01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

She finally caught up with him in the mouth of a dark slit in the rocks, after a precipitous scramble around the convex face of a boulder on a ledge over a nightmare maw of tangled thorn and broken stone. She was sweating and gasping in the afternoon heat and fighting for balance on the sandy, crumbling ground. The shift of the sun over the backbone of the Rampart Range had thrown the chasm into deep shadow. Ingold was barely visible but for the pale blur of face and beard and the bright glitter of his eyes.

"Very good, my dear," he greeted her mildly. "We shall make a mountain climber of you yet."

"The hell you will," she gasped, and looked back down behind her. If there was any kind of trail she'd come up, she was damned if she could see it now.

"We should be able to follow this chasm up toward the top of that ridge there," he went on, pointing. "Once over the ridge, we should be nearly to the snow line and, I believe, out of reach of the Dark for the time being. With luck, we should be able to pick up another trail on the other side that will lead us down to the Vale of Renweth, and hence to the Keep of Dare."

Gil calculated the distance as well as she could in the deceptive clarity of the mountain air. They seemed to have climbed above the drifting haze of the valley; things seemed blindingly clear up here, and the slanting shadows altered the apparent positions of peak and ridge. "I don't think we'll make it by dark," she stated doubtfully.

"Oh, I don't either," Ingold agreed. "But we can hardly spend the night in the valley."

Gil sighed resignedly. "You have a point there."

The wizard jabbed his staff cautiously at the loose rock hiding the foot of the trail, and a boulder curtsied perilously, sending a little stream of gravel and sand down across their feet and over the edge of the trail. Muttering to himself about the advisability of taking along a rope next time, coupled with imprecations against the unseen Raiders in the valley below, he began to scout cautiously for an alternate route. While he did so, Gil turned to look back over the cliff, appalled anew at the suicidal ascent she'd just made. Her gaze wandered to the valley below them and was held there by a queer, cold feeling of shock.

"Ingold," she called quietly. "Come and look at this."

Something in the note of her voice brought him scrambling and sliding to her side. "What is it?"

She pointed. "Look. Look out there. What do you see?"

Viewed from above and behind, the land wore a different aspect, the angle of the sunlight westering on the mountains changing the perspective of that darkness-haunted place. From here the symmetry was obvious, the nuclei of the long-overgrown woods lying in some kind of pattern whose geometry was just beyond the range of human comprehension, the stream beds following courses that held the echoes of perverted regularity. The clinging mats of the ubiquitous vines took on a curious appearance from this angle, the shifts in their color and thickness disquietingly suggestive. Almost directly below them the great rectangle of pavement lay, and its position relative to the anomalous mounds of black stone that thrust through the foliage became suddenly, shockingly, clear to a woman trained in the rudiments of archaeology.

Ingold frowned, staring down at the distorted counterpane beneath them. "It's almost-almost as if there were a city here at one time. But there never was, not in human history." His eye and finger traced the mathematical obscenity of a curved shadow in the weeds, the queerly obtuse angles faintly visible in the half-hinted relationships between stream and stone. "What causes that? It's as if the vines grow thinner in places... "

"Buried foundations," Gil softly replied. "From the looks of it, foundations so deeply buried that they leave barely a trace. The trees are more stunted on that line because their roots cannot go so deep. Look, see the line of that stream? And yet-" She paused, confused. "It looks so planned, so regular, but it's not like any city I've ever seen. There's a layout-you can see that in the angle of the sunlight-but the layout's all wrong."

"Of course," the wizard said mildly. "There are no streets."

Their eyes met. The meaning of this came to her slowly, like a whisper from incomprehensible gulfs of time.

"Come," Ingold said. "This is no place for us to remain once the sun has gone in."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN