The Walls of the Air

by Barbara Hambly

  "Maybe," the wizard said quietly. "If we find the room again. And if the crystal there is actually a means of communication, rather than simply observation. And if the image that you saw, Rudy, was not merely the echo of events long gone, or part of the illusions that surround Quo. Divination by crystal is by no means sure. You remember the Nest of the Dark in the valley to the north of here, Gil. By fire and crystal, it is still shown as blocked up, when you and I have been there and have seen that it has been open for years. And after all that," he continued somberly, "we may still have to set out on this journey, when deep winter has locked down upon the plains. But I will ask you this, Gil…"

  Their eyes met, and he grinned suddenly, as rueful as a schoolboy. "It seems to be my night for asking things of you."

  She grinned back. "I'll ask you something someday."

  The old impish expression flitted briefly across his tired eyes. "God help me." He smiled. "When we are gone, as your duties with the Guards give you time—look for this room for me. Lohiro will certainly want to see it when he comes."

  "All right," Gil agreed quietly.

  "Yeah, but shell have a hell of a time finding the place," Rudy argued. "I mean, since she isn't mage-born…"

  Ingold and Gil exchanged a glance, a quick glitter of eyes in the light of the staff that stood between them. Then Ingold smiled. "That's never stopped her."

  There was a moment of silence, then the wizard turned abruptly and vanished through the barracks door.

  Gil sighed and looked back out into the random flurries of dark and light in the Aisle. In repose, Rudy noticed, her face had acquired a network of fine-penned lines around the eyes that hadn't belonged to the shy, gawky scholar in the red Volkswagen. It had been a long night, and was wearing on toward dawn. Outside, if the Dark Ones waited, they waited in silence.

  Nothing like starting out on a walk of more than fifteen hundred miles with only two hours' sleep, he thought tiredly and prepared to turn into the barracks to see to his packing. But another thought crossed his mind, and he stopped. "Hey, Gil."

  Her attention came back from other things. The pale schoolmarm eyes turned to him.

  "What would you think of somebody who—who'd leave someone he loves, to go after something he wants?"

  Gil was silent for a moment, considering. "I don't know," she said finally. "Maybe that's because I don't understand love very well. I see people act out of what they say is love, but it's like watching someone act from a really deep religious conviction—it's incomprehensible to me. My parents—my mother—wanted certain things for me and couldn't understand that all I wanted was to be a scholar. Couldn't see that I'd rather live in a crummy little office in the history department of UCLA than in the classiest hundred-thousand-dollar home in Orange County. And she said she loved me. Over and over and over. So I'm the wrong expert to ask about love, Rudy. But as for leaving someone to go after something you want… Leaving them for how long? How badly do they need you to stay? It's all situational. Everything's situational."

  Manlike, Rudy shied from the specific. "Well, like if you had only a short time together and had a choice of spending it with this person you loved or being separated from them because of—of something you wanted. Something you wanted more than anything in the world, except them."

  Gil shook her raveled braid back over her shoulder. "What makes you think you have a choice?"

  Rudy gulped. "Hunh?"

  Her voice was as chilly and neutral as her eyes. "Only a wizard can find the City of Quo, Rudy. Ingold's got the Dark Ones on his trail, God only knows why. He needs another wizard to back him up. If you hadn't volunteered to go looking for the Archmage with him, Rudy, you'd probably have been drafted."

  A long moment of silence followed, while Rudy digested that one. Love and the loneliness of exile fought in him against the burning memory of that first instant of the knowledge of his own power, the instant he had called forth fire from darkness. The double need in him for love and power seemed to rise over him like the tide, with a confusion of memories: Ingold standing in a shining web of runes; the darkness of Minalde's watching eyes; and the sweep of pearlescent waves washing over a half-buried skill.

  In the end it all meant very little. He would go because it was required of him that he go.

  "You got a great way of putting things, spook," he muttered tiredly.

  Gil shrugged. "Booklearning," she explained. "It rots the brain. Get some sleep, punk. You have a long walk in the morning."

  It was a small and very tired group that gathered on the steps of the Keep three hours later in the gray chill of dawn. Standing, shivering, beside Ingold in the misty snowlight, Rudy reflected to himself that in some cases it was better to have no sleep than too little. As far as he knew, Ingold hadn't been to bed at all. Every time he'd waked up through the confused remainder of the night, he'd seen the old man sitting beside the fire with the demon-smoke of his foul-smelling tea in wreaths around his head, staring into the yellowed chip of crystal he carried, while Gil and the Icefalcon assembled provisions for the journey with their usual silent efficiency.

  After three days of storms, the Vale of Renweth lay bleak and snowbound all around them, a white, rolling sea breaking against the black rocks of the surrounding cliffs. To the west, the shallow trace of the road climbed toward the dark notch of Sarda Pass, almost hidden in roiling gray cloud; to the east, it wound, descending through what a week ago had been sun-tinted meadows of long grass and a scattering of woods, on out of the Vale past the broken bridge of the Arrow Gorge and down to the Dark-haunted lowlands by the Arrow River. Northward the land rose, mile after forested mile, like a fjord between the high cliffs of the Rampart Range and the greater bulk of the Snowy Mountains, to meet the cold meadows of the timberline and the white walls where the glaciers began.

  But around the Keep itself, the ground was clear. Hunks of snow mixed with chopped dirt had been ripped up by the violence of the Dark Ones' assault and lay scattered,

  like the spew of a frozen volcano, hundreds of feet from the walls. The walls themselves were unmarked, the black gates that had roared like gongs under that power and fury unscratched.

  Winds sneered down the Vale, roaring in the trees. Rudy shivered wretchedly in his damp cloak and wondered if he'd ever be warm again. Beside him, the Ice-falcon was saying to Ingold, "I hope you packed shovels, unless you plan on turning yourselves into eagles and flying over the Pass. Winter's hardly begun and they say Gettlesand across the mountains is buried deep in snow."

  Even as a rank novice in the arts of wizardry, Rudy knew that few mages would risk changing their being into the being of a beast, and then only under conditions of extreme emergency. But to nonwizards, magic was magic; and from the outside, shape-craftiness looked much the same as simple illusion. On the other hand, Rudy did think longingly of conjuring up a snowmobile.

  The Icefalcon continued in the same light, uninflected tone. "I imagine my own journey will be easier—provided I don't get my horse stolen."

  "Your journey?" Gil asked, surprised.

  Pale eyebrows elevated fractionally. "Hadn't you heard? I'm the one who has been chosen to ride south to the Alketch with my lord Alwir's letters to the Emperor, asking his help with troops."

  Ingold laid a hand gently on Gil's shoulder to stop her next angry words. "It was a logical choice," he said smoothly. "Alwir picked the messenger with the best chance of survival."

  Who coincidentally happened to be the man who kept him from shutting the doors on you last night, Rudy added. But, like Gil, he held his peace.

  Unruffled, Ingold searched through his voluminous robes and eventually located a small handworn token of carved wood that he gave to the pale captain. "I leave you with this," he said. The Icefalcon took it and turned it over in curious fingers. It was dark and smoke-stained, obviously old. Rudy had the impression that it was shaped like some living thing, but it was neither human nor any animal that he recognized. "It is imbued with the Rune of t
he Veil," Ingold explained, "the rune that turns aside the eyes and the mind. It will by no means make you invisible, but it may help you on your journey."

  The Icefalcon inclined his head in thanks, while Ingold pulled on his worn blue mittens and wound ten feet of knitted gray muffler around his neck, so that the ends fluttered like banners in the chilly winds. Around the corner of the Keep, a gaggle of the herdkids appeared, Keep orphans in charge of looking after the stock. Most of them were running aimlessly, shrieking with laughter and hurling snowballs as if they hadn't been playing keep-away with death through the night. But a couple of them were leading a donkey, a scrawny miserable beast with the Earth Cross of the Faith branded on one bony hip. The donkey represented a major victory for Alwir and Ingold, since the Church owned most of the stock in the Keep. Rudy suspected Govannin had had the thing exorcised and blessed.

  Other shadows appeared in the darkness of the gates. Alwir stepped forth into the wan light, dark and elegant and as unmarred as the walls, followed by Janus, Melantrys, Gnift of the Guards, and Tomec Tirkenson, who in a few days would himself be leaving with his troops, his stock, and his followers, to take the long road over the Pass to Gettlesand. Of Govannin the Bishop of Gae, there was no sign. True to her word, she would have no truck with the tools of Satan, nor lend her countenance to their endeavor.

  Ingold left his friends and walked up the steps toward the Chancellor, Rudy heard the drift of words, Alwir's voice deep and melodious, Ingold's reply warm and grainy. He glanced sideways at Gil and saw her looking hard and strained, her eyes narrowed and cold. He felt the tension rising off her like smoke, misery and worry and fear. Well, hell, why not? he thought. If the old man buys it out on the plains, she's in for a long stay.

  We both are. The thought was frightening.

  "Hey, spook?"

  She glanced forbiddingly at him.

  "Take care of yourself while we're gone, okay?"

  She evidently told herself to relax and did so, slightly. "I'm not the one who's gonna need taking care of," she said. "All I have to do is sit tight and keep the door shut."

  It was on the tip of Rudy's tongue to ask Gil to look after Alde for him, but on second thought, he couldn't imagine someone as tough and hard-hearted as Gil getting along with the shy, retiring Minalde.

  Gil sighed. "Have a good trip, punk," she added. "Don't screw up and turn yourself into a frog."

  "At this point, I doubt he could manage even that," Ingold said judiciously, coming back down to them. The rulers of the Keep were disappearing back into the shadows of the gates. After a moment the Icefalcon followed them, his dark cloak sweeping the loose powder snow that sprinkled the steps. 'Tor the present he's quite harmless."

  "Thanks loads," Rudy grumbled.

  "Enjoy it," Ingold urged. "There's a great deal to be said for being unable to destroy inadvertently those whom you love. And you surely will not be harmless by the time we return, if we return."

  "The pair of you," Rudy sighed, "are the worst couple of pessimists I've ever met in my life. No wonder you get along so well."

  Gil and Ingold unconsciously closed ranks against the common foe. "Clear analysis of any situation," Ingold declared, "is often mistaken for pessimism."

  "The two shouldn't be confused," Gil added.

  "I'll explain the difference to you one day."

  Thanks," Rudy said glumly. I'll look forward to it."

  He turned and started down the steps. For a moment Ingold and Gil stood alone before the doors of the Keep, but Rudy was collecting the lead-rope of the burro from the head herdkid and did not see what, if anything, passed between them there. A moment later the wizard came down to join him, huddling deeper into his dark mantle against the stinging wind. As they plowed their way along the buried path toward the road that would take them through and over Sarda Pass, Rudy glanced back once, to see Gil standing on the steps, her bruised hands tucked into her sword belt, watching them go. An icy skiff of breeze dashed blown snow into his eyes; he thought he saw another shape, black-cloaked and small, standing in the vast shadows of the gates; but when he looked again, there was no sign.

  Chapter Three

  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 wooliest 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 plow and too dry for regular fanning, 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 center 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… Wil
d 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 gray 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."