The Walls of Air Page 0,128

Ingold's nature had its cruel side - which, he supposed, he must have, back in the days when he had been naive - he did not doubt now. There were days when, if he had not been too afraid of the old man, Rudy would have told him to go to hell and left him - except that there was nowhere else to go in the midst of the winter-ridden plains.

Winter had locked down over the empty lands. The sky and ground were alike made of iron, the going slow, the hunting poor. Rudy did most of the hunting, as he did most of everything else. It was he who lay for hours in the brush blinds to shoot meat that Ingold seldom touched, he who washed the stains of Lohiro's blood from the old man's robe and patched the tears in his mantle. When Ingold did eat, it was because Rudy forced him to; when he spoke, it was with an impersonal bitterness that bordered on contempt. He seemed to be drawing further and further into some remote part of himself, walling himself into his private hell of guilt and grief and pain.

And why not? Rudy thought, his mind turning back to the

illusion- circled city on the shores of the Western Ocean, and the body of the golden-haired mage blackening like a straw in the flames. Who's to say Lohiro didn't have the answer? Who's to say he couldn't have given it to us, once the Dark Ones let go of his mind?

If, of course, they really did let go.

And if Ingold didn't simply let him die when he could have saved him, out of rage at his having betrayed them all.

Rudy glanced across the fire once again. Ingold was staring into the flames that were multiplied a hundredfold in his bleak eyes. He looked old, exhausted, and shabby, his long white hair fluttering around the sunken cheeks and brooding eyes. Out in the darkness, the wail of a coyote curled, thin and hopeless, on the wind, the cry of a lost soul wandering dry and empty wastes. The cloud-cover had broken, and the full moon stared down upon them from the rim of the broken-toothed western hills. Rudy wondered what Ingold saw in the blaze.

Was it Quo as it had been in the warm beauty of that last summer, unaware of the horror underlying its heart? Lohiro's empty eyes? Things that could have been, had Ingold thought to send them warning of the Dark? Or the Keep, black amid the snows under remote and freezing stars, now that the wizards of the world could literally be counted on the fingers of one hand?

Ingold, Bektis, Kara, me, and Kara's mother, Rudy enumerated glumly. What the hell kind of chance have we got against all the forces of the Dark? What kind of chance has anyone got?

No wonder Ingold walked in silence, a tumbleweed ghost on the desert road.

Only occasionally would the wizard rouse himself to give lessons in power that were, for days on end, their only means of communication. But his teaching was like everything else, brittle and bitter and cruel. He seemed to care very little whether Rudy learned anything or not; for him, Rudy felt, the lessons were simply a means of temporarily forgetting. He would throw unexplained illusions into Rudy's path, or deliberately wrap himself in a cloaking-spell and leave Rudy to search. For two days he had blindfolded Rudy, forcing him to rely on his other senses as they marched on in sightless silence. Without warning, Ingold had called forth blinding torrents of wind and rain and deadly flash floods in the washes, with which Rudy must cope or drown. By scorn and sarcasm and vicious invective, he pushed the younger man to learn stronger spells and taught him the tricky and terrible secrets of divination by water and bone.

Everything Ingold taught, he taught as a stranger. For the rest, he could not be bothered to speak at all.

Experimentally, Rudy's fingers formed chords, thirds and fifths. The tones of the harp sounded true. A wizard's harp, he thought, brought from the wizards' city. Did the spells that preserved it from harm keep it tuned as well? Cautiously, first with melody alone and then with groping chords, he found his way through the saddest and

most beautiful of the Lennon-McCartney ballads, his mind and body bending to the harp, his eyes to the firelight and starlight on hands and strings. The music was clean, pure, and