"Eldor was a scholar, and saw this; he knew what had happened before, through his own memories of the long years of superstition and darkness and the mean-minded fears of men to whom the unknown was always threatening. Alwir and Govannin see it coming, and know that once they let their hold on centralized power slip, nothing can get it back.
"And so, Quo could be our only hope."
Rudy cocked his head curiously. "Didn't Alwir talk about some plan-about getting allies to invade the Nests of the Dark? Is that still coming off?"
"It is," Ingold said thinly. "He has sent south, to the great Empire of Alketch, for help in this endeavor, and I do not doubt he shall get it."
The flat, repressive note in his voice startled Rudy, who looked up from idly turning the crystal in his fingers, angling it to what remained of the waning light. "Sounds like not a bad idea," he admitted.
Ingold shrugged. "It would not be," he said, "but for two things. The first is that, deny it though we might, our civilization is all but broken. Even if we drive back the Dark, to what new world of Light will we come? I have seen in the crystal, and by other means, that the depredations of the Dark are far lighter in the south than they are here. The Empire of Alketch is a strong realm still. They can help us in Alwir's invasion; and then, when the remains of the forces of the Realm have taken the brunt of the casualties, they will be on the spot, ready to take the land left depopulated and defenseless in the aftermath. Alwir will have exchanged death for slavery-and there are varying opinions on which is the worse fate."
The blue eyes glittered under the heavy brows. "I know Alketch, you see," the wizard went on quietly. "The southern Empire has long coveted these northern lands. I know Alketch-and I know the Dark.
"Alwir finds a great deal to say about the number of things for which mine is the only word. He is right. About the Dark, mine is the only word, now that Eldor is gone and the sole male heir of the House of Dare is too young to speak. And I know that an invasionary force to the Nests will surely fail.
"I have been to a Nest. I have seen the Dark in their cities beneath the ground."
The wizard leaned back against the wall behind him. The room was sinking in shadow all around. His voice was quiet, distant, leading his listeners to another place and time.
"A long time ago I was the local spell-weaver for a village, oh, way over in Gettlesand. It was a good-sized village, but not so large that the Lord of Gettlesand would think to look for me there. I was, in fact, hiding out, but that is part of another tale.
"The dooic run wild in tribes in that part of the country. They prefer the empty plains, but they do hide in the hills, and they have sometimes been known to carry off small children. One of the children of the mayor of my village had vanished, and I tracked her and her tribe of kidnappers for a night and a day, back into the hills. It was in a cave, in a ridge of foothills beneath a desert mountain range, that I first saw one of the Dark Ones. It was night. The creature dropped from the ceiling of the cave where it had been clinging and devoured an old male dooic which had taken shelter there. It was not aware of my presence.
"Now I had learned about Dark Ones in old books that I had read, and from the ancient legends handed down to me, like this jewel, from my master Rath. I realized this must be a surviving Dark One, and it occurred to me that isolated groups of these creatures, which had once overwhelmed mankind and then vanished from the face of the earth, might still be hiding in the fastnesses of mountain and desert. And because I am, and always have been, incurably inquisitive, I followed it back through the darkness, down tunnels so steep I had to cling to the walls and floor to keep myself from sliding headlong into the blackness. I remember thinking to myself at the time that the numbers of the Dark Ones had shrunk so badly that they lived thus for their own protection; a wretched remnant of a force that had once dominated the face of the world and changed the courses of civilization.
"I followed the little Dark One-for it was crawling along the floor, and only about so big-" He gestured with his hands. "-deeper and deeper into the heart of the earth, crawling and climbing and scrambling to keep up with it. And do you know, at that point I was almost sorry for the vanished Dark Ones in what I supposed to be their exile. Then I saw the tunnel widen ahead of me and I looked out into their-city."
The quality of the old man's voice was hypnotic, and his eyes had the faraway look of seeing nothing in that small twilit room. "It was completely dark, of course," he went on. "I do see clearly in the dark. The cavern below me must have run on for almost a mile, stretching downward and back and farther down into the earth. The tunnel in which I lay overlooked it, and I could scarcely see the other end of the cave, lost as it was in shadows. The stalactites of the ceiling, as far back as I could see, were crawling with the Dark, covered with them, black with their bodies; the rattle of their claws on the limestone was like the sound of hail. And down the wall to my right, at floor level, there was an entrance to another passageway, about as high as a man could walk through. There was a stream of them, coming and going from deeper underground. I knew that under that cavern there was another one, as large or larger; and below that, possibly another. That was only one city, situated miles from anywhere, in the midst of the deserts, probably not even their largest city." Memory of the horror deepened the lines that age and hard living had scrawled in his face; he looked like some Old Testament prophet, gifted with the sure knowledge of civilization's downfall and helpless to prevent it. Rudy knew that he saw, not them, not this room, but the endless cavern of darkness, and felt afresh the impact of that first realization that unguessably vast hordes of the Dark Ones still lived beneath the surface of the earth-not in exile, not out of necessity, hut because it was their chosen habitat. And there was nothing to prevent them from rising, as they had risen once before.
Rudy's voice broke the quiet that had followed the wizard's account. "You say they were all across the ceiling of the place," he said. "What was on the floor?"
Ingold's eyes met his, darkened with the memory and almost angry that Rudy should have asked-angry that he'd already half-guessed. "They have their-flocks and herds," he said unwillingly, and would have left it at that, but the young man's eyes challenged him to say it. "Mutated, adapted, inbred after countless generations of living in the dark. I knew then, you see, that human beings were their natural prey."
"That's why the stairways," Rudy said thoughtfully. The Dark don't need stairs-they haven't got any feet. They could drive dooic... "
"These weren't dooic," Ingold said. "They were human-of a sort." He shuddered, repelled by the memory. "But you see, my children, all the armies in the world would be hardly enough for what Alwir proposes. All that an invasion will do is cripple the existing fighting force of the Realm and leave too few men to guard the doors of their homes against the Empire of Alketch-or against the Dark.
"The alternative, retreating to the Keeps and letting civilization die around us in the hopes that one day the Dark will pass, is hardly a more appealing proposition; but at this point I literally cannot see a third course. Even Alwir has been forced to recognize that we cannot simply flee them, and it is not likely that the Dark Ones will spontaneously become vegetarians.
"So you see," he concluded quietly, "I must find Lohiro and find him quickly. If I do not, we are faced with a choice of disasters. Wizardry has long garnered its knowledge in an isolated tower on the shores of the Western Ocean, apart from the world, teaching, experimenting, balancing itself in the still center of the moving cosmos-power working for the perfection of power, knowledge for the perfection of knowledge. Nothing is fortuitous-there are no random events. It may be that the whole history of wizardry from Forn on was for this end only: to save us from the Dark."
"If it can," Rudy said softly, and handed him back his jewel.
"If it can," Ingold agreed.
Darkness had fallen. Thin gray rain slanted down on the wreckage of the town of Karst, flurrying the dark slickness of the puddles in the
soupy mud of the court, staining the timber and thatch of the lean-to sheds. Bitter winds blew down off the mountains, whipping Gil's wet cloak around her ankles as she and Rudy crossed the court.
"Three months," Rudy murmured, raising his head under the downpour to survey the ruin of the town, the ruin of the civilization that had built it. "Christ, if the Dark don't get us, we'll freeze to death in that time."
Distant thunder boomed, like far-off artillery. Gil sought shelter from the rain in the darkness of the lean-to barracks, watching Rudy as he crossed the court to where the glow of a sheltered fire marked the common pot. Guards were moving around it, dark ghostly shapes, the brotherhood of the sword, their stained black tunics marked with the white quatrefoil emblem of their company. The sounds of men talking drifted through the sodden drumming of the rain.
Strong hands slipped over her shoulders from behind. A colorless voice purred, "Gilshalos?" She glanced at the hands, close by her cheek; long and thin, the fingers calloused and knotted from the discipline of the sword. Past the black shape of a tunic and the tasseled ends of white braids, she saw a thin face and cool, disinterested eyes. In a flanking maneuver, two other forms appeared and made themselves at home on either side of her.
The swordmaster Gnift took her hand and pressed it to his breast in a good imitation of passion. "O Pearl of my Heart," he greeted her, and she laughed and pulled her hand away. She had never spoken to the instructor, and indeed had been rather awed, watching him coach the Guards. But his teasing took away her shyness and eased the bitterness in her heart. On her other side, Seya was silent, but the woman's thin, lined face smiled. She was evidently long familiar with Gnift's mock flirtations.
"What do you want?" Gil asked, still grinning, shy with them and yet feeling strangely at home. In the brief time she had known them, Seya and the Icefalcon-and now, evidently, Gnift as well-had accepted her for what she was. She had rarely felt so comfortable, even among the other scholars at the university.
Distant firelight reddened the smooth dome of Gnift's head-his baldness was like a tonsure, the hair around the sides growing thickly down almost to his collar. Under the overhanging jut of his brows, his brown eyes were bright, quick, very alive. He said quietly in answer, "You."
And with a flourish he produced the bundle he'd been half-hiding at his side. Unwrapping it, Gil found a faded black tunic, homespun shirt and breeches, a surcoat, and a belt with a dagger. All were marked with the white quatrefoil sign of the Guards.
CHAPTER NINE
Though members of the various military companies mounted guard in the town throughout the night, no sound battered the outer walls but the steady drumming of rain. After a rationed supper of porridge and cheese, Gil took her position with the Guards of the first watch in the Town Hall. The refugees huddled in the shelter of that great, half-empty cavern bowed to her in respect, as they did to all the Guards.
Rudy saw the change in her when he himself strolled into the smoky dimness of the hall later; it puzzled him, for his experience with women, though extensive, had been within a very narrow range. "Talk about hiding out on the front lines," he remarked.
Gil grinned. She was finding that Rudy's opinion of her mattered much less than it had earlier. "We're all on the front lines," she replied equably. "If I'm out there, at least it will be with a weapon in my hands."
"Have you seen the way they train?" He shuddered delicately.
"The insurance is cheap at the price."
But they both knew that this was not the reason she had accepted Gnift's offer of inclusion in that elite corps, though neither Gil nor Rudy was quite clear about the true reason.
In the early part of the evening the great hall was wakeful, though without the boisterous quarrelsomeness that had characterized the previous days. The massacre at Karst had broken the spirits of those who had survived it, had brought home to them, as well as to their rulers, that there was no escape and nowhere to hide.
Still, Rudy was surprised to see how many had survived. Some of them he even recognized: that was the fat man with the garden rake of last night, and the pair of tough old broads he'd talked to in the woods yesterday; over in the corner he could see the little gang of tow-headed kids, keeping watch over the sleeping woman they seemed to have taken for their guardian. Stragglers who had hidden in the woods all day came into the hall by ones and twos, as well as people lost from their families who had taken refuge in other buildings in the town. From Gil's post by the doors, Gil and Rudy saw them enter the hall, all ages, from young teen-agers to creeping oldsters; they would enter and move slowly through the little groups engaged in bundling up their miserable belongings, searching the faces of the people. Sometimes, rarely, the searcher would find the one he sought, and there would be tears and anxious words, some questions and usually more tears. More often the seeker would leave again. One stout man in his forties, in the muddy remains of a respectable black broadcloth tunic and hose, hunted through the hall for the better part of two hours, then sat on one of the piles of smashed and discarded utensils and rags by the door and cried as if his heart would break.
Rudy was thoroughly cold and depressed by the time the gray-haired Guard, Seya, came over to them from the shadows of the great stairway, her face drawn and grim. "Do either of you know where Ingold might be found?" she asked them quietly. "There's a man sick upstairs-we need his advice."
"He should still be at the gatehouse," Gil surmised.
Rudy said, "I'll see." He crossed the main square where the torchlight fitfully gilded the rain-pocked mud. The old fountain brimmed with water, slopping in ebony wavelets over its leeward edge. Icy wind bit into his legs below the wet, flapping hem of the cloak he'd scrounged. Not even the Dark Ones, he decided, would be abroad in a downpour like this.
A gleam of gold led him toward the gate into the Guards' Court. Someone sheltering in the old stables was playing a stringed instrument and singing:
"My love is like a morn in spring,
A falcon fleet when he takes to wing;
And I, a dove, behind will fly,
To ride the roads of the summer sky... "
It was a simple love song, with words of hope and brightness, but the tune was filled with melancholy and an aching grief, the singer's voice all but drowned in the pounding of the rain. Rudy entered the dark slit of the doorway and groped his way up the treacherous stair, guided by the faint light that came down from above. He found Ingold alone in the narrow room. A dim, bluish glow of ball lightning hung over his head, touching the angles of brow and nose and flattened triangular cheekbone with light, and plunging all the rest into shadow. Before him the crystal lay on the windowsill, its colored refractions encircling it in a ring of fire.
Silence and peace coalesced in that room. For a moment Rudy hesitated on the threshold, unwilling to break into Ingold's meditations. He saw the wizard's eyes and knew that the old man saw something in the heart of the crystal, bright and clear as tiny flame; he knew that his own voice, his own intrusion, would shatter the deep, welling silence that made that concentration possible. So he waited, and the silence of the room seeped into his heart, like the deep peace of sleep.
After a time Ingold raised his head. "Did you want me?" The light above his face grew stronger, brightening to silver the shaggy hair and the beard where it surged over the angle of his jutting chin; it broadened to take in the obscure shapes of sacks and firkins, of scattered rushes and sawdust on the floor, and the random pattern of the stone ceiling's cracks and shadows, like incomprehensible runes overhead.
Rudy nodded, releasing the room's silence with regret. "There's sickness over at the hall," he said quietly. "Bad, I think."
Ingold sighed and rose, shaking his voluminous robes out around him. "I feared that," he said. He collected the crystal and stowed it somewhere about his person, shrugged into his dark mantle, drew the hood up over his head, and started for the door, the light drifting after him.
"Ingold?"
The w
izard raised his brows inquiringly.
Rudy hesitated, feeling the question to be foolish, but driven nevertheless to ask it. "How do you do that?" He gestured toward the slim feather of light. "How do you call light?"
The old man held out his open hand; slowly the glow of light grew up from his palm. "You know what it is, and summon it," he replied, his voice low and clear and scratchy in the room. The brightness in his hand intensified, white and pure, stronger and stronger, until Rudy could no longer look at it and had to turn his eyes away. Even then he saw his own shadow cast huge and black against the stonework of the wall. "You know its true name and what it is," the wizard went on, "and by its true name you call it. It is as simple as picking a flower that grows on the other side of a fence." Against the white brilliance, shadows shifted, and Rudy looked back, to see the old man's strong fingers close over the light. For an instant its beams stabbed out from between his knuckles; then the brightness of it dimmed and was gone.
The vagrant glowworm of the witchlight that had been over Ingold's head wandered before them down the inky stairwell, to illuminate their feet. "No dice with Quo?" Rudy asked after a moment.
Ingold smiled at his words. "As you say, no dice."
Rudy, looking back at the sturdy, white-haired old wizard, remembered that it was this man who had worked that subtle enchantment of the languages; he saw Ingold again going against the Dark in the vaults, unarmed but for the noonday blaze of his power. "Are they all like you?" he asked suddenly. "The wizards? Other wizards?"
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