Darwath 2 - The Walls Of The Air (38 page)

No wonder Ingold walked in silence, a tumbleweed ghost on the desert road.

Only occasionally would the wizard rouse himself to give lessons in power that were, for days on end, their only means of communication. But his teaching was like everything else, brittle and bitter and cruel. He seemed to care very little whether Rudy learned anything or not; for him, Rudy felt, the lessons were simply a means of temporarily forgetting. He would throw unexplained illusions into Rudy's path, or deliberately wrap himself in a cloaking-spell and leave Rudy to search. For two days he had blind-folded Rudy, forcing him to rely on his other senses as they marched on in sightless silence. Without warning, Ingold had called forth blinding torrents of wind and rain and deadly flash floods in the washes, with which Rudy must cope or drown. By scorn and sarcasm and vicious invective, he pushed the younger man to learn stronger spells and taught him the tricky and terrible secrets of divination by water and bone.

Everything Ingold taught, he taught as a stranger. For the rest, he could not be bothered to speak at all.

Experimentally, Rudy's fingers formed chords, thirds and fifths. The tones of the harp sounded true. A wizard's harp, he thought, brought from the wizards' city. Did the spells that preserved it from harm keep it tuned as well? Cautiously, first with melody alone and then with groping chords, he found his way through the saddest and most beautiful of the Lennon-McCartney ballads, his mind and body bending to the harp, his eyes to the firelight and starlight on hands and strings. The music was clean, pure, and incredibly delicate, like a star caught in crystal, and he hated his own awkwardness and ignorance as unworthy of such beauty.

In the desert the coyotes yipped again, a full-throated chorus in the windy night. Rudy looked up and saw that Ingold had gone.

The moon had set. Rudy had no sense of the presence of the Dark, nor of any creature in the wastes of stone and cracked, parched clay, save those that made the place their home. Che dozed on the end of his tether.

Rudy set aside his harp and made a slow, careful examination of the camp. It was safe and secure within its rings of protective spells. Ingold's staff was gone. So was one of the bows.

Dogging a wizard by starlight was one of the less easy feats of this life. But Ingold's brutal training had paid off; Rudy picked up the turn of a branch and the scatter of sand that lay the wrong way to the wind, pointing a possible lead. He belted on his sword and picked up the staff that had once belonged to Lohiro the Archmage, taking his bearings from a notch in the hills and the shape and roll of the land. He stepped quietly away from the camp; then, turning back, he laid a word of warning on the whole outfit. Six feet farther off, he glanced back, and there was no trace of burro, fire, or packs to be seen.

He moved through the windy darkness like a ghost. Casting his senses wide, he occasionally found a trace of the old man—a place where a kit fox had unaccountably veered aside, or the slight scratch in the dirt on a rock face. He heard no sound, saw nothing moving in all the vastness of the frozen rocks, but twice his eyes returned to a humped black shadow where bare boulders broke the raw silver of clay flats. It was off the course of Ingold's trail. He could see nothing of the wizard in that jumbled outcrop of rock. But long meditation had given him a sense of dividing life from lifelessness. And once, on another windy desert night, he had glimpsed the shape of Ingold's soul, and that he would never forget.

Nevertheless, he had to get very close before he could be sure.

He stalked Ingold like a drift of wind in the night, as he had stalked his friends the jackrabbits. By this time he had a certain amount of experience as a hunter. But before he could reach the rocks, he saw Ingold move, a single turn of his head and the glint of a bitter eye in darkness. Then the wizard turned away again, scarcely even interested.

Rudy emerged from the concealing shadows. “You planning on coming back to camp tonight?”

“Is it any affair of yours?”

Rudy leaned on his crescent-tipped staff, annoyed at that steely arrogance. “Yeah, I'd kind of like to know if the Dark Ones are gonna put the munch on you.”

“Don't be stupid. We'll find violets in this desert before we find the Dark. Or haven't you been watching?”

“I've been watching.” Their voices were pitched low for each other's ears alone. Their bodies blended with rock and shadow; an observer at ten feet would have passed them by, unseeing. “But I don't figure I'm that much more clever than the Dark.”

“What's the matter, Rudy?” Ingold jeered. “Do you think I can't handle the Dark?”

“No, I don't.”

Ingold turned his face away and leaned his chin once more on folded hands and drawn-up knees.

“I think if it came to that, you'd love to get eaten by the Dark,” Rudy went on coldly, 'That way you wouldn't have to go back and tell Alwir the whole thing was a bust, and you'd still get credit for not being a quitter."

Ingold sighed. “If you think I'd undergo something as unpleasant as that over someone as essentially trivial as Alwir, your sense of proportion is almost as poor as your harp playing.” He glanced up, then continued impatiently, as if throwing a sop to a begging dog. “Yes, I was returning tonight.”

“Then why did you take a bow?”

Ingold was silent.

“Or did you figure I could carry the ball from here?”

“That's your choice,” the old man snapped angrily. “You've got what you want—you're a mage, or as much a mage as I can make you. You go back and play politics with Alwir. You go back and spin out the illusion that your power gives you either the ability or the right to alter the outcome of things. You go back and watch the people you care for die, either by your own hand or through your damned wretched meddling, and see what it does to you in sixty-three years. But until you do, don't sit there in self-righteous judgment of me or my actions.”

Rudy folded his arms and regarded the old man silently in the starlight. Hidden in the darkness of his drawn-up hood, Ingold's face seemed to be nothing more than a collection of angled bones, bruises, and scars amid a rough mane of dirty white hair. Halfway already to being a desert hermit again, Rudy thought. And why not? We blew it. The mages are gone. Whatever Lohiro might have been able to tell us, if the Dark did in fact release him, Ingold ended.

Quietly, Rudy asked, “So what do I tell them at the Keep?”

Ingold shrugged. “Whatever you please. Tell them I died in Quo. There would be some truth in that, anyway.”

“And is that what I tell Gil?” Rudy went on in a voice that shook with controlled anger.

The old man looked up, fury and the first life that Rudy had seen in him in weeks blazing into his eyes. “What does Gil have to do with it?”

“You're the only one who can get her back to her own world.” It wasn't until Rudy spoke that he realized the extent of his own anger. “You're the only one in the world who understands the gates through the Void. And you were responsible for getting her here in the first place. You have no right to be the cause of her being stuck in this universe forever.”

He felt the rage that surged through the old man, rage and some other emotion breaking the bleak passivity of self-torment in which he had been trapped since Quo. But, like his grief, Ingold's anger was silent and all inside. In a queer, stiff voice he said, “Perhaps it would be Gil's choice to remain in the world.”

“Like hell,” Rudy snorted. “For myself, I don't give a damn one way or the other. But she's got a life back there, a career she wants and a place in that world. If she stays here, she'll never be anything but a foot soldier, when she wanted to be a scholar; and she'll stay that way until she gets killed by the Dark or the cold or the next stupid war Alwir gets the Keep into. I care for that lady, Ingold, and I'm not going to have you stick her here forever against her will. You haven't got that right.”

The wizard sighed, and the life seemed to go out of him again, taking away even the bitter leaping of his anger. He sank his head slowly to his hands and said faintly, “No, you're right. I suppose I must go back, if only for that.”

Rudy started to say something else, but let his breath out with the words unspoken. Ingold's anger puzzled him, and this sudden capitulation bothered him even more. But he sensed the breaking of some bond of bitterness in the old man, a bleak self-hatred that had given him a kind of strength. Now there was nothing.

Quietly, he said, “I'll be back at the camp. Can you find your way there?”

Ingold nodded without looking up. Rudy left him there, walking slowly back along his own invisible tracks, the double points of his pronged staff winking in the desert starlight. Once he looked around and saw that the old man had not moved. The dark form was barely distinguishable from the rock itself, no more than a darkness against the muted, uncertain shape of the land beyond. As he walked back to the camp alone, Rudy could not remember having seen anyone so lonely or so wretched in his life.

“You think there's anybody home?” Moonlight drenched the town before them, a collection of little adobe boxes climbing the hills in back of the road. The distant trickle of water and thick clusters of date palms, black against the icy, glowing sky, marked where the stream came down out of the hills. Several houses had been blown apart by the Dark; but, by the look of them, it hadn't been recently. First quarter moon of autumn? Rudy wondered. Most of the bricks had been pillaged to reinforce the buildings that remained, turning them into little Individual fortresses covered on the outside from foundation to rooftree with elaborately painted designs, pictures, and religious symbols. On the nearest one, a beautiful woman stood with her feet on the back of a crooked devil, her left hand raised against a swarm of inaccurate, fishlike representations of the Dark Ones, her right arm and cloak sheltering a crowd of kneeling supplicants. By the light of the waning and cloud-crossed moon, the painting had a startling and primitive beauty, the colors lost in the moonlight but the outlines of the figures strikingly clear. For some reason, it reminded Rudy of the runes on the Keep doors.

“Possibly,” Ingold replied, in answer to his question. “But I hardly think they will unbar their doors at night.”

“It's you and me for the Church, then,” Rudy sighed, and started off through the shadows of the narrow streets, with Ingold drifting like a ghost at his heels. The poison, Rudy thought, was working its way out of the old man's system; if he seldom spoke, at least he seemed to realize whom he was talking to when he did. But Rudy missed his humor, the wry fatalism of his outlook, and the brief, flickering grin that so changed his nondescript face.

When they reached the Church, however, Ingold surprised Rudy by leading the way around to the back, where a narrow cell was built onto the rear of the fortresslike structure. He knocked on the heavy door. There was movement inside and the sound of sliding bars. The door was opened quickly and quickly closed behind them.

A short and slightly chubby young priest had let them in, a candle in his hand. “Be welcome…” he began, and then saw Ingold's face. In the soft amber light, the blood drained from his own face.

The priest's sudden silence called Ingold from his thoughts, and he looked at the young man, puzzled. The priest whispered, “It was you.” Ingold frowned. “Have we met?” The priest turned hastily away and fumblingly set the candle on the room's small table. “No—no, of course not I—please be welcome in this house. It is late for travelers —like yourselves—” He barred the door behind them, and Rudy saw that his hands were shaking. “I am Brother Wend,” he said, turning back and revealing an earnest, young face for a man in his early twenties. He was wearing the gray robe of a Servant of the Church. His head was shaved; but, by the color of his black eyebrows and sincere brown eyes, Rudy guessed his hair had been black or dark brown, like his own.

“I am the priest of this village,” Brother Wend said, babbling to cover up nervousness or fear. “The only one now, I'm afraid. Will you sup?”

“We've eaten, thanks,” Rudy said, which was true—and besides, he reflected, if things here were as bad as he'd seen them in the Keep, food was tight all over. “All we ask is a bed on your floor and stabling for our burro.”

“Certainly—of course.”

The priest went with him to put Che in the stables. While Rudy bedded the donkey down, he filled the priest in on all the news he could—of the fall of Gae, the retreat to Renweth, Alwir's army, and the destruction of Quo. He did not mention that Ingold was a wizard, nor indicate his own powers. Ingold, after the briefest exchange of amenities, had withdrawn to sit beside the small fire on the hearth and brood in silence. But throughout the evening, as Rudy and Brother Wend talked quietly in the shadows of the little room, the young priest's eyes kept straying back to Ingold, as if trying to match the man with some memory, and Rudy could see that the memory frightened him.

Rudy was just settling himself to sleep on the floor near the hearth when hurried knocking sounded at the door. Without hesitation, Brother Wend rose and slid back the bolts to let in two small children from the darkness outside. They were a pair of girls, eight and nine years of age, sandy-haired and hazel-eyed like the people of Gettlesand. In a babbling treble duet they outlined a confused tale of yellow sickness and fever and their mother and their little sister Danila, and last summer and tonight, clutching at the young man's sleeves and staring up at him with wide, frightened eyes. Wend nodded, murmuring soothingly to them, and turned back to his guests. “I must go,” he said softly.

“One or the other of us will let you back in,” Rudy promised. “Go carefully.”

When the priest had gone, Rudy got up to bar the door behind him. “Are you going to sleep?” he asked the silent figure by the hearth.

Ingold, staring into the fire, shook his head. He seemed hardly to have heard.

Rudy slid back into his abandoned blankets before they had a chance to grow cold and pillowed his head on the heavy volumes he'd carried from Quo—the only use, so far, that he'd seen for them. “You know that kid from someplace?” he asked. Again Ingold shook his head.