The Walls of Air

by Barbara Hambly

Chapter 3

  Forever after, Rudy's memories of the journey to Quo were memories of the wind. It never ceased, as integral a part of that flat, brown, featureless world as the endless ripple of the dried grasses or the bleak, unbroken line where the dark planes of ground and overcast sky met in an infinity of cold and emptiness. The wind blew from the north always, as bitterly cold as the frozen breath of outer space. It streamed down off the great ice fields where, Ingold said, the sun had not shone in a thousand years and where not even the woolliest mammoth could survive. It roared like a river in spate down eight hundred miles of unbroken flatlands, to bite the flesh to the bone. Ingold said that he could not remember a winter when it had blown so cold or so steadily, nor a time when the snows had fallen this far south. Neither in his memory, he said, nor in the memory of any that he had ever spoken to.

  'If it's usually even half this bad, it's no surprise we haven't met anybody,' Rudy commented, huddling as close to their wind-flattened fire as he could without the risk of self-immolation. They had made camp in a rolling depression of ground that Ingold identified as a beast wallow of some sort -bison or gelbu. 'Even without the Dark Ones, this part of the country would be a hell of a place to try and make a living. '

  There are those who do,' the wizard replied without looking up. Wind twisted their fire into brief yellow ribbons that licked the dust. By the restless light, only the prominences of his curiously reticent face could be made out - the tip of his nose, the wide-set flattened triangles of the cheekbones, and the close, secretive mouth. These lands are too hard for the plough and too dry for regular farming, but in the south and out in the deserts, there are colonies of silver miners; and here, close to the mountains, lie the cattle lands and the horse lands of the Realm. The plainsmen are a hardy breed,' he said, strong fingers

  twisting at the leaves of the fresh-water mallows he was braiding into a strand, 'as well they have to be. '

  Rudy watched him weaving the plants together and picked out by the leaping glow of the fire the shapes of the seeds, the petals, leaf and pod and stamen, identifying and fixing the plant in his mind and recalling what Ingold had told him about its curative properties. 'Are we still in the Realm of Darwath?' he asked.

  'Officially,' Ingold said. 'The great landchiefs of the plains owed allegiance to the High King at Gae - in fact, as a legal entity, the Realm stretches to the Western Ocean, for the Prince-Bishop of Dele takes - took - his laws from Gae. But Gettlesand and the lands along the Alketch border have carried on a long battle with the Empire to the south, and I doubt that the breach will be healed, whatever Alwir's policies may be. ' He glanced up, a bright glint of crystal blue between the shadows of his hood and the muffler that wrapped the lower part of his face, the firelight reddish gold on his long, straight eyelashes. 'But as you can see,' he went on, 'the plains themselves are all but deserted. '

  Rudy selected a long stick and poked at the tiny fire. 'How come? I mean, I see all these animals, antelope and bison and jillions of different kinds of birds. You could make a pretty good living in this part of the country. '

  'You could,' Ingold agreed mildly. 'But it's very easy to die in the plains. Have you ever seen an ice storm? You get them in the north. Once in the lands around the White Lakes I found the remains of a herd of mammoth, chunks of frozen flesh scattered in head-high snow. The beasts had been literally ripped to shreds by the inferno of the winds. I've heard stories that the cold in the centre of those storms is such that grazing animals will be frozen solid so swiftly that they do not even fall, but stand, turned to ice and half-buried in snow, with the flowers they were eating frozen in their mouths. And the storms strike without warning, out of a clear sky. '

  'That would sure kill the property values,' Rudy assented with a shiver. But something undefined stirred in his memory, something he had read, or had heard read to him. . . Wild David's Body Shop in Fontana came back to him, with himself slouched in the erupted mess of split vinyl and filthy padding of David's old swivel chair, leafing through decayed copies of the Reader's Digest while a crowd of the local bikers argued profanely about what they wanted him to paint on the tank of somebody's Harley. . .

  'And if you haven't seen the effects of an ice storm,' Ingold continued, 'at least you have seen the work of the White Raiders. '

  An almost physical memory returned to Rudy in a rush - the sweetness of the opalescent mist of the river valleys below Karst, and the sour tang of nausea in his throat. The drift of smoke in the foggy air, the bloody ruin of what had been a human being, the raucous laughter of the carrion crows, and Ingold, like a grey ghost in the pewter light, his robe beaded with dew and a tag of bloody leather in his hands, saying to Janus, 'This is the work of the White Raiders. . . '

  Rudy shivered. 'Who are the White Raiders? he asked.

  The old man shrugged. 'What can I tell you of them?' he replied. They are the People of the Plains, the kings of the wind. They say that once upon a time their home was only in the far north, in the high meadows along the rim of the ice. But they haunt all the northern plains now and, as we have seen, have begun to invade the river valleys at the heart of the Realm. '

  On the edge of the narrow circle of the firelight, the donkey Rudy had named Che Guevara snorted and stamped at some sound in the distant night, his long ears laid back along his head. Distantly, Rudy caught the howling of prairie wolves. 'You know,' he said with forced casualness, 'I don't think the whole time we were on the road down from Karst I ever actually saw a White Raider.

  I knew they were following the train, but I never saw one. '

  'Well, they're most dangerous when you don't see them. ' Ingold smiled. 'And you're wrong, in any case. You did see one. The Icefalcon is a White Raider. '

  Of course, Rudy thought, more surprised by the fact that the Raiders didn't resemble the Huns or the Sioux than he was to learn that the Icefalcon was a foreigner among the dark-haired, blue-eyed people of the Wath. And now that he came to think of it, the Icefalcon wasn't of Bishop Govannin's Faith; at least he'd only sniffed in disdain at Gil's question on the subject. Rudy remembered the farmhouse in the mists again and shuddered.

  'That's the chief reason Alwir sent him on the mission to Alketch,' Ingold continued, setting aside his herbs and rising. 'Of anyone, a Raider would have the best chances of surviving the journey. ' He picked up his staff, preparing to make his usual brief inspection of their campsite before settling down to guard duty.

  'Yeah, but if he's the enemy, how did he get to be a Guard?' Rudy protested uneasily, and Ingold paused in the act of turning away, a shapeless dark blur against the paler sand of the bank beyond.

  'What is an enemy?* His scratchy voice seemed to come disembodied from the surrounding darkness. 'A great variety of strange people find their way into the Guards. I'm sure if the Icefalcon wanted you to know, he would tell you. ' And though Rudy could not see him move, the wizard seemed to fade from sight.

  Rudy shook his head in a kind of amazement. Ingold could be the least visible man he had ever met, seen when he wanted to be seen and otherwise all but invisible. It wasn't that he was shy, Rudy knew. The wizard observed the world like a hunter from an unseen blind; concealment appeared to be his second nature. Rudy wondered if all wizards were like that.

  He huddled, shivering, next to the tiny fire. The cold of the night was so intense that he could feel only a little of the fire's warmth, even at a distance of twelve inches. Already in the treeless plains, wood was scarce, and they were burning brushwood and buffalo chips. Unlike the more volatile wood fires, the chips gave off a steady, cherry-red glow, and the heart of the fire was like a rippling amber well of heat. In that well, images took shape under his idle attention - the jewelled darkness of Aide's rooms at the Keep, with the single sphere of gold floating around the flame of the candle as pure and beautiful as a fruit of light or a single note of music, and Minalde's face,
bent over a book, the sudden gleam of a tear on her cheek.

  Although he was fairly certain the tear was not for him, but for the fate of the heroine of her book, Rudy still ached to go to her, to be with her and comfort her. At first he had shied from seeking her image in the fire this way, not wanting to spy on her. But his longing to see her, to know that she was all right, had proved too much for him. He wondered if Ingold knew.

  For that matter, had Ingold ever sought the image of a woman he loved in the fire?

  Sudden wind lashed at the fire, tearing the image from its heart. Like ripped silk in a cyclone, the fire twisted first one way, then another. . . And Rudy realized that the wind was not from the north.

  It came from no direction - thin, cold, twisting. He looked up, light-blinded, at the sky; but by the time his eyes adjusted, he could see only the chaos of darkness. He started to rise, and a voice said quietly behind him, 'Stay where you are. '

  Somewhere in the night, he saw the flutter of trailing muffler ends and the glint of eyes. Wind stirred at the fire once more, and the renewed light flashed in the burro's glassy green stare and picked out the shape of Ingold's cloak. Turning his eyes skyward again, Rudy saw them, black against the black of the churning sky, a sinuous ripple of movement and the glint of claws and wet, shining backs. The Dark Ones rode like a cloud, north against the wind.

  Rudy realized his hand had gone to his sword hilt and slowly released it as they passed on by. His heart was hammering irregularly, his flesh cold. 'We were lucky,' he whispered.

  'Really, Rudy. ' Ingold stepped from the darkness to join him. 'Luck had nothing to do with it. '

  'You mean you made us invisible?'

  'Oh, not invisible. ' The wizard settled down by the fire and set his staff within easy reach of his hand. 'Merely persistently unnoticed. '

  'Hunh?'

  Ingold shrugged. 'Surely you've had the experience of not noticing someone? Perhaps you turned your head, or were momentarily distracted by something else, or dropped your keys, or sneezed. It is very easy to arrange for that to happen. '

  To all of them at once?' There was something a little awesome in such a collective lapse of vigilance.

  Ingold smiled. 'Of course. '

  Rudy shivered. 'You know, those are the first Dark Ones we've seen on the plains?'

  'Understandably. ' The wizard fished in his many pockets and located the yellowed crystal in which he was wont to seek the images of things far away. 'I have reason to believe those Dark Ones have followed us since we left the mountains, or at least have been patrolling the road across the plains. '

  'You mean, looking for us?'

  'I don't know. ' The wizard glanced at him across the dim glow of the fire. 'Because if that were so, it would mean that they know that we have lost contact with the wizards at Quo. '

  'But how could they?'

  Ingold shrugged. 'How do they know anything?' he asked. 'How do they perceive? What is the nature of their knowledge? They are utterly alien intelligences, Rudy, strangers to the very pattern of human thought. '

  Rudy was silent for a moment. Then he said, 'But I'm thinking that the easiest way for them to know we've lost contact with Quo is if they know what happened to the wizards there. ' He looked hesitantly across the fire. 'You understand?' 'I understand,' the old man agreed, 'and I would say so, too, but for one thing. I do not know what has befallen Quo, nor how the Dark Ones have contrived to hold the wizards under siege there. But if Lohiro were dead, I would know it. I would feel it. '

  'Then what do you think has happened?' Rudy insisted.

  But to that Ingold had no answer.

  Neither had those they asked, the few straggling bands of refugees that they met upon the road, fleeing east through the searing iron wind. For days at a time the pilgrims would travel absolutely alone through a universe of brown, rippling grass and shallow sheets of water -water pocked like hammered silver by rains, or more often frozen in bleak and shining expanses of grey ice. But twice in those first few

  weeks, Ingold and Rudy encountered the decimated remains of clans or villages, fleeing cold and fear and darkness. The stories those men and womerrltold were always the same: of small things that crawled down cold chimneys, or slipped between the window bars; of huge things that ripped doors from their hinges, or blasted down stone walls with the wrath of all the devils of the night; and of chill, directionless wind and the scatter of stripped bones upon the ground.

  'And wizards? Ingold asked of those circling the low glow of the dim campfire light.

  'Wizards. ' A fat, heavy-muscled woman with a face like a leathery potato spat scornfully into the fire. ' Lot of good their wizardry did them or any of us. I talked to a student out of Quo. They're all gone, hidden, locked up in a ring of spells, and they've left us to fend for ourselves. We won't see them till the Dark have gone. '

  'Indeed?' Ingold said, wrapping together and stowing away his packets of medicines. He had returned the band's hospitality within the makeshift circle of guards by healing the wounds either incurred in battle against the Dark or the White Raiders, or the effects of exhaustion and exposure. 'When was this?

  She shrugged. 'Months gone,' she said. 'He spent a night with us. We buried his bones and my husband's in the morning. Never knew his name. '

  'Fled, I say. ' the big patriarch of the clan rumbled. In the firelight, his greenish eyes, so common in Gettlesand, regarded them askance, but he did not ask how they came to be travelling alone and westward in these bitter times. 'Fled south, to the jungles and the Emperor of Alketch. '

  Ingold paused in surprise. 'Where did you hear this?'

  The big man shook his head. 'Stands to reason,' he said. Far out over the plains rose the thin silvery chorus of wolves crying the moon. The camp guards shifted, calculating their distance; nearby an ox lowed in fear and jingled its tether chain. There are no Dark in the Alketch, they say. But I'd sooner die free than live there. '

  'What do you mean, there are no Dark in the Alketch?' Rudy asked, startled.

  'So they say,' the patriarch told him. 'But to my mind, that's just the kind of thing the Emperor would put around to get slaves cheap. '

  The second band they met, many days later, was smaller, two men and a couple of skinny towheaded kids, all that was left of a village of silver miners from the south. The children watched them from wary eyes through tangles of fair hair and stole a hatchet and packet of cornmeal when Rudy's back was turned, but to Ingold's question of wizards, the older of them only said, 'Dead, I reckon. '

  'Why do you say that? Ingold asked gently.

  The boy looked at him with bleak scorn. 'Ain't everyone?'

  'In a way it isn't surprising,' Ingold said later as he and Rudy trudged on westward through that dry, silken sea of hissing grass. In the buffalo wallows and the ditches beside the road, last night's snow drifted in cold, gritty mounds or blew like sand over

  the pavement. 'Lohiro called all of the ranked wizards to him, to gather at Quo. I don't wonder that nothing has been heard of them. '

  Rudy was silent for a time, remembering the long road down from Karst and Ingold in darkness before the sounding doors of the belaboured Keep. 'You mean,' he said quietly, 'that no one else has any kind of magic help at all!'

  'Well - not necessarily. ' The old man scanned the skyline for a moment; then his eyes returned to Rudy's. 'There are those who never went to Quo at all, village goodywives, or self-taught spellweavers, or the closet-mages who never developed their powers, as well as the small-time fortunetellers whose art and ambition were insufficient to take them through the mazes to Quo. And below them there is a third echelon of wizardry, people born with a single talent - firebringers, finders, goodwords; children who can light "-dry tinder just by looking at it, or who can find things that are lost; women who say, 'Bless you,' and it seems to
stick; healers who pretend their power comes from their learning, rather than from the palms of their hands; people who generally 'suppress such powers in childhood and deny them in the confessional; and people whose powers are so slight as to deny them the dubious prestige of wizardry, who seek to avoid the social stigma of being mageborn. These are the only wielders of magic left to defend against the Dark. '

  'And you,' Rudy said.

  'And me,' the old man agreed.

  As day followed day and the silver westward road dwindled out of existence under a black-clouded sky, Ingold spoke more of wizardry. He told Rudy of its long conflict with the Church, of its ancient strongholds, and of the great mages of past eras, Forn and Kedmesh and Pnak, who ran with the wild horse herds of the northern plains. Sometimes Ingold would point out animal signs, or identify the few creatures hardy enough to be abroad in the savage cold - huge, shaggy-coated bison, gelbu like short-necked, humpless camels, tabby-striped wild horses, or the many birds of the endless grasslands. He spoke of their ways and habits, not as a hunter would see them, but as the beasts saw themselves, with their narrow intelligence and their cautious world wisdom. In time Rudy found himself understanding even some of Che the burro's thought processes and motivations, such as they were, though it didn't make the balky and chicken-hearted animal any easier to live with. Now and then the old man would ask about something he had mentioned earlier. After the first few times Rudy was forced to admit he hadn't been paying attention, he listened more closely. And as he listened, it made more sense, as with any branch of knowledge as more is learned of it.

  Often in the course of that journey, Rudy wished he hadn't been so successful in avoiding the efforts of a well-meaning school system to educate him. Most of what he learned seemed to him to be not magic at all, only a prerequisite course in knowledge he should have had but didn't: how plants grow, and why; the shape of the land and the sky; the motions of the air, and why wind blows as it does; how to meditate, to still the restlessness of the mind and focus it on a star, or a flame, or a single wisp of grass twisting in the wind; how to listen; and how to see the subtle differences in the silence and emptiness of the plains, the variations in the shapes of pebbles, the subtle shifts of wind and colour and the pitch of the ground. Besides being a wizard, Rudy figured, Ingold must be at least an Eagle Scout, for he understood survival, how to set

  up a camp unseen, how to find water in the dry places, and how to scrounge food from this most barren and unyielding of countrysides.

  As they walked, Ingold would occasionally stop to pick a plant from the roadside or point one out where it grew in the arroyos that laced the land as they moved south. After he had pointed out such a plant and described its growth and uses if any, Rudy found he had damn well better be able to repeat back everything about that plant. As a sometime artist, he had learned to observe; and after studying eight or ten different plants, he found he knew what to look for when he came across new ones. After a time it got to be a game, and he would seek them out for himself, asking Ingold about the unfamiliar ones and coming to the sudden enlightenment that any biology major could have introduced to him years ago - namely that there are similarities of structure and function in different groups of living things. The orderliness of it amazed and delighted him, as if he had walked for twenty-five years in a world of black and white and, turning a corner, had discovered colour.

  'Wizardry is knowledge,' Ingold said one afternoon as they sat on the white boulders that lined the bottom of an arroyo where they had taken shelter from the wind. The land was growing higher and less grassy, the waving fields of long brown grasses giving way to short bunchgrass and huge, scraggy-barked sagebrush. Dry washes cut the land, scattering it with stone and gravel. At the bottom of this one, a thin trickle of water ran, edged with ice even at high noon. It burned Rudy's fingers through his gloves as he filled the drinking bottles. Ingold sat on the rocks behind him, idly drawing the dry, yellowish blossoms of a dead stalk of kneestem through his fingers as he scanned, without seeming to, the banks of the gully against the pallid sky. 'Even the most talented adept is useless without knowledge, without the awareness of every separate facet of the world within which he must work. '

  'Yeah,' Rudy said, sitting back and stoppering the flask with stiff, clumsy fingers. 'But a lot of what you've been teaching me sometimes seems kind of useless. Like that kneestem you've got - I mean, it doesn't have anything to do with magic. It's just a weed. You said yourself it's worthless. '

  'It is worthless to us and to animals, having no value either as medicine or as food,' Ingold agreed, turning the dry wisp in his mittened fingers. 'But we ourselves are useless to other forms of life - except, I might point out, as sustenance to the Dark Ones. Kneestem, like you and me, exists for its own sake, and we must take that into account in all our dealings with the world that we hold in common with it. '

  'I see your point,' Rudy said, after a moment's consideration of how much of what he loved and valued was, objectively, pretty useless. 'But I didn't know jack about anything when I started magic. I called fire because I had to. '

  'No,' the wizard contradicted. 'You called fire because you knew it could be done. '

  'But I didn't know that. '

  Then why did you try? I think you knew in your heart that you could do it. I think you might even have done it as a child. '

  Rudy was silent for some time, sitting on the bleached bones of the rock. The wind

  moaned faintly along the banks above them, and Che flicked his long ears at the sound. There was no wind in the gullies. It was so still he could hear the water clucking softly at the ice. 'I don't know,' he said finally, his voice small and a little frightened. 'I dreamed about it, I think. I used to dream about a lot of stuff like that when I was a real little kid, like three or four years old, I remember dreaming I think it was a dream - I picked up a dry branch in our back yard and, holding it in my hand, I knew I could make it flower. And I did. These white flowers budded out all over it, just from my holding it, just from my knowing they would. Then I ran and told my mother about it, and she hit me upside the head and told me not to imagine stuff. ' The memory came back to him now, as clear as vision, but distant, as if it had happened to someone else. There was no sorrow in his voice, no anger, only wonderment at the memory itself.

  Ingold shook his head. 'What a thing to tell a child. ' Rudy shrugged it away. 'But I was always interested in how stuff was put together. Like cars - or anyway, I think that's why I was good with cars. How they work, and the sound and feel of whether they're right or wrong. The human body's the same way, I guess. And I think that's why I drew. Just to know what it was and how it all fits. ' The wizard sighed and laid the dead plant stem among the rocks. 'Perhaps it's just as well,' he said finally. 'You could never have gotten the proper teaching, you know. And there are few more dangerous things in the world than an untaught mage. ' New winds threaded down the gully. Ingold stood up, shivering, and pulled his hood over his face once more, wrapping his long muffler over it so that all that showed of his face was the end of his nose and the deep-set glitter of bright azure eyes. Rudy got up also, hung the water bottles over the various projections of the pack-saddle, and led Che up the narrow trail that had taken them down into the draw. Ingold moved nimbly ahead of him.

  'Ingold?'

  They scrambled up the last few feet to level ground and made their way back toward the road. A covey of prairie hens went skittering away almost under their feet. Che flung up his head in panic. The skies had darkened perceptibly, and in the distance Rudy could see the rain sheeting down.

  'Why is an untaught mage so dangerous?'

  The wizard glanced back at him. 'A mage will have magic,' he said quietly. 'It's like love, Rudy. You need it and you will find it. You will be driven to find it. And if you can't find good love, you will have bad, or what passes in some circles for love. And it can hurt you
and destroy everyone you touch. That is why there is a school at Quo,' he went on, 'and a Council.

  'The wizardry at Quo is the mainstream, the centrepoint of teaching. Since Forn the Old retired there and began to gather all the lore of wizardry in his black tower by the sea, the Archmage and the Council of Quo have been the teachers of all those who were capable of understanding what was taught. Its principles are the principles handed down from the old wizardry, the legacy of the empires that existed before the first coming of the Dark, three thousand years ago. They are older than any kingdom of the earth, older than the Church. '

  'Is that why the Church has it in for us?'

  Wind had begun to blow down rain upon them, mixed with hard, tiny spits of hail. Rudy pulled up his hood resignedly. He had long since got used to the idea that if it rained, he got wet. There was no shelter in the open plains.

  The Church finds us unbiddable,' Ingold said mildly. They talk of the power as a manifestation of the illusions of the Devil, but it all comes down to the fact that we have the power to change the universe materially and we owe neither them nor their God allegiance. As you've already guessed, we are excommunicates, ranking with heretics, parricides, and doctors who poison wells to drum up" business for themselves. If the Church wanted to press the point, they could give Alwir considerable trouble for employing Bektis or even associating with me. The Church will make no marriage when one of the parties is mageborn; and when we die, we are buried like criminals in unhallowed ground, if we aren't simply burned like murrained beasts. Whatever happens, Rudy, remember that no law protects wizards. '

  The darkness of the vaults beneath the palace at Karst came back to Rudy's mind -the narrow doorless cell and the Rune of the Chain, spelled to hold Ingold there until he starved. No wonder, he thought, those with only a single power choose to lie about it. The surprising thing is that anyone becomes a wizard at all,

  Rain drummed down around them, black and freezing, from a dark sky. It pooled in the ditches beside the road, sheeted the low ground, and ran in rivulets down Rudy's cloak, slowly soaking him through. He tried to remember the last time he'd seen a clear sky and wondered wretchedly if he ever would see one again.

  Ingold was still speaking, more to himself than to his companion. This is why the bonds between us are so strong. We are the only ones who truly understand each other, as Lohiro and I know one another's mind. It's why he and I travelled together, bound as allies against all the world, why he was like a son to me, and why he picked me to be his father. We are all we have, Rudy - wizards, and those very few people who, not mageborn themselves, understand. Quo is more than the centre of wizardry on earth; it is our heart-home. It is all we have. '

  The cloudburst was slackening. Light and mists rolled in the lowering air, but no sign of sun or sky. It seemed as if all the world were blanketed in cloud and the sun would never break through again.

  Rudy asked, 'Do wizards - uh - marry among themselves? Or could a wizard, like, marry an ordinary person?'

  Ingold shook his head. 'Not legally. There is no legal marriage with excommunicates such as we, at least not anymore, though matters used to be different in times past. ' He glanced sharply sideways at him, and Rudy had the uncomfortable feeling, as he often did with Ingold, that his mind was being read. 'There used to be a saying, "A wizard's wife is a widow. " We are wanderers, Rudy. We make that choice in accepting the power, in admitting to ourselves what we are. There are those who are not mageborn who understand us, but mostly they also understand that we cannot be like them. It's a rare person, woman or man, who can accept a long-term relationship on that basis. In a sense we are born damned, though not in the way the Church means it. ' 'Do wizards love?'

  A look of pain crossed behind the blue eyes, like a quick shiver in the wake of a

  draught. 'God help us, yes. '

  All of this strange miscellany of knowledge and information only served as a background to quiet Rudy's mind and help him to focus and understand. The step between understanding the world and understanding magic was a very small one.

  One night Ingold scratched the runes in the dust by their tiny campfire, and Rudy, who had guessed by this time that the wizard did not repeat himself, spent the evening studying their shape and sequence in the dim, ruddy light. After that he periodically drew them out for himself while he sat his guard watches, laboriously memorizing shapes, names, and attributes - the constellations of forces which centred on each separate symbol. Ingold sometimes talked about them as the two men ate supper or settled down for the night, explaining how they might be used for meditation or divination, telling where they came from, who had first drawn them, and why. Slowly their pattern came to make sense to Rudy, until he saw how a single rune, properly made with the appropriate words and thoughts, could draw its attributes to itself and surround itself with them. This was how Yad would protect and turn aside the gaze of a seeker from that on which it was drawn, how Traw would make invisible things visible, and how Pern would focus the thoughts of those who looked upon it for rationality, justice, and law.

  Ingold never drew them all out for him again. He taught Rudy other things as the plains country gave way entirely to the fringes of the cold sagebrush deserts. He showed simple tricks of illusion that could be woven around a wizard to make other people see things they did not really see. A mage could spot the illusion, but most people, who operated on surface impressions, could easily be led to think that they saw a person of different appearance, or a tree, or an animal, or a flaming whirlwind -or simply nothing there at all. It was less like magic, Rudy thought, than it was like acting, or story-telling, or drawing, but done differently. Rudy could already call fire and mould the white witchlight into a ball to illuminate without heat, like St. Elmo's fire on the end of his staff. He had learned to use his ability better to see in darkness and, by experiment, to draw visible things in the air with his fingers. As they came into the true desert and water grew scarcer, Ingold showed him how to make a water compass by witching the twigs of a certain plant and how to tell by magic if a plant were poisonous.

  One night they spoke of power, of the central key of each person or being or living thing - and Ingold's definition of living things was very different from Rudy's. He spoke of the focus of all being, the innermost truth that Plato had called the essence; the understanding of that was the key to the Great Magic, and the ability to see it was the mark of a mage. Watching those bright crystal eyes across the fire, Rudy saw reflected in them the vision of his own soul, lying, like the silver runes on the Keep doors, beneath the surface of the familiar body. He saw with calm and pitiless detachment his own feelings about himself, the interlocking of vanity and love and yearning and laziness, a kind of bright, glittering perpetual-motion machine of affection, cowardice, and sloth that drove his restless soul. He saw it with Ingold's pure, unforbearing gaze, seeing faults and virtues alike, and was neither surprised nor ashamed. It only existed, being what it was. And in that timeless and bodiless trance, he became aware of that other essence beside him, like a lightning-riddled rock, lambent with power, fired within by a magic that permeated from its visible core. Ingold, he thought, startled and shocked, for the momentary vision of those scarred depths of love and grief and loneliness dwarfed his own bright, shallow emotions to

  insignificance. He felt an overwhelming awe of the wizard again, as he had before the ringing doors of the assaulted Keep and as he had one night in the valleys of the river, when Ingold had asked him why he wanted to be a mage. It was an awe that Rudy usually kept hidden, half-forgotten in the face of that shabby little old man with his scarred hands and mild, sarcastic humour. But the awe never fully left him; it increased as he came to understand this scruffy old pilgrim. He would now no longer question how Ingold knew whether Lohiro of Quo were alive or dead.

  'Magic isn't like I thought it would be,' Rudy said much later that same night as he gathered his blankets about him
, while Ingold settled down by the fire to take first shift at guard. 'I mean, I used to think it was like - oh, people turning themselves into wolves, or slaying dragons, or blasting walls down, or flying through the air, or walking on water - stuff like that. But it's not. '

  'But it is, really,' Ingold said easily, prodding at the ashes of their tiny fire. 'You yourself know that one does not turn oneself into a wolf - for to transpose your personality into the heart and brain of a wolf, aside from being very dangerous in terms of the structure of the universe, might prove too great a temptation to you. '

  Distantly, the wolves answered his words, their faint howling riding down the night wind. In the darkness of their arroyo camp, Rudy caught the bright, hard glitter of Ingold's eyes and heard the dreamy edge to his voice.

  'Wolves love what they are, Rudy. To be strong - to kill - to live with the wind and the pack - it would call to the wolf in your own soul. There would always be the danger, you see, that you would not want to come back. And as for slaying dragons,' he went on in a milder tone, 'well, dragons are really rather timid creatures, tricky and dangerous, but only likely to attack humans if driven by hunger. '

  'You mean - there are dragons? Real live dragons?'

  The wizard looked startled at the question. 'Oh, yes, I have actually even slain a dragon. Rather, I acted as decoy and Lohiro did the sword work. As for the rest of it -blasting down walls and walking on water. . . ' He smiled. 'Need has simply not arisen. '

  'You mean,' Rudy said uneasily, 'that - you could? If you had to?'

  'Walk on water? I could probably find a boat. '

  'But if there wasn't a boat?' Rudy pursued.

  Ingold shrugged. 'I'm quite a good swimmer. '

  Rudy was silent for a time, his head pillowed on his hands, staring up into the black and featureless sky, hearing the belling of the wolves on their hunting trail, sweet with distance and incredibly lonely, and remembering the men he had known who had chosen to live as human wolves on a hunting trail of steel and gasoline. To live with the wind and the pack. . . That he understood. That mind he knew.

  Another thought came to him. 'Ingold? When you said that the Dark Ones are -"alien intelligences" - you meant that humans can't understand their essence, didn't

  you? And because of that, we can't comprehend the source of their magic?*

  'Exactly. '

  'But if - if you took on the being of the Dark, if you took the form of a Dark One, then wouldn't you understand them? Wouldn't you know then what they are and how they think?'

  Ingold was silent for such a long time that Rudy began to fear he had offended the old man. But the wizard only stared into the fire, drawing the stem of a dried stalk of grass through his restless fingers, the flame repeated a thousandfold in his eyes. When he spoke, his soft, scratchy voice was barely audible over the keening of the winds. 'I could do that,' he said. 'In fact, I have thought of it many times. ' He glanced over at Rudy. Gleaming from the wizard's eyes, Rudy could see the overwhelming temptation to knowledge, the curiosity that amounted in the mageborn to an almost unslakable lust. 'But I won't. Ever. The risk would be too great. ' He dropped the grass stem he held into the fire and watched it idly as it curled and blackened in the veils of burning gold like a corpse upon a pyre. 'For you see, Rudy - I might like being a Dark One. '