01 THE TIME OF THE DARK d-1 Read online

"Get out of here!" he ordered them furiously.

  "The hell I will," Gil said.

  "You can't possibly be of any help to me... "

  "I'm not going to leave you alone."

  Rudy looked from the one to the other: the girl in her faded jeans and denim jacket, with those pale, wild eyes; the old man in his dark, billowing mantle, the sword gripped, poised, in one scarred hand. Loonies, he thought. What the hell have I walked into? He headed down the hall.

  Tir lay wrapped in his dark velvet blankets on the bed, blue eyes wide with fear. The only other thing in the bare room was a pile of kindling in one corner, looking as if every piece of wooden furniture in the little cabin had been broken up; next to it stood the can of kerosene. Steps sounded behind him in the hall, and Ingold's voice, taut as wire, said, "Don't you understand?"

  "I understand," Gil said quietly. "That's why I came back."

  "Rudy," Ingold said, and the tone in his voice was one of a man utterly used to command. "I want you to take Gil, get her in the car, and get her out of here. Now. Instantly."

  Rudy swung around. "Oh, I'm gonna get out of here all right," he said grimly. "But I'm taking the kid with me. I don't know what you guys think you're doing, but I'm not leaving a six-month-old kid to be mixed up in it"

  "Don't be a fool," Ingold snapped.

  "Look who's talking!"

  Then, as Rudy bent to pick up the child from the bed, the lights went out.

  In one swift movement, Ingold turned and kicked the door shut, the sword gleaming like foxfire in his hand.

  The little starlight leaking through the room's single window showed his face beaded with sweat.

  Rudy set the whimpering baby down again, muttering, "Goddam fuses." He started for the door.

  Gil gasped. "Rudy, no!"

  Ingold caught her arm as she moved to stop him. There was deceptive mildness in his voice as it came from the darkness. "You think it's the fuse?"

  "Either that or a short someplace in the box," Rudy said. He glanced over his shoulder at them as he opened the hall door, seeing their indistinct outlines in the near-total blackness; the faint touch of filtered starlight haloed Ingold's white hair and picked out random corners of Gil's angular frame. The edge of Ingold's drawn sword glimmered, as if with a pallid light of its own.

  The hall was black, pitch, utterly black, and Rudy groped his way blindly along it, telling himself that his nervousness came from being trapped in a house in the middle of nowhere with a deluded scholar and a charming and totally insane old geezer armed with a razor-sharp sword, a book of matches, and a can and a half of kerosene. After that stygian gloom, the dark kitchen seemed almost bright; he could make out the indistinct forms of the table, the counter; the thread-silver gleam on the hooked neck of the faucet; the pale, distinct glow of the windows by the door; the single one in the left with the broken pane.

  Then he saw what was coming in through the broken pane.

  He never knew how he got back to the bedroom, though later he found bruises on his body where he'd blundered against the walls in his flight. It seemed that one instant he was standing in the darkness of the tiny kitchen, seeing that hideous shape crawling through the window, and that next he was falling against the bedroom door to slam it shut, sobbing. "It's out there! It's out there!"

  Ingold, standing over him in the gloom, scarred face outlined in the misty gleam of his sword blade, said softly, "What did you expect, Rudy? Humans?"

  Firelight flared. Gil had made a kind of campfire out of splintered kindling in the middle of the cement floor and was coughing in the rank smoke. Lying on the sagging mattress, Tir was staring at the darkness with eyes huge with terror, whimpering like a beaten puppy afraid to bark. Another child would have been screaming; but, whatever atavistic memories crowded his infant brain, they warned him that to cry aloud was death.

  Rudy got slowly to his feet, shaking in every limb with shock. "What are we gonna do?" he whispered. "We could get out the back, make it down to the car... "

  "You think the car would start?" In the smoldery orange glare, the old man's eyes never left the door. Even as he was speaking, Rudy could see that both his hands were on the long hilt of the sword, poised to strike. "I doubt we would make it to the car in any case. And-the house limits its size."

  Rudy gulped, cold with shock, seeing that thing again, small and hideous and yet rife with unspeakable terror. "You mean-it can change its size?"

  "Oh, yes." Sword in hand, Ingold moved cat-footedly to the door. "The Dark are not material, as we understand material. They are only incompletely visible, and not always of the same-composition. I have seen them go from the size of your two hands to larger than this house in a matter of seconds."

  Rudy wiped sweating palms on his jeans, sickened with horror and totally disoriented. "But if-if they're not material," he stammered, "what can we do? How can we fight?"

  "There are ways." Firelight played redly over Ingold's patched mantle as he stood, one hand resting on the doorknob, the other holding ready the gleaming witchfire of the blade, his head bowed, listening for some sound. After a moment he spoke again, his voice barely a whisper. "Gil," he said, "I want you to take Tir and get between the bed and the wall. Rudy, how much of a fire do we have left?"

  "Not much. That wood was dry as grass. It's going quick."

  Ingold stepped back from the door, though he never took his attention from it. The little room was filled with smoke, the flaring fire already sinking, feebly holding at bay the encroaching ring of shadows. Without looking back, he held out his hand. "Give me the kerosene, Rudy."

  Wordlessly, Rudy obeyed.

  Moving swiftly now, Ingold sheathed his sword in a single fluid gesture, took the can, and set to work, unscrewing the filler-cap and throwing a great swatch of the clear liquid over the dry wood of the door. It glittered in the yellow firelight, its throat-catching smell mixing with the gritty foulness of the smoke, nearly choking Gil, who stood with her back pressed to the icy concrete of the wall, the muffled baby motionless in her arms. The fire's light had gone from yellow to murky orange, the brown shadows of the wizard's quick, sure movements wavering, vast and distorted, over the imprisoning walls. Ingold came hack toward her and saturated the mattress with the last of the kerosene, its stink nearly suffocating her at close range. Then he set the empty can down softly, turned and drew his sword again, all in one smooth move; all told, he had had his sword sheathed for less than forty seconds.

  He returned to the center of the room, a few feet in front of the dying fire, which had fallen in on itself to a fading heap of ash and crawling embers. As the darkness grew around him, the pallid light that seemed to burn up off the blade grew brighter, bright enough to highlight his scarred face. He said softly, "Don't be afraid." Whether it was a spell he cast, or merely the strength of his personality alone, Gil did not know, but she felt her apprehension lessen, her fear give place to a queer, cold numbness. Rudy moved out of his frozen immobility, took the last stick of unburned kindling, and lit it from the remains of the blaze.

  Darkness seemed to fill the room and, heavier than the darkness, a silence that breathed. In that silence Gil heard the faint blundering sounds in the hall, a kind of chitinous scratching, as if dark fumbled eyelessly through dark. Against her own heart, she could feel the baby's heart hammering with small violence, and a chill wind began to seep through the cracks in the door, touching her sweating face with feathers of cold. She could smell it, the harsh, acid blood-smell of the Dark.

  Ingold's rusty voice came very calmly out of the shadows. "Rudy," he said, "take that torch and stand next to the door. Don't be afraid, but when the creature comes in, I want you to close the door behind it and light the kerosene. Will you do that?"

  Empty, cold, keyed up long past the point of feeling anything, Rudy whispered, "Yeah, sure." He sidled cautiously past the wizard, the flaming wood flickering in his hand. As he took his post by the door, he could feel the presence of the thing, a nightmare a
ura of fear. He felt it bump the door, softly, a testing tap, far above his own eye level, and his flesh crawled at the touch. The thing would pass him-if it did pass him and didn't turn on the nearest person to it as it came through the door-within touching distance. But on the other hand, the thought crossed his mind that if it did pass him, there was nothing to prevent him from slipping out that open door and making a run for the car.

  If the car would start. If, having polished off Ingold and Gil, the Dark didn't come after him anyway. No! The need was to finish it now-the Dark One, the Enemy, the thing from across the Void, the obscene intruder into the warm, soft world of the California night...

  Groping for the shattered ends of his world-view, Rudy could only stand in darkness beside the door, torch in hand, and wait.

  The last glow of the embers was fading, the only light in the room now Rudy's smoldering torch and the gleaming challenge of the blade that Ingold held upright before him, his eyes glittering in the reflected witchlight like the eyes of an old wolf. There was a sibilant rustle of robes as he stirred, bracing himself, a whispering sigh as the dying ashes collapsed and scattered. The wind that ruffled so coldly through the cracks in the door seemed to drop and fail.

  In the same instant that the door exploded inward, Ingold was striding forward, blade flashing down in an arc of fire to meet the bursting tidal wave of darkness. Rudy got a hideous glimpse of the fanning canopy of shadow and the endless, engulfing mouth, fringed in sloppy tentacles whose writhings splattered the floor with smoking slime. As if released from a spell, Tir began to scream, the high, thin, terrified sound going through Rudy's brain like a needle. The sword flashed, scattering fire; the creature drew back, unbelievably agile for that soft floating bulk, the slack of its serpent-like tail brushing Rudy's shoulders as it uncoiled in a whip of darkness. The thing filled the room like a cloud, its darkness covering them, seeming to swell and pulse as if its whole bloated, obscene body were a single slimy organ. The whip-tail slashed out, cutting at Ingold's throat, and the wizard ducked and shifted inward for position with the split-second reflexes of a far younger man. In his dark robes, he was barely to be seen in the darkness; mesmerized, Rudy watched, hypnotized by the burning arc of the wizard's blade and the thing that snatched at him like a giant hand of shadow.

  Gil was screaming, "The fire! The fire!" The sound was meaningless to his ears; it was the heat of his torchlight burning down almost to his hands that made him remember. As if awakened from a dream, he started, kicked the door shut, and hit the greasy smear of the kerosene with the last burning stump. The door exploded into fire, scorching Rudy as he leaped back.

  The Dark One, thrown into crimson visibility, writhed and twisted as if in pain, changing size again and shooting up toward the ceiling. But streaks of fire were already rushing up the walls to the tinder-dry rafters. Sparks stung Rudy's exposed hands and face as he ducked across the open space of the floor and threw himself over the bed to crash against the wall at Gil's side. More sparks rained, sizzling, on the wet, twisting shadow of the Dark.

  The room was a furnace, blinding and smothering. Bleeding light silhouetted the creature, which fled this way and that, seeking a way out. Trapped by the fire, it turned like a cat and fell on Ingold, the whiplike tail elongating into spiny wire, slashing at his hands, his eyes, its claws catching at his body. The blade carved smoking slivers from the soft tissue, but the thing loomed too big, moved too swiftly in the cramped space, for Ingold to get in for a killing blow. Flattened against the wall, suffocating in the heat, and burned by the rain of falling sparks, Gil and Rudy both could see that Ingold was being pushed steadily back toward the corner where they crouched behind the filthy bed, hampered fatally by his need to remain at all costs between the creature and the Prince. He fell back, a step at a time, until Gil could have stretched her arms across the bed and touched his shoulder. Now, along with the sparks, they were burned by the flying droplets of acid that scattered like sweat from the creature's twisting body.

  Then the Dark One feinted with claws and tail, eluding the slash of the blade by fractions of an inch and throwing itself past the wizard with a rush. In the same split second Ingold flung himself over the mattress to the wall, between Gil and Rudy. As he did so, whether by accident or by design, the kerosene-saturated cotton went up in a wall of fire that singed the hem of his cloak and engulfed the Dark One in a roaring wave of scarlet heat. For one second Gil was conscious only of the wild, terrified screaming of the child in her arms, of the howling inferno only feet from her body, and of the heat of the holocaust that swallowed her. Then the wall of fire bulged inward, and the black shape appeared, distorted and buckling, blazing as it hurled itself, burning and dying, upon them all. Gil screamed as hot wind and darkness covered her.

  Then all things vanished in a sudden, blinding firefall of light and color and cold.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  There was only wind, and darkness. Gil stirred, her body one undifferentiated ache, frozen to the bone. The motion brought her stomach up into her throat. She felt as if she had swum a long way in rough cold water after a heavy meal, sickened and exhausted and weak. There seemed to be a weight of warm velvet clutched in her tired arms, a taste of earth and grass in her mouth, and the rankness of smoke in her jacket and hair.

  All around her, there was no sound but the wind.

  Painfully, she sat up. The child in her arms was silent. Under wispy starlight, she could make out bleak, rounded foothills stretching away in all directions around her, stony and forsaken, and combed incessantly by the ice-winds out of the north. Close beside her lay Ingold, face down, all but invisible in the darkness save for the faint edge of starlight on his drawn sword. A little farther away Rudy Was sitting, curled in a semifetal position with his head clasped between his hands.

  She asked, "You okay?"

  His voice was muffled. "Okay? I'm still trying to figure out if I'm alive." He raised his head, his dark, slanting eyebrows black in the starlight against the whiteness of his face. "Did you-were you-?"

  She nodded.

  He dropped his head back to his hands. "Christ, I was hoping it was all a hallucination. Are we-wherever Ingold comes from?"

  He still won't say it out loud, Gil thought. She looked around her at the ghostly pewter landscape, indistinct under the starlight, and said, "We're sure not in California."

  Rudy got up, stumbling as he came over to collapse beside her. "The kid okay?"

  "I don't know. I can't wake him. He's breathing-" She pressed her fingers to the child's waxy cheek, brought her lips close to the little rosebud mouth, and felt the thin trickle of breath. "Ingold said two crossings in twenty-four hours could do him a lot of harm."

  "The way I feel now, I don't think I could survive another one no matter when I did it. Let's see." He took the child from her, joggled him gently, and felt how cold his face was. "We'd better wake Ingold. Does this place have a moon?"

  "It should," Gil said. "Look, the constellations are the same. There's the Big Dipper. That's Orion there."

  "Weird," Rudy said, and brushed the long hair back from his face. He turned to scan the barren landscape. Shoulder upon shoulder, the hills massed up to a low range of mountains in the north, a black wall of rock edged with a starlit knife blade of snow. Southward, the rolling land closed them in, except for a dark gap through which could be glimpsed the remote glimmer of a distant river. "Wherever the hell we are, we'd better get someplace fast. If any more of those things show up, we're in deep yoghurt. Hey!" he called to Ingold, who stirred and flung out one groping hand to catch the hilt of his sword. "Stay with us, man."

  "I'll be all right," Ingold said quietly.

  Lying, Gil thought. She touched his shoulder, found his mantle splotched all over with great patches of charred slime that brushed off in a kind of flaky, blackish dust. Her own right sleeve was covered with it, the back of her hand and wrist smarting and scorched. The Dark One, in dying, had come very close to taking them all.

/>   Ingold half-rolled over, brought his hand up, and rubbed his eyes. "Is the Prince all right?"

  "I don't know. He's out cold," Gil said worriedly.

  The wizard sighed, dragged himself to a sitting position, and reached out to take the baby from Rudy's arms. He listened to Tir's breath and stroked the tiny face gently with one scarred hand. Then he closed his eyes; for a long time he seemed to be meditating. Only the thin moaning of the wind broke the silence, but all around them the night was alive with danger. Gil and Rudy were both aware of the depth of the darkness as they had never been, back in the world of Southern California, where there was always a glow in the sky from somewhere, competing with moon and star. Here the stars seemed huge, intent, staring down with great, watchful eyes from the void of night. Darkness covered the land, and their one brief contact with the Dark was all Rudy and Gil had needed to make them conscious of how unprotected they were, how uneasy with the ancient fear of being in open ground at night.

  At length Tir gave a little sob and began to cry, the weak, persistent cry of an exhausted baby. Ingold rocked him against his chest and murmured unintelligible words to him until he grew silent again, then held him, looking for a moment into the dark distance, idly stroking the fuzzy black hair. For a moment Gil saw, not a wizard rescuing the Prince and heir of the Realm, but only an old man cradling the child of his dead friend.

  Finally he looked up. "Come. We had best move on."

  Rudy got stiffly to his feet and gave first Gil, then Ingold, a hand up. "Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that," he said as the wizard handed Gil the child and proceeded to wipe his sword blade on the corner of his mantle and sheathe it. "Just where can we go to, clear the hell out here?"

  "I think," the wizard said slowly, "that we had best make for Karst, the old summer capital of the Realm, some fifteen miles from here in the hills. Refugees from Gae have gone there; we can get shelter, and food, and news, if nothing else."

  Rudy objected uneasily. "That's a helluva long way to go truckin' around in the middle of the night."