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head; Gil had only recently become used to seeing that long, narrow, hollow-cheeked face without its tangled black beard. 'She is a Penambran and, like me, knows what it is to sleep outside and await the coming of the Dark. I thought it might have been because he was alone... but I knew Snel, a little. He was a man absolutely without imagination. It takes a degree of sensitivity to be driven mad. But I did not know.' He folded his crippled hands on his knees and rested his chin upon them, his long body rolled into an ungainly ball of bones as he sat on his heels. Gil leaned back against the wall behind her, her head aching, her whole body shivering with reaction.

The Bishop of Penambra went on in a lower voice. 'Bektis, of course, is useless as a healer of minds. But I have heard that Ingold Inglorion is good at such things. It is heresy for me to say so.' He grinned with his white teeth. 'But I regret his absence.'

'You and me both, friend.' Gil sighed. He looked at her curiously for a moment, then turned his eyes again to the sprawled body with its puckered, elongated expression and vacant eyes. 'It is well known that the Dark devour the mind,' he said softly. 'But this is the first time that I have heard that they can put something else in its place.'
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,