01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

Rudy said, "I'll see." He crossed the main square where the torchlight fitfully gilded the rain-pocked mud. The old fountain brimmed with water, slopping in ebony wavelets over its leeward edge. Icy wind bit into his legs below the wet, flapping hem of the cloak he'd scrounged. Not even the Dark Ones, he decided, would be abroad in a downpour like this.

A gleam of gold led him toward the gate into the Guards' Court. Someone sheltering in the old stables was playing a stringed instrument and singing:

"My love is like a morn in spring,

A falcon fleet when he takes to wing;

And I, a dove, behind will fly,

To ride the roads of the summer sky... "

It was a simple love song, with words of hope and brightness, but the tune was filled with melancholy and an aching grief, the singer's voice all but drowned in the pounding of the rain. Rudy entered the dark slit of the doorway and groped his way up the treacherous stair, guided by the faint light that came down from above. He found Ingold alone in the narrow room. A dim, bluish glow of ball lightning hung over his head, touching the angles of brow and nose and flattened triangular cheekbone with light, and plunging all the rest into shadow. Before him the crystal lay on the windowsill, its colored refractions encircling it in a ring of fire.

Silence and peace coalesced in that room. For a moment Rudy hesitated on the threshold, unwilling to break into Ingold's meditations. He saw the wizard's eyes and knew that the old man saw something in the heart of the crystal, bright and clear as tiny flame; he knew that his own voice, his own intrusion, would shatter the deep, welling silence that made that concentration possible. So he waited, and the silence of the room seeped into his heart, like the deep peace of sleep.

After a time Ingold raised his head. "Did you want me?" The light above his face grew stronger, brightening to silver the shaggy hair and the beard where it surged over the angle of his jutting chin; it broadened to take in the obscure shapes of sacks and firkins, of scattered rushes and sawdust on the floor, and the random pattern of the stone ceiling's cracks and shadows, like incomprehensible runes overhead.

Rudy nodded, releasing the room's silence with regret. "There's sickness over at the hall," he said quietly. "Bad, I think."

Ingold sighed and rose, shaking his voluminous robes out around him. "I feared that," he said. He collected the crystal and stowed it somewhere about his person, shrugged into his dark mantle, drew the hood up over his head, and started for the door, the light drifting after him.

"Ingold?"

The wizard raised his brows inquiringly.

Rudy hesitated, feeling the question to be foolish, but driven nevertheless to ask it. "How do you do that?" He gestured toward the slim feather of light. "How do you call light?"

The old man held out his open hand; slowly the glow of light grew up from his palm. "You know what it is, and summon it," he replied, his voice low and clear and scratchy in the room. The brightness in his hand intensified, white and pure, stronger and stronger, until Rudy could no longer look at it and had to turn his eyes away. Even then he saw his own shadow cast huge and black against the stonework of the wall. "You know its true name and what it is," the wizard went on, "and by its true name you call it. It is as simple as picking a flower that grows on the other side of a fence." Against the white brilliance, shadows shifted, and Rudy looked back, to see the old man's strong fingers close over the light. For an instant its beams stabbed out from between his knuckles; then the brightness of it dimmed and was gone.

The vagrant glowworm of the witchlight that had been over Ingold's head wandered before them down the inky stairwell, to illuminate their feet. "No dice with Quo?" Rudy asked after a moment.

Ingold smiled at his words. "As you say, no dice."

Rudy, looking back at the sturdy, white-haired old wizard, remembered that it was this man who had worked that subtle enchantment of the languages; he saw Ingold again going against the Dark in the vaults, unarmed but for the noonday blaze of his power. "Are they all like you?" he asked suddenly. "The wizards? Other wizards?"

Ingold looked like an overage imp when he smiled like that. "No, thank God. No. Wizards are really a very individualistic crew. We are formed by what we are, like warriors or bards or farmers-but we're hardly alike."

"What's Lohiro like?" The Archmage, Master of the Council of Quo-Rudy found it difficult to picture a man whom Ingold would call master. He wondered just how this tough old maverick got along with the leader of the world's wizardry.