incredibly delicate, like a star caught in crystal, and he hated his own awkwardness and ignorance as unworthy of such beauty.
In the desert the coyotes yipped again, a full-throated chorus in the windy night. Rudy looked up and saw that Ingold had gone.
The moon had set. Rudy had no sense of the presence of the Dark, nor of any creature in the wastes of stone and cracked, parched clay, save those that made the place their home. Che dozed on the end of his tether.
Rudy set aside his harp and made a slow, careful examination of the camp. It was safe and secure within its rings of protective spells. Ingold's staff was gone. So was one of the bows.
Dogging a wizard by starlight was one of the less easy feats of this life. But Ingold's brutal training had paid off; Rudy picked up the turn of a branch and the scatter of sand that lay the wrong way to the wind, pointing a possible lead. He belted on his sword and picked up the staff that had once belonged to Lohiro the Archmage, taking his bearings from a notch in the hills and the shape and roll of the land. He stepped quietly away from the camp; then, turning back, he laid a word of warning on the whole outfit. Six feet farther off, he glanced back, and there was no trace of burro, fire, or packs to be seen.
He moved through the windy darkness like a ghost. Casting his senses wide, he occasionally found a trace of the old man - a place where a kit fox had unaccountably veered aside, or the slight scratch in the dirt on a rock face. He heard no sound, saw nothing moving in all the vastness of the frozen rocks, but twice his eyes returned to a humped black shadow where bare boulders broke the raw silver of clay flats. It was off the course of Ingold's trail. He could see nothing of the wizard in that jumbled outcrop of rock. But long meditation had given him a sense of dividing life from lifelessness. And once, on another windy desert night, he had glimpsed the shape of Ingold's soul, and that he would never forget.
Nevertheless, he had to get very close before he could be sure.
He stalked Ingold like a drift of wind in the night, as he had stalked his friends the jackrabbits. By this time he had a certain amount of experience as a hunter. But before he could reach the rocks, he saw Ingold move, a single turn of his head and the glint of a bitter eye in darkness. Then the wizard turned away again, scarcely even interested.
Rudy emerged from the concealing shadows. 'You planning on coming back to camp tonight?"
'Is it any affair of yours?'
Rudy leaned on his crescent-tipped staff, annoyed at that steely arrogance. 'Yeah, I'd kind of like to know if the Dark Ones are gonna put the munch on you.'
'Don't be stupid. We'll find violets in this desert before we find the Dark. Or
haven't you been watching?'
'I've been watching.' Their voices were pitched low for each other's ears alone. Their bodies blended with rock and shadow; an observer at ten feet would have passed them by, unseeing. 'But I don't figure I'm that much more clever than the Dark.'
'What's the matter, Rudy?' Ingold jeered. 'Do you think I can't handle the Dark?'
'No, I don't.'
Ingold turned his face away and leaned his chin once more on folded hands and drawn-up knees.
'I think if it came to that, you'd love to get eaten by the Dark,' Rudy went on coldly. 'That way you wouldn't have to go back and tell Alwir the whole thing was a bust, and you'd still get credit for not being a quitter.'
Ingold sighed. 'If you think I'd undergo something as unpleasant as that over someone as essentially trivial as Alwir, your sense of proportion is almost as poor as your harp playing.' He glanced up, then continued impatiently, as if throwing a sop to a begging dog. 'Yes, I was returning tonight.'
Then why did you take a bow?'
Ingold was silent.
'Or did you figure I could carry the ball from here?'
That's your choice,' the old man snapped angrily. 'You've got what you want -you're a mage, or as much a mage as I can make you. You go back and play politics with Alwir. You go back and spin out the illusion that your power gives you either the ability or the