Darwath 1 - The Time Of The Dark Read Online Free PDF Page A

I have been able to establish contact. It was seeing you, speaking to you, and then having you materialize not only in thought but in body, that made me understand what is happening with regard to the Void.”
    Outside, a truck rumbled by on Clarke Street, its sound muffled with distance and the night. Somewhere in the apartment building, a toilet flushed, a faint echoing gurgle along the pipes. Gil stared down at the table for a time, her eye automatically noting her own jagged black handwriting spelling out cryptic notes with regard to the upkeep of fourteenth-century bridges, then looked up again at the wizard calmly drinking beer across from her, his staff leaned against the wall at his side.
    She asked, “What is happening with the Void?”
    “When I spoke with you in Gae,” Ingold went on, “I realized that our worlds must lie in very close conjunction at this time—so close that, because of the psychic crisis, a dreamer could literally walk the line between them and see from one into the next. This is both a rare and a temporary occurrence, a one-in-a-million chance for two worlds to drift so close. But it is a situation that I can use to my advantage in this emergency.”
    “But why did it happen now, at the tune of crisis?” Gil asked, the harsh electric glare rippling in the embroidery of her gaudy sleeves as she leaned forward across the table. “And why did it happen to me?”
    He must have caught the suppressed slivers of uneasiness and fear of being singled out in her voice; when he replied he spoke gently. “Nothing is fortuitous. There are no random events. But we cannot know all the reasons.”
    She barely hid a smile. “That's a wizard's answer if I ever heard one.”
    “Meaning that mages deal in double talk?” His grin was impish. “That's one of our two occupational hazards.”
    “And what's the other one?”
    He laughed. “A deplorable tendency to meddle.”
    She joined him in laughter. Then after a moment she grew quiet and asked, “But if you're a wizard, how could you need my help? What help could I possibly give you that you couldn't find for yourself? How could I help you against—against the Dark? Who is, or what is, the Dark?”
    He regarded her in silence for a moment, judging her, testing her, watching her out of blue eyes whose surface brightness masked a depth and pull like the ocean's. His face had grown grave again, settled into its sun-scorched lines. He said, “You know.”
    She looked away, seeing in her unwilling mind monolithic bronze doors exploding off their hinges; seeing shadows that ran behind her, inescapable as ghostly wolves. She spoke without meeting his eyes. “I don't know what they are.”
    “Nor does anyone,” he said, "unless it's Lohiro, the Master of Quo. It's a question whose answer I wish I had never been set to seek, a riddle I'm sorry I have to unravel.
    “What can I say of the Dark, Gil? What can I say that you don't know already? That they are the sharks of night? That they pull the flesh from the bones, or the blood from the flesh, or the soul and spirit from the living body and let it stumble mindlessly to an eventual death from starvation? That they ride the air in darkness, hunt in darkness, and that fire or light or even a good bright moon will keep them away? Would that tell you what they are?”
    She shook her head, hypnotized by the warm roughness of his voice, caught by the intensity of his eyes and by the horror and the memory of even more appalling horrors that she saw there. “But you know,” she whispered.
    “Would to God I did not.” Then he sighed and looked away; when he turned his head again, there was only that matter-of-fact self-assurance in his face, without the doubt, or the fear, or the loathing of what he knew.
    “I—I dreamed of them.” Gil stumbled on the words, finding it unexpectedly more difficult to speak of that first forerunning dream to one who understood than to one who did not “Before I ever saw them,