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 lamp-flame 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.