01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

It was hard labor, and they kept it up all the forenoon. Gil's arms ached; her blistered hands were smarting, her nerves humming like a plucked bowstring every time she dumped a burden of corn or dried fruit or an unwieldy slab of cheese onto the pile at the top of the steps and turned back down to the waiting darkness. Her head throbbed with hunger and fatigue. Toward afternoon she was trembling uncontrollably, the stairs, the vaults, and the men and women around her blurring before her eyes. She stopped, leaning against the carved pilasters of the great doorway, trying to get her breath; someone passed her in a black uniform, bearing a torch, and laid a light, companionable hand briefly on her shoulder. Blindly, she followed him back into the vaults.

It was well into afternoon when the job was done after a last, sweating hour of loading the carts. Lightheaded and sick with weariness, Gil wondered if it were only a hallucination on her part or if they were really watched from every black window by unseen eyes-if the prickling on the back of her neck were some premonition of real danger or only the result of fatigue whose like she had never before known. That last hour she had noticed no one and nothing, only the pain that throbbed with every movement of her tired arms.

When someone said that Ingold was gone, she could not remember when she had seen him last.

"He was with us on the final trip out of the vaults, I think," Seya was saying to the Icefalcon, wiping sweat from her brow with the sleeve of her damp undertunic.

"But not after?"

The woman shook her head. "I really don't remember."

"Did anyone see him above the ground?"

Glances were exchanged, heads were shaken. No one could recall. The fat carter in brown said, "Well, he's a wizard, and he's got his tricks, to be sure. Likely he'll meet us halfway up the mountains. Let's go, I say, if we're to make Karst in the daylight."

The remark evidently didn't merit reply-Guards were already picking up the smoldered ends of doused torches and rekindling them from a little fire someone had lit in a corner of the court for warmth. Gil joined them as a matter of course, though she knew that there was no question of staying together for this search. Janus saw her as she was going down the steps and called out. "Gilshalos!" But before he could go to her, the fat carter caught him by the arm and started a long expostulation, about reaching Karst before night. Quietly, Gil slipped into the shadows.

It was different, entering the vaults alone. Her single torch called forth leaping, distorted shapes on the low groinings of the ceiling, her own footfalls multiplied eerily in the darkness, as if she were being stalked by a legion of goblins. The red gleams of wicked little eyes blinked momentarily from the impenetrable gloom around her, then were gone. All the stillness seemed to breathe. Some instinct warned her not to call out, and she continued alone in silence, scanning the maze of dark pillars for some sign of that bobbing white light or the soft tread of booted feet-though now that she thought of it, Ingold was a man who could move as noiselessly as a shadow. She left the trampled way the salvagers had taken and turned toward the deeper vaults, wandering down identical aisles of dark stone pillars, granite trees in a symmetrical forest, her torchlight calling no reflection from the smooth black basalt of the floor.

She felt it grow upon her gradually, imperceptibly; a sense of having passed this way before, a lingering sense of unnamed dread, an uneasy feeling of being watched from the dark by things that had no eyes.

How she could have helped Ingold she could not have said, for she was unarmed and less familiar than he with the haunts of the Dark. But she knew he had to be found and she knew that he was exhausted, pushed far past the limits of his endurance; she knew that, wizard or not, in such a state mistakes were fatally easy to make.

She had almost given up the hope of finding him when she saw the faint reflection of white light against the dark granite of the pillars. She hurried toward the light, coming at last to a cleared space in that stone forest, where her torchlight gleamed on the dark sweep of the red porphyry Stair that curved upward to the blown-out ruin of cyclopean bronze doors, with nothing but darkness beyond them. Among the rubble of disused furniture and dusty old boxes, she could make out the shapes of skeletons, bones scattered among the pillars, stripped of their flesh by the Dark. Almost at her feet, a sword-split box had disgorged its contents, and dried apples lay strewn among the skulls.