01 THE TIME OF THE DARK d-1

by Barbara Hambly

  Wind moved the clouds down from the west, obscuring the brightness of the moon. The camp was far enough away, behind the sheltering hill, to give them a greater illusion of privacy than they had ever had before, while the moon gave enough light between the clouds for Rudy to be sure nothing was sneaking up on them. He was less afraid of the Dark Ones than of the White Raiders or the wolves, though in all that dim world he saw nothing move, nor heard any howling nearer than the far-off river. So they drank the spiced wine Alde had brought and spoke of everything and nothing, of their childhoods and their past lives, trading memories like a couple of children trading marbles. More clouds gathered, and the darkness surrounding them deepened, the firelight warming and bright on their faces.

  The brief downpour, when it rushed without warning from the sky, took them completely unawares. Hand in hand, they ran for the dugout cabin, with Medda grumbling behind and stopping to pick up the discarded wine cup and a stick from the fire. They fell, laughing, through the door. From inside, they could just barely see Medda, leaning over the torch to protect it from the rain and stumping grumpily through the long grass. But for the moment they were alone in the damp, earth-smelling dimness of the little house.

  The realization that this was the first time they had been alone together out of anyone's sight came to both of them, and their laughter faded. In the darkness of the shack, he could hear Alde's breathing and he sensed that she was afraid of something she had never felt before, something to which she was not yet ready to give herself. She did not move when he put his hand up to push aside her unbound hair. Her cheek was cold under his touch. He could feel her trembling, feel her breath grow quick and uneven against his face. She put her hands against his chest, resisting as he pulled her to him, and the cloak slid from her shoulders and fell with a soft thud around their feet. He took her mouth, forcing it open with his own. Though she made a small noise of denial in her throat, she did not pull away from him. She went limp against him, shaking as his hands molded her body under the soft texture of the gown, her arms sliding up around his shoulders, his neck, uncertain at first and then clinging tighter and tighter, as if she would never let him go. Through the burning urgency of his own desire, his common sense told him that Medda would be there soon-that the old nurse could probably see them already and would be clucking her shocked disapproval of them.

  Releasing Alde's searching mouth from his, he raised his head and looked out. The rain was easing to a gentle shower, and a sliver of moon had broken through a hole in the clouds. By its light, he saw Medda.

  She stood less than four feet away. She wasn't looking at them. Though her eyes were open and staring, she wasn't looking at anything. The wine cup dangled forgotten from one nerveless hand, and the torch had gone out in a puddle at her feet. All this Rudy saw across Alde's shoulder in a split second of time, and he felt a chill, directionless wind ruffle across his face from somewhere in the darkness.

  With a violence born of the pure reflex of terror, he slung Alde into the back of the dugout and jerked the door shut with a slam like a gunshot. She fell against the wall, catching at it for balance, her eyes dilated with fear and, he suspected, misinterpretation of the situation. "Get me one of those sticks," he commanded roughly. Warned by something in his voice, she obeyed immediately. He used it to bolt the door and found another to use as a wedge for good measure, his hands shaking with shock.

  "There's a Dark One out there," he told her quietly. She said nothing, but in the dim light of the cabin's single window, he could see her eyes get wider. "It-got Medda."

  "Oh!" she whispered.

  "Do you have anything to make a fire with?"

  She shook her head, a tiny gesture, stunned. Then suddenly she turned, looking around the almost lightless interior of the room. "There's wood all along the back here," she said, her voice low and tense. "Your fire outside... "

  "It's a long way to my fire," Rudy said shortly, "and the rain probably put it out. I wouldn't leave you alone here, anyway." The ceiling of the tiny place was barely high enough for him to stand. He waited, drawn sword in hand, before the door, trying desperately to think what to do next. Behind him Alde gathered sticks together and made a competent little arrangement of them, with dead leaves and twigs for tinder, working swiftly, without display of the fear that must have been screaming inside her. Still tensed to spring, Rudy knelt down and fingered the wood. Soft and splintery. Did one need a special kind of wood, to make fire by rubbing two sticks together? Anyhow for sure, this trash wouldn't work. He examined the hilt of his sword. Steel. Flint and steel. Was it worth it to try to get a spark from the steel blade of the sword, at the risk of ruining the thing for fighting purposes? Anyhow, the walls of the dugout were made of wattle-and-daub, not stone, let alone flint.

  The rain now drummed lightly and steadily on the front wall. The moon must be hidden again, since he could see almost nothing in the darkness. But he felt suddenly that same chill wind creeping around the edges of the door. It stirred in the tinder, made a thin, dry whispering among the leaves, and closed off the breath in his throat with the strangling grip of fear.

  Flint, he thought through his panic. We've got to strike a spark somehow.

  "Are you wearing any jewelry? Any stones at all?" She shook her head, her eyes wide.

  What the hell, I probably wouldn't know what to do with flint if it jumped out and bit me ... "Well, after this you're going to have a gold ring made with a hunk of flint as big as a walnut set in it, and you're going to wear it all the time, you understand?"

  "All right," she whispered breathlessly.

  What the hell am I talking about? There's not going to be anything after this.

  Alde crouched back, keeping out of his way so as not to encumber his sword arm, though her terror cried for the comfort of his touch. High up, near the top of the door, Rudy heard a soft bumping noise, like a testing finger tapping, and then a faint scratching on the heavy glass of the window. His heart slamming sickeningly against his ribs, Rudy thought, All I can do is take a swing straight down at whatever comes through that door. What's stone? What's flint? What will make a spark? I wish to Christ Ingold were here. He could make a fire just by looking at the wood.

  Wonder if I could do that?

  Ingold's words came back to him, spoken in the darkness of the gatehouse, the light glowing up from his empty palm. You know what it is... by its true name you call it ... Rudy looked at the tiny pile of wood, the dried leaves and tinder scattered beneath. That would catch, he knew it would. Its true name... Maybe there was some kind of a magic name for fire. But whatever you called it, fire was fire. The smell of it was the same, the brightness. He thought how it would smell as it caught off those twigs, sort of sweet and sharp. It would give off snappy, sputtery little gold sparks, little crackly sounds... He called them to mind, the shape and smell and brightness, straining eyes and mind to see the tinder in the deepening darkness. He saw only that the room was fading; even his consciousness of Alde kneeling beside him and his chilled fear of the death that waited outside the door began growing less important than the fire, the fire purely for its own sake. He could see it, hear it, smell it; he knew how it would splutter out of that tinder.

  The dry leaves fluttered a little in the wind. From far off, he could see Alde press her knuckles to white lips, all the while without a sound. Detachedly, he saw the fire in his mind, in the first instant of its sparking, and knew exactly how it would be. He could see it, just couldn't touch it yet. He felt his mind and body relax, withdrawing to some great distance, his perspective on the world altering, narrowing to only the dry shapes of leaf and twig and wood that he could see, quite clearly, in the utter darkness. The wood, the dry little heap of leaves, the tiny gold sparks like stars... Without moving, he reached his mind across from where he was to where the fire was, as easily as picking a flower that grew on the other side of a fence.

  There was a sudden, bright crackle of little gold sparks, and the sharp, sweet smell
of dry leaves catching. Rudy bent forward, still detached from himself, calm, halfwondering if it could be a hallucination, but calmly certain that it was not, and fed one twig and then another to the fire, real fire where no fire had been before. The light spread quickly into the room, threw gleeful shadows across his face, and danced flickering, crazy jigs of triumph that reflected in tiny points of light in Alde's eyes as she brought up more and bigger sticks without a word.

  And then it hit him, like a blow from a club. I did that , he thought. I did that . The warmth scorched his trembling fingers and seeped into the cold flesh of his palms and face. The wind that had rustled so evilly at the door faltered, then waned and ceased, and all outside the dugout became terribly still, except for the faint drizzling of the last of the rain.

  Rudy's mind echoed like a thunderclap with the shock, and rocked wildly with surging triumph. One part of him, it seemed, was screaming , I did it! I did it! I called the fire, and the fire came , and another was saying, I shouldn't have been able to do that . But more real than either, deeper, within his true heart, there was only a calm knowledge, clear and small like a little light-the memory of that first crackle of flame in the dry leaves and the knowing that he could do this.

  Then he looked up and met Alde's terrified eyes. They were wild with fear, a fear tinged with hysteria and relief and superstitious terror, fear of the Dark, of the fire, of him. He saw that newfound power reflected in her eyes, saw it as others would see it, alien and terrible and uncanny. She couldn't speak the wild question in her eyes, nor could he have answered, and for a moment they could only stare at each other in the firelight, as once before they had stared in the shocked, shared knowledge of their desire. Then, with a sob that seemed to rip her soul from her body, she threw herself into his arms, weeping wildly, holding onto him as if he were her last hope of life itself. Magic and terror and death released him, the tension breaking with an almost physical shock, and he clutched the slender girl in his arms with a grip that seemed to drive her bones into his and buried his face in her dark hair. Desperately they took one another beneath their shared cloaks on the floor, while the fire threw its shadow dance across the low rafters.

  Afterward Alde slept, terror exhausted in passion, and Rudy lay awake, sword close to his hand, watching the fire and letting his thoughts of past and future have their way with him, until the rain outside stopped, and dawn came.

  "You think that's fighting?" Gnift roared in a voice that cut like the steel of his grip-worn sword. "Get him! Get him!" The Icefalcon, armed with an eighteen-inch wooden stick, feinted warily at his opponent, a massive Guard wielding three feet of split bamboo that could draw blood like metal. The young captain was marked with it, face and hands; Rudy, sitting on the sidelines, shuddered. Gil, he noticed, watched beside him with an alert interest. She looked as if she'd already had her turn at this game, and gotten the worst of it.

  Stubborn broad , he thought. They'll have to kill her before she'll give it up.

  Gnift yelled, "Attack him, you puling coward! Don't make love to him!"

  The big man swung, and the Icefalcon shifted back out of range. Exasperated, Gnift stepped forward under the arc of the wooden blade, grabbed the back of the captain's black tunic, and shoved him into the fray. The result was bloody, painful, and exhausting for both combatants.

  Rudy said thoughtfully, "One of these days somebody's gonna take a poke at that little bastard."

  "Gnift?" Gil raised her split eyebrow in amused surprise. "Not bloody likely." Rudy remembered seeing Gnift sparring with Tomec Tirkenson, the big landchief of Gettlesand, yesterday evening about this time, in the last of the daylight after the long march. Maybe Gil was right.

  They watched for a time more, sitting side by side on the square of groundcloth just off the makeshift training floor. Around them, the camp was settling itself down for the night once again. It would soon be time to collect their meager rations and make for the watchfires. Rudy noticed that Gil looked drawn and exhausted, a thin, almost sexless shadow with a great straggling mane of black hair. He knew that in addition to marching and guard duty she was training this way nightly, on starvation rations, with the mess of her half-healed arm wound, as if deliberately driving herself to collapse.

  Wind sneered down off the mountains and washed over the camp like incoming tide. The mountains loomed above them now, hugely close, blacking the western sky, a sheer wall, like the Rockies. That morning they had passed the crossroads, which were watched over by a crumbling stone cross, and set their feet on the great road that ran up to Sarda Pass. It was colder here in the shadows of the foothills and desolate of all habitation.

  In the wan twilight before them, the Icefalcon was holding his own, retreating before the great swinging strokes of his opponent's sword. Sweat bathed his face, white in the frame of ivory hair, and his pale eyes were desperate with exhaustion. Cursing, reviling, Gnift circled the fighters, finally stepping lightly up behind the captain and hooking his feet out from under him with a deft sweep of one leg. The Icefalcon went down, his opponent dropping on him like grim death from above. There was a confused blur of movement. The younger man came up under the arc of the longer sword with a clean slash across the big Guard's belly and turned the end of the movement into a circle-throw that hurled his attacker over his head and flat on the Guard's back in the mud. He got both swords and scrambled to his feet, gasping. The bigger man lay on the ground, puffing and cursing. Gnift yelled, "When you get your man down, do something, don't just take his sword and stand there like a fool. If you did that... "

  Rudy, who'd been tremendously impressed with this last maneuver, whispered, "Do all warriors have to do that? I mean, Alwir's Guards and the Church troops?"

  "The method is much the same," Ingold's mild voice remarked behind them. "Gnift is stricter than most, and the Guards have the reputation of having the best instruction in the West of the World. Methods differ in different modes of combat, of course. In Alketch, for instance, they train their famous cavalry by chaining a slave by one wrist to an iron post in the middle of the exercise hall, putting a sword in his free hand, and having the cavalry trainees practice their saber-charges on horseback against him."

  "What's their budget for replacements?" Rudy wanted to know. "Somebody remind me never to visit Alketch."

  Gil glanced sideways, from the old shackle gall on the wizard's wrist to his serene face, and said, "Somebody told me once that you used to be a slave in Alketch."

  "Did they?" Ingold's eyes twinkled. "Well, I have been and done many things in the course of my misspent life. Rudy, if you could spare me a moment, I would like to talk with you in private." He rose and led the way through the orange-lit confusion of the settling camp with Rudy tagging at his heels. At a distance they passed Alwir's wagons, and Rudy recognized the sable standards of the House of Dare and knew that Minalde was there with her son.

  He had hardly spoken to Alde during the day. She had turned away from him, silent and more shy than before, as if withdrawing herself after the shattering intimacy of last night. Rudy was puzzled but not surprised; they had taken each other in the passion that followed tension and terror; such things could change drastically come morning. It could be grief at Medda's death, though she must have known, after the Guards led the poor, stumbling zombie who had been her oldest companion out of the camp, that there was no way to bring her along with the train. It could be shame, either at the act of sex itself or at its implicit betrayal of her dead King. Rudy wondered about that. Alde seldom spoke of Eldor and shied almost visibly at the mention of his name. It might be shame that she'd lain with a commoner-though from remarks about history that Gil had dropped in passing, that wasn't something that seemed to bother female royalty much-or, more likely, fear and a kind of revulsion that she'd lain with a wizard. Alde was a good daughter of the Church. Rudy remembered the look in her eyes, awe and a wild kind of horror, staring into his across the new brightness of the flames.

  But whatever her re
asons, he sensed in her no anger toward him, only a terrible emotional confusion. And he knew, looking back at the square gray silhouette of the wagon top against the fading salmon of the sky, that he must bide his time. Rudy had been around enough to know that sleeping with someone once could happen to and with literally anybody. It was the second time, and those after, that had meaning. Impatient as he was to be with her again, he was aware that to rush her would be fatal. He knew Alde and knew that behind her deceptive gentleness lay a core of steel. For all her quiet diffidence, she was not a woman who could be bullied into bed.

  And that would be fine, he thought, as his breathing suddenly constricted, if she were the only one involved.

  He forced himself to turn his eyes away.

  "Now." Ingold halted on the grassy open ground that lay between the edge of the camp proper and the guard line where the watch fires were being kindled. Here they were alone, camp and lines both fading into the featureless gray of the evening. The wind blew the cold rain-smell down around them, surging through the grass and over the bare patches of stony ground beneath their feet. "You told me this morning how you called fire at need last night. Show me what you did."

  Rudy gathered a few sticks together that had been dropped from the making of the watch fires and found a patch of dry ground. With his thumbnail he peeled enough dry bark to make a little tinder and sat cross-legged beside that small pinch of wood, his cloak wrapped about him. He relaxed his body and mind, shutting out the smells of the camp, the smoke and scent of wet grass, and the lowing of the cattle. He saw only the twigs and the bark, and how the stuff would catch. Smokier than last night's leaves, he thought. A little spot, like one made with a magnifying glass in the sun... a different smell from the leaves...