The Walls of Air

Chapter 14

Rudy Solis and Ingold Inglorion entered the City of Wizards just after noon of the following day. From the hills above, they saw the sea mists roll back, revealing that small town - a village, really, grouped around its famous school - as it slowly emerged from veils of pewter, pearl, and white.
Even from the hills, Rudy did not think he had ever seen a place so completely destroyed by the Dark.
In Gae, the houses had been crumpled, smoke-blackened, or had had holes blown in roofs and walls. Here he could not find a single dwelling that had been left standing, not a roof that had not been ripped from its walls and thrown with blinding violence into the rubble-strewn streets. In the damp sea climate, weeds were already rank among the broken stone.
He and Ingold stood for a long time on the last rolling summit of the hill. Silvery grass rippled around their feet, but there was no sound here but the mewing of the sea birds and the boom of breakers. The air smelt of salt. A drift of mist obscured the town, then blew clear, as if unveiling the bare bones with a mocking flourish. Screeching whirlwinds of gulls rose from the ruins, to settle back a few moments later. Other gulls, wailing in their thin piping voices, hung motionless on stretched white wings against a featureless sky. Rudy wondered what the place had looked like the day after the attack had happened. Had the gulls blanketed the town like a visitation of death angels to pick the corpses, or had the rats been there first?
He hardly dared look at Ingold.
The old man stood beside him like something that had been carved from stone. The grey of the sky seemed to bleed the colour out of everything, leaving only the blue of his eyes under their short reddish lashes. There was no expression on his face,
but not for anything in the world would Rudy have spoken to him then. After a time, Ingold moved off, taking the downward path without a word.
Bodies were scattered throughout the city. From the way the bones lay, it was clear that scavengers had fought over them, worrying them to pieces. Mechanically, Rudy identified tracks -fox, rat, coyote, and crow. After this long in the open, there was little stink and few flies. He could see Ingold checking the signs as unemotionally as an insurance inspector, studying how the fire blackening striped the walls where it had been thrown or swept from a staff, instead of crawling up them in a regular pattern to concentrate on the roof beams, as it did in other places where the inhabitants had simply set everything they owned alight, and how the bones lay in groups of two or three at most, where they had not fallen singly. The wizards, it seemed, had not even had time to band together to make a stand.
It surprised Rudy a little how small Quo was. At no time could the City of Wizards have housed more than a couple of thousand, of whom, according to Ingold, about a third were wizards or students. Small, fanciful stone houses had grouped around a main square or bordered the crooked lanes that trailed on out of the town. Only in the centre of Quo were there large buildings, whose splintered frames loomed before the belated pilgrims as they made their way through the overgrown rubble of the streets. There the school proper rambled along the edge of the cove, buildings alternating with a long colonnade, through whose tinted pillars could be glimpsed the iron-edged sea. At the far left, the gatehouse slumped like a smashed sand castle, flanked by the kicked-in ruin of some mighty building of many storeys and turrets, all but buried now under the trailing vines of its feral roof gardens. To the right, at the end of the long curve of the bay, the black stump of a truncated tower stood alone on the farthest point of land.
It was for this tower that Ingold unhesitatingly made.
Since they had entered Quo, he had not spoken, and his face was still and very calm, as if this ruin had belonged to strangers
and had not been the only home his heart had known for most of his adulthood. The torn hem of his mantle, stained with the dragon's blood, brushed passingly over a picked skull and broken staff that lay half-buried in rubble and weeds. Behind him, Rudy shivered with a frightened sense of deja vu.
Forn's Tower was also smaller than Rudy had thought. The buildings surrounding it were little more extensive than a couple of good-sized houses put together, built on the big square knoll that jutted out into the sea. The tower itself, or what was left of it, looked no larger than one fair-sized room stacked on top of another. The black, curved shell of its walls extended thirty feet into the air. From the square below, Rudy could trace the broken stairs winding up its side. As he climbed behind Ingold through the ruins, he looked out over the half-moon beach and saw the steps leading down from the school with their twining patterns of inlaid stone and, half-buried at the tide line, the remains of a crab-eaten skeleton.
The two men reached the top of the knoll. The tower and the buildings surrounding it had been blasted and gutted, and the black stone spew of it lay scattered everywhere. Granted, the place was built later than the Keep, and by another technology entirely, Rudy thought, stooping to pick up a splinter of rock and then hurrying his steps to catch up with Ingold again. But it might have been thought that the spells of the Archmage could have kept the Dark out, as the spells Ingold set closed the doors to them.
Ahead of him, Ingold walked through the ruins, following the line of corridors he had traversed in other years with the light, unthinking tread of a man in a hurry to do something else, passing doors he had knocked at casually, back in the days when those rooms had housed people he knew. He barely glanced at the open ruins and the cracked walls.
He's like a man with a mortal wound, Rudy thought, frightened. He's still numb from the shock. The nerve ends are still cauterized. God help him when he starts to hurt. In front of them the floor fell away. It had been blasted upward, the torn
beam ends clearly indicating that the explosion had come from below. Standing on the crumbling lip of the pit, Rudy could look down into the labyrinths of the lower vaults and see squat pillars and worn red tile floors, the dust of ages that had accumulated since the tower's founding, muddied by the sea rains. Below them the torn flooring revealed a second vault, founded on the ancient heart of the knoll. But instead of the grey of buried rock, smooth black basalt reflected the distant sky. From deep below, a draught of warmer air blew upward on to Rudy's face, bringing with it the smell of a yet deeper darkness.
Beside him, Ingold said, 'I should have guessed.' Rudy turned his head quickly. The wizard looked calm and rather detached, with the rising breath from below stirring at his ragged white hair. Rudy said hastily, There's no way you could have known.'
'Oh, I don't know,' the wizard said absently. 'I certainly got myself into enough trouble for warning everyone else of the possibility. I don't know why it shouldn't have occurred to me that all of the old schools of wizardry were built in cities that were later destroyed by the Dark.'
'Yeah, but a lot of cities were destroyed by the Dark,' Rudy argued quickly, hearing, under the deep calm of that scratchy voice, a note he didn't like, like the first fissure of an earthquake. 'They knew the direction your research took. Any one of them...'
Ingold sighed and shut his eyes. Very quietly, he said, 'Go away, Rudy.'
'Look...' Rudy began, and the eyes opened. In them was a black depth of pain that amounted almost to madness. Gently the rusty voice repeated, 'Go away.'
Rudy fled, terrified, as if an idly lifted pebble had turned into an H-bomb in his hand. When he reached the bottom of the knoll and looked back, he could not see that the old man had moved.
For a long time, it seemed, Rudy wandered the empty spaces of the ruined City of Wizards, listening to the booming of the sea. The crash of the breakers was somehow comforting, an echo of California winters. Whether it was because of the familiar damp cold of the seashore, the salt smell, or the magic that still lay over the town like an enormous silence, he felt at peace, as if he had come home. Home, he thought, his boots making barely a sound on the coloured marble marquetry of the pavement. To find home in ruins, and family - the family I should have known and never did - dead! He looked back at the solitary figure on the knoll, very dark against the white of the empty sky.
Quo - gone. Everyone you knew and loved and respected -gone. The Archmage gone - Lohiro, whom you loved like a son. The only ones left are novices like me, charlatans like Bektis, goodywives like Kara and her mother. Alwir's army is scratched, or worse, going into battle against the Dark with no backup, leaving the Keep unguarded for the Raiders or the Empire ofAlketch or the Dark. And only you left, the last wizard, a lost soul like I was in California.
And yes, you might have guessed, but no, it wasn't your fault. But he knew already that Ingold would never believe that.
Heartsick, Rudy turned away. He explored for a time the roofless remains of the ancient school, lecture halls where the carved benches had been swept and scarred by fire, laboratories and workrooms whose furnishings were torn and twisted by wild and incomprehensible violence, glittering in the chill, pale light with shattered glass and broken gemstones, and libraries, their couches and seats ripped, charred, and acid-eaten, with the leaves of books strewing the rain-damp pavements or plastered like wads of crumpled leaf mast in corners. In one such chamber he found a harp, half-hidden in a wall niche and protected by fallen timbers, the only whole and untouched thing in that world of ruin and desolation.
As he carried it down the steps, on which moss was already beginning to grow, to where they had tethered the burro, it came
to him what this.ruin meant. Without the school, later generations of wizards, no matter what their inborn talents, would be like him, untaught callers of fire, hopeless dreamers groping for a mode of expression that they could not find.
Or worse, he thought. A mage will have magic...
If vou can't find good love, then you will have bad.
Wind rippled in his long hair and chilled his fingers as he packed the harp on to Che's back. They could take at least one thing, he thought, from the ancient city by the Western Ocean. One thing, out of all this destruction. He pulled the coarse, heavy fur of his buffalohide coat tighter around his neck and stood for a time in the shifting, patchy light of white sun and opal mist, staring out at the sea.
He thought of the Keep of Dare.
Not as he had often remembered it - the candlelit darkness of Aide's quiet rooms and the mazes stretching in shadows within those ancient walls but from outside, as he had seen it only once, the morning he and Ingold had taken the road for Quo. An almost cinematic image of it formed in his thoughts - black and square and solid against the snow that lay thick around its walls, impenetrable, enigmatic, self-contained. He saw the black loom of the Snowy Mountains behind it and smelled the cold, biting freshness of the pine-sharp glacier winds. And with the image, he felt a need blossom in his heart, a yearning to be there, as urgent as lust or starvation. But he felt it from outside himself, as if the thoughts of another had been projected into his heart.
Looking up, he saw again the black and curiously regular shape of the knoll by the sea, the dark stump of Horn's Tower. Through the lacework of the bare trees he saw the small figure standing, arms raised, mantle billowing in the freshening winds from the sea. And he knew that what he felt was a call, and that the calling came from the man who stood alone at the heart of the last ruined citadel of wizardry. The last wizard, an exile gypsy vagabond with a sword at his hip and his back to the wall, was calling them all - the second-raters, the flunk-outs, the
novices, the charlatans, and the goodywives. He was calling anyone, in fact, capable of hearing - calling them to meet him at the Keep of Dare.
Ingold came striding down from the knoll soon after, his face set and harsh, his eyes bitter and frighteningly cold, a stranger's eyes. Rudy scrambled off his perch on the rail of the colonnade to greet him, but there was nothing to greet in that blind, icy stare. 'Come with me,' Ingold ordered briefly. 'There is one thing yet we must do.'
The wizard scarcely spoke to Rudy again that afternoon. Rudy fetched the burro in silence and in silence followed the old man down the blasted shore to the collapsed ruin beside the gatehouse. The terraced roofs had supported storey after storey of incomparable gardens, and these had fallen in on one another, tangling trees, masonry, flowers, earth, tumbled pillar, and broken beam into one colossal pyramid of wreckage. Ingold hunted around it until he found what had been a wide window that would still admit them to the ruined lower hall, then slipped like a cat among the precariously balanced blocks of half-fallen granite, working his way downward and inward. Rudy followed unquestioningly, although Ingold had bidden him neither to go nor to stay. In places, they could walk beneath ceilings that moved and groaned with the weight pressing on the damaged arches. In places, they had to climb piles of fallen rubble. Once they crouched to slide beneath a mighty lintel stone that was cracked right through the middle, supporting by equilibrium alone literally tons of coloured stone, decked incongruously with dangling curtains of trailing yellow leaves. As he scrambled, panting, to keep up, Rudy half-feared that Ingold was seeking his own death in this place, for the wizard had turned suddenly strange and frightening, remote in his bitterness and rage. It was possible - logical, even - that he would arrange to perish with the others, in the city that had been his home.
But as they wriggled from the last rubble-clogged stairway into the broken vaults, Rudy understood why Ingold had come.
The bluish glow of witchlight slowly filled the long, narrow
hall. It picked out the gold on the bindings of the books there, the smooth sheen of cured leather covers, and the spark of emerald or amethyst on decorated clasps. Like a ghost returned to the land of the living, Ingold moved down the rows of the reading tables, his blunt, scarred hands touching the books as a man might touch the face of a woman he had once loved.
It was obvious they couldn't take all. There were hundreds of volumes, the garnered wisdom of centuries. But, fatally incomplete as it had been, knowledge was the heart of Quo, as it was the heart of wizardry. To protect that knowledge was the reason for the city's existence, the justification for the rings of spells that circled the place so tightly that even after the death of every person there, the image of Quo could not be called in water or fire or gem.
Silently, Ingold touched the locks and chains that bound the books to their slanted desks, and the chains clattered faintly as they fell away. He brought two volumes back to where Rudy waited in the doorway and handed them to the younger man as if he were a nameless servant. 'You'll have to come back for more,' Ingold said curtly and turned away.
In all, they salvaged two dozen books. Rudy had no idea which they were, or why these were chosen and not others, but they were all large and heavy and loaded Che down unmercifully. Ingold scavenged material from a curtain to make rough satchels for himself and Rudy to carry what could not be put in the packs; after one look at the old man's face, Rudy dared not complain of the extra weight. When they crept from the rubble for the last time, Ingold turned back and wove spells of ward and guard over the whole of the ruin, that neither rain nor mould nor beasts should enter there, that all things should remain as they were, protected, until he should come again.
By then it was dark.
They camped on the open beach. If the Dark still lurked in that dead city, the ruins offered too many hiding places for them. And, Rudy thought, as line after line of the spelled circles
of protection faded, glittering, into the air around the camp from the tips of Ingold's moving fingers, too many ghosts walked those silent streets for comfort. The night was cool, with the smell of distant rain; but over the ocean, the clouds broke to reveal a moon as rich and full as a silver fruit, its light frosting the billowed clouds into ski slopes of dazzling white. The crackling of the driftwood fire mingled with the slow surge of the waves in an echoing whisper of California.
Home, Rudy thought. Home.
He took the harp he'd found from its makeshift wrappings and ran hesitant fingers over its dark, shapely curves. The fire caught in the silver of its strings and touched the patterns of red enamel inlaid in the black wood of the sounding board. Like most Californians of a particular generation, Rudy had mastered sufficient guitar chords to get himself through epics like 'Light My Fire'; but this instrument, he sensed, was designed for music of a kind and beauty beyond his comprehension.
He caught the glint of Ingold's watching eye. 'Do you know how to play this?' Rudy asked hesitantly. 'Or how it's tuned?'
'No,' Ingold said harshly. 'And I'll thank you not to play it, either, until you know what you're doing.' He turned and looked out to sea.
Quietly, Rudy wrapped up the harp again. Maybe Aide can teach me, he thought. Anyway, somebody at the Keep should know. He felt as if he half-knew already what its sound should be and understood Ingold's not wanting to hear it bastardized.
'Its name is Tiannin,' Ingold added after a moment, still not looking at him.
Tiannin, Rudy thought, the way-wind, the south wind on summer evenings that sowed restlessness and yearning in the heart like wind-borne seeds. He strapped the harp into the packs, with mental apologies to the hapless Che, and started back toward the fire. In the dark beyond their camp, he could see the broken line of the colonnade, his wizard's sight picking
the merged patterns of flowers, hearts, and eyes that flowed down the coloured stone. Against the sky, the dark bulk of Forn's Tower rose, like the burned stump of a dead tree under the azure glow of the sea horizon. Westward, moonlight gleamed on the surge of the waves, opal lace on the white breast of the beach.
Against the black wall of the cliffs, the elusive wink of starlight flashed on pointed metal.
Rudy's breath, his heart, and time itself seemed to stop. As if he had heard something, Ingold looked up, then out into the darkness that even to Rudy's sharpened perceptions revealed nothing more. The leaping brightness of the fire showed hope in his face that was almost terrible to behold. But for a long while, there was nothing in the night but the surge of the ocean and the wild hammering of Rudy's heart.
Then in the outer dark, that twinkle of pronged gold came again, with a stirring in the shadows along the beach. Rudy started to move, but a hand touched his wrist, stilling him, and he felt Ingold's fingers shaking.
A distant flicker of moonlight shone on the crescent end of a staff and was echoed still more brightly on loose, fire-coloured hair. The wind picked up the motion of a dark cloak, billowing it briefly behind the man who walked along the ocean's edge, his tracks dark, enigmatic writing in the sand behind him.
Rudy knew their camp was wreathed in cloaking-spells fully as elusive as the walls of air that still circled the tomb of Quo, but the man looked straight toward them; in the moonlight, he could be seen to smile. The long stride quickened. Ingold's hand closed like a crushing vice on the bones of Rudy's wrist.
A dozen yards from the camp, Lohiro broke into a run. Ingold was on his feet instantly, striding out to meet him, catching his hands in greeting. Moonlight showed the old man and the young together, and gleamed on silver hair and gold and on the gnawed skeleton that lay half-buried in the sand at their feet.
'Ingold, you old vagabond,' Lohiro said softly. 'I knew you'd come.'
'Why did you stay?' Ingold asked later, when they'd drawn the Archmage into the circle of their fire. Lohiro glanced up from the meal of pan bread and dried meat he had been devouring. To Rudy's eyes, he looked thin and hunted; the sharp face was worn down to its elegant bones. In the bright gold mane that fell almost to his shoulders, scattered streaks of silver caught the firelight. His eyes were as they had been in Rudy's vision in the crystal - wide and variegated blue, like a kaleidoscope, flecked all through with dark and light, and containing that odd, empty expressionlessness Rudy had noticed before. After seeing Ingold before the ruins of Forn's Tower, it made sense.
'Because I couldn't get away.' Lohiro laughed, briefly and bitterly, at the sharpness of Ingold's glance. 'Oh, the Dark are gone,' he reassured them, in a taut, ironic voice. 'They left the same night, clouds of them, their darkness blotting the stars. But I - It took the lot of us to weave the maze, my friend. One man couldn't pick that mesh apart.'
'Yet they left?'
The skeletal white fingers gestured upward. 'Through the air,' he said. 'Over the maze itself.'
Ingold frowned. 'How could they? The mazes extend for miles above the town.'
Lohiro paused, then shook his head wearily. 'I don't know,' he said. 'I don't know.'
'Were you taken by surprise?' Ingold asked quietly.
The Archmage nodded. Behind him, his staff was stuck upright in the sand like a spear, the firelight glimmering off its points.
'By the Dark Ones from the Nest in the plains as well?'
'No.' Lohiro raised his head, a little surprised at the question. 'No, they had left their Nest to join the assault on Gae. Didn't you - Of course you wouldn't know.' He sighed and rubbed his eyes. 'We knew they'd left the plains to attack Gae -oh, the night it happened, I think. We'd all been going crazy for weeks. We had councils, committees, and research throughout the watches of the night. Teams of first-year students dug through the old records in the library. Thoth the Recorder turned out his most ancient documents, things so old they were held together by cobwebs and spells alone. It reminded me of that old joke about the miser whose favourite camel had swallowed a diamond.' He shrugged. The points of his shoulder bones stood out sharply under the dark cloth of his robe. 'But we turned up nothing much to the point. Only...' He hesitated, as if struggling with himself, and the dark, swooping brows were knotted in momentary pain.
'Only - what?'
Lohiro looked up again and shook his head. 'It was very late. Thoth, Anamara, and I were still awake, but I think almost everyone else had gone to his bed. We'd all seen the fall of Gae, one way or another. There was a great heaviness over the town. Still, I don't think any of us were uneasy for our own safety. It happened - suddenly.' He snapped his long fingers. 'Like that. A great explosion -I've never seen the like. You saw what it did to the tower.'
Ingold nodded, and his voice was very tired. 'Like the experiments Hasrid used to do with blasting powder,' he agreed. 'You remember the stone house he wrecked?'
Lohiro grinned wryly. 'That was nothing,' he said, 'compared to this. This was like - I don't know. It shook the foundations of the tower to its roots. I don't think I did anything, just sat there like a fool, and that probably saved me. Anamara ran to the door and threw it open... The darkness rolled over her like a big wave. I don't think she had time to make a sound.'
Ingold looked away, and Rudy could see by the amber glow
of the fire every small muscle, from temple to jaw, thrown suddenly into harsh prominence.
Lohiro went on. 'I think Thoth called one burst of light -I don't know. Then...' He stopped, seeing Ingold's face. 'I'm sorry,' he said quietly, looking down at his hands. For a long moment the terrible silence was unbroken except for the surge of the waves on the shining wetness of the sand. 'I didn't know.'
Ingold turned back to him. His face was calm, but something had changed in his eyes. 'It's nothing,' he said. 'It never was.' And Lohiro, catching his eye, half-smiled, reassured.
Like a fine beading of diamonds, Rudy could see the sweat that suddenly glittered along the curve of the old man's temples.
'And that was it,' the Archmage continued quietly. 'I threw the strongest cloaking-spell I could find around myself and went under the desk and prayed.' His long fingers wound together, unconsciously caressing the strong bones of those too-thin hands. 'The next second there was a roar as if the whole side of the tower were going out - which it was, of course - and from where I was, I could see nothing but a kind of dark hurricane as they ripped the room to shreds. There was nothing else I could do, not even come out and fight them, for the room was a buzzing blackness of them, swarming like monster bees. Through the break in the wall of the tower, I could dimly see that the whole town lay under a cloud, as if I looked down into a storm.' Wind blew in from the sea, a sudden gust of it stirring the thick, shining hair. Lohiro shook his head and raised those tired, empty eyes to meet Ingold's. 'They never had a chance,' he said softly. 'I could see lights, fire. I could smell the power, thrown out into that storm and burned. But there were so many of the Dark - so many. Someone turned himself into a dragon. From where I lay, I could see it, like a giant red eagle surrounded by hornets. But mostly - they were taken in their beds so suddenly that none of them knew.'
The sea wind blew stronger, the voice of the waves
imperceptibly louder on the offshore rocks. Rudy saw the clouds piling together to blot the blazing moon.
'And after,' Ingold said quietly, 'why didn't you get in touch with me?'
'I tried.' The Archmage sighed. 'The makers of the maze are dead, but the maze lives. I've been trying to contact you for weeks.'
Ingold started to say something else, then stopped himself. By the firelight, he looked suddenly harsh and old,. and the dark lines of bitter care cut like wire into his mouth and eyes.
Darkness was drawing like a curtain over the beach as the moon was lost in swift, smothering clouds. Its dying light glinted on the white crests of the driven waves. Even in the shelter of the rocks, their small fire began to thresh wildly in the wind.
'Yeah, but why couldn't you...?' Rudy began.
Ingold cut in. 'What have you been living on?'
Lohiro chuckled bitterly. 'Moss.'
'From the Nest?'
Lohiro nodded, his long, triangular mouth twisting unexpectedly into a wry grin. 'Oh, there was a certain amount of salvage, if you wanted to fight the rats for it. I lived on that for a while. But I went down into the Nest of the Dark at last and lived on the moss, like their poor, wretched herds. Not that it's done me any more good...' He stopped again, wincing as if at sudden pain. The long hands shut on each other, bone crushing bone.
'Yes?' Ingold asked softly.
The changeable eyes flickered up at him, startled and empty. 'What was I saying?'
'About the moss.'
'Oh.' Lohiro shrugged again. 'Sometimes I wondered-I lived like a beast. Alone. In the dark, like a mole. There were times I thought I'd go mad.'
'Yeah,' Rudy broke in. 'But why didn't you...?'
'Rudy, be still!' Ingold snapped, and Rudy, startled at the hardness of the tone, relapsed into silence. Ingold was profiled against the dark sea, and Rudy saw the old man's nostrils flare slightly, as if in anger, or as if his breath had quickened in fear. But he went on calmly. 'What about the herds of the Dark?'
Lohiro's eyes shifted. 'What about them?'
'Were they down there?' The smell of the storm front moving in off the sea was suddenly strong, a cold rushing of winds.
'No,' Lohiro said after a moment. 'No. They were gone. I don't know where or how. There was no trace of them.'
Ingold thought about that briefly, then leaned forward and picked up a stick of driftwood to poke at the fire. The embers leaped and the wind twisted at the ribbons of flame. 'You were right about the dragon,' he remarked casually. 'It was caught in the maze as well. We had to kill it.'
'Do you know who it was?'
'Hasrid, I think,' Ingold said. 'He always did like dragons.'
The Archmage nodded. 'So he did.'
Puzzled, Rudy looked from face to face in the firelight. Unsaid things and sentences unfinished hammered at his consciousness; for no reason he could think of, he was suddenly afraid - afraid of Ingold, harsh and distant and drawn in upon himself, and afraid of the tall, slender Archmage, restlessly twining his long fingers as he sat on the very edge of the circle of firelight. Rudy was afraid of the tension that lay in the silence between them, of the things they were obviously not saying to
each other, and of something he could not name. 'Look,' he said, 'I'm going to go check out the town...'
Ingold didn't even glance around. 'Shut up and stay where you are!' He looked up from the fire to Lohiro again. 'Although, mind you, Rudy did a good job helping me. He worked decoy as well as you did against the dragon we slew in the north.'
Lohiro nodded. 'Yes,' he said. 'I'd forgotten that.'
Across the fire, their eyes met. The silence stretched like tensioned wire, straining toward its inevitable breaking point, bitter and undeniable. It flashed across Rudy's mind that he stood in hideous danger; but, as when he had stood paralyzed, gazing into the dragon's eyes, he could not have moved, had he wanted to. In the changeable brightness of Lohiro's eyes he could see nothing human. Nothing at all.
Ingold said softly, 'You never worked decoy in your life.'
The eyes were blank, empty. The Archmage's stillness was that of an automaton; the restless hands ceased moving, and the long, sensitive muscles of the face suddenly slacked. For an eternity, there were no sounds except the cold roar of the ocean and the ragged draw of Ingold's hoarse breath.
Then Lohiro struck, blindingly swift. The metal crescent of his staff seemed to burn in the light as it lashed across the fire, aimed at Ingold's throat. Ingold's sword was in his hands. The old man parried from his knees and rolled to his feet seconds later as Lohiro rushed him, sand and cinders flying from the Archmage's ragged mantle, emptiness in his staring eyes. Immobile with shock, Rudy could only watch in horror.
Ingold parried Lohiro's rush so closely that the crescent's metal point put an inch of red line on the outer edge of his right cheekbone. He caught the back of the crescent on the strong part of his own blade and continued the momentum of the rush, tearing the weapon from the Archmage's hands. It skidded away into the sand. Rudy cried out, in terror or warning, he did not
know which, as Lohiro threw himself, empty-handed, toward Ingold...
... and changed!
The long, clever body seemed to melt into the billow of his wind-torn cloak, and his white, reaching hands appeared to multiply and become snatching claws. Without stopping his movement, he became a falling darkness of gaping, tentacled mouth that slobbered acid on to the sand and a spiny whip of tail snaking out to wrap itself around Ingold's body. Then the storm winds hit them like a freezing avalanche, caught that dark, tenuous body like an immense kite, and whirled it away into the howling night.
The winds roared down around Rudy and Ingold, a universe of noise and spray. Slashed sand buried the fire. Rudy was still sitting, his mouth open in shock and horror, when Ingold reached him at a staggering run through the wild chaos of the elements and pulled him bodily to his feet. The old man paused long enough to grab his staff and Che's lead-rope, then shoved Rudy along ahead through the blinding hurricane toward Quo.
Lohiro was waiting for them on the steps up from the beach. His face was as white as that of a glass-eyed corpse in the wild darkness of wind and magic, and his gold hair lifted from his brow in a fiery halo. Under the booming of the breakers, his voice was clearly audible, cool and amused. 'Well, Ingold? Will you really slay me?' He started down the steps, his pronged spear at the ready. 'Me?'
Ingold whispered, 'You above all, my son.'
With a swift, snapping movement, Lohiro reversed the staff, slamming its iron-shod foot like a club at Ingold's temple. The old man ducked, slashing upward and inward. Rudy saw white flesh and a thin streak of blood as the Archmage stepped away from the blade and chopped the staff down like an axe. Ingold caught the force on his pommel, drove the whining hardwood down past him, and struck along the shaft in the split second that the spear was entangled and his opponent's balance upset.
Fire exploded between them, thrown from Lohiro's hand almost in Ingold's face. The old man staggered on the steps, his arm flung up to protect his eyes, and the younger one reversed the staff again, catching him under the knees and throwing him down on to the sand. In the same motion, Lohiro turned the staff and struck downward with it like a pitchfork at Ingold's throat. The movement was unbelievably quick and smooth, as deadly as a striking snake. But somehow the old man was not under the razor edge of the weapon. He rolled and parried, catching the shaft with his hands and bringing his foot up in his opponent's groin, hurling the Archmage bodily over his head and into the dark beach beyond. Ingold rolled to his knees, gasping, with fire streaming from his open hand...
But Lohiro was gone.
Ingold scrambled to his feet as rain began to slash from the black, boiling skies. Rudy ran to him, as if woken from a trance. Without a word, Ingold caught his arm and half-dragged him up the steps. Lightning roared into the sky above them, laying bare the bones of the deserted town and blinding the fugitives in its passing, the thunder shaking the world like the crack of doom. Rain plastered their hair to their cheeks as they fled along the water-sheeted colonnade, the pillars on both sides leaping into electric-blue visibility and plunging into darkness with the bursting of the lightning. The gusting wind tore at their robes as they ran, and the rain drenched them. Che was squealing and jerking against the lead-rein, in terror at the smell of electricity and power. Rudy wondered desperately what they'd do if the stupid critter succeeded in bolting with all their food supplies and the books Ingold had risked both their lives to salvage.
Then light burned his eyes, the smell of ozone searing at his nostrils and his hair prickling with the crackle of the lightning. The ruined wall before them smoked with the blast. Turning, Rudy saw Lohiro behind them, with his empty eyes and mocking grin.
Lightning illuminated Lohiro's raised white hand in the rain. Earsplitting thunder came simultaneously with a burning white
explosion; a ruined doorpost near where they stood shattered, the splinters tearing the thick buffalohide of Rudy's coat. A rain squall veered, blinding him. Through it, the Archmage was a dim, watery form, his soaked gold hair lying slickly on his head, slowly advancing with his razor-pronged spear. Rudy shrank back, too afraid to run further, knowing that if lightning hit the pavement, they would all be electrocuted from the inch of water that flooded it.
Between Rudy and the Archmage, Ingold stood, the blade of his sword gleaming eerily in the soaking darkness. The winds increased, hurling great sheets of horizontal rain. On the drowning pavement the two wizards circled, feeling each other out. Thirty inches of blade, Rudy thought dizzily, to six and a half feet of dark, iron-hard wood. Slick footing and blinding rain. Ingold edged to the right, feinting, testing; Lohiro swayed like a snake. There was a swift gesture of Lohiro's long, white fingers and Ingold's quick counterspell, followed by the murmur of stillborn thunder and the acrid stink of ozone.
There were two Lohiros. Rudy saw the second one step, catlike, from the shattered doorway not three feet from him; with swift and deadly silence, the double plunged the pronged blade at Ingold's unprotected back.
Che reared, screaming in terror at the apparition. Rudy yelled wildly, 'INGOLD, LOOK OUT!'
The wizard whirled. Half-blind in the wind, Rudy drew his own sword and slashed at that second Lohiro, only to have the figure flicker out of existence. He saw Ingold twist too late away from the razor crescent and stagger back, hand to his side. There was a whine of air as the Archmage reversed the staff in his hands again and the crack of the wood against the old man's skull. Rudy stood for one instant in paralyzed horror as Lohiro reached down and wrenched the sword from Ingold's nerveless hands. The Archmage bent over the crumpled body with a look of chill, pitiless satisfaction in his inhuman eyes. Then, with an inarticulate cry of fury, Rudy flung himself at the Archmage, heedless of the consequences. His sword seared through the
blinding curtain of rain, but met only darkness and the fading echo of Lohiro's mocking laugh.
Rudy turned and scrambled back to where Ingold was struggling to rise from a pool of rain and blood. Che had already bolted through one of the dark doorways. Rudy pulled the old man erect, collected the sword where it lay a few feet away, and half-dragged, half-carried him to shelter inside.
It was one of the few buildings in Quo still blessed with a roof. Rain and wind crashed against the piled ruins of the storeys above, like the pounding of the mad sea. Rudy was shivering with fright and exertion as he laid Ingold down on a drift of moldering leaves and the soaked and matted remains of books. He called a faint glimmering of witchlight; by its gleam, he could see two skeletons crumpled in another corner of the room.
Ingold's face was corpselike in the ghastly light, white with shock and pain and the effort to remain conscious. Rudy could see where the points of the spear had torn into his side when he'd turned at the distraction of Rudy's yell. Just as Lohiro knew would happen, God damn it, Rudy thought furiously, working to pull off Ingold's mantle so he could get at the wound.
'Don't,' Ingold whispered desperately.
'You're hurt, man,' Rudy muttered. 'I've got to...'
'No. I'm a healer, Rudy. I'll be all right.' The old man was gasping for breath, his hand groping to press his bleeding side.
'You're gonna goddam bleed to death...'
'Don't talk like a fool.' Ingold's eyes opened, a stranger's eyes again, hard, glittering, and furious. His breath came hoarse and ragged, but already Rudy could see the flow of blood slowing between his burned fingers. 'What possessed you to bring me inside?'
The arrogance in his voice touched off Rudy's own temper. 'I
had to get you to shelter! You were bleeding like a pig!'
'And whose fault is that?' Ingold snapped. To be taken in by one of the cheapest tricks known to man, and a poor version of it at that.'
'Well, I'm sorry!' Rudy yelled, enraged. 'Next time I'll let you fight your own goddam battle!'
Equally furious, Ingold slashed back at him. 'And if you don't have the wits to realize -'
They both looked up as the witchlight faded. Rudy sensed the spell, then, the same strong force that had drained his power in the haunted woods. In the growing darkness, he felt Ingold's power reach out, trying to kindle light. It met with that same inexorable strength. By wizard sight he saw the old man sit up, then heard the rasping intake of breath at the pain. Outside, storms of hail clattered on the pavements. A blinding crack of lightning illuminated the swirling of wind-driven rain and silhouetted the tall, angular form in the black arch of the doorway.
Witchlight flickered into the room again, bluish and shadowy, playing like St. Elmo's fire over the linen-fold panelling, the charred ruins of chairs, and the glinting bullion in the decaying curtains. It threaded Lohiro's dripping gold hair with quicksilver and lost itself in his staring, inhuman eyes. The long, triangular mouth quirked up into a grin at the sight of the two bloody and sodden fugitives huddled in their corner. He came slowly down the steps into the room.
Rudy fumbled to draw his sword, but Ingold shoved him back. 'Don't be stupid.' The old man dragged himself to his feet, his own blade burning with a sudden, cold light.
Look who's talking, Rudy thought, as the wizard staggered and caught his balance on the remains of a twisted chair. Wisely, he kept his mouth shut.
Whether the stagger was a deliberate fake, Rudy didn't know,
but it drew Lohiro. The prongs flashed inches from Ingold's eyes. But the old man caught the crescent with his pommel, driving the spear down and past him to stick into the wood of the floor. In the same movement, it seemed, he slashed along the haft. Lohiro released his hold on the weapon and sprang clear, empty-handed.
Ingold rushed him, the blade of his sword burning as it slashed. Then, to his horror, Rudy realized why the old man had been angry to find himself in shelter- why he had called the storm in the first place. Out of the danger of the winds, Lohiro's body changed, his form melting into the form of the Dark. Dodging the whining arc of the blade, the Dark One flickered aside and fell, not upon Ingold, but upon Rudy.
There was no time to draw his sword. Rudy flung himself flat on the floor against the wall and covered his head, choking on the smell of stone, mould, blood, and acid in the darkness that seemed to engulf him. A shower of pebbles and dead leaves was kicked over him, and he felt the edge of a ragged mantle brush his face. Somewhere in the darkness, metal whined very close to him. When he looked up, it was to see Ingold standing above him, the crimson stain spreading over his side again. Five feet away, Lohiro was pulling his spear free of the floor. He was. smiling, but there was still nothing in his eyes.
The Archmage moved in again, light on his feet, agile as a cat. The mind might have been taken over by the Dark, but the body and its training were his own. And he was fresh, Rudy thought - fresher, anyway, than Ingold, who had the long labour in the library and the slaying of the dragon behind him. Also, the Archmage wasn't conscious of trying to kill a man who had been his friend.
Rudy glanced up at Ingold. Red-rimmed eyes glittered in the black-bruised hollows of flesh. There was no pity in them, no remorse. Like Lohiro, Ingold was a machine that existed for the kill.
He ducked a feint to the eyes and the lightning head-blow that
followed, then twisted out of the way as the prongs gouged upward at groin and belly. Lohiro evaded the old man's rush, falling back to his own distance and driving in again. The prongs of the crescent glittered, catching Ingold's blade and scissoring it viciously from his hands, the metal flashing as it struck the far wall. Ingold took a step back, his hands empty.
Lohiro struck like a gold puma. Rudy never saw Ingold's hand move, but he knew it must have done so, for Lohiro, though the floor at his feet was clear, tripped and staggered in his rush. In that gained second, Rudy pulled his own blade from its scabbard and tossed it to Ingold's ready hand. If the wizard had been less exhausted, he might have been faster, but the Archmage sidestepped the rush and regained his balance. A muffled explosion of sound cracked between them, throwing Ingold back against the far wall of the room, and the spear whined in again, the crescent driving into the panels to pin Ingold's sword hand to the wood. Then the Dark One, who had been Lohiro the Archmage an instant before, struck in along the spear haft. In the closing gap between the darkness around the Dark One and the old man pinned to the wall, Rudy had a confused glimpse of Ingold's left hand reaching across his body to pull his dagger from his belt; in the inky shadows, he saw the glint of its needle point. Then he heard a cry, somewhere between a shriek and a moan, and for an instant, Rudy wasn't sure who had cried out or why.
The darkness retreated. Rudy saw Ingold again, flattened against the wall, his sword hand still pinned and his eyes shut, his face glittering with sweat. Slumped against him, slender white hands clinging to his shoulders for support, Lohiro's long body was already buckling at the knees, the gold head bowed next to Ingold's face. Slowly he slipped downward and crumpled at the old man's feet.
Ingold dropped the bloody dagger and reached across his own body to dislodge the pronged spear. By the time Rudy got over to them, he was on his knees, gathering the Archmage's bleeding form into his arms.
Lohiro's eyes opened, blinking dazedly up at the face above his. 'Ingold?' he whispered, then coughed, bringing up a trickle of blood. In the witchlight, his face was ghastly, bathed in sweat and suddenly pinched-looking, as if the flesh were falling in on the bones. Even to Rudy's inexperience, the wound was obviously mortal.
Ingold said nothing, only sat with his head lowered, his face hidden in shadow.
The Archmage whispered,'... lied. Dark here - below.' He tried to draw breath and coughed again, a hideous gurgling sound. Bony fingers picked restlessly at Ingold's sleeve. 'Trapped... maze. Coming.' He gasped, choking, and a spasm of pain passed across the thin, fox-like features. 'Healer... you can heal me... They've let me go. Free.'
Softly the old man said, 'I'm sorry, Lohiro.'
'Didn't mean... they took... made me.' He choked again, fighting for air with a horrible wheezing. His fingers clamped hard over Ingold's soiled mantle, shaking at it, like a tugging child. 'Heal... you can. They let me go.'
Ingold's voice was a murmur for the dying man's ears alone. 'I'm sorry. They might be able to take you back, you see.'
'No,' Lohiro gasped; for a moment, his face twisted again, with anger as much as with pain. Then that passed, and he coughed, bringing up more blood. 'Don't know,' he whispered. 'Stupid... I never could... beat you. They take you... but they don't know.' He coughed again, struggling to draw himself up. Over Ingold's shoulder, Rudy could see that the younger wizard's chest bore a dark, glistening river of blood. 'They want you,' he went on, his voice fading. 'You...' 'Why?'
The blue eyes closed and gold lashes showed sharply against white skin that was already growing waxy. Lohiro rolled his head from side to side, his face convulsed with pain. 'One of them,' he whispered. 'Became one of them. They are not many
... they're one. They want you...' 'Why?' Ingold demanded.
Lohiro went on as if he had not heard. 'I know... But stupid. I'm sorry. I know...' he whispered. 'The moss... the herds of the Dark...' He coughed yet again, as if gagging on blood. '... the ice in the north...'
The gold head lolled back. A moment later the long, white fingers slipped down from Ingold's sleeves and the nimble, bony body became a dead weight in his arms. For as long, Rudy guessed, as it would take to count to a hundred, Ingold sat in the darkness, cradling the friend he had slain. Then he laid the body down gently and got to his feet, his face harsh, terrible, and as empty as that of a stone image.
'Come,' he said quietly. 'If the Dark are below, they'll be after us now.' He disappeared through a doorway, to return a few moments later leading Che. He found and sheathed his sword, while Rudy collected his own weapon and the gold-pronged spear Lohiro had carried.
Outside, the storm continued unabatedly, rain and wind slashing the town with redoubled fury. Ingold pulled up his hood, shadowing his face, and wrapped over it his sodden muffler with its trailing ends. Then he paused, turning back, gazing at Lohiro's body. It lay crumpled in the shadows where the Archmage had fallen, blood pooling on the leaf-strewn floor.
For a long time Ingold stood so, as if fixing some memory in his heart. Then, without warning, the twisted body of the dead Archmage burst into flame, the red-gold light showing clearly the sharp-boned face, the long, elegant hands, and the bright hair now transmuted to real fire. The pyre roared ceiling-high, a spreading column of heat that licked the rafters, its glare illuminating Ingold's calm, almost disinterested face and tortured eyes. Rudy watched until the body began to blacken, flesh curling from the bones in the midst of those topaz veils of heat, then turned away, unable to bear the sight. The room was filled with the odour of charred flesh.
After a time, he heard Ingold lead Che up the stairs, and he followed them out into the rain.
Thus they slipped from Quo like thieves, under cover of the hurricane winds. The Dark they left trapped within the walls of air. They left also in that town the ruins of the world's wizardry and the hopes of magical aid for humankind. Toward morning they made a cold camp in the hills above, and Rudy slept the profound sleep of total exhaustion. He woke in the afternoon to see Ingold sitting as he had last seen him, knees drawn up and arms linked around them, staring sightlessly down at the ruins by the grey ocean and weeping without a sound.