The Walls of the Air

by Barbara Hambly

  We're home.

  Home to Minalde.

  And to what else?

  By now, he was long used to carrying on both sides of the conversation. "You said to me once to remember that we were outcasts. But that was back when we thought we'd have the Archmage to help us. And now we've got nothing, literally nothing. Anybody who declares himself a wizard is asking for it." He shrugged, "I don't blame Wend for sitting tight."

  "Nor do I."

  He glanced around, startled at the response. Ingold had been silent for days.

  To his surprise, the old man continued. "In fact, I should be amazed if anyone shows up at all. Kara and her mother might," he added reflectively, "if nothing else happened to them. But—the opposition to wizardry will have redoubled. And those alive to hear my summoning would be those who could not overcome their fear of opposition in the first place."

  Ingold came up beside him, leaning on his staff, bowed under the weight of his burden of books, like a very old and very wretched beggarman, with his long white hair, grubby beard, and stained and tattered cloak. In the shadows between the rim of his hood and his ragged muffler, his eyes still looked sunken and tired. But at least he was talking.

  Ingold went on. "Maybe now you understand my impulse to become a hermit."

  "Well, let me tell you, the way you've been acting, I was damn tempted to let you do it."

  The wizard ducked his head. "I am sorry," he apologized quietly. "It was good of you to put up with the grieving of an old man."

  Rudy shrugged. "Well," he said judiciously, "since I've been perfect myself all my life, I guess I can find it in my heart to forgive you."

  "Thank you," the wizard replied gravely. "You are very kind. But having heard you play the harp, I feel your assertion of perfection is rather rash."

  Their eyes met, and Rudy grinned. "I had to get back at you somehow, didn't I?"

  Ingold shuddered. "In that case I doubly apologize," he said. "If that was meant as retribution, my conduct must have been execrable indeed."

  "Hey!" Rudy protested.

  "It's the first time in my life that I've been thankful that I'm almost completely tone-deaf," the wizard mused— not quite truthfully, Rudy knew. "So I suppose there is good to be derived from every state."

  "Well, then you and I better think real hard about what kind of good is to be derived from being in the doghouse," Rudy said grimly. "Because that's sure as hell where we're gonna be when Alwir finds out what happened at Quo." Then, in a different voice, he asked, "What did happen at Quo, Ingold?" Wind keened through the trees above the Pass, but only a breath of it touched the travelers laboring through the drifted snow. The clouds moved down the mountains, as gray and chill as the fogs that had surrounded Quo. "Was Lohiro acting for the Dark—or was that the Dark themselves?"

  There was a long pause while Ingold scanned the tracks of rabbit and bird in the snow of the drifts, as if judging matters pertaining to wind and weather. When he finally spoke, his scratchy voice was tired. "I think it was the Dark themselves." He sighed. "To this day, I don't know if they did release him, there at the end. If they did, I could have brought him back with us. At least we could then have had the benefit of his wisdom and the knowledge of whatever it was that the wizards unearthed before they were destroyed. But I couldn't risk it, Rudy," he said in a soft, urgent tone. "I couldn't risk it."

  "Hell, no," Rudy agreed. "With all his knowledge and the Dark behind him—no wonder every building in the town was smashed, the wizards destroyed, and Forn's Tower blown to flinders. If your power could hold them at bay before the gates of the Keep, his power could only double theirs."

  "As their powers could baffle, or channel, the powers of wizardry near their Nests. I should have guessed that when Hoof print of the Wind spoke of the Nest as a place of seeing. That was how Quo was spoken of, back in the old days—and of Gae, incidentally. It needed all the forces of the Dark to break Gae," he added. "It wasn't ill-planned, Rudy, the final blow at Gae, Quo, Penambra—Dele, too, from what Kara said—all within a few days. The back of organized resistance was broken, and the hope of magical aid destroyed."

  Ingold sighed, his breath a thin rag of cloud in the fog. "I had to kill him, Rudy. I couldn't let them have his powers. Perhaps he was still some sort of prisoner in his own body. Certainly—whatever it was—it had his speech, his mannerisms, his skills. But it didn't have his knowledge. Lohiro would have known that Anamara the Red and I were old classmates from years ago." He held up his hands, the first faint smile Rudy had seen glimmering wryly through his overgrown beard. "She knitted me these mittens the year we were lovers, back at Quo. For the fourth most powerful mage in the West of the World, she was very domestic. Lohiro would never have spoken to me casually of her death."

  "Was that what tipped you off?" Rudy asked quietly. "Partly. And—I didn't like his eyes. But from what he had been through, I didn't know."

  "So you trapped him."

  Ingold nodded miserably and trudged on through the snow. Che hung balkily back at the full stretch of his lead—neither of them had ever managed to train the stupid creature to follow, a failure that in his darker moments Rudy was inclined to attribute to the malice of the Bishop of Gae. "I trapped him," Ingold said, "and I killed him. Maybe they did let him go. He spoke of the Dark as he was dying—that they are not many, but one. Maybe he had been one of them and, if I had healed him, we could have learned from him what they know, why they rose—and why they departed."

  "Yeah," Rudy assented bluntly, "and maybe if you healed him, the wizards of Quo wouldn't have been the only ones to seal the Dark into the citadel with them." Ingold sighed. "Maybe."

  "What else could you have done?" Ingold shook his head. "Been more clever to begin with. Realized the connection between the so-called fortunate places and the Dark. Pursued my own researches at Quo, instead of playing politics halfway across the continent. But the answer is gone, it there ever was an answer. The Dark made sure of that. And perhaps there never was an answer to begin with."

  "Sure there was," Rudy said. He glanced over at the old man as they clambered up the last steep grade of the road, the crusted snow squeaking under their boots. "And there is. There's got to be."

  "Does there?" Ingold scrambled through the drifts at his heels, dragging the unwilling burro with his load of books behind. "At one time I used to think there was a reason for things happening as they do and that somewhere all questions have answers. I'm not so sure of that anymore. What makes you think this one does?"

  "Because even after Quo was destroyed, the Dark have been after you. They've chased you from here to hell and back again to keep you from finding that answer. The Dark think you have it, and they've been one jump ahead of us through this whole game."

  Ingold sighed and stood still in the drifted road, his head bowed and his face hidden in the shadows of his hood. A flurry of snow blew down on them from above and brought with it the smell of the high peaks, of glacier ice and rock. The fog surrounded them, gray, drifting wraiths haunting the gathering darkness in the throat of the Pass. "So we're back where we began," he said at last. "With the question and the answer. I'm the one they want, but they've wiped out everyone but me. Is that question or answer?"

  Rudy shrugged. "Which one are you going to make it?"

  Ingold glanced up at him sharply and continued walking without a reply. Rudy followed behind, testing with his staff the solid ground under the blankets of drifts. Evening was drawing on. The sharp, chill dampness of the mists seemed to eat into his bones.

  Ahead of him, the old man stopped; and following his gaze, Rudy looked up to the gray boil of clouds that shrouded the Pass.

  Out of the evening mists, dark forms were materializing there, melting into being from shadow and wind. A draft caught a cloak and blew it out into a great dark wing; the gathering forms solidified, massing against the fog. Ingold stood still, his hood fallen back from his face, doubt and fear and a strange, wild hope moving behind those still
eyes.

  Rudy came softly up behind him. "Is it the Bishop's people?"

  Ingold whispered, "I don't know…"

  Then a man's voice rolled down the Pass, deep and harsh, like the sound a stone might make when it was dislodged in an avalanche from the side of its parent cliff. "INGOLD!" the voice cried, and Ingold's face was suddenly white in the gray light, looking upward at that assembled host.

  Suddenly he shouted, "Thoth!" and struggled forward through the drifts at a speed which Rudy knew he could never match. Like a gangling bird of prey, the tallest of the watchers detached himself from their midst, striding down to Ingold in a black billow of robes. They met like long-lost brothers and embraced in the flurrying fog and snow, while the others came streaming down the path on Thoth's heels.

  Coming closer, Rudy saw Kara among them, her scarred face smiling hesitantly. The others he did not know, but he knew who they must be. There were at least thirty of them, of all ages, both sexes, and all kinds; many of them were old, but one or two seemed very young. Thoth and Ingold still had their arms around each other's shoulders. Thoth, with his hood thrown back, was revealed to be a grim old man whose shaven head and beaked nose reminded Rudy of Bishop Govannin; his eyes were the color of pale honey.

  Out of the crowd, another form pushed itself, an incredibly tiny, impossibly ancient little hermit, so shriveled with age that he looked as if he'd dried and bleached for a hundred years in the desert sun.

  "Kta!" Ingold cried delightedly, throwing his free arm around the narrow shoulders. "You came after all!" And the tiny old man smiled his sweet, toothless smile and nodded.

  "Rudy," Ingold said, and Rudy mused to himself that in the last six weeks he'd probably seen more emotion out of the usually unruffled wizard than anyone else had seen in decades. "Rudy, these are our people." Ingold had one arm around Thoth and the other around the ancient Kta, and among and between them and this knot of enchanted strangers on the snowy Pass, there seemed to lie an unbreakable bond, a chain made of light that bound them together. Ingold's face almost shone with joy. "These are the wizards who came in answer to my call. They've been waiting here to welcome us back to the Keep. My friends," he said, "this is Rudy. He is my student and one of us."

  Chapter Sixteen

  Unlike the messenger of Alketch, Rudy and Ingold did not merit formal reception. But from the crowd that stood in the streaming light of the gates, two figures detached themselves, hurrying down the dark steps to halt, suddenly shy and confused, at the bottom.

  Rudy's eyes met Alde 's, and his whole soul felt as if it were trying to leap from his body and carry him, weightless, up the snowy path. Somehow he was holding her hands, the torchlight edging her braided black hair in fire, his heart hammering so loudly in his breast he wondered if everyone in the Keep could hear it, and desperately telling himself, It's a secret. Our love is a secret that no one must know. He felt he would stifle if he spoke, so he only stood, gazing into the cornflower deeps of her eyes.

  He was broken from this reverie by Gil's little squeak of delight as Ingold flung one arm around her neck and took from her a resounding kiss of welcome, to the cheers of the Guards assembled on the top step. Looking up, Rudy recognized them—Janus, Seya, Melantrys, Gnift— along with a sizable bunch of civilians who had quite probably defied a specific Church directive and turned out to welcome the pilgrim wizards home. It was a nice gesture, but he earnestly wished them all in Hell and the steps vacant but for himself and the woman before him.

  "Alwir's inside," Alde said, stepping back from him. The touch of her fingertips had kindled a fire of hunger through his body, and the light of it was echoed in her eyes. But, mingled with her joy and desire, he could see something else in her face—that curious sense of security of a woman who had felt all along that her man would return.

  "He's been shut up with Stiarth of Alketch all day."

  Gil said, still pink with confusion. "You guys don't rate." She disengaged herself from Ingold's arm and came over to give Rudy a chaste, sisterly peck on the cheek. "But I'm damn glad to see you home, punk."

  Home, Rudy thought. I've been home, by the Western Ocean, and found it a haunted ruin. He glanced down at her unsurprised eyes and said, "I guess you know, hunh?"

  She nodded and glanced back at where Ingold stood, Kta still in tow, talking a mile a minute with Thoth and Kara and that chattering group of others. To half of them, Rudy had discovered, Ingold Inglorion was a legend—he could still see it in their eyes. They were a ragtag and bobtail crew, gathered around those three. Rudy recognized Kara's mother—Nan, somebody said her name was—a withered little white-haired woman with a bent back and a cackling voice, one of the very few who didn't seem to be particularly impressed by Ingold. Kta was another—he was beaming toothlessly at all and sundry— and Thoth was the third. But the others, from the fat little man in a brocade turban and overembroidered surcoat and the fey, red-haired girl-child in castoff rags to the scholarly black gentleman in an outlandish white and silver toga and the gaudy minstrel boy, were looking at Ingold with an awe that bordered on worship.

  "And, Ingold—Ingold, listen!" Minalde cried suddenly. Her dark-blue eyes were wide with enthusiasm, and she had evidently forgotten that she had ever been terrified of the old man. She slipped through the crowd of wizards and caught his sleeve eagerly, her face like a child's at Christmas. "We've found things here, wonderful things!"

  "The old laboratories are here, intact," Gil added, carried away, and Rudy was drawn with them into the general group as the girls plunged into an excited duet, accompanied by much repetition and gesture. "Things we don't understand…"

  "And Gil's been digging up the records…"

  "Air ducts and water pumps, and the old observation rooms…"

  Like schoolgirls, Rudy thought, amused. Schoolgirls who've turned the place inside out and maybe found the keys to the defeat of the Dark that Ingold and I traipsed all the way to Quo and did not find at all.

  "… and Alde has the inherited memories of the House of Dare," Gil finished in triumph, "which is how we found any of it to begin with."

  Ingold looked curiously at the younger girl, so like a flushed, eager schoolgirl with her braided hair and thin, gaudy skirts. "Do you?"

  Alde nodded, suddenly shy. "I think so. I recall things that I see, but they aren't—they aren't visions, like—like Eldor had."

  There was the slightest break in her voice, and Ingold passed over it without giving a sign that he had noticed. "A woman's memories, or a man's?"

  She hesitated, not having thought of that aspect before. "I don't know. A man's, I suppose, if they come from Dare of Renweth. And they're less memories than a sense of recognition, of having been somewhere before. It was Gil's scholarship that helped us more, and her maps."

  "Interesting," the wizard said softly. "Interesting." He looked for a moment longer at the girl, the child-wife of his dead friend, shoulder to shoulder with Rudy now, her hand seeking his, half-hidden by the folds of her skirts. Ingold's brow kinked swiftly, as if with passing pain, but it smoothed again; he turned back to Gil and put his arm across her angular shoulders. "And where have you put all this?"

  By this time, Janus and the Guards had come down the steps to join them, and it was Janus who replied. 'They've taken over the rooms at the back of the barracks. It started out as Gil-Shalos' study when she outgrew the storeroom; it's quite a complex now."

  "The wizards started arriving only last week," Gil informed them as the whole group trooped in a body up the steps and through the dark, echoing passage of the gates. "Dakis the Minstrel was the first, then Gray and Nila the weatherwitches…"

  "And Bektis was absolutely livid," the minstrel declared, pirouetting delightedly over the narrow span of a bridged watercourse. "I thought we should surely lose him to apoplexy."

  Eyes followed them as they crossed the dim reaches of the Aisle, idle or curious, hostile or sympathetic, noting, perhaps, the number of Guards that walked with them, or who wer
e the civilians in the crowd. They moved in a shifting blur of witchlight, the glow of it stirring around them like a luminous fog.

  Ingold stopped, startled at the chaos that prevailed in the wizards' complex. "We haven't had time to get things straightened out yet," Gil apologized.

  "It comforts me to hear that," the old man said, surveying the long, narrow room. Fleeces, skins, and crates seemed to make up most of the furnishings; staffs leaned in corners like rifles in an armory; makeshift shelves had been set up, stacked with dilapidated books. The bluish witchlight slid like silk over the round body of a pearwood lute and winked on the angles of white and gray glass polyhedrons that were scattered across the table, the floor, and everywhere else. Parchments, wax tablets, dusty chronicles, and scrolls of yellowed paper littered every horizontal surface in sight, and over one of the room's few chairs lay a great pile of homespun brown cloth, and with it a tiny satin pincushion sparkling like a miniature hedgehog.

  The wizards had evidently made themselves very much at home.

  "And we have to show you—" Alde began.

  But Thoth broke in. "Let them rest, child, and eat." His voice was as harsh as a vulture's, slow and heavy. He glanced once at the crescent-tipped staff that Rudy leaned in a corner and looked back down at Ingold. "You found Quo, then?"

  Ingold shut his eyes and nodded tiredly. "Yes," he said.

  "And Lohiro?"

  "Dead."

  Thoth's eyes flickered to the staff, to the bundles of books that Rudy and several volunteer helpers were placing on a small cleared corner of the table, and back to the ravaged face of his friend. "So," he said.

  Ingold's eyes opened. He studied the other man's narrow face. "What happened, Thoth? Lohiro said you had been killed."

  "No." The Recorder of Quo laid a long, bony hand on Ingold's shoulder. "The others… yes. Your girls have been telling me," he went on slowly, "of their—findings— regarding the fortunate places of ancient times. These were similar to your own discoveries, I am sure."