01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

From her watch fire in the darkness, Gil saw Alde stand up, wrap the soft bulk of her black fur cloak tighter around her, and make her way cautiously down the stony ridge of land back toward the dark silhouette of her wagon against the lighted camp. Gil was apprehensive, for the night seemed to her to prickle with evil, and she wondered how the silly girl could ever have left her child, even with the camp guards there, to go play pattyfingers in the dark with Rudy Solis. Gil was a woman who did not love, and her feelings toward those who did were a mixture of sympathy, curiosity, and occasionally a longing that she would not admit to. Ordinarily she would not have cared whether Rudy and the widowed Queen held hands and talked or engaged in al fresco orgies. But tonight was different-tonight she felt the presence of the Dark, that watchful malice she had fell lurking in the stygian mazes of the vaults at Gae, that chaotic, abhuman intelligence, so close to her that, despite the fire at her back, she was always turning her head to see if it were standing at her elbow.

At midnight one of Alwir's troopers relieved her, a big, solid young man in a red uniform much patched and stained. She saw Rudy turn his post over to one of the Red Monks and descend the ridge toward the camp. From the darkness where she stood, halfway between camp and ridge, Gil watched him double back through the shadows of the wagons and slip quietly over the tailboard of the one that bore the banners of the House of Dare.

Gil sighed and started back for the campfire of the Guards. But, like a dog, she scented wrongness in the windshifting darkness. She kept looking out into the night that lay beyond the amber glow of the camp lights, feeling, like a cold and heavy hand, the threat of impending doom.

Most of the Guards were already asleep when she returned to their camp, rolled in their blankets and lost in the swift, hard sleep of physical exhaustion. Only one man was awake, sitting by the small glow of the fire like a weathered rock, somehow giving the impression that he had been there from the beginning of time. She'd seen him sitting thus night after night, when he wasn't patrolling the perimeters of the camp. She could not remember when she had last seen him sleep.

Gil hunkered quietly down at his side. "What do you see?"

The wizard shifted his eyes from the blaze, light catching in the shadowy seams of his face as he smiled. "Nothing of any moment." The small motion of his fingers took in the louring silence of the night. "Nothing to explain-this."

"You feel it, too," she said softly, and he nodded.

"We should reach the Keep in as little as three days," he said. "Last night I felt this, dimly and far off. Tonight it's much worse. Yet for three nights now there has been no report of the Dark anywhere along the line of march."

Gil locked her hands around her drawn-up knees and looked at the muted light flickering over her bruised and swollen fingers, reddened with cold. "Is there a Nest in this part of the mountains?" she asked.

"Only the one I spoke of once to Janus. It's an old Nest, long ago blocked. Night after night, I've sought it in the fire and seen no sign that it has ever been touched. Yet night after night I look again." He nodded toward the small fire. "I can see it now. It lies in a broad, shallow-sided valley, maybe twenty miles from here. I can see the foundation lying at the very back of the vale, slanting upward against the cliffs; the valley itself is crowded with foliage; filled with heat and darkness." A log broke in the fire and the scattering embers threaded his face with light.

"The place lies always under a kind of shadow. No reflection of sky or stars touches that polished stone. And in the middle of that darkness, like the mouth of a tomb, there is the deeper darkness of the entrance itself. But I can see that it is blocked, and the heaped earth and rock there are covered over with straggling weeds."

Staring into the fire, Gil could see nothing-only the play of colors, topaz and rose and citrine, and the curling heat shivering over the rocks that enclosed the pit, revealing, like frost-traceries, the ghostly patterns of fossil ferns printed in the fabric of the rock. But his rusty voice put the images in her mind, the way the darkness clotted in those too-thickly twined trees, the stirring in the shadows of the mountain that no wind could account for. The sense of eldritch horror was latent in the whispering night.

"I don't like it," Gil said softly.

"Neither do I," Ingold replied. "I don't trust that vision, Gil. We are three days from the Keep. The Dark must make their attempt, and make it soon."

"Can we go there?"

He raised his head and looked around him at the silent, sleeping camp. Clouds were building above the mountains, killing the stars; it seemed as if deeper darkness were settling over the land. "I don't see," he said, "that we have any choice."