01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

Once they were out of the valley, the winds began, searingly cold, ripping at their grip on the precarious handholds with active malice. At times they were far over the timberline, scrambling perilously over goat trails slippery with old snow, at others working their way through knots of vegetation, or clinging for support to the wind-flayed roots of twisted acrobat trees, trusting to their strength over a sightless abyss. Gil and Ingold moved through a world whose only elements were cold, rock, wind, and the distant roaring of water, where they could not have stopped if they had wanted to, for there was nowhere to rest. Without the threads of witchlight Ingold had thrown to outline the ledges, Gil was certain they would not have survived the climb; even so, looking back on it later, she felt only a land of dull astonishment that she had done it at all.

They slept, finally, in the crevices of the bare rock slopes, locked together for warmth; it was the first sleep Gil had had in close to forty hours. In the deeps of the night she felt the weather change and, in her dreams, smelled the far-off threat of snow.

In the morning the going was easier, not much worse than a rough backpacking trip. By noon Ingold found the ghost of a trail-head and followed it down the sheer, tree-covered western face of the Rampart Range, to reach, by mid-afternoon, the cold, winding Vale of Renweth.

Gil shaded her eyes and squinted into the long, bright distance. "What the hell?" The cold winds that snaked down the valley tore her breath away in rags and rippled in patterns like swift-pouring water over the knee-deep fjord of colorless grass. "What is it?"

"It's the Keep of Dare." Ingold smiled, folding his arms to keep warm and shivering slightly in spite of it. "What did you expect?"

Gil wasn't sure what she'd expected. Something smaller, anyway. Something more medieval. Not that trapezoidal monolith of black stone that rose, bone of the mountain's bone, on the great knoll at the foot of those distant dark-browed cliffs. Its roof was taller than the pine trees that grew on the ridge behind. Thin, powdery snow blew in clouds from the Keep's flat roof, but none lodged anywhere on its sides, which were as bare and smooth as unflawed glass.

"Who the hell built that thing?" Gil whispered, awed. "How big is it?" She could believe, now, that in it humankind had withstood the Dark. The might of the Dark Ones, which could shatter stone and iron, would find this fortress impregnable. With a sense of surprise, she realized that there was, after all, a place of refuge in this dark and cold and terrible world into which she had been unwillingly cast.

"Dare of Renweth built it," Ingold's voice said at her side, "using the last of the technology and power of the ancient Realms, power which is far beyond our means today. In it he sheltered those of his people who survived the first onslaught of the Dark, and from it he and his line ruled this valley and Sarda Pass and all that was left of an empire whose name, bounds, and nature have been utterly lost to human memory. As to how big it is-" He gazed into the distance, surveying the black monolith that guarded the twisting expanses of the valley beyond. "It is small. It can hold some eight thousand souls in some sort of comfort, and the valley can be cultivated to support almost twice that many. The records no longer exist, if they ever existed, as to how many it has actually sheltered at any one time."

As they waded toward it through the champagne grass of the Vale, the thing seemed to grow in size, shadowless in the cold overcast of the day. Gil looked around her at the Vale as well, a walled series of upland meadows scattered with stands of aspen, birch, and cottonwood, their leaves glittering restlessly in the winds that whined down from the peaks above. There was a hard, bright beauty to the place, first heartland of the Realm and last, cradle and grave. Her bones ached, even muscles trained to the endurance of swordsmanship burning with the lingering effects of that tortuous climb.

As a place to be cooped up in for years on end, she thought, it isn't bad. Still, familiar as she had been with petty neighborhood bitchery, she had recognized its seeds already in the gossip that even a twenty-four-hour state of crisis hadn't eliminated from the refugee train, and she saw where it would lead-a small town, cramped in an impenetrable fort with the same people, bound together year in and year out, and nowhere to go.