01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

But they were good. Even to Gil's inexperienced eye, their quickness and balance were obvious; they were professional warriors, an elite corps. Lying here, as she had lain most of the day, she had seen them come in from duty; she knew that all of them had fought last night and, like her, bore the wounds of it. She had noticed in the confusion of last night that very few of the dead were Guards, and now she saw why; the speed, stamina, and unthinking reactions were trained into them until the downward slash-duck-parry motion of attack and defense was as automatic as jerking a burned finger from flame. They trained with split wood blades like the Japanese shinai, weapons that would neither cut nor maim but which left appalling bruises-nobody was armored and there wasn't a shield in the place. Gil watched them with an awe that came from the glimmerings of understanding.

"What do you think?" a cool voice asked. Looking up, she saw the Icefalcon standing beside her, indistinct in the murky shade.

"About that?" She gestured toward the moving figures and the distant clacking of wooden blade on blade. He nodded, pale eyes aloof. "You need it, don't you, to be perfect," she said, watching the quick grace of the warriors that was almost a dance. "And that's what it is. Perfect."

The Icefalcon shrugged, but his eyes had a speculative gleam in their silvery depths. "If you have only one blow," he remarked, "it had better be perfect. How's your arm?"

She shook her head wearily, not wanting to think about the pain. "It was stupid," she said. The bandages showed a kind of grubby brown through the torn, ruined sleeve of the shirt that had been part of a corpse's gown. "I was tired; it shouldn't have happened."

The tall young man leaned against the wall and hooked his thumbs in his swordbelt in a gesture common to the Guards. "You didn't do badly," he told her. "You have a knack, a talent that way. I personally didn't think you'd make it past the first fight. Novices don't. You have the instinct to kill."

"What?" she exclaimed, more startled than horrified, though on reflection she supposed she should have been more horrified than she was.

"I mean it," the Icefalcon said in that colorless, breathy voice. "Among my people that is a compliment. To kill is to survive the fight. To kill is to want very much to live." He glanced out into the gray afternoon, his long, thin hands folding over his propped knee. "In the Realm they consider that such ideas are crazy. Perhaps your people do, too. So they say that the Guards are crazy; and by their lights, perhaps they are right."

Perhaps, Gil thought. Perhaps.

It would look that way from the outside, certainly. That striving, that need, was seldom understood, any more than Rudy had understood why she would turn away from her home and family for the sake of the terrible and abstract joys of scholarship. In its way, it was the same kind of craziness.

A little, bald-headed man was moving through the mazes of the combatants, watching everything with beady, elfbright brown eyes. He stopped just behind Seya, scratching his close-clipped brown beard and observing her efforts against another Guard of about her size and weight. She cut and parried; as she moved forward for another blow, he stepped in lightly and hooked both her legs from under her, dumping her unceremoniously in the mud. "Stronger stance," he cautioned her, then turned and walked away. Seya climbed slowly to her feet, wiped the goop from her face, and went back to her bout.

"There are very few," the Icefalcon's soft voice went on, "who understand this. Very few who have this instinct for life, this understanding for the fire of perfection. Perhaps that is why there have always been very few Guards." He glanced down at her, the light shifting across the narrow bones of his face. "Would you be a Guard?"

Gil felt the slow flush of blood rise to her face and the quickening of her pulse. She waited a long time before she answered him. "You mean, stay here and be a Guard?"

"We are very short of Guards."

She was silent again, though a kind of eager tension wired its way into her muscles and a confusion into her heart. She watched the little, bearded, bald man in the square step unconcernedly between swinging blades to double up a tall Guard with a blow in mid-stroke, step lightly back with almost preternatural timing, and go on to correct his next victim. Finally she said, "I can't."

"Indeed," was all the Icefalcon said.

"I'm going back. To my own land."

He looked down at her and raised one colorless brow.

"I'm sorry," she muttered.

"Gnift will also be sorry, to hear that," the Icefalcon said.

"Gnift?"

He gestured toward the bald man in the square. "He is the instructor of the Guards. He watched you in the vaults at Gae and last night. He says you could be good."

She shook her head. "If I stayed," she said, "it would only be a matter of time until I died."