01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

The sky overhead had lost the paleness of day. The sun was long gone past the mountain's rim, and swift twilight had come down. All that afternoon's peace and beauty notwithstanding, Rudy had no intention of spending another night in this world. Besides which, he realized he was painfully hungry, and food was notoriously hard to come by. He made his way down the dead garden and through the rusted gate. He found the lane beyond almost totally dark, though the sky above still held a little of the day, like the sky above a canyon. As the shadows moved up the mountain toward Karst, he began his hunt for the wizard and the way home.

"Rudy!" He turned, startled to see Gil materialize out of the gloom, striding quickly toward him, followed by a tall young man with white Viking braids who wore the already-familiar uniform of the City Guards. He noticed that Gil had scrounged a cloak from somewhere and wore a sword belted over her Levi's. The outfit made him grin. This was a long way from the lady and scholar of yesterday afternoon...

"Where's Ingold?" he asked as they drew near.

Gil answered shortly. "He's been busted."

"Busted?" For a minute he couldn't take it in. "You mean arrested?"

"I saw it," Gil said tightly.

Close up now, Rudy saw that she looked exhausted, drawn, those cold gray-blue eyes sunk in purple smudges in a face that had gotten pointy and white. It didn't do much for her looks, he thought. But there was a hardness in her eyes now that he wouldn't have wanted to tangle with.

She went on. "A bunch of troops came and got him on the Town Hall steps while the Guards were busy unloading the supplies."

"And he just went with them?" Rudy asked, aghast and disbelieving.

The tall Guard nodded. "He knew that it was go or fight. The fight would trigger a riot."

The light, spare voice was uninflected, unexplaining, but the scenario sprang to Rudy's mind. The Guards backed Ingold and would have rushed to help; the people in the square would go after the food; all the pent-up violence of the day would condense in rage and fear and terror of the night. The town would go up like gunpowder. He'd been in enough small-scale riots at the Shamrock Bar in Fontana to know how that went. But what was all right in the safety of a steel-mill town on Friday night would be death and worse than death on a large scale, played for keeps out of hunger and fury and frustration. Bitterly, he remarked, "They sure knew their man. Who nailed him, do you know?"

"Church troops, from Gil's description," the Icefalcon said. "The Red Monks. The Bishop's men, but they could have acted on anyone's orders."

"Which anyone?" Rudy demanded, his glance shifting from Gil to the Icefalcon in the dimness of the shadowy lane. "Alwir? When he couldn't push him out at the council last night?"

"Alwir always feared Ingold's power over the King," the Guard said thoughtfully.

"His men wear red, too," Gil added.

The Icefalcon shrugged. "And the Bishop certainly doesn't relish the thought of an agent of Satan that close to the throne."

"A what?" Gil demanded angrily, and Rudy briefed her on the local Church stand on wizardry. Gil's comment was neither scholarly nor ladylike.

"The Bishop is very strong in her faith," the Icefalcon said in his soft neutral voice, the tone as colorless as his eyes. "Or-the Queen could have put out the order for his arrest. From all accounts she has never trusted Ingold, either."

"Yeah, but the Queen's out on a Section Eight these days," Rudy said unkindly. "And whoever popped him, we've got to find where they're keeping him, if we don't want to end up spending another night here."

"Not to mention the next fifty years, if they decide to wall him up in some dungeon and forget about him," Gil added, her voice sharp with fear.

"Yeah," Rudy agreed. "Though I personally wouldn't want to be the one in charge of putting that old duffer out of the way permanently."

"Look," the Icefalcon said, "Karst isn't that big a town. They will have put him in the Town Hall jail, in the vaults below Alwir's villa, or in the Bishop's summer palace somewhere. Divided, we can find him within the hour. Then you can do-whatever you will do."

The shift in inflection of that soft, breathless voice made Rudy's nerves prickle with the sudden premonition of disaster, but the inscrutable frost-white eyes challenged him to read meaning into the words. Alde had said that the Guards were all crazy. Crazy enough to jailbreak a wizard out from under the noses of the Powers That Be? They were Ingold's-and now, by the look of it, Gil's-allies. Rudy wondered if he wanted to mess with the whole thing.

On the other hand, he realized he didn't have much choice. It was a jailbreak in the dark or spending the night and God alone knew how many other nights besides in this world. Even standing in the quiet of the dark lane, Rudy had begun to feel nervous. "Okay," he said, with as much cheerfulness as he could muster under the circumstances. "Meet you back at the Town Hall in an hour."