The Walls of Air (Darwath #2)

The Walls of Air (Darwath #2) Page 16

Firelight touched the rocks of the arroyo and shivered like rain down the strings of Rudy's harp. He respected Ingold's dictum that he should not play it, but night after night, in the windy darkness of the desert, he was drawn to it, unwrapping it from its bindings and testing its twenty-six strings. He learned them as he had learned the runes, each note in its sequence, each with its separate beauty and use.

On the other side of the fire, Ingold was silent, as he had been silent going on five days now.

On the whole, Rudy preferred the old man's silence to his bitter sarcasm, or to that blistering politeness with which he had treated any offer of comfort regarding what had happened at Quo. If Rudy had even doubted that Ingold's nature had its cruel side - which, he supposed, he must have, back in the days when he had been naive - he did not doubt now. There were days when, if he had not been too afraid of the old man, Rudy would have told him to go to hell and left him - except that there was nowhere else to go in the midst of the winter-ridden plains.

Winter had locked down over the empty lands. The sky and ground were alike made of iron, the going slow, the hunting poor. Rudy did most of the hunting, as he did most of everything else. It was he who lay for hours in the brush blinds to shoot meat that Ingold seldom touched, he who washed the stains of Lohiro's blood from the old man's robe and patched the tears in his mantle. When Ingold did eat, it was because Rudy forced him to; when he spoke, it was with an impersonal bitterness that bordered on contempt. He seemed to be drawing further and further into some remote part of himself, walling himself into his private hell of guilt and grief and pain.

And why not? Rudy thought, his mind turning back to the

illusion- circled city on the shores of the Western Ocean, and the body of the golden-haired mage blackening like a straw in the flames. Who's to say Lohiro didn't have the answer? Who's to say he couldn't have given it to us, once the Dark Ones let go of his mind?

If, of course, they really did let go.

And if Ingold didn't simply let him die when he could have saved him, out of rage at his having betrayed them all.

Rudy glanced across the fire once again. Ingold was staring into the flames that were multiplied a hundredfold in his bleak eyes. He looked old, exhausted, and shabby, his long white hair fluttering around the sunken cheeks and brooding eyes. Out in the darkness, the wail of a coyote curled, thin and hopeless, on the wind, the cry of a lost soul wandering dry and empty wastes. The cloud-cover had broken, and the full moon stared down upon them from the rim of the broken-toothed western hills. Rudy wondered what Ingold saw in the blaze.

Was it Quo as it had been in the warm beauty of that last summer, unaware of the horror underlying its heart? Lohiro's empty eyes? Things that could have been, had Ingold thought to send them warning of the Dark? Or the Keep, black amid the snows under remote and freezing stars, now that the wizards of the world could literally be counted on the fingers of one hand?

Ingold, Bektis, Kara, me, and Kara's mother, Rudy enumerated glumly. What the hell kind of chance have we got against all the forces of the Dark? What kind of chance has anyone got?

No wonder Ingold walked in silence, a tumbleweed ghost on the desert road.

Only occasionally would the wizard rouse himself to give lessons in power that were, for days on end, their only means of communication. But his teaching was like everything else, brittle and bitter and cruel. He seemed to care very little whether Rudy learned anything or not; for him, Rudy felt, the lessons were simply a means of temporarily forgetting. He would throw unexplained illusions into Rudy's path, or deliberately wrap himself in a cloaking-spell and leave Rudy to search. For two days he had blindfolded Rudy, forcing him to rely on his other senses as they marched on in sightless silence. Without warning, Ingold had called forth blinding torrents of wind and rain and deadly flash floods in the washes, with which Rudy must cope or drown. By scorn and sarcasm and vicious invective, he pushed the younger man to learn stronger spells and taught him the tricky and terrible secrets of divination by water and bone.

Everything Ingold taught, he taught as a stranger. For the rest, he could not be bothered to speak at all.

Experimentally, Rudy's fingers formed chords, thirds and fifths. The tones of the harp sounded true. A wizard's harp, he thought, brought from the wizards' city. Did the spells that preserved it from harm keep it tuned as well? Cautiously, first with melody alone and then with groping chords, he found his way through the saddest and

most beautiful of the Lennon-McCartney ballads, his mind and body bending to the harp, his eyes to the firelight and starlight on hands and strings. The music was clean, pure, and incredibly delicate, like a star caught in crystal, and he hated his own awkwardness and ignorance as unworthy of such beauty.

In the desert the coyotes yipped again, a full-throated chorus in the windy night. Rudy looked up and saw that Ingold had gone.

The moon had set. Rudy had no sense of the presence of the Dark, nor of any creature in the wastes of stone and cracked, parched clay, save those that made the place their home. Che dozed on the end of his tether.

Rudy set aside his harp and made a slow, careful examination of the camp. It was safe and secure within its rings of protective spells. Ingold's staff was gone. So was one of the bows.

Dogging a wizard by starlight was one of the less easy feats of this life. But Ingold's brutal training had paid off; Rudy picked up the turn of a branch and the scatter of sand that lay the wrong way to the wind, pointing a possible lead. He belted on his sword and picked up the staff that had once belonged to Lohiro the Archmage, taking his bearings from a notch in the hills and the shape and roll of the land. He stepped quietly away from the camp; then, turning back, he laid a word of warning on the whole outfit. Six feet farther off, he glanced back, and there was no trace of burro, fire, or packs to be seen.

He moved through the windy darkness like a ghost. Casting his senses wide, he occasionally found a trace of the old man - a place where a kit fox had unaccountably veered aside, or the slight scratch in the dirt on a rock face. He heard no sound, saw nothing moving in all the vastness of the frozen rocks, but twice his eyes returned to a humped black shadow where bare boulders broke the raw silver of clay flats. It was off the course of Ingold's trail. He could see nothing of the wizard in that jumbled outcrop of rock. But long meditation had given him a sense of dividing life from lifelessness. And once, on another windy desert night, he had glimpsed the shape of Ingold's soul, and that he would never forget.

Nevertheless, he had to get very close before he could be sure.

He stalked Ingold like a drift of wind in the night, as he had stalked his friends the jackrabbits. By this time he had a certain amount of experience as a hunter. But before he could reach the rocks, he saw Ingold move, a single turn of his head and the glint of a bitter eye in darkness. Then the wizard turned away again, scarcely even interested.

Rudy emerged from the concealing shadows. 'You planning on coming back to camp tonight?"

'Is it any affair of yours?'

Rudy leaned on his crescent-tipped staff, annoyed at that steely arrogance. 'Yeah, I'd kind of like to know if the Dark Ones are gonna put the munch on you.'

'Don't be stupid. We'll find violets in this desert before we find the Dark. Or

haven't you been watching?'

'I've been watching.' Their voices were pitched low for each other's ears alone. Their bodies blended with rock and shadow; an observer at ten feet would have passed them by, unseeing. 'But I don't figure I'm that much more clever than the Dark.'

'What's the matter, Rudy?' Ingold jeered. 'Do you think I can't handle the Dark?'

'No, I don't.'

Ingold turned his face away and leaned his chin once more on folded hands and drawn-up knees.

'I think if it came to that, you'd love to get eaten by the Dark,' Rudy went on coldly. 'That way you wouldn't have to go back and tell Alwir the whole thing was a bust, and you'd still get credit for not being a quitter.'

Ingold sighed. 'If you think I'd undergo something as unpleasant as that over someone as essentially trivial as Alwir, your sense of proportion is almost as poor as your harp playing.' He glanced up, then continued impatiently, as if throwing a sop to a begging dog. 'Yes, I was returning tonight.'

Then why did you take a bow?'

Ingold was silent.

'Or did you figure I could carry the ball from here?'

That's your choice,' the old man snapped angrily. 'You've got what you want -you're a mage, or as much a mage as I can make you. You go back and play politics with Alwir. You go back and spin out the illusion that your power gives you either the ability or the right to alter the outcome of things. You go back and watch the people you care for die, either by your own hand or through your damned wretched meddling, and see what it does to you in sixty-three years. But until you do, don't sit there in self-righteous judgement of me or my actions.'

Rudy folded his arms and regarded the old man silently in the starlight. Hidden in the darkness of his drawn-up hood, Ingold's face seemed to be nothing more than a collection of angled bones, bruises, and scars amid a rough mane of dirty white hair. Halfway already to being a desert hermit again, Rudy thought. And why not? We blew it. The mages are gone. Whatever Lohiro might have been able to tell us, if the Dark did in fact release him, Ingold ended.

Quietly, Rudy asked, 'So what do I tell them at the Keep?'

Ingold shrugged. 'Whatever you please. Tell them I died in Quo. There would be some truth in that, anyway.'

'And is that what I tell Gil?' Rudy went on in a voice that shook with controlled anger.

The old man looked up, fury and the first life that Rudy had seen in him in weeks

blazing into his eyes. 'What does Gil have to do with it?'

'You're the only one who can get her back to her own world.' It wasn't until Rudy spoke that he realized the extent of his own anger. 'You're the only one in the world who understands the gates through the Void. And you were responsible for getting her here in the first place. You have no right to be the cause of her being stuck in this universe forever.'

He felt the rage that surged through the old man, rage and some other emotion breaking the bleak passivity of self-torment in which he had been trapped since Quo. But, like his grief, Ingold's anger was silent and all inside. In a queer, stiff voice he said, 'Perhaps it would be Gil's choice to remain in the world.'

'Like hell,' Rudy snorted. 'For myself, I don't give a damn one way or the other. But she's got a life back there, a career she wants and a place in that world. If she stays here, she'll never be anything but a foot soldier, when she wanted to be a scholar; and she'll stay that way until she gets killed by the Dark or the cold or the next stupid war Alwir gets the Keep into. I care for that lady, Ingold, and I'm not going to have you stick her here forever against her will. You haven't got that right.'

The wizard sighed, and the life seemed to go out of him again, taking away even the bitter leaping of his anger. He sank his head slowly to his hands and said faintly, 'No, you're right. I suppose I must go back, if only for that.'

Rudy started to say something else, but let his breath out with the words unspoken. Ingold's anger puzzled him, and this sudden capitulation bothered him even more. But he sensed the breaking of some bond of bitterness in the old man, a bleak self-hatred that had given him a kind of strength. Now there was nothing.

Quietly, he said, 'I'll be back at the camp. Can you find your way there?'

Ingold nodded without looking up. Rudy left him there, walking slowly back along his own invisible tracks, the double points of his pronged staff winking in the desert starlight. Once he looked around and saw that the old man had not moved. The dark form was barely distinguishable from the rock itself, no more than a darkness against the muted, uncertain shape of the land beyond. As he walked back to the camp alone, Rudy could not remember having seen anyone so lonely or so wretched in his life.

'You think there's anybody home?'

Moonlight drenched the town before them, a collection of little adobe boxes climbing the hills in back of the road. The distant trickle of water and thick clusters of date palms, black against the icy, glowing sky, marked where the stream came down out of the hills. Several houses had been blown apart by the Dark; but, by the look of them, it hadn't been recently. First quarter moon oj'autumn? 'Rudy wondered. Most of the bricks had been pillaged to reinforce the buildings that remained, turning them into little individual fortresses covered on the outside from foundation to rooftree with elaborately painted designs, pictures, and religious symbols. On the nearest one, a beautiful woman stood with her feet on the back of a crooked devil, her left hand raised against a swarm of inaccurate, fishlike representations of the Dark Ones, her right arm and cloak sheltering a crowd of kneeling supplicants. By the light of the waning and cloud-crossed moon, the painting had a startling and primitive beauty, the

colours lost in the moonlight but the outlines of the figures strikingly clear. For some reason, it reminded Rudy of the runes on the Keep doors.

'Possibly,' Ingold replied, in answer to his question. 'But I hardly think they will unbar their doors at night.'

'It's you and me for the Church, then,' Rudy sighed, and started off through the shadows of the narrow streets, with Ingold drifting like a ghost at his heels. The poison, Rudy thought, was working its way out of the old man's system; if he seldom spoke, at least he seemed to realize whom he was talking to when he did. But Rudy missed his humour, the wry fatalism of his outlook, and the brief, flickering grin that so changed his nondescript face.

When they reached the Church, however, Ingold surprised Rudy by leading the way around to the back, where a narrow cell was built on to the rear of the fortresslike structure. He knocked on the heavy door. There was movement inside and the sound of sliding bars. The door was opened quickly and quickly closed behind them.

A short and slightly chubby young priest had let them in, a candle in his hand. 'Be welcome...' he began, and then saw Ingold's face. In the soft amber light, the blood drained from his own face.

The priest's sudden silence called Ingold from his thoughts, and he looked at the young man, puzzled.

The priest whispered, 'It was you.'

Ingold frowned. 'Have we met?'

The priest turned hastily away and fumblingly set the candle on the room's small table. 'No no, of course not. I - please be welcome in this house. It is late for travellers -like yourselves -' He barred the door behind them, and Rudy saw that his hands were shaking. 'I am Brother Wend,' he said, turning back and revealing an earnest, young face for a man in his early twenties. He was wearing the grey robe of a Servant of the Church. His head was shaved; but, by- the colour of his black eyebrows and sincere brown eyes, Rudy guessed his hair had been black or dark brown, like his own.

'I am the priest of this village,' Brother Wend said, babbling to cover up nervousness or fear. 'The only one now, I'm afraid. Will you sup?'

'We've eaten, thanks,' Rudy said, which was true - and besides, he reflected, if things here were as bad as he'd seen them in the Keep, food was tight all over. 'All we ask is a bed on your floor and stabling for our burro.'

'Certainly - of course.'

The priest went with him to put Che in the stables. While Rudy bedded the donkey down, he filled the priest in on all the news he could - of the fall of Gae, the retreat to Renweth, Alwir's army, and the destruction of Quo. He did not mention that Ingold was a wizard, nor indicate his own powers. Ingold, after the briefest exchange of amenities, had withdrawn to sit beside the small fire on the hearth and brood in silence. But throughout the evening, as Rudy and Brother Wend talked quietly in the

shadows of the little room, the young priest's eyes kept straying back to Ingold, as if trying to match the man with some memory, and Rudy could see that the memory frightened him.

Rudy was just settling himself to sleep on the floor near the hearth when hurried knocking sounded at the door. Without hesitation, Brother Wend rose and slid back the bolts to let in two small children from the darkness outside. They were a pair of girls, eight and nine years of age, sandy-haired and hazel-eyed like the people of Gettlesand. In a babbling treble duet they outlined a confused tale of yellow sickness and fever and their mother and their little sister Danila, and last summer and tonight, clutching at the young man's sleeves and staring up at him with wide, frightened eyes. Wend nodded, murmuring soothingly to them, and turned back to his guests.

'I must go,' he said softly.

'One or the other of us will let you back in,' Rudy promised. 'Go carefully.'

When the priest had gone, Rudy got up to bar the door behind him. 'Are you going to sleep?' he asked the silent figure by the hearth.

Ingold, staring into the fire, shook his head. He seemed hardly to have heard.

Rudy slid back into his abandoned blankets before they had a chance to grow cold and pillowed his head on the heavy volumes he'd carried from Quo - the only use, so far, that he'd seen for them. 'You know that kid from some-place?' he asked.

Again Ingold shook his head.

Rudy had carried on a lot of these one-sided conversations in the last three weeks. Occasionally, he'd pursued them until he got an answer of some sort, usually monosyllabic, but tonight he gave it up. When he closed his eyes, Ingold was still brooding over whatever it was that he saw in the flames.

Rudy wondered what it was he sought there, but had never asked.

His mind went back over the glimpses that his own fire-watching had yielded, glimpses of Minalde mostly, scattered but comforting: Aide combing her hair by the embers of her small hearth, wrapped in her white wool robe, and singing to Tir, who crawled busily around the shadowy room; Aide sitting with her feet up in the dim study behind the Guards' quarters, reading aloud while Gil took notes, surrounded by a clutter of books and tablets; seeing Gil look up and grin and make somejoke, and Aide laugh; and once, frighteningly, Aide in a passionate argument with her brother, tears running down her white, furious face while he stood with his arms folded, shaking his head in cold denial. The images followed Rudy down into darkness, mingling with others: the empty Nest on the wind-blown desert to the north; the empty streets of Quo; the startled look in Brother Wend's big dark eyes when he had opened the door; and the way he'd whispered in terror, 'It was you.'

'Yes,' Ingold's voice said, soft and infinitely tired. 'It was me.'

Blinking in surprise, Rudy tasted the heaviness of lost sleep in his mouth and saw that the priest had returned. Ingold was barring the door behind him; in the shadows

thrown by the waning fire, his robes seemed to be dyed in blood.

The priest spoke shakily. 'What do you want of me?'

Defiance and terror mingled in the young man's voice. Ingold regarded him quietly for a moment, his arms folded, his scarred hands looking very bony and worn in the red flickering of the light. But he only asked, 'She's better, isn't she?'

'Who?'

'Those children's mother.'

The priest licked his lips nervously. 'Yes, by the grace of God.'

Ingold sighed and returned to his seat by the hearth, drawing his patched, stained mantle, which he'd been using for an extra blanket, back up around his shoulders. 'It wasn't the grace of God, though,' he said quietly. 'At least not in the sense that it's usually meant. They didn't come to ask for the sacraments, even though you know as well as I do that the yellow sickness, once it takes hold, is almost invariably fatal. They asked you to heal her, as you healed their little sister some months ago.' He reached across, picked up the poker, and stirred the fire, its sudden, leaping light doing curious things to the lines and scars of his hollowed face. He glanced back at Wend. 'Didn't you?'

'It was in God's hands.'

'Perhaps that's what you choose to say, but you don't believe it.' The priest started as if he had been burned. 'If you believed it, you wouldn't fear me,' Ingold went on reasonably.

'What do you want?' Wend demanded again in anguish.

Ingold set down the poker. 'I think you know.'

'Who are you?'

'I am a wizard.' Ingold settled back against the wall, the shadows cloaking him.

The priest spoke again, his voice tense and crackling with passion. That's a lie,' he whispered. 'They're all dead. He said so.'

Ingold shrugged. 'He is a wizard also. His name is Rudy Soils. Mine is Ingold Inglorion.'

Rudy heard the harsh gasp of the priest's breath and saw him turn away, his face buried in his hands. His body shook as if with a deadly chill. 'He said they were dead,' Wend repeated in a thin, cracked voice, muffled by his hands. 'And, God forgive me, I rejoiced to hear it. It was a terrible thing, but I was glad to hear that the Lord had finally removed the temptation from me, after all these years. You have no right to bring it back.'

'No,' Ingold agreed quietly. 'But you know as well as I do that God cannot remove temptation. It comes from inside you, and not from any outer cause. And you would

be tempted as long as you lived - every time someone called upon you to use your powers for healing, and in times to come, when one of your people begs you to put the runes on his door to keep the Dark at bay. How could you refuse?'

The young man raised his face from his hands. 'I never would,' he gasped. 'No?'

'I have no power,' the priest whispered hopelessly. 'I gave it up - sacrificed it. I have no power.' He faced Ingold desperately in the wavering shadows, his full lips pressed tight together and trembling. 'That power comes from the Devil, the Lord of Mirrors. Yes, God help me, I am tempted and will-forever be tempted. But I will not trade my soul for power, not even the power to help others. That power comes from the Crooked Side, and I will have no dealings with.it. And then -I dreamed -I saw that city that I have known in my heart all my life, how it would look... And you were there...'

'Do you know why you had the dream?' Ingold's voice was soft, coming from a form that was little more than a disembodied shadow among shadows, with a sunken glint of azure eyes.

'It was a summons,' Wend whispered. 'A need. A call. To go somewhere...'

To go to Renweth Keep at Sarda Pass,' Ingold said, and that deep, grainy voice, though quiet, seemed to fill the tiny room. To held me and Rudy - and whomever else we can find - to drive out the Dark.'

'And what else?' The young man's face shone with sweat, his eyebrows black against the whiteness of his high, shaven crown. To go openly to the Devil? To announce to my Bishop - if he survived - and to anyone else who cares to know that I am apostate?To put myself under judgement as a heretic?'

Rudy, remembering another pair of steely, dark eyes burning out of a shaven skull, reflected that the kid had a point.

'And wrongly,' Wend went on in a whisper. 'Wrongly. This world, when all is said, is an illusion. It will go on without me. My soul is all I have, and if I lose it - it will be forever.'

A long silence followed, with priest and wizard facing each other across the dying ripple of the hearthlight. They were curiously alike, Rudy thought, in their colourless robes. He remembered his own days as a drifter on the California highways, drawn by yearnings that could find no expression, an outcast because nothing made sense in terms of what he knew to be true. He tried to picture a life of fighting those yearnings, tried to imagine deliberately putting the powers of wizardry aside.

A mage will have magic...

He could not conceive of putting it aside.

Ingold rose. 'I am sorry,' he said quietly. 'You have temptations enough; to add to them would be poor payment for your hospitality. We will go.'

'No.' Brother Wend caught his sleeve as he moved to wake Rudy, though a moment before the priest would have cut off his hand rather than touch the old man.

'Wizard or devil, I cannot turn you out into the night. I -I'm sorry. It's only that I've fought it so long.'

Ingold moved his hand as if to lay it upon Wend's shoulder, but the young priest turned away, retreating into the shadows at the far end of the room where his own narrow pallet was. Rudy heard the creak of ropes as he lay down, followed by the slurred whisper of blankets. After a moment Ingold returned to his seat by the hearth, drawing his knees up before him and evidently preparing to stare broodingly into the fire until dawn.

Silence settled over the narrow cell as the fire burned low, but Rudy could hear no alteration in the young priest's shaken breathing and knew that he did not sleep.

'And he was right,' Rudy concluded, speaking of it many days later. 'That's the damn thing. You remember how Govannin's always saying, "The Devil guards his own." Well, he doesn't, not anymore.' Snow lay deep around them, covering the foothills through which they had trudged for two laborious days, blanketing the steep, rocky rise of the ground. Above them the black cliffs were criss-crossed with heavy, white ledges of snow, and the dark furring of trees was weighted with it. A smother of clouds hid the higher peaks and filled the rocky notch of Sarda Pass with nebulous grey.

Rudy's breath burned in his lungs. His long, wet hair hung damply around his face and over the collar of his buffalohide coat. The steel points of his pronged staff winked faintly in the wan afternoon light. Under the burden of books they'd brought all that long way from Quo, his shoulder ached, but his mind circled gull-like around a confusion of thoughts.

We're home.

Home to Minalde.

And to what else?

By now, he was long used to carrying on both sides of the conversation. 'You said to me once to remember that we were outcasts. But that was back when we thought we'd have the Archmage to help us. And now we've got nothing, literally nothing. Anybody who declares himself a wizard is asking for it.' He shrugged. 'I don't blame Wend for sitting tight.'

'Nor do I.'

He glanced around, startled at the response. Ingold had been silent for days.

To his surprise, the old man continued. 'In fact, I should be amazed if anyone shows up at all. Kara and her mother might,' he added reflectively, 'if nothing else happened to them. But - the opposition to wizardry will have redoubled. And those alive to hear my summoning would be those who could not overcome their fear of opposition in the first place.'

Ingold came up beside him, leaning on his staff, bowed under the weight of his burden of books, like a very old and very wretched beggarman, with his long white hair, grubby beard, and stained and tattered cloak. In the shadows between the rim of

his hood and his ragged muffler, his eyes still looked sunken and tired. But at least he was talking.

Ingold went on. 'Maybe now you understand my impulse to become a hermit.'

'Well, let me tell you, the way you've been acting, I was damn tempted to let you do it.'

The wizard ducked his head. 'I am sorry,' he apologized quietly. 'It was good of you to put up with the grieving of an old man.'

Rudy shrugged. 'Well,' he said judiciously, 'since I've been perfect myself all my life, I guess I can find it in my heart to forgive you.'

Thank you,' the wizard replied gravely. 'You are very kind. But having heard you play the harp, I feel your assertion of perfection is rather rash.'

Their eyes met, and Rudy grinned. 'I had to get back at you somehow, didn't I?'

Ingold shuddered. 'In that case I doubly apologize,' he said. 'If that was meant as retribution, my conduct must have been execrable indeed.'

'Hey!' Rudy protested.

'It's the first time in my life that I've been thankful that I'm almost completely tone-deaf,' the wizard mused - not quite truthfully, Rudy knew. 'So I suppose there is good to be derived from every state.'

'Well, then you and I better think real hard about what kind of good is to be derived from being in the doghouse,' Rudy said grimly. 'Because that's sure as hell where we're gonna be when Alwir finds out what happened at Quo.' Then, in a different voice, he asked, 'What did happen at Quo, Ingold?' Wind keened through the trees above the Pass, but only a breath of it touched the travellers labouring through the drifted snow. The clouds moved down the mountains, as grey and chill as the fogs that had surrounded Quo. 'Was Lohiro acting for the Dark or was that the Dark themselves?'

There was a long pause while Ingold scanned the tracks of rabbit and bird in the snow of the drifts, as if judging matters pertaining to wind and weather. When he finally spoke, his scratchy voice was tired. 'I think it was the Dark themselves.' He sighed. To this day, I don't know if they did release him, there at the end. If they did, I could have brought him back with us. At least we could then have had the benefit of his wisdom and the knowledge of whatever it was that the wizards unearthed before they were destroyed. But I couldn't risk it, Rudy,' he said in a soft, urgent tone. 'I couldn't risk it.'

'Hell, no,' Rudy agreed. 'With all his knowledge and the Dark behind him - no wonder every building in the town was smashed, the wizards destroyed, and Forn's Tower blown to flinders. If your power could hold them at bay before the gates of the Keep, his power could only double theirs.'

'As their powers could baffle, or channel, the powers of wizardry near their Nests. I should have guessed that when Hoofprint of the Wind spoke of the Nest as a place

of seeing. That was how Quo was spoken of, back in the old days - and of Gae, incidentally. It needed all the forces of the Dark to break Gae,' he added. 'It wasn't ill-planned, Rudy, the final blow at Gae, Quo, Penambra - Dele, too, from what Kara said - all within a few days. The back of organized resistance was broken, and the hope of magical aid destroyed.'

Ingold sighed, his breath a thin rag of cloud in the fog. 'I had to kill him, Rudy. I couldn't let them have his powers. Perhaps he was still some sort of prisoner in his own body. Certainly - whatever it was - it had his speech, his mannerisms, his skills. But it didn't have his knowledge. Lohiro would have known that Anamara the Red and I were old classmates from years ago.' He held up his hands, the first faint smile Rudy had seen glimmering wryly through his overgrown beard. 'She knitted me these mittens the year we were lovers, back at Quo. For the fourth most powerful mage in the West of the World, she was very domestic. Lohiro would never have spoken to me casually of her death.'

'Was that what tipped you off? Rudy asked quietly.

'Partly. And - I didn't like his eyes. But from what he had been through, I didn't know.'

'So you trapped him.'

Ingold nodded miserably and trudged on through the snow. Che hung balkily back at the full stretch of his lead -neither of them had ever managed to train the stupid creature to follow, a failure that in his darker moments Rudy was inclined to attribute to the malice of the Bishop of Gae. 'I trapped him,' Ingold said, 'and I killed him. Maybe they did let him go. He spoke of the Dark as he was dying - that they are not many, but one. Maybe he had been one of them and, if I had healed him, we could have learned from him what they know, why they rose - and why they departed.'

'Yeah,' Rudy assented bluntly, 'and maybe if you healed him, the wizards of Quo wouldn't have been the only ones to seal the Dark into the citadel with them.'

Ingold sighed. 'Maybe.'

'What else could you have done?

Ingold shook his head. 'Been more clever to begin with. Realized the connection between the so-called fortunate places and the Dark. Pursued my own researches at Quo, instead of playing politics halfway across the continent. But the answer is gone, if there ever was an answer. The Dark made sure of that. And perhaps there never was an answer to begin with.'

'Sure there was,' Rudy said. He glanced over at the old man as they clambered up the last steep grade of the road, the crusted snow squeaking under their boots. 'And there is. There's got to be.'

'Does there? Ingold scrambled through the drifts at his heels, dragging the unwilling burro with his load of books behind. 'At one time I used to think there was a reason for things happening as they do and that somewhere all questions have answers. I'm not so sure of that anymore. What makes you think this one does?

'Because even after Quo was destroyed, the Dark have been after you. They've chased you from here to hell and back again to keep you from finding that answer. The Dark think you have it, and they've been one jump ahead of us through this whole game.'

Ingold sighed and stood still in the drifted road, his head bowed and his face hidden in the shadows of his hood. A flurry of snow blew down on them from above and brought with it the smell of the high peaks, of glacier ice and rock. The fog surrounded them, grey, drifting wraiths haunting the gathering darkness in the throat of the Pass. 'So we're back where we began,' he said at last. 'With the question and the answer. I'm the one they want, but they've wiped out everyone but me. Is that question or answer?

Rudy shrugged. 'Which one are you going to make it?'

Ingold glanced up at him sharply and continued walking without a reply. Rudy followed behind, testing with his staff the solid ground under the blankets of drifts. Evening was drawing on. The sharp, chill dampness of the mists seemed to eat into his bones.

Ahead of him, the old man stopped; and following his gaze, Rudy looked up to the grey boil of clouds that shrouded the Pass.

Out of the evening mists, dark forms were materializing there, melting into being from shadow and wind. A draught caught a cloak and blew it out into a great dark wing; the gathering forms solidified, massing against the fog. Ingold stood still, his hood fallen back from his face, doubt and fear and a strange, wild hope moving behind those still eyes.

Rudy came softly up behind him. 'Is it the Bishop's people?'

Ingold whispered, 'I don't know...'

Then a man's voice rolled down the Pass, deep and harsh, like the sound a stone might make when it was dislodged in an avalanche from the side of its parent cliff. 'INGOLD!' the voice cried, and Ingold's face was suddenly white in the grey light, looking upward at that assembled host.

Suddenly he shouted, 'Thoth!' and struggled forward through the drifts at a speed which Rudy knew he could never match. Like a gangling bird of prey, the tallest of the watchers detached himself from their midst, striding down to Ingold in a black billow of robes. They met like long-lost brothers and embraced in the flurrying fog and snow, while the others came streaming down the path on Thoth's heels.

Coming closer, Rudy saw Kara among them, her scarred face smiling hesitantly. The others he did not know, but he knew who they must be. There were at least thirty of them, of all ages, both sexes, and all kinds; many of them were old, but one or two seemed very young. Thoth and Ingold still had their arms around each other's shoulders. Thoth, with his hood thrown back, was revealed to be a grim old man whose shaven head and beaked nose reminded Rudy of Bishop Govannin; his eyes were the colour of pale honey.

Out of the crowd, another form pushed itself, an incredibly tiny, impossibly ancient little hermit, so shrivelled with age that he looked as if he'd dried and bleached for a hundred years in the desert sun.

'Kta!' Ingold cried delightedly, throwing his free arm around the narrow shoulders. 'You came after all!' And the tiny old man smiled his sweet, toothless smile and nodded.

'Rudy,' Ingold said, and Rudy mused to himself that in the last six weeks he'd probably seen more emotion out of the usually unruffled wizard than anyone else had seen in decades. 'Rudy, these are our people.' Ingold had one arm around Thoth and the other around the ancient Kta, and among and between them and this knot of enchanted strangers on the snowy Pass, there seemed to lie an unbreakable bond, a chain made of light that bound them together. Ingold's face almost shone with joy. 'These are the wizards who came in answer to my call. They've been waiting here to welcome us back to the Keep. My friends,' he said, 'this is Rudy. He is my student and one of us.'