Barbara Hambly - The Time of The Dark

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The Time of The Dark

by Barbara Hambly

Version 1.0

CHAPTER 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 scream-

ing 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 be-

hind 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,

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her thick hair tangling in her eyes. The wild, jumping dance

of wind-bent torches silhouetted crowding forms, flicker-

ing 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 shin-

ing 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, know-

ing 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 vol-

unteers, 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

tuneless 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 dark-

ness. 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 any-

way 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 shad-

ows 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,

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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 cow-

boy 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

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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 famil-

iarity 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 perenni-

ally 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 cham-

ber, so huge that the lines of shadow-curtained arches sup-

porting the low, groined ceiling had vanished into darkness

all about her. Dust had stirred mustily beneath her bare

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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 monu-

mental bronze doors at their top, but had drawn no reflec-

tion 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, hold-

ing 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 un-

concernedly 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?

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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 molder-

ing 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 moun-

tains 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 fur-

nishings, 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 sophis-

ticated 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 rail-

ings veined in mother-of-pearl that caught the dim lamp-

light. 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 em-

blem 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 sleep-

ing 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 billow-

ing 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.

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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, show-

ing 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 be-

long. 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 gov-

ernor 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 Penam-

bra. 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 awk-

ward 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

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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 under-

stand 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 hap-

pened 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 wiz-

ard 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 memor-

ies 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

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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?"

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The wizard shook his head.

"He knows," Eldor said softly. "He knows. My memo-

ries 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 Same of the lamp,

pure and small as a gold com, 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 Mm, 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 flinch-

ing automatically to the hilt of his jeweled sword, but In-

gold 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

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Barbara Hambly - The Time of The Dark

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