Darwath 2 - The Walls Of The Air (29 page)

“But can't you feel it?” Rudy demanded helplessly. “It's—it's like a boy fighting a man. I'll never…”

“If you keep saying never,” Ingold replied mildly, “you'll come to believe it. If his back is to the wall, a boy has to fight a man, doesn't he? And sometimes he can win.”

Rudy subsided into silence. Above the fog, the sky was growing perceptibly darker, the first chill winds of evening drifting down from the unseen heights…

Winds. The endless winds of the plains.

With meticulous bounding-spells and limits, Rudy summoned the winds.

They were icy cold, but they smelled of the stone and glaciers above. Thin, steady, and strong they blew, riding gray horses up from the gully, breaking the fog before them like startled ghosts. Cloudy shapes rolled away from the path and retreated ponderously from the sloping land. Trees shook wetness down on the pilgrims disapprovingly in the new strength of the winds that whipped Rudy's long, wet hair into his eyes. He started down the path, Ingold leading the burro silently behind.

They camped that night in open ground, under the shadow of the higher peaks. Ingold circled the camp with spells of protection, visible to a wizard's sight as a faint ring of foxfire around the perimeter, but nothing threatened them throughout that whispering night. In the morning, the clouds had cleared somewhat, and Ingold pointed out the pass which they sought, a narrow notch in the blackness of the mountain wall. Throughout the day it seemed to shift unaccountably to the northward, and at times the trails Ingold chose appeared to lead nowhere near it.

They were in high, treeless country now, where rocks towered as proud as goddesses above the trail. An occasional twisted live oak or clumps of scented heather clung to the barren slopes, and water rushed down in veils of glimmering lace, or boiled in rock channels whose depths showed rust and pewter and the velvet green-black of moss. The trail here was perilous, switching back and forth across the steep stone of the mountain's flank, overhung by massive boulders. In places the trail was buried under single boulders or great spills of talus and boulders mixed, deadly testimony to the spells that guarded Quo. Rudy wondered what would have happened to him at this point, had Ingold not walked at his side.

Ingold led the way now, picking out the tangled trails with preternatural skill. Rudy was surprised at his own exhaustion following yesterday's efforts. Try as he would, he could not see half the illusions that Ingold did. It certainly would never have occurred to him to cross the boiling rapids of a swollen river, as Ingold did, wading through a ford at the place that looked to be the deepest and most deadly. Nor would he have found the trail that led over a seemingly sheer cliff.

And then there was the bridge.

“What's wrong with the bridge?” Rudy wanted to know. The great span of moss-grown stone arched proudly over the canyon, its curved blue shadow faintly visible on the thorn and boulders that choked the thread of stream far below.

“It isn't there,” Ingold replied simply.

Rudy looked again, then walked to the threshold and struck the stone with his staff. Wood clunked solidly on rock.

“Pieces of this road are unfamiliar to me,” the wizard went on, “and the road has changed recently—become more dangerous, I believe. But I have crossed this gorge here dozens of times. There is no bridge.”

“Maybe it has been put up since you were here last?”

“At the beginning of this summer? I hardly think so, with all the moss that's grown on it Look at how worn the stones are, there along the railing. The bridge looks as if it were there from the beginning of time. And since I know it wasn't…” He shrugged. “It was never there at all.”

“I seem to remember,” Rudy said judiciously, “something you once said to me about disbelieving your own senses because of something you believe to be true…”

Ingold laughed, remembering their first conversation in the old shack in the California hills. “I am paid,” he said humbly. “If, when we cross by hardier means, the bridge proves to be real and not illusion, you may revile me in any terms you please, and I shall bow meekly to the lash.” But when they scrambled, scratched and bleeding from forcing the recalcitrant Che up the impossible trail out of the gorge, Rudy looked back and saw that the stone bridge was only a single strand of willow withe, as frail as a spider web, on which the wizards had threaded their illusion. From there he could see the bone dump, too, at the bottom of the cliff below.

Kara had come this way, Rudy thought. And Bektis, too, and Ingold, in his youth. Had it been this bad then? It was one hell of a price to pay for safety.

“Hey, Ingold? If Quo stands on the Western
Ocean, and the walls of air defend the landward side—has anybody ever tried to assault it by sea?”

“Oh, yes,” the wizard said. “It's been tried.”

Rudy thought about it and of his horror of the ocean and of deep water and of the many things that could happen out on those dark depths. The thought wasn't pleasant.

This, then, was the other side of power—the power that isolated wizards, that made them vagabonds, exiles in their own world, the power that drew them together. He remembered the look in Alde 's eyes the first time he had called fire from cold wood:

You sought wizardry, he told himself. And here it is. A bridge of illusion and the bones below.

They traveled for hours through narrow canyons or followed rock ledges on the high peaks, slippery with ice. Twice they tried to force shortcuts over the bare, tawny flanks of the mountain, only to be driven back by the steepness of the ground. In the end, the trail petered out entirely, vanishing into the stony wastes. As they stood panting on the dark slope of a tumbled ruin of shale, Rudy looked up toward the pass, only to find that somehow he and Ingold had overshot it by miles, and it now lay to the south of them, the glaciers that crowned it gleaming palely in the heatless sky.

Ingold leaned on his staff, as motionless as a statue, with only the tautness of his mouth and the angry glitter of his eyes betraying him. Somewhere in the distance, Rudy heard the whine of the wind and the angry buzz of a rattlesnake. Other than that, the world was utterly still, as barren of life as it had been when the sun had first sung the world up from the sea. The wizard turned on his heel and started back along the false trail without a word.

Early evening found them in a deep, narrow valley thick with trees, at whose lower end lay a black tarn of still and oily water. “This place is not familiar to me at all,” Ingold said quietly, eyeing the gloomy wall of tangled trees that all but covered the trail. “I think the wood is wider than we suppose. Can you see there, that blurring along the farther edge? It deludes the eye. I should be surprised if we can cross it before full dark.”

Rudy glanced uneasily over his shoulder for perhaps the thousandth time that day. He hated the smell of the woods, but he found he loathed the water more. A wet, white mist had begun to curl from its dark surface. Wreaths of it floated among the first of the trees. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “But I'd sooner try that than camp near that water.”

“So would I, if you want the truth.” Ingold gathered the lead-rope to hand and led the way into the woods, spells of clearing on his lips.

The black trees grew very densely, the space between them choked with glossy-leaved holly, dark ivy, and wild grape that spilled across the path, tangling the pilgrims' footsteps. The valley mists seemed to follow them, sliding among the thorny trunks like white cats. Darkness thickened in the woods, and Rudy, tentatively adding his own clearing-spells to Ingold's, felt the magic that bound this place together into a single murky entity, a knot of hostility and evil. Twice they lost the path entirely, and Rudy began to wonder if the trees themselves were moving.

“This is getting monotonous,” Rudy panted, after the fourth time they had to halt and hack Che's packs clear of brambles with the little hatchet. The burro stood in shivering panic, the whites of his eyes showing all the way in a gleaming rim. “We gotta back out of this and try going around. We're never gonna get anywhere this way.”

“Again with your never,” Ingold reproached. But in the deepening darkness, Rudy could see that the old man's face was lined with concentration and weariness under the bleeding thorn scratches. Having pulled the donkey free, they advanced a few feet and looked back. The path behind them was gone.

Rudy cursed. Ingold sighed patiently and shut his eyes as if in meditation, bowing his head like some strange species of moss-grown tree himself. After a moment, Rudy saw his brow tighten in concentration and heard the deepening draw of his breath. Darkness seemed to tighten like a net. Rudy became aware of restless rustles and scurryings in the gloom around them. Things whistled in the trees, signaling, he thought.

Finally Ingold's tense shoulders relaxed, and his eyes opened. “In my day there was an enchanted wood in these hills,” he said, “but not like this. Unfortunately, as you may have seen, the wood fills this valley from end to end, and the mountains on both sides are steep. But at this rate, if we went on, we would stand a chance of being trapped farther in. If that happens, I would rather it happened in daylight.”

They turned back, and Rudy saw that the path they had taken into the woods had now disappeared ahead of them. He muttered a few choice curses at Lohiro and company and followed them up with clearing-spells that Ingold had taught him. The woods proved no easier to get out of than they had been to enter, and it was fully dark by the time they reached the edge. They made camp among the thinner trees by a stream, and Ingold drew the protective circle double and triple wide on the musty leaves underfoot.

It had been a great many nights since Rudy had called up Alde 's image in the flames. But Ingold still studied his crystal by the flickering glow of the fire. Exhausted in body and spirit, Rudy watched him, following the movement in the blue hawk eyes as they sought whatever they sought among the glinting facets. His own visions in the crystal table at the Keep came back to him—bright blue eyes, as wide and cold as the sky, seemed to stare into his, glittering like the diamond surge of foam over raw bones. The image followed him down into a restless sleep.

He dreamed of bones—bones lying in darkness, though in the dream he could see in the dark; the faint gleam of witchlight touched the ever-repeating curve of skull, rib, and pelvis in thin slips of ghostly silver. The dry, brown moss that the bones lay upon was slimy here, wetted with corruption and crawling with nameless and unspeakable white life. Around him, the red eyes of scavenger rats flickered in the dark. Something moved, hopping awkwardly. An eyeless white toad burped greasily at him from the top of a deformed skull. More toads hopped among the bones, slipping in the muck as they fled the touch of the witchlight. Rudy moaned, trying to fight his way clear of the horror of the dream, to turn his eyes from the hideous spectacle that he now saw covered the blackness of the uneven cavern floor for miles like a rotting swamp. Stalagmites rose through the filth like ghostly trees, and red eyes flickered and dodged around their bases. He heard the sticky scrambling of furtive feet in the dry, brown moss that was decaying and turning to dusty gray powder, where it was not horribly damp. He moaned again, sickened and faint. This time, however, it was not he who cried out, but the man he saw leaning against the dark entrance to some cavern beyond. His face was turned from Rudy, but Rudy knew him—would know him anywhere, whatever happened. The witchlight gleamed on white hair and on the galled ring of flesh visible between mitten and sleeve. Then there was silence, broken only by the rustling of millions of tiny feet among the moss and bones…

… among the leaves of the forest floor!

Che's squeal of terror brought Rudy up, sweating. The burro was tugging wildly at his tether, ears flattened back along his narrow skull, eyes staring. Beyond him, Rudy could see Ingold on his feet, at the edge of the pale glimmer of the protective circle. And still beyond, among the trees, was a limitless sea of red eyes.

“Holy Christ!” Rudy rolled to his feet and groped for his staff.

“No light,” Ingold said softly without turning his head. There was no wind, but the whisper of those tiny clawed feet was like the forerunner of a storm in the forest. Even where the darkness hid them, Rudy could sense the squirming of their packed bodies. Their dry, fetid smell was everywhere.

“Can they come through the circle?” Rudy whispered. He thought the white flame of it flickered brighter, dancing among the fallen leaves.

“No,” Ingold said softly. There was a creak and rustle overhead. Rudy looked up. The branches of the trees were furred with the rats, like foul fruit.

“Ingold, we gotta get out of here.”

“We'll do nothing of the kind,” the wizard stated in a voice like stone. “As long as nothing breaks the circle, we are safe.”

Trust him
, Rudy thought desperately, fighting the urge to run. He knows more about it than you do. Throughout the dark woods the rats shifted; the ferns were alive with their unholy scampering. He saw them clearly now, flowing in a gray-brown stream over the humped knees of the tree roots and through and around hollow logs. They swarmed in the stream bed and slithered in the deep, matted leaves, wrinkled noses pulled back from sharp, white teeth. Che squealed once again, jerking at his lead, his nostrils huge with terror.

Rudy saw the picket pin start from the ground and grabbed for the rope. The burro gave an almost human scream and flung himself backward, the pin tearing loose in a small fountain of leaf mold and dirt. The rope slid through Rudy's fingers. The burro put his head down and bolted over the edge of the circle and into the darkness.

It was as if the circling white flame had never been. The kicked leaves had not finished pattering down when the rats poured forward like a dirty river, hissing and squealing with rage. Rudy heard Che screaming and ran after him, striking with sickened horror with his staff at the vicious furry things that stuck like burrs to his boots, his coat, and his arms. One of the things launched itself from a tree in the darkness and struck his face; he thought he screamed, but later he wasn't sure, for at that moment he heard behind him the unmistakable roar of fire, and the light of it streamed over him. Flame splattered across the backs of the gray sea that seemed to be on the point of engulfing him. Turning, he saw Ingold swing his staff like a weapon, fire erupting from the length of it like a spewing banner of napalm.