The Walls of Air Page 0,21

dead stalk of kneestem through his fingers as he scanned, without seeming to, the banks of the gully against the pallid sky. 'Even the most talented adept is useless without knowledge, without the awareness of every separate facet of the world within which he must work.'

'Yeah,' Rudy said, sitting back and stoppering the flask with stiff, clumsy fingers. 'But a lot of what you've been teaching me sometimes seems kind of useless. Like that kneestem you've got - I mean, it doesn't have anything to do with magic. It's just a weed. You said yourself it's worthless.'

'It is worthless to us and to animals, having no value either as medicine or as food,' Ingold agreed, turning the dry wisp in his mittened fingers. 'But we ourselves are useless to other forms of life - except, I might point out, as sustenance to the Dark Ones. Kneestem, like you and me, exists for its own sake, and we must take that into account in all our dealings with the world that we hold in common with it.'

'I see your point,' Rudy said, after a moment's consideration of how much of what he loved and valued was, objectively, pretty useless. 'But I didn't know jack about anything when I started magic. I called fire because I had to.'

'No,' the wizard contradicted. 'You called fire because you knew it could be done.'

'But I didn't know that.'

Then why did you try? I think you knew in your heart that you could do it. I think you might even have done it as a child.'

Rudy was silent for some time, sitting on the bleached bones of the rock. The wind

moaned faintly along the banks above them, and Che flicked his long ears at the sound. There was no wind in the gullies. It was so still he could hear the water clucking softly at the ice. 'I don't know,' he said finally, his voice small and a little frightened. 'I dreamed about it, I think. I used to dream about a lot of stuff like that when I was a real little kid, like three or four years old, I remember dreaming I think it was a dream - I picked up a dry branch in our back yard and, holding it in my hand, I knew I could make it flower. And I did. These white flowers budded out all over it, just from my holding it, just from my knowing they would. Then I ran and told my mother about it, and she hit me upside the head and told me not to imagine stuff.' The memory came back to him now, as clear as vision, but distant, as if it had happened to someone else. There was no sorrow in his voice, no anger, only wonderment at the memory itself.

Ingold shook his head. 'What a thing to tell a child.' Rudy shrugged it away. 'But I was always interested in how stuff was put together. Like cars - or anyway, I think that's why I was good with cars. How they work, and the sound and feel of whether they're right or wrong. The human body's the same way, I guess. And I think that's why I drew. Just to know what it was and how it all fits.' The wizard sighed and laid the dead plant stem among the rocks. 'Perhaps it's just as well,' he said finally. 'You could never have gotten the proper teaching, you know. And there are few more dangerous things in the world than an untaught mage.' New winds threaded down the gully. Ingold stood up, shivering, and pulled his hood over his face once more, wrapping his long muffler over it so that all that showed of his face was the end of his nose and the deep-set glitter of bright azure eyes. Rudy got up also, hung the water bottles over the various projections of the pack-saddle, and led Che up the narrow trail that had taken them down into the draw. Ingold moved nimbly ahead of him.

'Ingold?'

They scrambled up the last few feet to level ground and made their way back toward the road. A covey of prairie hens went skittering away almost under their feet. Che flung up his head in panic. The skies had darkened perceptibly, and in the distance Rudy could see the rain sheeting down.

'Why is an untaught mage so dangerous?'

The wizard glanced back at him. 'A mage will have magic,' he said quietly. 'It's like love, Rudy. You