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 bootheels 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