01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

She blinked and rubbed her eyes again. There was something, she thought, in the air of this place, some foulness, an invisible game of blindman's bluff. Then she looked back and saw Ingold standing about twenty feet off at the end of the track of flattened ivy, as if he had always been there. As he came back to her, she had no trouble following his movements.

Gil shook her head. "I don't understand." She hitched her cloak up on her shoulder, a gesture that was quickly becoming automatic, like straightening her sword belt. Always before, the cloak had never provided quite enough protection from the cold, but in this place, with its stifling air, it seemed hot and heavy. She was acutely aware of the wrongness of this place. "Do you know what's going on?"

"I'm afraid I do," Ingold said slowly. "The power of the Dark is strong here, very strong. It seems to be interfering with the cloaking spell I've had over both of us, which is a pity, because that probably means I'll have to dispense with it."

"You mean," Gil said in surprise, "we've been under a spell all along?"

"Oh, yes." He smiled at her startled face. "I've been keeping a number of spells on the convoy all the way down from Karst. Mostly ward and guard, aversion and protection. They wouldn't hold back a concerted attack, but they have served to deflect random misfortune."

She flushed, annoyed at herself. "I never knew that."

"Of course not. It's the mark of a good mage that he's never seen doing anything at all." She glanced suspiciously at him to see if he were teasing her, but he seemed perfectly serious-as serious as Ingold ever looked.

"But would a-a cloaking spell protect us from the Dark in the first place?"

"Probably not here in their own valley," Ingold replied casually. "But the White Raiders have been following us since we left the road. If the cloaking spell is unreliable, we're going to have a devil of a time getting back."

They reached the place in mid-afternoon. Gil felt it from afar, horror coalescing in her veins. She knew without being told that this was the place that Ingold had seen reflected in the depths of the fire. The ground was unnaturally even, tipped at a steep angle, with a great slanting slab of basalt jammed into the foundations of the mountain behind it, its farther end rising like the hull of a heeled wreck; one corner was buried in the valley floor as if driven there by some unspeakable cataclysm lost in the abysses of time. The slanted angle showed how deep the slab was founded; though it had been displaced upward a good thirty feet, there was no sign of bottom. And in the midst of it gaped the black hole of its stairway, the plunging road down into the chasm of the Dark.

The stairway was open. Little trace of the earth and rock Ingold had seen in the shadow image of the fire remained anywhere near that hideous gulf. A great scattering of stones, like the fan-trail of a volcanic spew, littered the slope below, but Gil could see from the way the clutching, ubiquitous weeds grew over them that the stones had been blown from that hole many years since. Still she picked one up. On its side, she could see the dry ghost of a lush, obscene orchid, frozen in some primeval swamp a million years ago and fragmented by the violence of that ancient blast. Ingold, too, was examining the wide-flung pattern of the stones, working his way methodically toward the crazily tilted pavement and the hole that yawned like a silent scream at the day.

He paused at the place where the rank, overgrown ground ended and the black pavement began. Gil saw him stoop to pick up a stone and stand in thought for a moment, turning it over in his hands. Then he stepped cautiously onto the slick, canted surface of the stone and began his careful climb toward the stairway itself.

Though her whole being shrank from it, as it had on that other pavement in the vaults at Gae, Gil followed him. She struggled through the foliage that clung with such perverted persistence to her feet, scrambled up after the wizard onto the tilted pavement, and saw, ahead of her, Ingold pause to wait, his shadow lying small and leaden around his feet. Seen under the light of day, naked to the sky, the sheer size of the pavement awed her; from the corner buried in the weed-choked earth to the corner tilted upward and buried in the out-thrust knee of the mountain, it must have measured close to seven hundred feet. In its midst Ingold seemed very small and exposed. It was a tricky scramble up the smooth incline; when she reached his side, Gil was panting in the gluey, breathless air.

"So we were right," Ingold said softly. "The vision was a lie."

Below them stretched the stairway, open to the winds. A cool drift of damp air seemed to rise from it, making Gil's sweat-matted hair prickle on the back of her neck. There was nothing now between them and the Dark except the presence of the sun, and she glanced at the sky quickly, as if fearing to see the gathering of clouds.

"So what can we do?"