The Walls of the Air

by Barbara Hambly

  Brought up short, Rudy looked uncertain and deflated.

  The Recorder of Quo folded bony arms, his yellow eyes glittering in the gloom. "In all of our researches at Quo, I found no mention of such a thing being used against the Dark. It is my belief that you hold in your hands an experiment that failed."

  "Or that was never performed," Alde said suddenly. "Because—well, Gil and I have found lots of places here, the labs downstairs especially, but the pump rooms, too, that look as if they were abandoned very quickly. They didn't get taken over by other things. They were just locked up and left."

  "But why?" asked Kara, who had been standing quietly all this time, watching Kta pick through the smaller jewels in their boxes on the table.

  "I don't know," Alde replied, "but I think something happened to the—the engineer-wizards who built the Keep. I think the Church had them exiled or killed. If it happened suddenly, they might have left the flame throwers downstairs and never returned to finish them."

  "That's hardly intelligent," Kara protested.

  "Neither was imprisoning me in the vaults beneath Karst on the eve of an attack by the Dark," Ingold pointed out acidly. "But we are dealing with fanatics… or with a fanatic, in this case."

  There was an uncomfortable silence. Rudy cleared his throat. "Uh—how much chance would you say there is of that happening again?"

  Ingold's eyes glinted with mischief. "Worried?"

  "No—I mean, yes. I mean…"

  "Don't be—yet. We have convinced Alwir that we have our uses, without which his invasion of the Nests must come to a standstill."

  "What?" Rudy asked bluntly. "We're all the magic he's got and, present company excepted, it ain't much."

  "Really, Rudy," Ingold said, and there was an echo of the old serenity, the old control, in the droop of his heavy eyelids. "What else would a Wizards' Corps be for? Military intelligence, of course."

  "Holy hell," Rudy whispered.

  "Ingold!" Dakis the Minstrel's voice called down the short passageway. Others joined it. "My lord Ingold?"

  There was a quick flurry of skirts, and the red-haired witchchild appeared in the doorway, her dark eyes huge. "Me lord Alwir's here," she breathed. "Be askin' also for me lady Minalde."

  Alde sighed, and Rudy thought she braced herself just slightly; a tiny fold of tiredness manifested at the corner of her eye.

  He smiled wryly. "Sure is nice to be home." As he had hoped, it made her laugh.

  "Catch," Ingold said. He lighted and threw a polyhedron of milky light to Rudy, ignited another and tossed it to Alde , then passed a third to the red-haired girl. A dazzling halo ringed them as they passed through the door, with Kara, Kta, and Thoth following, their shadows streaming long and black behind them. From beyond in the common room, a mingling of voices could be heard. Laughter blended with Nan's scolding and the light, dancing runs of Dakis' lute. Ingold went to the table, kindled a fourth lamp, and held it out to Gil.

  "Thank you," he said softly. "You have done very well."

  She took it, as she had once taken his glowing staff, and the soft brilliance of it poured out between the shadowed bones of her fingers. "Ingold?"

  "Yes, child?"

  "One thing I've always wanted to ask you."

  "What is it?"

  She started to speak, then stopped, confused and unable to go on, her pale, intolerant eyes unusually blue in the radiance of the lamp. What she did say might or might not have been her original intention. "Was there some reason you asked me to back you up, the night the Dark attacked the Keep? I know it was you who kept the light on the staff alive, but was there a reason you had me hold it?"

  Ingold was silent for some time and did not meet her gaze. "Yes," he said finally, "and it was inexcusable of me to ask you to back me, for it was my doing in the first place that brought you here, and I had no right to place you in peril."

  She shrugged. "It doesn't matter."

  "No," he said bitterly. "God knows, I've done it often enough."

  The bleak guilt in his voice and the self-hatred troubled and frightened her. She caught his hand in her free one, to draw his eyes to hers. "You do what you have to do," she told him gently. "You know I'd follow you anywhere."

  "And that," Ingold said, his scratchy voice suddenly taut, "is precisely why I asked you." But the tension was caused by something in himself, and his tone softened again. "You were the only one I could trust, Gil, not to flee."

  "That's a lot of trust," Gil said quietly, "for somebody you'd known only a month."

  Ingold nodded. "But there are times, my dear, when I feel that I have known you all my life."

  They stood thus for a moment longer, wizard and warrior, with Ingold holding Gil's fingers gently against the tips of his own. In his eyes she could read the tracks of the journey—pain and loneliness, and only the ghost of the old serenity which had once characterized him. A hint of another emotion was strange to her.

  What he read in her eyes she did not know, but it made him look away quickly and drape his arm across her shoulders. He led her out through the maze to the voices and the lights.