The Walls of Air Page 0,130

right to alter the outcome of things. You go back and watch the people you care for die, either by your own hand or through your damned wretched meddling, and see what it does to you in sixty-three years. But until you do, don't sit there in self-righteous judgement of me or my actions.'

Rudy folded his arms and regarded the old man silently in the starlight. Hidden in the darkness of his drawn-up hood, Ingold's face seemed to be nothing more than a collection of angled bones, bruises, and scars amid a rough mane of dirty white hair. Halfway already to being a desert hermit again, Rudy thought. And why not? We blew it. The mages are gone. Whatever Lohiro might have been able to tell us, if the Dark did in fact release him, Ingold ended.

Quietly, Rudy asked, 'So what do I tell them at the Keep?'

Ingold shrugged. 'Whatever you please. Tell them I died in Quo. There would be some truth in that, anyway.'

'And is that what I tell Gil?' Rudy went on in a voice that shook with controlled anger.

The old man looked up, fury and the first life that Rudy had seen in him in weeks

blazing into his eyes. 'What does Gil have to do with it?'

'You're the only one who can get her back to her own world.' It wasn't until Rudy spoke that he realized the extent of his own anger. 'You're the only one in the world who understands the gates through the Void. And you were responsible for getting her here in the first place. You have no right to be the cause of her being stuck in this universe forever.'

He felt the rage that surged through the old man, rage and some other emotion breaking the bleak passivity of self-torment in which he had been trapped since Quo. But, like his grief, Ingold's anger was silent and all inside. In a queer, stiff voice he said, 'Perhaps it would be Gil's choice to remain in the world.'

'Like hell,' Rudy snorted. 'For myself, I don't give a damn one way or the other. But she's got a life back there, a career she wants and a place in that world. If she stays here, she'll never be anything but a foot soldier, when she wanted to be a scholar; and she'll stay that way until she gets killed by the Dark or the cold or the next stupid war Alwir gets the Keep into. I care for that lady, Ingold, and I'm not going to have you stick her here forever against her will. You haven't got that right.'

The wizard sighed, and the life seemed to go out of him again, taking away even the bitter leaping of his anger. He sank his head slowly to his hands and said faintly, 'No, you're right. I suppose I must go back, if only for that.'

Rudy started to say something else, but let his breath out with the words unspoken. Ingold's anger puzzled him, and this sudden capitulation bothered him even more. But he sensed the breaking of some bond of bitterness in the old man, a bleak self-hatred that had given him a kind of strength. Now there was nothing.

Quietly, he said, 'I'll be back at the camp. Can you find your way there?'

Ingold nodded without looking up. Rudy left him there, walking slowly back along his own invisible tracks, the double points of his pronged staff winking in the desert starlight. Once he looked around and saw that the old man had not moved. The dark form was barely distinguishable from the rock itself, no more than a darkness against the muted, uncertain shape of the land beyond. As he walked back to the camp alone, Rudy could not remember having seen anyone so lonely or so wretched in his life.

'You think there's anybody home?'

Moonlight drenched the town before them, a collection of little adobe boxes climbing the hills in back of the road. The distant trickle of water and thick clusters of date palms, black against the icy, glowing sky, marked where the stream came down out of the hills. Several houses had been blown apart by the Dark; but, by the look of them, it hadn't been recently. First quarter moon oj'autumn? 'Rudy wondered. Most of the bricks had been pillaged to reinforce the buildings that remained, turning them into little individual fortresses covered on the outside from foundation to rooftree with elaborately painted designs, pictures, and religious symbols. On