01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

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."

"Well, you may stay here, of course," the old man agreed magnanimously.

"Thanks a lot."

The rising moon edged the hills in a thin flame of silver as they moved off, the shadows of the rolling land profound and terrible in the icy night. Ingold's dark mantle whispered like a ghost across the silver grass.

"Uh, Ingold?" Rudy said hesitantly as they started down the long slope of the land. "I'm sorry I said you were a nut."

Ingold glanced back at him, a glint of the old mischief in his eyes. Gravely, he said, "Apology accepted, Rudy. I'm only pleased we were able to convince you-"