The Time Of The Dark - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,50

of shyness; Rudy put her age at somewhere between eighteen and twenty. Her crow-black hair was braided down past her hips.

"Warm?" Like most Californians, Rudy was thinblooded. "I've been freezing to death all afternoon. What do you people consider cold?"

Startled, she raised her eyes to his; hers were dark, luminous blue, like Crater Lake on a midsummer afternoon. "Oh!" She smiled. "You're the companion of Ingold, one who helped him rescue Tir."

And, indeed, Tir was making his way purposefully over to Rudy across the bearskin, tangling himself in the black and white silk of his gown. Rudy folded up to sit crosslegged beside the girl and gathered the child into his lap. "Well-" he said, a little embarrassed by that awe and gratitude in her eyes. "I just kind of stumbled into that. I mean, it was either come with him or die, I guess-we didn't have much choice."

"But still, you had the choice to be with him in the first place, didn't you?" she reminded him.

"Well- yeah," he agreed. "But believe me, if I'd known what it was all about, I'd still be running."

The girl laughed. "Betrayed into heroism," she mocked his assertion gently.

"Honey, you don't even know." Rudy extricated Tir's exploring hands from his collar and dug in his pocket for his key ring, which the child, in blissful fascination, proceeded to try to eat. "You know," he went on after a few minutes, "what floors me about this whole thing is that the kid's fine. After all he's been through from the time Ingold got him out of Gae until we got him back here, you'd think he'd be in shock. Is he? Hardly! Babies are so little, you'd think they'd break in your hands, like-like kittens, or flowers."

"They're tough." The girl smiled. "The human race would have perished long ago if babies were as fragile as they look. Often they're tougher than their parents." Her fingers made absent-minded ringlets of the black, downy hair on Tir's tiny pink neck.

Rudy remembered things said in the hall and other talk throughout the day. "How's his mom?" he asked. "I heard she-the Queen-was sick. Will she be okay?"

The girl hesitated, an expression of-what? Almost grief-altering the delicate line of her cheek. "They say the Queen will recover," she answered. him slowly. "But I don't know. I doubt she will ever be as she was." The girl shifted her position on the rug and put the long braid of her hair back over her shoulder. Rudy stopped, another question unspoken on his lips, wondering suddenly how and under what circumstances this girl had made her own escape from Gae.

"And your friend?" The girl made an effort, and withdrew her mind from something within her that she would rather not have looked at. "Ingold's other companion?"

"Gil?" Rudy asked. "I guess she went with the Guards to Gae this morning. That's what they tell me, anyway. You wouldn't get me within a hundred miles of that place."

"You're within ten," the girl said quietly.

Rudy shivered. "Well, I can tell you I'll be farther away before sundown. Food or no food, you'd have to be crazy to go back there."

"I don't know," the girl said, toying with the end of her braid. "They say the Guards are crazy, that you have to be crazy, to be a Guard. And I believe that. I would never go back, not for anything, but the Guards-they're a rare breed. They're the best, the finest corps in the West of the World. It's their life, fighting and training to fight. The Guards say it's like nothing else, and for them there is nothing else. I don't understand it. But then, nobody does. Only other Guards."

Pro ballplayers would, Rudy thought. Heavy-duty martial artists would. He remembered some of the karate black belts he knew back home. Aloud, he said, "God help anyone or anything that takes on a bunch of people like that. Ingold's with them, too."

"Oh," the girl said quietly.

"Do you know Ingold?"

"Not- not really. I-I've met him, of course." She frowned slightly. "I've always been a little bit afraid of him. He's said to be tricky and dangerous, all the more so because he appears so-so harmless. And, of course, wizards-there are those who believe that wizards are the agents of evil."

"Evil? Ingold?" Rudy was startled and a little shocked. A more harmless old man he could never hope to find.

"Well- " She hesitated, twining the end of her braid through her fingers. Tir, having misplaced or