Darwath 2 - The Walls Of The Air (20 page)

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 practiced 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. I 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-gray 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 saber-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 disemboweled 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 to be was 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. For a 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-fetal 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 mist 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 Alde 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 colorless 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. I 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 gray 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 gray-brown of the land; the riders wore the same color. 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.