The Walls of the Air

by Barbara Hambly

  After the smells of grease and smoke and human frowziness, the ice-water clarity of the morning was a welcome relief. Mauve clouds piled the lower slopes of the peaks above. Beyond them, the sky was a pale bluish green, the light cool and holy on the tracked brown slush and ice-crusted mud. Gil stood on the steps, her cloak wrapped tightly about her, thinking of the three men on whom she had closed the gates—of the Icefalcon, when the slender protection of the Rune of the Veil had been stolen from him, of Ingold, journeying slap into the biggest Nest of the Dark in the West of the World, hoping to find the Archmage there, and of Rudy— "Gil?"

  Alde was standing at her elbow. Gil breathed a sigh of relief. "You're just the lady I want to see." As they walked together out of Gil's watchpost among the sprawling food compounds, Gil hastily outlined last night's conclusions with regard to the meaning of the words "fortunate place."

  "So the guys are walking straight into that," she finished, her breath drifting in a white veil against the darkness of the inky trees beyond. "Bektis will be awake by this time, won't he? Can you ask him if he can get in touch with them? Ingold talked about getting in contact with Lohiro at Quo, so there's got to be a way to do it. I mean, to talk back and forth by crystal. Get him to contact them and tell them not to go any farther until I can talk to them." She glanced up at the pale brightness of the sky. It was late October, she calculated, but the days were already shortening to the time of the Winter Feast. "I'll be off duty around sunset."

  "All right" Alde wrapped her sable cloak more tightly around her and hurried off down the slushy path for the Keep once more, the thick fur rippling in the light. But in less than an hour she was back, stumbling over the slippery mess of the icy trail, holding her thin peasant skirts clear of the mud.

  Gil, huddled like an undernourished blackbird at one corner of the compound, left off trying to warm her hands and strode toward the girl. "What did he say?"

  "I'm sorry, Gil," Alde panted. A flurry of the Keep children ran past them, throwing snowballs and shrieking, on their way to pick up kindling in the woods. A drift of smoke came to them from the wash-pots or the smokehouses, and with it the thunk of an arrow in a practice tree. "I'm sorry. Bektis says they're there already."

  "What?"

  "He says they've reached the walls of air. His spells can't find them within the mazes."

  Gil cursed, comprehensively and imaginatively. "How long have they been there? Or does that tea leaf reader know?"

  "No—Bektis isn't very careful about things like that. But they've been gone only a little over four weeks, so I'd imagine they've only just reached the Seaward Mountains."

  "Son of a—I've been stupid," Gil said. "Blind and stupid. I should have figured out the etymology before this." She picked up a chunk of snow from the ground and hurled it with vicious strength against the mud-slab side of the nearest shelter.

  "So if they've reached the walls of air," she went on more quietly, "then by the time they come out, they'll already know anything we have to tell them."

  Chapter Twelve

  "Do you see it?"

  "See what?"

  Ingold did not reply. He only tucked his mittened hands into his sleeves and watched Rudy with a close, speculative expression, as he watched the younger man when he practiced spells of illusion or made the waters of a creek rise or fall. A breeze shook the leaves of the yellowed aspens over their heads, spattering them and the sodden path underfoot with leftover rain.

  "You mean the road?" Rudy asked, looking back. The turning he'd seen—or thought he'd seen—was gone. Only the main road was visible, its hexagonal blocks unevenly worn and faintly silver under their carpet of tawny decay, winding away in silence through the wet cathedral stillness of the woods.

  Rudy looked inquiringly at Ingold but saw that he wasn't going to get any help there. He turned again to the vine-tangled banks above the road, wondering why he was so certain a road ought to be there. He sensed for the first time that feeling of rightness about something that did not exist, or wrongness about something that supposedly did. But there was nothing to see. Only a damp, blackish clay bank, grown over with wild grape and soggy, brown fern, crowned with a thin screen of ghostly, black-flecked birches. Somewhere in the distance, a swollen river groaned and stormed through the trees that had once fringed its banks. The air was filled with its muted clamor and the scent of leaf-mast and water.

  Cautiously, Rudy scuffed through the squishing yellow carpet of leaves toward the bank. A drainage ditch separated the road from the steepness of the overgrown cutting, brimming with water from the bright, unseasonable rains,

  Impelled by he knew not what force—or maybe simply by the maddening itch of a wizard's curiosity—Rudy started to wade into the ditch.

  His foot touched stone.

  He wondered how he could not have seen the little bridge that spanned it. It was directly underfoot, old and moss-covered, a few feet wide by a few feet long, jumping the ditch like a humpbacked dwarf. Trailing vines almost hid the milestone at its head; but peering closely at the worn granite, Rudy could discern the rune Yad had carved there. The Rune of the Veil.

  And beyond the bridge was the path.

  Rudy was sure he hadn't seen it before, but he felt as if he had known it would look like that. The sense of deja vu carried to the smallest details—the way the wine-brown tangles of wild grape cloaked the sides of the cutting like curtains in an untidy house, the ankle-deep mold of yellow leaves on the path, and the black-edged mushrooms that grew on the bank above. With his foot on the stone of the bridge, Rudy looked back to where Ingold stood, smiling, beside the burro. "Can you see it?" he challenged.

  Ingold's smile broadened. "Of course." He came forward, leading Che at his heels.

  It had rained throughout the day, sheets of twisting silver rain that froze and soaked the travelers even through the comparative shelter of the trees. These eastern foot-slopes of the Seaward Mountains were wooded, and the roaring of the rain on the leaves had called to mind the voice of the sea booming in a storm. All yesterday and the day before it had rained, blinding them to the road ahead and swelling the creeks to rivers, turning the lowlands to wrinkled gray marshes all prickled with the dark spears of reeds. Above the trees, the day was still gray, cold, and threatening, but for all that, warmer than the frozen reaches of the plains or the bitterness of the wind-scoured desert. Rudy shivered in his buffalohide coat and wondered if he'd ever be warm or dry again.

  Even in the dying of the year, the Seaward Mountains were beautiful, lush and opulent after the spare grandeur of the treeless lands. Scuffing through the oozing leaves of the roadbed, Rudy found that beauty seeping into his soul. He rejoiced in the quiet of the woods, in the color and richness of the life among the bronze and fawn of the carpeting ferns, in the black of the wet pine bark and the dark red of the oak, and in the alternation of darkness and silver. Movement and life surrounded them, the flick of the red squirrel's tail as it vanished around a tree and the high, harsh laugh of a jay. The path topped the cut bank and wound away through the woods, climbing a ridge cloaked in yellow tamarisk and leading down through a little pass that Rudy would have sworn was not there before.

  The wet leaves underfoot made the ground slippery, but his leg barely twinged. He still used as a walking stick the spear shaft he'd gotten from the Raiders and wore the sleeved coat of buffalohide they'd given him. Another breeze shook down more rain and brought with it the cold, wet scent of the heights. Cloudy pillars of vapor hid the peaks, but the bright smell was like the distant music that called to the soul.

  Against all his expectations, he and Ingold had reached the Seaward Mountains. It now only remained for them to find their way to Quo. "RUDY!"

  The desperation in Ingold's shout jerked him back to reality, and a split second later something collided with his head, a beating madness of black feathers and a beak that gored into his cheekbone and narrowly missed his eye. He struck at the tearing claws and heard the whine of Ingold's staff
slashing down inches from his face. With a hoarse, mocking caw, the giant crow eluded the blow. With a bloody beak it went flapping heavily back toward its native trees. Rudy stood trembling in the road, gasping with shock and idiotically remembering a Hitchcock film he'd seen on the late-late show. Blood dripped down his fingers as he touched the wound. Beside him, Ingold scanned the trees with cold fury in his face. Whirlwinds of black crows rose from their bare branches. Their obscene laughter drifted back down like stray black feathers, along with the dead leaves dislodged by their wings.

  "Are you all right?" Ingold turned back to Rudy, dug a kerchief from somewhere in his robes, and dabbed at the cut.

  "Yeah," Rudy whispered. "Fine, I guess. What the hell did that bird attack me for?"

  The wizard shook his head. "That happens here, if you take your guard off. That, or something like it."

  Rudy's hands were shaking as he took the cloth. The wound stung in the chilly air. In a way, even getting his leg slashed open by the dooic hadn't been this bad. He'd been ready for that.

  There was no way to be entirely ready for the walls of air that encircled the City of Quo.

  Often there was only a sense of being followed. Rudy caught himself constantly looking over his shoulder, uneasy in the silence of the dripping woods. Sometimes he had the conviction that he did not see things that were there. He would stop in such places, letting his mind drop into that state of unconcern that saw all things with crystal clarity, as once in the desert he had seen his own soul— the shapes of dead leaves, straw-colored against the sepia background of decay, and the roll of the land under its cloak of fern. Often, while he sensed the illusion of such spots, he could not fathom it, though once he did find another path, threading away from the main one, winding around a thicket of thorn-choked aspens that he had thought lay wider and higher than was later proved. Ingold followed him down this new path without a word. Still other times, the illusion-spell took the shape of a curious, irrational fear, a loathing to continue at all, or a vile detestation at passing a certain tree. Once past it, Rudy looked back to see the faint outlines of the Rune of the Chain all but obscured in the overgrowing bark.

  "If you ask me, it would be damn easy to get lost in these woods," Rudy muttered, after Ingold had stopped him from going on and had shown him a side turning through a dark glen that he had, for some reason, been completely unable to notice. Once on the path itself, it was completely visible, and he was not even sure that it had ever been out of his sight.

  Ingold mimed a man shielding his eyes from too-brilliant light. "Dazzling," he murmured. "The boy's intellect is simply dazzling."

  "What are they afraid of?" Rudy went on, ignoring him. "Afraid?" Ingold raised his brows.

  "I mean, they have their magic to protect them in case of trouble. If it came down to a fight, I mean, which it wouldn't. I mean, who'd take on a bunch of wizards?"

  "Never underestimate human motivations," Ingold advised. "Especially under the impulse of the Church. Remember that the Archmage has been called the Devil's Left Hand. It wasn't so long ago that the Prince-Bishop of Dele mounted a major war on the Council and sent an expeditionary force to torch the town and burn as many wizards as might be found in the ruins."

  "Did the wizards fight them off?" Rudy asked, awed at the thought.

  "Of course not. The expedition never came anywhere near Quo. There was rain and fog, and the army became lost in the foothills. It was eventually deposited back on the main road, miles from where it had entered the hills. Wizards can fight, if need be. But we are all very good at evading the conflict. Stop a moment."

  Rudy halted, puzzled. Ingold took him by the arm and led him forward along the narrow path toward the edge of a cloud-filled gorge visible through the smooth, bare boles of the gray trees. Ingold kept a little in the lead and advanced with what Rudy considered ridiculous caution—until it became suddenly apparent that the edge of the gorge was very much nearer than Rudy had thought. He found himself looking down a sheer drop of black-walled cliff to a bristle of torn rock and jagged, broken trees, half-hidden in the mists at the bottom. Head swimming, he stepped back hastily. He thought he had seen something else on the rocks below, like the broken limbs of the dead trees, but whiter.

  He glanced around quickly. The path itself had changed. Fog was blowing softly down on them from the higher peaks, and the trees were receding around them like mocking spirits into the mists, the ferns spider-webbed in silver dew.

  "We've come quite high," Ingold said, his soft, scratchy voice calm and strangely disembodied in that cool, two-dimensional world. "From here the way becomes more difficult. The illusions of the road alone will have turned aside the malicious or curious or idle. The only ones to come this high are those who seek to become mages and who can see the traps before they close—or those with the motivation to do the wizards real harm."

  "So—what can we do?" Rudy whispered, afraid.

  "Do?" The fog had closed on them now, so that Ingold was only a flat shape in the mist, hooded darkness hiding his face. "Dispel the fog, of course."

  Hesitantly, Rudy stammered out the words Ingold had taught him to summon and dismiss the weather. Chill as wraiths, the fog caressed his face. Now he could feel the spell that bound the mist, drawing it like a net around them. He put out his strength against it, but felt it greater than his own power, older and infinitely more complex. He stood alone, wrapped in mist, almost choked by its thickness, as if smothering in a wet shroud. Sweat as well as fog dampened his face. He fought the impulse to run shouting from it—it did not matter in which direction— only to be away from the malicious strength of the hands that held the net.

  "I can't do it," he whispered in despair.

  Ingold clicked his tongue reprovingly. "Can't! If you can't, then we shall stay here, or else walk sightlessly. It will be night soon."

  "Dammit!" Rudy wailed. "Can't you give me a stronger spell?"

  "Why? Yours is perfectly adequate."

  "It is not! You know you could sweep this stuff aside like a cobweb!"

  "With the self-same spell, Rudy." Ingold was no more than a dark blur in the mists, but his voice was warming, like a fire in a cold place. "The strength of your spells is the strength of your soul. Haven't you realized that?" Ingold stepped closer to him, the coarse fiber of his robe sewn with pearls of dew. "As you grow, your spells will grow also."

  "But can't you feel it?" Rudy demanded helplessly. "It's—it's like a boy fighting a man. I'll never…"

  "If you keep saying never," Ingold replied mildly, "you'll come to believe it. If his back is to the wall, a boy has to fight a man, doesn't he? And sometimes he can win."

  Rudy subsided into silence. Above the fog, the sky was growing perceptibly darker, the first chill winds of evening drifting down from the unseen heights…

  Winds. The endless winds of the plains.

  With meticulous bounding-spells and limits, Rudy summoned the winds.

  They were icy cold, but they smelled of the stone and glaciers above. Thin, steady, and strong they blew, riding gray horses up from the gully, breaking the fog before them like startled ghosts. Cloudy shapes rolled away from the path and retreated ponderously from the sloping land. Trees shook wetness down on the pilgrims disapprovingly in the new strength of the winds that whipped Rudy's long, wet hair into his eyes. He started down the path, Ingold leading the burro silently behind.

  They camped that night in open ground, under the shadow of the higher peaks. Ingold circled the camp with spells of protection, visible to a wizard's sight as a faint ring of foxfire around the perimeter, but nothing threatened them throughout that whispering night. In the morning, the clouds had cleared somewhat, and Ingold pointed out the pass which they sought, a narrow notch in the blackness of the mountain wall. Throughout the day it seemed to shift unaccountably to the northward, and at times the trails Ingold chose appeared to lead nowhere near it.

  They were in high, treeless country now, where rocks towered as prou
d as goddesses above the trail. An occasional twisted live oak or clumps of scented heather clung to the barren slopes, and water rushed down in veils of glimmering lace, or boiled in rock channels whose depths showed rust and pewter and the velvet green-black of moss. The trail here was perilous, switching back and forth across the steep stone of the mountain's flank, overhung by massive boulders. In places the trail was buried under single boulders or great spills of talus and boulders mixed, deadly testimony to the spells that guarded Quo. Rudy wondered what would have happened to him at this point, had Ingold not walked at his side.

  Ingold led the way now, picking out the tangled trails with preternatural skill. Rudy was surprised at his own exhaustion following yesterday's efforts. Try as he would, he could not see half the illusions that Ingold did. It certainly would never have occurred to him to cross the boiling rapids of a swollen river, as Ingold did, wading through a ford at the place that looked to be the deepest and most deadly. Nor would he have found the trail that led over a seemingly sheer cliff.

  And then there was the bridge.

  "What's wrong with the bridge?" Rudy wanted to know. The great span of moss-grown stone arched proudly over the canyon, its curved blue shadow faintly visible on the thorn and boulders that choked the thread of stream far below.

  "It isn't there," Ingold replied simply.

  Rudy looked again, then walked to the threshold and struck the stone with his staff. Wood clunked solidly on rock.

  "Pieces of this road are unfamiliar to me," the wizard went on, "and the road has changed recently—become more dangerous, I believe. But I have crossed this gorge here dozens of times. There is no bridge."