Darwath 2 - The Walls Of The Air (35 page)

Quo—gone. Everyone you knew and loved and respected—gone. The Archmage gone—Lohiro, whom you loved like a son. The only ones left are novices like me, charlatans like Bektis, goodywives like Kara and her mother. Alwir's army is scratched, or worse, going into battle against the Dark with no backup, leaving the Keep unguarded for the Raiders or the Empire of Alketch or the Dark. And only you left, the last wizard, a lost soul like I was in California.

And yes, you might have guessed, but no, it wasn't your fault. But he knew already that Ingold would never believe that.

Heartsick, Rudy turned away. He explored for a time the roofless remains of the ancient school, lecture halls where the carved benches had been swept and scarred by fire, laboratories and workrooms whose furnishings were torn and twisted by wild and incomprehensible violence, glittering in the chill, pale light with shattered glass and broken gemstones, and libraries, their couches and seats ripped, charred, and acid-eaten, with the leaves of books strewing the rain-damp pavements or plastered like wads of crumpled leaf mast in corners. In one such chamber he found a harp, half-hidden in a wall niche and protected by fallen timbers, the only whole and untouched thing in that world of ruin and desolation.

As he carried it down the steps, on which moss was already beginning to grow, to where they had tethered the burro, it came to him what this ruin meant. Without the school, later generations of wizards, no matter what their inborn talents, would be like him, untaught callers of fire, hopeless dreamers groping for a mode of expression that they could not find.

Or worse, he thought. A mage will have magic…

If you can't find good love, then you will have bad.

Wind rippled in his long hair and chilled his fingers as be packed the harp onto Che's back. They could take at least one thing, he thought, from the ancient city by the Western
Ocean. One thing, out of all this destruction. He pulled the coarse, heavy fur of his buffalohide coat tighter around his neck and stood for a time in the shifting, patchy light of white sun and opal mist, staring out at the sea.

He thought of the Keep of Dare.

Not as he had often remembered it—the candlelit darkness of Alde 's quiet rooms and the mazes stretching in shadows within those ancient walls—but from outside, as he had seen it only once, the morning he and Ingold had taken the road for Quo. An almost cinematic image of it formed in his thoughts—black and square and solid against the snow that lay thick around its walls, impenetrable, enigmatic, self-contained. He saw the black loom of the Snowy
Mountains behind it and smelled the cold, biting freshness of the pine-sharp glacier winds. And with the image, he felt a need blossom in his heart, a yearning to be there, as urgent as lust or starvation. But he felt it from outside himself, as if the thoughts of another had been projected into his heart.

Looking up, he saw again the black and curiously regular shape of the knoll by the sea, the dark stump of Forn's Tower. Through the lacework of the bare trees he saw the small figure standing, arms raised, mantle billowing in the freshening winds from the sea. And he knew that what he felt was a call, and that the calling came from the man who stood alone at the heart of the last ruined citadel of wizardry. The last wizard, an exile gypsy vagabond with a sword at his hip and his back to the wall, was calling them all—the second-raters, the flunk-outs, the novices, the charlatans, and the goodywives. He was calling anyone, in fact, capable of hearing—calling them to meet him at the Keep of Dare.

Ingold came striding down from the knoll soon after, his face set and harsh, his eyes bitter and frighteningly cold, a stranger's eyes. Rudy scrambled off his perch on the rail of the colonnade to greet him, but there was nothing to greet in that blind, icy stare. “Come with me,” Ingold ordered briefly. “There is one thing yet we must do.”

The wizard scarcely spoke to Rudy again that afternoon.

Rudy fetched the burro in silence and in silence followed the old man down the blasted shore to the collapsed ruin beside the gatehouse. The terraced roofs had supported storey after storey of incomparable gardens, and these had fallen in on one another, tangling trees, masonry, flowers, earth, tumbled pillar, and broken beam into one colossal pyramid of wreckage. Ingold hunted around it until he found what had been a wide window that would still admit them to the ruined lower hall, then slipped like a cat among the precariously balanced blocks of half-fallen granite, working his way downward and inward. Rudy followed unquestioningly, although Ingold had bidden him neither to go nor to stay. In places, they could walk beneath ceilings that moved and groaned with the weight pressing on the damaged arches. In places, they had to climb piles of fallen rubble. Once they crouched to slide beneath a mighty lintel stone that was cracked right through the middle, supporting by equilibrium alone literally tons of colored stone, decked incongruously with dangling curtains of trailing yellow leaves. As he scrambled, panting, to keep up, Rudy half-feared that Ingold was seeking his own death in this place, for the wizard had turned suddenly strange and frightening, remote in his bitterness and rage. It was possible—logical, even—that he would arrange to perish with the others, in the city that had been his home.

But as they wriggled from the last rubble-clogged stairway into the broken vaults, Rudy understood why Ingold had come.

The bluish glow of witchlight slowly filled the long, narrow hall. It picked out the gold on the bindings of the books there, the smooth sheen of cured leather covers, and the spark of emerald or amethyst on decorated clasps. Like a ghost returned to the land of the living, Ingold moved down the rows of the reading tables, his blunt, scarred hands touching the books as a man might touch the face of a woman he had once loved.

It was obvious they couldn't take all. There were hundreds of volumes, the garnered wisdom of centuries. But, fatally incomplete as it had been, knowledge was the heart of Quo, as it was the heart of wizardry. To protect that knowledge was the reason for the city's existence, the justification for the rings of spells that circled the place so tightly that even after the death of every person there, the image of Quo could not be called in water or fire or gem.

Silently, Ingold touched the locks and chains that bound the books to their slanted desks, and the chains clattered faintly as they fell away. He brought two volumes back to where Rudy waited in the doorway and handed them to the younger man as if he were a nameless servant “You'll have to come back for more,” Ingold said curtly and turned away.

In all, they salvaged two dozen books. Rudy had no idea which they were, or why these were chosen and not others, but they were all large and heavy and loaded Che down unmercifully. Ingold scavenged material from a curtain to make rough satchels for himself and Rudy to carry what could not be put in the packs; after one look at the old man's face, Rudy dared not complain of the extra weight. When they crept from the rubble for the last time, Ingold turned back and wove spells of ward and guard over the whole of the ruin, that neither rain nor mold nor beasts should enter there, that all things should remain as they were, protected, until he should come again.

By then it was dark.

They camped on the open beach. If the Dark still lurked in that dead city, the ruins offered too many hiding places for them. And, Rudy thought, as line after line of the spelled circles of protection faded, glittering, into the air around the camp from the tips of Ingold's moving fingers, too many ghosts walked those silent streets for comfort The night was cool, with the smell of distant rain; but over the ocean, the clouds broke to reveal a moon as rich and full as a silver fruit, its light frosting the billowed clouds into ski slopes of dazzling white. The crackling of the driftwood fire mingled with the slow surge of the waves in an echoing whisper of California.

Home
, Rudy thought. Home.

He took the harp he'd found from its makeshift wrappings and ran hesitant fingers over its dark, shapely curves. The fire caught in the silver of its strings and touched the patterns of red enamel inlaid in the black wood of the sounding board. Like most Californians of a particular generation, Rudy had mastered sufficient guitar chords to get himself through epics like “Light My Fire”; but this instrument, he sensed, was designed for music of a kind and beauty beyond his comprehension.

He caught the glint of Ingold's watching eye. “Do you know how to play this?” Rudy asked hesitantly. “Or how it's tuned?”

“No,” Ingold said harshly. “And I'll thank you not to play it, either, until you know what you're doing.” He turned and looked out to sea.

Quietly, Rudy wrapped up the harp again. Maybe Alde can teach me, he thought. Anyway, somebody at the Keep should know. He felt as if he half-knew already what its sound should be and understood Ingold's not wanting to hear it bastardized.

“Its name is Tiannin,” Ingold added after a moment, still not looking at him.

Tiannin
, Rudy thought, the way-wind, the south wind on summer evenings that sowed restlessness and yearning in the heart like wind-borne seeds. He strapped the harp into the packs, with mental apologies to the hapless Che, and started back toward the fire. In the dark beyond their camp, he could see the broken line of the colonnade, his wizard's sight picking the merged patterns of flowers, hearts, and eyes that flowed down the colored stone. Against the sky, the dark bulk of Forn's Tower rose, like the burned stump of a dead tree under the azure glow of the sea horizon. Westward, moonlight gleamed on the surge of the waves, opal lace on the white breast of the beach.

Against the black wall of the cliffs, the elusive wink of Starlight flashed on pointed metal.

Rudy's breath, his heart, and time itself seemed to stop. As if he had heard something, Ingold looked up, then out into the darkness that even to Rudy's sharpened perceptions revealed nothing more. The leaping brightness of the fire showed hope in his face that was almost terrible to behold. But for a long while, there was nothing in the night but the surge of the ocean and the wild hammering of Rudy's heart.

Then in the outer dark, that twinkle of pronged gold came again, with a stirring in the shadows along the beach. Rudy started to move, but a hand touched his wrist, stilling him, and he felt Ingold's lingers shaking.

A distant flicker of moonlight shone on the crescent end of a staff and was echoed still more brightly on loose, fire-colored hair. The wind picked up the motion of a dark cloak, billowing it briefly behind the man who walked along the ocean's edge, his tracks dark, enigmatic writing in the sand behind him.

Rudy knew their camp was wreathed in cloaking-spells fully as elusive as the walls of air that still circled the tomb of Quo, but the man looked straight toward them; in the moonlight, he could be seen to smile. The long stride quickened. Ingold's hand closed like a crushing vise on the bones of Rudy's wrist.

A dozen yards from the camp, Lohiro broke into a run. Ingold was on his feet instantly, striding out to meet him, catching his hands in greeting. Moonlight showed the old man and the young together, and gleamed on silver hair and gold and on the gnawed skeleton that lay half-buried in the sand at their feet.

“Ingold, you old vagabond,” Lohiro said softly. “I knew you'd come.”

“Why did you stay?” Ingold asked later, when they'd drawn the Archmage into the circle of their fire. Lohiro glanced up from the meal of pan bread and dried meat he had been devouring. To Rudy's eyes, he looked thin and hunted; the sharp face was worn down to its elegant bones. •In the bright gold mane that fell almost to his shoulders, scattered streaks of silver caught the firelight. His eyes were as they had been in Rudy's vision in the crystal— wide and variegated blue, like a kaleidoscope, flecked all through with dark and light, and containing that odd, empty expressionlessness Rudy had noticed before. After seeing Ingold before the ruins of Forn's Tower, it made sense.

“Because I couldn't get away.” Lohiro laughed, briefly and bitterly, at the sharpness of Ingold's glance. “Oh, the Dark are gone,” he reassured them, in a taut, ironic voice. 'They left the same night, clouds of them, their darkness blotting the stars. But I— It took the lot of us to weave the maze, my friend. One man couldn't pick that mesh apart."

“Yet they left?”

The skeletal white fingers gestured upward. “Through the air,” he said. “Over the maze itself.”

Ingold frowned. “How could they? The mazes extend for miles above the town.”

Lohiro paused, then shook his head wearily. “I don't know,” he said. “I don't know.”

“Were you taken by surprise?” Ingold asked quietly.

The Archmage nodded. Behind him, his staff was stuck upright in the sand like a spear, the firelight glimmering off its points.

“By the Dark Ones from the Nest in the plains as well?”

“No.” Lohiro raised his head, a little surprised at the question. “No, they had left their Nest to join the assault on Gae. Didn't you— Of course you wouldn't know.” He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “We knew they'd left the plains to attack Gae—oh, the night it happened, I think. We'd all been going crazy for weeks. We had councils, committees, and research throughout the watches of the night. .Teams of first-year students dug through the old records in the library. Thoth the Recorder turned out his most ancient documents, things so old they were held together by cobwebs and spells alone. It reminded me of that old joke about the miser whose favorite camel had swallowed a diamond.” He shrugged. The points of his shoulder bones stood out sharply under the dark cloth of his robe. “But we turned up nothing much to the point. Only…” He hesitated, as if struggling with himself, and the dark, swooping brows were knotted in momentary pain.

“Only—what?”

Lohiro looked up again and shook his head. “It was very late. Thoth, Anamara, and I were still awake, but I think almost everyone else had gone to his bed. We'd all seen the fall of Gae, one way or another. There was a great heaviness over the town. Still, I don't think any of us were uneasy for our own safety. It happened—suddenly.” He snapped his long fingers. “Like that. A great explosion—I've never seen the like. You saw what it did to the tower.”