The Time Of The Dark - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,102
her sword was half out of its scabbard. "Where did you go?" she whispered.
The wizard frowned. "I didn't go anywhere." His hand still on her wrist, he looked around them doubtfully.
"You sure as hell weren't here a minute ago."
"Hmm." He scratched thoughtfully at his scrubby beard. "Wait here," he said finally, "and watch me." With these words he released Gil's arm and walked away, his feet making barely a sound in the knee-deep jungles of undergrowth. Gil tried her best to watch him. Tired as she was with the weariness that seemed to have settled around her bones, she was certain she hadn't moved or shut her eyes. But somehow she lost sight of the wizard, in open ground, in the sunlight, without an inch of cover in yards.
She blinked and rubbed her eyes again. There was something, she thought, in the air of this place, some foulness, an invisible game of blindman's bluff. Then she looked back and saw Ingold standing about twenty feet off at the end of the track of flattened ivy, as if he had always been there. As he came back to her, she had no trouble following his movements.
Gil shook her head. "I don't understand." She hitched her cloak up on her shoulder, a gesture that was quickly becoming automatic, like straightening her sword belt. Always before, the cloak had never provided quite enough protection from the cold, but in this place, with its stifling air, it seemed hot and heavy. She was acutely aware of the wrongness of this place. "Do you know what's going on?"
"I'm afraid I do," Ingold said slowly. "The power of the Dark is strong here, very strong. It seems to be interfering with the cloaking spell I've had over both of us, which is a pity, because that probably means I'll have to dispense with it."
"You mean," Gil said in surprise, "we've been under a spell all along?"
"Oh, yes." He smiled at her startled face. "I've been keeping a number of spells on the convoy all the way down from Karst. Mostly ward and guard, aversion and protection. They wouldn't hold back a concerted attack, but they have served to deflect random misfortune."
She flushed, annoyed at herself. "I never knew that."
"Of course not. It's the mark of a good mage that he's never seen doing anything at all." She glanced suspiciously at him to see if he were teasing her, but he seemed perfectly serious-as serious as Ingold ever looked.
"But would a-a cloaking spell protect us from the Dark in the first place?"
"Probably not here in their own valley," Ingold replied casually. "But the White Raiders have been following us since we left the road. If the cloaking spell is unreliable, we're going to have a devil of a time getting back."
They reached the place in mid-afternoon. Gil felt it from afar, horror coalescing in her veins. She knew without being told that this was the place that Ingold had seen reflected in the depths of the fire. The ground was unnaturally even, tipped at a steep angle, with a great slanting slab of basalt jammed into the foundations of the mountain behind it, its farther end rising like the hull of a heeled wreck; one corner was buried in the valley floor as if driven there by some unspeakable cataclysm lost in the abysses of time. The slanted angle showed how deep the slab was founded; though it had been displaced upward a good thirty feet, there was no sign of bottom. And in the midst of it gaped the black hole of its stairway, the plunging road down into the chasm of the Dark.
The stairway was open. Little trace of the earth and rock Ingold had seen in the shadow image of the fire remained anywhere near that hideous gulf. A great scattering of stones, like the fan-trail of a volcanic spew, littered the slope below, but Gil could see from the way the clutching, ubiquitous weeds grew over them that the stones had been blown from that hole many years since. Still she picked one up. On its side, she could see the dry ghost of a lush, obscene orchid, frozen in some primeval swamp a million years ago and fragmented by the violence of that ancient blast. Ingold, too, was examining the wide-flung pattern of the stones, working his way methodically toward the crazily tilted pavement and the hole that yawned like a silent scream at the day.