The Walls of the Air

by Barbara Hambly

  Fantastic. Rudy settled himself cautiously a little more firmly into the main crotch of the tree and carefully altered the arrangement of his sword. I am not only lost and abandoned, I am also treed. If there is no such thing as random events, I sure as hell can't see the cosmic significance of this. It seems like a pretty pointless way to die.

  He drew his left foot up and checked the gashes on his leg. The boot and legging were saturated with blood, but his foot was still mobile—no tendon damage. Still, his leg would get infected if he didn't put alcohol on it or cauterize the wound somehow. At the moment, that didn't look real easy to do. He flexed his left arm and found it hurt like hell but would also move; he felt tenderly at his ribs and winced when one of them moved, too. Below, the dooic watched him with greedy eyes. He wondered how long they would stick around and what would happen if he fell asleep.

  The cold afternoon dragged on. The dooic sat hunkered on the ground around the tree, occasionally wandering away in quest of lizards or grubs, the wind ruffling at their coarse, dark hair. Rudy disengaged his cloak and wrapped it about him for what little warmth he could get out of it. His leg throbbed agonizingly, making him wonder how long it took for blood poisoning to set in; this fear finally made him wedge himself more firmly into the crotch of the tree, unlace his boot and, sweating and sick, call fire repeatedly to the blade of his knife until the metal grew hot enough to sear the flesh. The process was excruciating and, since Rudy hadn't sufficient resolution to make a one-shot job of it, lasted a long time. He ended up by dropping the knife and vomiting, hanging limply in the branches of the tree, wondering if he were going to faint and fall and be torn to pieces, anyway, and wishing he were dead. He there remained until it was almost dark. Twilight came early under the overcast sky. Half in a stupor, Rudy barely noticed the failing of the light until the sudden flurry of grunts from below brought him back to full consciousness.

  The dooic were scrambling to their feet, whistling and coughing among themselves, their beady eyes alert and their stooped bodies taut with fear. From his point of vantage, Rudy could see a pair of tall, ostrichlike birds stalking silently through the twilight shadows of the sagebrush, almost unnoticeable, despite their size, because of their hairy, brownish-gray feathers and smooth, catlike tread. He had seen such creatures once in the distance and had found their tracks. Now he saw that they had enormous, hawklike bills and that their eyes were set forward in their skulls—the mark, Ingold had pointed out, of a predator.

  The dooic had fallen silent. They began to fade into the brush until, even from his high perch, Rudy could barely see them. Keeping his own movements to a minimum, he sat up, tore a strip from the hem of his surcoat, and bandaged the swollen mess of his left leg, tying his boot together over it. He cursed himself as he worked; in letting himself be injured, he had halved his already minimal chances for survival. The thought of trying to walk on the leg made him sick, but so did remembering that the dooic would very likely be back in the morning.

  He had no idea which way was west, but by standing up in the branches of the tree, he could pick out the distant shape of a tall rock promontory that would offer some protection, if he could scale it. He refrained from thinking about what was likely to happen, if he could not. The thing to do now was to get away from the tree and find some place where the dooic wouldn't look for him the minute the saber-beaked ostriches were gone.

  Below him, there was a flurry of movement in the twilight. A female dooic broke cover almost under the feet of one tall bird and fled at a sprint Rudy hadn't thought the things capable of. But the bird shot forward like a gazelle, its huge beak tearing at the quarry in mid-stride, sending it down in a kicking jumble of arms and legs and blood. The other bird had started after its own prey, a young male with a hundred yards' start, and Rudy watched, aghast, as the thing ran down the fleeing dooic with long, effortless strides and disemboweled it on the run, then stood on one foot, holding a limb in its claw and tearing at it in a businesslike fashion, for all the world like a parrot eating a strawberry. Rudy remained, immobile with fear, in his tree until the birds had finished their grisly repast and stalked away into the dusk. The rest of the dooic were utterly gone. The ripped remains of Rudy's two erstwhile hunters were surrounded by the scavenger rats that seemed to have risen from the earth to quarrel over the bones.

  The rats barely glanced at him as he slipped gingerly from the tree at last. They did put on some show of interest when his feet touched the ground and his cramped knee buckled, but went back to feeding when he got up again. Rudy had a brief, queasy vision of what would have happened if he had not been able to rise. The painful weakness of his left leg frightened him. He limped around the trunk of the tree and found his knife, then cut a sucker from the roots the right length for a walking stick. He checked his bow, debated momentarily about shooting a couple of scavengers for meat—it would be like shooting fish in a barrel—but couldn't bring himself to think of actually eating the carrion beasts. Besides, he'd only have to fight their brothers for the corpses, and at the moment all he wanted to be was out of there.

  Leaning on his staff, which, like most cottonwood, was so soft as to be almost useless for the purpose, he limped slowly on his way.

  He awakened to the distant sound of trumpeting. For a moment he puzzled over it, wondering if it were part of the clinging fog of his dreams, like the very brief, very clear vision he had had of Ingold, sitting as he had so often sat beside their campfire, scratching runes in the dust with a stick. Then the pain of wakening came, the pain of cramps, of bruises, the stabbing pinch of his cracked rib, and the sickening throb of his ripped ankle. He had slept in a semi-fetal position in a cranny high in the rocks, half-frozen after a walk that had seemed to last most of the night.

  The trumpeting did not fade with his dreams. It came again, a living sound, shrill and brazen. Elephants?

  What in hell are elephants doing in the middle of the Gettlesand deserts? Or am I really delirious this time?

  He dragged himself upright and scrambled to the top of the rocks.

  Once on the road from Karst to Renweth—years ago, it felt like, though he knew it had been less than a month— the train had stopped on a high, green saddleback hill. The rain had cleared, silver veils of mist drawing back from the heartbreaking beauty of the lands below, revealing them holy and mysterious, pearled with rain and frost. He'd stood next to the small, hide-roofed cart that fluttered with the black pennons of the House of Dare, leaning on the wheel while Alde bent from the seat to talk to him, holding Tir in her arms. She'd pointed outward over those drenched green lands at moving brown shapes in the distance and had said, "Mammoth. There haven't been mammoth in the river valleys for—oh, hundreds and hundreds of years." And now here they were.

  In the cold, pale wastes of the desert, they moved like perambulating haystacks, far more vast than any elephant Rudy had ever seen. They looked absurdly like the artists' reconstructions in picture encyclopedias—enormous shaggy bulks sloping down from huge, blocklike heads and mountainous shoulders, little fanlike ears, and recurved tusks like the soundbow of an ancient harp, with small, black, beady eyes above the tusks. Their brown fur was speckled with the white spits of snow that blew down from a bleak, featureless sky. Rudy identified the herd bulls, as massive as freight cars, the smaller cows, and the little calves, the smallest of which was still considerably larger than a Winnebago, clinging like Dumbo the Elephant to mamma's tail. A fresh gust of wind stung his face and flurried snow into his sheltering rocks. The mammoth turned their gargantuan backs to the snow and strode off southward, driven before it as they had been driven, Rudy thought, from their home on the high, brown grasslands of the north.

  He shivered and wondered how much farther he could get on this futile quest. To the west, the colorless horizon lay as straight as a ruled line. He doubted he would see the Seaward Mountains for weeks yet and he knew already that he would not be able to continue that long. Ingold was right, he thought bitterly. I should
have reconsidered, sat tight back at the Keep. But, dammit, I didn't know then I'd lose him.

  Ingold knew. He knew there was an odds-on chance of one of us buying it and he was afraid it was going to be he. And he knew there had to be someone else to finish the quest.

  Despairing, Rudy leaned his forehead on his wrists against the stone and wished he were dead. Why me?

  The question is the answer, Rudy. The question is always the answer. Because you're a mage. You wanted to come along to learn to be a mage. You came to be a mage, and he took you because only a mage can finish the quest. You still owe him.

  I didn't want this! his mind cried.

  You didn't want to realize that you can call fire from darkness?

  Dammit, Rudy thought tiredly. Dammit, dammit, dammit. Even when he was gone—lost—devoured by the Dark —you never could win an argument with Ingold.

  A change, a turning of the wind, brought to him the swift, steady drumming of hooves—horses, a troop of them. A distant beating murmur vibrated through the rock beneath his body. He inched his head over the lip of the crag once more and saw them, like ghosts streaming as gray as mist through the snow-flecked wind.

  White Raiders!

  Ingold had been right. They were undoubtedly the people of the Icefalcon. Pale braids like Vikings streamed out behind the lean, long-legged warriors bending over the curved necks of their mustangs. They turned in a single fluid line, manes rippling and nostrils smoking, less than half a mile off, but barely visible except as a pounding sense of motion in the empty lands. There was nothing of them to catch the eye; the horses were mostly that wolfish gray-brown of the land; the riders wore the same color. Even the fairness of their braids was the echo of sun-bleaching on dry grass. The fluttering of tags, feathers, and chips of bright-winking glass on their harness seemed like the random twinkling of wind and leaves. In a wide curve, they headed along the tracks of the mammoth and vanished, driven south by the winds.

  Rudy sighed. He'd have to hunt again that day, for his rabbit meat was nearly gone. He changed the bandage on his ankle, cannibalizing another strip from the hem of his frayed surcoat for the purpose, and examined the wound worriedly. He had no idea what blood poisoning looked like or how long it took for red streaks to show up. Ingold had taught him emergency spells to keep gangrene at bay, but Rudy had no idea whether he'd executed them properly or not. It was borne upon him how gross was his own ignorance and how much he would have to learn, provided he ever got out of this mess alive. He cringed at the thought of all the knowledge he had passed blithely by in the good old days when he could go to a doctor, a grocery store, or —God forbid!—the cops as a last resort. As he climbed down out of his shelter, he remembered Ingold's saying that he had wandered this desert alone for fifteen years. No wonder Ingold had been so utterly self-sufficient. Rudy picked up his worthless staff and headed west again.

  He walked throughout the day. Keeping the wind on his right, he knew he was heading west, though no sun broke the eternal overcast of the clouds. At times he wondered what he would do when he came within sight of the Seaward Mountains. But what the hell was he worried about? he asked himself. You'll be dead long before you get in sight of them. There was no reason for him to go on, but he did, like an ant crossing a football field. He wondered what had become of Ingold, whether the Dark had gotten him or whether it had been something else, that unseen other power that the White Raiders feared. What would become of Gil, stuck here forever in an alien universe?

  He crossed a high, treeless stretch of barren rock, and the lands around him were now mostly pebbles and sand, a desolation in which only an occasional scrap of saltbush would grow. Blown sand and snow stung his face, the cold cutting through the bandages to torture his leg. In their shabby gloves, his fingers were numb. Three days he had been alone, moving like a ghost through this empty land —longer than he had ever been alone in his life. Though solitude had always bothered him less than he knew it bothered most people, his soul had ached yesterday and the day before for companionship—someone, anyone, a total stranger; he'd even have settled for his sister Yolanda. But he found that he was becoming used to the company of his own spirit. Though he still shuddered at the thought of spending months and years alone, as Ingold had done, he could now imagine, as a faint echo of the reality, what it would be like.

  Twilight was settling down again. He wondered where he would spend the night. The land around him was utterly flat and desolate, without rock, without tree, without more than a few isolated patches of thin brush. He felt weak and exhausted, but knew that he had to keep going until he found something. To lie down and sleep in the open would be death indeed.

  A movement caught his eye. It bobbed, stalky and awkward, on the crest of a stony ridge, yet there was a curiously catlike quality to it… Rudy froze. It was a tricky time of day; the graying light fooled the eyes, and the threshing of the few bits of brush in the wind masked the steps of those that hunted in twilight Dooic? he wondered. Christ, not again.

  Then he saw it, a streak of gray in the distance. It ran weightlessly over the sand, a blurred ripple of wolf-colored feathers and the pale gleam of a beak like a scythe blade.

  There was nowhere to run and no hope of outdistancing the bird, but Rudy ran. He felt the grinding pain in his leg and rib and ran anyway, sprinting desperately into the twilight, without any thought but hopeless escape, like trying to outrun a speeding car. Rocks bruised his feet, and his breath sobbed in his lungs. Behind him, he could hear the soft, light thud-thud-thud of clawed and padded feet. He couldn't look back; his mind blanked to everything but staying on his feet and running faster. He felt no pain, no tiredness, only desperate terror. He ran blindly into the sinking twilight.

  When he fell, his first thought was that his bad leg had given out. But the hands he threw out to catch himself met nothing, and he plunged over the shallow cliff and down through a yielding tangle of branches that had masked the pit beneath. In the half-light and confusion, he felt twigs tear his hair. He slammed into something wooden and rough-barked that took the skin off his face as he half-rolled, half-slid down the last two or three feet to land in the fresh-turned earth below. Too dazed to understand, he rolled over and looked up. Ten feet above him, skylined on the edge of the brush-fringed cliff, the horrible predator bird stood, cocking its head to look down at him, as if at a loss to understand how he had suddenly gotten down there. For a heart-stopping moment, Rudy wondered if it would jump down after him. He could never fight it in this pit, even if he hadn't broken his sword, or his arm, or both, in falling. But the bird only ruffled up its feathers in disgust, opened its swordlike bill, gave a hoarse honk of displeasure, and stalked away into the dusk.

  Rudy leaned back against the post behind him and closed his eyes. He felt that he could sleep or faint or die—it didn't matter which. But after a time, he told himself he wasn't out of the soup yet and he'd better sit up and take notice if he didn't want to come to a bad end.

  He opened his eyes and looked around.

  Fantastic. I've fallen into a mammoth trap.

  There was nothing else it could possibly be. Most of the overroofing brush had been pulled down in his fall, revealing the edge of the pit against the fading sky. The place smelled of new-dug earth, and white fingers of roots poked from the black walls near the top. In the center of the pit, three huge stakes had been driven into the floor, and it was against one of these that he'd fallen. He used it to pull himself upright and pressed his hand to his abraded cheek. Cheer up, he told himself. You could have impaled yourself on the way down.

  Now who the hell, he wondered, would build a mammoth trap out here? Is there a town of some kind… ?

  White Raiders!

  Fantastic.

  He slipped back down the pole to slump at its base, his head supported in his hands. Maybe I should have impaled myself, he thought. At least that would be fast. How come just when things look blackest, I turn around and they get worse?

  All I rea
lly need now to make things perfect, he reflected bitterly, is a mammoth, The ground shook.

  Distantly, the high, squealing trumpet of a beast in pain reached him, along with the booming thud of massive weight in flight and the swift pounding of hooves.

  If I stay right where I am, Rudy thought tiredly, the goddam thing will land directly on top of me and then I'll be mashed flat and out of this whole mess.

  No, he decided. With the way things have been going lately, I'd just be maimed and then I'd still have to deal with the Raiders. But Christ, they have horses. Even whole and healthy, I couldn't run from them.

  What the hell. He lurched to his hands and knees and crawled to the corner of the pit closest to the direction from which the mammoth was coming, where he would have the most chance of its falling over and past him as it went down. The ground rumbled with the earthquake of its feet; it was squealing like a bugle, the sound shrill in Rudy's brain. The noise was like an approaching Panzer division, inescapable, blotting him into a dusk-enshrouded nightmare of noise and fear. The vibration of it shook his bones. Then he looked up and saw it silhouetted against the sky—a massive brown head, a mountain of flesh as large as a two-storey house, its trunk unflung and its eyes red with savage pain and fury. Dark blood splattered its pounding feet to the knees. Trapped below it, Rudy could only stare upward in horror. The sound of its feet, its voice, and the sea roar of the hooves went round and round in his brain. A horse and rider flashed past on the very lip of the pit, the man's braids gleaming whitely in the gloom. Hypnotized, Rudy watched the mammoth balk and swerve from the edge; its teetering feet showered him with dislodged rock and earth as it hung suspended above him. In what looked like a slow-motion cinema, he saw the man on horseback remove an arrow from his quiver and nock it as the mammoth shied and raised its trunk in a deafening scream of rage. The horse reared in panic, hooves inches from the edge; the rider drew his bow and aimed through the thrashing melee of shadow and weight and motion, of flying mane and fur and the titan bulk of the thing bearing straight down on top of him. In slow motion the arrow left the bow, floating, it seemed to Rudy, with calm deliberation across the dozen feet of intervening distance, to bury itself to the feathers in the mammoth's glaring red eye. The huge beast flung itself upward with a final scream of agony, rearing on its treelike hind legs, and seemed to hover, weightless, over the pit in which Rudy sat, trapped and immobile with terror. Then, like a mountain avalanche, it fell.