The Walls of Air Page 0,64

through the night, as well as his quiver of arrows. He had water in his flask, and there was enough snow on the ground so that this was not yet a problem. He also had a little dried meat and some fruit-leather in the wallet at his belt. In addition, he had a knife, a sword, and some extra bowstrings. Shivering in the wan, heatless light, he wrapped his damp cloak around him, to no great avail.

The cold leaking through his wet clothes would be a further drain on his energy, but there was no way to get dry. He scrambled to the top of the bank to have a look at the lands around him.

Only desolation met his eyes. There was no sign of the road anywhere. The overcast sky had broken enough so that the sun was remotely visible as a whitish patch in the endless roof of clouds. The wind was still bitter. The land sloped away before him in a pale reddish expanse of stony sand, barren of brush, cactus, or grass. Here and there, snow patched the sands, blown into fitful little whirlwinds.

The wind from the north and the sun in the east were the only guides for direction in all that empty land. He tried to remember whether he'd crossed the road last night and if he were north or south of it; he tried to recall the map Ingold had sketched out for him one night in the dUst beside the fire. All he remembered of that was that they'd have to leave the main road to Dele at some point and strike overland, due west, to reach the Seaward Mountains and the Hidden City of Quo.

That much he could do. Head straight west - and then what? Eventually reach the Seaward Mountains? How long? Two weeks afoot, lost and virtually helpless? Dream on. And supposing he did? The Seaward Mountains were now one great spider web of illusions. What the hell am I gonna do, stand in the foothills and yell, 'Let me in. Ingold sent me?'

But that, he realized, was exactly why Ingold had brought him along. Punk airbrush-jockey and half-trained screw-up artist that he was, he was the only free and trustworthy mage in the West of the World. Ingold, over whose stripped bones the scavenger rats must be fighting by this time, was counting on him.

And besides, where else was he going to go?

He headed west. The emptiness of the desert engulfed him.

He had thought before, travelling with Ingold through the wastelands, that he had come to understand the solitude and silence of those empty places, but he saw now that this had been a delusion. He was totally alone, totally forgotten. He was the only human soul in all this great emptiness. The sun climbed, strengthening a little. His cloak dried, and his shadow drifted, pale and watery, before him. Once or twice in the rocky wastes he glimpsed jackrabbits or huge lizards the length of his arm, and once in the distance he heard the unmistakable dry buzzing of a rattler. But he knew himself to be alone. If he shouted at the top of his lungs, his voice would roll unheard through those silvery distances and die without ever reaching a human being's ear. He moved through the emptiness like a tortoise, with slow, dogged steps in a single direction, not to be turned aside.

A distant thicket of mesquite and greasewood proclaimed ground-water; he found a catch basin of rocks there, half-filled with melted snow. In the empty silence of noon, he ate as little of the dried meat and fruit as he could manage, resting, letting his thoughts drift. He wondered what Minalde was doing, how Tir was. He wondered about the White Raiders and the ghost that they feared. Had it been that, he wondered, which had taken Ingold so silently from his own camp? Or had it been the Dark, who had dogged their footsteps from Renweth? Would Lohiro know that? Had Lohiro, who was like a son to Ingold, watched him in the fire, even as Rudy had watched Aide? The vision in the crystal flashed disturbingly before his thoughts, the cold, empty blue eyes and the brush of a cloak hem across the wet gleam of a crab-crawling skull. A small movement in the mesquite caught his eye; a moment later a rabbit hobbled cautiously into view, nose and ears a-twitch with apprehension. Poor little bastard, Rudy thought, and his hand