but perhaps he thought that I was lying. Eldor believed me. Without his preparations, I think we would all have perished the first night of their rising.”
“And now?” Gil asked softly.
“Now?” The night was far spent; the lines of weariness etched into his scarred face seemed to settle a little deeper. “We are holding out in the Palace at Gae. The main body of the Army under the command of the Chancellor of the Realm, Alwir, the Queen’s brother, has been in Penambra, where the raids were the worst. They should return to the city within days; but without a miracle they will be too late to prevent catastrophe. I have tried vainly to get in touch with the Council of Wizards in the Hidden City of Quo, but I fear they, too, may be besieged. They have retreated behind their defenses of power and illusion. Though I still have hopes that we can hold out long enough for Lohiro to send us aid of some kind, I would not want to wager the lives of my friends on that hope. The defenders at the Palace need me, Gil. Though I cannot do much, I will not leave them until it is beyond doubt that no effort of mine can save them.
“And that,” he said, “is where I need your help.” She only looked at him, uncomprehending. “You understand,” Ingold went on in that same quiet tone, “that by leaving it that late, I shall be cutting my escape very fine. In the last extremity, my only course will be to flee across the Void into some other world—this world. I can cross back and forth at will with relative impunity. Normally such a crossing is a shocking enough physical trauma for an adult. For an infant of six months, even under my protection, it can be injurious, and two such crossings in a short span of time could do the child real harm. I will therefore have to remain a day in this world, with the child, before I can return to some safer spot in my own.”
The light dawned. Gil smiled. “You need a place to hole up.”
“As you say. I need an isolated spot and a few creature comforts—a place to pass that time in obscurity. Do you know of such a place?”
“You could come here,” Gil offered.
Ingold shook his head. “No,” he said decidedly.
“Why not?”
The wizard hesitated before answering. “It’s too dangerous,” he said at last. He rose from his chair, moved restlessly to the flat rectangle of the window, and pushed the curtain aside, looking out, down into the apartment courtyard below. The greenish reflections of the courtyard lights in the waters of the swimming pool rippled over the old marks of alien battles on his face. “Too many things could happen. I have a great mistrust of fate, Gil. My powers are severely limited in your world. If something were to go wrong, I have no desire to try to explain my presence or that of the child to the local authorities.”
Gil had a brief, disturbing picture of Ingold, like some bearded refugee from the Society for the Preservation of Dungeons and Dragons in his shabby robes and killing sword, having a close encounter with the local police or the Highway Patrol. Despite her impression that the Highway Patrol would come off second best, she realized such a confrontation could not be risked. Not with so much at stake.
“There’s a place we used to go past on trail rides,” she said, after a moment’s thought.
“Yes?” He turned back from the window, letting the curtain swish shut.
“A girl I used to go to school with lives out near Barstow—it’s in the desert, way the hell east of here. I spent a couple weeks out there two summers ago. She had horses, and we used to ride all over the back-hills country. I remember there was a cabin, kind of a little house, out in the middle of some abandoned orange groves in the hills. We holed up there one afternoon during a thunderstorm. It isn’t much, but there’s running water and a kerosene stove, and it’s as isolated as you could want.”
Ingold nodded. “Yes,” he murmured, half to himself. “Yes, it should do.”
“I can bring you food and blankets,” she went on. “Just tell me when you’ll be there.”
“I don’t know that yet,” the wizard said quietly. “But you’ll know, at the time.”
“All right.” Though Gil was normally a suspicious person, it never occurred to her to question him, and this did not even surprise her about herself. She trusted him, she found, as if she had known him for years.
Ingold reached across the table and took her hand.
“Thank you,” he said. “You are a stranger to our world and you owe us nothing—it is good of you to help.”
“Hey,” Gil protested softly. “I’m not a stranger. I’ve been in your world, and I’ve seen the Dark. I just about met King Eldor, as a matter of fact.” Then she paused, confused at her blunder, for she remembered that the King and the wizard were friends, and that Eldor was almost certainly going to die before the week was out.
But Ingold passed over her error like the gentleman he was. “I know Eldor would have been pleased to make your acquaintance,” he said. “And you shall always have his gratitude, and mine, for … “
Some sound in the night made him suddenly alert, and he broke off, raising his head to listen.
“What is it?” Gil whispered.
Ingold turned back to her. “I’m afraid I must go,” he said politely. His voice seldom betrayed worry or fear—he might have been making his excuses because of a prior engagement for tea with the Queen of Numenor. But Gil knew that something was happening, across the Void, in the embattled Palace at Gae.
He rose to go, the straight dark line of his mantle breaking over the sword at his hip. Gil thought of the danger and of the Dark waiting on the other side of the Void. She caught at his sleeve. In a voice smaller than she meant, she said, “Hey, take care.”
His smile was like the coming of the sun. “Thank you, my dear. I always do.” Then he walked a few paces to the center of the kitchen and put out his hand to push the fabric of the universe aside like a curtain. As he did so, he drew his sword, and Gil could see the cold light that burned up off the blade as he stepped into the mist and fire beyond.
CHAPTER TWO
It was the goddam motherless fuel pump!
Rudy Solis identified immediately the gasp and drag of the old Chevy’s engine, automatically checked his rear-vision mirror, and scanned the dark, straight, two-lane highway ahead, though he knew there was nothing resembling a light in fifty miles. With all of Southern California to choose from, naturally the thing would decide to give up the ghost in the dead, endless stretch of desert and hill country that lay between Barstow and San Bernardino, miles from anywhere in the middle of Sunday night.
Rudy wondered if he could make it back to the party.
Be a lot of sorrow and tears if I can’t, he thought to himself, glancing over his shoulder at the ten cases of beer stacked amid the shredded foam, old newspapers, and greasy articles of unidentifiable clothing heaped in the sagging back seat. The engine faltered, coughed apologetically, and chugged on. Rudy cursed the owner of the car, the seventh-magnitude rock-and-roll star at whose party he’d been drinking and sunburning himself into a stupor all weekend, and the buddies who’d volunteered him to make the beer run, thirty miles down the hills to Barstow; cursed them impersonally, and threw in a few curses at himself as well for being euchred into going.
Well, serves ‘em right. Next time they want somebody to buy their beer for ‘em, they can damn well lend me a decent car.