The Walls of the Air

by Barbara Hambly

  Ingold nodded wretchedly.

  "But deeper, since they had access to things to which you did not."

  Only those who stood nearest heard Ingold whisper, "I should have guessed."

  "Perhaps," the tall wizard said evenly. "But you are wrong if you suppose that Lohiro did not have such knowledge."

  Ingold looked up quickly; though all reason for fear was past now, the reflection of it suddenly aged his sunken eyes.

  "From the outset, as you know, I sought the oldest of the records for reference to the Dark—largely without result," Thoth continued. "The records there did not go much farther back than Forn's time, but your mention of Nests at Gae, Penambra, and Dele—all the great centers of the wizardry of old—seemed to fit into a disquieting pattern. Shortly after Lohiro and the Council closed Quo to all, I went to him with my suppositions, and he, Anamara, and I searched the town and the Seaward Mountains for miles. We suspected that a Nest lay under the tower itself, under the subfloors of the old vaults, though we could find no sign of it. Still we three spelled and respelled the foundations of the tower. Believe me, Ingold, not even the winds of the Dark could have risen through the cracks in the floor, had we not been betrayed."

  Those strange eyes rested for a moment on the old man's haggard face. "It was when we were spelling the mountains, I think, that Lohiro first spoke of the Dark as being of a single essence. We found little concerning them in the books, though my students turned the libraries inside out, breaking spells of opening on volumes whose very languages had been long forgotten and combing for something, anything—to little avail. But Lohiro watched in Anamara's mirror and saw the Dark Ones fight at Penambra and Gae. He said that their strength lay in their numbers and in their movements. He said that what one of them learned, they all then knew. He said this was clear when they left their northern Nests in the plains to join the assault on Gae.

  "At first, he spoke of it only in terms of the maze— that we could not afford to let so much as a single Dark One slip through its windings. But later, as cities and towns fell to the Dark and we found ourselves no nearer to an understanding of them that would enable our magic to work against them, he said that we must, at all costs, learn what their nature, their essence, was. He said that until one of us studied them by transformation, we could hold no hope for their defeat."

  Ingold's face went white. "That was madness."

  "So I told him," the Recorder said dryly. "But remember also that our backs were to the wall. There had been talk of going forth from Quo willy-nilly, to battle them without plan and ultimately without hope. Lohiro said that it would be madness for a weak man to take on a strong one, but he did not feel himself to be that much overmatched. He was proud, Ingold. Proud and desperate. You know he was ever one to throw his whole strength into a battle. Perhaps he thought that his own death was the worst that could befall.

  "Then Gae fell. We watched it in Anamara's mirror; we saw you and Eldor and all the others cornered in the flaming Palace and we looked no more. It was deep night, close on to dawn. Lohiro left us sitting in the library, and my heart was so heavy I did not mark whether he went upstairs to his own study or down. I think it makes no difference.

  "That day was bitter for us, Ingold. We sought you in the crystals throughout the daylight hours, Anamara and Hasrid and I, and we could find no sign of you. We mourned you for dead."

  "I might as well have been dead." Ingold sighed. "I had passed the Void—I was in another universe entirely, I and Prince Tir. Did Lohiro seek me?"

  Thoth shook his head. "That I do not know. None of us saw him that day. Toward evening, there was talk of going to Karst, where we saw the refugees gathering. We knew the Dark would strike there and that the only wizard within hundreds of miles was Bektis. We were still speaking of this when darkness fell."

  The old Recorder fell silent again, his queer yellow eyes grown distant and pale. In the flickering witchlight, others had gathered around, silent, hardly breathing. Ingold's mouth was taut, his face drained of blood as if from some internal wound. Through him, Rudy saw again the ruin of that small and peaceful city, smelled the autumn sweetness of the vines grown wild over colored stones, and heard the hushed rumbling of the sea.

  "I do not know at what time that day Lohiro took the form of the Dark," Thoth went on quietly. "I only know that in the deeps of the night we were still gathered in the tower, talking of what was best to do. Then the walls shook with the echoes of a blast that sounded as if the foundations of the tower itself were ripping asunder, as if the earth beneath us were exploding. I think I rose, but no one else had time to move. The doors of the library were flung open, and I saw Lohiro framed in them, his eyes blank and empty, like blue-green glass; behind him lay such a storm of the Dark as I have never seen. He was the Archmage—he held the Master-Spells over us all." He shook his head. "And it was over.

  "I think Anamara tried to fight him. I saw her face outlined for an instant in a burst of light against the darkness. But I knew there was no hope if Lohiro had taken into himself the essence of the Dark. So, as that terrible whirlwind of power fell upon the room, I turned myself into a grass snake, the lowliest and swiftest creature I could think of. My perceptions of what happened after that are not human perceptions. I knew only darkness and cries, fire and bursting lights. The tower crumbled around us. Lohiro faded into one of the Dark and whirled away into the night. From the rubble, I saw darkness covering the town and great columns of fire, smothered and sapped by blackness and magic. Hasrid was a dragon. Others took different forms to fight, but Lohiro's power and the Dark confounded them all. But none of that was important to me then. I was a serpent, with only a serpent's fears and hungers. I was cold and I hid in the rubble until dawn."

  There was silence again. In the dim bluish shadows, Rudy could see several of the other mages in tears—for the Archmage, for the world whose fringes they had been on, and for the dream of that vanished city to which they had once all aspired. But Ingold's tears had been shed in the Seaward Mountains, and he looked only empty and exhausted, as he had looked in the desert.

  Thoth's golden eyes returned to an awareness of the present. "Have you ever spent time in another being, Ingold?"

  Ingold nodded. No one else moved. "Then you will understand that, after that, time meant very little to me. How long it took me to leave the Seaward Mountains, I do not know. The eaters of little insects do not count days. In part of my mind, I knew I was a man and a wizard, but there was very little in me that cared. Perhaps it was only mourning. I hid in the rocks and moved alone through wet grasses and rain. I was nothing… nothing. But I must have known I was a man, for I traveled slowly east, and I was far out in the desert when the yearning came to me to seek the Keep of Dare in Renweth at Sarda Pass. It was a man's yearning, far beyond what a snake could feel or accomplish. Yet such was its force that I knew that I could go there only as a man. So a man I became.

  "I did not know," he finished quietly, "that the call came from you, my friend."

  Ingold sighed. "Perhaps it were better had you kept your belly to the ground, serpentmage."

  A single line, as fine as a pen-scratch in the corner of the long, wry mouth, briefly indicated a smile. "It is easier to live off the land so," Thoth replied, "but the company becomes boring. Nevertheless, I shall carry to my grave a horror of the road runner bird."

  "Yes," Ingold agreed reminiscently. "I recall I had nightmares about dogs for many years."

  "Eh?" a thin voice creaked. Nan the witchwife appeared suddenly in the circle, her pale eyes sparking with malice. "So, shall I get you some nice cricket soup, serpentmage? Or you some fat mice, Sir Tomcat? Or will you stand here talking until you fall down from hunger?"

  "Mother!" Kara said, shocked. 'That's—"

  "I know who it is, girl," the old lady snapped sharply. "And I'm saying, let the poor men eat, before they go to trading war stories about how brave they all were." Her bent back forced her to twist her neck to look up at them,
and Rudy found himself thinking that all she needed was a peaked black hat and a broomstick.

  "Thank you," Ingold said gravely. "Your care for our comfort touches my heart."

  "Huh!" she grumbled and bustled away toward the cubbyhole that Rudy guessed must be the communal kitchen. In the doorway she swung around again, shaking her wooden spoon at them, her thick cobwebs of grayish-white hair falling down over her bony shoulders and her eyes glittering in her haglike face. "Heart indeed!" she cackled. "Wizards have no heart. And I tell you true, for I'm one and I haven't any more heart than a shrike." With that she flounced out of sight.

  "She's right," Ingold said mildly. Thoth looked shocked, but Kta laughed.

  "Alwir subsidizes the Wizards' Corps, the same way he does the Guards," Gil explained as Kara, her mother, and a thin little red-haired girl served them oatbread and stew from a common pot. "Bektis still dines up at the high table—I suppose because the food's better—but I expect both he and Alwir will be along later." She grinned across the room at Alde , who sat cross-legged on a pile of bison and mammoth hides between Rudy and the sleeping Prince Tir, sharing the wizards' rough-and-ready feast. Fire flickered on the hearth, the room's only illumination, brightening over the assorted features of the very odd crew assembled there.

  At Alde 's side, Rudy felt that, with very little more provocation, he'd start purring like a cat. It was the first time in over two months that he'd faced the prospect of a night's sleep without four hours of guard duty first; he was bathed, shaved, and stationary, and the novelty of that was pleasant enough. He was with the woman he loved and among his own kind at last, after a journey he had never thought he'd survive. It would be odd, he mused, to sleep under a roof.

  His hand sought Alde 's under the furs. She glanced sideways at him and smiled.

  Profiled against the dim light, Alde looked different, more sure of herself—less pretty but more beautiful, Rudy thought illogically. Gil had changed, too, he decided, glancing over at the thin girl sitting like some scrawny teen-age boy on the floor beside Ingold's chair. She was softer, somehow, though physically she was like a leather strap. Her eyes were gentler, but there was a firm line to her mouth that spoke of bitter experience and knowledge that she could never unknow.

  Well, what the hell, he thought. We've all changed. Even old Ingold.

  Maybe one day the old man would regain the amused serenity with which he had once viewed the world. Quo had broken something inside him that Rudy sensed was only partially healed. After his first flood of greetings and information, Ingold had relapsed into silence; throughout supper, he had spoken very little. This was not to say the room was quiet; once the initial chorus of chomping noises had died down, there had been news to exchange, stories to tell, and adventures to recount, most of these among Rudy, Gil, and Alde .

  Now and then the old man's eyes traveled from face to face—not judging what this strange rabble was good for, though that would come. Now Ingold was only getting to know them—the goodywives and tea leaf readers, the two-and-thirty second-raters who had happened to miss the destruction of Quo, plus its single austere survivor, one wizened old hermit, and one punk airbrush-jockey who'd stumbled into the middle of his destiny by mistake. This was all the force Ingold would have to work with, all the magic left in the world for his command.

  No wonder he looks like death warmed over, Rudy thought.

  "Now," Ingold said finally, in the meal's comfortable afterglow, tightening his hand, which had come to rest easily on Gil's shoulder. "Show me these marvels you have found."

  As if on cue, Gil and Alde leaped to their feet. "We've got them in the back here," Gil said, showing the way. 'That door there leads into the room where we found the stairway down to the labs; we usually keep it bolted. We put our things in here…" Most of the other wizards had already seen their trawlings from the laboratories and storerooms and so remained in the common room. Some of them—Thoth, Kta, and Kara—followed Rudy, Ingold, and the girls through a dusty little cubbyhole scarcely wider than a hallway and into a kind of storeroom, where a plank table had been set up, laden with the mysteries from below. As they entered, a bluish drift of witchlight bloomed around them—the rooms of the Wizards' Corps were the only ones in the Keep to have decent lighting. Scattered across the table were vessels, boxes, chains of bubbled glass, apparatus of glass balls and gold rods, twining knots of metal tubes, sinuous pieces of meaningless sculpture, and slick, unexplainable polyhedrons, white and smoked.

  "These were what blew us away the most," Gil said, picking up one of the white shapes and tossing it to Ingold. "They were everywhere—under the machinery in the pump rooms, in piles in the storerooms, and strung in nets over the tanks in the hydroponic gardens. So far, the only thing they're good for is that Tir likes to play with them."

  "Indeed." Ingold turned the polyhedron in his fingers for a moment, as if testing its weight or proportions. Then, quite suddenly, it glowed to life in his hands, the soft, white radiance of it warming the angles of his wind-darkened face. He tossed it to Gil, who caught it ineptly on cringing palms. It was quite cool. "Lamps," he said.

  "Oh…" Gil breathed, entranced. "Oh, how beautiful! But how did the ancients turn them on and off? How do the things work?" She looked up at him, the light glowing brightly out of her cupped hands, illuminating her thin face.

  "I should imagine they simply covered them when they wanted darkness," Ingold said. "The material itself is spelled to hold the light for a long time and can be kindled by a very simple means. Someone on the lowest echelons of wizardry, like a firebringer or a finder, could do it."

  "Hmmm." Rudy picked up one of the white crystals on the table and studied the bottom facet. "You should have figured that out, Gil. It says 'one hundred watts' right here."

  "Hit him for me, Alde . But I really should have figured it out, because I always did wonder about how the Keep was originally lighted. And there are hydroponic gardens down in the subvaults, room after room of them, with no light source at all—"

  "You ever grow marijuana in a closet?" Rudy inquired, apropos of nothing.

  "Hey, around my place the only things that grew in closets were mushrooms. But, Ingold, with this kind of light we could get the gardens going again. With hydroponics, we could grow carloads of stuff in almost no space; and down there it's warm enough to do it."

  "You could draw off power from the pumps to heat the tanks," Rudy added. "And to heat water, for that matter."

  "Yes, but we never did manage to find the main power source."

  "It would have been magically hidden and sealed," Ingold said, interrupting a discussion that threatened to become increasingly technical. "At a guess, the pumps operate on the same principle as the lamps. The wizards of old times could probably alter the essence of materials and enable them to hold something—light, or some other force—for incredible periods of time."

  Gil looked thoughtful. "You mean this whole Keep operates on the principle of a giant footwarmer?"

  "Essentially."

  "Fantastic," Rudy said, turning away from them to investigate the bits and pieces of glass and metalwork that strewed the table behind him. Alde reached tentatively around Gil's arm to remove the glowing polyhedron from her hands.

  "Do you know what this really means?" she asked softly. "It means no more wandering around the corridors in the dark… or worry about setting the place on fire…"

  "It means I won't have to go blind from reading those goddam books by the light of a spoonful of burning Crisco, is what it means." Gil was about to take another crystal polyhedron from the table when she froze, her movement arrested halfway. "What the hell… ?"

  Rudy turned from the table, his face glowing with pride. Hefted in his hands were four or five of the miscellaneous objects Alde had brought up from the lab, now fitted together, ends and pieces mating to form something very similar to a huge and clumsy rifle.

  "What is it?" Alde walked around the thing, passing in front of the muzzle wit
h the unconcern of one who had never entertained the concept of a gun in her life. Rudy instinctively raised the muzzle to avoid pointing it at her.

  "It's a—a—" There was no word for it in the Wathe. "It shoots things out of the hole at the end there."

  "Shoots what?" Gil demanded, coming over to look. She touched the large glass bubble that fitted into the fluid curve of the stock. "What kind of firing chamber does it have?"

  Rudy peered down the hoselike barrel. "I don't know," he said, "but I can guess." He set the gun upright at his side, like a rifleman on parade. "My guess is that it shoots fire. What other kind of gun would you use on the Dark?"

  "It's a flame thrower." There were words in the Wathe for that.

  "Yeah. And my guess is that it worked on magic."

  "You mean," Alde broke in excitedly, "that this—flame thrower—could spurt fire out of the end?"

  "With the barrel to channel it," Ingold mused, taking the gun and sighting awkwardly along the barrel, his hands competent on the smooth, triggerless stock. "The flame could go much farther than a wizard could throw it. But what would fuel such a flame?"

  "I don't know," Rudy said eagerly, his voice rising with excitement, "but if there's a laboratory downstairs, I'm sure as hell gonna find out. Ingold, think about it! You've been telling me all along about a—a third echelon of the mageborn, about people who don't have but maybe one little bit of power. The firebringer and goodwords and finders, people who never developed their skill because the Church frowned on it and there were either trained wizards or just ordinary human civilization to cover for them. But it isn't like that anymore. I bet we could get up a flame thrower corps between the wizards we have here and the firebringers we could round up in the Keep! Ingold, this is it! We didn't have to trek out to Quo at all! The answer was right here all the time!"

  "If this is the answer," Thoth said in his driest voice, "why was it not used upon the Dark three thousand years ago?"