The Time Of The Dark

Chapter Five

The first sensation in Gil's mind, as she stepped from the dark slot of the postern door into soft pearl daylight and bone-chilling morning cold, was relief. She had made it, somehow, through the bizarre terrors of the night; she had lived to see dawn. She could not remember when she had ever taken such conscious pleasure in simple daylight.
The second sensation was dismay. As she came out on the top step, the noise and stink hit her like a wall. People were quarreling, arguing, yelling at the tops of their voices, demanding where food could be found, squabbling over the possession of ragged and frightened animals, and clustering in an arm-waving group around the doorways of buildings already jammed to the rafters with refugees demanding admittance; others were milling around the half-drained town fountain, bickering over water in voices sharp with the anger bred of fear. The growing light showed Gil faces pale and taut, wary eyes shifting like those of rats. They were physically and mentally angling for a toehold of position in this slipping world. The ice-breeze of the mountains bore on its cold breath the drifting stench of untended waste.
Jesus, Gil thought, appalled, they're setting themselves up for cholera, plague... you name it. How much do these people know about sanitation and disease anyway?
And her third sensation, as she stood shivering at the top of the steps in the biting cold, was ravenous hunger. She gave the matter some thought. The Commander of the Guards seemed to be on Ingold's side, and could probably be talked into giving her something to eat on the basis of her connection with the wizard. She made her way down the steps, having to pick her path around a middle-aged man in soiled broadcloth who seemed to have set up camp on the lowest step with every intention of staying there, to where half a dozen men and women in the black uniform of the City Guards were readying the transport carts to join the convoy to Gae. They were evidently under the command of a tall young man with ivory-blond braids that hung to his waist, who was currently engaged in a heated argument with a knot of civilians in dirty homespun. The chief of the civilians was shaking his head emphatically, the Guard gesturing to the mob in the square. As she came close, he dismissed the men in disgust and swung around to face her, regarding her from under colorless brows with eyes as light and cold as polar ice.
"Can you drive?" he demanded.
"A horse?" Gil asked, startled, her mind going to cars.
"I don't mean geese. If you can't drive, will you lead on foot? Or ride the bloody thing. I don't care."
"I can ride," Gil told him, suddenly aware of why she was being asked. "And I don't fear the Dark."
"You're a fool, then." The captain stared down at her, those haughty white-blond brows drawing slightly together as he took in her alien clothes. But he said nothing of it, only turned to call to a grizzle-haired woman in a shabby black uniform. "Seya! Get this one a cart with riding reins." He turned back to Gil. "She'll take care of you." Then, as Gil started to go with Seya, he asked, "Can you fight?"
Gil stopped. "I've never used a sword."
"Then if we're ambushed, for God's sake stay out of the way of those who can." He turned away, calling out orders to someone else, as concise and cold as a hunting cat. The woman Seya came up to Gil, wry amusement on her deeplined face, her sword slapping at her soft booted feet.
"Don't let him fret you," she said, glancing after his slim, retreating figure. "He'd put the High King himself to driving a cart if we were short, with never a by-your-leave. There, look."
Gil followed the gesture of the woman's hand and saw Janus and Ingold standing in the middle of the ruckus at the foot of the steps, surrounded by quarreling drivers, gesturing Guards, and rickety carts. The tall captain was talking to them, gazing down the length of his aristocratic nose. Janus looked shocked, Ingold amused. The wizard swung himself up into the nearest cart, settled down on the driver's seat, and gathered the reins into his hands as deftly as a coachman.
The sun cleared the spiky peaks in the east as they were leaving the last houses of Karst behind them, brightening the scene without dispersing the white mist lying so thickly among the trees. Gil was mounted uncomfortably on the narrow harness-saddle of a fat roan, drawing a cart close to the head of the convoy. She could see that most of the vehicles in town had been commandeered, far more than could be provided with civilian drivers who were willing to return to the haunted city of Gae. Many were driven by Guards, and a thin, straggling line of them walked on either side of the train-men and women both, she saw, mostly young, though there were gray or balding heads visible up and down the line as well. They moved restlessly, and she could see the marks of strain and exhaustion clearly on their faces. These were the fighters who had borne the brunt of the defense of Gae.
As the light grew, Gil could make out little camps of refugees in the woods, straggling out along the road and far back among the trees. There were refugees on the road, too, men and women in wrinkled and dirty clothes, carrying awkward bundles of blankets and cooking pots on their backs, pushing makeshift wheelbarrows, or dragging crude travois. Now and then a man would be leading a donkey, or a woman drawing an unwilling cow at the end of a rope. Mostly they did not stop and gave only scant attention to the winding file of carts and their ragged line of escorts. They were too weary with flight and fear to have any thought but for the refuge ahead.
Eventually, the road dipped and bent. Beyond the thin screen of brown-leaved trees, Gil felt the wind freshen and change. She looked up to see the land fall away on one side of the road, to show her the city of Gae.
Recognition caught at her heart. It lay in the distance, surrounded by its many walls, held in the crook of the river's arm, facing out across a plain turned tawny gold with autumn and latticed with the white of the city roads. It was almost as if she had lived there, walked those close-angled streets, and known from childhood that skyline of turrets and branches. Against the morning sky, six spires of stone rose up, flying buttresses bereft of the walls they had supported, stretching like the bony fingers of a skeleton hand into the whiteness of the air.
"The trees are bare," a man's light, breathless voice said beside her. "In summer it was a garden."
She looked down. By her knee, pacing with the jogging of the cart, walked the pale-haired captain, his eyes reflecting the flat white light of the sky. She said, "I know."
The light eyes shifted back to her face. "You're Ingold's far traveler."
She nodded. "But I've been in Gae."
Again there were no questions, only a docketing of information in his mind. He was spare and loose-boned; in the mingling shadows of the trees, she saw that he was younger than she'd first supposed-in his early twenties, possibly a few years younger than she was. It was the toughness, the sheath of self-sufficiency, that aged him-that and the long wrinkles scored by weather around his pale eyes. After a moment he said, "I am called the Icefalcon of the Guards."
"My name is Gil," she said, ducking as they passed beneath the overhanging branches of a huge oak. Gae was lost to them once more behind the woods of rust and silver and opal mist. The sound of the cart wheels mingled with the crackle of the dead leaves underfoot.
"In the old language of the Wath, gil means ice," he said absently. "Gil-shahs-a spear of ice, an icicle. I had a hunting hawk by that name once."
Gil looked down at him curiously. "Then your own name would be-Gil-something-or-other."
He shook his head. "In the language of my people, we call the icefalcon Nyagchilios, Pilgrim of the Sky. Why did you come with us?"
"Because you ordered me to," Gil replied.
The Icefalcon raised colorless eyebrows. But he did not ask further, and she could not have answered if he had done so. She only knew that she had felt drawn to these calm and competent warriors; asked to join them, she could not have stayed away.
They broke from the woods and came down out of the foothills, riding through the lion-colored grasses of the plain as if swimming in a lake of soft, blown gold, the sun small and remote in a colorless morning sky. They passed more refugees, straggling family or neighborhood groups, wretched single men and women carrying the last of their possessions on their backs, confused gangs of children, the older herding the younger like geese. The edges of the road were scattered with the flotsam of flight-books, bedding, and in one place a silver bird cage, dainty as lace, on whose open door-frame a pink, ornamental finch sat chirping fearfully in the sky-wide freedom of the winds. The Icefalcon pointed out Trad's Hill, the round promontory in the middle of the golden plain, crowned with its lichened cross, but Gil's eyes went past it to the walls of Gae. She saw towers mounting spire on shattered spire, arch and corbel and crenelations as fine as hand-tooled miniatures, with woven trellises of bare branches, and above it all, the broken, arching ribs of the buttresses that were all that remained of the Palace.
And as surely as she knew her name, Gil knew that somewhere in that city there was a square whose steps were guarded by statues of malachite, where bronze doors lay broken among the rubble. Somewhere was a vault with the red porphyry Stair, an odd slab in the smooth basalt of the floor, and a shadow-crowded archway into an empty and ruined street. Cold wind stung her chapped hands on the duty leather of the riding reins; the jog of the slow-moving cob between her knees and the squeal of cart wheels came like elements of waking into an uncertain world of dreams; and with them came the mellow, rusty voice that floated back along the line of march, like a breath of mist on the wind, talking with the Commander of the Guards.
Gae stank of death. Gil had not been prepared for it, and it took her by the throat like a strangler's hand. Her otherworld life had encompassed enough bus stations, rock concerts, and weekends in the desert to have in some measure inured her to the stench of Karst, but the fetor that hung like a cloud over the ruined city was the miasma of rot, dead rot that her world was wont to hide or incinerate.
The streets lay empty to the sunlight, the echoes of hooves and booted feet and the creaking wheels of the carts ringing back off bare walls. House after house bore signs of burning-caved-in upper storeys, charred timbers jutting like the broken ribs of picked carcasses, barricaded doors and windows with the telltale crawling of soot reaching halfway up the walls above them. Gil saw how some of the walls had been broken inward; in other places, little slides of rubble spewed down into the street, mixed with stripped, rat-chewed bones. The hollow shadows rustled with the suggestion of a rodent population released from its old war with man and gorged on the spoils of victory. From the tops of broken walls, wild scrawny cats watched them with mad eyes. Gil held the short riding reins of her fat carthorse and tried not to be sick.
"Three days ago it was going," a man's soft voice said beside her, and she almost jumped. "And now it is gone." Ingold had drawn up his cart next to her, blinking in the sharp changes of the barred and broken sunlight.
Something unwholesome rustled and flicked out of sight behind a garden wall. Gil shivered, feeling unclean. "You mean the city?"
"In a sense." A branch cracked under the wheels. The Icefalcon, scouting alongside, turned sharply at the sound. Gil could see they all felt it, all sensed the foulness of those buzzing, crawling streets. What must it be, she wondered, to be coming back now, after having known it, grown up with it, as it was?
Her eye traveled slowly down the broken lines of a graceful colonnade that bordered the street, picking out sophisticated motifs of mathematics and flowers, the gaiety and balance of its multiple interwoven friezes. She remembered again the furnishings of Tir's nursery, museum pieces of inlaid ivory and ebony. All that was rich and beautiful of this civilization, all the good things that could be had, could once have been found here. She turned her horse's head a little to avoid the black ruin of a doorway in which the body of a woman lay sprawled in shadow, one gnawed white arm trailing limply in the sun, diamonds sparkling on the wrist among crawling flies.
Even for those who had survived, there was no going back. She wondered if the people up at Karst had realized this yet.
Ingold did. She saw it in the hard set of his mouth, in the line of pain that had appeared between his brows. Janus did. The Commander of the Guards looked white and ill; but beyond that, strange on a pug face that would look more at home above a Coors T-shirt and a six-pack of beer, was a look of a deep, quiet, and aching regret. His expression was that of a man who looked on tragedy and understood the meaning of what he saw. The Icefalcon-It was hard to tell. That enigmatic young man picked his fastidious way through the ruins of human civilization with the single-minded wariness of an animal, uncaring for anything beyond his personal safety and the accomplishment of his job.
Under her, the horse let out a sudden, frightened squeal and threw up its head with white, rolling eyes. Almost beneath their hooves, two shambling, misshappen things broke cover from a ruined doorway and fled down the lane at a scrambling run. Gil had a horrified glimpse of flat, semihuman faces under snarling manes of reddish hair, of hunched bodies and trailing, apelike arms. She stared after them, shocked and breathless, until she heard Ingold say softly, "No, let them go." Turning, she saw that the Icefalcon had taken bow and arrow from one of the carts, preparatory to shooting the creatures down. At Ingold's command he paused, one pale eyebrow raised inquiringly, and in those few instants the creatures, whatever they were, had vanished down the lane.
The Icefalcon shrugged and replaced his weapons. "They're only dooic," he stated, as a self-evident fact.
Ingold's face was expressionless. "So they are."
"We'll have them all around the carts, once we get the food." He might have been speaking of rats.
The wizard turned back to his own business and flicked the reins of his mismated team. "We can deal with them then." The convoy started forward again, jostling in the cold shadows of the narrow streets. After a moment the Icefalcon shrugged again and slipped back, catlike, to his place in the Guard line.
"What are they?" Gil asked of the Guard nearest her, a fair-haired young man with the shining face of an apprentice Galahad, walking at her other side. "Are they-people?"
He glanced up at her, shading his eyes against the sunlight that fell through the breaks in the buildings. "No, they're only dooic," he repeated the Icefalcon's excuse. "Don't you have dooic in your land?"
Gil shook her head.
"They do look like people," the Guard went on casually. "But no, they're beasts. They run wild in most of the wastelands of the West-the plains beyond the mountains are crawling with them."
"Your people might call them Neanderthal," Ingold's soft voice said at her side. "If they're caught they're put to work in the south cutting cane, or in the silver-mines of Gettlesand, but many people train them for household tasks as well. They're said to make useful slaves, but evidently no one considered them worth taking when their owners fled."
The dry distaste in his voice wasn't lost on the young Guard. "We could never afford to feed them," he protested. "Food's short enough in Karst." And he added to Gil, as if excusing himself, "I never liked them myself."
The grain stores were in the vaults of the City Prefecture Building, a low, solid structure that formed one side of the great Palace square. As the convoy drew up before it, Gil saw that it had been little touched by fire, though clearly there had been looting going on-a trail of muddy tracks, torn grain sacks, and spilled corn led like a stream up the steps from the sunken doorway, to be dispersed among the general garbage of the square. The square itself she recognized, though she had last seen it from the window of a tower that had now fallen to flaming ruin: a broad expanse of patterned marble; wide gates of intricately worked iron; and trees whose bare gray branches were scorched from the inferno that had swallowed the last battle. The monumental shadow of the Palace reared to her left, storey upon storey of sliding ruin, the gutted belly that had been the Throne Hall of the Realm laid open to the day, half-buried under rubble and ash.
This, then, was the Palace of Gae, she thought, viewing it dispassionately, sane and awake and by daylight, from the back of a fat, jittery carthorse, with her hands blistered from the reins and her eyes aching from lack of sleep. This was what she had come to see, the place where Eldor had died, the place she had known in dreams. This was where humankind had fought-and lost-its last organized battle against the Dark.
By the look of those blackened ruins, it was very clear that the place had been looted before the ashes were cold.
More voices, angry this time, rang against the stone walls of the square in faint derisive echoes. Turning from her silent contemplation, Gil saw that a little group of carters and Guards had formed before the wide, shallow steps that led down to the broken doors of the Prefecture, centering on Commander Janus and a big, brawny man in homespun whom Gil remembered vaguely as having driven the lead cart. The man was saying, "Well, this driver's not going down to fetch no grain. If the top level of the vaults has been cleared out like you say, that means going down the subcellar, and that's death, sure as the ice in the north."
Someone else chimed in over the general din of agreement. "The vaults is haunted, haunted by the Dark. I said I'd drive a cart, but going against the Dark ain't in it."
A Guard shouted back, "Well, who in hell did you think was going down for the stuff?"
Janus, red-faced with anger, spoke quietly, his brown eyes cold. "Every man knows the value of his own courage. Those drivers brave enough to do so can help us fetch the food out. I have no use for cowards. Icefalcon, I'm leaving you in charge on top. Pick twelve Guards and shoot anyone or anything that comes near the food once we get it up here. Get it loaded and be ready to move out."
From the back of the cart he had been driving, Ingold handed down a bundle of cold pitch torches, then stepped down himself, bringing with him a six-foot walking staff on which he leaned tiredly.
The Commander disengaged a torch from the bundle and went on. "Gae isn't empty, by any means. It's dead, but every corpse has its maggots. There's danger above the ground as well as below." He turned and walked, torch in hand, toward the steps. Without a glance at him, Ingold made a slight gesture with his fingers; the cold torch in the Commander's hand burst into flame with a loud whoof! The other Guards, and over half the drivers, clustered around to get their own torches and light them from his.
As Gil was picking up a torch from the bundle on the ground, Ingold stepped over to her and laid a hand on her shoulder. "That didn't apply to you, Gil. This is none of your affair."
She looked up at him, then straightened to bring her eyes level with his. "You don't have to look after me specially," she said. "I'll stay with the Guards."
He glanced back over his shoulder at the small group already descending to the vaults, then at the long train of empty carts that would have to be filled by afternoon. "I brought you here against your will," he said quietly. "You are in my charge. I won't demand that you put yourself in danger of death in another universe, when you're going back to your own tonight. This is no dream, Gil. To die here is to die."
The ice- winds from the north pierced her thin jacket like a knife, and the heatless sun glared in her eyes without power to warm her. From the steps a woman's voice-Seya's, she thought-called out. "Gilshalos! You staying or coming?"
She yelled back, "Coming!" Ingold caught her arm as she started to move off. To him she said, "I won't get in your hair, I promise."
He smiled, the weary lines of his face lightening with a brief illusion of youth. "Like a bat, eh? As you will. But as you love your life, stay close to the others." And he walked with her to join the Guards.
They worked swiftly in the darkness of the vaults, soundlessly, with drawn swords, their efficiency impaired by the need to keep together. Following the bobbing chain of weak yellow lights, Gil found herself almost afraid to breathe, straining every nerve for the glimpse of some anomalous motion in the blackness, the breath of alien wind. In the deeper vaults where the food was stored, the endless darkness was all a whisper of tiny pattering feet and a sea of glaring little red eyes, gray bodies swarming soundlessly away from the light of the torches; but beside the fear of the Dark, that was of no more moment than a cockroach on the wall might have been. They carried burden after burden back toward the light, sacks of grain, cured meats, great waxed wheels of cheese, treading the swiftest path they could under their loads, with Ingold flitting beside them like a will-o'-the-wisp, sword in one hand, the tip of his upraised staff throwing clear white light that dispelled the crowding shadows.
It was hard labor, and they kept it up all the forenoon. Gil's arms ached; her blistered hands were smarting, her nerves humming like a plucked bowstring every time she dumped a burden of corn or dried fruit or an unwieldy slab of cheese onto the pile at the top of the steps and turned back down to the waiting darkness. Her head throbbed with hunger and fatigue. Toward afternoon she was trembling uncontrollably, the stairs, the vaults, and the men and women around her blurring before her eyes. She stopped, leaning against the carved pilasters of the great doorway, trying to get her breath; someone passed her in a black uniform, bearing a torch, and laid a light, companionable hand briefly on her shoulder. Blindly, she followed him back into the vaults.
It was well into afternoon when the job was done after a last, sweating hour of loading the carts. Lightheaded and sick with weariness, Gil wondered if it were only a hallucination on her part or if they were really watched from every black window by unseen eyes-if the prickling on the back of her neck were some premonition of real danger or only the result of fatigue whose like she had never before known. That last hour she had noticed no one and nothing, only the pain that throbbed with every movement of her tired arms.
When someone said that Ingold was gone, she could not remember when she had seen him last.
"He was with us on the final trip out of the vaults, I think," Seya was saying to the Icefalcon, wiping sweat from her brow with the sleeve of her damp undertunic.
"But not after?"
The woman shook her head. "I really don't remember."
"Did anyone see him above the ground?"
Glances were exchanged, heads were shaken. No one could recall. The fat carter in brown said, "Well, he's a wizard, and he's got his tricks, to be sure. Likely he'll meet us halfway up the mountains. Let's go, I say, if we're to make Karst in the daylight."
The remark evidently didn't merit reply-Guards were already picking up the smoldered ends of doused torches and rekindling them from a little fire someone had lit in a corner of the court for warmth. Gil joined them as a matter of course, though she knew that there was no question of staying together for this search. Janus saw her as she was going down the steps and called out. "Gilshalos!" But before he could go to her, the fat carter caught him by the arm and started a long expostulation, about reaching Karst before night. Quietly, Gil slipped into the shadows.
It was different, entering the vaults alone. Her single torch called forth leaping, distorted shapes on the low groinings of the ceiling, her own footfalls multiplied eerily in the darkness, as if she were being stalked by a legion of goblins. The red gleams of wicked little eyes blinked momentarily from the impenetrable gloom around her, then were gone. All the stillness seemed to breathe. Some instinct warned her not to call out, and she continued alone in silence, scanning the maze of dark pillars for some sign of that bobbing white light or the soft tread of booted feet-though now that she thought of it, Ingold was a man who could move as noiselessly as a shadow. She left the trampled way the salvagers had taken and turned toward the deeper vaults, wandering down identical aisles of dark stone pillars, granite trees in a symmetrical forest, her torchlight calling no reflection from the smooth black basalt of the floor.
She felt it grow upon her gradually, imperceptibly; a sense of having passed this way before, a lingering sense of unnamed dread, an uneasy feeling of being watched from the dark by things that had no eyes.
How she could have helped Ingold she could not have said, for she was unarmed and less familiar than he with the haunts of the Dark. But she knew he had to be found and she knew that he was exhausted, pushed far past the limits of his endurance; she knew that, wizard or not, in such a state mistakes were fatally easy to make.
She had almost given up the hope of finding him when she saw the faint reflection of white light against the dark granite of the pillars. She hurried toward the light, coming at last to a cleared space in that stone forest, where her torchlight gleamed on the dark sweep of the red porphyry Stair that curved upward to the blown-out ruin of cyclopean bronze doors, with nothing but darkness beyond them. Among the rubble of disused furniture and dusty old boxes, she could make out the shapes of skeletons, bones scattered among the pillars, stripped of their flesh by the Dark. Almost at her feet, a sword-split box had disgorged its contents, and dried apples lay strewn among the skulls.
She knew the place; the familiarity of it made her heart pound and the blood din in her ears. But no granite slab broke the ancient regularity of the smooth basalt of the floor. Only a great rectangular hole gaped where it had lain, black and yawning, the blasphemous gate of the abyss. And down from the pavement black stairs led, unspeakably ancient, cold with the ruinous horror of uncounted millennia, looking as she knew they would look, even in her dreams-as they had looked since the beginning of time. The damp chill that breathed out of that darkness brushed her cheek like the echo of primordial chaos, an evil beyond comprehension by humankind.
And up from that unspeakable chasm, like the distant glow of a far-off lamp, shone the soft white light she had been seeking. It picked out the curves of the ceiling arches, echoed in the lines of a skull and the delicate roundness of the bone over the eye socket. Hands shaking, Gil stooped and picked up a long sword that lay on the floor amid a tumble of acid-eaten handbones. With the balanced weight of the hilt in her hand she felt better, steadier, and less afraid. She held the torch aloft and walked to the edge of the abyss.
Far down the stairs, outlined by the soft brightness of his staff's white radiance, she could see Ingold. He stood as unmoving as a statue some fifty steps below her, just at the point where the stairs curved and were lost to sight in the black throat of the earth. His face was intent, as if listening for some sound which Gil could not hear. He had sheathed his sword, and his right hand hung empty at his side. As she watched, he moved with the slow hesitance of one hypnotized, down one step, and then another, like a man in a trance following enchanted music. She knew that after another step or two she would lose sight of him utterly, unless she chose to follow him down. He took the next step, the shadows closing him around.
"Ingold!" she called out in despair.
He turned and looked Inquiringly up at her. "Yes, my dear?" His voice echoed softly, ringing against the darkness of the overarching walls. He stared around him, at the stairway and the walls, and frowned, as if a little surprised to find he had come that far down. Then he turned thoughtfully to look at the deeper chasm below him again, and Gil remembered with a shiver that he had once told her that curiosity was the leading characteristic of any wizard, and that a mage would pursue a riddle to the brink of his own grave. For a moment she had the terrible impression that he was toying with the notion of descending that eldritch stairs, of walking willingly into the trap to see of what it consisted.
But he turned away and came up toward her, the darkness seeming to fall back at the advent of his light. He emerged to stand beside her on the top step and asked quite calmly, "Do you hear it?"
Gil shook her head, mute and frightened. "Hear what?"
His blue gaze rested on her face for a moment, then moved away, back toward that endless dark. There was a slight frown between his white brows, as if his mind worried at a riddle, oblivious to the danger in which they stood. She sensed that danger all around them, watching and waiting in the shadows, pressing behind them as if it would drive them into the accursed pit. But when he spoke, his rusty voice was calm. "You don't hear anything?"
"No," Gil said softly. "What do you hear?"
He hesitated, then shook his head. "Nothing," he lied. "I must be more tired than I thought. I-I thought-I didn't think I had descended the stairs quite that far. I hadn't meant to."
That, more than anything else, shocked her-the note of exhaustion in his voice, the admission of how close he had come to being trapped. He frowned again, looking down at the darkness that gaped below his feet, puzzling at some new knowledge, disconcerted, not by the darkness, but by something else.
Then he sighed and let the matter go. "You came alone?" he asked.
She nodded, a curiously forlorn figure in her grubby jeans, with her guttering torch and the borrowed sword heavy in her hand. "The others are searching, too," she explained-no explanation, really, as to why she had come alone.
"Thank you," he said quietly, and laid a hand on her shoulder. "It's extremely likely that you just saved my life. I-I feel as if I have been under a spell, as if-" He broke off, and shook his head as if to clear it. "Come," he said at last. "This way out is quicker. Keep the sword," he added as she moved to lay it down where she had found it. "You may need it. Its owner never will again."
By the time the convoy reached Karst the air was cold, and the late, weary day was drawing down to evening. They traveled slowly, for the underfed horses were deadbeat and the road steep and foully muddy. The closer they got to the town, the more often they were stopped by men and women who had been camping in the woods and who came hurrying down the steep banks to them, begging for something to eat. Only a little-it was always only a little.
Janus, riding in the lead, shook his head. "There'll be shares given out at Karst."
"Bah!" A woman in a torn purple gown spat. "Karst-if you can get into the town! And them as are there'll be sure they get first pickings!"
The Commander only looked down with stony eyes. "Move aside." He kneed his sweat-darkened horse forward, past her. The wagons had not even stopped.
"Pig!" the woman yelled at him, and bent to pick up a stone from the roadway. It struck his back hard enough to raise dust. He didn't turn. "All of you, pigs!!"
It wasn't what Gil had expected. Walking beside her horse's head, hanging grimly onto the cheekpiece of the bridle to keep from staggering, she'd half-expected to be cheered into town. But, she thought cynically, people are people-nobody cheers the lunchwagon unless he gets first dibs on the food. She looked back along the line of the convoy and saw none of her own feeling reflected in the strained and dusty faces of the other Guards. It's a hell of a thing, she thought, to risk your life to feed someone and have him pelt you with mud on your way into town. But she supposed the Guards had seen too much of human nature in this crisis ever to be surprised by anything again.
They walked quietly along the blue evening road with a tirelessness and an endurance she bitterly envied. The civilians moved dully with fatigue, leading the overburdened horses in silence. The sun had already vanished behind the tips of the surrounding mountains, and the evening grew cold. It would soon be night. Someone had scrounged a heavy, hooded cloak for her from the ruins of the Palace, and it flapped awkwardly around her ankles, the folds of it catching on her sword; the rhythmic slap of the scabbarded weapon against her calf was curious, but somehow comforting. She would take the sword back to California with her along with the memory of this strange and terrifying place.
Where in hell are all these people coming from? she wondered, as a dozen or more came scrambling down the ferns of the roadside and into the way of the carts. She straightened up and scanned the woods, picking out the hundreds of trashy little campsites that strewed the slopes all around Karst. Sweet Mother of God, do they think there's a magic force-field around the place? Did they really buy that line of Alwir's about how safe they all are? The refugees tacked themselves onto the train, keeping pace with exhausted horses and their Guards, tagging them through the blue rivers of shadow between the first outlying buildings. Some of the Guards drew their swords, but no move was made against them; the people simply followed, crowding one another but not the warriors, only making sure of being at the distribution point when shareouts began. Gil heard the murmur of voices thrown back by the moss-grown walls, a restless tension and discontent. So many people, so few wagons, so little food!
And then they moved into the twilit square. Gil paused in shock, stiffening as if against a physical blow, and cold apprehension fisted in her chest. The square was nearly solid with people, all ages, both sexes, dirty, in rags or clothes soiled enough to be rags, and watchful as wolves. The great bonfires of last night had been kindled at the four corners of the square, and the leaping scarlet light repeated itself a millionfold in their glittering eyes, like the eyes of the rats in the vaults. The ugly tension was palpable; even Gil's horse, drooping with weariness, sensed it and threw up its head with a snort of fear.
At the head of the convoy, Janus moved his horse toward the mob that was headed for the villa across the square where the food was to be stored. There was a slight movement, an uneasy convection current in the dark mass of eyes and faces, but no one stepped aside. The Commander's war horse fidgeted and sidestepped from that wall of hatred. Janus drew his sword.
Then Gil felt the cart she was leading creak with a sudden motion, and Ingold, who had been dozing in the back, swung himself up onto the driver's seat. In the firelight, he was visible to everyone in the square, the hood falling back from his head to reveal his craggy face with its rough chaparral of white beard and his eyes as cold and hard as the storm sky. He said nothing, did nothing, only stood leaning on his staff, looking down at the mob in the square.
After a long moment of silence, men shifted away from the doors of the villa. A pathway widened before the Guards, their convoy, and the wizard.
Janus' voice was crisp on the chilly air. "Start unloading. Get the stuff indoors, under triple guard." But he himself did not dismount. Other Guards emerged from the villa, mixed with Alwir's red-liveried private troops and the warrior-monks of the Church, also in red, the bloodtroops of God. Gil leaned against the shoulder of the carthorse, feeling the sweat cold on her face, the warmth of the beast through cloak and jacket and shirt against her arm, tired and glad it was over. The mob in the square had fallen back, crowding one another around the bonfires, but they watched the moving lines of armed men stowing the food, and that restless murmuring never ceased.
Gil heard someone call out. "My lord Ingold!" Turning, she saw someone beckoning urgently from the Town Hall steps. She saw the wizard scan the crowd, judging it, but few of the people were watching him now; all eyes were riveted, as by enchantment, on the food. He swung himself lightly down from the cart, and the crowd rippled back from where he landed on his feet. They moved, not in dread or fear, exactly, but in awe of something they did not and could not comprehend. He did not have to push his way through them to the steps.
If Gil hadn't been watching him, following his path with her eyes, she would have completely missed what happened next. A man, cloaked and hooded in red, stood waiting for him on the steps of the Town Hall, holding a rolled parchment in one hand, flat and colorless in the deep shadows thrown by the fires. He handed Ingold the parchment and drew his sword.
Gil saw Ingold read what was written there and look up. She could feel, even at that distance, the fury and indignation that tautened every line of his body, the wrath that smoked off him. A dozen men in red emerged quietly from the shadows and surrounded him. They all carried drawn swords.
For one instant, she thought he would fight. And she thought, Oh, my God, there'll be a riot, and a queer, cold fury put fire-ice into her veins. Several of the red troops evidently thought so, too, for they flinched back from him. Gil remembered that, in addition to being a wizard, Ingold was supposed to be one hell of a swordsman. Then he held his hands up to show that they were empty, and the men closed him in. One of them took his staff, another his sword, and they all vanished into the shadows of the Town Hall doors.
Stunned, Gil turned to see if Janus had witnessed this, but the Commander's back was to her, his attention held by the mob. The Guards were still working, carrying grain, sides of bacon, and sacks of potatoes and corn up the steps of the villa and through the guarded darkness of the doors. She doubted anyone besides herself had seen the arrest. They timed that, she thought suddenly. And they counted on his going quietly, rather than triggering a riot by resistance.
Rage swept her then, leaving no room for fear. She looked back at the steps, splotched by shadow and firelight. They were empty, as if nothing had happened. The wizard might simply have disappeared.