01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

"You think that's fighting?" Gnift roared in a voice that cut like the steel of his grip-worn sword. "Get him! Get him!" The Icefalcon, armed with an eighteen-inch wooden stick, feinted warily at his opponent, a massive Guard wielding three feet of split bamboo that could draw blood like metal. The young captain was marked with it, face and hands; Rudy, sitting on the sidelines, shuddered. Gil, he noticed, watched beside him with an alert interest. She looked as if she'd already had her turn at this game, and gotten the worst of it.

Stubborn broad , he thought. They'll have to kill her before she'll give it up.

Gnift yelled, "Attack him, you puling coward! Don't make love to him!"

The big man swung, and the Icefalcon shifted back out of range. Exasperated, Gnift stepped forward under the arc of the wooden blade, grabbed the back of the captain's black tunic, and shoved him into the fray. The result was bloody, painful, and exhausting for both combatants.

Rudy said thoughtfully, "One of these days somebody's gonna take a poke at that little bastard."

"Gnift?" Gil raised her split eyebrow in amused surprise. "Not bloody likely." Rudy remembered seeing Gnift sparring with Tomec Tirkenson, the big landchief of Gettlesand, yesterday evening about this time, in the last of the daylight after the long march. Maybe Gil was right.

They watched for a time more, sitting side by side on the square of groundcloth just off the makeshift training floor. Around them, the camp was settling itself down for the night once again. It would soon be time to collect their meager rations and make for the watchfires. Rudy noticed that Gil looked drawn and exhausted, a thin, almost sexless shadow with a great straggling mane of black hair. He knew that in addition to marching and guard duty she was training this way nightly, on starvation rations, with the mess of her half-healed arm wound, as if deliberately driving herself to collapse.

Wind sneered down off the mountains and washed over the camp like incoming tide. The mountains loomed above them now, hugely close, blacking the western sky, a sheer wall, like the Rockies. That morning they had passed the crossroads, which were watched over by a crumbling stone cross, and set their feet on the great road that ran up to Sarda Pass. It was colder here in the shadows of the foothills and desolate of all habitation.

In the wan twilight before them, the Icefalcon was holding his own, retreating before the great swinging strokes of his opponent's sword. Sweat bathed his face, white in the frame of ivory hair, and his pale eyes were desperate with exhaustion. Cursing, reviling, Gnift circled the fighters, finally stepping lightly up behind the captain and hooking his feet out from under him with a deft sweep of one leg. The Icefalcon went down, his opponent dropping on him like grim death from above. There was a confused blur of movement. The younger man came up under the arc of the longer sword with a clean slash across the big Guard's belly and turned the end of the movement into a circle-throw that hurled his attacker over his head and flat on the Guard's back in the mud. He got both swords and scrambled to his feet, gasping. The bigger man lay on the ground, puffing and cursing. Gnift yelled, "When you get your man down, do something, don't just take his sword and stand there like a fool. If you did that... "

Rudy, who'd been tremendously impressed with this last maneuver, whispered, "Do all warriors have to do that? I mean, Alwir's Guards and the Church troops?"

"The method is much the same," Ingold's mild voice remarked behind them. "Gnift is stricter than most, and the Guards have the reputation of having the best instruction in the West of the World. Methods differ in different modes of combat, of course. In Alketch, for instance, they train their famous cavalry by chaining a slave by one wrist to an iron post in the middle of the exercise hall, putting a sword in his free hand, and having the cavalry trainees practice their saber-charges on horseback against him."

"What's their budget for replacements?" Rudy wanted to know. "Somebody remind me never to visit Alketch."

Gil glanced sideways, from the old shackle gall on the wizard's wrist to his serene face, and said, "Somebody told me once that you used to be a slave in Alketch."

"Did they?" Ingold's eyes twinkled. "Well, I have been and done many things in the course of my misspent life. Rudy, if you could spare me a moment, I would like to talk with you in private." He rose and led the way through the orange-lit confusion of the settling camp with Rudy tagging at his heels. At a distance they passed Alwir's wagons, and Rudy recognized the sable standards of the House of Dare and knew that Minalde was there with her son.