The Walls of Air Page 0,104

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