The Walls of Air Page 0,117

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