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.