but looking up, she saw only the blackness of clouds. Yet she felt something in the shadows, haunting the snowy darkness with malignant watchfulness. In the utter silence, the faint ringing of her drawn sword seemed very loud.
'There!' Aide whispered. Gil swung around and saw the drift of darkness like a ghost above the snow. Sinuous, inhuman, it flickered into brief visibility and was gone. Without being certain why she did so, Gil turned and glimpsed something - the suggestion of anomalous motion, the flick of snow swirling against the drift of the breeze - to their right. But it faded, like a word whispered into darkness.
Then something dropped from the dark air above, something that splattered acid from a monstrous mouth to melt the snow in stinging rain, something that stank of blood and darkness. Gil's sword whined faintly, a blur of razor-bright steel cleaving the sooty protoplasm and dousing them both in a stream of foul and gritty black water that gushed from the wound. She saw the creature now as it swung through the air, a formless darkness that grew as it moved, the catch of crustaceous pincers and the long, sudden slash of a spined tail, coiling like a whip and thicker than a man's forearm. She hacked downward, severing six feet of that thrashing cable, which began at once to disintegrate. Like a howling storm of silence, the creature turned on her, the dripping tentacles of its mouth reaching out for her, an eldritch, all-swallowing cloud of night. She slashed into the darkness, stepping into the slimy welter of beating membranes and knowing, the instant before her sword cleaved the thing, that she had it and had it clean. Then the sticky remnants of the severed creature were streaming and folding messily around her like wet, dissolving sheets in the wind. The snow around them stank.
Aide started to get up from the ground, where she had very sensibly thrown herself to give Gil a clear field. Her face was dead white under the bloody slime, but calm.
'No,' Gil said softly, 'stay down.' Without a word, Minalde obeyed. Nothing moved in the darkness, but Gil felt the chill presence of the Dark still. Above the fetor of the mucky snow around them, she smelled the sharper odor of the living creatures. In a single motion, she turned and slashed, her body reacting to cues before her mind registered them. The creature that loomed so suddenly from the darkness behind her split on the bright metal of a long, one-handed side-cut that Gnift had told her only that morning looked like an old granny beating a carpet...
To hell with Gnift and his granny, Gil thought, turning in the storm of slime to cut downward at the third Dark One, delighting, as she always did, in that clean and
terrible precision. Her face and hands smeared now with charred muck, she swung around, scenting the night for further signs of attack.
The night was still. She reached down quickly and hauled Aide to her feet, running for that square of burning orange light that was the only thing visible in the blackness of the overcast night. 'Are there more?' Aide whispered, glancing back over her shoulder at the massed, windy darkness of the trees and mountains beyond. 'Can you...'
'I don't know,' Gil panted. She stumbled, her feet slipping in the trampled goo of the road, her drawn sword in one hand and her other gripping Aide's elbow. There's a Nest of them in the valley twenty miles to the north they haven't got far to come. I guess those three were strays from the main attack.' The light was nearer now, warm and amber on the snow, hard as glass reflected from the black sides of the Keep. Against an orange whirlwind of fire, forms were recognizable - Alwir, like Lucifer in his winged cloak, the Guards' instructor Gnift with the firelight flashing off his bald head, Seya and the other Guards.
'Main attack?' Aide asked, horrified. 'But where...'
'Can't you guess where the rest of the Dark are? Why we were attacked by only two or three?' They reached the last slope of ground, coming into the glare of the fires. The ruddy light gilded Aide's scratched, dirty face and shimmered like a live thing over the dark, rippling fur of her cloak. She shook her head, confused.
They're all down at the Tall Gates,' Gil said quietly.
Aide looked absolutely stricken. *Oh, no,' she whispered.
Dark figures massed within the slit of brightness