The Walls of the Air

by Barbara Hambly

  "If you are right, and there is nothing below," the chieftain said, "better would it be that we remain to guard the road at your back."

  "Even so," Ingold agreed without irony, since this was, after all, his expedition to begin with. "Rudy?"

  "Uh—" Rudy said. "Yeah. Sure." He slid down from his horse's back, astonished at how sore he was. Nine hours of fast, steady riding was no joke for a novice. He wondered if he'd be crippled for life. He disengaged the spear shaft he'd been using for a walking stick from behind his saddle blanket and limped down the bank to join the wizard on the pavement below.

  Ingold turned back toward the stairway. Then he froze, like a wolf startled by some sound, raising his head as if at some far-off scent of smoke. The daylight reflected, flat and white, off his eyes as he scanned the sky.

  "It can't be," he said softly to himself.

  Rudy looked about nervously. "What can't be?"

  "We're much too far south." Ingold swung around, scanning the horizon, his brows drawn down with worry and puzzlement. At the same time one of the horses on the bank threw up its head with a snort and began to prance fretfully.

  "Too far south for what?"

  Ingold turned back to the Raiders. "I'm not sure," he said to Hoofprint of the Wind, "and I may be mistaken— but I believe there's an ice storm coming."

  It was the first time that Rudy had seen the implacable Raiders show any emotion at all. Fear sparked into the chieftain's amber eyes. "Can you be sure?" he asked and made a quick sign to the warriors behind him, a swift hand gesture that sent a ripple of whispers and motion through them like a stone dropped in still water. They, too, were afraid.

  "No— Yes. Yes, I am sure." Ingold looked in one direction and then another, the lines of his face deepening with concern.

  Not, Rudy suspected, so much because we're all going to get turned into popsicles in the next sixty seconds, but because he doesn't understand why it should happen this far south, for Chrissake.

  "Don't!" the wizard called out as one of the Raiders wheeled her horse to flee. "You'll never outrun it."

  "No," Hoofprint of the Wind agreed. "We are with you after all, Desert Walker." He urged his mount down the bank at a quick, slippery trot and across the stone pavement toward the stairway and the pit, the others streaming down behind him. Ingold strode after them, with Rudy limping in his wake.

  "How soon?" Rudy whispered, glancing up at the pale, empty sky. He could feel nothing, sense nothing but the chill lour that had prickled his hair all day.

  "Very soon." Ingold switched his staff from his right hand to his left as he came to the group of Raiders and horses and Rudy grinned a little to himself. Like the old Western gunfighters, Ingold did a lot of things with his left hand.

  Rudy had heard Gil speak of the stairways of the Dark, but before now he had never understood the eeriness that surrounded them, the sense of alien and incomprehensible gulfs of time. Even deserted—if it was deserted—there was something about that black and terrible stair that tensed his backbone with a sense of watching and malicious cold. Light had never touched that blackness, any more than it had the darkness of the remoter fastnesses of the Keep of Dare. Those who could bear no light could come and go at will in that darkness, as silent and undetectable as the air on which they drifted. And the stairs looked so worn. The whole emptiness of the half-buried, dark pavement was foot-smooth and slick, unreflective of the hard, white sky. How many little bare feet had been drawn over that open space? he wondered. How many had followed that whispering call to their deaths in darkness? And over what terrible span of years?

  And yet Rudy noticed that the Raiders would rather go down a supposedly empty Nest of the Dark than stay topside on the off chance that Ingold might be wrong about the storm.

  Ingold's staff flickered into phantom brightness as he descended the stair ahead of them. Like phosphorous, it illuminated the narrow walls, the curve of the low roof, and the endless, twisting steps. Even as he crossed the threshold on the wizard's heels, Rudy could catch the smell from below, the sweetish reek of old decay that made the horses shy and the men look askance at one another. That smell clung around them like a vapor as they wound their way toward the center of the earth.

  They turned a corner, and the wan daylight was lost behind them. The pallid gleam of the staff flashed glassily and green in the eyes of the horses, and the surrounding silence whispered with the fears of the men. Looking up at the black ceiling overhead, Rudy saw that it had been carved with long, chiseling strokes upward from below. The steps were straight but disturbingly irregular as to height and width, as they would be, to have been carved out by those who had no feet. Cool, damp air wafted upward to touch his face and bore on it a death reek, the stench of ancient corruption. He shuddered, taking what comfort he could in the living smells of men and horses around him and in the warmth of the crowding bodies and the whispers and occasional soft nickerings that broke the deadly silence of underground. Once or twice he heard the scritching of rodent claws on the walls nearby and caught a glimpse of lean, wary scavenger rats slipping like furtive shadows into the fissures in the dark walls.

  Whatever lay below, it was dead, dead and rotten, the stink of it laid by the cold. Yet it seemed that they descended for hours. The stairs curved and doubled back, and the only light was the faint foxfire glow that fell on the shoulders of the old man before him. Rudy's legs ached, then burned, while his mind and senses strained to catch some sound, some movement in the darkness below. But there was nothing—only the faint foetor of decay.

  Just as Rudy felt that his legs couldn't stand anymore of this, Ingold said, "Stop!" He halted so abruptly that Rudy almost ran into him. With hardly a rustle of his fur clothing, Hoofprint of the Wind slipped forward from among his troops to join them. Rudy tried to take another Step to see what lay in the darkness beyond, but Ingold put his arm across the passage to block him.

  "What is it?"

  Silently the wizard gestured with his staff out over the void.

  There were no steps beyond the one on which they stood—only darkness, heightless, widthless, and bottomless. Without the glow of Ingold's staff to guide them, they would have simply walked off the edge unseeingly. In that stygian pit, Rudy could hear the slip and skitter of movement, the scavenger rats' thin pecking squeaks; he could smell the last sickening whiffs of old and distant putrefaction. Then Ingold held his staff out over the darkness, and the glare of it slowly increased until it burned with the diamond-hard, white light of a magnesium flare. It was the first light to penetrate that gloom since the forming of the world, and it did so slowly, touching the lines of floor and arch and pillar shyly, like a hesitant lover, unwillingly delimiting water and stone from night.

  Rudy had meant to sound facetious, but awe conquered him, and his voice was barely a whisper. "Holy hellfires, Batman," he breathed, and Ingold raised a bristling eyebrow at him.

  These hellfires, as you say, are holy indeed," the wizard replied quietly. "For you look upon what only I have seen and lived to speak of. This is the domain of the Dark Ones beneath the earth."

  Twenty feet below them, the cavern floor began, sloping downward to roll away in miniature hills into darkness that the light of the staff could not fathom. The cave itself was hundreds of feet in height and perhaps twice that in breadth, and its opposite end was lost in impenetrable shadows. Dark, narrow entrances could be discerned among the pillars of limestone foresting the grotto, leading to yet other caverns. Vast stalactites hung like the pendant vaults of a flamboyant gothic ceiling, and these gleamed oddly in the steady white light, as if they had been polished smooth. The floor beneath was covered in a deep carpet of withered, brownish moss, broken in places by black sheets of water whose still surface threw back the light like polished onyx. So complete was the silence that lay upon the eon-haunted cavern that the vast, twisted vaults picked up the breathing of the tiny group of invaders, who huddled like beggars on the threshold of the abandoned realms of their foe.


  "Look." Hoofprint of the Wind pointed. Something moved down there—scavenger rats slipping, beady-eyed, along the marges of a pool whose waters were like obsidian. Barely discernible among the brown, shriveled mosses of the cave floor, bones could be seen, gleaming palely in the white blaze of the witchlight. It was hard to tell because of the fluted pillars of the stalagmites, but there seemed to be a lot of them. "This is perhaps their graveyard, their place to leave the bones of those they take?"

  "Nonsense," Ingold said, and raised his head to gaze off into the limitless distance of the cave. "There are far too few of them, for one thing. If this were the regular place to deposit the bones of their herds, in all the years the Dark have kept their wretched flocks in this cavern, the floor would be dozens of feet thick with them. And besides, you see there—" He pointed toward the ceiling, all eyes following the movement of the light. "See how pitted and shiny the stalactites are? The claws of the Dark rubbed them smooth. And see how deep that pathway is, up into that hole in the roof? It must have been one of their main thoroughfares. They would never live in the same place as corpses. No animal would."

  "You mean they just lived up there?" Rudy whispered. "Like bats on the ceiling? I thought you said they were intelligent, that they had a civilization."

  "And so they did," Ingold said. "Of a kind. But I believe it to be a civilization of the mind, a civilization with virtually no outward expression at all. It is one to which our minds cannot penetrate; and even if they could, we could not comprehend it, any more than a sheep or a pig could comprehend a love poem or money or the concept of honor."

  Rudy nodded, his eyes traveling slowly over those dark and gleaming walls. "You got a point there. I could name you a couple of people who'd have a rough time with two out of three." Beside him, he heard Ingold chuckle.

  While they were speaking, Rudy became aware of the cold. It flowed down the stairway behind him, deepening and intensifying until he found himself shivering in his heavy buffalo-fur coat. Even the weather-hardened Raiders huddled together for warmth; their breath steamed in the diamond brilliance of Ingold's light. From the twisting tunnel of the endless stair behind them, Rudy heard the moaning of far-off winds, a thin keening shriek whose wildness chilled his heart. He knew they'd been descending for a long time—God only knew how deep in the earth they were. Yet the intensity of the ice storm penetrated even there. He could see the ice condensing from the moisture of their breath to frost the polished walls.

  His teeth chattered as he spoke. "So why are the bones there? Can we go see?" It crossed his mind that deeper in the caverns they might have a better chance against the unearthly cold.

  Ingold pointed his staff downward at the drop. Rudy saw almost at once that it would be impossible to take the horses down the sheer fall. He wondered if the dooic, or whomever the Dark lured to their Nests, broke their ankles going over that edge.

  The wizard glanced back over his shoulder at the chief of the Raiders. "Have you ropes?" he asked.

  The panther eyes under the chieftain's long, curling brows darkened. "My friend, it is not a good thing," Hoof-print said quietly. "Down there are the dead. The whole cavern stinks of them. You can smell the wind that rises from the tunnels below. Better it is that you remain here with us to wait out the storm."

  Ingold turned away restlessly, as if he would pace the narrow step. His feet touched the very edge of the chasm. "Why are they dead?" he asked. "How did they die?"

  The chieftain sniffed, as at the question of a fool. "You stand in the caverns of the Eaters in the Night and ask how men came to die in this place? Stay among us, Walker in the Dark. To know that the Eaters slay men is no new thing."

  Ingold only said, "Give me a rope."

  They gave it to him.

  "Rudy?"

  Obediently, Rudy called light to the tip of the spear he used for a walking stick. With his fingers numb and aching in their worn gloves, he held it out over the void while Ingold dropped his own staff over the edge, then shinned down the rope with the businesslike deftness of a mountain climber. As he watched the wizard picking his way back along the cavern floor, Rudy noticed that the scavenger rats gave Ingold a wide berth. He wondered if this were a spell in itself, or if they were merely under the carefully engineered impression that the wizard was a saber-toothed tiger. From here, he was simply a little old man, the white glow of his staff like a dwindling star above his bowed head, the brown of his robes blending in with the dry, flaky moss that crumbled to dust beneath his light tread. Rudy watched that bobbing phosphorescence play in the shadows of the stalagmites for a time, while the wizard explored what lay beyond and among them. Then it vanished abruptly through a claw-smoothed doorway, seeking deeper darkness.

  Behind him, Rudy heard Hoofprint of the Wind murmur, "Not for all the horses nor all the hunting eagles nor all the willing women of the earth would I seek thus the Eaters in the Night. Death there is in that tunnel. Cannot he smell it? This ghost that the Eaters themselves fear, this has swept these caverns end to end and slain the Eaters and their victims alike. Yet he will go to seek it, like a little priest on foot."

  The cold grew deeper and more bitter, driving men and horses together to huddle like sheep in the protection of one another's warmth. Rudy wondered if Ingold would freeze down there by himself among the rats and darkness. Now and then, searing winds shrieked along the tunnel from above, moaning through the cavern and sighing in the carpet of frost-bitten moss. Rudy had little sense of time, but suspected it was something over an hour before the light glimmered once again in the caverns below and Ingold returned, shivering like a frozen beggar in a killing snow. He handed his staff up to Rudy, who took the glowing end gingerly and found the blazing wood perfectly cold and solid to his touch. Ingold climbed the rope hand over hand, the powdering of frost on his cloak glittering like diamond dust. The Raiders made room for him among them.

  "Well, Thief of the White Bird's Horses?" Hoofprint murmured. "Found you, then, what you sought?"

  "I never stole the White Bird's horses," Ingold responded automatically. Even through the freezing cold, Rudy could smell the taint of corruption on his ice-encrusted cloak. In the pallid witchlight, he looked white and drawn—like a man, Rudy thought, who had just got done vomiting up his socks.

  "And no," the old man went on. "I found only the dead. They're mostly skeletons by this time, but you can see they're all of the same date of death, not a gradual accumulation. Rats, worms, bloated white toads as big as your head… But that's all. Down to the farthest depths of these caverns, I can sense the presence of no living creature— neither the Dark Ones nor anything that might have driven them forth."

  Rudy hastily shoved away the images he had conjured from his too-vivid imagination. But something in the old man's scratchy, tired voice told him that Ingold would wander those caverns for many nights afterward in dreams. The sound of the furtive scampering in the deeps below turned him suddenly sick. "But why?" he whispered.

  "Why?" Ingold glanced over at him. "If something did kill off the Dark—which I'm not altogether certain it did —it could have killed the herds as well. But if the Dark simply evacuated the Nest to go elsewhere, they could hardly take their herds with them, now, could they?"

  "But could they not have defended this place against any ghost that came against them?" Hoofprint asked, and the frost crackled on his braided mustache.

  "Perhaps," Ingold replied softly. "But we cannot even be sure that there was a ghost. I don't think so. I am not even certain that they left in fear."

  The Raider's dark, animal face grew thoughtful. "If not in fear—then why?"

  "Perhaps at a command?"

  "And who would command the Dark?"

  "A good question," the old man said. "And one whose answer I will seek in Quo. If the wizards there cannot help me, perhaps that question and what I have seen here can help them. All I ask of you, Hoofprint of the Wind, is the leave to walk through your lands."

  The chieftain
laughed softly. "As if the leave of any man could bid the Desert Walker to go or stay. As soon can a man bid the Dark. Nevertheless, you have my leave. And what will you do, wise man, you and your Little Insect, together •with all the wise men of the world in one place upon the Western Ocean?"

  "Find a way to drive forth the Dark indeed," the wizard replied quietly. "Or perish together in trying."

  They emerged from beneath the earth to a world blasted and changed. As they struggled toward the livid remains of the daylight through the drifted snow that all but blocked the last twenty feet of the stairway, the cold seemed to grip Rudy's bones. Even after the bitter chill beneath the earth, it took his breath away with its brutal intensity. The small band of Raiders and horses came out to a surface landscape buried under hard, powdery snow so cold that it shrieked beneath the foot and to a sky black with clouds, where twisting columns of tornadoes wavered between dark air and frozen earth. Smaller winds chased each other aimlessly across the desolation, blowing snow now from one direction, now from another, in the confused remnants of the hurricane blast that had entombed the land.

  "I thought you said the storm would be over," Rudy managed to say through uncontrollable shivering,

  "It is over." Ingold swung himself lightly up onto his borrowed stallion. His breath crystallized to ice in his beard even as he spoke. "This is only its aftermath."

  On the way south through the sick darkness of the late afternoon, they passed a small herd of bison, half-buried in the drifted snow. The animals stood head-down, crusted with frost, their flesh and blood frozen to rock as they grazed. No wonder, Rudy thought, the Raiders will sacrifice one of their own people, if necessary, to propitiate whatever evil ghost it is that can do that.

  It was long after dark before they made camp. Even the freezing desert night was warmer than the daylight after the ice storm. The Raiders set up a tiny war camp with silent efficiency, and Ingold sat awake for a long time by the fire, talking with Hoofprint of the Wind. Rudy could see them through the narrow entrance of his shelter, the flickering touch of the gold light on the chieftain's long braided mustaches and on the scars on Ingold's hands.