The Walls of Air (Darwath #2)

The Walls of Air (Darwath #2) Page 9

The smothering sense of impending horror woke Rudy from a sound sleep. Wind screamed overhead, but the arroyo in which they'd made camp was protected and relatively still. He sat up, the rock against which he'd leaned to take his turn at guard duty digging sharply into his back, his breath coming fast, his hands damp and cold. His heart chilled with the knowledge that Ingold was gone. A hasty look around confirmed it. He could see nothing of the wizard in the shifting darkness of the fire.

Rudy scrambled hastily to his feet, the terror of being left to his own devices in the midst of the wind-seared desert night fighting the horror born of guilt for falling asleep on duty. A thin shiver of wind lashed down on him from above, but it wasn't that which made himshudder. He knew himself incapable of surviving without the wizard. And - who or what could have snatched Ingold so silently? Panic seized him. He caught up his bow and quiver and scrambled up the steep, rocky bank. At the top, the seething turmoil of the winds struck him, his wizard's vision showing him nothing but the wild movement of tossing sagebrush and cloud. Despairing, he cried against the winds, 'INGOLD!' The winds threw his voice back upon him again.

The cold up here was incredible, burning like a sword of ice run through his lungs. Raging winds ripped the sound of his cry from his lips, throwing it at random into the darkness. He yelled again, 'INGOLD!' His voice was drowned in the maelstrom of the night.

What was he to do? Return to the camp to wait? For what? Beat his way back to the road a few dozen yards away to look for some sign of the old man? Wait for morning? But he might as well give up hope then, for tonight's storm would scour all sign of Ingold from the face of the earth. A kind of frenzy took

him - the terror of being alone in the dark. He knew he was helpless without Ingold, unable to go on and probably unable to return to Renweth either, set down in the midst of a hostile and terrible place. He fought off the overwhelming urge to run, to flee somewhere, anywhere. The wind shrieked curses in his ears and tore at his face with claws of frozen iron. Ingold was gone -and Rudy knew he could never survive without him.

Then he heard the wizard's harsh, powerful voice, torn and twisted on the deceiving fury of the winds, calling his name. Rudy swung around, facing what he thought was the direction of the sound. He strained his eyes, but could see nothing in the utter darkness of the howling desert night. The winds were screaming so fiercely that he could barely have heard himself shout, but he heard the call again.

Leaning against the force of the wind, he struck off into the darkness.

It took him less than half an hour to realize he had been a total fool. Wherever Ingold was, whatever had become of him, searching for him in the wild blackness of the storm was tantamount to suicide. Staggering blindly under the flail of the elements, frozen to the bone and gasping with the mere effort of remaining upright, Rudy cursed the panic that had sent him away from the hidden camp in the arroyo. He had utterly lost sight of it, wandering helplessly, chasing every will-o'-the-wisp of movement he fancied he'd seen or a sound on the wind that he took for his name...

Turning around in despair, he struggled back toward where he thought the camp ought to be. But nothing in all that wind-ripped landscape was familiar. Wizard or no wizard, he could not see in the dark when the wind blinded his eyes. Against his numbed cheeks, he could already feel the stinging bite of powder snow.

If you lie down, you'll die, he told himself grimly. Keep moving till daybreak, for Chrissake, or it's one more contribution to the Starving Jackals' Benevolent Fund. But the

lure of sleep enticed him, the thought of that warmth beyond the dark wall. He thought of Minalde, of the sweetness of her arms, of the warm, golden afternoons of California, and of talking endless rounds of nothing with his buddies, throwing beer bottles at the trash can... Keep going, turkey, he commanded, forcing his mind from those soft temptations. Think about fingernails on the blackboard. Think about jumping in water. Think about anything but sleep.

He made himself move on.

There was no question of going anywhere or finding anything now only of putting one foot in front of the other, of keeping his blood circulating until morning. In the morning there would be time enough... For what? To find Ingold, when in all probability the old man was walking straight away from him and would continue to do so for however many hours it would be until dawn? To sleep, out in the middle of nowhere, exposed to the dangers of the desert without the old man's cloak of magic and expertise to cover him? He wondered if this was the ice storm Ingold had spoken of, the searing hurricane of cold that could freeze-dry a grazing mammoth complete with the buttercups in its mouth...

He fought back the urge to sleep. Gil's image returned to him, shouting through that other snowstorm that had covered their last flight to the Keep of Dare three weeks ago? A month ago? He pictured Gil dragging him up out of the snow and forcing him to move on when he would have lain down and died. / don't care if you are a goddam wizard, she had said, you're a coward and a quitter. And he was. He had always been. Only now he couldn't afford to be. Neither he nor anyone else could allow him that luxury. If the Dark Ones had taken Ingold from the camp, it would be up to him, Rudy Solis, the mage of San Berdoo, to find the Hidden City and present the problem to Lohiro. The despair he felt at that idea was enough to make him think about lying down right there and letting the snows have him.

Coward and quitter, Gil had said. He couldn't feel his feet or hands; his whole body was numb and sluggish, his mind darkening under the inexorable grip of cold and fatigue. He stumbled and went down, feeling the snow winds ride over him.

It was the tingling in his numbed fingertips that woke him. Without opening his eyes, he flexed his hand; he heard the thin crackle of the ice that had formed on his glove and the swift-flying whisk of animal feet fleeing across the snow. Through his eyelids he could see light. He knew he'd made it.

Rudy sighed. He was still cold and damp clear through to his bones. But the bitter cold of last night's storm had lessened, and the wind had dropped to its familiar steady whine. He was starvingly hungry, sore in every limb, and exhausted. It would be nice to lie here in this relatively sheltered space - had he dragged himself to the lee side of a dry wash last night or something? - and wait for rescue. Only there wasn't going to be any rescue. It came back to him with chilling and horrible finality that Ingold was gone. If Ingold is gone, he thought with sudden horror, how the hell am I going to get back to California?

Lohiro, he thought. Lohiro is Archmage and head of the Council. He's Ingold's superior. He'll know.

But grief took hold of his heart as he lay in the shaded snow. The old man was gone, never to sit across the flickering light of the campfires with that wicked humour in his sleepy eyes - never to blister Rudy with sarcasm if he mixed up the seed pods of kneestem and crannywort never to stand with cupped palms filled with white light, blazing in an aura of brilliance out of the darkness. Rudy bowed his head against the icy slush. He had loved the old man, not just for his magic, or because the wizard was his teacher. If Ingold had been some old, pensioned-off steel-worker living next door to him in San Bernardino, he knew he would still have loved the man.

Rudy thought of Lohiro and the vision he had seen in the crystal table at the Keep the serene, emotionless face in its frame of fire-gold hair, the emptiness of those kaleidoscope-blue eyes. What had Ingold said to Lohiro? That he was like a dragon, a creature of fire and power, gold and light. But the Archmage was nothing like the shabby, old, beer-drinking maverick whom Rudy had first seen stepping out of the blaze of silver glory into the dawn stillness of the California hills. Rudy knew it was time to go on. He opened his eyes and found himself stretched out in the shelter of the dry wash's overhanging bank. Snow lay drifted all around him, melted by the warmth of his body into a kind of hollow that had further protected him from the winds. He lay in the long blue ribbon of shade thrown by the bank. Just beyond its border, where the sun glittered brightly on the snows, perched half a dozen small animals with coats of white-streaked brown fur. They were about the size of cats but had the long-drawn-out snouts, wrinkled lips, and gleaming red eyes of rats. They sat up on their hind legs, whiskers twitching, and regarded him with malevolent disappointment. Rudy remembered the tingling of his fingers which had awakened him and looked at them quickly. The leather at the ends of his gloves had been chewed..

With a wholehearted shudder of disgust, he snatched up a rock and flung it at the rats, and they melted almost scornfully out of sight into the snowy brush. Irrationally, Rudy wiped the nibbled leather on the seat of his breeches. He had the ugly feeling that he had not seen the last of them.

Cautiously, he picked up his bow. He'd managed to keep that through the night, as well as his quiver of arrows. He had water in his flask, and there was enough snow on the ground so that this was not yet a problem. He also had a little dried meat and some fruit-leather in the wallet at his belt. In addition, he had a knife, a sword, and some extra bowstrings. Shivering in the wan, heatless light, he wrapped his damp cloak around him, to no great avail.

The cold leaking through his wet clothes would be a further drain on his energy, but there was no way to get dry. He scrambled to the top of the bank to have a look at the lands around him.

Only desolation met his eyes. There was no sign of the road anywhere. The overcast sky had broken enough so that the sun was remotely visible as a whitish patch in the endless roof of clouds. The wind was still bitter. The land sloped away before him in a pale reddish expanse of stony sand, barren of brush, cactus, or grass. Here and there, snow patched the sands, blown into fitful little whirlwinds.

The wind from the north and the sun in the east were the only guides for direction in all that empty land. He tried to remember whether he'd crossed the road last night and if he were north or south of it; he tried to recall the map Ingold had sketched out for him one night in the dUst beside the fire. All he remembered of that was that they'd have to leave the main road to Dele at some point and strike overland, due west, to reach the Seaward Mountains and the Hidden City of Quo.

That much he could do. Head straight west - and then what? Eventually reach the Seaward Mountains? How long? Two weeks afoot, lost and virtually helpless? Dream on. And supposing he did? The Seaward Mountains were now one great spider web of illusions. What the hell am I gonna do, stand in the foothills and yell, 'Let me in. Ingold sent me?'

But that, he realized, was exactly why Ingold had brought him along. Punk airbrush-jockey and half-trained screw-up artist that he was, he was the only free and trustworthy mage in the West of the World. Ingold, over whose stripped bones the scavenger rats must be fighting by this time, was counting on him.

And besides, where else was he going to go?

He headed west. The emptiness of the desert engulfed him.

He had thought before, travelling with Ingold through the wastelands, that he had come to understand the solitude and silence of those empty places, but he saw now that this had been a delusion. He was totally alone, totally forgotten. He was the only human soul in all this great emptiness. The sun climbed, strengthening a little. His cloak dried, and his shadow drifted, pale and watery, before him. Once or twice in the rocky wastes he glimpsed jackrabbits or huge lizards the length of his arm, and once in the distance he heard the unmistakable dry buzzing of a rattler. But he knew himself to be alone. If he shouted at the top of his lungs, his voice would roll unheard through those silvery distances and die without ever reaching a human being's ear. He moved through the emptiness like a tortoise, with slow, dogged steps in a single direction, not to be turned aside.

A distant thicket of mesquite and greasewood proclaimed ground-water; he found a catch basin of rocks there, half-filled with melted snow. In the empty silence of noon, he ate as little of the dried meat and fruit as he could manage, resting, letting his thoughts drift. He wondered what Minalde was doing, how Tir was. He wondered about the White Raiders and the ghost that they feared. Had it been that, he wondered, which had taken Ingold so silently from his own camp? Or had it been the Dark, who had dogged their footsteps from Renweth? Would Lohiro know that? Had Lohiro, who was like a son to Ingold, watched him in the fire, even as Rudy had watched Aide? The vision in the crystal flashed disturbingly before his thoughts, the cold, empty blue eyes and the brush of a cloak hem across the wet gleam of a crab-crawling skull. A small movement in the mesquite caught his eye; a moment later a rabbit hobbled cautiously into view, nose and ears a-twitch with apprehension. Poor little bastard, Rudy thought, and his hand stole smoothly toward his bow. Many nights on watch he had observed the jackrabbits and felt rather a kinship with them. They didn't hurt anyone and, like himself, were mainly concerned with food and fornication and staying out of trouble. The rabbit's ears swung like radar receivers; the timid little creature stared around, hoping against hope that the scenery

concealed no greedy, bright-toothed death, which would end those mild rabbity dreams of sweet mesquite tops and nymphomaniac does. It's a tough life, Rudy thought, but it's you or me, and I'd rat her it was you.

As he drew the bow to him, the end snagged on a root and the arrow rolled sideways. The rabbit, galvanized into instant frenzy, rocketed wildly into the distance, leaving Rudy once again alone.

Great White Hunter blows it again. He returned to his meditations.

Eventually he shot three rabbits, one where he sat and two later in the early twilight. He found another mesquite thicket, this one among rocks. After sweeping away his tracks, he made a kind of fort by piling thornbushes between the largest of the boulders to defend his camp. He built a small fire and wondered if it was safe to sleep. Probably not, he reflected, but he knew himself incapable of remaining awake all night. After a day of semi-starvation, it was hard not to eat all three bunnies the minute they were cooked, but he reminded himself that he didn't know where his next meal was coming from and crawled into his spiny shelter to dream of superburgers and sun.

Deep in the night, he was wakened by the muffled padding of animal feet and the soft scratching of blunt claws on the rocks. He lay sweating in the darkness, seeing nothing beyond the tangles of interwoven thorn. In the morning he saw wolf tracks as large as his own hands all around the shelter in the dust.

The next day was colder, sunless, and grey. By the scent of the wind, he decided the rain would hold off and he filled his water flask with snow gleaned from a hollow in the rocks. The land was lower, thinly grown now with mesquite, small sagebrush, greasewood, and ocotillo that rattled like dry bones in the wind. The wind grew bitter, clawing at his face and cloak. He saw nothing that could remotely be construed as edible and he began to feel desperately lonely and frightened.

By afternoon he realized that he was being stalked.

The knowledge came upon him gradually. At first it was only a vague sensation, a wariness about open ground, a subliminal wondering about the anomalous rustlings in the mesquite on both sides of him. He had lived long enough with the wind to recognize the pattern of its sounds. He knew when the pattern broke.

He stood still, quieting his breath to absorb the sound and smell of the land. He could hear nothing but the whining of the wind through the chaparral, which lay like a waist-high forest over the desolation through which he had moved all day. He looked slowly around him, searching for something, anything, to tell him what he was up against and in which direction he might flee. Like the jackrabbits, he had no other course of action; he only wished it were possible for him to go streaking madly away through the sagebrush at eighty miles an hour as they did.

A sound riveted his attention. He turned his eyes back toward a clump of brush he'd already scanned before. There had been no movement that he could see; but he now saw a big male dooic, squatting in its shelter, holding a huge wedge of rock in its hands, and staring at him with that same hungry malice he had seen in the eyes of the scavenger rats. Like them, it melted slowly backward and edged out of sight into the

brush beyond.

Rudy swung around, hearing more surreptitious stirrings in the brush. Another hunched body was making its stealthy retreat. He felt himself grow clammy with sweat.

He was now aware of them all around. What had Ingold said - that he'd travelled with a band of them? But these dooic didn't look as if they had that kind of friendly intentions; they were armed with crudely chipped hand-axes and had tusks like those of wild pigs. Rudy moved on cautiously. He'd come pretty close to getting killed several times since his arrival in this world; but freezing to death, having the Dark Ones put the munch on him, or even having Ingold run him through with his own sword suddenly seemed a whole lot more comfortable and dignified than being dirtily mauled to pieces by a gang of Neanderthals. He was scanning the skyline and finally found what he was looking for - a distant clump of trees marking a water hole. He wondered how well dooic climbed. But in the trees he could at least get his back to something and fend them off. As it was, with his being surrounded in open ground, it looked like a losing proposition.

As he moved, he was conscious of the whole ring of them on both sides of him as well as behind. He could hear them shifting up through the brush to get ahead of him. If he let that happen, he figured it would be kiss-off time. He quickened his pace toward the trees - cottonwoods, he saw now - some two miles off. Without breaking stride, he unbuckled his sword belt and shifted the weapon up over his back, getting ready to run for it. On second thought, he also pulled off his cloak, rolling it up and bundling it under the sword belt. All he needed, he thought wryly, was to trip over the damn thing. He tried to judge the distance to the trees but couldn't; the dry, clear air of the desert made things look closer than they really were. He knew that, once he broke into a run, he had damn well better stay ahead of the pack.

He glimpsed movement in the sagebrush ahead of him and to the sides humped, skittering shapes making a dash across open ground. Here goes nothing, Rudy thought. He broke into a run.

On all sides of him, the ground seemed to erupt dooic. He hadn't thought there were so many of them - twenty-five at least, rushing toward him with shrill, grunting howls, some of them from much closer than he'd suspected. Those ahead of him tried to close in, but it was no race. Rudy's longer legs carried him past them, and he sprinted out ahead, running for the trees with the pack streaming at his heels.

Once, when he was a very young child, Rudy had been chased for blocks by the local dog pack; he still remembered the heart-bursting terror of that run. But that had only been for a few hundred yards. He saw almost at once that he'd have to pace himself. The dooic were well behind him, but their whistling grunts still carried to his' ears, and he knew they would overtake him when he'd run himself breathless. He tried to judge their speed and slow his own to match it. Already the trees looked farther off" than they had looked before, and he knew it was going to be a long run. He thought fleetingly, Why couldn't I have been a jogger instead of a goddam biker? His chest was aching now; his body, toughened though it had been by the endless miles of walking, burned with fatigue. And to think there were people who ran twenty-six miles for the hell of it.

He felt himself flagging before half the distance was run. The raucous yammering behind him grew louder; and risking a glance backward, he saw the leaders of the pack a dozen yards from him, running with a rolling, bandylegged lope. The flash of bared yellow tusks sent a surge of adrenalin through him that carried him a few yards farther from them, but he was already stumbling, the strain telling in every muscle of his sweat-soaked body.

He hit the trees three strides in front of the pack, barely able to breathe or stand, and swept his sword from its scabbard in an over-the-shoulder slash that hacked the arm half off the nearest of his pursuers. The blade jammed between ribs and sternum, and the creature went down howling in a geyser of blood, while the rest of the ring broke and drew back. In sickened panic, Rudy put his foot on the still-writhing Neanderthal to pull the sword free, and the thing's teeth slashed the leather of his boot and the flesh beneath before it expired as the blade came clear. Rudy fell back against the tree as the circle closed on him, hacking desperately at hairy hands and faces, sobbing with exhaustion, and being splattered with blood and dust. A thrown rock caught him on the shoulder as the dooic drew back again out of sword range. He swung around, unwilling to leave the minimal shelter of the tree. The attackers were hurling rocks at him from all sides with deadly and practised aim. A stone the size of his two fists took a divot out of the tree inches from his head; another one smashed his elbow, numbing his arm, and a third caught him painfully in the ribs. With more haste than efficiency, he shoved the sword through his belt - whose bright idea had it been to sling the scabbard on his back? -and jumped for the lowest tree branch, scrambling awkwardly upward and praying he wouldn't cut his leg off with the deadly, unprotected edge of razor-sharp steel. The dooic swarmed around the trunk, shaking it and screaming and flinging rocks at him. Rudy clung to the swaying branches and tried to remember how deep the roots of cottonwoods went. But none of the dooic attempted to climb up to get him. After a time, they subsided, their howls dropping to a fierce muttering snarl. They squatted down around the tree to wait.

Fantastic. Rudy settled himself cautiously a little more firmly into the main crotch of the tree and carefully altered the arrangement of his sword. / am not only lost and abandoned, I am also treed. If there is no such thing as random events, I sure as hell can't see the cosmic significance of this. It seems like a pretty pointless way to die.

He drew his left foot up and checked the gashes on his leg. The boot and legging were saturated with blood, but his foot was still mobile no tendon damage. Still, his leg would get infected if he didn't put alcohol on it or cauterize the wound somehow. At the moment, that didn't look real easy to do. He flexed his left arm and found it hurt like hell but would also move; he felt tenderly at his ribs and winced when one of them moved, too. Below, the dooic watched him with greedy eyes. He wondered how long they would stick around and what would happen if he fell asleep.

The cold afternoon dragged on. The dooic sat hunkered on the ground around the tree, occasionally wandering away in quest of lizards or grubs, the wind ruffling at their coarse, dark hair. Rudy disengaged his cloak and wrapped it about him for what little warmth he could get out of it. His leg throbbed agonizingly, making him wonder how long it took for blood poisoning to set in; this fear finally made him wedge himself more firmly into the crotch of the tree, unlace his boot and, sweating and sick, call fire repeatedly to the blade of his knife until the metal grew hot enough to sear the flesh. The process was excruciating and, since Rudy hadn't sufficient resolution to

make a one-shot job of it, lasted a long time. He ended up by dropping the knife and vomiting, hanging limply in the branches of the tree, wondering if he were going to faint and fall and be torn to pieces, anyway, and wishing he were dead.

He there remained until it was almost dark.

Twilight came early under the overcast sky. Half in a stupor, Rudy barely noticed the failing of the light until the sudden flurry of grunts from below brought him back to full consciousness.

The dooic were scrambling to their feet, whistling and coughing among themselves, their beady eyes alert and their stooped bodies taut with fear. From his point of vantage, Rudy could see a pair of tall, ostrichlike birds stalking silently through the twilight shadows of the sagebrush, almost unnoticeable, despite their size, because of their hairy, brownish-grey feathers and smooth, catlike tread. He had seen such creatures once in the distance and had found their tracks. Now he saw that they had enormous, hawklike bills and that their eyes were set forward in their skulls - the mark, Ingold had pointed out, of a predator.

The dooic had fallen silent. They began to fade into the brush until, even from his high perch, Rudy could barely see them. Keeping his own movements to a minimum, he sat up, tore a strip from the hem of his surcoat, and bandaged the swollen mess of his left leg, tying his boot together over it. He cursed himself as he worked; in letting himself be injured, he had halved his already minimal chances for survival. The thought of trying to walk on the leg made him sick, but so did remembering that the dooic would very likely be back in the morning.

He had no idea which way was west, but by standing up in the branches of the tree, he could pick out the distant shape of a tall rock promontory that would offer some protection, if he could scale it. He refrained from thinking about what was likely to happen, if he could not. The thing to do now was to get away from the tree and find some place where the dooic wouldn't look for him the minute the sabre-beaked ostriches were gone.

Below him, there was a flurry of movement in the twilight. A female dooic broke cover almost under the feet of one tall bird and fled at a sprint Rudy hadn't thought the things capable of. But the bird shot forward like a gazelle, its huge beak tearing at the quarry in mid-stride, sending it down in a kicking jumble of arms and legs and blood. The other bird had started after its own prey, a young male with a hundred yards' start, and Rudy watched, aghast, as the thing ran down the fleeing dooic with long, effortless strides and disembowelled it on the run, then stood on one foot, holding a limb in its claw and tearing at it in a businesslike fashion, for all the world like a parrot eating a strawberry. Rudy remained, immobile with fear, in his tree until the birds had finished their grisly repast and stalked away into the dusk. The rest of the dooic were utterly gone. The ripped remains of Rudy's two erstwhile hunters were surrounded by the scavenger rats that seemed to have risen from the earth to quarrel over the bones.

The rats barely glanced at him as he slipped gingerly from the tree at last. They did put on some show of interest when his feet touched the ground and his cramped knee buckled, but went back to feeding when he got up again. Rudy had a brief, queasy vision of what would have happened if he had not been able to rise. The painful

weakness of his left leg frightened him. He limped around the trunk of the tree and found his knife, then cut a sucker from the roots the right length for a walking stick. He checked his bow, debated momentarily about shooting a couple of scavengers for meat - it would be like shooting fish in a barrel but couldn't bring himself to think of actually eating the carrion beasts. Besides, he'd only have to fight their brothers for the corpses, and at the moment all he wanted was to be out of there.

Leaning on his staff, which, like most cottonwood, was so soft as to be almost useless for the purpose, he limped slowly on his way.

He awakened to the distant sound of trumpeting. Fora moment he puzzled over it, wondering if it were part of the clinging fog of his dreams, like the very brief, very clear vision he had had of Ingold, sitting as he had so often sat beside their campfire, scratching runes in the dust with a stick. Then the pain of wakening came, the pain of cramps, of bruises, the stabbing pinch of his cracked rib, and the sickening throb of his ripped ankle. He had slept in a semi-foetal position in a cranny high in the rocks, half-frozen after a walk that had seemed to last most of the night.

The trumpeting did not fade with his dreams. It came again, a living sound, shrill and brazen. Elephants?

What in hell are elephants doing in the middle of the Gettlesand deserts? Or am I really delirious this time?

He dragged himself upright and scrambled to the top of the rocks.

Once on the road from Karst to Renweth - years ago, it felt like, though he knew it had been less than a month -the train had stopped on a high, green saddleback hill. The rain had cleared, silver veils of mict drawing back from the heartbreaking beauty of the lands below, revealing them holy and mysterious, pearled with rain and frost. He'd stood next to the small, hide-roofed cart that fluttered with the black pennons of the House of Dare, leaning on the wheel while Aide bent from the seat to talk to him, holding Tir in her arms. She'd pointed outward over those drenched green lands at moving brown shapes in the distance and had said, 'Mammoth. There haven't been mammoth in the river valleys for oh, hundreds and hundreds of years.' And now here they were.

In the cold, pale wastes of the desert, they moved like perambulating haystacks, far more vast than any elephant Rudy had ever seen. They looked absurdly like the artists' reconstructions in picture encyclopedias - enormous shaggy bulks sloping down from huge, blocklike heads and mountainous shoulders, little fanlike ears, and recurved tusks like the soundbow of an ancient harp, with small, black, beady eyes above the tusks. Their brown fur was speckled with the white spits of snow that blew down from a bleak, featureless sky. Rudy identified the herd bulls, as massive as freight cars, the smaller cows, and the little calves, the smallest of which was still considerably larger than a Winnebago, clinging like Dumbo the Elephant to mamma's tail. A fresh gust of wind stung his face and flurried snow into his sheltering rocks. The mammoth turned their gargantuan backs to the snow and strode off southward, driven before it as they had been driven, Rudy thought, from their home on the high, brown grasslands of the north.

He shivered and wondered how much farther he could get on this futile quest. To

the west, the colourless horizon lay as straight as a ruled line. He doubted he would see the Seaward Mountains for weeks yet and he knew already that he would not be able to continue that long. Ingold was right, he thought bitterly. / should have reconsidered, sat tight back at the Keep. But, dammit, I didn't know then I'd lose him.

Ingold knew. He knew there was an odds-on chance of one of us buying it and he was afraid it was going to be he. And he knew there had to be someone else to finish the quest.

Despairing, Rudy leaned his forehead on his wrists against the stone and wished he were dead. Why me?

The question is the answer, Rudy. The question is always the answer. Because you're a mage. You wanted to come along to learn to be a mage. You came to be a mage, and he took you because only a mage can finish the quest. You still owe him.

I didn't want this! his mind cried.

You didn't want to realize that you can call fire from darkness?

Dammit, Rudy thought tiredly. Dammit, dammit, dammit. Even when he was gone - lost - devoured by the Dark - you never could win an argument with Ingold.

A change, a turning of the wind, brought to him the swift, steady drumming of hooves - horses, a troop of them. A distant beating murmur vibrated through the rock beneath his body. He inched his head over the lip of the crag once more and saw them, like ghosts streaming as grey as mist through the snow-flecked wind. White Raiders!

Ingold had been right. They were undoubtedly the people of the Icefalcon. Pale braids like Vikings streamed out behind the lean, long-legged warriors bending over the curved necks of their mustangs. They turned in a single fluid line, manes rippling and nostrils smoking, less than half a mile off, but barely visible except as a pounding sense of motion in the empty lands. There was nothing of them to catch the eye; the horses were mostly that wolfish grey-brown of the land; the riders wore the same colour. Even the fairness of their braids was the echo of sun-bleaching on dry grass. The fluttering of tags, feathers, and chips of bright-winking glass on their harness seemed like the random twinkling of wind and leaves. In a wide curve, they headed along the tracks of the mammoth and vanished, driven south by the winds.

Rudy sighed. He'd have to hunt again that day, for his rabbit meat was nearly gone. He changed the bandage on his ankle, cannibalizing another strip from the hem of his frayed surcoat for the purpose, and examined the wound worriedly. He had no idea what blood poisoning looked like or how long it took for red streaks to show up. Ingold had taught him emergency spells to keep gangrene at bay, but Rudy had no idea whether he'd executed them properly or not. It was borne upon him how gross was his own ignorance and how much he would have to learn, provided he ever got out of this mess alive. He cringed at the thought of all the knowledge he had passed blithely by in the good old days when he could go to a doctor, a grocery store, or -God forbid! the cops as a last resort. As he climbed down out of his shelter, he remembered Ingold's saying that he had wandered this desert alone for fifteen years. No wonder Ingold had been so utterly self-sufficient. Rudy picked up his worthless

staff an'd headed west again.

He walked throughout the day. Keeping the wind on his right, he knew he was heading west, though no sun broke the eternal overcast of the clouds. At times he wondered what he would do when he came within sight of the Seaward Mountains. But what the hell was he worried about? he asked himself. You'll be dead long before you get in sight of them. There was no reason for him to go on, but he did, like an ant crossing a football field. He wondered what had become of Ingold, whether the Dark had got him or whether it had been something else, that unseen other power that the White Raiders feared. What would become of Gil, stuck here forever in an alien universe?

He crossed a high, treeless stretch of barren rock, and the lands around him were now mostly pebbles and sand, a desolation in which only an occasional scrap of saltbush would grow. Blown sand and snow stung his face, the cold cutting through the bandages to torture his leg. In their shabby gloves, his fingers were numb. Three days he had been alone, moving like a ghost through this empty land longer than he had ever been alone in his life. Though solitude had always bothered him less than he knew it bothered most people, his soul had ached yesterday and the day before for companionship - someone, anyone, a total stranger; he'd even have settled for his sister Yolanda. But he found that he was becoming used to the company of his own spirit. Though he still shuddered at the thought of spending months and years alone, as Ingold had done, he could now imagine, as a faint echo of the reality, what it would be like.

Twilight was settling down again. He wondered where he would spend the night. The land around him was utterly flat and desolate, without rock, without tree, without more than a few isolated patches of thin brush. He felt weak and exhausted, but knew that he had to keep going until he found something. To lie down and sleep in the open would be death indeed.

A movement caught his eye. It bobbed, stalky and awkward, on the crest of a stony ridge, yet there was a curiously catlike quality to it... Rudy froze. It was a tricky time of day; the greying light fooled the eyes, and the threshing of the few bits of brush in the wind masked the steps of those that hunted in twilight. Dooic? he wondered. Christ, not again.

Then he saw it, a streak of grey in the distance. It ran weightlessly over the sand, a blurred ripple of wolf-coloured feathers and the pale gleam of a beak like a scythe blade.

There was nowhere to run and no hope of outdistancing the bird, but Rudy ran. He felt the grinding pain in his leg and rib and ran anyway, sprinting desperately into the twilight, without any thought but hopeless escape, like trying to outrun a speeding car. Rocks bruised his feet, and his breath sobbed in his lungs. Behind him, he could hear the soft, light thud-thud-thud of clawed and padded feet. He couldn't look back; his mind blanked to everything but staying on his feet and running faster. He felt no pain, no tiredness, only desperate terror. He ran blindly into the sinking twilight.

When he fell, his first thought was that his bad leg had given out. But the hands he threw out to catch himself met nothing, and he plunged over the shallow cliff and down through a yielding tangle of branches that had masked the pit beneath. In the

half- light and confusion, he felt twigs tear his hair. He slammed into something wooden and rough-barked that took the skin off his face as he half-rolled, half-slid down the last two or three feet to land in the fresh-turned earth below. Too dazed to understand, he rolled over and looked up. Ten feet above him, skylined on the edge of the brush-fringed cliff, the horrible predator bird stood, cocking its head to look down at him, as if at a loss to understand how he had suddenly got down there. For a heart-stopping moment, Rudy wondered if it would jump down after him. He could never fight it in this pit, even if he hadn't broken his sword, or his arm, or both, in falling. But the bird only ruffled up its feathers in disgust, opened its swordlike bill, gave a hoarse honk of displeasure, and stalked away into the dusk.

Rudy leaned back against the post behind him and closed his eyes. H e felt that he could sleep or faint or die - it didn't matter which. But after a time, he told himself he wasn't out of the soup yet and he'd better sit up and take notice if he didn't want to come to a bad end. He opened his eyes and looked around. Fantastic. I've fallen into a mammoth trap. There was nothing else it could possibly be. Most of the overroofing brush had been pulled down in his fall, revealing the edge of the pit against the fading sky. The place smelled of new-dug earth, and white fingers of roots poked from the black walls near the top. In the centre of the pit, three huge stakes had been driven into the floor, and it was against one of these that he'd fallen. He used it to pull himself upright and pressed his hand to his abraded cheek. Cheer up, he told himself. You could have impaled vowself on the way down.

Now who the hell, he wondered, would build a mammoth trap out here? Is there a town of some kind...? White Raiders! Fantastic.

He slipped back down the pole to slump at its base, his head supported in his hands. Maybe I should have impaled myself, he thought. At least that would be fast. How come just when things look blackest, I turn around and they get worse?

All I really need now to make things perfect, he reflected bitterly, is a mammoth. The ground shook.

Distantly, the high, squealing trumpet of a beast in pain reached him, along with the booming thud of massive weight in flight and the swift pounding of hooves.

// / stay right where I am, Rudy thought tiredly, the goddam thing will land directly on top of me and then I'll be mashed flat and out of this whole mess.

No, he decided. With the way things have been going lately, I'd just be maimed and then I'd still have to deal with the Raiders. But Christ, they have horses. Even whole and healthy, I couldn't run from them.

What the hell. He lurched to his hands and knees and crawled to the corner of the pit closest to the direction from which the mammoth was coming, where he would have the most chance of its falling over and past him as it went down. The ground rumbled with the earthquake of its feet; it was squealing like a bugle, the sound shrill in Rudy's brain. The noise was like an approaching Panzer division, inescapable, blotting him into a dusk-enshrouded nightmare of noise and fear. The vibration of it shook his bones. Then he looked up and saw it silhouetted against the sky - a massive brown head, a mountain of flesh as large as a two-storey house, its trunk unflung and its eyes red with savage pain and fury. Dark blood splattered its pounding feet to the

knees, Trapped below it, Rudy could only stare upward in horror. The sound of its feet, its voice, and the sea roar of the hooves went round and round in his brain. A horse and rider flashed past on the very lip of the pit, the man's braids gleaming whitely in the gloom. Hypnotized, Rudy watched the mammoth balk and swerve from the edge; its teetering feet showered him with dislodged rock and earth as it hung suspended above him. In what looked like a slow-motion cinema, he saw the man on horseback remove an arrow from his quiver and nock it as the mammoth shied and raised its trunk in a deafening scream of rage. The horse reared in panic, hooves inches from the edge; the rider drew his bow and aimed through the thrashing melee of shadow and weight and motion, of flying mane and fur and the titan bulk of the thing bearing straight down on top of him. In slow motion the arrow left the bow, floating, it seemed to Rudy, with calm deliberation across the dozen feet of intervening distance, to bury itself to the feathers in the mammoth's glaring red eye. The huge beast flung itself upward with a final scream of agony, rearing on its treelike hind legs, and seemed to hover, weightless, over the pit in which Rudy sat, trapped and immobile with terror. Then, like a mountain avalanche, it fell.