01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

If it wasn't for the kid, Rudy thought, glancing from the tangled shadows of the car toward the wizard, who was seated in the long grass, thoughtfully dissecting and examining a seed pod, I wouldn't care. Hell, the guy could claim to be Napoleon and it'd be no business of mine. But he's got no business with a kid that young, wandering around a million miles from noplace.

And his hangover hallucination of their stepping out of the burning air returned to him, the absolute reality of the vision, far clearer than anything muscatel or anything else had ever done for him. Something about it troubled him, something he could not yet define.

Then the rusted nut he was working on gave way, and other matters claimed his attention. Ten minutes later he crawled out from under the car, grease-smudged, hot, and disgusted. Ingold set aside the seed pod and raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

Rudy flung the wrench he was holding violently into the dirt. "Goddam fuel pump," he sighed, and dropped crosslegged to the ground at the wizard's side.

"It is the pump, then, and not the line?" Rudy had briefed him on the problem.

"Yeah." He cursed, and elaborated on the car, its owner, and things in general. He finished with, "So I guess the only thing to do is walk to the highway and hitch."

"Well," Ingold said comfortably, "my contact in this world should be here very shortly. You could always get a ride back to civilization with her."

Rudy paused in wiping his oily hands on a rag he'd fished out of the back seat. "Your what?"

"My contact in this world." Seeing Rudy's surprise, Ingold explained. "I shall be stranded the night in your world and, though on occasion I've starved, I see no reason to do it if it can be avoided."

"So you're just passing through, is that it?" Rudy wondered if there was, in fact, such a contact, or if this was yet one more strange figment of the old man's peculiar imagination.

"In a manner of speaking," Ingold said slowly.

"But if you're a wizard in your own world, how come you'd starve?" Rudy asked, more out of lazy curiosity than anything else. "How come you can't just make food appear if you're hungry?"

"Because it doesn't work that way," Ingold said simply. "Creating the illusion of food is relatively simple. To make a piece of grass like this one convincingly resemble bread requires only that in taste, texture, and appearance, I convince you that you are eating bread. But if you ate it, it would provide you no more nourishment than the grass, and on a steady diet of such things you would quickly starve. But literally to transform the inner nature of the grass would be to alter reality itself, to tamper with the fabric of the entire universe."

"Lot of trouble to go through for a crummy piece of bread."

"Well, more than that, it's potentially dangerous. Any tampering, no matter how small, with the fabric of the universe is perilous. That is why shape-changing is seldom done. Most high-ranking wizards understand the principle behind turning oneself into a beast-with the mind and heart of a beast-but very, very few would dare to put it into practice. An archmage might do it, in peril of his life. But... " He raised his head suddenly, and Rudy caught the far-off chugging of an engine in the still, pale air of afternoon.

"My friend," Ingold explained. He got up, brushing dry grass and twigs off his robe. Rudy scrambled likewise to his feet as a dusty red Volkswagen beetle crept into view around the shoulder of the hill.

"This I gotta see."

The bug's tires surrounded it in a light cloud of dust as it made its slow approach, bumping cautiously over every rut and pothole of the treacherous road. It came to a stop a few yards away, the door opened, and a girl got out.

She took one look at Rudy and stopped, her eyes filled with suspicion and distrust. Then Ingold stepped down the bank toward her, both hands held out in welcome. "Gil," he said. "This is Rudy Solis. He thinks I'm crazy. Rudy-Gil Patterson. My contact in this world."

They regarded each other in silent animosity.

Gil would almost have preferred the Highway Patrol. This character had "biker" written on him in letters a foot tall: greasy jeans, grubby white T-shirt, scarred boots. Dark hair faintly tinged with red fell loosely on either side of a long widow's peak almost to his shoulders; cocky darkblue eyes under sharply backslanted black brows gave her an arrogant once-over and dismissed her. She noted the bump of an old break on his nose. RUDY was tattooed on a banner across a flaming torch on his left wrist. A real prize.

Kind of tall and scrawny, but not bad-looking, Rudy decided, checking her out. Bitchy, though, I bet. A real spook. Beyond that he noted the worn jeans, blue checkered shirt, lack of make-up, unworked hands and bitten nails, and cool, pale, forbidding eyes. Where'd Ingold dig her up?

Ingold went on, "Rudy's been stranded here with car trouble. Could you take him back with you as far as he needs to go when you leave, Gil, as a favor to me?"