01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

Rudy passed his hand cautiously across the man's line of vision. The eyes tracked, but registered no understanding of what they saw. The girls were the same-beautiful girls, dainty and sweet as lilies of the valley. Rudy would cheerfully have taken either or both of them to bed with him, except for the creeping horror of that empty stare.

"This," Ingold's voice said behind him, "is the other thing that the Dark Ones do."

Rudy swung around, startled; he hadn't heard the wizard approach, even through four inches of water. The old man's face looked taut and sick, barely visible in the shadows of his drawn-up hood. "We didn't see much of it at Karst; probably because the victims were trampled by those seeking safety, or lost in the woods around the town. But I know this from Gae. I daresay most people know it."

"What's wrong with them?" Rudy looked from the wizard to the three shivering, empty-eyed automatons and felt a creeping of his flesh that, for once, had little to do with the cold.

"I think I spoke of it earlier," Ingold said quietly. "The Dark Ones devour the mind as well as the flesh-which is why, I suspect, they prey upon human beings and not upon beasts. As well as human flesh and human blood, the Dark Ones devour the psychic energy, the intelligence-the mind, if you will. Perhaps to them that is the most important of the three."

Reaching out, Ingold shut the eyes of the man with his thumb and forefinger and, closing his own eyes, meditated for a moment in silence. The man's knees buckled abruptly, and Ingold stepped lightly back from him as he splashed noisily into the rain-thrashed water and lay face down. Rudy was still staring, aghast, at the corpse when Ingold touched each of the girls in turn. They fell and lay with their flowered hair floating around them in the dirty water of the ditch. The wizard turned away and, leaning on his staff, clambered up the bank again. Rudy followed him, water dripping soggily from the hem of his mantle, cold and shivering and shocked at what he was pretty sure Ingold had done.

They did not speak for some time, but trudged down the road in silence. Then Rudy asked, "They don't get over it, do they?"

"No." The wizard's voice came disembodied from the shadows of his hood. A harmless old man, Rudy thought. A charming old lunatic. No wonder people are afraid of him.

"No," Ingold went on. "If they are indoors they generally starve. If they are outdoors they die of exposure."

"Uh- anybody ever take care of one, to see if his mind might come back?"

Ingold shrugged. "Not easy when you're fleeing the Dark yourself. Up in Twegged in the north, at the start of all this trouble, it was tried. The victim lasted two months."

"What happened after two months?"

"Her caretakers killed her." The wizard added, in a tone of explanation, "They were the victim's husband and daughter, you see."

Rudy looked back over his shoulder. The evening mists were coming down heavily, shadow and darkness covering the land. Still, he thought he could see in the distance the curve of the road, the ditch, and the whitish blur against the darker ground.

The night fell, and for miles up and down the Great

South Road the refugees sought what sleep they could. Watch fires threaded the darkness like a glittering necklace on both sides of the road, and all who could bear arms took their turn at them. In the low ground, the puddled rain turned to ice.

Alde came to Rudy's watch fire in the night, with Medda escorting her like a stout, disapproving shadow. She was shy with him, and they did not speak of what had passed between them at Karst, but Rudy felt a joy in her presence he had never known with any other human being. As they sat together with their backs to the fire, not touching, talking of Tir or of the small doings of the road, the intimacy between them was as close and warm as if they shared a cloak.

The morning dawned clear and freezing cold. The wind had broken the overcast and piled the clouds in the south, like the immeasurable slopes of achingly white mountains against the soaring blue of the morning sky. Word came down the line that wolves had attacked the horse herd belonging to the Church and had been driven off by the Red Monks; four night guards had been found dead by their watch fires, bloodless victims of the Dark. Nevertheless, Bishop Govannin gave a cart-tail service of thanksgiving, and those who had survived the night thanked their God that it had been no worse.