The Walls of the Air

by Barbara Hambly

  "Is it any affair of yours?"

  Rudy leaned on his crescent-tipped staff, annoyed at that steely arrogance. "Yeah, I'd kind of like to know if the Dark Ones are gonna put the munch on you."

  "Don't be stupid. We'll find violets in this desert before we find the Dark. Or haven't you been watching?"

  "I've been watching." Their voices were pitched low for each other's ears alone. Their bodies blended with rock and shadow; an observer at ten feet would have passed them by, unseeing. "But I don't figure I'm that much more clever than the Dark."

  "What's the matter, Rudy?" Ingold jeered. "Do you think I can't handle the Dark?"

  "No, I don't."

  Ingold turned his face away and leaned his chin once more on folded hands and drawn-up knees.

  "I think if it came to that, you'd love to get eaten by the Dark," Rudy went on coldly, 'That way you wouldn't have to go back and tell Alwir the whole thing was a bust, and you'd still get credit for not being a quitter."

  Ingold sighed. "If you think I'd undergo something as unpleasant as that over someone as essentially trivial as Alwir, your sense of proportion is almost as poor as your harp playing." He glanced up, then continued impatiently, as if throwing a sop to a begging dog. "Yes, I was returning tonight."

  "Then why did you take a bow?"

  Ingold was silent.

  "Or did you figure I could carry the ball from here?"

  "That's your choice," the old man snapped angrily. "You've got what you want—you're a mage, or as much a mage as I can make you. You go back and play politics with Alwir. You go back and spin out the illusion that your power gives you either the ability or the right to alter the outcome of things. You go back and watch the people you care for die, either by your own hand or through your damned wretched meddling, and see what it does to you in sixty-three years. But until you do, don't sit there in self-righteous judgment of me or my actions."

  Rudy folded his arms and regarded the old man silently in the starlight. Hidden in the darkness of his drawn-up hood, Ingold's face seemed to be nothing more than a collection of angled bones, bruises, and scars amid a rough mane of dirty white hair. Halfway already to being a desert hermit again, Rudy thought. And why not? We blew it. The mages are gone. Whatever Lohiro might have been able to tell us, if the Dark did in fact release him, Ingold ended.

  Quietly, Rudy asked, "So what do I tell them at the Keep?"

  Ingold shrugged. "Whatever you please. Tell them I died in Quo. There would be some truth in that, anyway."

  "And is that what I tell Gil?" Rudy went on in a voice that shook with controlled anger.

  The old man looked up, fury and the first life that Rudy had seen in him in weeks blazing into his eyes. "What does Gil have to do with it?"

  "You're the only one who can get her back to her own world." It wasn't until Rudy spoke that he realized the extent of his own anger. "You're the only one in the world who understands the gates through the Void. And you were responsible for getting her here in the first place. You have no right to be the cause of her being stuck in this universe forever."

  He felt the rage that surged through the old man, rage and some other emotion breaking the bleak passivity of self-torment in which he had been trapped since Quo. But, like his grief, Ingold's anger was silent and all inside. In a queer, stiff voice he said, "Perhaps it would be Gil's choice to remain in the world."

  "Like hell," Rudy snorted. "For myself, I don't give a damn one way or the other. But she's got a life back there, a career she wants and a place in that world. If she stays here, she'll never be anything but a foot soldier, when she wanted to be a scholar; and she'll stay that way until she gets killed by the Dark or the cold or the next stupid war Alwir gets the Keep into. I care for that lady, Ingold, and I'm not going to have you stick her here forever against her will. You haven't got that right."

  The wizard sighed, and the life seemed to go out of him again, taking away even the bitter leaping of his anger. He sank his head slowly to his hands and said faintly, "No, you're right. I suppose I must go back, if only for that."

  Rudy started to say something else, but let his breath out with the words unspoken. Ingold's anger puzzled him, and this sudden capitulation bothered him even more. But he sensed the breaking of some bond of bitterness in the old man, a bleak self-hatred that had given him a kind of strength. Now there was nothing.

  Quietly, he said, "I'll be back at the camp. Can you find your way there?"

  Ingold nodded without looking up. Rudy left him there, walking slowly back along his own invisible tracks, the double points of his pronged staff winking in the desert starlight. Once he looked around and saw that the old man had not moved. The dark form was barely distinguishable from the rock itself, no more than a darkness against the muted, uncertain shape of the land beyond. As he walked back to the camp alone, Rudy could not remember having seen anyone so lonely or so wretched in his life.

  "You think there's anybody home?" Moonlight drenched the town before them, a collection of little adobe boxes climbing the hills in back of the road. The distant trickle of water and thick clusters of date palms, black against the icy, glowing sky, marked where the stream came down out of the hills. Several houses had been blown apart by the Dark; but, by the look of them, it hadn't been recently. First quarter moon of autumn? Rudy wondered. Most of the bricks had been pillaged to reinforce the buildings that remained, turning them into little Individual fortresses covered on the outside from foundation to rooftree with elaborately painted designs, pictures, and religious symbols. On the nearest one, a beautiful woman stood with her feet on the back of a crooked devil, her left hand raised against a swarm of inaccurate, fishlike representations of the Dark Ones, her right arm and cloak sheltering a crowd of kneeling supplicants. By the light of the waning and cloud-crossed moon, the painting had a startling and primitive beauty, the colors lost in the moonlight but the outlines of the figures strikingly clear. For some reason, it reminded Rudy of the runes on the Keep doors.

  "Possibly," Ingold replied, in answer to his question. "But I hardly think they will unbar their doors at night."

  "It's you and me for the Church, then," Rudy sighed, and started off through the shadows of the narrow streets, with Ingold drifting like a ghost at his heels. The poison, Rudy thought, was working its way out of the old man's system; if he seldom spoke, at least he seemed to realize whom he was talking to when he did. But Rudy missed his humor, the wry fatalism of his outlook, and the brief, flickering grin that so changed his nondescript face.

  When they reached the Church, however, Ingold surprised Rudy by leading the way around to the back, where a narrow cell was built onto the rear of the fortresslike structure. He knocked on the heavy door. There was movement inside and the sound of sliding bars. The door was opened quickly and quickly closed behind them.

  A short and slightly chubby young priest had let them in, a candle in his hand. "Be welcome…" he began, and then saw Ingold's face. In the soft amber light, the blood drained from his own face.

  The priest's sudden silence called Ingold from his thoughts, and he looked at the young man, puzzled. The priest whispered, "It was you." Ingold frowned. "Have we met?" The priest turned hastily away and fumblingly set the candle on the room's small table. "No—no, of course not I—please be welcome in this house. It is late for travelers —like yourselves—" He barred the door behind them, and Rudy saw that his hands were shaking. "I am Brother Wend," he said, turning back and revealing an earnest, young face for a man in his early twenties. He was wearing the gray robe of a Servant of the Church. His head was shaved; but, by the color of his black eyebrows and sincere brown eyes, Rudy guessed his hair had been black or dark brown, like his own.

  "I am the priest of this village," Brother Wend said, babbling to cover up nervousness or fear. "The only one now, I'm afraid. Will you sup?"

  "We've eaten, thanks," Rudy said, which was true—and besides, he reflected, if things here were as bad as he'd seen t
hem in the Keep, food was tight all over. "All we ask is a bed on your floor and stabling for our burro."

  "Certainly—of course."

  The priest went with him to put Che in the stables. While Rudy bedded the donkey down, he filled the priest in on all the news he could—of the fall of Gae, the retreat to Renweth, Alwir's army, and the destruction of Quo. He did not mention that Ingold was a wizard, nor indicate his own powers. Ingold, after the briefest exchange of amenities, had withdrawn to sit beside the small fire on the hearth and brood in silence. But throughout the evening, as Rudy and Brother Wend talked quietly in the shadows of the little room, the young priest's eyes kept straying back to Ingold, as if trying to match the man with some memory, and Rudy could see that the memory frightened him.

  Rudy was just settling himself to sleep on the floor near the hearth when hurried knocking sounded at the door. Without hesitation, Brother Wend rose and slid back the bolts to let in two small children from the darkness outside. They were a pair of girls, eight and nine years of age, sandy-haired and hazel-eyed like the people of Gettlesand. In a babbling treble duet they outlined a confused tale of yellow sickness and fever and their mother and their little sister Danila, and last summer and tonight, clutching at the young man's sleeves and staring up at him with wide, frightened eyes. Wend nodded, murmuring soothingly to them, and turned back to his guests. "I must go," he said softly.

  "One or the other of us will let you back in," Rudy promised. "Go carefully."

  When the priest had gone, Rudy got up to bar the door behind him. "Are you going to sleep?" he asked the silent figure by the hearth.

  Ingold, staring into the fire, shook his head. He seemed hardly to have heard.

  Rudy slid back into his abandoned blankets before they had a chance to grow cold and pillowed his head on the heavy volumes he'd carried from Quo—the only use, so far, that he'd seen for them. "You know that kid from someplace?" he asked. Again Ingold shook his head.

  Rudy had carried on a lot of these one-sided conversations in the last three weeks. Occasionally, he'd pursued them until he got an answer of some sort, usually monosyllabic, but tonight he gave it up. When he closed his eyes, Ingold was still brooding over whatever it was that he saw in the flames.

  Rudy wondered what it was he sought there, but had never asked.

  His mind went back over the glimpses that his own fire-watching had yielded, glimpses of Minalde mostly, scattered but comforting: Alde combing her hair by the embers of her small hearth, wrapped in her white wool robe, and singing to Tir, who crawled busily around the shadowy room; Alde sitting with her feet up in the dim study behind the Guards' quarters, reading aloud while Gil took notes, surrounded by a clutter of books and tablets; seeing Gil look up and grin and make some joke, and Alde laugh; and once, frighteningly, Alde in a passionate argument with her brother, tears running down her white, furious face while he stood with his arms folded, shaking his head in cold denial. The images followed Rudy down into darkness, mingling with others: the empty Nest on the windblown desert to the north; the empty streets of Quo; the startled look in Brother Wend's big dark eyes when he had opened the door; and the way he'd whispered in terror, "It was you."

  "Yes," Ingold's voice said, soft and infinitely tired. "It was me."

  Blinking in surprise, Rudy tasted the heaviness of lost sleep in his mouth and saw that the priest had returned. Ingold was barring the door behind him; in the shadows thrown by the waning fire, his robes seemed to be dyed in blood.

  The priest spoke shakily. "What do you want of me?"

  Defiance and terror mingled in the young man's voice. Ingold regarded him quietly for a moment, his arms folded, his scarred hands looking very bony and worn in the red flickering of the light. But he only asked, "She's better, isn't she?"

  "Who?"

  "Those children's mother."

  The priest licked his lips nervously. "Yes, by the grace of God."

  Ingold sighed and returned to his seat by the hearth, drawing his patched, stained mantle, which he'd been using for an extra blanket, back up around his shoulders. "It wasn't the grace of God, though," he said quietly. "At least not in the sense that it's usually meant. They didn't come to ask for the sacraments, even though you know as well as I do that the yellow sickness, once it takes hold, is almost invariably fatal. They asked you to heal her, as you healed their little sister some months ago." He reached across, picked up the poker, and stirred the fire, its sudden, leaping light doing curious things to the lines and scars of his hollowed face. He glanced back at Wend. "Didn't you?"

  "It was in God's hands."

  "Perhaps that's what you choose to say, but you don't believe it." The priest started as if he had been burned. "If you believed it, you wouldn't fear me," Ingold went on reasonably.

  "What do you want?" Wend demanded again in anguish.

  Ingold set down the poker. "I think you know."

  "Who are your?"

  "I am a wizard." Ingold settled back against the wall, the shadows cloaking him.

  The priest spoke again, his voice tense and crackling with passion. 'That's a lie," he whispered. 'They're all dead. He said so."

  Ingold shrugged. "He is a wizard also. His name is Rudy Soils. Mine is Ingold Inglorion."

  Rudy heard the harsh gasp of the priest's breath and saw him turn away, his face buried in his hands. His body shook as if with a deadly chill. "He said they were dead," Wend repeated in a thin, cracked voice, muffled by his hands. "And, God forgive me, I rejoiced to hear it. It was a terrible thing, but I was glad to hear that the Lord had finally removed the temptation from me, after all these years. You have no right to bring it back."

  "No," Ingold agreed quietly. "But you know as well as I do that God cannot remove temptation. It comes from inside you, and not from any outer cause. And you would be tempted as long as you lived—every time someone called upon you to use your powers for healing, and in times to come, when one of your people begs you to put the runes on his door to keep the Dark at bay. How could you refuse?"

  The young man raised his face from his hands. "I never would," he gasped.

  "No!"

  "I have no power," the priest whispered hopelessly. "I gave it up—sacrificed it. I have no power." He faced Ingold desperately in the wavering shadows, his full lips pressed tight together and trembling. "That power comes from the Devil, the Lord of Mirrors. Yes, God help me, I am tempted and will forever be tempted. But I will not trade my soul for power, not even the power to help others. That power comes from the Crooked Side, and I will have no dealings with it. And then—I dreamed—I saw that city that I have known in my heart all my life, how it would look… And you were there…"

  "Do you know why you had the dream?" Ingold's voice was soft, coming from a form that was little more than a disembodied shadow among shadows, with a sunken glint of azure eyes.

  "It was a summons," Wend whispered. "A need. A call. To go somewhere…"

  "To go to Renweth Keep at Sarda Pass," Ingold said, and that deep, grainy voice, though quiet, seemed to fill the tiny room. "To help me and Rudy—and whomever else we can find—to drive out the Dark."

  "And what else?" The young man's face shone with sweat, his eyebrows black against the whiteness of his high, shaven crown. 'To go openly to the Devil? To announce to my Bishop—if he survived—and to anyone else who cares to know that I am apostate? To put myself under judgment as a heretic?"

  Rudy, remembering another pair of steely, dark eyes burning out of a shaven skull, reflected that the kid had a point.

  "And wrongly," Wend went on in a whisper. "Wrongly. This world, when all is said, is an illusion. It will go on without me. My soul is all I have, and if I lose it—it will be forever."

  A long silence followed, with priest and wizard facing each other across the dying ripple of the hearthlight. They were curiously alike, Rudy thought, in their colorless robes. He remembered his own days as a drifter on the California highways, drawn by yearnings that could fi
nd no expression, an outcast because nothing made sense in terms of what he knew to be true. He tried to picture a life of fighting those yearnings, tried to imagine deliberately putting the powers of wizardry aside.

  A mage will have magic…

  He could not conceive of putting it aside.

  Ingold rose. "I am sorry," he said quietly. "You have temptations enough; to add to them would be poor payment for your hospitality. We will go."

  "No." Brother Wend caught his sleeve as he moved to wake Rudy, though a moment before the priest would have cut off his hand rather than touch the old man. "Wizard or devil, I cannot turn you out into the night. I—I'm sorry. It's only that I've fought it so long."

  Ingold moved his hand as if to lay it upon Wend's shoulder, but the young priest turned away, retreating into the shadows at the far end of the room where his own narrow pallet was. Rudy heard the creak of ropes as he lay down, followed by the slurred whisper of blankets. After a moment Ingold returned to his seat by the hearth, drawing his knees up before him and evidently preparing to stare broodingly into the fire until dawn.

  Silence settled over the narrow cell as the fire burned low, but Rudy could hear no alteration in the young priest's shaken breathing and knew that he did not sleep.

  "And he was right," Rudy concluded, speaking of it many days later. "That's the damn thing. You remember how Govannin's always saying, The Devil guards his own.' Well, he doesn't, not anymore." Snow lay deep around them, covering the foothills through which they had trudged for two laborious days, blanketing the steep, rocky rise of the ground. Above them the black cliffs were crisscrossed with heavy, white ledges of snow, and the dark furring of trees was weighted with it. A smother of clouds hid the higher peaks and filled the rocky notch of Sarda Pass with nebulous gray.

  Rudy's breath burned in his lungs. His long, wet hair hung damply around his face and over the collar of his buffalohide coat. The steel points of his pronged staff winked faintly in the wan afternoon light. Under the burden of books they'd brought all that long way from Quo, his shoulder ached, but his mind circled gull-like around a confusion of thoughts.