THE TIME OF THE DARK

Book 1 of the Darwath Series

Barbara Hambly

Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1982

Copyright © Barbara Hambly 1982

Cover illustrations © Nakonechnyi Jaroslav

Cover design by Andrew Davis © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Barbara Hambly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008378684

Ebook Edition © February 2020 ISBN: 9780008378691

Version: 2020-02-18

Dedication

For Laurie

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

About the Author

Also by Barbara Hambly

About the Publisher

Map

The Reaches of the Dark

ONE
_____________________

GIL KNEW THAT IT was only a dream. There was no reason for her to feel fear – she knew that the danger, the chaos, the blind, sickening nightmare terror that filled the screaming night were not real; this city with its dark, unfamiliar architecture, these fleeing crowds of panic-stricken men and women who shoved her aside, unseeing, were only the vivid dregs of an overloaded subconscious, wraiths that would melt with daylight.

She knew all this; nevertheless, she was afraid.

She seemed to be standing at the foot of a flight of green marble stairs, facing into a square courtyard surrounded by tall peak-roofed buildings. Fleeing people were shoving past her, jostling her back against the gigantic pedestal of a malachite statue, without seeming to be aware of her presence at all; gasping, wild-eyed people, terrified faces bleached to corpses by the brilliance of the cold quarter moon. They were pouring out of the gabled houses, the men clutching chests or bags of money, the women jewels, lap-dogs, or children crying in uncomprehending terror. Their hair was wild from sleep, for it was deep night; some of them were dressed but many were naked, or tripping over bedclothes hastily snatched, and Gil could smell the rank terror-sweat of their bodies as they brushed against her. None of them saw her, none of them stopped; they stumbled frantically up those vast steps of moonlit marble, through the dark arch of the gates at the top, and out into the clamoring streets of the stricken city beyond.

What city? Gil wondered confusedly. And why am I afraid? This is only a dream.

But she knew. In her heart she knew, as things are known in dreams, that this scene of frenzied escape was even now being repeated, like the hundredfold reflections in a doubled mirror, everywhere in the city around her. The knowledge and the horror created a chill that crept along her skin, crawled wormlike through her guts.

They all felt it, too. For not a man would stop to lean on the pillar behind her, nor a woman stumble on the steps at her feet. They looked back with the blank, wide eyes of madness, their frenzied gaze drawn as if against their will to the cyclopean doors of ancient time-greened bronze that dominated the wall opposite. It was from these that they fled. It was behind this monstrous trapezoidal gateway that the horror was building, as water builds behind a weakening dam a soft, shifting, bodiless evil, an unspeakable eruption into the land of the living from out of black abysses of space and time.

There was motion, and voices, in the cavern of the arched gateway behind her, muffled footfalls and the thin, ringing whine of a sword as it was drawn. Gil turned, her thick hair tangling in her eyes. The wild, jumping dance of wind-bent torches silhouetted crowding forms, flickering across a face, a blade-edge, the dull pebbled gleam of chain mail. Against the thinning tide of desperate civilians, the Guards stepped into the cool pewter monochrome of the moonlight – black-uniformed, lightly mailed, booted, men and women both, the honed blades of their weapons shining thinly against the play of the shadows. Gil could catch a glimpse of a nervous rabble of hastily armed civilians massing up behind them, whispering in dread and fumbling with unpracticed hands at the hilts of borrowed armament, grim fear fighting terrified bewilderment in their half-seen faces. And striding down ahead of them all was an old man in a brown robe, an old wizard, hawk-eyed and bearded and bearing a sword of flame.

It was he who stopped on the top step, scanning the court before him like a hunting eagle while the last of the fleeing, half-naked populace streamed raggedly up the stairs past Gil, brushing against her, unseeing, past the wizard, past the Guards, bare feet slapping hollowly in the black passage of the gates. She saw him fix his gaze on the doors, knowing the nature of that eldritch unseen horror, knowing from whence it would come. The battered, nondescript face was serene behind the tangled chaparral of beard. Then his gaze shifted, judging his battleground, and his eyes met hers.

He could see her. She knew it instantly, even before his eyes widened in startled surprise. The Guards and volunteers, hesitating behind the old man, unwilling to go where he was not ahead of them, were looking around and through and past her, dubiously seeking the wizard’s vision in the suddenly still moonlight of the empty court. But he could see her, and she wondered confusedly why.

Across the court, from the cracks and hinges of those timeless doors, a thin, directionless wind had begun to blow, stirring and whispering over the silver-washed circles of the pavement, tugging at Gil’s coarse black hair. It carried on it the dank, cold scent of evil, of acid and stone and things that should never see light, of blood and darkness. But the wizard sheathed the gleaming blade he held and came cautiously down the steps toward her, as if he feared to frighten her.

But that, Gil thought, would not be possible – and anyway she was only dreaming. He looked like a gentle old man, she thought. His eyes, blue and bright and very fierce, held in them neither pride nor cruelty, and if he were afraid of the shifting, sightless thing welling in darkness behind the doors, he did not show it. He advanced to within a few feet of where she stood shivering in the green shadows of the monstrous statue, those blue eyes puzzled and wary, as if trying to understand what he saw. Then he held out his hand and made as if to speak.

Abruptly, Gil woke up – but not in her bed.

For a moment she didn’t know where she was. She threw out her hand awkwardly, startled and disoriented, as those suddenly wakened are, and the cold fluted marble of the pedestal’s edge bit savagely into her palm. The night’s damp cold knifed her bare legs, froze her naked feet on the pavement. The cries of fear from the night-gripped city came to her suddenly clearer on the wind, and with them the elusive scent of water. For an instant, the shrieking horror of what lay behind the doors was like a gripping hand at her throat, and then it sank, whirled away like leaves in the face of shock and confusion and even greater horror.

She had waked up.

She was no longer dreaming.

She was still there.

All the eyes were on her now; startled, uncertain, even afraid. The warriors, still gathered at the top of the broad polished steps, stared in surprise at this thin young woman, dark-haired and scantily clad in the green polka-dot cowboy shirt that she habitually wore to bed, who had so suddenly appeared in their midst. Gil stared back, clutching for support the sharp edge of the marble behind her, weak with shock and frantic with bewilderment and dread, her legs shaking and her breath strangling in her throat.

But the wizard was still there, and she realized that it was impossible to be truly afraid when she was with him.

Quietly, he asked her, “Who are you?”

To her own surprise she found the voice to answer. “Gil,” she said. “Gil Patterson.”

“How did you come here?”

Around them the black wind blew stronger from the doors, rank and cold and vibrant with brooding abhuman lusts. The Guards murmured among themselves, tension spreading along the line, visible as the humming quiver of a tautened wire – they, too, were afraid. But the wizard didn’t stir, and the mellow, scratchy warmth of his voice was unshaken.

“I – I was dreaming,” Gil stammered. “But – this – I – it isn’t a dream anymore, is it?”

“No,” the old man said kindly. “But don’t be afraid.” He raised his scarred fingers and made some movement in the air with them that she could not clearly see. “Go back to your dreams.”

The night’s cold faded as the cloying haziness of sleep blurred sound and smell and fear. Gil saw the Guards peer with startled eyes at the blue, flickering shadows that she knew were all they could now see. Then the wizard spoke to them, and they followed him as he strode across the deserted pavement of the court, facing into the black winds and the nameless menace of the doors. He raised his sword, a long two-handed blade, and it sparked in the darkness like summer lightning. Then, as if an explosion had rocked the vaults below the building, the doors burst open, and blackness poured forth over them like smoke.

Gil saw what was in the darkness, and her own screams of terror woke her.

Her hands shook so badly she could barely switch on the bedside lamp. The clock on the table beside her bed said two-thirty. Drenched in sweat and colder than death, Gil fell back against the pillow, whispering frantically to herself that it was only a dream – only a dream. I am twenty-four years old and a graduate student in medieval history and I will have my Ph.D. in a year and it’s stupid to be afraid of a dream. And it was only a dream. It’s all over now and none of it was real. It was only a dream.

She told herself this, staring out from the fortress of worn sheets and cheap blankets at the convincing familiarity of her own apartment – the Levi’s lolling out of the half-closed dresser drawer, Rooster Cogburn glowering down from a poster on the wall, the absent-minded litter of textbooks, tissues, pennies, and dog-eared paperbacks that strewed the threadbare shag of the rug. She thought about the early hour of today’s seminar, glanced again at the clock and the lamp, and considered seeking sleep and darkness. But though she was, as she had said, twenty-four years old and almost a Ph.D., far too old to be troubled by the fears felt in a dream, she rolled over after a short time and groped Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages from the floor beside her bed. She found her place in it, and by act of will forced herself to become fascinated by the legal status of the King’s Highway in fifteenth-century England.

She did not trust herself to sleep again until it was almost dawn.

Oddly enough, Gil remembered nothing of the dream until nearly a week later. And what she did remember, driving home from the university in the tawny-golden brilliance of a California September afternoon, was the wizard’s voice, wondering where she had heard it, the warm timbre of it and the characteristic break in tone, the velvet smoothness sliding into roughness and then abruptly back.

Then she remembered the eyes, the city, the shadows, and the fear. And she realized, turning her red VW down Clarke Street toward her apartment building, that it wasn’t the first time she’d dreamed about that city.

The odd thing about the first dream, Gil recalled, maneuvering into a narrow parking space on the perennially crowded cul-de-sac, was that, though there had been nothing at all in it to cause her fear, she had been afraid and had waked up chilled with a lingering sense of dread.

She had dreamed of wandering alone in a vaulted chamber, so huge that the lines of shadow-curtained arches supporting the low, groined ceiling had vanished into darkness all about her. Dust had stirred mustily beneath her bare feet, had coated the disused junk and dilapidated boxes piled between and among the pillars, and had fogged the distant glow of a yellow flame that she was following to its source, a little tallow-dip lamp burning beside the dark sweep of a red porphyry Stair. All around her, as cloaking as the dust, as ubiquitous as the shadows, was that sense of lurking fear, of being watched from the darkness by things that had no eyes.

The pallid flame had gleamed dully on the broad red steps and had thrown back the half-seen shape of monumental bronze doors at their top, but had drawn no reflection from the leaden blackness of the basalt floor, in spite of the fact that the floor was as smooth as glass, polished by the passage of countless feet; how this could be in the deeps of the vaults she did not know, and it was clear from the dust that few if any came here now. The floor was old, far older than the walls, though how she knew this Gil was not sure – older, she thought, than the city over her head, or any city of mankind. In the midst of that dark pavement, right before the lamplit steps, one single slab of the floor was new, hewn of pale gray granite, its surface rough against the worn, silken smoothness of the rest of the floor, though it, too, was covered with that agelong mantle of dust.

In the darkness above her a door creaked, and light wavered across the many arches. Gil slipped back into the shadow of a pillar, though she knew it was only a dream, and knew that people here could not see her because they did not exist. A woman, a servant by her dress, came padding down the steps with a basket on her arm, holding a lamp up above her head; at her heels lumbered a hunchbacked slave, peering around him at the darkness out of shadowed, wary eyes. The woman led the way unconcernedly down the Stair, across the smooth dark floor, turning aside to avoid walking on the odd granite slab, although her goal – a bin of dried apples – lay directly opposite the foot of the stairs, and the odd slab was in no way raised above the level of the rest of the floor. The hunchback made an even wider circuit, moving from pillar to pillar, woofing and clucking quietly to himself and never taking those sharp, fear-filled eyes from the pale stone.

The woman loaded her basket and handed it to the hunchback to carry. She started back toward the steps and paused, irresolute, clearly telling herself not to be a silly, superstitious goose, that there was no reason to be afraid, not of the darkness that pressed so close around her, and certainly not of six feet by twelve of pavement that was gray instead of black, granite instead of basalt. But in the end, she took the long way around, to avoid walking on that odd slab.

That’s why it’s rough, when the rest of the floor is so weirdly smooth, Gil thought. No one walks on it. No one has ever walked on it.

Why?

But even the sense that the two dreams were somehow connected held only a kind of passing curiosity for her, until the third dream. They did nothing to disturb the fabric of her daily existence. She continued to spend hours in the university library, searching scholarly articles and moldering Middle English town records, jotting information on index cards that she later sorted out at the kitchen table back in the Clarke Street apartment, trying to make sense of what she knew. She graded undergraduate papers, sweated over her grant proposal, and had her dealings with friends and lovers – the routine of her life – until she dreamed of that beleaguered city again.

She knew it was the same city, though she looked down on it now from above. She found herself standing in the embrasure of a tall window, in a tower, she thought. So bright was the moonlight that she could discern the patterns of the courtyard pavement far below, see the designs worked into the wrought-iron lace of the gates, and make out even the shadows of the fallen leaves, like a furring of dust on the ground. Raising her eyes, she could catch, across the peaked maze of rooftrees, the glimpse of distant water. In the other direction, the black shoulders of mountains loomed against the hem of a star-blazing sky.

In the room behind her a solitary tongue of flame stood above the polished silver of the lamp on the table, and by its small, unwavering glow she could distinguish the furnishings, few and simple, each exquisitely wrought out of dark wood and ivory. Though the design and motifs were alien to her eyes, she could recognize in them the creative height of a well-founded tradition, the product of a sophisticated and tasteful culture.

And she saw that she was not alone.

Against the chamber’s far wall stood the room’s largest piece of furniture, a massive ebony crib, its scrolled railings veined in mother-of-pearl that caught the dim lamplight. Above it, all but hidden in the massed shadows, a tall canopy loomed, with an emblem picked out in gold: a stylized eagle striking, beneath a tiny crown. This emblem was repeated, stitched in pinfire glints of bullion, on the black surcoat of the man who stood beside that crib, head bent and silent as a statue, looking down at its sleeping occupant.

He was a tall man, handsome in an austere way. Some silver showed in his shoulder-length brown hair, though Gil would not have put his age much above thirty-five. From the soles of his soft leather boots to the folds of the billowing robe that covered surcoat and tunic, the man’s clothing was rich, of a piece with the subdued grandeur of the room, dark, plain, flawlessly tailored of the most expensive fabric. The gems in the hilt of his sword flickered like stars in the lamplight with the small movement of his breath.

A sound in the corridor beyond made him raise his head, and Gil saw his face, haunted with the expectation of terrible news. Then the door beside him opened.

“I thought I should find you here,” the wizard said. For one moment Gil had the absurd notion that he was speaking to her. But the man in black nodded, his face setting into lines worn by grim concentration on a problem beyond solving, and his long, slender hand continued to stroke the inward-curling circles of the rail of the crib.

“I was on my way down,” he apologized, his voice muffled, his face turned half away. “I only wanted to see him.”

The wizard closed the door. The movement of the air made the single lampflame shudder, the flickering color briefly gilding sunbursts of wrinkles around his eyes, showing that same expression of weariness and strain. Gil saw that he, too, wore a sword, belted over the pale homespun of his robe. The hilt of it was not jeweled, but was worn silky with years of use. He said, “There is no need. I doubt they will attack again tonight.”

“Tonight,” the man in black repeated somberly. His bitter eyes were a hard smoke-gray, like steel in the dense shadows of the little room. “What about tomorrow night, Ingold? And the night after? Yes, we pushed them back tonight, back down under the earth where they belong. We won – here. What about in the other cities of the Realm? What have you seen in that crystal of yours, Ingold? What has been happening elsewhere tonight? In Penambra in the south, where it seems now even my governor has been slain, and the Dark Ones haunt his palace like foul ghosts? In the provinces along the valley of the Yellow River to the east, where you tell me they hold such sway that not a man will leave his house after the sun goes in? In Gettlesand across the mountains, where the fear of the Dark Ones is so great that men will stay within their doors while the White Raiders ride down off the plains to burn and loot among them at will?

“The Army cannot be everywhere. They’re scattered in the four corners of the Realm, most of them still at Penambra. We here in Gae cannot hold out forever. We may not even be able to hold the Palace, should they come again tomorrow night.”

“That is tomorrow,” the wizard replied quietly. “We can only do what we must – and hope.”

“Hope.” He said it without scorn or irony, only as if it were a word long unfamiliar, whose very sound was awkward upon his tongue. “Hope for what, Ingold? That the Council of Wizards will break this silence of theirs and come out of hiding in their city at Quo? Or that, if and when they do, they will have an answer?”

“You narrow hope when you define it, Eldor.”

“God knows it’s narrow enough as it is.” Eldor turned away, to pace like a restless lion to the window and back, taking the room in three of his long strides. He passed within a foot of Gil without seeing her, but Ingold the wizard looked up, and his eyes rested briefly, curiously, on her. Eldor swung around, his sleeve brushing Gil’s hand on the windowsill. “It’s the helplessness I can’t stand,” he burst out angrily. “They are my people, Ingold. The Realm – and all of civilization, if what you tell me is true – is falling to pieces around me, and you and I together cannot so much as offer it a shield to hide behind. You can tell me what the Dark Ones are, and where they come from, but all your powers cannot touch them. You can’t tell us what we can do to defeat them. You can only fight them, as we all must, with a sword.”

“It may be there is nothing we can do,” Ingold said, settling back in his chair. He folded his hands, but his eyes were alert.

“I won’t accept that.”

“You may have to.”

“It’s not true. You know it’s not true.”

“Humankind did defeat the Dark, all those thousands of years ago,” the wizard said quietly, the flickering of the light doing curious things to the scar-seamed contours of his weathered face. “As to how they did it – perhaps they themselves were not certain how it came about; in any case, we have found no record of it. My power cannot touch the Dark Ones because I do not know them, do not understand either their being or their nature. They have a power of their own, Eldor, very different from mine – beyond the comprehension of any human wizard, except, perhaps, Lohiro, the Master of the Council of Quo. Of what happened in the Time of the Dark, three thousand years ago, when they rose for the first time to devastate the earth – you know it all as well as I.”

“Know it?” The King laughed bitterly, facing the wizard like a beast brought to bay, his eyes dark with the memory of ancient outrage. “I remember it. I remember it as clearly as if it had happened to me, instead of to my however-many-times-great-grandfather.” He strode to stand over the wizard, shadowing him like a blighted tree, the single lamp flinging the great distorted shape of him to blend with the crowding dimness of the room. “And he remembers, too.” His hand moved toward the crib, the vast shadow-hand on the wall its dark echo, toward the child asleep within. “Deep in his baby mind those memories are buried. He’s barely six months old – six months, yet he’ll wake up screaming, rigid with fear. What can a child that young dream of, Ingold? He dreams of the Dark. I know.”

“Yes,” the wizard agreed, “you dreamed of it, too. Your father never did – in fact, I doubt your father ever feared or imagined anything in his life. Those memories were buried too deep in him – or perhaps there was simply no need for him to remember. But you dreamed of them and feared them, although you did not know what they were.”

Standing in the cool draft of the window, Gil felt that bond between them, palpable as a word or a touch: the memory of a gawky, dark-haired boy waked screaming from nameless nightmares, and the comfort given him by a vagabond wizard. Some of the harshness left Eldor’s face, and the grimness faded from his voice, leaving it only sad.

“Would I had remained ignorant,” he said. “We of our line are never entirely young, you know. The memories that we carry are the curse of our race.”

“They may be the saving of it,” Ingold replied. “And of us all.”

Eldor sighed and moved back to the crib in reflective silence, his slim, strong hands clasped lightly behind his back. But he was not now looking down at the child asleep. His eyes, brooding away into the shadows, lost their sharpness, focusing on times beyond his lifetime, on experience beyond his own.

After a while he said, “Will you do me one last service, Ingold?”

The old man’s eyes slid sharply over to him. “There is no last.”

The lines of Eldor’s face creased briefly deeper with his tired smile. He was evidently long familiar with the wizard’s stubbornness. “In the end,” he said, “there is always a last. I know,” he went on, “that your power cannot touch the Dark Ones. But it can elude them. I’ve seen you do it. When the night comes that they rise again, your power will allow you to escape, when the rest of us must die fighting. No—” He raised his hand to forestall the wizard’s next words. “I know what you’re going to say. But I want you to leave. If it comes to that, as your King, I order you to. When they come – and they will – I want you to take my son Altir. Take him and flee.”

The wizard sat silent, but his beard bristled with the set of his jaw. At last he said, “For one thing, you are not my King.”

“Then as your friend, I ask it,” the King said, and his voice was very low. “You couldn’t save us. Not all of us. You’re a great swordsman, Ingold, perhaps the greatest alive, but the touch of the Dark is death, to a wizard as well as to any other. Our doom is surely upon us here, for they will come again, as sure as the ice in the north, and there can be no escape. But you can save Tir. He’s the last of my line, the last of Dare of Renweth’s line – the last of the lineage of the Kings of Darwath. He’s the only one in the Realm now who will remember the Time of the Dark. History itself has all but forgotten; no record at all exists of that time, bar a mention in the oldest of chronicles. My father remembered nothing of it – my own memories are sketchy. But the need is greater now. Maybe that has something to do with it – I don’t know.

“But I know, and you know, that three thousand years ago the Dark Ones came and virtually wiped humankind from the face of the earth. And they departed away again. Why, Ingold, did they depart?”

The wizard shook his head.

“He knows,” Eldor said softly. “He knows. My memories are incomplete. You know that; I’ve told you a dozen times. He’s a promise, Ingold. I’m only a failed hope, a guttered candle. Somewhere in his memory, the heritage of the line of Dare, is the clue that all the rest of us have forgotten, that will lead to the undoing of the Dark. If I ever had it, it’s buried too deeply; and he’s the only other one. Him you must save.”

The wizard said nothing. The quiet flame of the lamp, pure and small as a gold coin, reflected in his thinking eyes. In the stillness of the room, that tiny gleam was unmoving, the pool of waxy gold that lay around the lamp on the polished surface of the table as steady and sharply defined as a spotlight. At length he said, “And what about you?”

“A King has the right,” Eldor replied, “to die with his kingdom. I will not leave the final battle. Indeed, I do not see how I could. But for all the love you have ever borne me, do this thing for me now. Take him, and see him to a place of safety. I charge you with it – it is in your hands.”

Ingold sighed and bent his head, as if to receive a yoke, the gold of the lamplight limning his silver hair. “I will save him,” he said. “That I promise you. But I will not desert you until the cause is hopeless.”

“Do not trouble yourself,” the King said harshly. “The cause is hopeless already.”

Deep below the dark foundations of the Palace a hollow booming resounded, like the stroke of a gigantic drum, and Gil felt the sound vibrate through the marble of the floor. Eldor’s head jerked up and around, his long mouth hardening in the smooth gold and shadows, his hand flinching automatically to the hilt of his jeweled sword, but Ingold only sat, a statue of stone and darkness. A second booming shivered the weight of the Palace on its deep-found piers, as if struck by a great fist. Breathless in the closeness of that peaceful room, three people waited for the third stroke. But no third stroke fell; only a cold, creeping horror that prickled Gil’s hair seemed to seep into the silence from below, the wordless threat of unknown peril.

Finally Ingold said, “They will not come tonight.” Through his weariness, his tone was certain. “Go to the Queen and comfort her.”

Eldor sighed; like a man released from a spell that had turned him to stone, he shifted broad, rawboned shoulders to relax the tension from his back. “The landchiefs of the Realm meet in an hour,” he excused himself tiredly, and rubbed at his eyes, his fingers grinding the dark smudges that ringed them. “And I should speak with the Guards before then about moving provisions out of the old vaults under the Prefecture, in case our supply lines are cut. But you’re right, I should go to see her … though first I should speak with the Bishop about bringing Church troops into the city.” He began to pace again, the restless movement of an active man whose mind forever outran his body. Ingold remained seated in the carved ivory chair with its little gilded deer-hoof feet, and the flame before him moved with Eldor’s motion, as if it, too, were drawn by the restless vitality of the man. “Will you be at the council?”

“I have given all the help and advice I can,” Ingold replied. “I shall remain here, I think, and try again to get in touch with the wizards at Quo. Tir may not be our only answer. There are records in the Library at Quo, and traditions handed down from master to pupil over millennia; knowledge and the search for knowledge are the key and the heart of wizardry. Tir is an infant. By the time he learns to speak, it may be too late for what he has to tell us.”

“It may already be too late.” The flame bowed with the soft closing of the door behind Eldor.

Ingold sat for a time after he had gone, brooding silently on that pure small slip of fire. The glow of it played across his shadowed eyes, touched the knuckles of his folded hands – blunt-fingered, powerful hands, nicked all over with the scars of old sword cuts and marked on one heavy wrist with an age-whitened shackle gall. Then he rubbed his eyes tiredly and looked straight into the deep hollow of shadow where Gil stood, framed by the intricately screened filigree of the pillars beside the window. He beckoned to her. “Come here,” he said gently, “and tell me about yourself. Don’t be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid.” But as she took a hesitating step forward, the lamplight darkened, and the whole room was lost to her sight in the foggy mazes of sleep.

Gil told no one about the third dream. She had spoken of the second one to a woman friend who had listened sympathetically but hadn’t, she felt, understood. Indeed, she didn’t understand it herself. But the third dream she mentioned to no one, because she knew that it had been no dream. The certainty troubled her. Maybe, she told herself, she would tell her friend about it one day, when enough time had passed so that it was no longer important. But for now she locked it away, with several other irrelevant matters, in her secret heart.

Then one night she woke from a sound sleep standing up. She saw, as her eyes cleared, that she was in a sunken courtyard in that deserted city. The great houses surrounded her like lightless cliffs, and moonlight drenched the square, throwing her shadow clearly on muddy and unwashed flagstones under her bare feet. The place was deserted, like a courtyard of the dead. Where the ghastly silver light blanched the facade of the east-facing house, she saw that its great doors had been blown off their hinges from within and lay in scattered pieces about her feet.

From out of that empty doorway, a sudden little wind stirred, restless and without direction, turning back on itself in a small scritching eddy of fallen leaves. She sensed beyond the blind windows and vacant doors of that house a sound, a fumbling movement, as if dark shifted through dark, bumbling eyelessly at the inner walls, seeking a way out. She swallowed hard, her breath quickening in fear, and she glanced behind her at the arched gateway that led out into the deserted street beyond. But the gate was dark, and she felt a clammy, unreasoning terror of walking beneath the clustered shadows in the high vault of the enclosed passage.

The wind from the house increased, chilling her. She edged her way back toward the dark gate, feeling herself beginning to shiver, her feet icy on the marble pavement. The silence of the place was terrible; even the screaming flight of that first night would have been more welcome. Then she had been in a crowd, though unseen; then she had not been alone. Silent and terrible, the lurker waited on the threshold of that dark house, and she knew that she must flee for her life. She would not be able to waken out of this dream; she knew that she was already awake.

Then, out of the corner of her eye, she had the brief impression of something moving, low to the ground, in the shadows by the wall. Swinging around, she saw nothing. But she thought that the darkness itself was reaching out toward her, damping even the moonlight.

Turning, she fled, her black shadow running on the ground before her in the ivory moonlight. Broken stone and iron gashed her bare feet as she plunged into the black arch of the gate, but the pain was swallowed in icy fear as thin, aimless winds tugged at her – as she sensed, rather than saw, something move in the utter blackness over her head. She stumbled into the street outside, her bleeding feet leaving red blotches on the wet slime of the cobbles, running, running in heart-bursting panic through the empty boulevards of the city that she now saw lay half in ruins, the silent pavements cluttered with rubble and new-stripped human bones. Shadows, black and as staring as walls of stone, confronted her with new horrors at every turn; gargoyle shapes of terror lurked under every eave and fallen rooftree. The only sounds in all that empty city of freezing night were the moist, pattering slap of her bare feet on stone and the gasp of her laboring breath, the only movements her own frenzied flight and that of her jerking, leaping shadow, and, behind her, the drifting movement of wind and darkness pouring after her like smoke. She fled blindly down black canyons, feet numb, legs numb, stumbling over she knew not what, knowing by instinct in which direction the Palace lay, knowing that Ingold the wizard was there and that Ingold would save her.

She ran until she woke, sobbing, clutching her pillow in the dark, soaked with cold terror-sweat, her body aching with exhaustion. Only gradually did the filtered moonlight register the familiar things of the Clarke Street apartment, alien to her wondering eyes, as if both worlds were now equally hers. She forced her gasping breath to slow, forced her mind to think; her legs smarted; her feet were like ice beneath the covers. In a confused clutching at the straws of sanity she thought, That’s why I dreamed of having cold feet; because my feet are cold. She groped for the light with trembling fingers, turned it on, and lay there shivering, repeating to herself the desperate, unbelieving litany: It was only a dream, it was only a dream. Please, God, let it be only a dream.

But even as she whispered, she felt the sticky wetness matting her numb toes. Reaching down, unwillingly, to warm them, she brought her fingers back streaked with fresh blood, from where she had cut her feet on the broken stone in the gateway.

Five nights later, the moon was full.

Its light woke Gil, startling her out of sleep into a split-second convulsion of fear, until she recognized the night-muted patterns of familiar things and realized she was in her place on Clarke Street. Waking suddenly in the night, she was seldom sure anymore. She lay still for a time, listening open-eyed in the darkness, waiting for the quick flood of panic to subside from her veins. White moonlight lay on the blanket beside her, palpable as a sheet of paper.

Then she thought, Dammit, I forgot to put the chain on the door.

This was purely a formality, a bedtime ritual; the apartment had a regular lock and, moreover, the neighborhood was a quiet one. She almost decided to forget the whole thing, roll over, and go back to sleep; but after a minute, she crawled out of bed, shivering in the cold, and groped her peacock kimono from its accustomed place on the floor. Wrapping it about her, she padded silently into the dark kitchen, her feet finding their way easily. Her hand found the light switch by touch in the darkness and flicked it up.

The wizard Ingold was sitting at the kitchen table.

Absurdly, Gil’s first thought was that this was the only time she’d seen him in decent lighting. He looked older, wearier, the brown and white of his homespun robes faded and stained and shabby, but he was essentially the same fierce, gentlemanly old man she knew from her dreams: the advisor of the dark King; the man whose face she’d seen reflected in the foxfire glow of his sword, striding down to meet the darkness.

This is stupid, she thought. This is crazy. Not because she was seeing him again – for she’d known all along that she would – but because it was in her apartment, her world. What the hell was he doing here if it wasn’t a dream? And she knew it wasn’t. She glanced automatically around the kitchen. The supper dishes – and the previous night’s supper dishes – were piled unwashed on the counter, the table top invisible under a litter of apple cores and index cards, cups of moldering coffee and sheets of scribbled notebook paper. Two of her old T-shirts were dumped over the back of the chair on which Ingold sat. The seedy electric clock behind his head read just past three. It was all too squalidly depressing to be anything but real – she was definitely neither asleep nor dreaming.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

The wizard raised shaggy eyebrows in surprise. “I came to talk to you,” he replied. She knew the voice. She felt that she had always known it.

“I mean – how did you get here?”

“I could give you a technical explanation, of course,” he said, and the smile that briefly illuminated his face turned it suddenly very young. “But would it matter? I crossed the Void to find you, because I need your help.”

“Hunh?”

It was not the kind of response best suited to what she’d read of dealing with wizards, but Ingold’s eyes twinkled with fleeting amusement. “I would not have sought you out,” he told her gently, “if I didn’t.”

“Uh—” Gil said profoundly. “I don’t understand.” She started to sit down opposite him, which involved clearing two textbooks and the calendar section of the Times off the chair, then paused in a tardy outburst of hospitality. “Would you like a beer?”

“Thank you.” He smiled, and gravely studied the opening instructions inscribed on the top of the can. For a first time, he didn’t do badly.

“How could you see me?” she asked, sliding into her chair as he shook the foam off his fingers. “Even when it was a dream, even when no one else could – King Eldor and the Guards at the gate – you could. Why was that?”

“It’s because I understand the nature of the Void,” the wizard said gravely. He folded his hands on the table, the blunt, scarred fingers idly caressing the gaudy aluminum of the can, as if memorizing its shape and feel. “You understand, Gil, that there exists an infinite number of parallel universes, meshed in the matrix of the Void. In my world, in my time, I am the only one who understands the nature of the Void – one of a bare handful who even suspects its existence.”

“And how did you learn about it, much less how to cross it, if no one else in your world knows?” Gil asked curiously.

The wizard smiled again. “That, Gil, is a story that would take all night to do justice to, without advancing the present situation. Suffice it to say that I am the only man in perhaps five hundred years who has been able to cross the curtain that separates universe from universe – and having done so, I was able to recognize the imprint of your thoughts, your personality, that had been drawn across the Void by the mass vibration of worldwide panic and terror. I believe there are a very few others in your world who, for whatever reason, be it psychic or physical or purest coincidence, have felt, from across the Void, the coming of the Dark. Of them all, you are the only one with whom I have been able to establish contact. It was seeing you, speaking to you, and then having you materialize not only in thought but in body, that made me understand what is happening with regard to the Void.”

Outside, a truck rumbled by on Clarke Street, its sound muffled with distance and the night. Somewhere in the apartment building, a toilet flushed, a faint echoing gurgle along the pipes. Gil stared down at the table for a time, her eye automatically noting her own jagged black handwriting spelling out cryptic notes with regard to the upkeep of fourteenth-century bridges, then looked up again at the wizard calmly drinking beer across from her, his staff leaned against the wall at his side.

She asked, “What is happening with the Void?”

“When I spoke with you in Gae,” Ingold went on, “I realized that our worlds must lie in very close conjunction at this time – so close that, because of the psychic crisis, a dreamer could literally walk the line between them and see from one into the next. This is both a rare and a temporary occurrence, a one-in-a-million chance for two worlds to drift so close. But it is a situation that I can use to my advantage in this emergency.”

“But why did it happen now, at the time of crisis?” Gil asked, the harsh electric glare rippling in the embroidery of her gaudy sleeves as she leaned forward across the table. “And why did it happen to me?”

He must have caught the suppressed slivers of uneasiness and fear of being singled out in her voice; when he replied he spoke gently. “Nothing is fortuitous. There are no random events. But we cannot know all the reasons.”

She barely hid a smile. “That’s a wizard’s answer if I ever heard one.”

“Meaning that mages deal in double talk?” His grin was impish. “That’s one of our two occupational hazards.”

“And what’s the other one?”

He laughed. “A deplorable tendency to meddle.”

She joined him in laughter. Then after a moment she grew quiet and asked, “But if you’re a wizard, how could you need my help? What help could I possibly give you that you couldn’t find for yourself? How could I help you against – against the Dark? Who is, or what is, the Dark?”

He regarded her in silence for a moment, judging her, testing her, watching her out of blue eyes whose surface brightness masked a depth and pull like the ocean’s. His face had grown grave again, settled into its sun-scorched lines. He said, “You know.”

She looked away, seeing in her unwilling mind monolithic bronze doors exploding off their hinges; seeing shadows that ran behind her, inescapable as ghostly wolves. She spoke without meeting his eyes. “I don’t know what they are.”

“Nor does anyone,” he said, “unless it’s Lohiro, the Master of Quo. It’s a question whose answer I wish I had never been set to seek, a riddle I’m sorry I have to unravel.

“What can I say of the Dark, Gil? What can I say that you don’t know already? That they are the sharks of night? That they pull the flesh from the bones, or the blood from the flesh, or the soul and spirit from the living body and let it stumble mindlessly to an eventual death from starvation? That they ride the air in darkness, hunt in darkness, and that fire or light or even a good bright moon will keep them away? Would that tell you what they are?”

She shook her head, hypnotized by the warm roughness of his voice, caught by the intensity of his eyes and by the horror and the memory of even more appalling horrors that she saw there. “But you know,” she whispered.

“Would to God I did not.” Then he sighed and looked away; when he turned his head again, there was only that matter-of-fact self-assurance in his face, without the doubt, or the fear, or the loathing of what he knew.

“I – I dreamed of them.” Gil stumbled on the words, finding it unexpectedly more difficult to speak of that first forerunning dream to one who understood than to one who did not. “Before I ever saw them, before I ever knew what they were. I dreamed about a – a vault, a cellar – with arches going in all directions. The floor was black and smooth, like glass; and in the middle of that black floor was a slab of granite that was new and rough, because nobody ever walked on it. You said they came from – from beneath the ground.”

“Indeed,” the wizard said, looking at her with an alert, speculative curiosity. “You seem to have sensed their coming far ahead of its time. That may mean something, though at the moment I’m not sure … Yes, that was the Dark, or, rather, the blocked-up entrance to one of their Nests. Under that granite slab – and I know the one you’re talking about – is a stairway, a stairway going downward incalculable depths into the earth. It was with the stairways, I believe, that it all began.

“For the stairways were always there. You find representations of them in the most ancient prehistoric petroglyphs: vast pavements of black stone and, in the midst of them, stairs descending to the deepest heart of the earth. No one ever went down them – at least, no one who came back up again – and no one knew who built them. Some said it was the titans of old, or the earth-gods; old records speak of the places as being awesome, full of magic. For a long time they were considered to be lucky, favored by the gods – the old religion built temples over them, temples which became the centers of the first cities of humankind.

“All this was millennia ago. Villages grew to towns and then to great cities. The cities united; states and realms spread along the rich valleys of the Brown River, on the shores of the Round Sea and the Western Ocean, and in the jungles and deserts of Alketch. Civilization flowered and bore its fruits: wizardry, art, money, learning, war. Records of that time are so scarce as to be almost nonexistent. Only beguiling fragments of chronicles remain, mostly in the Library at Quo, a teasing sliver of a civilization of great depth and richness, of sublime beauty and wisdom and truly foul decadence, a society that parented first wizardry and then the Church and the great codes of civil law.

“I am virtually certain that some kind of tradition existed then regarding the Dark Ones, simply because the word for them was in the language. Sueg – dark – isueg – an archaic, personalized form of the same word. But they were only a vague rumor of shadow on the edges of the oldest legends – the misty memory of hidden fear. And if there was such a tradition, it did not connect them with the stairways themselves. So they remained, rooted in the abysses of time, an ancient mystery buried in the heart of civilization.

“Of the destruction of the ancient world we have no coherent account. We know that it happened within a matter of weeks. That what struck, struck worldwide, we also know – a simultaneous siege of horror. But the horror and the confusion were so overwhelming that virtually no record was preserved; and since defense against the Dark generally entailed uncontrolled use of fire as a weapon, we lost what little information we might have had about their coming. We know that they came – but we do not know why.

“Unable to fight, humankind fled and retreated to fortified Keeps, behind whose massive walls they led a windowless existence, creeping forth by day to till their fields and hiding when the sun went down. For three hundred years, absolute chaos and terror held sway on the earth, because there was no knowing where or when the Dark would come. Civilization crumbled, fading to a few glowing embers of the great beacon light that it had once been.

“And then—” Ingold spread his hands, showing them empty, like a sideshow magician. “The Dark no longer came. Whether the cessation was sudden or gradual, we cannot be sure, for by that time few people were literate enough to be keeping accurate records. Little villages had grown up outside the Keeps; in time, new little villages appeared on the crumbling ruins of the ancient cities whose very names had been forgotten through the intervening years. There were wars and change and long spaces of time. Old traditions faded; the very language changed. Old songs and stories were forgotten.

“Three thousand years is a long time, Gil. You’re an historian – can you tell me, with any accuracy, what happened three thousand years ago?”

“Uh—” Gil cast a hasty scan over her memories of Ancient Civilizations 1A. Marathon? Stonehenge? Hyksos’ invasions of Egypt? As a medievalist, she had only the foggiest impressions of anything prior to Constantine. What must it be like, she wondered, for the average Joe Doakes who hadn’t been to college and didn’t like history much anyway? Even something as hideous as the Black Death, an event which had grossly and permanently impacted western civilization, was only a name to eighty percent of the population – and that was only six hundred years ago.

Ingold nodded, his point made. It occurred to Gil to wonder how he had known that her subject was history, but he went on, as she was beginning to find was his habit, without explaining. “For many years I was the only one who knew anything about even the old tales of the Dark. I knew – I learned – that the Dark Ones were not utterly gone. Eventually I learned that they were not even much diminished in numbers. And I heard things that made me believe that they would return. Eldor’s father had me banished for speaking of it, which I thought small-minded of him, since sending me away could not reduce the danger – but perhaps he thought that I was lying. Eldor believed me. Without his preparations, I think we would all have perished the first night of their rising.”

“And now?” Gil asked softly.

“Now?” The night was far spent; the lines of weariness etched into his scarred face seemed to settle a little deeper. “We are holding out in the Palace at Gae. The main body of the Army under the command of the Chancellor of the Realm, Alwir, the Queen’s brother, has been in Penambra, where the raids were the worst. They should return to the city within days; but without a miracle they will be too late to prevent catastrophe. I have tried vainly to get in touch with the Council of Wizards in the Hidden City of Quo, but I fear they, too, may be besieged. They have retreated behind their defenses of power and illusion. Though I still have hopes that we can hold out long enough for Lohiro to send us aid of some kind, I would not want to wager the lives of my friends on that hope. The defenders at the Palace need me, Gil. Though I cannot do much, I will not leave them until it is beyond doubt that no effort of mine can save them.

“And that,” he said, “is where I need your help.”

She only looked at him, uncomprehending.

“You understand,” Ingold went on in that same quiet tone, “that by leaving it that late, I shall be cutting my escape very fine. In the last extremity, my only course will be to flee across the Void into some other world – this world. I can cross back and forth at will with relative impunity. Normally such a crossing is a shocking enough physical trauma for an adult. For an infant of six months, even under my protection, it can be injurious, and two such crossings in a short span of time could do the child real harm. I will therefore have to remain a day in this world, with the child, before I can return to some safer spot in my own.”

The light dawned. Gil smiled. “You need a place to hole up.”

“As you say. I need an isolated spot and a few creature comforts – a place to pass that time in obscurity. Do you know of such a place?”

“You could come here,” Gil offered.

Ingold shook his head. “No,” he said decidedly.

“Why not?”

The wizard hesitated before answering. “It’s too dangerous,” he said at last. He rose from his chair, moved restlessly to the flat rectangle of the window, and pushed the curtain aside, looking out, down into the apartment courtyard below. The greenish reflections of the courtyard lights in the waters of the swimming pool rippled over the old marks of alien battles on his face. “Too many things could happen. I have a great mistrust of fate, Gil. My powers are severely limited in your world. If something were to go wrong, I have no desire to try to explain my presence or that of the child to the local authorities.”

Gil had a brief, disturbing picture of Ingold, like some bearded refugee from the Society for the Preservation of Dungeons and Dragons in his shabby robes and killing sword, having a close encounter with the local police or the Highway Patrol. Despite her impression that the Highway Patrol would come off second best, she realized such a confrontation could not be risked. Not with so much at stake.

“There’s a place we used to go past on trail rides,” she said, after a moment’s thought.

“Yes?” He turned back from the window, letting the curtain swish shut.

“A girl I used to go to school with lives out near Barstow – it’s in the desert, way the hell east of here. I spent a couple weeks out there two summers ago. She had horses, and we used to ride all over the back-hills country. I remember there was a cabin, kind of a little house, out in the middle of some abandoned orange groves in the hills. We holed up there one afternoon during a thunderstorm. It isn’t much, but there’s running water and a kerosene stove, and it’s as isolated as you could want.”

Ingold nodded. “Yes,” he murmured, half to himself. “Yes, it should do.”

“I can bring you food and blankets,” she went on. “Just tell me when you’ll be there.”

“I don’t know that yet,” the wizard said quietly. “But you’ll know, at the time.”

“All right.” Though Gil was normally a suspicious person, it never occurred to her to question him, and this did not even surprise her about herself. She trusted him, she found, as if she had known him for years.

Ingold reached across the table and took her hand. “Thank you,” he said. “You are a stranger to our world and you owe us nothing – it is good of you to help.”

“Hey,” Gil protested softly. “I’m not a stranger. I’ve been in your world, and I’ve seen the Dark. I just about met King Eldor, as a matter of fact.” Then she paused, confused at her blunder, for she remembered that the King and the wizard were friends, and that Eldor was almost certainly going to die before the week was out.

But Ingold passed over her error like the gentleman he was. “I know Eldor would have been pleased to make your acquaintance,” he said. “And you shall always have his gratitude, and mine, for …”

Some sound in the night made him suddenly alert, and he broke off, raising his head to listen.

“What is it?” Gil whispered.

Ingold turned back to her. “I’m afraid I must go,” he said politely. His voice seldom betrayed worry or fear – he might have been making his excuses because of a prior engagement for tea with the Queen of Numenor. But Gil knew that something was happening, across the Void, in the embattled Palace at Gae.

He rose to go, the straight dark line of his mantle breaking over the sword at his hip. Gil thought of the danger and of the Dark waiting on the other side of the Void. She caught at his sleeve. In a voice smaller than she meant, she said, “Hey, take care.”

His smile was like the coming of the sun. “Thank you, my dear. I always do.” Then he walked a few paces to the center of the kitchen and put out his hand to push the fabric of the universe aside like a curtain. As he did so, he drew his sword, and Gil could see the cold light that burned up off the blade as he stepped into the mist and fire beyond.

TWO
_____________________

IT WAS THE GODDAM motherless fuel pump!

Rudy Solis identified immediately the gasp and drag of the old Chevy’s engine, automatically checked his rear-vision mirror, and scanned the dark, straight, two-lane highway ahead, though he knew there was nothing resembling a light in fifty miles. With all of Southern California to choose from, naturally the thing would decide to give up the ghost in the dead, endless stretch of desert and hill country that lay between Barstow and San Bernardino, miles from anywhere in the middle of Sunday night.

Rudy wondered if he could make it back to the party.

Be a lot of sorrow and tears if I can’t, he thought to himself, glancing over his shoulder at the ten cases of beer stacked amid the shredded foam, old newspapers, and greasy articles of unidentifiable clothing heaped in the sagging back seat. The engine faltered, coughed apologetically, and chugged on. Rudy cursed the owner of the car, the seventh magnitude rock-and-roll star at whose party he’d been drinking and sunburning himself into a stupor all weekend, and the buddies who’d volunteered him to make the beer run, thirty miles down the hills to Barstow; cursed them impersonally, and threw in a few curses at himself as well for being euchred into going.

Well, serves ’em right. Next time they want somebody to buy their beer for ’em, they can damn well lend me a decent car.

But the fact was that most people had arrived at Tarot’s party on motorcycles, as Rudy himself had. And Tarot – who had started out life as James Carrow and was still known as Jim when not wearing his flameout stage makeup – wasn’t about to lend his custom Eldorado to anybody, no matter how few cases of beer were left.

Well, what the hell. Rudy shook back the long hair from his eyes and risked another glance at the unrelieved blackness of empty desert reflected in his rear-view mirror. Everybody up at that hundred-thousand-dollar hideaway in the canyons was so drunk by this time that it was impossible to see what difference ten more cases of beer could make. If worst came to worst – which it looked like it was going to, from the sound of that engine – he could always find someplace in the hills to hole up in until morning and try to hitch a ride to the nearest phone then. There was a service road about ten miles farther on that he knew of, which would take him to a dilapidated shack in what remained of an old orange grove. Half-plastered as he was, he didn’t relish the idea of trying to do anything about the engine tonight, nor was the thought of sleeping by the road real appealing. Rudy took a drink from the half-empty bottle of wine propped on the seat beside him and drove on.

Rudy had been driving and dealing with cars and motorcycles half his life – not always with legal sanctions – but it took all his expertise to nurse the failing Chevy the mile or two from the last lighted billboard to the rutted track of the service road. The lag and jerk of the big V-8 engine as he maneuvered through potholes, gravel slides, and the ruinous washes of old stream beds made him wonder if the problem wasn’t simply a blocked line. He itched to climb out, raise the hood, and check – except that he had nothing resembling a light with him, and the odds were that, once stopped, nothing short of total rebuilding would get the stupid car started again. The feeble glare of the headlights picked out landmarks he knew from his motorcycle trips back this way: an oak tree twisted into the shape of a disapproving monk, gloomily damning the couples who came out here to park; a rock like a sleeping buffalo, silhouetted against the star-luminous sky. Rudy’s hobby of hunting with bow and arrow had given him a familiarity with half the wild country left in Southern California, a knowledge of these silent desert hills as casual as his knowledge of the inner workings of a V-8 engine or of the floor plan of his own sparsely furnished apartment. He was as much at home here as he was anywhere else.

Sometimes more so. Maybe the hunting was the reason, or maybe only the excuse. There were times when he simply took pleasure in being alone, a different pleasure from what was to be had from partying and raising hell, from horsing around with the guys at the body shop, from ratpack weekends in the desert. Never self-analytical, Rudy only understood that he needed the solitude, needed the touch of the empty land and the demand for slow skill and perfect accuracy. Perhaps it was this that had kept him on the edge of the biker crowd; he’d become acquainted with them at the body shop but never of them. Or perhaps it was simple cowardice.

Whatever his reasons, he was accepted for what he was; and though not part of any motorcycle gang, as an airbrush painter and pinstriper at Wild David’s body shop in Fontana, he was part of that world. Hence, he understood his inclusion in Tarot’s party – not that anybody in Southern California was excluded from Tarot’s party. Tarot’s local reputation included an apocryphal story about being a former member of the Hell’s Angels. But, thinking the matter over as he guided the thrombotic car deeper and deeper into the blackness of the hills, Rudy couldn’t imagine any gang admitting a member as essentially chickenhearted as Jim Carrow.

The car’s front wheels dropped suddenly into a twelve inch water-cut in the road with a heart-rending scrape of oil pan against rock. Rudy tried the engine twice and got only a tired whirring in response. He opened the door and climbed cautiously out, boots slipping on the round stones of the dry stream bed. Two days of continuous partying didn’t help his footing much. He ascertained at once that pushing wouldn’t help matters, for the car was nose-down with its front bumper inches from the far bank of the gully. It might, he decided, kneeling in the soft sand, be possible to back out if the engine could be started, but it wasn’t something he’d want to try at one-thirty in the morning.

Disgusted, he straightened up.

Starlight showed him the shape and roll of the hills, the shallow valley opening out to his right, with a dark clustering of dry, black-leaved citrus trees. The shack – a cabin, really – would be over there in the dense shadow of the hill, a hundred yards farther on.

Made it, he thought. Thank God for small favors.

It was surprising how silent the night was. There was little silence in the world; even away from people, there was usually street noise, airplanes, air conditioning. The cooling metal of the car’s engine ticked softly in the darkness; now and then, dried grass sighed at the memory of wind. Rudy’s eyes, adjusting to the wan glow of the Milky Way, slowly made out the edges of the cabin’s roof line, the shapes of long grass and twisted trees. His footfalls seemed very loud in that world of darkness.

Walking carefully, if not precisely staggering, he collected two six-packs of beer from the back seat and the remainder of his bottle of muscatel from the front. His head was beginning to ache. Just what I need. A busted fuel pump and a hangover to fix it with. They’ll probably figure I took the beer money and headed for Mexico.

He made his way up to the shack.

It stood solitary against the dark of the hills, the long grass around its peeling walls concealing the fossilized remains of dead farm equipment and broken bottles, the shabby asphalt tile of the roof sagging under the weight of accumulated leaves. He mounted the crazy front steps and set down his burdens on the narrow front porch, the mild chill of the sweet-scented night making him shiver as he stripped off his greasy denim jacket, wrapped it around his hand, and punched out a pane of the window beside the door to let himself in.

The lights worked, surprisingly. Hookup to the power lines in the grove, he decided, taking a quick look around the dingy kitchen. So did the sink, giving cold water but not hot. Well, you can’t have everything. In the cupboard under the sink he found three cans of pork and beans with prices stamped on them that were at least four years old, and a kerosene stove with half a can of kerosene.

Not bad, he reflected, if I had anything to cook. Further exploration revealed a minuscule bathroom and a cell like bedroom at the end of a narrow hall, with a sagging cot whose threadbare mattress would have been thrown out of any jail in the state as cruel and unusual.

Nothing to write home about, he thought, returning to the kitchen and thence to the star-limned silence of the front porch. He donned his jacket, on which the faded blue denim was rather gaudily illuminated with a flaming skull with roses in its eyes, and settled back against the door-jamb to polish off the muscatel and watch the night in peace. As the dark quiet of the hills soaked into his soul, he decided that there was, after all, something to be said for the place, a perfection of solitude in many ways superior to all the beer busts thrown by all the rock stars of California.

After a long time of silence he returned inside to sleep.

He woke up wondering what he’d done to annoy the little man with the sledgehammer who lived inside his head. He rolled over, to his instant regret, and wondered if he was going to die.

The room was barely light. He lay for a time staring at the shadows of the dry, cobwebby rafters, memories of yesterday and last night leaking back to his protesting consciousness: Tarot’s party; the fact that it was Monday and he was supposed to be back at work at the body shop, painting flaming sunsets on custom vans; last night’s beer run to Barstow; and that pig of a Chevy. It might be just the fuel lines, he told himself, his mind backtracking creakily through the obstacle course of a splitting headache and assorted other symptoms of the immoderate consumption of muscatel. If that was the case, he could be under way in a few hours. If it was the pump, he was in for a long walk.

Rudy made his way out of the house and down the steps, blinking in the pallid light of dawn. He was soon cursing the owner of the car. There wasn’t anything resembling a tool in all the bushels of trash in the trunk or on the back seat.

There was a shed half-buried in the weeds farther back in the groves behind the cottage, and he spent ten grimy minutes picking through spider-infested debris there in search of tools. The result was hardly satisfactory: a rusted Phillips screwdriver with a dog-chewed handle; a couple of blades with the business ends twisted; and an adjustable end wrench so corroded that he doubted it could be used.

The sun was just clearing the hills as he stepped out again, wiping his hands on his jeans; all around him the clear magic colors of day were emerging from the dawn’s grayed pastels. The house, formerly a nameless bulk of shadow, ripened into warm russets and weathered sepias, its windows blazing with the sun’s reflected glory like the dazzle of molten electrum. As Rudy stood there in the shadow of the shed, he thought for a moment that it was this burning glare that was playing tricks on his eyes.

Then he saw that this was not so, but for a moment he didn’t know what it was. He shaded his eyes against the blinding silvery shimmer that hung in the air like a twisting slit of fire, blinking in the almost painful brilliance that stabbed forth as the slit, or line of brightness, widened scarcely a dozen yards in front of him. He had the momentary impression that space and reality were splitting apart, that the three dimensions of this world were merely painted on a curtain, and that air and ground and cabin and hills were being folded aside, to reveal a more piercing light, blinding darkness, and swirling nameless colors beyond. Then, through that gap, a dark form stumbled, robed and hooded in brown, a drawn sword gleaming in one hand and a trailing bundle of black velvet gripped tightly in the crook of the other arm. The sword blade was bright, as if it reflected searing light, and it smoked.

Blinded by the intensity of the light, Rudy turned his face away, confused, disoriented, and shocked. When he turned back, the blazing vision was gone. There remained only an old man in a brown robe, an old man who held a sword in one hand and a wailing baby in the other arm.

Rudy blinked. “What in hell was I drinking last night?” he asked aloud. “And who the hell are you?”

The old man sheathed the sword in one smooth, competent gesture, and Rudy found himself thinking that whoever this was, he must be very quick on the draw with that thing. It looked real, too, balanced and razor-sharp. The old man replied, in a scratchy baritone, “I am called Ingold Inglorion. This is Prince Altir Endorion, last Prince of the House of Dare.”

“Hunh?”

The old man drew back the hood from his face, revealing a countenance wholly nondescript except for the remarkable blueness of the heavy-lidded eyes and for its expression of awesome serenity. Rudy had never seen a face like that, gentle, charming, and supremely in command. It was the face of a saint, a wizard, or a nut.

Rudy rubbed his aching eyes. “How’d you get here?”

“I came through the Void that separates your universe from mine,” Ingold explained reasonably. “You could hardly have missed it.”

He’s a nut.

Curious, Rudy walked slowly around him, keeping his distance. The guy was armed, after all, and something in the way he’d handled the sword made Rudy sure he knew how to use it. He looked like a harmless old buffer, except for the Francis of Assisi get-up, but years of association with the brotherhood of the road had given Rudy an instinctive caution of anybody who was armed, no matter how harmless he looked. Besides, anybody running around dressed like that was obviously certifiable.

The old man watched him in return, looking rather amused, one thick-muscled hand absently caressing the child he held into muffled whimpers, then silence. Rudy noticed that the old man’s dark robes and the child’s blankets were rank with smoke. He supposed they could have come out of the shadows around the corner of the house in the moment the reflected sunlight had blinded him, giving the impression they’d stepped out of a kind of flaming aura, but that explanation still didn’t tell him where they’d come from, or how the old man had happened to acquire the kid.

After a long moment’s silence Rudy asked, “Are you for real?”

The old man smiled, a leaping webwork of lines springing into being among the tangle of white beard. “Are you?”

“I mean, are you supposed to be some kind of wizard or something?”

“Not in this universe.” Ingold surveyed the young man before him for a moment, then smiled again. “It’s a long story,” he explained, turned, and strolled back toward the house as if he owned the place, with Rudy tagging along in his wake. “Would it be possible for me to remain here until my contact in this world can reach me? It shouldn’t be long.”

What the hell? “Yeah, sure, go ahead.” Rudy sighed. “I’m only here myself because my car died on me – I mean, it’s not really my car – and I have to check out the pump and see if I can get it running again.” Seeing Ingold’s puzzled frown, he remembered the guy was supposed to be from another universe where, since they used swords – and he’d still like to know where the old man had picked that one up – the internal combustion engine hadn’t been invented. “You do know what a car is?”

“I’m familiar with the concept. We don’t have them in my world, of course.”

“Of course.”

Ingold led the way calmly up the steps and into the house. He proceeded straight on down the hall to the bedroom, where he placed the child on the stained, lumpy mattress of the cot. The baby immediately began working himself free of his blankets, with the apparently fixed intention of rolling off and braining himself on the cement floor.

“But who are you?” Rudy persisted, leaning in the doorway.

“I told you, my name is Ingold. Here, enough of that …” He reached down and stopped Prince Tir from worming himself over the edge. Then he glanced back over his shoulder. “You haven’t told me your name,” he added.

“Uh – Rudy Solis. Where’d you get the kid?”

“I’m rescuing him from enemies,” Ingold stated matter-of-factly.

Wonderful, Rudy thought. First the fuel pump and now this.

Untangled, the kid was revealed to be a crawler of six months or so, with a pink rosebud of a face, fuzzy black hair, and eyes that were the deep unearthly blue of the heart of a morning glory. Ingold set the kid back in the middle of the bed, where he promptly started for the edge again. The old man removed his dark, smoke-smelling mantle and spread it out like a groundcloth on the floor. Under it he wore a white wool robe, much patched and stained, a worn leather belt, and a low-slung sword belt that supported the sword and a short dagger in beat-up scabbards. The whole setup looked authentic as hell.

Ingold picked up the child again and put him down on the mantle on the floor. “There,” he said. “Now will you stay where you are put and fall asleep like a sensible person?”

Prince Altir Endorion made a definite but unintelligible reply.

“Good,” Ingold said, and turned toward the door.

“Whose kid is he?” Rudy asked, folding his arms and watching the old man and the child.

For the first time that look of self-command broke, and grief, or the concealment of grief, tightened into the muscles of the old man’s face. His voice remained perfectly steady. “He is the child of a friend of mine,” he replied quietly, “who is now dead.” There was a moment’s silence, the old man concentrating on turning back the cuffs of his faded robe, revealing a road map of old scars striping the hard, heavy muscle of his forearms. When he looked up again, that expression of gentle amusement was back in his eyes. “Not that you believe me, of course.”

“Well, now that you mention it, I don’t.”

“Good.” Ingold smiled, stepping past Rudy into the narrow hall. “It’s better that you shouldn’t. Close the door behind you, would you, please?”

“Because, for one thing,” Rudy said, following him down the hall to the kitchen, “if you’re from a whole other universe, like you say, how come you are speaking English?”

“Oh, I’m not.” Ingold located one of the six-packs of beer on the kitchen counter and extricated a can for himself and one for Rudy. “Speaking English, that is. You only hear it as English in your mind. If you were to come to my world, I could arrange the same spell to cover you.”

Oh, yeah? Rudy thought cynically. And I suppose you figured out how to operate push-tab beer cans the same way?

“Unfortunately, there’s no way I can prove this to you,” Ingold went on placidly, seating himself on the corner of the grimy formica table top, the butter-colored morning sunlight gilding the worn hilt of his sword with an edge like fire. “Different universes obey different physical laws, and yours, despite its present close conjunction with my own, is very far from the heart and source of Power. The laws of physics here are very heavy, very certain and irreversible, and unaffected by … certain other considerations.” He glanced out the window to his right, scanning the fall of the land beyond, judging the angle of the sun, the time of day. The expression of calculation in his eyes, adding up pieces of information that had nothing to do with Rudy or with maintaining a role, troubled Rudy with a disquieting sense that the old man was too calm about it, too matter-of-fact. He’d met masqueraders before; living in Southern California, you could hardly help it. And, young or old, all those would-be Brothers of Atlantis had the same air of being in costume, no matter how cool they were about it. They all knew you were noticing them.

This old croaker didn’t seem to be thinking about Rudy at all, except as a man to be dealt with in the course of something else.

Rudy found himself thinking, He’s either what he says he is, or so far out in left field he’s never coming back.

And his indignant outrage at being beguiled into admitting two possibilities at all was almost immediately superimposed on the uneasy memory of that gap of light and the colors he’d thought he’d seen beyond.

Watch it, kiddo, he told himself. The old guy’s not hitting on all his cylinders. If you’re not careful, he’ll have you doing it next. So he asked, “But you are a wizard in your own world?” Because the outfit couldn’t be for anything else.

Ingold hesitated, his attention returning to Rudy; then he nodded. “Yes,” he said slowly.

Rudy leaned back against the counter and took a pull at his beer. “You pretty good?”

Ingold shrugged and seemed to relax, as if reassured by the disbelief in Rudy’s tone. “I’m said to be.”

“But you can’t do any magic here.” A foregone conclusion – the ersatz Merlins of the world did not often operate outside a friendly environment.

But the ersatz Merlins of the world didn’t usually smile, then hide the smile, at the suggestion of fraud. “No. That isn’t possible.”

Rudy simply couldn’t figure the guy. But something in that serene self-assurance prompted him to ask, “Yeah, but how can you be a wizard without magic?” He finished his beer, crumpled the aluminum with one hand, and tossed it into the corner of the bare room.

“Oh, wizardry has really very little to do with magic.”

Taken off-balance, Rudy paused, the old man’s voice and words touching some feeling in his soul that echoed, like the distant note of a long-forgotten guitar. “Yeah, but—” he began, and stopped again. “What is wizardry?” he asked quietly. “What is magic?”

“What isn’t?”

There was silence for the space of about two long-drawn breaths, Rudy fighting the sudden, illogical, and overwhelming notion that that was the reply of a man who understood magic. Then he shook his head, as if to clear it of the webs of the old man’s crazy fantasies. “I don’t understand you.”

Ingold’s voice was soft. “I think you do.”

He really did step out of that light.

In another minute you’ll be as crazy as he is.

Confusion made Rudy’s voice rough. “All I understand is that you’re crazier than a loon …”

“Am I really?” The white eyebrows lifted in mock offense. “And just how do you define crazy?”

“Crazy is somebody who doesn’t know the difference between what’s real and what’s just in his imagination.”

“Ah,” Ingold said, all things made clear. “You mean if I disbelieved something that I saw with my own eyes, just because I imagined it to be impossible, I would be crazy?”

“I did not see it either!” Rudy yelled.

“You know you did,” the wizard said reasonably. “Come now, Rudy, you believe in thousands of things you’ve never seen with your own eyes.”

“I do not!”

“You believe in the ruler of your country.”

“Well, I’ve seen him! I’ve seen him on television.”

“And have you not also seen people materializing out of showers of silver light on this television?” Ingold asked.

“Dammit, don’t argue that way! You know as well as I do …”

“But I don’t, Rudy. If you choose deliberately to disregard the evidence of your own senses, it’s your problem, not mine. I am what I am …”

“You are not!”

Slowly, in an absent-minded imitation of Rudy’s can-squashing ritual, Ingold crushed his empty beer can into a wad slightly smaller than his own fist. “Really, you’re one of the most prejudiced young men I’ve ever met,” he declared. “For an artist you have singularly little scope.”

Rudy drew in his breath to reply to that one, then let it out again. “How did you know I’m an artist?”

Amused blue eyes challenged him. “A wild guess.” In his heart Rudy knew it had been nothing of the kind. “You are, aren’t you?”

“Uh – well, I paint airbrush pictures on the sides of custom vans, and pinstripe motorcycle fuel tanks, that kind of stuff.” Seeing Ingold’s puzzled frown, he conceded, “Yeah, I guess you could call it art.”

There was another silence, the old man looking down at his scarred hands in the sunlight on the table top, the isolated cabin utterly silent but for the faint creaking insect noises in the long grasses outside. Then he looked up and smiled. “And is it beneath your dignity to have friends with, I think you call it, nonstandard reality?”

Rudy thought about some of the people who hung around Wild David’s bike shop. Nonstandard was one way of putting it. He laughed. “Hell, if I felt that way I’d have maybe about two friends. Okay, you win.”

The old man looked startled and just a little worried. “You mean you believe me?”

“No – but it doesn’t bother me if it doesn’t bother you.”

If he’s schizo, Rudy found himself thinking later in the morning, he’s got it all down. Wizardry, the mythical Realm of Darwath, the Hidden City of Quo on the Western Ocean where the garnered learning of a hundred generations of mages was stored in the dark labyrinths of Forn’s Tower – Ingold had it all, seemed to know it as intimately as Rudy knew his own world of bars and bikes and body shops, of smog and steel. Through the long, warm morning, Rudy messed with the Chevy’s engine, Ingold lending a hand occasionally when one was needed and staying out of the way when it wasn’t, and their talk drifted over magic, the Void, engines, and painting. Ingold never slipped up.

Not only was he totally familiar with his own fantasy world, but Rudy noticed he had the lapses of knowledge that a man imperfectly acquainted with this world would have. He seemed totally fascinated with Rudy’s world, with the wonders of radio and television, the complexities of the welfare system, and the mysteries of the internal combustion engine. He had the insatiable curiosity that, he had said, was the hallmark of wizards: the lust for knowledge, almost any kind of knowledge, that superseded even the most elementary considerations of physical comfort or safety.

If it wasn’t for the kid, Rudy thought, glancing from the tangled shadows of the car toward the wizard, who was seated in the long grass, thoughtfully dissecting and examining a seed pod, I wouldn’t care. Hell, the guy could claim to be Napoleon and it’d be no business of mine. But he’s got no business with a kid that young, wandering around a million miles from noplace.

And his hangover hallucination of their stepping out of the burning air returned to him, the absolute reality of the vision, far clearer than anything muscatel or anything else had ever done for him. Something about it troubled him, something he could not yet define.

Then the rusted nut he was working on gave way, and other matters claimed his attention. Ten minutes later he crawled out from under the car, grease-smudged, hot, and disgusted. Ingold set aside the seed pod and raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

Rudy flung the wrench he was holding violently into the dirt. “Goddam fuel pump,” he sighed, and dropped cross-legged to the ground at the wizard’s side.

“It is the pump, then, and not the line?” Rudy had briefed him on the problem.

“Yeah.” He cursed, and elaborated on the car, its owner, and things in general. He finished with, “So I guess the only thing to do is walk to the highway and hitch.”

“Well,” Ingold said comfortably, “my contact in this world should be here very shortly. You could always get a ride back to civilization with her.”

Rudy paused in wiping his oily hands on a rag he’d fished out of the back seat. “Your what?”

“My contact in this world.” Seeing Rudy’s surprise, Ingold explained. “I shall be stranded the night in your world and, though on occasion I’ve starved, I see no reason to do it if it can be avoided.”

“So you’re just passing through, is that it?” Rudy wondered if there was, in fact, such a contact, or if this was yet one more strange figment of the old man’s peculiar imagination.

“In a manner of speaking,” Ingold said slowly.

“But if you’re a wizard in your own world, how come you’d starve?” Rudy asked, more out of lazy curiosity than anything else. “How come you can’t just make food appear if you’re hungry?”

“Because it doesn’t work that way,” Ingold said simply. “Creating the illusion of food is relatively simple. To make a piece of grass like this one convincingly resemble bread requires only that in taste, texture, and appearance, I convince you that you are eating bread. But if you ate it, it would provide you no more nourishment than the grass, and on a steady diet of such things you would quickly starve. But literally to transform the inner nature of the grass would be to alter reality itself, to tamper with the fabric of the entire universe.”

“Lot of trouble to go through for a crummy piece of bread.”

“Well, more than that, it’s potentially dangerous. Any tampering, no matter how small, with the fabric of the universe is perilous. That is why shape-changing is seldom done. Most high-ranking wizards understand the principle behind turning oneself into a beast – with the mind and heart of a beast – but very, very few would dare to put it into practice. An archmage might do it, in peril of his life. But …” He raised his head suddenly, and Rudy caught the far-off chugging of an engine in the still, pale air of afternoon.

“My friend,” Ingold explained. He got up, brushing dry grass and twigs off his robe. Rudy scrambled likewise to his feet as a dusty red Volkswagen beetle crept into view around the shoulder of the hill.

“This I gotta see.”

The bug’s tires surrounded it in a light cloud of dust as it made its slow approach, bumping cautiously over every rut and pothole of the treacherous road. It came to a stop a few yards away, the door opened, and a girl got out.

She took one look at Rudy and stopped, her eyes filled with suspicion and distrust. Then Ingold stepped down the bank toward her, both hands held out in welcome. “Gil,” he said. “This is Rudy Solis. He thinks I’m crazy. Rudy – Gil Patterson. My contact in this world.”

They regarded each other in silent animosity,

Gil would almost have preferred the Highway Patrol. This character had “biker” written on him in letters a foot tall: greasy jeans, grubby white T-shirt, scarred boots. Dark hair faintly tinged with red fell loosely on either side of a long widow’s peak almost to his shoulders; cocky dark-blue eyes under sharply backslanted black brows gave her an arrogant once-over and dismissed her. She noted the bump of an old break on his nose. RUDY was tattooed on a banner across a flaming torch on his left wrist. A real prize.

Kind of tall and scrawny, but not bad-looking, Rudy decided, checking her out. Bitchy, though, I bet. A real spook. Beyond that he noted the worn jeans, blue checkered shirt, lack of make-up, unworked hands and bitten nails, and cool, pale, forbidding eyes. Where’d Ingold dig her up?

Ingold went on, “Rudy’s been stranded here with car trouble. Could you take him back with you as far as he needs to go when you leave, Gil, as a favor to me?”

Her eyes went warily from Ingold to Rudy, then back to the wizard’s face. Ingold rested a hand briefly on her shoulder and said quietly, “It’s all right. He doesn’t have to believe me, Gil.”

She sighed and forced herself to relax. “All right,” she agreed.

Rudy had watched all this with curiosity bordering on annoyance. “Well, don’t do me any favors.”

Those pale gray eyes grew colder. But Ingold’s hand tightened almost imperceptibly on Gil’s bony shoulder, and she said, in a more natural voice, “No, it’s all right.”

Rudy, in turn, relaxed and meant it when he said, “Thank you. Uh – can I give you a hand with that?” for Gil had turned back to the car and was fetching out assorted provisions, including canned beef stew and diapers, from the back seat. He dropped back a pace to walk beside her as they followed Ingold up to the cabin, however, and as soon as the old man was out of earshot Rudy asked softly, “Who is he?”

She regarded him with those pale schoolmarm eyes – old-maid eyes in the face of a girl his own age. “What did he tell you?”

“That he was some kind of a wizard from another universe.”

When Gil was embarrassed, she became brusque. “That’s his story.”

Rudy refused to be put off. “Where’d you meet him?”

Gil sighed. “It’s a long story,” she said, falling back on Ingold’s usual explanation. “And it doesn’t matter, not really.”

“It matters to me,” Rudy said, and glanced up ahead of them to where Ingold was just vanishing into the shadows of the little house. “You see, I like the old guy, I really do, even if he isn’t playing with a full deck. I’m just worried some kind of harm will come to the kid.”

They stopped at the foot of the rickety steps, and Gil looked carefully for the first time at the young man’s face. It was sun-bronzed and sensual, but not a crass face, nor a stupid one. “Do you think he’d let any harm come to Tir?”

Rudy remembered the old man and the child together, Ingold’s gentle competence and the protectiveness in his voice when he spoke to the baby. “No,” he said slowly. “No – but what are they doing out here? And what’s gonna happen when he goes wandering back to civilization like that?”

There was genuine concern in his voice, which Gil found rather touching. Besides, she thought, if I hadn’t had the dreams, I’d probably think the same.

She shifted her burden from one hand to the other. “It will be okay,” she assured him quietly.

“You know what’s going on?”

She nodded.

Rudy looked down at her doubtfully, not quite satisfied and sensing something amiss. Still, in one real sense this girl was Ingold’s contact with reality, which in spite of his obvious shrewdness and charm the old man sorely needed. And yet – and yet – troubled visions of the old man stumbling out of a blazing aura of silver light returned to him as he started up the steps, Gil climbing at his heels. He swung around on her abruptly, to ask, “Do you believe him?”

But before Gil could answer, the cabin door opened again, and Ingold re-emerged onto the narrow porch, a flushed, sleepy infant in his arms. “This is Prince Altir Endorion,” he introduced.

Gil and Rudy came up the last few steps to join him, the question left unanswered. On the whole, Gil disliked children, but, like most hard-hearted women, she had a soft spot for the very young and helpless. She touched the round pink cheek with gingerly reverence, as if afraid the child would shatter on contact. “He’s very beautiful,” she whispered.

“And very wet,” Ingold replied, and led the way back into the house.

It was Rudy who ended up doing the changing as the only one with experience in the task, while Gil made a lunch of beef stew and coffee on the kerosene stove, and Ingold investigated the light switches to see how electricity worked. Rudy noticed that, among other things, Gil had brought an extra can of kerosene; though, if he recalled, the little stove had been out of sight beneath a counter when he’d first come in, and there had been no signs that the house had been entered in years.

How had Ingold known?

Gil came over to him and set a styrofoam cup of steaming black liquid on the floor at his side. She watched Rudy playing tickle-me with Tir for some moments, smiling, then said, “You know, you’re probably the first man I’ve ever seen who’d volunteer for diaper duty.”

“Hell,” Rudy told her, grinning. “With six younger brothers and sisters, you get used to it.”

“I suppose so.” She tested one of the wobbly chairs, then sat in it, her arm resting over the back. “I only had the one sister, and she’s just two years younger than I am, so I never knew.”

Rudy glanced up at her. “Is she like you?” he asked.

Gil shook her head ruefully. “No. She’s pretty. She’s twenty-two and already getting her second divorce.”

“Yeah, my next-next younger sister’s like that,” Rudy said thoughtfully, fishing in the pocket of his discarded jacket for his motorcycle keys, which Tir received with blissful fascination and proceeded to try to eat. “She’s seventeen years old, and she’s been around more than I have.” He caught Gil’s raised eyebrow and askance look, and followed her eye to the decoration on the back of his jacket – skulls, roses, black flames, and all. “Aah, that,” he said, a little embarrassed at it. “Picasso had a Blue Period. I had my Pachuco Period.”

“Oh,” Gil said distastefully, not believing him. “Are you in a gang?”

Rudy sat back on his heels, hearing the tone in her voice. “What the hell do you think I do, live in Fontana and go out on raids?”

Since that was exactly what she thought he did, she said, “No. I mean—” She broke off in confusion. “You mean you painted that yourself?”

“Sure,” Rudy said, reaching over to spread out the offending garment with its elaborate symbology and multiple grease stains. “I’d do it better now – I’d have different lettering, and no fire; the fire makes it look kind of trashy. That is, if I did it at all. It’s kind of tacky,” he admitted. “But it’s good advertising.”

“You mean you make your living at that?”

“Oh, yeah. For now, anyway. I work at Wild David Wilde’s Paint and Body Shop in Berdoo, and painting’s a hell of a lot easier than body work, let me tell you.”

Gil contemplated the jacket for a moment longer, her chin resting on her folded hands on the back of the chair. Though morbid, violent, and weird, the design was well-executed and argued a certain ability and sensitivity of style. “Then you’re not a biker yourself?”

“I ride a motorcycle,” Rudy said. “I like bikes, work on them. I’m not in a gang, though. You can run yourself into real trouble that way.” He shrugged. “Those guys are really heavy-duty. I couldn’t do it.”

Ingold came back in, having traced the power cables to their sources and explored the land around the little house as if seeking something in the dusty silence of the groves. Gil dished up canned beef stew and bread. As they ate, Rudy listened to the girl and the wizard talk and wondered again how much this thin, spooky-looking woman believed the old man, and how much of her conversation was tactful humoring of an old, well loved, and totally crazy friend.

It was impossible to tell. That she was fond of him was obvious; her guarded stiffness relaxed, and with liveliness her face was almost pretty. But it was Ingold who dominated and led, she who followed, and there were times when Rudy wondered if she was as crazy as the old man.

“I never understood that about the memories,” Gil was saying, blowing on her coffee to cool it. “You and Eldor talked about it, but I don’t understand.”

“No one really understands it,” Ingold said. “It’s a rare phenomenon, far rarer than wizardry. To my knowledge, in all the history of the Realm it has appeared in only three noble houses and two peasant ones. We don’t know what it is or why it works, why a son will suddenly recall events that happened to his grandfather, when the grandfather never exhibited such a talent in his life, why it seems to descend only in the male line, why it skips one generation, or two, or five, why some sons will remember certain events and be ignorant of others that their brothers recall with exacting clarity.”

“I could be like a double-recessive gene,” Gil began thoughtfully.

“A what?”

“A genetic trait …” She stopped. “Jeez, you people don’t understand genetics, do you?”

“As in horse breeding?” Ingold asked with a smile.

She nodded. “Sort of. It’s how you breed for a trait, how you get throwbacks, the more you inbreed. I’ll explain it sometime.”

“You mean,” Rudy said, drawn into the conversation in spite of himself, “Pugsley here is supposed to remember stuff that happened to his dad and his grandpa and stuff like that?” He jiggled the baby sitting in his lap.

“He should,” Ingold said. “But it’s a gamble, for we do not know for certain if – and what – he will remember. His father remembers – remembered—” There was a slight shift, almost a crack, in the wizard’s rusty voice as he changed the tense. “—things that happened at the time of their most remote ancestor, Dare of Renweth. And, Gil, it was Dare of Renweth who was King at the time of the rising of the Dark Ones.”

“The who?” Rudy asked.

“The Dark Ones.” The touch of that heavy-lidded, blue gaze gave Rudy the uncomfortable feeling of having his mind read. “The enemy whom we flee.” His eyes shifted back to Gil, the light from the western window slanting strong and yellow on the sharp bones of her face. “Unfortunately, I fear the Dark Ones know it. They know many things – their power is different from mine, of a different nature, as if from a different source. I believe their attacks were concentrated on the Palace at Gae because they knew that Eldor and Tir were dangerous to them, that the memories the King and Prince held were the clue to their ultimate defeat. They have – eliminated – Eldor. Now only Tir is left.”

Gil cocked her head and glanced across at the pink cheeked baby, gravely manipulating a bunch of motorcycle keys in Rudy’s lap, then at the wizard, profiled against the cracked and grimy glass of the window through which the hills could be seen, desolate, isolated, dyed gold by the deep slant of the light. Her voice was quiet. “Could they have followed you here?”

Ingold looked up at her quickly, his azure-crystal eyes meeting hers, then shifting away. “Oh, I don’t think so,” he said mildly. “They have no notion that the Void exists, much less how to cross it.”

“How do you know?” she insisted. “You said yourself you don’t understand their powers, or their knowledge. You have no power at all in this world. If they crossed the Void, would they have power?”

He shook his head. “I doubt they could even exist in this world,” he told her. “The material laws here are very different. Which, incidentally, is what makes magic possible – a change in the ways the laws of physics operate …”

As the conversation turned to a discussion of theoretical magic and its relation to the martial arts, Rudy listened, puzzled; if Ingold had his end of the script down pat, Gil sure as hell had hers.

After a time, Ingold took charge of Tir to feed him, and Gil made her way quietly out onto the porch, seeking the silence of the last of the westering sunlight. She sat on the edge of the high platform, her booted feet dangling in space, leaning her arms along the bottom rail of the crazy old banister and watching the hills go from tawny gold to crystal, like champagne in the changing slant of the light, the air luminous with sunlit dust one moment, then suddenly overlaid with the cool of the hills’ shadow. The evening wind slurred softly through the lion-colored grass of the wastelands all around. Each rock and stunted tree was imbued by the light with a unique and private beauty. The light even lent something resembling distinction to the sunken wreck of the blue Impala and the nondescript VW, half-hidden by the screen of whispering weeds.

She heard the door open and shut behind her then and smelled the dark scent of tallow and wool permeated with smoke as Ingold settled down beside her, once more wearing his dark mantle over the pale homespun of his robe. For some minutes they didn’t speak at all, only watched the sunset in warm and companionable silence, and she was content.

Finally he said, “Thank you for coming, Gil. Your help has been invaluable.”

She shook her head. “No trouble.”

“Do you mind very much taking Rudy back?” She could tell by his voice he’d sensed her dislike and was troubled by it.

“I don’t mind.” She turned her head, her cheek resting on her arm on the rail. “He’s okay. If I didn’t know you, I probably wouldn’t believe a word of it myself.” She noticed in the golden haze of the light that, though his hair was white, his eyelashes were still the same fairish gingery red that must have been his whole coloring at one time. She went on. “But I’m going to drop him off at the main highway and come back. I don’t like leaving you here alone.”

“I shall be quite all right,” the wizard said gently.

“I don’t care,” she replied.

He glanced sideways at her. “You couldn’t possibly help, you know, if anything did happen.”

“You have no magic here,” she said softly, “and your back’s to the wall. I’m not going to leave you.”

Ingold folded his arms along the rail, his chin on his crossed wrists, seeming for a time only to contemplate the rippling tracks of the wind in the long grass below the porch, the rime of sun-fire like a halo on the distant hills. “I appreciate your loyalty,” he said at last, “misguided though it is. But the situation will not arise. You see, I have decided to risk going back tonight, before it grows fully dark.”

Gil was startled, both relieved and uneasy. “Will Tir be okay?”

“I can put a spell of protection over us both that should shield him from the worst of the shock.” The sun had touched the edges of the hills already; the evening breeze wore the thin chill of coming night. “There should be a good two hours of daylight left in my own world when Tir and I return – there seems to be a disjunction of time involved in the Void, your world and mine not quite in synch. We should be able to come to cover before dark.”

“Won’t that be an awful risk?”

“Maybe.” He turned his head a little to meet her eyes, and in the dimming evening light she thought he looked tired, the shadows of the porch railings barring his face but unable to hide the deepened lines around his mouth and eyes. His fingers idled with the splinters of the wood, casually, as if he were not speaking of danger into which he would walk. “But I would rather take that risk than imperil your world, your civilization, should the Dark prove able to follow me through the Void.”

Then he sighed and stood up, as if dismissing the whole subject from his mind. He helped her to her feet, his hand rough and warm and powerful, but as light and deft as a jeweler’s. The last glow of the day surrounded them, silhouetted against the burning windows. “I am entitled to risk my own life, Gil,” he said. “But whenever I can, I draw the line at risking the lives of others, especially those who are loyal to me, as you are. So don’t be concerned. We shall be quite safe.”

THREE
_____________________

“WHERE YOU HEADED?” Gil carefully guided the VW in a small circle, bumping slowly over stones and uneven ground, and eased it back onto the road again. The road, the hills, the dark trees of the grove had turned gray-blue and colorless in the twilight. In her rear-view mirror, Gil saw Ingold’s sword blade held high in salute. She could see him on the cabin porch, straight and sturdy in his billowing dark mantle, and her heart ached with fear at the sight. Rudy, chewing on a grass blade, one sunburned arm hanging out of the open window, was about as comforting as reruns of The Crawling Eye on a dark and stormy night.

“San Bernardino,” Rudy said, glancing back also at the dark form of the wizard in the shadows of the house.

“I can take you there,” Gil said, negotiating a gravel slide and the deep-cut spoor of last winter’s rains. “I’m heading on into Los Angeles so it’s not out of my way.”

“Thank you” Rudy said. “It’s harder than hell to get rides at night.”

Gil grinned in spite of herself. “In that jacket it would be.”

Rudy laughed. “You from L.A.?”

“Not originally. I go to UCLA; I’m in the Ph.D. program in medieval history there.” Out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed his start of surprise, a typical reaction in men, she had found. “Originally I’m from San Marino.”

“Ah,” Rudy said wisely, recognizing the name of that wealthy suburb. “Rich kid.”

“Not really.” Gil objected more to the label than to the facts. “Well – I guess you could say that. My father’s a doctor.”

“Specialist?” Rudy inquired, half-teasing.

“Child psychiatrist,” Gil said, with a faint grin at how well the label fitted her.

“Yow.”

“They’ve disowned me,” she added with a shrug. “So it doesn’t matter.” Her voice was offhand, almost apologetic. She turned on the headlights, and dust plumed whitely in their feeble glare. By their reflection Rudy could see that her face wore the shut, wary look again, a fortress defended against all corners.

“Why the hell would they disown you?” He was indignant in spite of himself for her sake. “Christ, my mother would forgive any one of my sisters for murder if she’d just finish high school.”

Gil chuckled bitterly. “It’s the Ph.D. mine objects to,” she told him. “What up-and-coming young doctor or dentist is going to marry a research scholar in medieval history? She doesn’t say that, but that’s what she means.” And Gil drove on for a time in silence.

The dark shapes of the hills loomed closer around the little car, the stars emerging in the luminous blue of the evening sky, small and bright with distance. Staring out into the milky darkness, Rudy identified the landmarks of his trip into the hills, rock and tree and the round, smooth shapes of the land. The green eyes of some tiny animal flashed briefly in the gloom, then vanished as a furry shape whipped across the dark surface of the road.

“So they kicked you out just because you want to get a Ph.D.?”

She shrugged. “They didn’t really kick me out. I just don’t go home anymore. I don’t miss it,” she added truthfully.

“Really? I’d miss it like hell.” Rudy slouched back against the door, one arm draped out the window, the wind cool against wrist and throat. “I mean, yeah, my mom’s house is like a bus stop, with the younger kids all over the place, and the cats, and her sisters, and dirty dishes all over the house, and my sisters’ boyfriends hanging out in the back yard – but it’s someplace to go, you know? Someplace I’ll always be welcome, even if I do have to shout to make myself heard. I’d go crazy if I had to live there, but it’s nice to go back.”

Gil grinned at the picture he painted, mentally contrasting it with the frigid good taste of her mother’s home.

“And you left your family just to go to school?” He sounded wondering, unbelieving that she could have done such a thing.

“There was nothing there for me,” Gil said. “And I want to be a scholar. They can’t understand that I’ve never wanted to do or be or have anything else.”

Another long silence. Up ahead, yellow headlights flickered in the dark. Long and low, the cement bridge of the freeway overpass bulked against the paler background of the hills; like a glittering fortress of red and amber flame, a semi roared by, the rumble of its engine like distant thunder. The VW whined up the overpass; Rudy settled back in his seat, considering her sharp-boned, rather delicate face, the generosity belying the tautness of the mouth, the sentimentalism lurking in the depths of those hard, intelligent eyes. “That’s funny,” he said at last.

“That anybody would like school that much?” Her voice held a trace of sarcasm, but he let it go by.

“That you’d want anything that much,” he said quietly. “Me, I’ve never really wanted to have or do or be anything. I mean, not so much that I’d dump everything else for it. Sounds rough.”

“It is,” Gil said, and returned her attention to the road.

“Was that where you ran into Ingold?”

She shook her head. Though it hadn’t seemed to bother the wizard that Rudy thought him a candidate for the soft room, she didn’t want to discuss Ingold with Rudy.

Rudy, however, persisted. “Can you tell me what the hell that was all about? Is he really as cracked as he seems?”

“No,” Gil said evasively. She tried to think up a reasonable explanation for the whole thing that she could palm off on Rudy to keep him from asking further questions. At the moment a queer uneasiness haunted her, and she didn’t feel much in the mood for questions, let alone obvious disbelief. In spite of the occasional lights on the highway, she was conscious as she had never been before of the weight and depth of the night, of darkness pressing down all around them. She found herself wishing vaguely that Rudy would roll up his window instead of leaning against the frame, letting the night-scented desert winds brush through the car.

Billboards fleeted garishly by them, primitive colors brilliant in the darkness; now and then a car would swoosh past, with yellow eyes staring wildly into the night. Her mind traced the long road home, the road she’d seen in last night’s aching dream of restlessness that had told her where she must come, then had framed awkwardly the next chapter of her thesis, which had to be worked on tonight if she were going to make her seminar deadline. But her mind moved uncontrolledly from thing to thing, returning again and again to that silent, isolated cabin, the salute from the blade of an upraised sword …

“You believe him.”

She turned, startled, and met Rudy’s eyes.

“You believe him,” he repeated quietly, not as an accusation, but as a statement.

“Yes,” Gil said. “Yes, I do.”

Rudy looked away from her and stared out the window. “Fantastic.”

“It sounds crazy …” she began.

He turned back to her. “Not when he says it,” he contradicted, pointing his finger accusingly, as if she would deny it. “He’s the most goddam believable man I’ve ever met.”

“You’ve never seen him step through the Void,” Gil said simply. “I have.”

That stopped Rudy. He couldn’t bring himself to say, I have, too.

Because he knew it had just been a hallucination, born of bright sunlight and a killing hangover. But the image of it returned disturbingly – the glaring gap of light, the folding air. But I didn’t see it, he protested; it was all in my head.

And, like an echo, he heard Ingold’s voice saying, You know you did.

I know I did.

But if it was all a hangover hallucination, how did he know it?

Rudy sighed, feeling exhausted beyond words. “I don’t know what the hell to believe.”

“Believe what you choose,” Gil said. “It doesn’t matter. He’s crossing back to his own world tonight, he and Tir. So they’ll be gone.”

“That’s fairy-tale stuff!” Rudy insisted. “Why would a – a wizard be toting a kidnapped Prince through this world on the way to someplace else anyway?”

Gil shrugged, keeping her eyes on the highway.

Annoyed, he went on. “And besides, if he was going back tonight to some world where he’s got magical powers, why would he need to bum my matches off me? He wouldn’t need them there.”

“No, he wouldn’t,” Gil agreed mildly. Then the sense of what Rudy had said sank in, and she looked quickly across at him. “You mean, he did?”

“Just before we left,” Rudy told her, a little smug at having caught the pair of them out. “Why would he need matches?”

Gil felt as if the blood in her veins had turned suddenly to ice. “Oh, my God,” she whispered.

I am entitled to risk my own life … but I draw the line at risking the lives of others …

As if a door had opened, showing her the room beyond, she knew that Ingold had lied. And she knew why he had lied.

She swerved the Volkswagen to the side of the highway, suspicion passing instantaneously to certainty as the threadbare tires jolted on the stones of the unpaved shoulder. There was only one reason for the wizard to need matches, the wizard who, in his own world, could bring fire at his bidding.

There was only one reason, in this world, that the wizard would need fire tonight.

He hadn’t spoken of going back until she’d offered to remain with him, until she’d spoken of the possibility of the Dark following him through the Void. He had refused to flee Gae until all those who needed him were utterly past help. So he would take his own chances, alone in the isolated cabin, rather than risk involving anyone else.

“Climb out,” she said. “I’m going back.”

“What the hell?” Rudy was staring at her as if she’d gone crazy.

“He lied,” Gil said, her low voice suddenly trembling with urgency. “He lied about crossing the Void tonight. He wanted to get rid of us both, get us out of there, before the Dark Ones come.”

“What?”

“I don’t care what you think,” she went on rapidly, “but I’m going back. He was afraid from the beginning that they’d come after him across the Void …”

“Now, wait a minute,” Rudy began, alarmed.

“No. You can hitch your way to where you’re going. I’m not leaving him to face them alone.”

Her face was white in the glare of the headlights, her pale eyes burning with an intensity that was almost frightening. Crazy, Rudy thought. Both of them, totally schizoid. Why does this have to happen to me?

“I’ll go with you,” he said. It was a statement, not an offer.

She drew back, instantly suspicious.

“Not that I believe you,” Rudy went on, slouching against the tattered upholstery. “But you two gotta have one sane person there to look after that kid. Now turn this thing around.”

With scarcely a glance at the road behind her, Gil jammed the accelerator, smoking across the center divider in a hailstorm of gravel, and roaring like a tin-pan thunderbolt into the night.

“There,” Rudy said, half an hour later, as the car skidded to a bone-jarring stop on the service road below the groves. Ahead of them on its little rise, the cabin was clearly visible, every window showing a dingy yellow electric glare. Gil was out of the car before the choking cloud of dust had settled, striding quickly over the rough ground toward the porch steps. Rudy followed more slowly, picking his way carefully through the weeds, wondering how in hell he was going to get out of this situation and what he was going to say to his boss back at the body shop. Dave, I didn’t make it to work Monday because I was helping a wizard rescue a baby Prince out someplace between Barstow and San Bernardino? Not to mention explaining why he never made it back to Tarot’s party from the beer run.

He looked around him at the dark landscape, distorted by starlight, and shivered at the utter desolation of it. Cold, aimless wind stirred his long hair, bearing a scent that was not of dusty grass or hot sunlight – a scent he’d never smelled before. He hurried to catch up with Gil, his boot-heels thumping hollowly on the board stairs.

She pounded on the door. “Ingold!” she called out. “Ingold, let me in!”

Rudy slipped past her and reached through the pane of glass he’d broken last night to unlock the door from the inside. They stepped into the bare and brightly lighted kitchen as Ingold came striding down the hallway, his drawn sword in his hand and clearly in a towering rage.

“Get out of here!” he ordered them furiously.

“The hell I will,” Gil said.

“You can’t possibly be of any help to me …”

“I’m not going to leave you alone.”

Rudy looked from the one to the other: the girl in her faded jeans and denim jacket, with those pale, wild eyes; the old man in his dark, billowing mantle, the sword gripped, poised, in one scarred hand. Loonies, he thought. What the hell have I walked into? He headed down the hall.

Tir lay wrapped in his dark velvet blankets on the bed, blue eyes wide with fear. The only other thing in the bare room was a pile of kindling in one corner, looking as if every piece of wooden furniture in the little cabin had been broken up; next to it stood the can of kerosene. Steps sounded behind him in the hall, and Ingold’s voice, taut as wire, said, “Don’t you understand?”

“I understand,” Gil said quietly. “That’s why I came back.”

“Rudy,” Ingold said, and the tone in his voice was one of a man utterly used to command. “I want you to take Gil, get her in the car, and get her out of here. Now. Instantly.”

Rudy swung around. “Oh, I’m gonna get out of here all right,” he said grimly. “But I’m taking the kid with me. I don’t know what you guys think you’re doing, but I’m not leaving a six-month-old kid to be mixed up in it.”

“Don’t be a fool,” Ingold snapped.

“Look who’s talking!”

Then, as Rudy bent to pick up the child from the bed, the lights went out.

In one swift movement, Ingold turned and kicked the door shut, the sword gleaming like foxfire in his hand. The little starlight leaking through the room’s single window showed his face beaded with sweat.

Rudy set the whimpering baby down again, muttering, “Goddam fuses.” He started for the door.

Gil gasped. “Rudy, no!”

Ingold caught her arm as she moved to stop him. There was deceptive mildness in his voice as it came from the darkness. “You think it’s the fuse?”

“Either that or a short someplace in the box,” Rudy said. He glanced over his shoulder at them as he opened the hall door, seeing their indistinct outlines in the near-total blackness; the faint touch of filtered starlight haloed Ingold’s white hair and picked out random corners of Gil’s angular frame. The edge of Ingold’s drawn sword glimmered, as if with a pallid light of its own.

The hall was black, pitch, utterly black, and Rudy groped his way blindly along it, telling himself that his nervousness came from being trapped in a house in the middle of nowhere with a deluded scholar and a charming and totally insane old geezer armed with a razor-sharp sword, a book of matches, and a can and a half of kerosene. After that stygian gloom, the dark kitchen seemed almost bright; he could make out the indistinct forms of the table, the counter; the thread-silver gleam on the hooked neck of the faucet; the pale, distinct glow of the windows by the door; the single one in the left with the broken pane.

Then he saw what was coming in through the broken pane.

He never knew how he got back to the bedroom, though later he found bruises on his body where he’d blundered against the walls in his flight. It seemed that one instant he was standing in the darkness of the tiny kitchen, seeing that hideous shape crawling through the window, and that next he was falling against the bedroom door to slam it shut, sobbing. “It’s out there! It’s out there!”

Ingold, standing over him in the gloom, scarred face outlined in the misty gleam of his sword blade, said softly, “What did you expect, Rudy? Humans?”

Firelight flared. Gil had made a kind of campfire out of splintered kindling in the middle of the cement floor and was coughing in the rank smoke. Lying on the sagging mattress, Tir was staring at the darkness with eyes huge with terror, whimpering like a beaten puppy afraid to bark. Another child would have been screaming; but, whatever atavistic memories crowded his infant brain, they warned him that to cry aloud was death.

Rudy got slowly to his feet, shaking in every limb with shock. “What are we gonna do?” he whispered. “We could get out the back, make it down to the car …”

“You think the car would start?” In the smoldery orange glare, the old man’s eyes never left the door. Even as he was speaking, Rudy could see that both his hands were on the long hilt of the sword, poised to strike. “I doubt we would make it to the car in any case. And – the house limits its size.”

Rudy gulped, cold with shock, seeing that thing again, small and hideous and yet rife with unspeakable terror. “You mean – it can change its size?”

“Oh, yes.” Sword in hand, Ingold moved cat-footedly to the door. “The Dark are not material, as we understand material. They are only incompletely visible, and not always of the same – composition. I have seen them go from the size of your two hands to larger than this house in a matter of seconds.”

Rudy wiped sweating palms on his jeans, sickened with horror and totally disoriented. “But if – if they’re not material,” he stammered, “what can we do? How can we fight?”

“There are ways.” Firelight played redly over Ingold’s patched mantle as he stood, one hand resting on the doorknob, the other holding ready the gleaming witchfire of the blade, his head bowed, listening for some sound. After a moment he spoke again, his voice barely a whisper. “Gil,” he said, “I want you to take Tir and get between the bed and the wall. Rudy, how much of a fire do we have left?”

“Not much. That wood was dry as grass. It’s going quick.”

Ingold stepped back from the door, though he never took his attention from it. The little room was filled with smoke, the flaring fire already sinking, feebly holding at bay the encroaching ring of shadows. Without looking back, he held out his hand. “Give me the kerosene, Rudy.”

Wordlessly, Rudy obeyed.

Moving swiftly now, Ingold sheathed his sword in a single fluid gesture, took the can, and set to work, unscrewing the filler-cap and throwing a great swatch of the clear liquid over the dry wood of the door. It glittered in the yellow firelight, its throat-catching smell mixing with the gritty foulness of the smoke, nearly choking Gil, who stood with her back pressed to the icy concrete of the wall, the muffled baby motionless in her arms. The fire’s light had gone from yellow to murky orange, the brown shadows of the wizard’s quick, sure movements wavering, vast and distorted, over the imprisoning walls. Ingold came back toward her and saturated the mattress with the last of the kerosene, its stink nearly suffocating her at close range. Then he set the empty can down softly, turned and drew his sword again, all in one smooth move; all told, he had had his sword sheathed for less than forty seconds.

He returned to the center of the room, a few feet in front of the dying fire, which had fallen in on itself to a fading heap of ash and crawling embers. As the darkness grew around him, the pallid light that seemed to burn up off the blade grew brighter, bright enough to highlight his scarred face. He said softly, “Don’t be afraid.” Whether it was a spell he cast, or merely the strength of his personality alone, Gil did not know, but she felt her apprehension lessen, her fear give place to a queer, cold numbness. Rudy moved out of his frozen immobility, took the last stick of unburned kindling, and lit it from the remains of the blaze.

Darkness seemed to fill the room and, heavier than the darkness, a silence that breathed. In that silence Gil heard the faint blundering sounds in the hall, a kind of chitinous scratching, as if dark fumbled eyelessly through dark. Against her own heart, she could feel the baby’s heart hammering with small violence, and a chill wind began to seep through the cracks in the door, touching her sweating face with feathers of cold. She could smell it, the harsh, acid blood-smell of the Dark.

Ingold’s rusty voice came very calmly out of the shadows. “Rudy,” he said, “take that torch and stand next to the door. Don’t be afraid, but when the creature comes in, I want you to close the door behind it and light the kerosene. Will you do that?”

Empty, cold, keyed up long past the point of feeling anything, Rudy whispered, “Yeah, sure.” He sidled cautiously past the wizard, the flaming wood flickering in his hand. As he took his post by the door, he could feel the presence of the thing, a nightmare aura of fear. He felt it bump the door, softly, a testing tap, far above his own eye level, and his flesh crawled at the touch. The thing would pass him – if it did pass him and didn’t turn on the nearest person to it as it came through the door – within touching distance. But on the other hand, the thought crossed his mind that if it did pass him, there was nothing to prevent him from slipping out that open door and making a run for the car.

If the car would start. If, having polished off Ingold and Gil, the Dark didn’t come after him anyway. No! The need was to finish it now – the Dark One, the Enemy, the thing from across the Void, the obscene intruder into the warm, soft world of the California night …

Groping for the shattered ends of his world-view, Rudy could only stand in darkness beside the door, torch in hand, and wait.

The last glow of the embers was fading, the only light in the room now Rudy’s smoldering torch and the gleaming challenge of the blade that Ingold held upright before him, his eyes glittering in the reflected witchlight like the eyes of an old wolf. There was a sibilant rustle of robes as he stirred, bracing himself, a whispering sigh as the dying ashes collapsed and scattered. The wind that ruffled so coldly through the cracks in the door seemed to drop and fail.

In the same instant that the door exploded inward, Ingold was striding forward, blade flashing down in an arc of fire to meet the bursting tidal wave of darkness. Rudy got a hideous glimpse of the fanning canopy of shadow and the endless, engulfing mouth, fringed in sloppy tentacles whose writhings splattered the floor with smoking slime. As if released from a spell, Tir began to scream, the high, thin, terrified sound going through Rudy’s brain like a needle. The sword flashed, scattering fire; the creature drew back, unbelievably agile for that soft floating bulk, the slack of its serpentlike tail brushing Rudy’s shoulders as it uncoiled in a whip of darkness. The thing filled the room like a cloud, its darkness covering them, seeming to swell and pulse as if its whole bloated, obscene body were a single slimy organ. The whip-tail slashed out, cutting at Ingold’s throat, and the wizard ducked and shifted inward for position with the split-second reflexes of a far younger man. In his dark robes, he was barely to be seen in the darkness; mesmerized, Rudy watched, hypnotized by the burning arc of the wizard’s blade and the thing that snatched at him like a giant hand of shadow.

Gil was screaming, “The fire! The fire!” The sound was meaningless to his ears; it was the heat of his torchlight burning down almost to his hands that made him remember. As if awakened from a dream, he started, kicked the door shut, and hit the greasy smear of the kerosene with the last burning stump. The door exploded into fire, scorching Rudy as he leaped back.

The Dark One, thrown into crimson visibility, writhed and twisted as if in pain, changing size again and shooting up toward the ceiling. But streaks of fire were already rushing up the walls to the tinder-dry rafters. Sparks stung Rudy’s exposed hands and face as he ducked across the open space of the floor and threw himself over the bed to crash against the wall at Gil’s side. More sparks rained, sizzling, on the wet, twisting shadow of the Dark.

The room was a furnace, blinding and smothering. Bleeding light silhouetted the creature, which fled this way and that, seeking a way out. Trapped by the fire, it turned like a cat and fell on Ingold, the whiplike tail elongating into spiny wire, slashing at his hands, his eyes, its claws catching at his body. The blade carved smoking slivers from the soft tissue, but the thing loomed too big, moved too swiftly in the cramped space, for Ingold to get in for a killing blow. Flattened against the wall, suffocating in the heat, and burned by the rain of falling sparks, Gil and Rudy both could see that Ingold was being pushed steadily back toward the corner where they crouched behind the filthy bed, hampered fatally by his need to remain at all costs between the creature and the Prince. He fell back, a step at a time, until Gil could have stretched her arms across the bed and touched his shoulder. Now, along with the sparks, they were burned by the flying droplets of acid that scattered like sweat from the creature’s twisting body.

Then the Dark One feinted with claws and tail, eluding the slash of the blade by fractions of an inch and throwing itself past the wizard with a rush. In the same split second Ingold flung himself over the mattress to the wall, between Gil and Rudy. As he did so, whether by accident or by design, the kerosene-saturated cotton went up in a wall of fire that singed the hem of his cloak and engulfed the Dark One in a roaring wave of scarlet heat. For one second Gil was conscious only of the wild, terrified screaming of the child in her arms, of the howling inferno only feet from her body, and of the heat of the holocaust that swallowed her. Then the wall of fire bulged inward, and the black shape appeared, distorted and buckling, blazing as it hurled itself, burning and dying, upon them all. Gil screamed as hot wind and darkness covered her.

Then all things vanished in a sudden, blinding firefall of light and color and cold.

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