Dreamers of Black Rock

By Barbara Hambly

A novelette of 16,000 words, sequel to Hambly’s Darwath series. The wizards at the distant Keep of Black Rock have disappeared. Warrior woman Gil Patterson, the wizard Ingold Inglorion, and Ingold’s pupil Rudy Solis set out to learn what happened to them – but only Gil manages to arrive at Black Rock Keep. Something caused the mages of Black Rock – and Ingold and Rudy, when they drew near to the half-ruined Keep – to lose their magic, before they disappeared, and Gil senses that something deeper and stranger still is going on. But whatever it is, she has to figure it out alone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barbara Hambly
• Release date: Dec 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463440186

Barbara Hambly

Since her first published fantasy in 1982 - The Time of the Dark - Barbara Hambly has touched most of the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror, mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. Born and raised in Southern California, she attended the University of California, Riverside, and spent one year at the University of Bordeaux, France. She married science fiction author George Alec Effinger, and lived part-time in New Orleans for a number of years. In her work as a novelist, she currently concentrates on horror (the Don Simon Ysidro vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, though she has also written another historical whodunnit series under the name of Barbara Hamilton.Professor Hambly also teaches History part-time, paints, dances, and trains in martial arts. Follow her on Facebook, and on her blog at livejournal.com.Now a widow, she shares a house in Los Angeles with several small carnivores.

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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