The Walls of Air Page 0,24

of that shabby little old man with his scarred hands and mild, sarcastic humour. But the awe never fully left him; it increased as he came to understand this scruffy old pilgrim. He would now no longer question how Ingold knew whether Lohiro of Quo were alive or dead.

'Magic isn't like I thought it would be,' Rudy said much later that same night as he gathered his blankets about him, while Ingold settled down by the fire to take first shift at guard. 'I mean, I used to think it was like - oh, people turning themselves into wolves, or slaying dragons, or blasting walls down, or flying through the air, or walking on water - stuff like that. But it's not.'

'But it is, really,' Ingold said easily, prodding at the ashes of their tiny fire. 'You yourself know that one does not turn oneself into a wolf - for to transpose your personality into the heart and brain of a wolf, aside from being very dangerous in terms of the structure of the universe, might prove too great a temptation to you.'

Distantly, the wolves answered his words, their faint howling riding down the night wind. In the darkness of their arroyo camp, Rudy caught the bright, hard glitter of Ingold's eyes and heard the dreamy edge to his voice.

'Wolves love what they are, Rudy. To be strong - to kill - to live with the wind and the pack - it would call to the wolf in your own soul. There would always be the danger, you see, that you would not want to come back. And as for slaying dragons,' he went on in a milder tone, 'well, dragons are really rather timid creatures, tricky and dangerous, but only likely to attack humans if driven by hunger.'

'You mean - there are dragons? Real live dragons?'

The wizard looked startled at the question. 'Oh, yes, I have actually even slain a dragon. Rather, I acted as decoy and Lohiro did the sword work. As for the rest of it -blasting down walls and walking on water...' He smiled. 'Need has simply not arisen.'

'You mean,' Rudy said uneasily, 'that - you could? If you had to?'

'Walk on water? I could probably find a boat.'

'But if there wasn't a boat?' Rudy pursued.

Ingold shrugged. 'I'm quite a good swimmer.'

Rudy was silent for a time, his head pillowed on his hands, staring up into the black and featureless sky, hearing the belling of the wolves on their hunting trail, sweet with distance and incredibly lonely, and remembering the men he had known who had chosen to live as human wolves on a hunting trail of steel and gasoline. To live with the wind and the pack... That he understood. That mind he knew.

Another thought came to him. 'Ingold? When you said that the Dark Ones are -"alien intelligences" - you meant that humans can't understand their essence, didn't

you? And because of that, we can't comprehend the source of their magic?*

'Exactly.'

'But if - if you took on the being of the Dark, if you took the form of a Dark One, then wouldn't you understand them? Wouldn't you know then what they are and how they think?'

Ingold was silent for such a long time that Rudy began to fear he had offended the old man. But the wizard only stared into the fire, drawing the stem of a dried stalk of grass through his restless fingers, the flame repeated a thousandfold in his eyes. When he spoke, his soft, scratchy voice was barely audible over the keening of the winds. 'I could do that,' he said. 'In fact, I have thought of it many times.' He glanced over at Rudy. Gleaming from the wizard's eyes, Rudy could see the overwhelming temptation to knowledge, the curiosity that amounted in the mageborn to an almost unslakable lust. 'But I won't. Ever. The risk would be too great.' He dropped the grass stem he held into the fire and watched it idly as it curled and blackened in the veils of burning gold like a corpse upon a pyre. 'For you see, Rudy - I might like being a Dark One.'
Chapter 4
'I never thought it would come to this so soon.' Gil lobbed a hunk of snow down at the trampled muck of the valley road below.

Seya set down her bow and quiver, shook the powdered snow from her black cloak, and gave a perfunctory glance at the dark pine woods that rose behind the little watch-post. 'Come