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  The Dreamers of Black Rock

  By

  Barbara Hambly

  Published by Barbara Hambly at Amazon

  Copyright 2018 Barbara Hambly

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  Table of Contents

  The Dreamers of Black Rock

  About the Author

  The Dreamers of Black Rock

  “He’s dead.” Gil Patterson’s hands shook so badly that the water spilled from the gourd bowl that had been pressed into them. She handed it back to the man who held it: gray-haired, sunburned, and lean, as all the inhabitants of the old Black Rock Keep were lean, after seven years in the arid wastes of Gettlesand. “They’re both dead.”

  A shocked murmur gusted among those gathered around her. She was aware of the glances that went back and forth. They weren’t surprised.

  Not even horrified, she thought. Not really…

  “White Raiders?” asked the man who stood before her, the man the old Keep’s outpost guards had called, when Gil had come staggering up out of the arroyo nearly a mile from the spatchcocked walls.

  Gil fought to keep her voice calm. The image of the two bodies, sprawled on the blood-soaked ground of their desert camp in the pale gray of early morning, was almost more than she could stand. Rudy Solis, fellow-exile from California to this alien world, trainee wizard, the only person who truly understood the world they had left seven years ago…

  And Ingold Inglorion. Archmage of the few wizards left, after the incursion of the subterranean monsters who seven years ago had destroyed all the works of humankind here. The reason she had remained in this world, rather than re-crossing the Void to her own time and place. Her lover. Her friend. The father of her child.

  The best and wisest man she had ever known.

  By the condition of the bodies, it had definitely been White Raiders.

  “Mages…” began a young woman, compact and fair-haired, clothed in the rough gear of a range-rider and with the very dark eyes one seldom saw out here in Gettlesand.

  Gil raised her head, looked from face to face. The big blonde man who seemed to be in charge (What happened to Tomec Tirkenson, Lord of Gettlesand? she wondered) frowned, thinking hard even as he gestured the youth to silence. Again Gil was conscious of the way the people of Black Rock Keep looked at one another. Not, Oh, my God, how could such a thing happen to two mages?

  Rather: How does this fit in with what’s already happened? From one another’s eyes, they all looked to Big Blonde Boss for an answer.

  And WHERE THE HELL ARE THE MAGES???

  Thoth the Serpentmage, thin and bald and acerbic, Recorder of the now-lost School of Mages in Quo.

  Gawky Kara of Ippit, the steady-handed midwife and healer of a mid-sized Gettlesand village, before the Dark Ones came…

  Old Kta the Hermit, who’d been Ingold’s master. Scholarly flaxen Saerlinn, tousled untidy Dakis the Minstrel…

  Even the horrible old hagwife Nan, Kara’s mother…

  There’d been twenty-five mages at the Black Rock Keep. This was where they’d come when they’d been exiled from Dare’s Keep – Gil’s home and headquarters for seven years now – during a brief frenzy of religious fundamentalism during the worst days of the Time of the Dark. Jesus, don’t tell me some religious movement has exiled them from HERE…?

  “I don’t know what happened,” stammered Gil at last. “Their magic…”

  Again she felt the look that passed among the Keep-dwellers.

  “Yesterday…” she said. It was hard to form the words. “The day before that…” The vision of those twisted bodies, the horrible ritual mutilations of the White Raiders, tangled her tongue as if she’d swallowed barbed wire.

  “I don’t know what happened. Neither did they. But their spells wouldn’t work. It was as if their power deserted them. We were lighting fires with flint and steel… Finding water, Ingold…” With a struggle, she was able to pronounce his name. “He was… He’d been raised in this country. He knew how to find water without using magic. But…”

  Even before she’d trained as a warrior herself, she had learned – back in the brittle perfection of her family in California, not in this transdimensional world of cold and ruin – never to let herself cry.

  She said, “Tirkenson…” and Big Blonde Boss shook his head.

  “Tirkenson is gone.” He frowned, angry, at the name of the big, gruff landchief who had ruled the Gettlesand Keep. “I am Marspeth Ankeion. I’m the Lord of the Keep now. Shuji—“ His motion summoned the gray-haired man to his side. “Take Gil-Shalos to one of the empty rooms, and get her water and food.” He helped Gil to her feet with a big, square hand, callused with sword and reins and lariat. “We’ll explain this when you’ve rested. But there’s nothing to fear now.”

  Ingold was right. Gil looked past him, across the uneven waste of red sand and gray rock, to the mended gates of Black Rock Keep. Nearly thirty days ago, on the other side of the mountains, Ingold had looked into his scrying-crystal, in the dark of his little lair in the Keep of Dare, and had murmured, There’s something wrong there…

  Even before they’d neared Black Rock, she, Ingold, and Rudy had found sign of the White Raiders, who had previously been few in that arid land. Where the hell are the wizards? Tomec Tirkenson is the toughest warrior west of the mountains. He’s gone –THEY’RE gone – and ‘there’s nothing to fear now’???

  As Shuji and two of the scruffy-looking cowboys who made up the Keep guard led her under the shadows of the gate, Gil reflected that the old man had been right.

  *

  Pardilla – the fair-haired young woman with the dark eyes – brought Gil a big gourd of water and a pottage of corn and goats-milk in the cell she’d been given, on the third level of the Black Rock Keep. Like the Keep of Dare in high Renweth vale on the other side of the mountains, Black Rock Keep had been built three millennia before, at the time of the first rising of the Dark Ones. Behind its shut steel doors, as in the Keep of Dare, the remnant of humankind had huddled, dwindling in the cold years when the half-visible, half-immaterial entities had scoured the nights. And after the first, mysterious departure of the Dark, the Black Rock Keep, like the Keep of Dare and the other ancient Keeps that dotted the plains and forests and river valleys, fell into disuse, and then into decay.

  Like many of those ancient Keeps, at some time in the intervening centuries Black Rock had been broken, so that when the Dark Ones returned its black, slick, obsidian-hard walls had had to be mended, and mended quickly. Blocks of adobe and stone now filled in the gaps of its breached masonry, and a huge cluster of towers guarded what had been the adamantine antediluvian doors. Gil was given one of the hundreds of disused cells that made up the crumbling honeycomb of the ancient fortress, which like Dare’s Keep was five levels aboveground and who knew how many below. Her cell’s curtained doorway opened onto a sort of gallery above the Aisle, the open space in the Keep’s center where streams of water still flowed.

  As they’d passed through the Aisle on their way to the rickety wooden stair that led up to the third level, Gil had guessed that the system of pumps and fountains that still worked – more or less – in Dare’s Keep had evidently failed long ago here. The upper levels beneath the gaping, broken roof were cle
arly deserted, and a labyrinth of small huts – roofed with thatch of acacia or cottonwood boughs – had accreted out from the Aisle’s walls, to be closer to the remaining streams at ground level.

  She wondered if cells in the upper levels of the Keep were haunted, as some were back at the Keep in Renweth Vale.

  And if, somewhere in the vaults below, there were chambers where no magic would work.

  “The wizards left us.” Pardilla sat – at Gil’s gestured invitation – on the end of the rough sleeping-platform which Shuji had spread with a couple of sheepskins and some blankets. Unlike the Keep of Dare, Black Rock – its roof torn off in some long-forgotten cataclysm – was freezing cold, and no fire burned in the little stone brazier in the corner. The scarce fuel in these treeless badlands was clearly reserved for night-time.

  “Left you?” Gil stared at him. “All of them?”

  “They left in the night.” The young rider – Gil guessed her age at seventeen or eighteen – looked deeply distressed, and no goddam wonder, reflected Gil. For seven years, as the world-devouring cold had advanced in the northern plains and the White Raiders had been driven south into this red land of gullies and ancient lava-beds, it was the little colony of mages that had kept Gettlesand safe. “Marspeth says it was from pride, and rage that their magic had left them.”

  “Them, too?”

  “Right after the new moon,” Pardilla affirmed, big hands folded on one bony knee. “Their spells started to fail. Rats came into the Keep, and into the granaries. Wolves started picking off the herds. The mages were plotting, horrible rituals to bring their power back – Marspeth heard them. Black magic, drawn from the blood and brains of sacrificed children…”

  Gil bit back the words, That’s ridiculous! Thoth Serpentmage was cold-blooded and terrifying, but as far as Gil knew he wouldn’t harm a fly. And old Kta wouldn’t…

  The girl’s voice broke a little as she stammered, “I’d never… I’d never have thought it of them…”

  That’s because it’s complete horseshit…! Gil gritted her teeth, and let her continue. One thing she’d learned, training with the Guards of the Keep of Dare, was not to distract the person who’s telling the story. You can ask questions later.

  But she felt chilled inside, breathless with anger.

  “Jellin – my sister – heard them talking about it also,” Pardilla went on. “And Imaleen, Tarew’s daughter – Tarew’s the head of the baker’s guild. Then about five days after the rats first started walking over the ward-spells, the wizards all… all left. Just took off, in the middle of the night. Lord Tirken—“ She stopped himself, corrected, “Tomec Tirkenson went with them, with ten of his rangers, the best warriors we have. I’d never have thought….” Her voice shook again. In spite of the weathering of her face and her air of weary toughness, back in California, Gil estimated, she’d still be in High School.

  “Even if things are safe now—“

  Gil yanked free the thong that bound the braid of her coarse black hair, and shook the dust out of it angrily. “Why are things safe now?”

  “The Raiders are gone.”

  “The Raiders just killed—“ Her voice strangled in her throat. Pardilla looked aghast at having thrown her memory back at her, and started to say, I’m sorry… but she shook her head. Don’t say anything. Don’t say ANYTHING…

  “I’m sorry,” whispered the young rider miserably. “I’m so sorry. But they are leaving. They’re moving west, toward the Western Ocean…”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Marspeth said so.”

  Gil raised her eyebrows – though, she thought, the man may be as expert a tracker as Ingold…” Her mind stumbled on the phrase. “…as Ingold was…:

  “Marspeth saw them in one of his dreams. He has dreams.” Pardilla’s face, long and angular beneath its heavy tan, was an expressive one, and for a moment she seemed to be struggling with herself, as to how much she could say that an outsider would understand. “Real dreams, true dreams. We’re hoping…”

  Gil forced herself not to ask the other questions hammering in her brain: Did Tirkenson and his men take horses when they left? Did the absconding mages leave tracks, to show which way they went? Was anybody on gate-guard duty that night?

  Marspeth saw them in a DREAM???

  And waited.

  The new moon was when the communication – which Ingold had conducted regularly with Thoth and the other Black Rock mages – had ceased. The old man had sat up three nights, with Rudy and the two other novice mages at the Keep of Dare – Brother Wend, formerly a priest, and young Ilae – trying without success, either individually or in concert, to either make contact with one or all of the Black Rock mages, or even to scry into Black Rock Keep.

  The best that Ingold could do, after long meditation and using the strongest of spells to focus his power, had been to glimpse Black Rock Keep from afar. He had seen the cattle still roving on the scrubby hillsides near by it, and the occasional distant shape of a rider keeping watch on them. Seen the threads of smoke floating from the Keep’s cook-chimneys, to show that bread was still being baked there.

  Beyond that, nothing.

  That was when he’d decided to make the three-week trek across the mountains and into Gettlesand. Every night on the road, Gil had gone to sleep, rolled in her blanket, and seen the old man sitting wrapped in his tattered brown mantle, white moonlight shining on his white hair and beard, alternately looking into his scrying-crystal and gazing into the west.

  “Marspeth is the only adult that has these dreams,” Pardilla explained, hesitantly. “We’re hoping that the kids will be able to dream the way that he does, when they grow up. Now, they’re just…”

  And she smiled, tenderly, love shining in her dark eyes.“I was eleven when the Dark Ones came,” she said after a long time. “I remember so clearly what it was like before, when you could walk outside in the twilight. When you weren’t afraid all the time, hungry all the time, tired all the time. Cold all the time… it was warmer then. I remember my mother catching two of the ponies at our ranch, and she and I would get on them bareback and ride like the wind, ride like there was no tomorrow and no dinner to make and chores to do and no fear. Nothing but wind and joy and the ponies and knowing she was happy with me. That’s how Jellin smiles, when she wakes up in the morning. Jellin my sister.”

  Something in Pardilla’s voice told Gil that the two sisters were the only one of the family who had survived the Time of the Dark.

  “She says… She tells me about it.” The happiness of the one she loved, the sister she cared for, reflected like lamplight from her face. “Sometimes she’ll go to beautiful cities, where painted pillars soak up the gold of sunsets over magic seas. Sometimes she’ll be with Mother and Dad – and she knows them, even though she was only three when they died – eating supper out on the veranda of what I know was our old house at Grouse Creek. Sometimes she’ll be dancing at balls like a princess. All the happiness I want for her – happiness there’s no way I can ever give her as things are – she gets from these dreams. She says it goes right down through to her backbone, to her toes, to her marrow. The other kids, too.”

  Gil set down the water-gourd, wrapped her skinny arms around her knees. “So she’s not the only one who has these dreams?”

  There were almost tears in Pardilla’s voice. “Every child in the Keep. There aren’t a lot of them,” she added quietly. “It’s… It’s been hard. Even with the mages to heal the sick, we lost… so many. And this winter has been colder than last, and last winter the Raiders—“

  She shook her head quickly, pushing away a thought. “So I’m hoping – a lot of us are – we’re hoping that when they grow up – Jellin and Imaleen and Rayco and the others – they’ll be able to see things in their dreams the way Marspeth is able to do now. See visions that mean something. That will help us here, instead of just bring them happiness. Though you know,” she finished, with a wry little smile, “even if they don’t ge
t the ability to find lost things, or locate water, or hear what’s happening far away… It’s worth it, if they’re just happy.”

  Gil thought about this. About all Ingold had told her. “And Marspeth is able to dream these things?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Pardilla’s brown eyes returned to the present, and she brushed back the lock of wheat-yellow hair that had fallen over her forehead. Her boots, Gil noticed, like her own, were much-patched hand-me-downs – older, because there were two cobblers at the Keep of Dare and, by the look of it, none here. “He dreams like the kids do – of places nobody has ever been, or of the world the way it used to be. Of flying, of peace, of… of happiness like sunlight. But he can also see and hear things far away. The way he heard the wizards plotting—“

  Her dark eyebrows pinched together again, at the reminder of this terrible betrayal.

  “That’s how saw the Raiders, moving on to the West. How he saw the mages leaving the Keep in the dead of night, with Lord—With Tirkenson and Dreven and Norek and the others. I don’t know what the mages must have told them…”

  Gil stifled her question again – And nobody on gate-guard saw them? Did they take horses? Supplies? Water, even? “When did he start having these dreams?”

  “A week after the full moon,” said Pardilla. “Not this last one, but the one before. Right when the kids did.”

  *

  Sleep was out of the question. Gil knew damn well what she’d see in her dreams.

  Lying under the sheepskins and blankets of the sleeping-platform, she listened to the sounds of the Keep that drifted up from the Aisle. Voices of the children as they finished their evening chores, of the women putting up their endless spinning and corn-grinding. Of the men coming in from the fields grumbling about deer in the crops, about what looked to be another stunted yield as the small and distant sun seemed to give off less heat this summer…

  She smelled wood-smoke and stew, rising from all those little huts crowded near the water on the Aisle floor. When the wind keened through the broken vaulting of the Aisle roof, she caught the whiff of the horse-paddocks.