01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

The Dark were all around them. Gil could feel them, sense their presence in the still, sour miasma that overlay the daylight. She stopped on the edge of one of the innumerable tangled woods that snarled the valley like the thick-grown webs of monstrous spiders, looking northward on the rising slant of that unholy land, and found herself firmly repeating in her heart that it was broad daylight and she was with Ingold.

But she knew they were there.

The climb had been an easy one. Too easy, she caught herself thinking-an odd thing to think. The broad, round, shallow-walled valley through which Ingold had led her most of the morning was smooth-floored, with an easy grade that would have made considerably better walking than the road below, were it not so badly overgrown. The wind that had tormented them on the long miles down from Karst was cut off here. The walls of the canyon, cliffs marching steadily back toward a tumbled pile of talus slopes and the sudden, dark ramparts of sky-gouging peaks, protected the place. In their shelter the air was warmer than she had encountered anywhere in the West of the World. But, though she was warm now for the first time in days, Gil found that the valley disconcerted her. The woods were too thick to be healthy, the air was too heavy, and the ground was too even underfoot. The clumps of dark, sullen trees that scattered the broad length of the valley seemed to hem her in with a labyrinth of shadow, guarding beneath their entangling boughs thin shreds of a night that never lifted.

"They're here," she whispered. "I know they are."

Beside her, all but invisible in the shadows of the trees, Ingold nodded. Though it was not long after noon, the akin this valley seemed to play tricks with the sunlight. The thickness of the atmosphere dragged on Gil's lungs and, she had thought once or twice, on her mind as well.

"Can they be a danger to us even by daylight?"

"We know very little about the Dark, my dear," Ingold replied quietly. "All power has its limits, and we have seen that the power of the Dark grows with their numbers. We walk on a layer of ice that covers the depths of Hell. Tread carefully." Drawing his hood over his face, he moved forward, a wraith in the vaporous, leaden air.

As they climbed the valley, this sense that they were tampering in evil far beyond human ken grew upon her. There was something hellishly symmetrical about the valley, some persistent wrongness in the geology of the crowding, stratified rock of the cliffs that whispered warnings to Gil's mind. The land under their feet smoothed its way up over a great fault that cut the valley in half, with wild grape and a particularly tough-fibered species of ivy tangling over the break and the natural causeway that bridged it. Fossils Gil had seen on the stones of last night's campfire repeated themselves, peeking from broken rock-huge ferns, long-fingered marine weed, and the crawling things of times long past, trilobite and brachiopod, imprinted forever in the stamp of the slate. The ground seemed leveled by the passing feet of millions, hard as an ancient roadbed among its pathless labyrinth of crowding trees.

Ingold paused and turned to check their backtrail for what seemed like the hundredth time that day. Gil rubbed her aching eyes; she had snatched a few hours of sleep before setting out from the camp before dawn, but the lack of it was beginning to tell. Not, she reflected wryly, that she had gotten whole bunches of that particular commodity since this trail drive started. Some anomaly in the lay of the ground caught her attention, a stream bed that did not lie as it ought, a formation of rocks...

Looking back, she found she was alone. Momentary panic seized her. Even a few weeks ago she would have thrown caution to the winds and yelled for Ingold, even on the very doormat of the Dark. But living like a winter wolf and associating with the Icefalcon had altered her reactions, and she stood perfectly still, scanning the too regular landscape.

A hand touched her shoulder and she swung around. Ingold caught her wrist as her sword was half out of its scabbard. "Where did you go?" she whispered.

The wizard frowned. "I didn't go anywhere." His hand still on her wrist, he looked around them doubtfully.

"You sure as hell weren't here a minute ago."

"Hmm." He scratched thoughtfully at his scrubby beard. "Wait here," he said finally, "and watch me." With these words he released Gil's arm and walked away, his feet making barely a sound in the knee-deep jungles of undergrowth. Gil tried her best to watch him. Tired as she was with the weariness that seemed to have settled around her bones, she was certain she hadn't moved or shut her eyes. But somehow she lost sight of the wizard, in open ground, in the sunlight, without an inch of cover in yards.