01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

"The Keep has stood a long time," Ingold said as they came at last to the roadway that led up past the Keep toward Sarda Pass, the same road where, miles below, Alwir led his people along in their quest for semi-mythical safety. "Yet the Runes of Power are still on the Keep doors, marked there by the wizards who helped in the building of the place-Yad on the left, and Pern on the right, the Runes of Guarding and Law. Only a wizard can see them, like a gleaming tracery of silver in the shadows. But after all this time, the spells of the builders still hold power."

Gil turned her eyes from the towering masses of the mountains that rose, wall on wall of black, tree-enshrouded gorges cut with the distinct, shallow notch of Sarda Pass, to view again the looming shadow of the Keep. She could see nothing of the Runes, only great panels of iron, hinged and strapped in steel, and untouched for centuries.

The great gates stood open. Waiting in their shade were the assembled members of the small garrison Eldor had sent down years before to ready the place as an eventual refuge, when Ingold had first spoken of the possibility of the rising of the Dark. The captain of the garrison, a petite blonde woman with the meanest eyes Gil had ever seen, greeted Ingold with deference and seemed unsurprised at the news that Gae had fallen and its refugees were but a few days off.

"I feared it," she said, looking up at the wizard, her gloved fingers idling on the hilt of her sword. "We've had no messages from anywhere in over a week, and my boys report seeing the Dark Ones drifting along the head of the valley almost every night." She pursed her lips into a wry expression. "I'm only glad so many as you say got clear. I remember, when I was in Gae, people were laughing at you in the streets about your warnings, calling you an alarmist crackpot and making up little songs."

Gil made a noise of indignation in her throat, but Ingold laughed. "I remember that. All my life I wanted to be immortalized in ballads, but the poetry of the things was so bad that they were completely unmemorable."

"And," the captain said cynically, "most of the people who made them up are dead."

Ingold sighed. "I'd rather they were still alive to go on singing about what a fool I am, every day of my life," he said. "We'll be here the night. Can you feed us?"

The captain shrugged. "Sure. We have stock... " She gestured to mazes of cottonwood-pole corrals that stretched out beyond the knoll, where a gaggle of horses and half a dozen milk cows stood rubbing their chins on the top rail of the fences, staring at the strangers with mild, stupid eyes. "We even have a still over in the grove there; some of the boys brew Blue Ruin out of gaddin bark and potatoes."

Ingold shuddered delicately. "At tunes I see Alwir's point about the horrors of uncivilized existence." And he followed her up the worn steps to the gates.

"By the way," the captain said as the other warriors of the garrison grouped up behind them, "we have Keep Law here."

Ingold nodded. "I understand."

They entered the Keep of Dare, and Gil was struck silent with awe.

Outside, the Keep had been intimidating enough. Inside, it was crushing, frightening, dark, monstrous, and unbelievably huge; the footfalls of the Guards echoed in its giant sounding-chamber like the far-off drip of distant water, the torches they bore dwindling to fireflies. The monstrous architecture with its blending of naked planes had nothing to do with the gothic liveliness of Karst-nothing to do with human scale at all. The technology that had wrought this place out of stone and air was clearly far beyond anything else in this world or, Gil guessed, in her own. She gazed down the length of that endless central cavern, where the small bobbing candles of torchlight were reflected in the smooth black of the water channels in the floor, and shivered at the cold, the size, and the emptiness.

"How was this place built?" she whispered, and the chamber picked up her voice and sighed her words to every corner of that towering hall. "What a shame it couldn't have been the chief architect's memory that got passed on, as well as the Kings'."

"It is," Ingold said, his voice, too, ringing family in the unseen vaults of the ceiling. "But heritable memory is not governed by choice-indeed, we have no idea what does govern it." He moved like a shadow at Gil's side, following the diminishing torches. Gazing around her, Gil could see, as far as the torchlight reached, that the towering walls of the central hall were honeycombed with dark little doorways, rank on rank of them, joined sometimes by stone balconies, sometimes by rickety catwalks that threaded the wall like the webs of drunken or insane spiders. Those dark little doors admitted onto a maze of cells, stairways, and corridors, whose haphazard windings were as dark as the labyrinths below the earth.