This time he must have laid a spell on the words, for Gil fell asleep at once, and the wizard’s words followed her down into the darkness of her dreams,
The Dark hunted. She could feel them, sense them, sense the dark shifting of movement through spinning, primordial blackness, the vague stirrings in unspeakable chasms that light had never touched. Groggily, through a leaden fog of sleep, Gil tried to remember where she was—the Keep, Dare’s Keep. Fleeting, tangled images came to her of slipping through nighted corridors and converging on a chosen prey. She could sense that eyeless, waiting malevolence, smell, as they smelled, the hot pulse of blood, and sense, through the thick gloom of vibrating, purple darkness, the glow of the prey, the centerpoint of a whirling vortex of lust and hate … But it wasn’t the closeness of the Keep at all that surrounded her, but wind, utter bone-piercing cold, the roaring of water among pillars of stone, the white surge and fleck of spray, and the freezing touch of the air above the flood. Greedy power gnawed at stone, greedy minds counted out glowing beads on a four-mile chain of tangled sleep and laughed with a gloating laughter that never emerged to sound.
Her eyes snapped open, and sweat drenched her face at the memory of that gloating laughter. She whispered, “Ingold … ” almost afraid to make a sound, for fear they might hear.
The wizard was already awake, his white hair tousled with sleep, his eyes alert, as if he listened for some distant sound that Gil could not hear. A dim blue ball of witchlight hung above his head; the fire in the cell had long grown cold. “What is it?” he asked her gently. “What did you dream?”
She drew a deep breath, grasping at the fast-fading rags of sensation, of things she’d heard and smelled. “The Dark … “
“I know,” he said softly. “I felt it, too. What? And where?”
She sat up, drawing her cloak around her shoulders, as if that would still her shivering. “I don’t know where it was,” she said, a little more calmly. “There was water rushing, and—stone—hewn stone, I think, pillars. They were tearing pieces of stone out of pillars, throwing them into rushing water—and—and laughing. They know where Tir is, Ingold,” she added, her voice low and urgent.
He came across the room to her and put an arm around her shoulders for comfort, though for her the worst was past. His voice was grim as he said, “So do I. He’s with his mother, half a day’s journey below the stone bridge that crosses the gorge of the Arrow River.”
Somewhere above the inky overcast, the sky might have been lightening, preparatory to the breaking of day; but if so, Rudy Solis could see little indication of it. The canyon through which the road at this point wound was like a black wind tunnel, the smell of the wind strong and somehow earthy, its sound like the roar of the sea in the pines above the road. He prowled restlessly through the rousing camp, unable to account for his uneasiness, threading through little knots of bundled-up fugitives huddled around their breakfast fires, making his way almost subconsciously back to the wagons he had stealthily quitted before the camp was astir.
The fires there had been built up and threw an uneasy flickering glow over the camp. Alde was awake, feeding Tir on bread soaked in milk in the little island of shelter at the back of her wagon. On the other side of the fire, a handful of troopers of the House of Bes were wolfing down their meager rations in silence. Farther out among the wagons, another woman, a servant of the household, was ordering two small children about as she fed a baby smaller than Tir, while her husband fed the ox teams in sullen silence. Overhead, the banners cracked like bullwhips in the icy stream of the wind.
Rudy shook his head and grinned down at Alde, leaning his shoulder against the uprights that supported the wagon’s roof. “You know, what amazes me about this trip is how many kids have survived. You see them all over the camp. Look at that one there. He looks as if the first stiff wind would blow him away.”
“It’s a she,” Alde replied calmly, watching the child in question playing tag with herself under the feet of the wagon teams. The little girl’s mother saw what she was doing and called her back to the fire with a screech like a parrot’s, and the child, with the sublime unconcern of those who have only recently learned to walk, came running happily back out of danger, arms open, a treasury of broken straws in her hands.
Rudy reached out to stroke Tir’s downy hair absentmindedly. He’ll grow up like that, he found himself thinking. Learning to run in the dark labyrinth of the Keep of Dare, learning swordsmanship from the Guards … Strange to think of Alde and Tir going on living for years in that fortress Rudy had never seen, long after he was gone.
If they make it there. And he shivered, not entirely from the cold.
“And it isn’t so unusual,” Minalde went on, a glimmer of timid mischief in her blue eyes. “If you’ve noticed, it isn’t the women and children who sit down by the roadside and die. If a wagon breaks down, the man will moan and despair—the woman will start pushing. Watch sometime.”
“Oh, yeah?” he said, suspicious that she was baiting him.
She gave him a sidelong, teasing glance. “Seriously, Rudy. Women are tougher. They have to be, to protect the children.”
He remembered the wind-stirred gallery at Karst, the flutter of the white dress of a girl who was running down the hall in darkness. “Aaah—” he conceded ungraciously, and she laughed.
More children eddied into the circle of the fire, the gaggle of camp orphans with the slim young girl they’d taken as their guardian carrying the youngest in her arms. The girl and the servant woman stopped to speak. Seeing them together, Rudy was reminded of the way he’d seen Alde and Medda that first day on the terrace of the villa at Karst.
A new thought crossed his mind, and he frowned suddenly. “Alde?” She looked up quickly, getting milk all over her fingers. “How do the Dark Ones know who Tir is?”
Slim brows drew together in thought. “I don’t know,” she said, startled by the question. “Do they?”
“Yeah. They went after him at Karst, anyway, and at Gae. There were beaucoup kids in the villa at Karst. As far as they should have known, he could have been any one of them. But they were right on the spot outside his nursery.”
She shook her head, puzzled, the cloak of her unbound hair slipping across her shoulders. “Bektis!” she called out, seeing the tall figure crossing the camp to his own wagons.
He came forward and gave her a gracious bow. “My lady pleases?”
The Sorcerer of the Realm didn’t look any the worse for two weeks in the open; like Alwir, he was fastidious to the point of foppishness, and there wasn’t so much as an untoward wrinkle in his billowing gray robe.
Rudy broke in. “How do the Dark Ones know where to find Tir? I mean, they haven’t got eyes, they can’t tell he looks different or anything. Why do they know to come after him?”
The sorcerer hesitated, giving the matter weighty consideration—probably, Rudy guessed, to cover the fact that he was stumped. At length he said, “The Dark Ones have a knowledge that is beyond human ken.” He is stumped. “Perhaps my lord Ingold could have told you, had he not chosen this time to disappear. The sources of the knowledge of the Dark—”
Rudy cut him off. “What I’m getting at is this. Do the Dark Ones really know it’s Tir, or are they just going after any kid in a gilded cradle? If Alde went on foot with the kid in her arms, like every other woman in this train, wouldn’t she be safer than being stuck in the wagon?”