The Walls of the Air

by Barbara Hambly

  Chapter Fourteen

  Rudy Solis and Ingold Inglorion entered the City of Wizards just after noon of the following day. From the hills above, they saw the sea mists roll back, revealing that small town—a village, really, grouped around its famous school—as it slowly emerged from veils of pewter, pearl, and white.

  Even from the hills, Rudy did not think he had ever seen a place so completely destroyed by the Dark.

  In Gae, the houses had been crumpled, smoke-blackened, or had had holes blown in roofs and walls. Here he could not find a single dwelling that had been left standing, not a roof that had not been ripped from its walls and thrown with blinding violence into the rubble-strewn streets. In the damp sea climate, weeds were already rank among the broken stone.

  He and Ingold stood for a long time on the last rolling summit of the hill. Silvery grass rippled around their feet, but there was no sound here but the mewing of the sea birds and the boom of breakers. The air smelled of salt. A drift of mist obscured the town, then blew clear, as if unveiling the bare bones with a mocking flourish. Screeching whirlwinds of gulls rose from the ruins, to settle back a few moments later. Other gulls, wailing in their thin piping voices, hung motionless on stretched white wings against a featureless sky. Rudy wondered what the place had looked like the day after the attack had happened. Had the gulls blanketed the town like a visitation of death angels to pick the corpses, or had the rats been there first?

  He hardly dared look at Ingold.

  The old man stood beside him like something that had been carved from stone. The gray of the sky seemed to bleed the color out of everything, leaving only the blue of his eyes under their short reddish lashes. There was no expression on his face, but not for anything in the world would Rudy have spoken to him then. After a time, Ingold moved off, taking the downward path without a word.

  Bodies were scattered throughout the city. From the way the bones lay, it was clear that scavengers had fought over them, worrying them to pieces. Mechanically, Rudy identified tracks—fox, rat, coyote, and crow. After this long in the open, there was little stink and few flies. He could see Ingold checking the signs as unemotionally as an insurance inspector, studying how the fire blackening striped the walls where it had been thrown or swept from a staff, instead of crawling up them in a regular pattern to concentrate on the roof beams, as it did in other places where the inhabitants had simply set everything they owned alight, and how the bones lay in groups of two or three at most, where they had not fallen singly. The wizards, it seemed, had not even had time to band together to make a stand.

  It surprised Rudy a little how small Quo was. At no time could the City of Wizards have housed more than a couple thousand, of whom, according to Ingold, about a third were wizards or students. Small, fanciful stone houses had grouped around a main square or bordered the crooked lanes that trailed on out of the town. Only in the center of Quo were there large buildings, whose splintered frames loomed before the belated pilgrims as they made their way through the overgrown rubble of the streets. There the school proper rambled along the edge of the cove, buildings alternating with a long colonnade, through whose tinted pillars could be glimpsed the iron-edged sea. At the far left, the gatehouse slumped like a smashed sand castle, flanked by the kicked-in ruin of some mighty building of many storeys and turrets, all but buried now under the trailing vines of its feral roof gardens. To the right, at the end of the long curve of the bay, the black stump of a truncated tower stood alone on the farthest point of land.

  It was for this tower that Ingold unhesitatingly made.

  Since they had entered Quo, he had not spoken, and his face was still and very calm, as if this ruin had belonged to strangers and had not been the only home his heart bad known for most of his adulthood. The torn hem of his mantle, stained with the dragon's blood, brushed passingly over a picked skull and broken staff that lay half-buried in nibble and weeds. Behind him, Rudy shivered with a frightened sense of deja vu.

  Forn's Tower was also smaller than Rudy had thought The buildings surrounding it were little more extensive than a couple of good-sized houses put together, built on the big square knoll that jutted out into the sea. The tower itself, or what was left of it, looked no larger than one fair-sized room stacked on top of another. The black, curved shell of its walls extended thirty feet into the air. From the square below, Rudy could trace the broken stairs winding up its side. As he climbed behind Ingold through the ruins, he looked out over the half-moon beach and saw the steps leading down from the school with their twining patterns of inlaid stone and, half-buried at the tide line, the remains of a crab-eaten skeleton.

  The two men reached the top of the knoll. The tower and the buildings surrounding it had been blasted and gutted, and the black stone spew of it lay scattered everywhere. Granted, the place was built later than the Keep, and by another technology entirely, Rudy thought, stooping to pick up a splinter of rock and then hurrying his steps to catch up with Ingold again. But it might have been thought that the spells of the Archmage could have kept the Dark out, as the spells Ingold set closed the doors to them.

  Ahead of him, Ingold walked through the ruins, following the line of corridors he had traversed in other years with the light, unthinking tread of a man in a hurry to do something else, passing doors he had knocked at casually, back in the days when those rooms had housed people he knew. He barely glanced at the open ruins and the cracked walls.

  He's like a man with a mortal wound, Rudy thought, frightened. He's still numb from the shock. The nerve ends are still cauterized. God help him when he starts to hurt.

  In front of them the floor fell away.

  It had been blasted upward, the torn beam ends clearly indicating that the explosion had come from below. Standing on the crumbling lip of the pit, Rudy could look down into the labyrinths of the lower vaults and see squat pillars and worn red tile floors, the dust of ages that had accumulated since the tower's founding, muddied by the sea rains. Below them the torn flooring revealed a second vault, founded on the ancient heart of the knoll. But instead of the gray of buried rock, smooth black basalt reflected the distant sky. From deep below, a draft of warmer air blew upward onto Rudy's face, bringing with it the smell of a yet deeper darkness.

  Beside him, Ingold said, "I should have guessed."

  Rudy turned his head quickly. The wizard looked calm and rather detached, with the rising breath from below stirring at his ragged white hair. Rudy said hastily, "There's no way you could have known."

  "Oh, I don't know," the wizard said absently. "I certainly got myself into enough trouble for warning everyone else of the possibility. I don't know why it shouldn't have occurred to me that all of the old schools of wizardry were built in cities that were later destroyed by the Dark."

  "Yeah, but a lot of cities were destroyed by the Dark," Rudy argued quickly, hearing, under the deep calm of that scratchy voice, a note he didn't like, like the first fissure of an earthquake. "They knew the direction your research took. Any one of them…"

  Ingold sighed and shut his eyes. Very quietly, he said, "Go away, Rudy."

  "Look…" Rudy began, and the eyes opened. In them was a black depth of pain that amounted almost to madness.

  Gently the rusty voice repeated, "Go away."

  Rudy fled, terrified, as if an idly lifted pebble had turned into an H-bomb in his hand. When he reached the bottom of the knoll and looked back, he could not see that the old man had moved.

  For a long time, it seemed, Rudy wandered the empty spaces of the ruined City of Wizards, listening to the booming of the sea. The crash of the breakers was somehow comforting, an echo of California winters. Whether it was because of the familiar damp cold of the seashore, the salt smell, or the magic that still lay over the town like an enormous silence, he felt at peace, as if he had come home. Home, he thought, his boots making barely a sound on the colored marble marquetry of the pavement. To find home in ruins, and family—the family I should have known and never
did—dead! He looked back at the solitary figure on the knoll, very dark against the white of the empty sky.

  Quo—gone. Everyone you knew and loved and respected—gone. The Archmage gone—Lohiro, whom you loved like a son. The only ones left are novices like me, charlatans like Bektis, goodywives like Kara and her mother. Alwir's army is scratched, or worse, going into battle against the Dark with no backup, leaving the Keep unguarded for the Raiders or the Empire of Alketch or the Dark. And only you left, the last wizard, a lost soul like I was in California.

  And yes, you might have guessed, but no, it wasn't your fault. But he knew already that Ingold would never believe that.

  Heartsick, Rudy turned away. He explored for a time the roofless remains of the ancient school, lecture halls where the carved benches had been swept and scarred by fire, laboratories and workrooms whose furnishings were torn and twisted by wild and incomprehensible violence, glittering in the chill, pale light with shattered glass and broken gemstones, and libraries, their couches and seats ripped, charred, and acid-eaten, with the leaves of books strewing the rain-damp pavements or plastered like wads of crumpled leaf mast in corners. In one such chamber he found a harp, half-hidden in a wall niche and protected by fallen timbers, the only whole and untouched thing in that world of ruin and desolation.

  As he carried it down the steps, on which moss was already beginning to grow, to where they had tethered the burro, it came to him what this ruin meant. Without the school, later generations of wizards, no matter what their inborn talents, would be like him, untaught callers of fire, hopeless dreamers groping for a mode of expression that they could not find.

  Or worse, he thought. A mage will have magic…

  If you can't find good love, then you will have bad.

  Wind rippled in his long hair and chilled his fingers as be packed the harp onto Che's back. They could take at least one thing, he thought, from the ancient city by the Western Ocean. One thing, out of all this destruction. He pulled the coarse, heavy fur of his buffalohide coat tighter around his neck and stood for a time in the shifting, patchy light of white sun and opal mist, staring out at the sea.

  He thought of the Keep of Dare.

  Not as he had often remembered it—the candlelit darkness of Alde 's quiet rooms and the mazes stretching in shadows within those ancient walls—but from outside, as he had seen it only once, the morning he and Ingold had taken the road for Quo. An almost cinematic image of it formed in his thoughts—black and square and solid against the snow that lay thick around its walls, impenetrable, enigmatic, self-contained. He saw the black loom of the Snowy Mountains behind it and smelled the cold, biting freshness of the pine-sharp glacier winds. And with the image, he felt a need blossom in his heart, a yearning to be there, as urgent as lust or starvation. But he felt it from outside himself, as if the thoughts of another had been projected into his heart.

  Looking up, he saw again the black and curiously regular shape of the knoll by the sea, the dark stump of Forn's Tower. Through the lacework of the bare trees he saw the small figure standing, arms raised, mantle billowing in the freshening winds from the sea. And he knew that what he felt was a call, and that the calling came from the man who stood alone at the heart of the last ruined citadel of wizardry. The last wizard, an exile gypsy vagabond with a sword at his hip and his back to the wall, was calling them all—the second-raters, the flunk-outs, the novices, the charlatans, and the goodywives. He was calling anyone, in fact, capable of hearing—calling them to meet him at the Keep of Dare.

  Ingold came striding down from the knoll soon after, his face set and harsh, his eyes bitter and frighteningly cold, a stranger's eyes. Rudy scrambled off his perch on the rail of the colonnade to greet him, but there was nothing to greet in that blind, icy stare. "Come with me," Ingold ordered briefly. "There is one thing yet we must do."

  The wizard scarcely spoke to Rudy again that afternoon.

  Rudy fetched the burro in silence and in silence followed the old man down the blasted shore to the collapsed ruin beside the gatehouse. The terraced roofs had supported storey after storey of incomparable gardens, and these had fallen in on one another, tangling trees, masonry, flowers, earth, tumbled pillar, and broken beam into one colossal pyramid of wreckage. Ingold hunted around it until he found what had been a wide window that would still admit them to the ruined lower hall, then slipped like a cat among the precariously balanced blocks of half-fallen granite, working his way downward and inward. Rudy followed unquestioningly, although Ingold had bidden him neither to go nor to stay. In places, they could walk beneath ceilings that moved and groaned with the weight pressing on the damaged arches. In places, they had to climb piles of fallen rubble. Once they crouched to slide beneath a mighty lintel stone that was cracked right through the middle, supporting by equilibrium alone literally tons of colored stone, decked incongruously with dangling curtains of trailing yellow leaves. As he scrambled, panting, to keep up, Rudy half-feared that Ingold was seeking his own death in this place, for the wizard had turned suddenly strange and frightening, remote in his bitterness and rage. It was possible—logical, even—that he would arrange to perish with the others, in the city that had been his home.

  But as they wriggled from the last rubble-clogged stairway into the broken vaults, Rudy understood why Ingold had come.

  The bluish glow of witchlight slowly filled the long, narrow hall. It picked out the gold on the bindings of the books there, the smooth sheen of cured leather covers, and the spark of emerald or amethyst on decorated clasps. Like a ghost returned to the land of the living, Ingold moved down the rows of the reading tables, his blunt, scarred hands touching the books as a man might touch the face of a woman he had once loved.

  It was obvious they couldn't take all. There were hundreds of volumes, the garnered wisdom of centuries. But, fatally incomplete as it had been, knowledge was the heart of Quo, as it was the heart of wizardry. To protect that knowledge was the reason for the city's existence, the justification for the rings of spells that circled the place so tightly that even after the death of every person there, the image of Quo could not be called in water or fire or gem.

  Silently, Ingold touched the locks and chains that bound the books to their slanted desks, and the chains clattered faintly as they fell away. He brought two volumes back to where Rudy waited in the doorway and handed them to the younger man as if he were a nameless servant "You'll have to come back for more," Ingold said curtly and turned away.

  In all, they salvaged two dozen books. Rudy had no idea which they were, or why these were chosen and not others, but they were all large and heavy and loaded Che down unmercifully. Ingold scavenged material from a curtain to make rough satchels for himself and Rudy to carry what could not be put in the packs; after one look at the old man's face, Rudy dared not complain of the extra weight. When they crept from the rubble for the last time, Ingold turned back and wove spells of ward and guard over the whole of the ruin, that neither rain nor mold nor beasts should enter there, that all things should remain as they were, protected, until he should come again.

  By then it was dark.

  They camped on the open beach. If the Dark still lurked in that dead city, the ruins offered too many hiding places for them. And, Rudy thought, as line after line of the spelled circles of protection faded, glittering, into the air around the camp from the tips of Ingold's moving fingers, too many ghosts walked those silent streets for comfort The night was cool, with the smell of distant rain; but over the ocean, the clouds broke to reveal a moon as rich and full as a silver fruit, its light frosting the billowed clouds into ski slopes of dazzling white. The crackling of the driftwood fire mingled with the slow surge of the waves in an echoing whisper of California.

  Home, Rudy thought. Home.

  He took the harp he'd found from its makeshift wrappings and ran hesitant fingers over its dark, shapely curves. The fire caught in the silver of its strings and touched the patterns of red enamel inlaid in the black woo
d of the sounding board. Like most Californians of a particular generation, Rudy had mastered sufficient guitar chords to get himself through epics like "Light My Fire"; but this instrument, he sensed, was designed for music of a kind and beauty beyond his comprehension.

  He caught the glint of Ingold's watching eye. "Do you know how to play this?" Rudy asked hesitantly. "Or how it's tuned?"

  "No," Ingold said harshly. "And I'll thank you not to play it, either, until you know what you're doing." He turned and looked out to sea.

  Quietly, Rudy wrapped up the harp again. Maybe Alde can teach me, he thought. Anyway, somebody at the Keep should know. He felt as if he half-knew already what its sound should be and understood Ingold's not wanting to hear it bastardized.

  "Its name is Tiannin," Ingold added after a moment, still not looking at him.

  Tiannin, Rudy thought, the way-wind, the south wind on summer evenings that sowed restlessness and yearning in the heart like wind-borne seeds. He strapped the harp into the packs, with mental apologies to the hapless Che, and started back toward the fire. In the dark beyond their camp, he could see the broken line of the colonnade, his wizard's sight picking the merged patterns of flowers, hearts, and eyes that flowed down the colored stone. Against the sky, the dark bulk of Forn's Tower rose, like the burned stump of a dead tree under the azure glow of the sea horizon. Westward, moonlight gleamed on the surge of the waves, opal lace on the white breast of the beach.

  Against the black wall of the cliffs, the elusive wink of Starlight flashed on pointed metal.

  Rudy's breath, his heart, and time itself seemed to stop. As if he had heard something, Ingold looked up, then out into the darkness that even to Rudy's sharpened perceptions revealed nothing more. The leaping brightness of the fire showed hope in his face that was almost terrible to behold. But for a long while, there was nothing in the night but the surge of the ocean and the wild hammering of Rudy's heart.