Darwath 1 - The Time Of The Dark by Barbara Hambly Read Free Book Online Page B

Where'd you get the kid?”
    “I'm rescuing him from enemies,” Ingold stated matter-of-factly.
    Wonderful, Rudy thought. First the fuel pump and now this.
    Untangled, the kid was revealed to be a crawler of six months or so, with a pink rosebud of a face, fuzzy black hair, and eyes that were the deep unearthly blue of the heart of a morning glory. Ingold set the kid back in the middle of the bed, where he promptly started for the edge again. The old man removed his dark, smoke-smelling mantle and spread it out like a groundcloth on the floor. Under it he wore a white wool robe, much patched and stained, a worn leather belt, and a low-slung sword belt that supported the sword and a short dagger in beat-up scabbards. The whole setup looked authentic as hell.
    Ingold picked up the child again and put him down on the mantle on the floor. “There,” he said. “Now will you stay where you are put and fall asleep like a sensible person?”
    Prince Altir Endorion made a definite but unintelligible reply.
    “Good,” Ingold said, and turned toward the door.
    “Whose kid is he?” Rudy asked, folding his arms and watching the old man and the child.
    For the first time that look of self-command broke, and grief, or the concealment of grief, tightened into the muscles of the old man's face. His voice remained perfectly steady. “He is the child of a friend of mine,” he replied quietly, “who is now dead.” There was a moment's silence, the old man concentrating on turning back the cuffs of his faded robe, revealing a road map of old scars striping the hard, heavy muscle of his forearms. When he looked up again, that expression of gentle amusement was back in his eyes. “Not that you believe me, of course.”
    “Well, now that you mention it, I don't.”
    “Good.” Ingold smiled, stepping past Rudy into the narrow hall. “It's better that you shouldn't. Close the door behind you, would you, please?”
    “Because, for one thing,” Rudy said, following him down the hall to the kitchen, “if you're from a whole other universe, like you say, how come you are speaking English?”
    “Oh, I'm not.” Ingold located one of the six-packs of beer on the kitchen counter and extricated a can for himself and one for Rudy. “Speaking English, that is. You only hear it as English in your mind. If you were to come to my world, I could arrange the same spell to cover you.”
    Oh, yeah? Rudy thought cynically. And I suppose you figured out how to operate push-tab beer cans the same way?
    “Unfortunately, there's no way I can prove this to you,” Ingold went on placidly, seating himself on the corner of the grimy formica table top, the butter-colored morning sunlight gilding the worn hilt of his sword with an edge like fire. “Different universes obey different physical laws, and yours, despite its present close conjunction with my own, is very far from the heart and source of Power. The laws of physics here are very heavy, very certain and irreversible, and unaffected by… certain other considerations.” He glanced out the window to his right, scanning the fall of the land beyond, judging the angle of the sun, the time of day. The expression of calculation in his eyes, adding up pieces of information that had nothing to do with Rudy or with maintaining a role, troubled Rudy with a disquieting sense that the old man was too calm about it, too matter-of-fact. He'd met masqueraders before; living in Southern California, you could hardly help it. And, young or old, all those would-be Brothers of Atlantis had the same air of being in costume, no matter how cool they were about it. They all knew you were noticing them.
    This old croaker didn't seem to be thinking about Rudy at all, except as a man to be dealt with in the course of something else.
    Rudy found himself thinking, He's either what he says he is, or so far out in left field he's never coming back.
    And his indignant outrage at being beguiled into admitting two possibilities