01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

Fluttering shadows pursued them down the hall, monster shapes of himself, the girl, and the child. The torchlight briefly illuminated the open arches to their left; but beyond, sight failed in an endless abyss of blasphemous night. Rudy could sense the Dark all around them, watching them with a queer, horrible intelligence, waiting only for the unguarded moment to pounce. From the top of the stairs they looked down at the chasm of the hall, where a dropped torch, burning itself out on the floor, revealed a ruin of filth, torn clothes, discarded shoes, and smashed furniture trampled in the flight. Around the far archway and dimly visible in the hall beyond, a straggle of bones and bloodless, crumpled bodies showed what had happened moments after he'd followed Alde up the stairs; and beyond that archway, slipping over the bodies, a gliding shifting darkness seemed to flow.

Rudy's breath strangled in his throat. Exposed as they were at the top of the stairs, nothing could have induced him to descend to that hall, to try to cross that floor. Beside him Alde gasped, and he looked where she pointed. Four or five things like black snail shells clung to the great arched ceiling of the room, long tails hanging down, wavering in the moving air. The dim torchlight played over the chitinous gleam of their shiny backs, and picked out claws and spines and the glittering drool of acid that ran from their tucked mouths down the stone ribbing of the wall. Then, one by one, they released their hold, dropping down into the air, changing shape-changing size-melting into the shadows. Though he'd watched them as they let go, Rudy had no idea where they'd gone.

Alde whispered, "There's another way into the vaults. It's back this way. Hurry!"

Needless waste of words, Rudy thought, striding beside her down the gallery, the soft evil winds stirring in his long hair. How many of the things did it take to kill the light of a fire? A dozen? Half a dozen? Four? His T-shirt and denim jacket were clammy with sweat; his hand ached on the hilt of the sword. The shadows all around them seemed to be moving, pressing closer upon them. The torchlight reflected darkly in Tir's watching eyes. A doorway opened on a corridor, wind-searched and smelling of the Dark. There was a sense of something that followed, soft-breathing and always out of sight. Alde's breath came like a swift-breaking series of sobs; his own footsteps seemed eerily loud. A small black doorway led to the sudden, twisting spiral of a lightless corkscrew stair, down and down, steep as a ladder and perilously slippery; the amber flicker of the torches gilded stone walls barely a yard apart.

Then they reached the bottom and smelled all around them the damp, nitrous odor of underground.

"Where the hell are we?" Rudy whispered. "The dungeons?" Dampness gleamed like phosphorus on the rough walls and pooled among the lumpy stones of the floor.

Alde nodded and pointed down the corridor. "That way."

Rudy took one of the torches from her and held it low, so as not to brush the stone ceiling with the flame. "These were really the dungeons?"

"Oh, yes," the girl said softly. "Well, way back in former days, of course. Every great House of the Realm kept its own troops and had law over its own people. The High Kings, the Kings at Gae, changed all that; any man can appeal from a landchief's or a lord's court to the King's now. That's for civil crimes, of course; the Church still judges its own." She hesitated at a branching of the ways. The dungeons were a black labyrinth of cramped wet passageways; Rudy wondered how she could be so confident. "Down here, I think."

They passed along the narrow way, the light of their torches touching briefly on shut doors, hewn heavy oak strapped in bronze and iron, sometimes on a level with the crude flagstones of the passage, sometimes sunk several moss-slippery steps below it. Most of the doors were bolted, a few sealed with ribbon and lead. One or two were bricked up, with a hideous finality of judgment that made Rudy's palms clammy. It was brought back to him that he was in another universe, a world totally alien to his own, with its own society, its own justice, and its own summary ways of dealing with those who tried to buck the system.

Alde stumbled, catching at his arm for support. Stopping to let her steady herself, Rudy felt the shifting, the movement of the air, the smell that breathed on his face.

He could see nothing in the corridor ahead. The close-hemmed walls narrowed to a rectangle of darkness that the torchlight seemed unable to pierce, a darkness stirred by wind and filled with a terrible waiting. Wind licked at the flames of his torch, and he became suddenly aware of the darkness filling the passage at his unprotected back. It might have been only the over-stretched tension of his nerves, the strain of keeping his senses at fever-pitch for endless nightmare hours-but he thought that he could see movement in the darkness before him.