01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

"Nor does anyone," he said, "unless it's Lohiro, the Master of Quo. It's a question whose answer I wish I had never been set to seek, a riddle I'm sorry I have to unravel.

"What can I say of the Dark, Gil? What can I say that you don't know already? That they are the sharks of night? That they pull the flesh from the bones, or the blood from the flesh, or the soul and spirit from the living body and let it stumble mindlessly to an eventual death from starvation? That they ride the air in darkness, hunt in darkness, and that fire or light or even a good bright moon will keep them away? Would that tell you what they are?"

She shook her head, hypnotized by the warm roughness of his voice, caught by the intensity of his eyes and by the horror and the memory of even more appalling horrors that she saw there. "But you know," she whispered.

"Would to God I did not." Then he sighed and looked away; when he turned his head again, there was only that matter-of-fact self-assurance in his face, without the doubt, or the fear, or the loathing of what he knew.

"I- I dreamed of them." Gil stumbled on the words, finding it unexpectedly more difficult to speak of that first forerunning dream to one who understood than to one who did not "Before I ever saw them, before I ever knew what they were. I dreamed about a-a vault, a cellar-with arches going in all directions. The floor was black and smooth, like glass; and in the middle of that black floor was a slab of granite that was new and rough, because nobody ever walked on it. You said they came from-from beneath the ground."

"Indeed," the wizard said, looking at her with an alert, speculative curiosity. "You seem to have sensed their coming far ahead of its time. That may mean something, though at the moment I'm not sure... Yes, that was the Dark, or, rather, the blocked-up entrance to one of their Nests. Under that granite slab-and I know the one you're talking about-is a stairway, a stairway going downward incalculable depths into the earth. It was with the stairways, I believe, that it all began.

"For the stairways were always there. You find representations of them in the most ancient prehistoric petroglyphs: vast pavements of black stone and, in the midst of them, stairs descending to the deepest heart of the earth. No one ever went down them-at least, no one who came back up again-and no one knew who built them. Some said it was the titans of old, or the earth-gods; old records speak of the places as being awesome, full of magic. For a long time they were considered to be lucky, favored by the gods-the old religion built temples over them, temples which became the centers of the first cities of humankind.

"All this was millennia ago. Villages grew to towns and then to great cities. The cities united; states and realms spread along the rich valleys of the Brown River, on the shores of the Round Sea and the Western Ocean, and in the jungles and deserts of Alketch. Civilization flowered and bore its fruits: wizardry, art, money, learning, war. Records of that time are so scarce as to be almost nonexistent. Only beguiling fragments of chronicles remain, mostly in the Library at Quo, a teasing sliver of a civilization of great depth and richness, of sublime beauty and wisdom and truly foul decadence, a society that parented first wizardry and then the Church and the great codes of civil law.

"I am virtually certain that some kind of tradition existed then regarding the Dark Ones, simply because the word for them was in the language. Sueg -dark- isueg -an archaic, personalized form of the same word. But they were only a vague rumor of shadow on the edges of the oldest legends-the misty memory of hidden fear. And if there was such a tradition, it did not connect them with the stairways themselves. So they remained, rooted in the abysses of time, an ancient mystery buried in the heart of civilization.

"Of the destruction of the ancient world we have no coherent account. We know that it happened within a matter of weeks. That what struck, struck worldwide, we also know-a simultaneous siege of horror. But the horror and the confusion were so overwhelming that virtually no record was preserved; and since defense against the Dark generally entailed uncontrolled use of fire as a weapon, we lost what little information we might have had about their coming. We know that they came-but we do not know why.

"Unable to fight, humankind fled and retreated to fortified Keeps, behind whose massive walls they led a windowless existence, creeping forth by day to till their fields and hiding when the sun went down. For three hundred years, absolute chaos and terror held sway on the earth, because there was no knowing where or when the Dark would come. Civilization crumbled, fading to a few glowing embers of the great beacon light that it had once been.