Darwath 1 - The Time Of The Dark (17 page)

“It's the only town we have. Now, run!”

And they ran, through the black nightmare of alien pursuit, with the winds stirring after them like the breath of some unspeakable abyss. It was a nightmare of woods, darkness, sinuous half-seen forms, flame, and stumbling terror. They ran toward the refuge of Karst, and the Dark Ones followed.

Hell of a joke on Alwir! Rudy slumped back against the clustered pilasters framing the open archway from the villa's main reception-hall out to its entryway and shut his eyes. But nothing could block out the wild glare of the torches, the screaming that went through his head like a hacksaw, and the dizzy sickness of fatigue. That whole sales pitch about everything being hunky-dory and let's make Karst capital of the new Realm had gone down the tubes. And Ingold, whatever the hell they did with him, was right all along.

He opened his eyes again, the sensory burn-out of the hall stabbing body and brain like crimson knives. It was like the waiting room of Judgment Day. The hall and entryway on either side of the fluted arch were mobbed wall to wall with people, refugees driven in from the woods and the town square who had taken shelter here when the defense lines around the town had caved in. People were weeping, praying, cursing, all at the tops of their lungs; they were milling like panic-stricken sheep when the wolf was in the fold. The jackhammer din was like the final set of a rock concert, so deafening that no single sound was audible, and the faces illuminated by the bleeding torchlight seemed to mouth senselessly. The packed heat of the room was smothering, the air foul with smoke and human fear. Detachedly, Rudy wondered if he were involved in one of Gil's nightmares. But he was too hungry to be asleep for one thing; and for another, it looked as if he'd started at the wrong end of the dream and couldn't remember going to bed. He wondered if the end of the world was going to be this noisy. He hoped not.

Like Satan in the chaos of the fire, Alwir stood in the middle of the room, blood from his cut cheek making a red track in the sweaty slime of his face. One hand rested on the pommel of his sword, the other gestured, black and eloquent—he was speaking with Commander Janus and Bishop Govannin, who stood leaning on her drawn sword, her robe girded up for fighting. Under the marks of battle, that thin skull-face of hers was calm. Rudy reflected dryly to himself that it looked as if everybody in town knew how to handle a sword except him. Alwir suggested something, and the Bishop shook her head in somber denial. The angry, insistent sweep of the Chancellor's gesture took in all the room. Rudy had a bad feeling that he knew what the problem was.

The villa was indefensible.

It was obvious. They'd been driven there when the defenses around the square had crumbled, when darkness like a fog had sapped the light of the fires. One minute, it seemed, Rudy had been standing in the line of armed men, awkwardly gripping the hilt of a sword somebody had shoved into his hands, backed by the wind-whipped, flaring blaze of dozens of bonfires and the yammering cries of the unarmed civilians who were crowding in the square for protection and watching with uneasy terror the restless stirrings in the darkness beyond the light. Then the darkness had begun to draw closer, the shifting suggestion of nebulous bodies growing increasingly clear. Looking behind him, Rudy had seen the bonfires pale and weaken, the flames robbed of their light. And then he'd been caught in the blind stampede for walls to hide behind, for any shelter against that encroaching terror. He'd been one of the lucky ones. The square and the streets outside were littered with the unlucky.

And the irony of it was, Rudy thought, surveying the scarlet confusion before him, that this place which they'd trampled over each other to reach was about as defensible as a bird cage.

It was a summer palace. A man didn't have to study architecture to guess that one. The whole place was designed to let in light and air and summer breezes. Colonnades joined to open galleries; dainty, trefoiled arches opened into long vistas of wide-windowed rooms; and the long double stairway rising from the entry-hall to his left terminated in a balcony gallery that communicated with the rest of the villa by a series of airy, unwalled breezeways. The whole thing would be as much use as a lace tablecloth in a hurricane. If he hadn't been half-blind with exhaustion and within kissing distance of a horrible death, Rudy could have laughed.

Janus offered some other plan. Alwir shook his head. Nix on anything that means going outside, Rudy thought. Blackness seemed to press like a bodiless entity against the long windows that ran the length of one wall. A few minutes ago, the orange reflection of firelight had been visible through them. Now there was only darkness. The multivoiced baying of the fugitives had begun to fade, men and women making little forays into the murky dimness of the entry-hall beyond the arch, as if seeking a safer room for their hiding, but unwilling to leave the main crowd to do so. Alwir pointed downward, to the floor or, Rudy guessed, to the cellars of the villa. The Bishop asked him something that made his eyes flash with anger.

But before he could reply, a rending crash sounded from somewhere in the deeps of the house, the violence of it shaking the stone walls on their foundations.

In the hush that followed, Janus' voice could be heard to the far corners of the hall. “East gallery,” he said briefly.

A woman began to scream, a steady, unwavering note. A few feet from him, Rudy saw a young woman of about his own age tighten her clutch on a gaggle of smaller children who clung to her skirts for courage.. A fat man with a garden rake for a weapon hopped to his feet and began to glare around, as if expecting the Dark to come rushing down from the throbbing air. The mob in the room packed tighter, as if they could conceal themselves from the Dark by doing so.

Their voices climbed to a crescendo of wild terror through which Alwir's trained bass battle voice cut like a cleaver. “With me! We can defend the vaults!”

Someone began howling. “Not the vaults! Not underground!”

Rudy scrambled to his feet, cursing, narrowly missing cutting off his own fingers with the sword he still held. He personally didn't care where they holed up, as long as it had nice thick walls and only one door. People were yelling, swaying, surging after Alwir through the arched doorway at the far end of the tall. Torches were being pulled down from the walls, the flailing red light throwing the room into a maelstrom of jerking shadow.

Someone shoved against Rudy in the mob, fighting against the current to go the other way, and he caught at a familiar arm.

“Where the hell are you going?”

Minalde's hair had come unbraided and hung against her torn and dirty white gown. “Tir's up there,” she said fiercely. “I thought Medda had brought him down.” Shoulders jostled them, throwing them close together. In the whiteness of her face, her eyes were iris-colored in the torchlight.

“Well, you can't go up there now!” As she pulled angrily at his grip, Rudy added, “Look, if the door's locked and there's some kind of light in the room, they'll miss him, he'll be fine. There's a zillion people down here for them to get.”

“They know who he is,” she whispered desperately. “It's him they want.” With a swift jerk she freed her arm and plunged toward the stairs, slipping between the crowding bodies like an eel.

“You crazy female, you're gonna get killed!” Rudy shoved his way after her, his larger size hampering him, the crowd dragging him inexorably along. He saw Alde stop by the foot of the stairs and take a torch from its holder. Elbowing and struggling frantically, he reached the place moments later, snatched another torch, and dashed up after her into the darkness. He caught her at the top and grabbed her arm in a grip that would leave bruises.

“You let me go!”

“The hell I will!” he yelled back at her. “Now you listen… ”

With an inarticulate sob of fury she thrust her torch into his face. He leaped back, barely catching himself from going backward down the stairs, and she was gone, a flicker of white fluttering down the wind-searched gallery, her torch streaming in her wake like a banner. Rudy followed profanely.

In spite of the Dark, she left the nursery door open for him. He stumbled through and slammed it shut behind him, gasping with exertion and terror and rage.

“You're insane, do you know that?” he shouted at her. “You could get the both of us killed! You didn't even know if the kid was still alive—”

She wasn't listening. She bent over the gilded cradle and gathered the child in her arms. Tir was awake, but silent, as he had been in that dilapidated shack in the orange groves of California, dark-blue eyes wide with understanding fear. The girl shook back the waves of hair from her face and smoothed the child's round cheek with her fingers. Rudy could see that her hands were shaking.

“Here,” he said roughly, and pulled a shawl from the table beside the crib. “Make a sling and tie the kid to you. You're gonna need your hands free to carry the torches.” She obeyed silently, not meeting his eyes. “I don't know whether I shouldn't brain you myself. It might knock some sense into your head.”

She took her torch from the wall holder where she'd placed it and turned back to him, her eyes defiant. Rudy grunted in an unwilling and inarticulate concession to her courage, if not to her brains. “You're gonna have to tell me how to find these vaults they're talking about.”

“Down the stairs, through the arch at the end of the big hall, down the steps to the right,” she said in a small voice. “It will be the main vault, where they store the wine. That's the only room large enough.”

He took up his own torch again and glanced briefly around that small octagonal room with its dull gold hangings and filigreed ebony fixtures. Then he looked back at the girl, her face as white as her gown in the flickering shadows. “Yeah, well, if we get killed… ” he began to threaten, then stopped. “Aah,” he growled. “I still think you're crazy.” He handed her his torch and edged to the door of the room, gripping the sword hilt in both hands, as he had seen Ingold do. Alde stood back from him without a word.

“You ready?”

“Yes,” she said softly.

He muttered, “Here goes nuthin”, sweetheart," and took a step forward. In one quick movement, he kicked the door open and slashed. The Dark One that dropped through like an inky storm of protoplasm split itself on the brightness of the blade, splattering the three of them with stinking liquid; the second, immediately following the first, withdrew almost instantly on an aimless swirl of wind. No shapes were visible in the dark corridor stretching before them—only a restless sense of movement down at the -far end. He caught Alde by the arm and ran.

Fluttering shadows pursued them down the hall, monster shapes of himself, the girl, and the child. The torchlight briefly illuminated the open arches to their left; but beyond, sight failed in an endless abyss of blasphemous night. Rudy could sense the Dark all around them, watching them with a queer, horrible intelligence, waiting only for the unguarded moment to pounce. From the top of the stairs they looked down at the chasm of the hall, where a dropped torch, burning itself out on the floor, revealed a ruin of filth, torn clothes, discarded shoes, and smashed furniture trampled in the flight. Around the far archway and dimly visible in the hall beyond, a straggle of bones and bloodless, crumpled bodies showed what had happened moments after he'd followed Alde up the stairs; and beyond that archway, slipping over the bodies, a gliding shifting darkness seemed to flow.

Rudy's breath strangled in his throat. Exposed as they were at the top of the stairs, nothing could have induced him to descend to that hall, to try to cross that floor. Beside him Alde gasped, and he looked where she pointed. Four or five things like black snail shells clung to the great arched ceiling of the room, long tails hanging down, wavering in the moving air. The dim torchlight played over the chitinous gleam of their shiny backs, and picked out claws and spines and the glittering drool of acid that ran from their tucked mouths down the stone ribbing of the wall. Then, one by one, they released their hold, dropping down into the air, changing shape—changing size—melting into the shadows. Though he'd watched them as they let go, Rudy had no idea where they'd gone.

Alde whispered, “There's another way into the vaults. It's back this way. Hurry!”

Needless waste of words, Rudy thought, striding beside her down the gallery, the soft evil winds stirring in his long hair. How many of the things did it take to kill the light of a fire? A dozen? Half a dozen? Four? His T-shirt and denim jacket were clammy with sweat; his hand ached on the hilt of the sword. The shadows all around them seemed to be moving, pressing closer upon them. The torchlight reflected darkly in Tir's watching eyes. A doorway opened on a corridor, wind-searched and smelling of the Dark. There was a sense of something that followed, soft-breathing and always out of sight. Alde's breath came like a swift-breaking series of sobs; his own footsteps seemed eerily loud. A small black doorway led to the sudden, twisting spiral of a lightless corkscrew stair, down and down, steep as a ladder and perilously slippery; the amber flicker of the torches gilded stone walls barely a yard apart.

Then they reached the bottom and smelled all around them the damp, nitrous odor of underground.

“Where the hell are we?” Rudy whispered. “The dungeons?” Dampness gleamed like phosphorus on the rough walls and pooled among the lumpy stones of the floor.

Alde nodded and pointed down the corridor. “That way.”

Rudy took one of the torches from her and held it low, so as not to brush the stone ceiling with the flame. “These were really the dungeons?”

“Oh, yes,” the girl said softly. “Well, way back in former days, of course. Every great House of the Realm kept its own troops and had law over its own people. The High Kings, the Kings at Gae, changed all that; any man can appeal from a landchief's or a lord's court to the King's now. That's for civil crimes, of course; the Church still judges its own.” She hesitated at a branching of the ways. The dungeons were a black labyrinth of cramped wet passageways; Rudy wondered how she could be so confident. “Down here, I think.”