01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

"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?