The Walls of Air Page 0,119

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