The Walls of the Air

by Barbara Hambly

Ingold leaned upon the spear. 'Tell me of these evil ghosts," he said.

  Zyagarnalhotep regarded these two ragged pilgrims from the lands of his enemies for a moment in silence, as if gauging what each of them was worth. Rudy had the uncomfortable feeling that they were far from out of it yet. But the chief only said, "Come. Eat with me, you and your Little Insect who knows spells, and we will speak of this thing."

  Hoof print of the Wind's shelter was larger than others in the camp, but, like most of them, indistinguishable from a thicket of mesquite at more than a few feet away. The faintest drift of smoke marked its fire, with a whiff of meat cooking. Ingold unerringly picked out the concealed entrance and led the way into the dugout room. "Is it safe?" Rudy asked softly, with a worried glance back at the warriors still grouped and talking quietly outside.

  "Is anything you've done for the past four days?" Ingold replied tartly. "Sit down and let me see your leg."

  The place was narrow and low-roofed, intensely gloomy, and smelling of crushed sage, dirt, and woodsmoke. Bison and mammoth furs strewed the floor, and Rudy eased himself down onto one of these while Ingold sorted through the various pouches and packets he habitually carried concealed about his person.

  Another horrible suspicion assailed Rudy. "Hey—"

  Ingold glanced up.

  "It wasn't all a test, was it? I mean, to see how well I'd get along on my own?"

  "It was not," the wizard stated dryly and began to unwrap the crusted bandages on Rudy's ankle and calf. "For one thing, you aren't tit to be tested on anything yet, and a test of this sort would be tantamount to murder. When I have call to murder my assistants, I do so deliberately and after fair warning. For another, I should have failed you the moment you went haring off out of camp into a storm without stopping to ascertain whether I had really vanished or not."

  "Yeah, but I—" The sense of what the old man said sank in. "Hunh?"

  Ingold sighed and sat back on his heels. "It's the oldest trick in the book, Rudy," he explained patiently. "If you want to separate two partners, one of the quickest ways of doing so is to throw a cloaking-spell of some kind over one of them when the other one's back is turned. You were asleep, weren't you? I thought so. The other partner is bound to go pelting away in the opposite direction, yelling his friend's name, without stopping to make a careful search of the place or even take a second look. Merely a few minutes unguarded would have suited their purposes. The storm only made the situation worse."

  "They—who?" Rudy winced as Ingold applied the thin paste of powdered herbs and water to the half-healed mess of his scabbing wound.

  The old man looked up at him again and dried his hands on a corner of his patched and fraying mantle. "The Dark Ones," he said somberly. 'The same ones, I think, that have followed us from Renweth. There weren't many of them, but there were enough to keep me pinned in a cave in the bank till morning. I'm going to need another piece out of your surcoat, Rudy. We haven't anything else to bind this with."

  Rudy obliged him, reflecting philosophically that at this point a few more tatters made little difference. He knew he looked like some gorily exaggerated beggar out of an Ingmar Bergman movie, with his filthy rags, long hair, bruised face, and four days' worth of black stubble on his jaw. Ingold looked little better, worn out, filthy, and shabby, like a St. Francis after a bar fight. The last four days hadn't been easy ones on him, either.

  "It wasn't neglect that kept me from tracking you and catching you up immediately," Ingold went on, bending down to rewrap the wound. "The Dark pursued me for two nights, and I couldn't afford to be far from shelter. I ended by killing most of them—which is the reason I believe that they came from Renweth and have pursued us all along."

  Rudy said, "Hunh?" and then yelped with pain as Ingold's fingers probed gently at his damaged ribs.

  "Sit still and this won't hurt."

  "Like hell it won't. How do you figure that about Renweth?"

  "It is always difficult to count the Dark, Rudy." The wizard paused in his ministrations, kneeling before him in the murky darkness of the shelter, his face grave in the gloom. "But there were surely fewer on the second night than the first, and fewer still on the third. If the Dark can communicate among themselves and there had been others within call, there would have been more, not less. Hence their anxiety to separate us, rather than risk further decrease in their numbers by an open fight." He turned back to his medicine bag. "Those ribs are only cracked, by the way. I'll mix a gum plaster to hold them still while they heal, which they should do in a few weeks, provided you don't try any more spectacular feats like this afternoon's. I was also hampered in my pursuit of you because I had to keep track of Che."

  "Have you still got Che?"

  "Yes," Ingold replied mildly. "At the moment he's concealed up my sleeve." Seeing Rudy's expression, he grinned suddenly for the first time since they had met. "He's hidden out in the desert, not far from here," he explained "I couldn't lose him—I certainly didn't plan on journeying to the Seaward Mountains, grubbing for forage all the way. We're in too much of a hurry for that. Besides," he added, "the Bishop would excommunicate me twice over if I lost her donkey."

  Rudy pulled the frayed remains of his surcoat back into place and tangled with the lacings, cursing the man or woman in this universe who had never invented zippers. "Ingold, listen," he said after a moment. "You say the Dark didn't bring in reinforcements. I was four days out in the desert alone and I never saw the Dark Ones at all." Ingold nodded, and Rudy had the curious feeling for a moment that the old man could read those solitary hours printed like the tracks of a piper on sand in the lines of his face. "And you know what else? I never saw this ghost thing, either."

  "No," Ingold said quietly. "Neither did I." Meticulously, he gathered together his herbs and medicines, his hands deft and his face in shadow as he spoke. "And the odd thing is that I never even felt its presence. I spent last night sitting awake in the darkness, without fire, watching, hearing, and feeling, as wizards can, the threads and fibers of the air for miles over the desert, seeking the smallest sign that the Dark Ones might still know where I was. But there was no trace of the Dark, and no trace of—anything. No breath, no sign, no spirit moving over the sands, except those night-walking creatures that are one with the being of the earth."

  Rudy nodded, understanding what Ingold had done. As he himself had extended his senses to reconnoiter the camp beyond his prison shelter of brush, so Ingold had done on a vastly greater scale. He had sought and understood the shift of every spear of wind-moved weed, every harsh little scattering of kicked sand, and every scent that rode the airs of night, with the web of his awareness thrown like a net over hundreds of miles, seeking danger in the night—and finding none.

  "But in that case," Rudy asked, "where or what is the ghost?"

  "This do all my people ask," a bass voice rumbled. Looking up, Rudy saw that Hoofprint had entered the shelter, bending his tall head beneath the low pitch of the roof. He was surrounded by the greasy aura of woodsmoke and stewed game. The warriors who entered behind him, lesser chiefs of the war band, Rudy guessed, bore a tightly woven basket plastered inside and out with hardened clay and filled with chunks of steaming meat. Others carried smaller vessels filled with some kind of green, sharp-smelling mush. Rudy took a second look and saw that some of the smaller vessels were the skulls of dooic. Others, judging by the shape of the cranium and the absence of a suborbital ridge, were not.

  The lesser chiefs settled down in a group a little apart, sitting on the furs and talking quietly among themselves in their own tongue. Rudy overheard a drift of it now and then, a spare, quiet murmur, modulated like the sigh of the wind, half-augmented by signs and marked by subtle changes of inflection. Only Hoofprint of the Wind came to sit with him and Ingold, bringing meat and mush and a bottle of some kind of drink that had a nasty sweetish backtaste and an insidious alcoholic content.

  "Now," the chief said, when they had eaten and the semidarkness of the shelter was
deepening with the coming of evening outside. "You wise men, who read all the papers of the mud diggers beyond the mountains, what is this ghost that is more terrible than the Eaters in the Night, wise man?"

  "More terrible?" Ingold asked softly. Rudy heard in the mellow, grainy voice not only apprehension but overwhelming curiosity. Pointed to its lair, Rudy thought, he'd investigate it or die.

  "So must it be."

  "Why? Have you seen it?"

  There was a movement of denial and the glint of silver on a thick, gleaming braid.

  "Then how do you know that it is more terrible?"

  The Raider shrugged, a slight gesture reminiscent of the Icefalcon's curt movements. 'They flee before it," he said. "All the holes in the ground from which they rose up have they deserted and they come no more to this part of the plain. If this thing has eaten up the Eaters, now that they are gone, will it not destroy us also? When the chosen prey of a thing dies out, will it not turn to other? We know nothing of this thing and never have we seen it. Yet why have the Eaters gone? From what would such creatures flee? Have you heard the name of this thing, Desert Walker, in all your lore?"

  "No," Ingold said. "I have heard nothing of this. When did they depart, the Eaters in the Night?"

  Hoofprint of the Wind paused in thought, counting backward in time. Outside, the wind grew to a shrill-voiced violence with the dropping of the ground temperature; a few inches above their heads, the hide roof of the shelter rattled angrily on its moorings.

  "It was the time of the first quarter moon of autumn," the tall barbarian said finally, and Rudy, gifted with the dark-sight of a mage, saw Ingold look up suddenly, a strange eagerness illuminating his lined face. "Yes," the chieftain went on. "They rose in the last full moon of the failing summer, far away in the north, and hunted across the lands of us, the Stcharnyü, the Chasers of the Mammoth, the People of the Plains. And we moved south, the Twisted Hills People, the White Lakes People, the Lava Hills People, and all the others of the Stcharnyü. We have hunted the deserts, picking little bugs from the ground as the dooic do. And now the Eaters in the Night have gone away and rise no more from their holes. But what has driven them forth, Desert Walker? What is this ghost that they fear? For now it has come here and driven the Eaters forth out of their holes, even in the desert. We have camped the night beside such a hole, and they came not in the night. Now what shall we do if this thing will choose to hunt us?"

  Ingold sat quietly for a time, as if he had turned to stone. But Rudy could feel the tension in him, like a current of electricity, and could hear it when he spoke, under the deep, scratchy calm of his voice. "When the deer depart, the lion does not feed on the grasses on which they fed," he said softly. "Nor does the hrigg, the horrible bird, eat the bugs and lizards that are the prey of its prey. It may be that humankind has nothing to fear from this ghost. But tell me, Hoofprint of the Wind, where is this hole where you spent so calm and dreamless a night?"

  "From here," the chieftain of the Raiders said, "we could be there tomorrow, riding swift horses." His amber eyes gleamed a little, like a beast's in the dark.

  Beside him, Ingold asked casually, "And have you not swift horses?"

  Chapter Ten

  In spite of his dashing attempt at Errolflynnery, Rudy had never been on a horse before his arrival in this universe. On the road down from Karst he'd ridden exactly once, when he'd gone with a patrol of the Guards to investigate a farmhouse burned out by the White Raiders. The memory of what he'd found there still turned him sick. But, raised as he had been on Maverick and Paladin, he had been under the impression that there was nothing much to leaping aboard a horse and thundering away into the sunset. He had recently found out he was wrong.

  The horses of the White Raiders were taller and longer-limbed than those bred in the Realm of Darwath and, from foraging on the scant saltbush and wiregrass of the desert, they were narrow-built and of prominent vertebrae. They were also skittish and half-wild, and Rudy's humiliation was complete when, in the iron darkness before the freezing desert dawn, he got chucked unceremoniously off the mildest old mare of the herd, the one Hoofprint of the Wind had chosen for him deliberately on account of her gentleness. He looked up from the dirt in bitter envy at Ingold, who was sitting a fire-snorting buckskin stallion like a patriarch of the Cossacks.

  "Were you ever in the cavalry, by any chance?" he asked, as several of the Raiders went to catch the mare, their soundless laughter almost palpable in the leaden gloom.

  "In a. manner of speaking," the wizard replied cryptically. His breath smoked faintly in the starlight; he held the single rawhide rein in one mittened hand, the other hand resting relaxedly on his thigh.

  Rudy remembered hearing somewhere—from Gil?—the rumor about Ingold's having been in his youth a slave in the Alketch and he also remembered how the Alketch cavalry trained. Being chained to a practice post and having the local hotshots try saber charges at him wouldn't improve his riding much; but, if the story were true, it would sure as hell account for the old man's iron nerves. He muttered under his breath. "It figures."

  The Raiders returned, solemn-faced with inward amusement, leading the mild and gentle mare.

  They were riding north before dawn and continued throughout the day. The clouds that had broken the previous afternoon regathered, and the day grew colder instead of warmer as the small band of horsemen galloped north beneath a pale and heatless sky. At midday their breath was visible smoke, and the backs of the horses were steaming. Patchy snow covered the red sands and grew thicker as they proceeded north. Here and there Rudy saw tracks unfamiliar to his experience, and Ingold told him they were the sign of creatures native to the far north. But deeper and more frightening than the cold was the silence that covered the land. Nothing seemed to move or live in these wastes of sand and snow. At a casual look, even the winds that whirled like dust-devils across them appeared to be gone. When the riders stopped to rest or to change horses from the small cavvy of spares they had brought, Hoofprint of the Wind prowled restlessly on the edges of the group, talking softly with the dozen or so of his warriors who accompanied them or listening across the plains for some sound Rudy could not hear. The warriors who had come with them were silent, edgy as animals before summer lightning, keeping close together in the endless expanses of the snowy waste.

  "There," the chieftain whispered, pointing to where the mottled red and white of the land seemed to slope upward to a far and hazy horizon. 'There it lies."

  Rudy shaded his eyes against the distance. He could make out a flat, dark gleam, like a sunken lake of oil. Though he wore a coat of buffalohide that the Raiders had given him, he felt suddenly cold.

  "Do you have such places in your home in the north?" Ingold asked Hoofprint of the Wind as they turned the heads of their horses toward the dark gleam.

  "Not in our own lands," the chieftain of the Twisted Hills replied. "The Lava Hills People to the south of our runs, they had such a place. The tuar, they call them, and others spoke of them, out in the Salt Plain to the east."

  "Tuar?" the wizard said curiously. "Seeing?"

  "At such places it is said that the shamans, the wise men of my own people, can stand and, having made proper respect to the ghosts of the Earth, can see far away. They say, too, among the Lava Hills People that once they hunted in this fashion, the wise man seeing and leading the people to the track of the antelope; but they hunt so no more."

  "Why not?"

  Zyagarnalhotep shook his head. "They do not say. Healing there was also, worked upon those spots."

  Ingold fell silent, deep in thought, and thus they came to the entrance of the home of the Dark.

  It was the first such place Rudy had seen, an entrance such as all must have been before humankind had used the deep-founded stones to bear the weight of early temples and forts. A vast plaza, hundreds of feet to the side, lay before them, like a football field floored in black and shining glass. In its center gaped a rectangle of shadow, like an open and screa
ming throat pointed at the sky. From it, worn stairs led down to the depths of the world. Rudy shivered, at once repelled and curiously attracted, a fear that was oddly like acrophobia coming over him. He felt an uneasy desire to cover that inky pit, to cover it and chain down the cover, and to mark it with the rune of Darb, the rune that would not let evil pass. But side by side with the repugnance was the fear that, if he got too near, he would descend those stairs and, against his conscious will, go freely to the Dark.

  The riders drew rein where the snowy ground sloped downward to that glassy pavement. Ingold nudged his horse forward down the slope, and the hooves clicked loudly on the stone as he rode to the very brink of the pit. There he dismounted and took his staff from where it had been tied across the horse's withers; he had fetched it when they'd brought the burro Che into the camp last night. From the bank of snowy ground where he sat his horse among the Raiders, Rudy watched him, feeling a kind of eerie uneasiness as Ingold stood for a few moments on the lip of the stair, his head turned, listening as Zyagarnalhotep had listened to the wind. Then he descended a few steps and listened again, his hands in their incongruous blue mittens folded around the wood of the staff, the white sky vast above his head.

  Hoofprint of the Wind called out, "What think you, Desert Walker?"

  Ingold looked up and pushed his hood back from his face. "I hardly know what to think," he said. He came back toward them, like a ghost himself in the blowing wasteland of cold, and his horse followed him like a dog with its single rein trailing. "I feel that they are gone. In fact, I do not believe there is anything living down there, good or evil. Will you come down with me, Hoofprint of the Wind, to see this for yourself, or will you remain on guard up here while I go?"

  The Raider looked uneasy, a feeling which Rudy heartily shared. He trusted Ingold implicitly and had never seen him err. If the wizard said there was nothing down there, he was probably right. On the other hand, Rudy knew that the Dark had magic of their own. There was just the outside chance that Ingold was wrong. And if Rudy was jumpy about it, somebody who knew the old man only by reputation could hardly be expected to follow him down to the very heart of the darkness, no matter how macho he was.