The Walls of Air

Chapter 12

'Do you see it?'
'See what?'
Ingold did not reply. He only tucked his mittened hands into his sleeves and watched Rudy with a close, speculative expression, as he watched the younger man when he practised spells of illusion or made the waters of a creek rise or fall. A breeze shook the leaves of the yellowed aspens over their heads, spattering them and the sodden path underfoot with leftover rain.
'You mean the road?' Rudy asked, looking back.
The turning he'd seen - or thought he'd seen - was gone. Only the main road was visible, its hexagonal blocks unevenly worn and faintly silver under their carpet of tawny decay, winding away in silence through the wet cathedral stillness of the woods.
Rudy looked inquiringly at Ingold but saw that he wasn't going to get any help there. He turned again to the vine-tangled banks above the road, wondering why he was so certain a road ought to be there. He sensed for the first time that feeling of Tightness about something that did not exist, or wrongness about something that supposedly did. But there was nothing to see. Only a damp, blackish clay bank, grown over with wild grape and soggy, brown fern, crowned with a thin screen of ghostly, black-flecked birches. Somewhere in the distance, a swollen river groaned and stormed through the trees that had once fringed its banks. The air was filled with its muted clamour and the scent of leaf-mast and water.
Cautiously, Rudy scuffed through the squishing yellow carpet of leaves toward the bank. A drainage ditch separated the road from the steepness of the overgrown cutting, brimming with
water from the bright, unseasonable rains. Impelled by he knew not what force- or maybe simply by the maddening itch of a wizard's curiosity Rudy started to wade into the ditch.
His foot touched stone.
He wondered how he could not have seen the little bridge that spanned it. It was directly underfoot, old and moss-covered, a few feet wide by a few feet long, jumping the ditch like a humpbacked dwarf. Trailing vines almost hid the milestone at its head; but peering closely at the worn granite, Rudy could discern the rune Yad had carved there. The Rune of the Veil.
And beyond the bridge was the path.
Rudy was sure he hadn't seen it before, but he felt as if he had known it would look like that. The sense of deja vu carried to the smallest details - the way the wine-brown tangles of wild grape cloaked the sides of the cutting like curtains in an untidy house, the ankle-deep mould of yellow leaves on the path, and the black-edged mushrooms that grew on the bank above. With his foot on the stone of the bridge, Rudy looked back to where Ingold stood, smiling, beside the burro. 'Can you see it?' he challenged.
Ingold's smile broadened. 'Of course.' He came forward, leading Che at his heels.
It had rained throughout the day, sheets of twisting silver rain that froze and soaked the travellers even through the comparative shelter of the trees. These eastern foot-slopes of the Seaward Mountains were wooded, and the roaring of the rain on the leaves had called to mind the voice of the sea booming in a storm. All yesterday and the day before it had rained, blinding them to the road ahead and swelling the creeks to rivers, turning the lowlands to wrinkled grey marshes all prickled with the dark spears of reeds. Above the trees, the day was still grey, cold, and threatening, but for all that, warmer than the frozen reaches of the plains or the bitterness of the wind-scoured desert. Rudy shivered in his buffalohide coat and wondered if he'd ever be
warm or dry again.
Even in the dying of the year, the Seaward Mountains were beautiful, lush and opulent after the spare grandeur of the treeless lands. Scuffing through the oozing leaves of the roadbed, Rudy found that beauty seeping into his soul. He rejoiced in the quiet of the woods, in the colour and richness of the life among the bronze and fawn of the carpeting ferns, in the black of the wet pine bark and the dark red of the oak, and in the alternation of darkness and silver. Movement and life surrounded them, the flick of the red squirrel's tail as it vanished around a tree and the high, harsh laugh of a jay. The path topped the cut bank and wound away through the woods, climbing a ridge cloaked in yellow tamarisk and leading down through a little pass that Rudy would have sworn was not there before.
The wet leaves underfoot made the ground slippery, but his leg barely twinged. He still used as a walking stick the spear shaft he'd got from the Raiders and wore the sleeved coat of buffalohide they'd given him. Another breeze shook down more rain and brought with it the cold, wet scent of the heights. Cloudy pillars of vapour hid the peaks, but the bright smell was like the distant music that called to the soul.
Against all his expectations, he and Ingold had reached the Seaward Mountains. It now only remained for them to find their way to Quo.
'RUDY!'
The desperation in Ingold's shout jerked him back to reality, and a split second later something collided with his head, a beating madness of black feathers and a beak that gored into his cheekbone and narrowly missed his eye. He struck at the tearing claws and heard the whine of Ingold's staff slashing down inches from his face. With a hoarse, mocking caw, the giant crow eluded the blow. With a bloody beak it went flapping heavily back toward its native trees. Rudy stood trembling in the road, gasping with shock and idiotically remembering a
Hitchcock film he'd seen on the late-late show. Blood dripped down his fingers as he touched the wound. Beside him, Ingold scanned the trees with cold fury in his face. Whirlwinds of black crows rose from their bare branches. Their obscene laughter drifted back down like stray black feathers, along with the dead leaves dislodged by their wings.
'Are you all right?' Ingold turned back to Rudy, dug a kerchief from somewhere in his robes, and dabbed at the cut.
'Yeah,' Rudy whispered. 'Fine, I guess. What the hell did that bird attack me for?'
The wizard shook his head. That happens here, if you take your guard off. That, or something like it.'
Rudy's hands were shaking as he took the cloth. The wound stung in the chilly air. In a way, even getting his leg slashed open by the dooic hadn't been this bad. He'd been ready for that.
There was no way to be entirely ready for the walls of air that encircled the City of Quo.
Often there was only a sense of being followed. Rudy caught himself constantly looking over his shoulder, uneasy in the silence of the dripping woods. Sometimes he had the conviction that he did not see things that were there. He would stop in such places, letting his mind drop into that state of unconcern that saw all things with crystal clarity, as once in the desert he had seen his own soul - the shapes of dead leaves, straw-coloured against the sepia background of decay, and the roll of the land under its cloak of fern. Often, while he sensed the illusion of such spots, he could not fathom it, though once he did find another path, threading away from the main one, winding around a thicket of thorn-choked aspens that he had thought lay wider and higher than was later proved. Ingold followed him down this new path without a word. Still other times, the illusion-spell took the shape of a curious, irrational fear, a loathing to continue at all, or a vile detestation at passing a certain tree. Once past it, Rudy looked back to see the faint
outlines of the Rune of the Chain all but obscured in the overgrowing bark.
'If you ask me, it would be damn easy to get lost in these woods,' Rudy muttered, after Ingold had stopped him from going on and had shown him a side turning through a dark glen that he had, for some reason, been completely unable to notice. Once on the path itself, it was completely visible, and he was not even sure that it had ever been out of his sight.
Ingold mimed a man shielding his eyes from too-brilliant light. 'Dazzling,' he murmured. The boy's intellect is simply dazzling.'
'What are they afraid of?' Rudy went on, ignoring him.
'Afraid?' Ingold raised his brows.
'I mean, they have their magic to protect them in case of trouble. If it came down to a fight, I mean, which it wouldn't. I mean, who'd take on a bunch of wizards?'
'Never underestimate human motivations,' Ingold advised. 'Especially under the impulse of the Church. Remember that the Archmage has been called the Devil's Left Hand. It wasn't so long ago that the Prince-Bishop of Dele mounted a major war on the Council and sent an expeditionary force to torch the town and burn as many wizards as might be found in the ruins.'
'Did the wizards fight them off?' Rudy asked, awed at the thought.
'Of course not. The expedition never came anywhere near Quo. There was rain and fog, and the army became lost in the foothills. It was eventually deposited back on the main road, miles from where it had entered the hills. Wizards can fight, if need be. But we are all very good at evading the conflict. Stop a moment.'
Rudy halted, puzzled. Ingold took him by the arm and led him forward along the narrow path toward the edge of a cloud-filled gorge visible through the smooth, bare boles of the grey trees.
Ingold kept a little in the lead and advanced with what Rudy considered ridiculous caution -until it became suddenly apparent that the edge of the gorge was very much nearer than Rudy had thought. He found himself looking down a sheer drop of black-walled cliff to a bristle of torn rock and jagged, broken trees, half-hidden in the mists at the bottom. Head swimming, he stepped back hastily. He thought he had seen something else on the rocks below, like the broken limbs of the dead trees, but whiter.
He glanced around quickly. The path itself had changed. Fog was blowing softly down on them from the higher peaks, and the trees were receding around them like mocking spirits into the mists, the ferns spider-webbed in silver dew.
'We've come quite high,' Ingold said, his soft, scratchy voice calm and strangely disembodied in that cool, two-dimensional world. 'From here the way becomes more difficult. The illusions of the road alone will have turned aside the malicious or curious or idle. The only ones to come this high are those who seek to become mages and who can see the traps before they close - or those with the motivation to do the wizards real harm.'
'So - what can we do?' Rudy whispered, afraid.
'Do?' The fog had closed on them now, so that Ingold was only a flat shape in the mist, hooded darkness hiding his face. 'Dispel the fog, of course.'
Hesitantly, Rudy stammered out the words Ingold had taught him to summon and dismiss the weather. Chill as wraiths, the fog caressed his face. Now he could feel the spell that bound the mist, drawing it like a net around them. He put out his strength against it, but felt it greater than his own power, older and infinitely more complex. He stood alone, wrapped in mist, almost choked by its thickness, as if smothering in a wet shroud. Sweat as well as fog dampened his face. He fought the impulse to run shouting from it - it did not matter in which direction only to be away from the malicious strength of the hands that
held the net.
'I can't do it,' he whispered in despair.
Ingold clicked his tongue reprovingly. 'Can't! If you can't, then we shall stay here, or else walk sightlessly. It will be night soon.'
'Dammit!' Rudy wailed. 'Can't you give me a stronger spell?'
'Why? Yours is perfectly adequate.'
'It is not! You know you could sweep this stuff aside like a cobweb!'
'With the self-same spell, Rudy.' Ingold was no more than a dark blur in the mists, but his voice was warming, like a fire in a cold place. The strength of your spells is the strength of your soul. Haven't you realized that?' Ingold stepped closer to him, the coarse fibre of his robe sewn with pearls of dew. 'As you grow, your spells will grow also.'
'But can't you feel it?' Rudy demanded helplessly. 'It's -it's like a boy fighting a man. I'll never...'
'If you keep saying never,' Ingold replied mildly, 'you'll come to believe it. If his back is to the wall, a boy has to fight a man, doesn't he? And sometimes he can win.'
Rudy subsided into silence. Above the fog, the sky was growing perceptibly darker, the first chill winds of evening drifting down from the unseen heights...
Winds. The endless winds of the plains.
With meticulous bounding-spells and limits, Rudy summoned the winds.
They were icy cold, but they smelled of the stone and glaciers above. Thin, steady, and strong they blew, riding grey horses up from the gully, breaking the fog before them like startled ghosts. Cloudy shapes rolled away from the path and retreated
ponderously from the sloping land. Trees shook wetness down on the pilgrims disapprovingly in the new strength of the winds that whipped Rudy's long, wet hair into his eyes. He started down the path, Ingold leading the burro silently behind.
They camped that night in open ground, under the shadow of the higher peaks. Ingold circled the camp with spells of protection, visible to a wizard's sight as a faint ring of foxfire around the perimeter, but nothing threatened them throughout that whispering night. In the morning, the clouds had cleared somewhat, and Ingold pointed out the pass which they sought, a narrow notch in the blackness of the mountain wall. Throughout the day it seemed to shift unaccountably to the northward, and at times the trails Ingold chose appeared to lead nowhere near it.
They were in high, treeless country now, where rocks towered as proud as goddesses above the trail. An occasional twisted live oak or clumps of scented heather clung to the barren slopes, and water rushed down in veils of glimmering lace, or boiled in rock channels whose depths showed rust and pewter and the velvet green-black of moss. The trail here was perilous, switching back and forth across the steep stone of the mountain's flank, overhung by massive boulders. In places the trail was buried under single boulders or great spills of talus and boulders mixed, deadly testimony to the spells that guarded Quo. Rudy wondered what would have happened to him at this point, had Ingold not walked at his side.
Ingold led the way now, picking out the tangled trails with preternatural skill. Rudy was surprised at his own exhaustion following yesterday's efforts. Try as he would, he could not see half the illusions that Ingold did. It certainly would never have occurred to him to cross the boiling rapids of a swollen river, as Ingold did, wading through a ford at the place that looked to be the deepest and most deadly. Nor would he have found the trail that led over a seemingly sheer cliff.
And then there was the bridge.
'What's wrong with the bridge?' Rudy wanted to know. The
great span of moss-grown stone arched proudly over the canyon, its curved blue shadow faintly visible on the thorn and boulders that choked the thread of stream far below.
'It isn't there,' Ingold replied simply.
Rudy looked again, then walked to the threshold and struck the stone with his staff. Wood clunked solidly on rock.
'Pieces of this road are unfamiliar to me,' the wizard went on, 'and the road has changed recently - become more dangerous, I believe. But I have crossed this gorge here dozens of times. There is no bridge.'
'Maybe it has been put up since you were here last?'
'At the beginning of this summer? I hardly think so, with all the moss that's grown on it. Look at how worn the stones are, there along the railing. The bridge looks as if it were there from the beginning of time. And since I know it wasn't...' He shrugged. 'It was never there at all.'
'I seem to remember,' Rudy said judiciously, 'something you once said to me about disbelieving your own senses because of something you believe to be true...'
Ingold laughed, remembering their first conversation in the old shack in the California hills. 'I am paid,' he said humbly. 'If, when we cross by hardier means, the bridge proves to be real and not illusion, you may revile me in any terms you please, and I shall bow meekly to the lash.' But when they scrambled, scratched and bleeding from forcing the recalcitrant Che up the impossible trail out of the gorge, Rudy looked back and saw that the stone bridge was only a single strand of willow withe, as frail as a spider web, on which the wizards had threaded their illusion. From there he could see the bone dump, too, at the bottom of the cliff below.
Kara had come this way, Rudy thought. And Bektis, too, and Ingold, in his youth. Had it been this bad then? It was one hell of a price to pay for safety.
'Hey, Ingold? If Quo stands on the Western Ocean, and the walls of air defend the landward side - has anybody ever tried to assault it by sea?'
'Oh, yes,' the wizard said. 'It's been tried.'
Rudy thought about it and of his horror of the ocean and of deep water and of the many things that could happen out on those dark depths. The thought wasn't pleasant.
This, then, was the other side of power - the power that isolated wizards, that made them vagabonds, exiles in their own world, the power that drew them together. He remembered the look in Aide's eyes the first time he had called fire from cold wood.
You sought wizardry, he told himself. And here it is. A bridge of illusion and the bones below.
They travelled for hours through narrow canyons or followed rock ledges on the high peaks, slippery with ice. Twice they tried to force short cuts over the bare, tawny flanks of the mountain, only to be driven back by the steepness of the ground. In the end, the trail petered out entirely, vanishing into the stony wastes. As they stood panting on the dark slope of a tumbled ruin of shale, Rudy looked up toward the pass, only to find that somehow he and Ingold had overshot it by miles, and it now lay to the south of them, the glaciers that crowned it gleaming palely in the heatless sky.
Ingold leaned on his staff, as motionless as a statue, with only the tautness of his mouth and the angry glitter of his eyes betraying him. Somewhere in the distance, Rudy heard the whine of the wind and the angry buzz of a rattlesnake. Other than that, the world was utterly still, as barren of life as it had been when the sun had first sung the world up from the sea. The wizard turned on his heel and started back along the false trail without a word.
Early evening found them in a deep, narrow valley thick with trees, at whose lower end lay a black tarn of still and oily water.
This place is not familiar to me at all,' Ingold said quietly, eyeing the gloomy wall of tangled trees that all but covered the trail. 'I think the wood is wider than we suppose. Can you see there, that blurring along the farther edge? It deludes the eye. I should be surprised if we can cross it before full dark.'
Rudy glanced uneasily over his shoulder for perhaps the thousandth time that day. He hated the smell of the woods, but he found he loathed the water more. A wet, white mist had begun to curl from its dark surface. Wreaths of it floated among the first of the trees. 'Yeah,' he said slowly. 'But I'd sooner try that than camp near that water.'
'So would I, if you want the truth.' Ingold gathered the lead-rope to hand and led the way into the woods, spells of clearing on his lips.
The black trees grew very densely, the space between them choked with glossy-leaved holly, dark ivy, and wild grape that spilled across the path, tangling the pilgrims' footsteps. The valley mists seemed to follow them, sliding among the thorny "trunks like white cats. Darkness thickened in the woods, and Rudy, tentatively adding his own clearing-spells to Ingold's, felt the magic that bound this place together into a single murky entity, a knot of hostility and evil. Twice they lost the path entirely, and Rudy began to wonder if the trees themselves were moving.
This is getting monotonous,' Rudy panted, after the fourth time they had to halt and hack Che's packs clear of brambles with the little hatchet. The burro stood in shivering panic, the whites of his eyes showing all the way in a gleaming rim. 'We gotta back out of this and try going around. We're never gonna get anywhere this way.'
'Again with your never,' Ingold reproached. But in the deepening darkness, Rudy could see that the old man's face was lined with concentration and weariness under the bleeding thorn scratches. Having pulled the donkey free, they advanced a few feet and looked back. The path behind them was gone.
Rudy cursed. Ingold sighed patiently and shut his eyes as if in meditation, bowing his head like some strange species of moss-grown tree himself. After a moment, Rudy saw his brow tighten in concentration and heard the deepening draw of his breath. Darkness seemed to tighten like a net. Rudy became aware of restless rustles and scurryings in the gloom around them. Things whistled in the trees, signalling, he thought.
Finally Ingold's tense shoulders relaxed, and his eyes opened. 'In my day there was an enchanted wood in these hills,' he said, 'but not like this. Unfortunately, as you may have seen, the wood fills this valley from end to end, and the mountains on both sides are steep. But at this rate, if we went on, we would stand a chance of being trapped farther in. If that happens, I would rather it happened in daylight.'
They turned back, and Rudy saw that the path they had taken into the woods had now disappeared ahead of them. He muttered a few choice curses at Lohiro and company and followed them up with clearing-spells that Ingold had taught him. The woods proved no easier to get out of than they had been to enter, and it was fully dark by the time they reached the edge. They made camp among the thinner trees by a stream, and Ingold drew the protective circle double and triple wide on the must leaves underfoot.
It had been a great many nights since Rudy had called up Aide's image in the flames. But Ingold still studied his crystal by the flickering glow of the fire. Exhausted in body and spirit, Rudy watched him, following the movement in the blue hawk eyes as they sought whatever they sought among the glinting facets. His own visions in the crystal table at the Keep came back to him - bright blue eyes, as wide and cold as the sky, seemed to stare into his, glittering like the diamond surge of foam over raw bones. The image followed him down into a restless sleep.
He dreamed of bones - bones lying in darkness, though in the dream he could see in the dark; the faint gleam of witchlight touched the ever-repeating curve of skull, rib, and pelvis in thin
slips of ghostly silver. The dry, brown moss that the bones lay upon was slimy here, wetted with corruption and crawling with nameless and unspeakable white life. Around him, the red eyes of scavenger rats flickered in the dark. Something moved, hopping awkwardly. An eyeless white toad burped greasily at him from the top of a deformed skull. More toads hopped among the bones, slipping in the muck as they fled the touch of the witchlight. Rudy moaned, trying to fight his way clear of the horror of the dream, to turn his eyes from the hideous spectacle that he now saw covered the blackness of the uneven cavern floor for miles like a rotting swamp. Stalagmites rose through the filth like ghostly trees, and red eyes flickered and dodged around their bases. He heard the sticky scrambling of furtive feet in the dry, brown moss that was decaying and turning to dusty grey powder, where it was not horribly damp. He moaned again, sickened and faint. This time, however, it was not he who cried out, but the man he saw leaning against the dark entrance to some cavern beyond. His face was turned from Rudy, but Rudy knew him - would know him anywhere, whatever happened. The witchlight gleamed on white hair and on the galled ring of flesh visible between mitten and sleeve. Then there was silence, broken only by the rustling of millions of tiny feet among the moss and bones...
... among the leaves of the forest floor!
Che's squeal of terror brought Rudy up, sweating. The burro was tugging wildly at his tether, ears flattened back along his narrow skull, eyes staring. Beyond him, Rudy could see Ingold on his feet, at the edge of the pale glimmer of the protective circle. And still beyond, among the trees, was a limitless sea of red eyes.
'Holy Christ!' Rudy rolled to his feet and groped for his staff.
'No light,' Ingold said softly without turning his head. There was no wind, but the whisper of those tiny clawed feet was like the forerunner of a storm in the forest. Even where the darkness hid them, Rudy could sense the squirming of their packed bodies. Their dry, fetid smell was everywhere.
'Can they come through the circle?' Rudy whispered. He thought the white flame of it flickered brighter, dancing among the fallen leaves.
'No,' Ingold said softly. There was a creak and rustle overhead. Rudy looked up. The branches of the trees were furred with the rats, like foul fruit.
'Ingold, we gotta get out of here.'
'We'll do nothing of the kind,' the wizard stated in a voice like stone. 'As long as nothing breaks the circle, we are safe.'
Trust him, Rudy thought desperately, fighting the urge to run. He knows more about it than you do. Throughout the dark woods the rats shifted; the ferns were alive with their unholy scampering. He saw them clearly now, flowing in a grey-brown stream over the humped knees of the tree roots and through and around hollow logs. They swarmed in the stream bed and slithered in the deep, matted leaves, wrinkled noses pulled back from sharp, white teeth. Che squealed once again, jerking at his lead, his nostrils huge with terror.
Rudy saw the picket pin start from the ground and grabbed for the rope. The burro gave an almost human scream and flung himself backward, the pin tearing loose in a small fountain of leaf mould and dirt. The rope slid through Rudy's fingers. The burro put his head down and bolted over the edge of the circle and into the darkness.
It was as if the circling white flame had never been. The kicked leaves had not finished pattering down when the rats poured forward like a dirty river, hissing and squealing with rage. Rudy heard Che screaming and ran after him, striking with sickened horror with his staff atthe vicious furry things that stuck like burrs to his boots, his coat, and his arms. One of the things launched itself from a tree in the darkness and struck his face; he thought he screamed, but later he wasn't sure, for at that moment he heard behind him the unmistakable roar of fire, and the light of it streamed over him. Flame splattered across
the backs of the grey sea that seemed to be on the point of engulfing him. Turning, he saw Ingold swing his staff like a weapon, fire erupting from the length of it like a spewing banner of napalm.
Che was squealing frantically, his coat matted with running blood in the firelight, three huge rats hanging like terrier dogs to his lacerated muzzle. Rudy struck them off with his staff, feeling at the same time claws and sharp little teeth ripping at his calves. He beat them away and grabbed the lead-rein, paralyzed with disgust and panic, desperate to fight free of the filthy things.
The fire was spreading, rushing uncontrollably through the autumn-withered ferns. The leaves underfoot were catching, their mouldering dampness throwing forth immense billows of sooty smoke. The flame in the ferns licked through that blinding curtain like the burning backdrop of Hell. Blazing rats fled this way and that, their fiery coats igniting the dead underbrush, their shrill screams forming an overwhelming metallic chattering above the smothered roar of the blaze. Smoke seared Rudy's eyes and seemed to clog his lungs, blinding him and trapping him in a wall of heat from which he could find no escape. Screaming in panic, Che twisted at the lead, and Rudy felt the stickiness of blood on his hands as he fought to drag the terrified animal out of a closing trap of heat, suffocation, and flame.
Out of the rolling fog of the smoke Ingold burst, gasping, his muffler wound over his nose and mouth. He caught Rudy's arm and dragged him along the path. They waded through a surging inferno, floored in fire and roofed in blinding smoke, and echoing with the chattering shriek of rats burning alive. Against the blazing underbrush, the damp tree trunks stood like black, smoking pillars in the murk. Unable to breathe, unable to tell one direction from another, Rudy was conscious only of a desperate fight for air against the blinding heat and of Ingold's hand like an iron shackle on his arm. As they left the woods behind them, they could see the reflection burning in the dark
waters of the tarn, like a thick stream of blood and gold.
They did not stop until it was almost morning. The light from the forest fire was far behind them now, but the smell of smoke and rats stuck to their clothing, and the roar of the blazing underbrush carried for miles. Half-unconscious from asphyxiation, Rudy could only follow where Ingold led, up and down stony trails in blind darkness and through streams that bit their feet with cold. Dawn found them lying, scorched and exhausted, on level, stony ground. Rudy was too weary to flee farther, his hands and face burned, unable to sleep because of the terror of his dreams. The grey light that leaked slowly into the sky revealed the road before them, its hexagonal silvery blocks all but hidden under the accumulated drift of the dirt of ages. Above them loomed the massive darkness of the Seaward Mountains, plumed in billows and ostrich feathers of smoke and mist that caught the first coral tints of the morning. Behind them lay the rolling, lizard-coloured sands of the high desert, the thick rust-red scrub nodding in the chill backwash of the northern winds.
They were where they had been three days ago, before entering the walls of air.
Rudy sighed, scarcely caring. All right, man, have it your way. I didn't want to visit your lousy town in the first place. Next year I'll go to Disneyland instead.
But Ingold got slowly to his feet, leaning on his staff with singed hands, looking westward to the dark backbone of the mountains. Rudy thought the old man looked half-dead and felt suddenly concerned for him as he swayed like a drunken man on his feet. The first gleams of rare sunlight glinted in the wizard's hair. Ingold raised his head, and his voice rolled out over the wooded expanse of the foothills. 'LOHIRO!' he called, and the echoes boomed it in the rocks. 'LOHIRO, DO YOU HEAR ME? DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?' Scrub and stone and water whispered a reply to his words. Somewhere a jay screamed. High up, a feather of smoke caught the new sun, like a vagrant rosy cloud. His shout leaped from rock to rock.
'LOHIRO, WHERE ARE YOU?'
But the echoes died, and the silence mocked their passing.
They climbed throughout the day.
At first the road was the same as on the previous day, swifter and easier because they knew the spells laid on it, though occasionally some branching trail that he had not seen before would catch Rudy's eye. The weather turned bad again, the sky heavy with the threat of rain. Rudy sent the cold front concerned several miles to the north, to dump its pent-up waters on the stony gullies of the foothills. He figured they had enough troubles without that. They reached the wooded vale with its burned trees and tarn of still water well before sunset and began the climb over the flanks of the mountain at its sides.
Clouds still masked the high peaks. The grey rocks were damp and icy. Rudy scrambled wherever Ingold led, exhausted and half-frozen, dragging the unwilling burro behind. Night found them in a mist-drowned wood far above the valley. Rudy was so weary he could barely stagger. He mumbled something about being waked at midnight to take the second watch; but when he finally rolled over, stiff and smarting and aching in every limb, he found himself wet with the dew and frost of morning, and the world was opalescent in the clinging fogs.
'Hey, you shoulda kicked me or something,' he apologized, sitting up amid a soft crackling of ice on his blankets.
'I did,' Ingold replied easily. 'Repeatedly. I could have beaten you with a stick with much the same results.' He'd built a small fire and was making griddle cakes on the iron tripod they used for cooking. The dark smudges under his eyes had turned to bruises. He looked as if he'd been in a fight. 'It doesn't matter,' the wizard added kindly. 'I needed the time to think.'
Rudy wondered how much the old man had slept since seeing the empty Nest in the plains. He sat up, stretching his shoulders gingerly, and thought with dread of breaking the ice in the
nearby stream to shave. The world smelt of newness, of wet grasses and snow and sky. But from the valley below, the wind brought up another smell, and Rudy turned his head quickly, not knowing what it was or liking it. He glanced over at Ingold. The old man was digging in the packs for the dried meat with which Hoofprint of the Wind had stocked them. His movements were slow and tired. You may have needed time to think, Rudy decided grimly, but it's gonna be a damn long day of rock climbing, and you look as if six cups of coffee, ten hours of sleep, and a handful of whites wouldn't do you any harm.
'I've been up this trail a little farther already this morning,' Ingold continued, returning to the fire. The trail itself ends about two miles from here; from there the ground gets worse. You and I might make it, but we'd have to leave Che. And aside from the fact that he would surely die in this wilderness, we shall have troubles enough before us without trying to live off the land as well.'
Rudy sighed. His whole body ached with the thought of a trailless scramble over terrain worse than yesterday's. For one thing, he hadn't thought terrain could get worse than yesterday's. Gritting his teeth, he asked, 'So what do we do?'
'Go back.'
Relief flooded Rudy's muscles like the hot bath that was rapidly replacing food, California, and Minalde as the object of his most wishful fantasies. 'I'm game,' he said. 'Maybe the woods will be easier to get through in daylight.'
They weren't.
From the stream back for some distance into the woods, the fire had seared off the underbrush, though the wet bark and damp leaves of the trees themselves had defied its heat. Beyond the burned woods, the trees yielded at first to Rudy's spells. But through his magic he felt their strength, and the implacable power of it frightened him. In time, the trees crowded in thicker, brambles tangling at the travellers' clothing and vines catching at their feet, until it was all Ingold could do to force a path.
Even so, it seemed that the underbrush closed in after the old man, and Rudy found himself struggling through the clutching hedges simply not to lose sight of his guide. The cloudy light of the overcast day sickened to murky gloom here, choked by mats of thrusting branches and tangled creepers, until the woods were almost as dark as evening.
Rudy cursed as Che's packs got hung up for the umpteenth time in the thick mazes of blackberry brambles. He pulled the little axe free and began chopping at the thick vines. There was ivy twined with the brambles, and the axe head became entangled as well. Rudy's hands and face were bleeding with scratches by the time he'd unravelled the mess. Turning to go on, he found the trail ahead of him entirely gone.
'Ingold!' he called out. 'Ingold, hang on a minute! Where are you?'
But only the silence of the black trees pressed upon him. Thorn and bramble surrounded him like a net, vicious and impenetrable. He could see no trail, either forward or back.
'Motherloving trees - INGOLD!' he yelled again. Somewhere in the woods there was a furtive, greedy rustling, but it was not in the direction Ingold had gone, nor anywhere near. Fighting panic, Rudy called on all his powers for a clearing-spell to break him out of what felt like a closing tangle of barbed wire, but the spells on the woods sapped his power like a leech on a vein, and the dark trees whispered in a sound very much like laughter.
For nearly an hour he called, his voice cracking with strain and terror, sweat running down his face and soaking his clothes. He began to wonder if something had happened to Ingold and the old man was never coming back for him. He remembered the rats. 'INGOLD!' he yelled, and this time he could hear the panic edging his voice.
Gritting his teeth, he repeated the spells of clearing, to open a path, some path, any path. So gripped was he by the suffocating sense of panic that he might have thrown himself at random against the thorns and tried to claw his way out. But a whisper
of the leaves behind him sent him swinging around in terror and a path was there. It was a fairly broad trail, and he thought he could glimpse faint glimmers of sunlight on the leaves far down its winding curves. He wrapped his hand tighter around Che's lead-rope...
... and stopped.
Sunlight? It's been raining for days.
Stay put, Ingold had said. It's the oldest trick in the book.
Rudy stayed put, like a lost child, calling Ingold's name.
Finally he heard a muffled reply, a hoarse, cracked voice calling, 'Rudy?'
'I'm over here!'
There was a trampling noise and a great shaking among the dark branches. Rudy had a momentary panic-stricken scenario of some incredible, slavering monster seeking him out by calling with Ingold's voice, but a few minutes later the wizard appeared from a thinning among the trees, his face and hands scratched all over and thorns and twigs lodged in his cloak and hair. He looked white and strained, exhausted by the game of wits with shadows. Without a word, he caught Rudy by the arm, took the axe from the pack, and began methodically hacking a path through the wall of briars. The woods yielded grudgingly, snaring the axe, tearing their clothes, reaching clawed, greedy hands to rip at their faces or snatch at their eyes. Both of them were stumbling with weariness when they finally broke through the last of the dark trees, to find themselves on the rim of jagged boulders that overhung a deep canyon - forty feet of sheer-sided cliffs falling below them to a jumble of water-torn rocks and splintery trees.
Ingold slumped quietly down against a boulder and shut his eyes. He looked dead and dug up, Rudy thought, sitting wordlessly beside him. Even the cold of the overcast day was welcome after the hushed, hot darkness of the haunted woods. Rudy also closed his eyes, glad to rest, to have a few minutes wherein he was not afraid of what was going to happen next. Wind snuffled down the canyon below them and set all the trees of the woods at their backs to whispering their angry curses. Spits of cold rain kissed his face, but he hadn't the heart to send the rain-clouds elsewhere. The veering of the wind brought another smell to him, bitter and metallic, one that he had scented before.
He opened his eyes and looked down the gorge before them. The rocks along the stream, he saw now, were stained black, and the brush and paloverde along the stream were charred and rotted in long spoors, as if filthy and corrosive streams had trickled down from farther up the canyon. That stinging smell breathed up at them again, poisonous and overpowering. He coughed and glanced over at his companion.
Ingold had also opened his eyes. The sweat was drying in his hair, the blood caking in little rivulets on his scratched hands. He was staring out into space, and his
eyes held a look of infinite weariness and a kind of tired despair.
'Ingold?'
Only his eyes moved, but they seemed to lighten and smile.
'What is it?' Rudy asked.
The old man shook his head. 'Only that we'll have to go up the gorge. We can't go back through the woods. There is worse evil in them than I thought, and I won't risk being trapped there until nightfall.'
'Ingold, I don't like this,' Rudy said. 'Who's doing this? What's happening? Did Lohiro really set up all this?'
Ingold made a tired little motion with his hand, 'No. Not Lohiro alone. I set up some of it myself when I was at Quo. In fact, many of the spells on the woods were mine, though they've been changed now and made - much worse. All the members of the Council have put their powers into the maze, and the maze changes, the traps and illusions shifting with each new mind that goes into it. It has never been this this difficult. It has never been this perilous. But Lohiro and the Council intended to wall themselves in. Only one of the makers of the maze can shift it now.'
Rudy sighed. He wondered what would have become of him if the Dark Ones had really made off with Ingold in the desert. Could he have found his way to the heart of the maze?
No wav, he decided. I'd have poked around the feet of the mountains till I died.
'You're the Great White Scout,' he said after a moment. 'But I'm here to tell you I do not like that gorge.'
Ingold chuckled briefly. 'Most astute.' He got stiffly to his feet, collected his staff and Che's lead, and started down the narrow trail into the gully.
At the bottom of the ravine, the hot metallic smell was stronger, the fumes of it burning the nostrils. Pools of fouled black water gleamed greasily in the wan daylight, fringed with charred, stinking vegetation. Even close to the canyon walls, the weeds had shrivelled in the noxious air, like flowers in Rudy's native California smog. Farther along, the head-high thickets of tule and bullrush that had masked the stream could be seen to be colourless, rotting in the pollution of that narrow place. From the canyon rim above them, the dark trees of the haunted woods frowned down; before them, on the distant shoulders of the mountain, Rudy thought he could glimpse the pass.
They followed the windings of the canyon for some distance, through a wasteland of fetid puddles and crippled, dying trees. A final turning brought them within sight of the end - desolate, stinking, a dark cave mouth amid broken slopes of shale and boulders. The sand around the cave was cut by filthy runnels of black and violent yellow slime. An oily suggestion of a putrid, greenish mist hung low over the ground. Beyond, on the higher slopes above the cave, the trees grew clean. But the woods were silent, unstirred by so much as a bird song, and Rudy heard the intaken hiss of
Ingold's breath.
'What is it?' he asked softly, and the wizard touched his lips for silence.
In a voice indistinguishable from the flicker of wind in grass, he cautioned, They have excellent hearing.'
Apprehensively, Rudy dropped his voice to a subvocal whisper. 'What do?'
The old man had already begun to retreat soundlessly behind the rocks. He replied in a murmur of breath. 'Dragons.'
'There's no chance he's out hunting?' Rudy whispered hopefully.
He and Ingold stood side by side in the black shadow of a massive boulder of splintered granite that shielded them from the cave beyond. They had scouted the walls of the canyon back for miles, but the only trail leading out of it was the one they had come down from the haunted woods.
'Of course not,' the wizard replied in a soft, almost inaudible breath. 'Can't you hear his scales sliding on the rocks of the cave?'
Rudy was silent, listening, casting his senses into the dark pit that loomed before them. In all the world there seemed no other noises but the hrssh of wind through Che's dusty pelt and the nervous jitter of his little hooves on the rocks. Then he heard the dry grating of incalculable weight and the thick drag of fetid breath. 'How big is that thing?' he whispered, aghast. Ingold drew himself back from the edge of the boulders. 'Forty feet at least. I'm told the old bulls can get to almost twice that.'
'Eighty feet!' Rudy wailed soundlessly. He calculated the distance from their rock to the boulders that flanked the cave - it looked like miles, with or without Godzilla lurking in between.
'It may be sleeping,' the wizard continued softly, 'but I doubt it. Judging by the amount of discolouration on the trees, it's laired here for a little over two months. Probably it was trapped here when the mazes surrounding Quo were shifted and strengthened. But there's little game in these mountains, and certainly nothing large enough to interest a dragon. You can see for yourself that there are no bones near the mouth of the cave.'
'Wonderful,' Rudy said shakily. 'Our friend should be just tickled pink to see us.' He edged his way around the boulders and surveyed the ground before the cave.
Here at the ends of the canyon, the stink of the beast was overwhelming. The deep bed of river sand was littered with fallen or rotting trees, eucalyptus, cottonwood, or oak, whose roots had been eaten away by the poisonous fluids that dribbled from the mouth of the cave. Violently discoloured tangles of weeds and distorted brush flanked the cave itself and grew halfway up the boulders on either side. Rudy felt a light touch on his shoulder as Ingold came around beside him.
'You bear left up the rocks there; I'll take Che and climb the talus slope to the right of the cave. Go as swiftly as you can in silence. If it does come out and attack you, dive for shelter - any kind of shelter - and I'll try to draw it off. On the whole,
it's more likely to attack me, since I'll have the burro. If that happens, you've got to go in and do the axe-work. Cut it behind the forelegs or through the belly or up behind the neck, if you can get that close. And stay away from its tail. It can club you senseless before you realize what's hit you.'
Ingold started to move forward, and Rudy caught his sleeve. 'It doesn't - it can't fly, can it?* he whispered anxiously.
The wizard appeared startled by the question. 'Good heavens, no.'
'Or breathe fire?'
'No, although its slime and spittle can be corrosive in wounds, and its blood will burn you. No - the deadliness of the dragon lies in its speed, its strength - and its magic,'
Rudy whispered in horror, 'Magic?'
One white eyebrow lifted. 'After your experience with the Dark, you surely cannot believe that the seed of magic is limited to humankind. Dragons do not have human intelligence; their magic is a beast's magic, the magic that lures the prey to the hunter - a magic of illusion and invisibility, for the most part. No cloaking-spell will work against a dragon; no illusion will turn it aside. Remember that.' His hand closed around Che's headstall, and he stepped out into the pale daylight, beyond the shelter of the rocks. Rudy gathered up his staff, preparing to make a run for the canyon's left-hand wall. Ingold's whisper stopped him. 'And one more thing. Whatever you do -don't look into the dragon's eyes.'
At a quick, steady walk, Ingold started for the talus spill that formed a steep grey slope up the mountain to the right of the cave. Che braced his feet and shook his short mane, unwilling to walk toward the chemical stench of the dragon's lair, but Ingold, Rudy knew, was a lot stronger than he looked.
Rudy moved in the opposite direction, skirting the discoloured pools and the rotting stands of dying trees along the foot of the cliff, uncomfortably aware of the possibility of rattlesnakes in the rocks he'd have to climb. His hands felt tied up with the staff he carried. Across the seventy feet or so of sand that separated the canyon walls, Ingold and Che glided in an almost invisible medley of brown.
Ahead of him, Rudy heard the slithering noise of tons of slipping iron. Something round and gold and glassy flashed in the darkness of the cave, and he stopped in his tracks, paralyzed by something closer to fascination than by horror. A preliminary hiss came from the darkness, with a rolling breath of oily stench and fumes that stung his eyes. Rudy blinked, blinded, wiped at the burning tears...
And there it was.
He had never imagined anything so hideous or so gaudy. He had been expecting something green and vaguely crocodilian, like the dragons in picture books, not the product of an unnatural mating between a dinosaur and a calliope. It was enamelled Chinese red and flaming gold, flickering with bands of green and black and white that mottled the lean-ribbed sides like a beadwork on a pair of slippers. The head was
massive, horned, mailed, and bristling with flared scales of purple, black, and gold, which gave it a curiously beribboned effect; from the tufted whorls of streamers, spikes, and fins on that snake-like nape, a long ridge ran backward, up over the towering fulcrum of the mighty hind legs and down the counterpoised bulk of the spined, deadly tail. Green slime dripped from the armoured chin as it champed and swallowed. The huge head turned, not with the slow, saurian deliberation of a movie monster's, but as quick as a bird's. Rudy found himself looking into round, golden eyes.
The amber quicksilver of those twin mirrors drank his soul. He did not understand the vision that he saw in them, distant and clear, striking resonances of certainty within his heart. He saw the far-off image of his own chained hands silhouetted against the freezing arch of winter stars. An echo of bitter cold and blinding despair pierced him from what he knew, as surely as he knew his name, was his own future. Mesmerized, he could neither have moved nor looked away, had he willed it. He had to see, to understand...
He had never thought that anything that huge could move so fast. The dragon lunged like a lizard. Waking from his trance, Rudy could scarcely have moved if he had been ready. But instead of ripping, eight-inch fangs, all that struck him was a whiplash of kicked sand, for the dragon turned in mid-spring with a metallic hiss of rage and pain. Rudy threw himself aside to avoid the lashing hind foot, then raised his head from the ground in time to see Ingold leap away from the steaming deluge of blood that burst from the monster's slashed flank. From the end of that long neck, the armoured head struck like a snake. Ingold sprang clear of it, his sword striking sparks from the mailed nose.
The dragon reared itself back on the massive fulcrum of its long hind legs, its belly gleaming like stained ivory in the sick grey light. It strode forward and lunged down again, snapping, then half-turned to slash with twenty-five feet of spined tail whose force could easily have broken a man's back. Ingold moved out of range, but a moment later his sword whined in again, cleaving through air rotten with the choking fumes of the dragon's breath, to strike at the slashing teeth and iron mouth.
Don't go for the head, dammit, Rudy thought cloudily. There's nothing but armour there. Then, as the wizard ducked back from the lash of the tail again, he realized what Ingold was doing. He was opening the dragon up, distracting its attention, so that Rudy could go in for the kill.
The fanning mane of its protective bone shield guarded the dragon's neck from the front, making it impossible for its victim to get in any kind of killing blow. But every time the monster brought its head down to snap at Ingold, the whole of its neck brushed the ground. From where he lay belly-down in the sand, Rudy could see how delicate were the beaded scales covering the pumping arteries of the throat. A single blow would do it - provided, of course, a man was willing to run in under that heaving crimson wall of angry flesh.
His knees weak at the thought, Rudy scanned that mountain of scarlet iron for another target.
He could see none. His scanty knowledge of anatomy didn't cover dragons. He had no idea where they kept their hearts; and anyway, he doubted his sword would pierce
the polychrome mail of its side.
The spiked club of the tail cut the air like a whip, its barbs skimming Ingold's shoulder as he dodged it, with a force that spun him, bleeding, into the sand. The claws raked at him like swords; Ingold cut at them desperately from where he lay. Rudy knew that if the dragon pinned the old man, it would be all over for them.both. He gathered his feet under him and drew his sword, watching for his chance. The wizard rolled to his feet somehow, staggering, but kept drawing the attack backward and in his direction, never letting Rudy get within the creature's line of sight. Absurdly, Rudy heard the old man saying far back along the trail, 'I have even actually slain a dragon -rather, I acted as decoy and Lohiro did the sword work...'
If Lohiro could do it, Rudy thought grimly, so can I. Anyway, it was a curious comfort to know that the Archmage had been relegated to the butcher position, rather than the infinitely trickier post as decoy.
The dragon struck out with its claws again, and Ingold went down, his bloodied sword gleaming as he slashed at the snatching mouth. The huge shadow spread over him in the drenched and smoking sand. Rudy was on his feet as the massive head reached down. Ingold saw him coming, cut, and rolled, the great head swinging to follow, green drool splattering from the chisel teeth. Rudy's sword cleaved the air as if he were chopping wood. It split the jugular vein, and he barely ducked aside in time to avoid the firehose of blood that exploded outward, steaming in the air as it roared thickly against the rock of the canyon wall, some forty feet away. The dragon screamed, flinging up its head, its huge tail lashing as it clawed at the streaming wound.
Rudy plunged in under the writhing shadow to drag Ingold to his feet, hauling him
toward the talus slope as the ground all around them was drenched in a burning rain
of splattering blood. His hands felt scorched by it; his lungs were seared by the fumes.
The lashing tail struck the ground so near that it covered them in a wave of thrown
sand. Stumbling on the base of the slope, Rudy looked back, staring upward in horror
at that huge, gaudy body swaying against the pallid sky..,
Then the dragon fell, hitting the earth like a derailed freight train, and the ground shook under the impact of its weight. It heaved itself halfway up, screaming harshly and metallicly, its beribboned mane lashing in the frenzy of its death throes. The trees cracked where it heaved against them, their leaves shrivelling in the scorch of its blood.
Rudy pulled Ingold a little farther up the loose rock of the slope, so weak with terror and reaction that he felt he could hardly move himself. The old man was a dead weight in his arms, the back of his mantle sticky where the claws had raked through to the flesh.
In malice or unknowing agony, the dragon reared and made one final lunge at them, the vast jaws snapping shut in a spew of blood and drool. Then the great body twisted in one last convulsive heave and lay still. Black liquid trickled from between the chisel teeth.
Rudy whispered, 'Jesus Christ...*
But Ingold said softly, 'Hush.'
The gold eyes opened. They stared upward, baleful, inhuman, at the two wizards crouched out of its reach on the slope. Then they blinked, filmy, translucent shutters sliding down over the dying inner fire, and for a moment there was a blank, curious question in the dragon's eyes. The hideous mask of scarlet bone was incapable of expression; but for a fleeting instant, Rudy had the impression of some other personality looking out through the sunken eyes. A thin, dark, bearded face, he thought, whose dragon gaze rested briefly on Ingold before those dim, amber lamps were extinguished forever.
Around them, the hush was like the draw of expectant breath. Rudy felt the air stir and change, though there was no breeze; it was like the shifting in a curtain of perception.
'Look behind you,' Ingold said softly.
Rudy turned his head to look. A path, old and overgrown, wound on up toward the pass that was, he saw now, less than five miles from the end of the canyon. For the first time since they'd come to the Seaward Mountains, he had no sense of illusion or misdirection. He looked down at the crimson carcass where it lay amid the decaying broken trees and smoking sand, its gaudy tags and scales already beginning to blacken in the virulence of its own body chemistry. Then he looked back at Ingold's face, to see it white with shock, hollow and stretched and old.
'What is it?' Rudy whispered.
Bleak blue eyes shifted to his own. 'It's the road to the pass, Rudy,' he said quietly. The road into Quo.'
'It wasn't there before.'
'No.' Ingold got stiffly to his feet, catching his breath as he tried to move. 'He -removed the illusion. Just before he died.'
'He?' Rudy echoed, confused. 'He who? The dragon? But how did the dragon have any power over the maze?'
The wizard turned wearily and led the way to the top of the slope, where Che could be heard, squealing in panic and fighting his tether. Ingold took his staff from where he'd left it propped against the scabby bark of a twisted oak and, leaning heavily on it, limped to free the burro. Rudy realized his own staff had been left down below, scorched to charcoal in the dragon's blood.
Ingold went on. 'I think the inference is obvious. You and I, Rudy, have just killed one of the makers of the maze - one of the members of the Council of Wizards. I have told you before how easy it is to forget your own nature, once you have taken on the nature of a beast.' He looked back down the slope to where the dragon lay, steaming faintly, gay colours quenched in darkening blood. 'Having taken on the being of a dragon, he forgot what it was to be a man and a wizard. He became a prisoner in his own maze. Only in death did he recognize me and remember, to do what he could for me in memory of o.ur friendship.' Under the slime of blood and dirt, his face was a
bruised mass of cuts, the blood from them leaking slowly into his beard.
'You mean - that was a friend of yours?'
'I think so,' Ingold whispered.
'But - why would he do it? Why would he change himself into a dragon in the first place?'
Ingold sighed, and the sound was like a death rattle in his throat. He wiped his eyes, and his sleeve came away fouled with red, gritty slime. 'I don't know, Rudy. The answer to that lies in Quo. And I'm beginning to fear what that answer is.'