Darwath 2 - The Walls Of The Air (11 page)

In all this empty vastness the travelers met no one, and the solitude, far from bringing loneliness, created a kind of measureless peace in Rudy's soul. They seldom spoke these days, but neither seemed to feel the lack. Sentences uttered two and three days apart took on the flow of conversation. Ingold would point out the burrow of the tarantula-hawk or the tracks of the little yellow cat-deer; sometimes Rudy would ask about an unfamiliar cactus or type of rock. Twice they felt the presence of the Dark Ones, seeking them on nights when the wind died down. But for the most part, they were utterly alone.

“How long were you in the desert?” Rudy asked, after a long time of walking in silence.

“Forever,” Ingold replied and smiled at the startled look Rudy gave him. Since the start of their journey, the pale cloud-cover had not broken; in the shadowless light, the wrinkles in his windburned face seemed very dark. “You see, the desert is my home. Quo is my heart-home, the place of my belonging. But I was raised in the desert. I have traveled it from one end to the other, from the borders of the Alketch jungles to the lava hills that rim the northern ice, and still I do not know it all.”

“Was this when you were village spellweaver?”

“Oh, no. That came much later, after King Umar, Eldor's father, had me exiled from Gae. No. For fifteen years I was a hermit down in the split-rock country, the land of empty hills and sky. I would be months alone there, with nothing but the wind and stars for company. I think I once went for four years without seeing another human being's face.”

Rudy stared at the wizard, horrified but uncomprehending. It was inconceivable to him. Like most of his generation, he had seldom spent more than twelve hours alone at any one time. He could literally not imagine being alone, absolutely alone, for four years. “What were you doing?”

His feelings must have crept into his voice, for Ingold smiled again. “Looking for food. You do a lot of that in the desert. And watching the animals and the sky. And thinking. Mostly thinking.”

“About what?”

Ingold shrugged. “Life. Myself. Human stupidity. Death. Fear. Power. This was—oh, years ago. There was another hermit there then, a man of great power and kindness, who helped me at a time when I needed help desperately.” He frowned, remembering. Rudy saw in his eyes the brief echo of the young man he had been, wandering the solitudes of the wastelands alone. Then Ingold shook his head, as if dismissing an impossible thought. “He is very likely dead by this time, for he was quite old when he first found me, and I was only a little older then than you are now.”

“Can you contact him?” Rudy asked curiously. “If he's a wizard, he might have some word about the wizards at Quo.”

“Oh, Kta wasn't a wizard. He was—I don't know what he was, really. Just a little old man. But no, it would be impossible for me or anyone to contact him. He would be found, if he wanted to be found, and if not…” Ingold spread his hands, showing them empty. “I haven't seen him in a good fifteen years.”

They walked on in silence for a time, Rudy's thoughts chasing one another randomly, his eyes picking out tiny tracks in the sand, patterns of wind, and the shapes and natures of plants that flickered dry and yellow against the empty sky. He was trying to picture Ingold as a young man, trying to picture any situation in which the wizard would be in desperate need of help, trying to envision someone capable of giving the old man what he could not find for himself.

The road mounted a small rise, coming out of its sunken bed to crest a barren ridge above yet another flat of salt-bush and stone. The veer of the wind whipped Rudy's long hair into his eyes. For a moment he wasn't sure if he saw or only imagined the distant glitter of something far out in the flatlands. Even when he paused to shade his eyes, he wasn't sure what it was—only that vultures circled over k, high in the wan air.

“What is it?” he asked softly as Ingold came back to stand beside him.

The old man didn't reply for a time. He stood, his eyes narrowed against the distance, showing no visible reaction. But Rudy could sense a tautness that grew in him, as if in readiness for a surprise attack.

“White Raiders,” Ingold said at last.

Rudy turned his eyes from the gruesome remains of the Raiders' sacrifice. It was nearly a week old. What the vultures and jackals hadn't gotten, ants had. But it was still fresh enough to be revolting. He concentrated instead on the cross that had been erected beyond the head of the stretched victim; it was seven feet tall and wreathed in complicated streamers of feather, polished bone, and glass. The cross itself was wood, rare in this treeless land, with a skull nailed in the join of the beams. The tufts of feathers and knotted grass twirled skittishly in the wind, reminding him weirdly of the candy skulls with roses in their eyes of the Fiesta de los Muertos.

“It's a magic-post.” Ingold walked around it, cat-footed, leaving barely a trace of tracks on the dry crumble of the turned-up earth. His fingers caressed lightly the smoothed wood, as if to read something there by his touch, then brushed the dangling glass. “That's odd.” He said it half to himself, like a man who found in his garden flowers not of his own planting. Rudy shivered and scanned the horizon, as if expecting to see the Raiders materialize like Apache from the pale wastelands of sand and thorn.

“Did the Raiders make it?”

“Oh, yes.” Ingold went over to the remains of the sacrifice, hunkering down to examine the loathsome bones. Rudy looked away. 'The Raiders will make a sacrifice in propitiation of something that they fear—you saw that in the valleys below Renweth—and usually, but not always, put up a magic-post to hold the soul of the tormented dead.“ He straightened up, frowning. ”Generally they will make the propitiation against the ice storms, which they consider to be evil ghosts; lately they have begun to do so against the Dark. But this…“ He came back to the cross, like a ghost himself in the pallor of the shadowless afternoon. ”This I have not seen.“ He moved a little way off, poking with his staff at the hard, cracked clay of the ground, the knobby yellow twigs of the catclaw snagging at his mantle and the blown dust blurring his tracks. ”They fear something, Rudy, and fear it enough to sacrifice one of their own band to divert its rage. But it wouldn't be an ice storm this far to the south—and it isn't the Dark."

“How can you tell?” Rudy asked curiously.

“I can tell by the pattern of the streamers and the marks scratched in the wood. This isn't the regular hunting ground of any tribe of Raiders that I know—they do not range the desert at all, but stick to the plains, following the bison and mammoth. Only the extreme bitterness of the winter and perhaps the coming of the Dark have driven them here.” He came back and collected Che's lead-rope again, for all the world like a ragged old prospector hunting for the motherlode among the cactus and ocotillo. “We shall have to be careful and cover our tracks,” he went on, turning back toward the road. “The Raiders prize steel weaponry and would in all probability cut our throats to steal our swords.”

“Great,” Rudy said fatalistically. “One more thing for us to worry about.”

“Two,” Ingold corrected him. “The Raiders—and whatever it is that the Raiders fear.”

But in the two empty days that followed, they saw no sign of White Raiders. Toward afternoon of the second, Rudy thought he could discern a dust-cloud and movement on the road ahead and he suggested concealment.

“Nonsense,” Ingold said. “Any Raider who raised dust higher than his own knees would be expelled from the band and left for the jackals.”

“Oh.” Rudy shaded his eyes and gazed into the clear grayish distance. “That's a hell of a dust for just one family, though.”

As they drew nearer, Rudy saw that this was indeed far more than a single family, or even several families. An entire town was on the move, as the refugees from Karst and Gae and the ragged survivors of Penambra had moved. A long line of swaying wagons was surrounded by a skirmishing ring of riders and a broad scattering of scouts afoot. The creak of leather and the barking of dogs sounded weirdly unfamiliar to Rudy's ears. He had not been aware of how used he had grown to the silence of the desert. At the head of the wagon train, a cloaked woman walked afoot, and it was she who hurried her steps to meet them as the mounted scouts drew in from both sides. Something in the arrangement of the band reminded Rudy of the way Ingold had said the dooic traveled, and he smiled to himself at the thought.

The woman threw back the hood of her cloak as she came toward them, revealing a long, plain face that had been just short of homely before it had acquired whip-cut scars from the tails of the Dark and the blotched burn of acid. Her warriors fell in behind her, grim, dusty men and women in sheepskin jackets with seven-foot longbows in their hands. The woman herself carried a halberd, which she seemed to use as a walking stick, its enormous blade glittering in the pale daylight.

“Welcome,” she called out to them as she came near.

“And well met on the road, pilgrims.” Close up, Rudy could see she was about five years older than he was, with a long, straight mare's-tail of black hair and the hazel eyes so often found in Gettlesand. “Where have you come from, that you're moving west? Are you from the Realm?” Hope, eagerness, and anxiety struggled in her face and in the faces of those behind her.

Ingold held out his hand to her and inclined his head in mingled greeting and respect. “We have come out of the Realm,” he replied. “But I fear we bear ill news, my lady. Gae has fallen. King Eldor is dead.”

The woman was silent, the hope stricken from her eyes. Around her, the warriors, men and women, exchanged quiet glances. Back in the train, a baby cried, and a woman shushed it.

“Fallen,” she said after a moment. “How fallen?”

“The city is a ruin,” Ingold said quietly. “It is the haunt of the Dark by night, of ghouls and beasts and slave dooic gone feral by daylight. The Palace burned, and King Eldor perished in its ashes. I am sorry,” he said gently, “to be the bearer of such news.”

She looked down, and Rudy saw her big, rawboned hands tighten on the shaft of the halberd, as if to steady herself, or to cling to it for support. She looked up, and her eyes were sick with weariness. “Have you come from Gae, then?” she asked. “Because if you're bound for Dele in the west, if you'd hoped to find refuge there…” She gestured behind her at the train, which was slowly coalescing around the strangers in the road. “About two-thirds of these people are from Dele. The rest are from Ippit, or the country around the Flat
River. I'm Kara of Ippit. I was— am—spellweaver of the village.”

Ingold looked up at her sharply. “You're a spellweaver?”

She nodded. “The priest always understood. And I've been able to help, with what powers I have…”

“Are you ranked?”

“No. I had to leave Quo after my first year there because my mother was ill.” Then she looked down at him with sudden eagerness, realizing what his question had meant. “Are you a spellweaver?”

“Yes. Is your mother?”

She nodded, and Rudy saw the quickening of new life from the dead exhaustion of her face. “Have you had any word, heard anything at all, from Quo?” she demanded. I've been trying so hard, trying for weeks, but I can't even get sight of the town. You're the first wizard I've seen since any of this began.“ She reached out to clasp his hand. ”You don't know how good it is…"

“I know very well,” he contradicted with a smile. “I haven't had word or sign from Quo or news of any other wizard but yourself since Gae fell. We're bound for Quo now, to find Lohiro and ask his help.”

A faint stain of color flushed up under the burnt brown of her skin. “Well,” she said, “I'm afraid your calling me a wizard is like calling that little burro of yours a battle-charger. In the same family, maybe, but different in kind.” She looked at his face again, the black line of her brow kinking suddenly, as if she sought some lost memory.

He smiled again. “The colt of a battle-charger, perhaps,” he said. “Where were you and your people bound for, Kara?”

She sighed and shook her head. “Gae,” she said simply. “Or the river valleys, anyway. We left Ippit for Dele, which was the nearest city. We couldn't hold out in Ippit —too many buildings had been destroyed, and the raiding of the Dark was too heavy. Three days out of Dele, we met a great train of people fleeing that town, most of them half-frozen and starving. We shared what food we had… We've been on the road for three weeks. We thought if we could reach the river valleys…” Her voice trailed off hopelessly.

The valleys are alive with the Dark. They're far thicker there than on the plains. King Elder's son Altir has been taken to the old Keep of Dare in Renweth at Sarda
Pass, where Chancellor Alwir has set up the government of what Is left of the Realm. But they are hard-pressed, too," Ingold went on, passing over the scene that Rudy and he had both glimpsed in the fire, the sight of Alwir and his troops turning aside the refugees of Penambra.

Kara nodded despairingly. “I feared that,” she whispered. “Have you heard of anywhere, anywhere at all… ?”

“Possibly. Tomec Tirkenson, the landchief of Gettlesand, has rebuilt the old Keep at Black Rock. I don't know how crowded they are there or how well supplied, but it may be, if you went there and threw yourselves on his mercy, he could give some of you a home.”

Kara glanced over her shoulder at the scruffy band of rangers at her back, and it seemed to Rudy that, without a word spoken, a motion was moved, passed, seconded, and voted—a swift council of desperation that had nowhere else to go. Her eyes returned to Ingold. “Thank you,” she said quietly. “We will go there, and if he turns us away, at least it's better than remaining in Ippit to die.” She straightened her broad shoulders and shook back her straight, heavy hair.

“Tirkenson has a bad reputation with the Church,” Ingold told her. “But he is a man of what mercy he can afford as Lord of Gettlesand and he knows the value of having a wizard in his Keep. Is your mother with you also?”

Kara nodded.

“And did she go to the school at Quo in her time?”

A rare glimmer of humor flashed behind those greenish eyes. “And mix with all that highfalutin booklarnin'? Not her.”