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.