The Walls of the Air

by Barbara Hambly

  Then he heard the wizard's harsh, powerful voice, torn and twisted on the deceiving fury of the winds, calling his name. Rudy swung around, facing what he thought was the direction of the sound. He strained his eyes, but could see nothing in the utter darkness of the howling desert night. The winds were screaming so fiercely that he could barely have heard himself shout, but he heard the call again.

  Leaning against the force of the wind, he struck off into the darkness.

  It took him less than half an hour to realize he had been a total fool. Wherever Ingold was, whatever had become of him, searching for him in the wild blackness of the storm was tantamount to suicide. Staggering blindly under the flail of the elements, frozen to the bone and gasping with the mere effort of remaining upright, Rudy cursed the panic that had sent him away from the hidden camp in the arroyo. He had utterly lost sight of it, wandering helplessly, chasing every will-o'-the-wisp of movement he fancied he'd seen or a sound on the wind that he took for his name…

  Turning around in despair, he struggled back toward where he thought the camp ought to be. But nothing in all that wind-ripped landscape was familiar. Wizard or no wizard, he could not see in the dark when the wind blinded his eyes. Against his numbed cheeks, he could already feel the stinging bite of powder snow.

  If you lie down, you'll die, he told himself grimly. Keep moving till daybreak, for Chrissake, or it's one more contribution to the Starving Jackals' Benevolent Fund. But the lure of sleep enticed him, the thought of that warmth beyond the dark wall. He thought of Minalde, of the sweetness of her arms, of the warm, golden afternoons of California, and of talking endless rounds of nothing with his buddies, throwing beer bottles at the trash can… Keep going, turkey, he commanded, forcing his mind from those soft temptations. Think about fingernails on the blackboard. Think about jumping in water. Think about anything but sleep.

  He made himself move on.

  There was no question of going anywhere or finding anything now—only of putting one foot in front of the other, of keeping his blood circulating until morning. In the morning there would be time enough… For what? To find Ingold, when in all probability the old man was walking straight away from him and would continue to do so for however many hours it would be until dawn? To sleep, out in the middle of nowhere, exposed to the dangers of the desert without the old man's cloak of magic and expertise to cover him? He wondered if this was the ice storm Ingold had spoken of, the searing hurricane of cold that could freeze-dry a grazing mammoth complete with the buttercups in its mouth…

  He fought back the urge to sleep. Gil's image returned to him, shouting through that other snowstorm that had covered their last flight to the Keep of Dare—three weeks ago? A month ago? He pictured Gil dragging him up out of the snow and forcing him to move on when he would • have lain down and died. I don't care if you are a goddam wizard, she had said, you're a coward and a quitter. And he was. He had always been. Only now he couldn't afford to be. Neither he nor anyone else could allow him that luxury. If the Dark Ones had taken Ingold from the camp, it would be up to him, Rudy Solis, the mage of San Berdoo, to find the Hidden City and present the problem to Lohiro,

  The despair he felt at that idea was enough to make him think about lying down right there and letting the snows have him.

  Coward and quitter, Gil had said. He couldn't feel his feet or hands; his whole body was numb and sluggish, his mind darkening under the inexorable grip of cold and fatigue. He stumbled and went down, feeling the snow winds ride over him.

  It was the tingling in his numbed fingertips that woke him. Without opening his eyes, he flexed his hand; he heard the thin crackle of the ice that had formed on his glove and the swift-flying whisk of animal feet fleeing across the snow. Through his eyelids he could see light. He knew he'd made it.

  Rudy sighed. He was still cold and damp clear through to his bones. But the bitter cold of last night's storm had lessened, and the wind had dropped to its familiar steady whine. He was starvingly hungry, sore in every limb, and exhausted. It would be nice to lie here in this relatively sheltered space—had he dragged himself to the lee side of a dry wash last night or something?—and wait for rescue. Only there wasn't going to be any rescue. It came back to him with chilling and horrible finality that Ingold was gone.

  If Ingold is gone, he thought with sudden horror, how the hell am I going to get back to California?

  Lohiro, he thought. Lohiro is Archmage and head of the Council. He's Ingold's superior. He'll know.

  But grief took hold of his heart as he lay in the shaded snow. The old man was gone, never to sit across the flickering light of the campfires with that wicked humor in his sleepy eyes—never to blister Rudy with sarcasm if he mixed up the seed pods of kneestem and crannywort— never to stand with cupped palms filled with white light, blazing in an aura of brilliance out of the darkness. Rudy bowed his head against the icy slush. He had loved the old man, not just for his magic, or because the wizard was his teacher. If Ingold had been some old, pensioned-off steel-worker living next door to him in San Bernardino, he knew he would still have loved the man.

  Rudy thought of Lohiro and the vision he had seen in the crystal table at the Keep—the serene, emotionless face in its frame of fire-gold hair, the emptiness of those kaleidoscope-blue eyes. What had Ingold said to Lohiro? That he was like a dragon, a creature of fire and power, gold and light. But the Archmage was nothing like the shabby, old, beer-drinking maverick whom Rudy had first seen stepping out of the blaze of silver glory into the dawn stillness of the California hills.

  Rudy knew it was time to go on.

  He opened his eyes and found himself stretched out in the shelter of the dry wash's overhanging bank. Snow lay drifted all around him, melted by the warmth of his body into a kind of hollow that had further protected him from the winds. He lay in the long blue ribbon of shade thrown by the bank. Just beyond its border, where the sun glittered brightly on the snows, perched half a dozen small animals with coats of white-streaked brown fur. They were about the size of cats but had the long-drawn-out snouts, wrinkled lips, and gleaming red eyes of rats. They sat up on their hind legs, whiskers twitching, and regarded him with malevolent disappointment. Rudy remembered the tingling of his fingers which had awakened him and looked at them quickly. The leather at the ends of his gloves had been chewed.

  With a wholehearted shudder of disgust, he snatched up a rock and flung it at the rats, and they melted almost scornfully out of sight into the snowy brush. Irrationally, Rudy wiped the nibbled leather on the seat of his breeches. He had the ugly feeling that he had not seen the last of them.

  Cautiously, he picked up his bow. He'd managed to keep that through the night, as well as his quiver of arrows. He had water in his flask, and there was enough snow on the ground so that this was not yet a problem. He also had a little dried meat and some fruit-leather in the wallet at his belt. In addition, he had a knife, a sword, and some extra bowstrings. Shivering in the wan, heatless light, he wrapped his damp cloak around him, to no great avail. The cold leaking through his wet clothes would be a further drain on his energy, but there was no way to get dry. He scrambled to the top of the bank to have a look at the lands around him.

  Only desolation met his eyes. There was no sign of the road anywhere. The overcast sky had broken enough so that the sun was remotely visible as a whitish patch in the endless roof of clouds. The wind was still bitter. The land sloped away before him in a pale reddish expanse of stony sand, barren of brush, cactus, or grass. Here and there, snow patched the sands, blown into fitful little whirlwinds.

  The wind from the north and the sun in the east were the only guides for direction in all that empty land. He tried to remember whether he'd crossed the road last night and if he were north or south of it; he tried to recall the map Ingold had sketched out for him one night in the dust beside the fire. All he remembered of that was that they'd have to leave the main road to Dele at some point and strike overland, due west, to reach the S
eaward Mountains and the Hidden City of Quo.

  That much he could do. Head straight west—and then what? Eventually reach the Seaward Mountains? How long? Two weeks afoot, lost and virtually helpless? Dream on. And supposing he did? The Seaward Mountains were now one great spider web of illusions. What the hell am I gonna do, stand in the foothills and yell, "Let me in. Ingold sent me?"

  But that, he realized, was exactly why Ingold had brought him along. Punk airbrush-jockey and half-trained screw-up artist that he was, he was the only free and trustworthy mage in the West of the World. Ingold, over whose stripped bones the scavenger rats must be fighting by this time, was counting on him.

  And besides, where else was he going to go?

  He headed west. The emptiness of the desert engulfed him.

  He had thought before, traveling with Ingold through the wastelands, that he had come to understand the solitude and silence of those empty places, but he saw now that this had been a delusion. He was totally alone, totally forgotten. He was the only human soul in all this great emptiness. The sun climbed, strengthening a little. His cloak dried, and his shadow drifted, pale and watery, before him. Once or twice in the rocky wastes, he glimpsed jackrabbits or huge lizards the length of his arm, and once in the distance he heard the unmistakable dry buzzing of a rattler. But he knew himself to be alone. If he shouted at the top of his lungs, his voice would roll unheard through those silvery distances and die without ever reaching a human being's ear. He moved through the emptiness like a tortoise, with slow, dogged steps in a single direction, not to be turned aside.

  A distant thicket of mesquite and greasewood proclaimed ground-water; he found a catch basin of rocks there, half-filled with melted snow. In the empty silence of noon, he ate as little of the dried meat and fruit as he could manage, resting, letting his thoughts drift. He wondered what Minaide was doing, how Tir was. He wondered about the White Raiders and the ghost that they feared. Had it been that, he wondered, which had taken Ingold so silently from his own camp? Or had it been the Dark, who had dogged their footsteps from Renweth? Would Lohiro know that? Had Lohiro, who was like a son to Ingold, watched him in the fire, even as Rudy had watched Alde ? The vision in the crystal flashed disturbingly before his thoughts, the cold, empty blue eyes and the brush of a cloak hem across the wet gleam of a crab-crawling skull.

  A small movement in the mesquite caught his eye; a moment later a rabbit hobbled cautiously into view, nose and ears a-twitch with apprehension. Poor little bastard, Rudy thought, and his hand stole smoothly toward his bow. Many nights on watch he had observed the jackrabbits and felt rather a kinship with them. They didn't hurt anyone and, like himself, were mainly concerned with food and fornication and staying out of trouble. The rabbit's ears swung like radar receivers; the timid little creature stared around, hoping against hope that the scenery concealed no greedy, bright-toothed death, which would end those mild rabbitty dreams of sweet mesquite tops and nymphomaniac does. It's a tough life, Rudy thought, but it's you or me, and I'd rather it was you.

  As he drew the bow to him, the end snagged on a root and the arrow rolled sideways. The rabbit, galvanized into instant frenzy, rocketed wildly into the distance, leaving Rudy once again alone.

  Great White Hunter blows it again. He returned to his meditations.

  Eventually he shot three rabbits, one where he sat and two later in the early twilight. He found another mesquite thicket, this one among rocks. After sweeping away his tracks, he made a kind of fort by piling thornbushes between the largest of the boulders to defend his camp. He built a small fire and wondered if it was safe to sleep. Probably not, he reflected, but he knew himself incapable of remaining awake all night. After a day of semi-starvation, it was hard not to eat all three bunnies the minute they were cooked, but he reminded himself that he didn't know where his next meal was coming from and crawled into his spiny shelter to dream of superburgers and sun.

  Deep in the night, he was wakened by the muffled padding of animal feet and the soft scratching of blunt claws on the rocks. He lay sweating in the darkness, seeing nothing, beyond the tangles of interwoven thorn. In the morning he saw wolf tracks as large as his own hands all around the shelter in the dust.

  The next day was colder, sunless, and gray. By the scent of the wind, he decided the rain would hold off and he filled his water flask with snow gleaned from a hollow in the rocks. The land was lower, thinly grown now with mesquite, small sagebrush, greasewood, and ocotillo that rattled like dry bones in the wind. The wind grew bitter, clawing at his face and cloak. He saw nothing that could remotely be construed as edible and he began to feel desperately lonely and frightened.

  By afternoon he realized that he was being stalked. The knowledge came upon him gradually. At first it was only a vague sensation, a wariness about open ground, a subliminal wondering about the anomalous rustlings in the mesquite on both sides of him. He had lived long enough with the wind to recognize the pattern of its sounds. He knew when the pattern broke.

  He stood still, quieting his breath to absorb the sound and smell of the land. He could hear nothing but the whining of the wind through the chaparral, which lay like a waist-high forest over the desolation through which he had moved all day. He looked slowly around him, searching for something, anything, to tell him what he was up against and in which direction he might flee. Like the jackrabbits, he had no other course of action; he only wished it were possible for him to go streaking madly away through the sagebrush at eighty miles an hour as they did.

  A sound riveted his attention. He turned his eyes back toward a clump of brush he'd already scanned before. There had been no movement that he could see; but he now saw a big male dooic, squatting in its shelter, holding a huge wedge of rock in its hands, and staring at him with that same hungry malice he had seen in the eyes of the scavenger rats. Like them, it melted slowly backward and edged out of sight into the brush beyond.

  Rudy swung around, hearing more surreptitious stirrings in the brush. Another hunched body was making its stealthy retreat. He felt himself grow clammy with sweat.

  He was now aware of them all around. What had Ingold said—that he'd traveled with a band of them? But these dooic didn't look as if they had that kind of friendly intentions; they were armed with crudely chipped hand-axes and had tusks like those of wild pigs. Rudy moved on cautiously. He'd come pretty close to getting killed several times since his arrival in this world; but freezing to death, having the Dark Ones put the munch on him, or even having Ingold run him through with his own sword suddenly seemed a whole lot more comfortable and dignified than being dirtily mauled to pieces by a gang of Neanderthals. He was scanning the skyline and finally found what he was looking for—a distant clump of trees marking a water hole. He wondered how well dooic climbed. But in the trees he could at least get his back to something and fend them off. As it was, with his being surrounded in open ground, it looked like a losing proposition.

  As he moved, he was conscious of the whole ring of them on both sides of him as well as behind. He could hear them shifting up through the brush to get ahead of him. If he let that happen, he figured it would be kiss-off time. He quickened his pace toward the trees—cottonwoods, he saw now—some two miles off. Without breaking stride, he unbuckled his sword belt and shifted the weapon up over his back, getting ready to run for it. On second thought, he also pulled off his cloak, rolling it up and bundling it under the sword belt. All he needed, he thought wryly, was to trip over the damn thing. He tried to judge the distance to the trees but couldn't; the dry, clear air of the desert made things look closer than they really were. He knew that, once he broke into a run, he had damn well better stay ahead of the pack.

  He glimpsed movement in the sagebrush ahead of him and to the sides—humped, skittering shapes making a dash across open ground. Here goes nothing, Rudy thought. He broke into a run.

  On all sides of him, the ground seemed to erupt dooic. He hadn't thought there were so many of them—twenty-five at lea
st, rushing toward him with shrill, grunting howls, some of them from much closer than he'd suspected. Those ahead of him tried to close in, but it was no race. Rudy's longer legs carried him past them, and he sprinted out ahead, running for the trees with the pack streaming at his heels.

  Once, when he was a very young child, Rudy had been chased for blocks by the local dog pack; he still remembered the heart-bursting terror of that run. But that had only been for a few hundred yards. He saw almost at once that he'd have to pace himself. The dooic were well behind him, but their whistling grunts still carried to his ears, and he knew they would overtake him when he'd run himself breathless. He tried to judge their speed and slow his own to match it. Already the trees looked farther off than they had looked before, and he knew it was going to be a long run. He thought fleetingly, Why couldn't I have been a jogger instead of a goddam biker? His chest was aching now; his body, toughened though it had been by the endless miles of walking, burned with fatigue. And to think there were people "who ran twenty-six miles for the hell of it.

  He felt himself flagging before half the distance was run. The raucous yammering behind him grew louder; and risking a glance backward, he saw the leaders of the pack a dozen yards from him, running with a rolling, bandylegged lope. The flash of bared yellow tusks sent a surge of adrenalin through him that carried him a few yards farther from them, but he was already stumbling, the strain telling in every muscle of his sweat-soaked body.

  He hit the trees three strides in front of the pack, barely able to breathe or stand, and swept his sword from its scabbard in an over-the-shoulder slash that hacked the arm half off the nearest of his pursuers. The blade jammed between ribs and sternum, and the creature went down howling in a geyser of blood, while the rest of the ring broke and drew back. In sickened panic, Rudy put his foot on the still-writhing Neanderthal to pull the sword free, and the thing's teeth slashed the leather of his boot and the flesh beneath before it expired as the blade came clear. Rudy fell back against the tree as the circle closed on him, hacking desperately at hairy hands and faces, sobbing with exhaustion, and being splattered with blood and dust. A thrown rock caught him on the shoulder as the dooic drew back again out of sword range. He swung around, unwilling to leave the minimal shelter of the tree. The attackers were hurling rocks at him from all sides with deadly and practiced aim. A stone the size of his two fists took a divot out of the tree inches from his head; another one smashed his elbow, numbing his arm, and a third caught him painfully in the ribs. With more haste than efficiency, he shoved the sword through his belt—whose bright idea had it been to sling the scabbard on his back?—and jumped for the lowest tree branch, scrambling awkwardly upward and praying he wouldn't cut his leg off with the deadly, unprotected edge of razor-sharp steel. The dooic swarmed around the trunk, shaking it and screaming and flinging rocks at him. Rudy clung to the swaying branches and tried to remember how deep the roots of cottonwoods went. But none of the dooic attempted to climb up to get him. After a time, they subsided, their howls dropping to a fierce muttering snarl. They squatted down around the tree to wait.