Darwath 1 - The Time Of The Dark (35 page)

“You're gonna need a leash for that kid once he starts crawling,” Rudy commented.

Alde shuddered. “Don't remind me.” And she disappeared inside.

The convoy began to move. The wind increased in violence, howling down the canyons to fall on the pilgrims with iron claws. Rudy stumbled along beside the wagon, blinded by the snow, his fingers growing numb through his gloves. The road here was disused, but better than the road from Karst had been, with pavement down the center where it had not been broken up by tree-roots or buried by neglect. Still, the drifting snow made treacherous footing, and Rudy knew that those at the tail of the convoy would be sliding their way through a river of slush. Wind and darkness cut visibility to almost nothing. The shapes of the Guards surrounding the wagon grew dim and chaotic, like half-guessed shadows in a frightful dream.

Remembering Ingold's teachings, Rudy tried to call light to him. He managed to throw a big, sloppy ball of it about three feet in front of him to light his steps. But the effort took most of his concentration and, as he slipped in the snow or staggered under the brutal flail of the wind, the light dimmed and scattered. The snow thickened in the air, like swirling gray meal all around him, except where it passed, unmelting, through the witchlight, which transformed it into a tiny roaring storm of diamonds that made his eyes ache. His cloak and boots dragged wetly on his limbs, and his hands passed quickly from insensibility to pain. Once, when the wind slacked like the slacking of a rope, he heard Minalde's voice from the wagon, singing softly to her child:

"Hush, little baby, don't say a word,

Papa's gonna buy you a mockingbird… "

He wondered numbly how that song had ever leaked its way into the tongue of the Wathe.

He lost all track of time. How long he'd been struggling through the blinding wilderness he had no way of knowing, could not even guess. He felt as if it had been hours since they'd broken camp, the ground always rising under his slipping feet, the wind worrying at him like a beast at its prey. He hung onto the wagon grimly with one hand and onto his staff with the other; at tunes it seemed as if those were the only things keeping him on his feet He knew by then that if he went down, he would die.

At one point, Gil came up beside him, so thin and ragged he wondered dully why she didn't blow away. She yelled at him over the gale. “You okay?”

He nodded. A lady and a scholar, he thought. And tough as they come.

Others passed them, or were passed by them, fighting the wind with desperate persistence. He saw the old man from Karst with his crates of chickens still piled on his bowed back, wrapped up in blankets and laden with pounds of trapped snow. The struggling band of camp orphans were roped together like goslings behind their chief. A stout woman leading a goat passed them; a little farther on he saw her lying face down in the snow, the goat standing wretchedly over her body.

And still they pushed on. Rudy stumbled and fell, his body so numb he was scarcely aware of hitting the ground. Someone bent over him, hauled him to his feet, and shook him out of his stupor with a violence that surprised him—a ghostly, dark shape in a blowing mantle, with a bluewhite light burning on the end of his staff. Rudy staggered wordlessly back to the wagon, catching the cover ropes for support, and the shape melted into the dark. In the lightless chaos he could see other shapes moving, dragging stragglers to their feet, urging them on with words or pleas, curses or blows. He clung to the ropes grimly, reminding himself he'd promised to get Alde to the Keep, reminding himself that there was a goal, somewhere in this black universe of unending cold. He had learned already that, under certain circumstances, death could be very sweet indeed.

Time had become very deceptive; every movement was ponderously slow, an incredible effort barely worth the trouble, like that old Greek guy who had to push the stone up the hill, knowing full well it was just going to roll to the bottom again. The night was far gone. He could tell by the changing note of the wind that they were coming clear of the deep gorges, coming into a more open space. Feebly, mind and will drowning in a blind darkness that was within him as well as without, he tried to call back a little of the witchlight, but raised not even a glimmer.

Just keep putting one foot in front of the other, he told himself grimly. You'll get there. The wind struck him like a club; he went down and this time decided not to get up. They could make it to the Keep without him. He was going to sleep for a while.

He drifted for a time in memories, chiefly of the warm hills of California, the rippling gold of the sunbaked grass, and the way the sun had felt on his bare arms as he hauled down Highway 15 on his chopper in the late evening, the wind streaming through his hair. He wondered if he'd ever get to do that again. Probably not, he decided. But even that didn't matter much. Who'd have figured that leaving on a beer run would end up with me freezing to death in a range of mountains that never even existed?

Life is weird.

A seven-foot giant with a kick like a mule loomed suddenly in the darkness and booted him in the ribs. Cold returned, and a thin leakage of pain spread into every muscle and joint. He mumbled, “Hey,” protestingly, and the giant kicked him again.

“Get up, you sniveler.” Why did a seven-foot giant have Gil's voice?

Arrogant egghead bitch. “No.”

Even a few weeks of swordmastery training had given her a grip like a claw. Surprising, too, that somebody wasted down to ninety-eight pounds of brittle bone could have the strength to drag him to his feet and throw him with such violence against the side of the moving wagon, so that he had to catch hold of it.

“Now keep moving,” she ordered.

Stupid of her not to understand. “I can't,” he explained groggily.

“The hell with you!” she yelled at him, suddenly furious. “You may be a goddam wizard, but you're a coward and a quitter, and I'll be damned if I'll have you let everybody down by up and dying on the road. You die when you get to the Keep if you want to so bad. We're only a couple miles from it.”

“Hunh?” Rudy tried to keep a grip on the rope with his fingers, but they were too numb. He thrust his whole arm through the space between the rope and the flapping cover. “What did you say?”

But as if in answer to his words, he felt a sudden change in the air. The titanic winds veered, and the relentless hammering force of them slackened, making him stagger, as if for a support suddenly lost. The snow, instead of peppering his body like bullets from a Tommy gun, fell straight for a few moments, then ceased. He could hear the roaring of the wind in the pines above the road and its shrieking whine in the rocks, but the air around him, though freezing cold, was still.

The wagon team halted, one ox managing a plaintive low. Boots scrunched in the squeaking snow all about him; somewhere leather creaked. He could hear his own breath and that of the woman beside him.

“What is it?” he whispered. “Has the storm let up?”

“Not like that, it wouldn't. Besides, you can still hear it overhead.”

He blinked against the darkness and raised a shaking hand to scrape ice crystals from his eyes. “Then what… ” Then he realized what must have happened. Shock and fear sent a jolt of adrenalin into his veins that cleared his groggy mind. “Oh, Christ,” he whispered. “Ingold.”

“He stopped the storm, didn't he?” Gil said softly. “They must have been losing too many people… ”

“But you know what that means?” Rudy said urgently.

“It means the Dark will be coming now.” He took an experimental step away from the wagon and found he could stand after a fashion by leaning on his staff. “We gotta get moving.”

The Guards were closing in around them, some thirty strong; he could pick out their voices in the darkness. God only knew where the rest of the train was. They'd gotten so badly strung out in the storm, it was every man for himself. He flexed his right hand stiffly, trying to convince himself it was still really his; he heard Gil's voice speaking softly to the Guards around them and, brief and cold, the Icefalcon's breathless laugh. Gil came back to him. “Can you call up some light?” she asked. “The land flattens out from here on; we could lose the road completely. Look.”

There was, in fact, only one thing to look at: a tiny square of orange light, distant and sharp in the wastelands of cold.

“Tomec Tirkenson's up at the Keep. That's the fire around the doors.”

“Okay,” Rudy said. “We can make for that, if nothing else.” He tried several times to call light, but his fatigue-drugged consciousness was unequal to the task. They were moving again, heading steadily toward that tiny orange star, the going impossibly rough over the steep, uneven ground. From the wagon behind him, he heard Tir's thin, protesting wails and Alde's voice, softly shushing him. He trod on something hard that rolled sickeningly underfoot, stumbled, and put his hand on it in falling. It was an iron cook pot. Despite the cold and danger, he grinned—others had made it this far. The whole Vale was probably littered with discarded household goods, flung away in a last, desperate effort to keep on going. Well, if they could do it, he could do it.

And then he felt it—a breath of wind in the stillness, a wind not like the might of the storm, but a thin, directionless whisper that spoke of stone and damp, warm darkness, a faint stirring of air from above and behind and all sides. Turning, he saw the Dark.

How he saw them he wasn't sure—perhaps by some wizard-sense, grown from the exercise of his powers. They flowed over the snow toward the wagon, scarcely distinguishable one from the other or from the shifting river of illusion in which they swam. Whiplike tails steered and propelled, and they moved with a sinuous glide, the jointed legs tucked in folds like bamboo armor under the soft, dripping tentacles of the slobbering mouths. For a moment he stood hypnotized, fascinated by the changing shapes, now visible, now only wavering ghosts. He wondered in what sense they could be said to be material at all. What atoms and molecules made up those sleek, pulsing bodies? What brain, or brains, had conceived the stairways that led down to the blackness under the earth?

Then one of the oxen gave a great bellow of terror and tried to leap forward; it fell, pulling down its teammate in a tangle of harness and splintering the wagon tongue under its threshing weight.

“The Dark!” Rudy yelled in desperate warning, and tried to summon light, any light, for aid against the unseen foes. He heard Alde scream. Then from behind him a shattering blaze of witchlight pierced the darkness like a strobe, and that pouring river of shadow and illusion broke against it and swirled away like a great ring of smoke. Ingold came striding out of the unnatural stillness, his shadow thrown hard and blue onto the glittering snow at his feet.

“Cut that ox loose, get my lady out of the wagon, and get moving,” he ordered briefly. By the burning light, the Guards came running to them, faces haggard under the crusting of frost. “Janus, do you think you can make it as far as the Keep?”

The Commander, barely recognizable under the ice that scaled his hair and cloak, squinted at the light in the distance, against which the tiny figures of men were now clearly visible. “I think so,” he panted. “Again, you've saved us.”

Ingold retorted, “It's about a mile and a half too soon to say that. My lady… ”

He turned back to the wagon. The Icefalcon had cut the team loose, but the wagon was clearly beyond further use. From the curtains at the front, a white face looked out, framed in the darkness of a black fur hood and a cascade of crow-black hair.

Rudy stepped quickly over to the wagon. “We've got to run for it, babe,” he said softly, and she nodded, turning unquestioningly back into the shadows of the cart to fetch Tir. She reappeared a moment later with the heavily muffled infant in her arms, her face pale in the light of Ingold's staff, her eyes wide with apprehension. Gil held out her arms and received the child awkwardly, while Rudy helped Minalde down over the broken wagon tongue. Even through two pairs of gloves and the burning numbness of his fingers, he was conscious of the touch of her hand.

“How far?” she whispered.

Gil nodded toward the distant orange gleam of the Keep doors. “About two miles.”

Alde took the baby back, feeling as she did so the chill, prickly sensation she had known before, the subconscious awareness of the presence of the Dark. The Dark Ones had not been defeated by the advent of the light. They had merely drawn off to wait.

The wind still howled overhead, but near them the air was uncannily still. From all around them in the Vale they could hear voices, distorted by cold and distance, voices of fear, hope, despair. Refugees throughout the dark mountains were making for the lights of the Keep, unseen forms fighting their way through stillness and deep snow; but within the circle of light cast by Ingold's staff, the little group of Guards around the fallen wagon were alone. Coated with frost, they seemed to be some kind of fantastic ice-creatures, beaded with diamonds and breathing crystal smoke. And beyond them, invisible in the blue-black ocean of the night, that sense of restless motion stirred just out of the range of vision.

Ingold came over to the little group by the wagon tongue, his light harsh on their drawn, haggard faces. He was a man who imparted his own strength to others; Gil found she drew warmth from his presence, as from a fire, and saw that Rudy and Alde looked a little less deathly as well. He put a hand briefly to Alde's cheek and gazed sharply into her face. “Can you make it?”

“I have to,” she said simply.

“Good girl. Rudy… ”

Rudy stepped forward hesitantly.

“Channel your Power through your staff; that's what it's there for, not just to keep you from stubbing your toes.”

Rudy looked in surprise at the six-foot walking stick he'd cut for himself miles up the road. “Uh—you mean, that's all? You don't have to do anything special to make a staff magic?”

Ingold appeared to pray briefly for patience. “All things are inherently magic,” he said patiently. “Now… ”

Tentatively, Rudy called light again, feeling the power of it through his hand, through the wood that had become smoothed to his grip by its use, through the air. Light began to burn smokily from the end of the staff, growing brighter and throwing doubled shadows, blue and black, on the spokes of the wagon wheels, on the thin, frightened faces of the two girls, on the dilapidated cart, and on the deep-set hollows of Ingold's eyes.