motorcycle drifter could call forth fire from darkness, or that a mild-mannered and acrophobic Ph.D. candidate would follow him over the perilous roof of creation to do battle with bodiless, unspeakable foes.

Or that a ragged train of fugitives, split by dissensions, frozen half to death and at the end of their strength, could make a fifteen-mile forced march through storm and darkness to find at last a refuge they had never seen.

She sighed and hitched her too-large cloak over her narrow shoulders. The wind still bit through, as it had torn at her all day. She felt tired to the bones. The night, she knew, would be terrible beyond thinking. She started to move off, seeking the Guards, then paused in her steps. "Hey, Rudy?"

"Yeah?"

"Take care of Minalde. She's a good lady."

Rudy stared at her in surprise, for he had not thought she had known, much less that she would understand. Rudy still had much to learn about coldhearted women with pale schoolmarm eyes. "Thanks," he said, unaccountably touched by her concern. "You ain't so bad yourself. For a spook," he added with a grin, which she returned wickedly.

"Well, it beats me why she'd hang out with a punk airbrush-jockey, but that's her business. I'll see you at the Keep."

Rudy found Alde where the few remaining servants of the House of Bes were packing the single wagon. She herself was loading bedrolls into it; Medda, if she had still been alive, would have expired from indignation at the sight. He kissed her gently in greeting. "Hey, you were dynamite."

"Dynamite?"

"You were great," he amended. "Really. I didn't think Alwir would go along with it."

She turned back, Hushing suddenly in the diffuse glow of the torchlight. "I didn't care whether he went along, as you say, or not. But I ought not to have called them fools. Not Alwir, and certainly not my lady Bishop. It was-rude."

"So do penance for it at confession." He drew her to him again. "You got your point across."

She stared in silence for a moment into his eyes. "He's right, isn't he?" she whispered intently. "The Dark are in the mountains."

"That's what Gil tells me," he replied softly. "He's right. They're nearer than we think."

She stood for a moment, her hands clasped behind his neck, staring up into his face with wide, desperate eyes, as if unwilling to end this moment because of all that must come after. But a noise from the cart made her break away and scramble over the tailboard to replace her wandering son in his little nest among the blankets. He heard her whisper, "You lie down." A moment later she reappeared around the curtains.

"You're gonna need a leash for that kid once he starts crawling," Rudy commented.

Alde shuddered. "Don't remind me." And she disappeared inside.

The convoy began to move. The wind increased in violence, howling down the canyons to fall on the pilgrims with iron claws. Rudy stumbled along beside the wagon, blinded by the snow, his fingers growing numb through his gloves. The road here was disused, but better than the road from Karst had been, with pavement down the center where it had not been broken up by tree-roots or buried by neglect. Still, the drifting snow made treacherous footing, and Rudy knew that those at the tail of the convoy would be sliding their way through a river of slush. Wind and darkness cut visibility to almost nothing. The shapes of the Guards surrounding the wagon grew dim and chaotic, like half-guessed shadows in a frightful dream.

Remembering Ingold's teachings, Rudy tried to call light to him. He managed to throw a big, sloppy ball of it about three feet in front of him to light his steps. But the effort took most of his concentration and, as he slipped in the snow or staggered under the brutal flail of the wind, the light dimmed and scattered. The snow thickened in the air, like swirling gray meal all around him, except where it passed, unmelting, through the witchlight, which transformed it into a tiny roaring storm of diamonds that made his eyes ache. His cloak and boots dragged wetly on his limbs, and his hands passed quickly from insensibility to pain. Once, when the wind slacked like the slacking of a rope, he heard Minalde's voice from the wagon, singing softly to her child:

"Hush, little baby, don't say a word,

Papa's gonna buy you a mockingbird... "

He wondered numbly how that song had ever leaked its way into the tongue of the Wathe.

He lost all track of time. How long he'd been struggling through the blinding wilderness he had no way of knowing, could not even guess. He felt as if it had been hours since they'd broken camp, the ground always rising under his slipping feet, the wind worrying at him like a beast at its prey. He hung onto the wagon grimly with one hand and onto his staff with the other; at tunes it seemed as if those were the only things keeping him on his feet He knew by then that if he went down, he would die.

At one point, Gil came up beside him, so thin and ragged he wondered dully why she didn't blow away. She yelled at him over the gale. "You okay?"

He nodded. A lady and a scholar, he thought. And tough as they come.

Others passed them, or were passed by them, fighting the wind with desperate persistence. He saw the old man from Karst with his crates of chickens still piled on his bowed back, wrapped up in blankets and laden with pounds of trapped snow. The struggling band of camp orphans were roped together like goslings behind their chief. A stout woman leading a goat passed them; a little farther on he saw her lying face down in the snow, the goat standing wretchedly over her body.

And still they pushed on. Rudy stumbled and fell, his body so numb he was scarcely aware of hitting the ground. Someone bent over him, hauled him to his feet, and shook him out of his stupor with a violence that surprised him-a ghostly, dark shape in a blowing mantle, with a bluewhite light burning on the end of his staff. Rudy staggered wordlessly back to the wagon, catching the cover ropes for support, and the shape melted into the dark. In the lightless chaos he could see other shapes moving, dragging stragglers to their feet, urging them on with words or pleas, curses or blows. He clung to the ropes grimly, reminding himself he'd promised to get Alde to the Keep, reminding himself that there was a goal, somewhere in this black universe of unending cold. He had learned already that, under certain circumstances, death could be very sweet indeed.

Time had become very deceptive; every movement was ponderously slow, an incredible effort barely worth the trouble, like that old Greek guy who had to push the stone up the hill, knowing full well it was just going to roll to the bottom again. The night was far gone. He could tell by the changing note of the wind that they were coming clear of the deep gorges, coming into a more open space. Feebly, mind and will drowning in a blind darkness that was within him as well as without, he tried to call back a little of the witchlight, but raised not even a glimmer.

Just keep putting one foot in front of the other, he told himself grimly. You'll get there. The wind struck him like a club; he went down and this time decided not to get up. They could make it to the Keep without him. He was going to sleep for a while.

He drifted for a time in memories, chiefly of the warm hills of California, the rippling gold of the sunbaked grass, and the way the sun had felt on his bare arms as he hauled down Highway 15 on his chopper in the late evening, the wind streaming through his hair. He wondered if he'd ever get to do that again. Probably not, he decided. But even that didn't matter much. Who'd have figured that leaving on a beer run would end up with me freezing to death in a range of mountains that never even existed?

Life is weird.

A seven- foot giant with a kick like a mule loomed suddenly in the darkness and booted him in the ribs. Cold returned, and a thin leakage of pain spread into every muscle and joint. He mumbled, "Hey," protestingly, and the giant kicked him again.

"Get up, you sniveler." Why did a seven-foot giant have Gil's voice?

Arrogant egghead bitch. "No."

Even a few weeks of swordmastery training had given her a grip like a claw. Surprising, too, that somebody wasted down to ninety-eight pounds of brittle bone could have the strength to drag him to his feet and throw him with such violence against the side of the moving wagon, so that he had to catch hold of it.

"Now keep moving," she ordered.

Stupid of her not to understand. "I can't," he explained groggily.

"The hell with you!" she yelled at him, suddenly furious. "You may be a goddam wizard, but you're a coward and a quitter, and I'll be damned if I'll have you let everybody down by up and dying on the road. You die when you get to the Keep if you want to so bad. We're only a couple miles from it."

"Hunh?" Rudy tried to keep a grip on the rope with his fingers, but they were too numb. He thrust his whole arm through the space between the rope and the flapping cover. "What did you say?"

But as if in answer to his words, he felt a sudden change in the air. The titanic winds veered, and the relentless hammering force of them slackened, making him stagger, as if for a support suddenly lost. The snow, instead of peppering his body like bullets from a Tommy gun, fell straight for a few moments, then ceased. He could hear the roaring of the wind in the pines above the road and its shrieking whine in the rocks, but the air around him, though freezing cold, was still.

The wagon team halted, one ox managing a plaintive low. Boots scrunched in the squeaking snow all about him; somewhere leather creaked. He could hear his own breath and that of the woman beside him.

"What is it?" he whispered. "Has the storm let up?"

"Not like that, it wouldn't. Besides, you can still hear it overhead."

He blinked against the darkness and raised a shaking hand to scrape ice crystals from his eyes. "Then what... " Then he realized what must have happened. Shock and fear sent a jolt of adrenalin into his veins that cleared his groggy mind. "Oh, Christ," he whispered. "Ingold."

"He stopped the storm, didn't he?" Gil said softly. "They must have been losing too many people... "

"But you know what that means?" Rudy said urgently.

"It means the Dark will be coming now." He took an experimental step away from the wagon and found he could stand after a fashion by leaning on his staff. "We gotta get moving."

The Guards were closing in around them, some thirty strong; he could pick out their voices in the darkness. God only knew where the rest of the train was. They'd gotten so badly strung out in the storm, it was every man for himself. He flexed his right hand stiffly, trying to convince himself it was still really his; he heard Gil's voice speaking softly to the Guards around them and, brief and cold, the Icefalcon's breathless laugh. Gil came back to him. "Can you call up some light?" she asked. "The land flattens out from here on; we could lose the road completely. Look."

There was, in fact, only one thing to look at: a tiny square of orange light, distant and sharp in the wastelands of cold.

"Tomec Tirkenson's up at the Keep. That's the fire around the doors."

"Okay," Rudy said. "We can make for that, if nothing else." He tried several times to call light, but his fatigue-drugged consciousness was unequal to the task. They were moving again, heading steadily toward that tiny orange star, the going impossibly rough over the steep, uneven ground. From the wagon behind him, he heard Tir's thin, protesting wails and Alde's voice, softly shushing him. He trod on something hard that rolled sickeningly underfoot, stumbled, and put his hand on it in falling. It was an iron cook pot. Despite the cold and danger, he grinned-others had made it this far. The whole Vale was probably littered with discarded household goods, flung away in a last, desperate effort to keep on going. Well, if they could do it, he could do it.

And then he felt it-a breath of wind in the stillness, a wind not like the might of the storm, but a thin, directionless whisper that spoke of stone and damp, warm darkness, a faint stirring of air from above and behind and all sides. Turning, he saw the Dark.

How he saw them he wasn't sure-perhaps by some wizard-sense, grown from the exercise of his powers. They flowed over the snow toward the wagon, scarcely distinguishable one from the other or from the shifting river of illusion in which they swam. Whiplike tails steered and propelled, and they moved with a sinuous glide, the jointed legs tucked in folds like bamboo armor under the soft, dripping tentacles of the slobbering mouths. For a moment he stood hypnotized, fascinated by the changing shapes, now visible, now only wavering ghosts. He wondered in what sense they could be said to be material at all. What atoms and molecules made up those sleek, pulsing bodies? What brain, or brains, had conceived the stairways that led down to the blackness under the earth?

Then one of the oxen gave a great bellow of terror and tried to leap forward; it fell, pulling down its teammate in a tangle of harness and splintering the wagon tongue under its threshing weight.

"The Dark!" Rudy yelled in desperate warning, and tried to summon light, any light, for aid against the unseen foes. He heard Alde scream. Then from behind him a shattering blaze of witchlight pierced the darkness like a strobe, and that pouring river of shadow and illusion broke against it and swirled away like a great ring of smoke. Ingold came striding out of the unnatural stillness, his shadow thrown hard and blue onto the glittering snow at his feet.

"Cut that ox loose, get my lady out of the wagon, and get moving," he ordered briefly. By the burning light, the Guards came running to them, faces haggard under the crusting of frost. "Janus, do you think you can make it as far as the Keep?"

The Commander, barely recognizable under the ice that scaled his hair and cloak, squinted at the light in the distance, against which the tiny figures of men were now clearly visible. "I think so," he panted. "Again, you've saved us."

Ingold retorted, "It's about a mile and a half too soon to say that. My lady... "

He turned back to the wagon. The Icefalcon had cut the team loose, but the wagon was clearly beyond further use. From the curtains at the front, a white face looked out, framed in the darkness of a black fur hood and a cascade of crow-black hair.

Rudy stepped quickly over to the wagon. "We've got to run for it, babe," he said softly, and she nodded, turning unquestioningly back into the shadows of the cart to fetch Tir. She reappeared a moment later with the heavily muffled infant in her arms, her face pale in the light of Ingold's staff, her eyes wide with apprehension. Gil held out her arms and received the child awkwardly, while Rudy helped Minalde down over the broken wagon tongue. Even through two pairs of gloves and the burning numbness of his fingers, he was conscious of the touch of her hand.

"How far?" she whispered.

Gil nodded toward the distant orange gleam of the Keep doors. "About two miles."

Alde took the baby back, feeling as she did so the chill, prickly sensation she had known before, the subconscious awareness of the presence of the Dark. The Dark Ones had not been defeated by the advent of the light. They had merely drawn off to wait.

The wind still howled overhead, but near them the air was uncannily still. From all around them in the Vale they could hear voices, distorted by cold and distance, voices of fear, hope, despair. Refugees throughout the dark mountains were making for the lights of the Keep, unseen forms fighting their way through stillness and deep snow; but within the circle of light cast by Ingold's staff, the little group of Guards around the fallen wagon were alone. Coated with frost, they seemed to be some kind of fantastic ice-creatures, beaded with diamonds and breathing crystal smoke. And beyond them, invisible in the blue-black ocean of the night, that sense of restless motion stirred just out of the range of vision.

Ingold came over to the little group by the wagon tongue, his light harsh on their drawn, haggard faces. He was a man who imparted his own strength to others; Gil found she drew warmth from his presence, as from a fire, and saw that Rudy and Alde looked a little less deathly as well. He put a hand briefly to Alde's cheek and gazed sharply into her face. "Can you make it?"

"I have to," she said simply.

"Good girl. Rudy... "

Rudy stepped forward hesitantly.

"Channel your Power through your staff; that's what it's there for, not just to keep you from stubbing your toes."

Rudy looked in surprise at the six-foot walking stick he'd cut for himself miles up the road. "Uh-you mean, that's all? You don't have to do anything special to make a staff magic?"

Ingold appeared to pray briefly for patience. "All things are inherently magic," he said patiently. "Now... "

Tentatively, Rudy called light again, feeling the power of it through his hand, through the wood that had become smoothed to his grip by its use, through the air. Light began to burn smokily from the end of the staff, growing brighter and throwing doubled shadows, blue and black, on the spokes of the wagon wheels, on the thin, frightened faces of the two girls, on the dilapidated cart, and on the deep-set hollows of Ingold's eyes.

Softly, the wizard said, "Don't leave them, Rudy." Rudy had the sudden, uncomfortable feeling that the old man knew about his giving up, his lying down to die and leaving the others to their own devices. He felt himself flush.

"I'm sorry," he mumbled.

Wind stirred around his feet. He swung about, scanning the darkness beyond. He felt a counterspell, like the cold touch of an alien hand, slipping into his mind from the darkness. He felt the light dimming, looked up, and saw that Ingold's staff, too, had begun to flicker unsteadily. At the same time he smelled the cold, bitter, acid stink of the Dark. Steel whined as Gil drew her sword; all around them was the muted flashing of blades as the Guards closed in an outward-facing ring.

What instinct warned him he never knew, but he ducked, drew and turned, and slashed in one movement, almost before he was aware of the thing that fell suddenly on him out of the night. He heard Alde scream and got a confused glimpse of Gil, with a face of stone and a blade of fire, cleaving darkness in a long side-on cut that seemed to cover them all in an explosion of blood and slime. The witchlight dimmed to gray, and the Guards pressed back, defending as best they could against the slimy onslaught. The counterspell sucked at him, draining his power as if from a cut artery, and for a time he saw nothing, knew nothing but that he must keep between the Dark and the woman at his back.

Then, without warning, they were gone, and the strength of the witchlight was renewed. Somebody yelled, "Come on!" and Rudy found himself grasping Alde's right arm while Gil held her left, hurrying over the slime-spattered muck of the snow, the light of his staff brightening over the mess of mud and bloody bones, with the Guards closing around them in a tight flying wedge. Ingold strode ahead, white breath smoking in the light that showed the snow all around them trampled by stampedes of fleeing feet and strewn with the discarded bundles of the refugees. Groggily, Rudy tried to keep up with him, leaden with cold and fatigue and stumbling in the drifted mess, trying to keep his eyes on the brilliant square of orange light in the distance that marked the end of this nightmare road. He could make out movement there clearly now, small shapes in those great doors. He could sense the Dark massing above them like storm clouds and felt the touch of their spells again, drawing and sapping at his strength.

Then the soft, sinister shadows dropped like vultures from above, a half-seen cloudy death that filled the night. Rudy's sword seemed to be weighted with lead, his arm shot full of Novocain. He knew that if he hadn't been in the center of the pack, he would have been killed at once. Seeing Gil slash and dodge in the gray darkness and step in under the whining arc of a spined whip half again as long as she was, he understood why Gnift flayed the bodies and souls of his Guard students and why Gil and the others trained the way they did, doggedly, through injuries, cold, and fatigue. It was only their training that saved them now.

Thin winds ruffled mockingly around them, and the Dark were gone. Rudy, gasping for breath, hung onto his staff for support, holding the half-fainting Alde with his other arm and wondering if he'd have the strength to drag her as far as the Keep. Though they were less than a mile off, the roaring glow of the gate-fires could barely be seen through the massed, cloaking shadows that filled the night. The Guards closed up again. "Now," Ingold said quietly. "Go. Go quickly." Horrified, Janus protested, "They're all around us, they'll never let us through."

The wizard was panting with exertion, and the pallid light showed his hands cut and noisome with slime. "They will if you go now. Hurry, or-"

"You're not staying!" the Commander cried.

"But- " Rudy began, stupefied.

"Do as I say!" the wizard thundered, and Rudy stepped back a pace, shocked. Ingold drew his sword in a single gleaming movement, the blade flashing in the dark. "Go!"

Janus looked at him for a long moment, as if he might, at the last, disobey. Then abruptly he turned and strode off through snow and darkness; after a momentary, uncertain pause, Rudy and the others followed, he and Gil half-dragging Minalde between them. He could feel the spells of the Dark shifting aside from the light he bore and could sense their malice concentrated elsewhere. Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw Ingold standing where they had left him, a dark form in the burning aureole of the light, his head cocked to listen to the sounds of the night, blood dripping from his gashed knuckles to stain the snow at his feet.

The wizard waited until the little party of Guards had gone almost two hundred yards from him. Then Rudy, turning again to look back, saw him throw down his staff in the snow. The light went out. The sword blade swung in a searing, phosphorescent arc. Rudy knew that the Dark had closed in on the old man.

They ran on. Tir had begun to wail, his cries thin and muffled with exhaustion, within the shelter of his mother's cloak. There was no other sound; but looking across Alde once, Rudy got a glimpse of Gil's face, a pale-eyed mask of pain. The blazing gates seemed to get no nearer, though he could now clearly distinguish the shapes grouped on the steps in the glare of the bonfires, with the Runes of Guarding and Law looming behind them, reflected in the bloody light. One dark shape he knew must be Tomec Tirkenson; another, he thought, was Govannin. There seemed to be something wrong with his perception of distance. The air was still, without movement or scent or breath, without even the sensation of the nearness of the Dark-though he knew he had to be wrong about that; it must be only the effect of his senses slipping gradually away. The Dark had to be following, waiting the moment to strike. Twice he looked back over his shoulder and saw the firefly movement of Ingold's blade in the darkness. He wondered dizzily why the wizard had sent them on and wondered, with all the strength left in him to wonder, if they'd make it as far as the gates before the Dark finally fell on them from above. The ground steepened; he seemed to be moving through a knee-deep sea of slush, struggling to keep to his feet.

Then from above them, the wind streamed down-not the winds of the Dark, but the storm winds, swirling snow down on them as they fled toward the blazing Hell-mouth of the gates. The howl of the rising gale was like the keening of wolves on the kill. The storm winds that hit them with a force that made Rudy stagger were blinding, freezing, raging over them with wild, malicious glee. He struggled on, seeing before him the towering darkness of some vast, somber cliff, the storm winds driving the flames into thirty-foot maypoles of fire. He tripped on something in the darkness and fell, Alde's arm sliding from his grasp. Looking up, he saw before him the blazing gates; he had fallen on the steps. He could see Gil dragging Alde up the steps, framed in a wild coruscation of snow and fire, the wind mixing their dark hair into a single streaming cloud.

Someone came down to him and hauled him up and into that red inferno. Sick and half-fainting, he could see only that the hand that gripped his arm was covered by a black velvet glove glittering with rubies, like droplets of newshed blood.

When his eyes cleared, he was lying on the floor just within the gates, half-covered in blowing snow. Men and women were coming inside, staggering with cold and exhaustion-children, too, he saw, and realized Gil had been right. His surrender to fate back in the snowy darkness had been an act of cowardice that an eight-year-old could have bettered. Beyond them, silhouetted against the ruddy light, he saw Govannin, a skull with live coals in the eye sockets, a sword in her skeleton hand. Alwir was a dark tower, his sister leaning on the strength of his mighty arms, her child sobbing exhaustedly at her breast. Alwir's eyes were not on either of them, but looking beyond, into the dark cave of the Keep itself, calculating the dimensions of his new kingdom. And past them was Gil, her coarse, witchy hair fluttering in the backwash of the storm as she stood at the gates, looking out into the darkness. But in all that waste of ice and bitter wind, Rudy could see no trace of any moving light.