The Walls of Air Page 0,7
the answer to this riddle itself. He let the soft, bright glitter of the gems below have its way with him, to do whatever it did.
For a time the images confused him. He did not understand what they were -incoherent scenes of blowing sand, rock hills on which nothing grew, rolling seas of brown grass invisible in the overcast night. He sensed rather than saw a dark place take shape, roofed with clouds and drifted deep in snow, walled in by high cliffs of black rock crowned with twisted pines. Beyond the black clouds he sensed gorge-riven peaks, knife-edged heights, and the endless miles of glaciers where the ice
winds skated, screaming... Sarda Pass ? he wondered. Tomorrow's road? The images grew clearer ragged foothills and then an endless brown plain, with tawny grasses waving under the lash of the wind. A black sky was sheeted with cloud. A pale thread of road stretched out of sight into pitiless distance.
Frozen and bitter vastness swallowed his soul.
And, as if the images moved with his heart, he saw the soft glow of reflected candlelight and the starred embroidery on the changeable colours of a silken quilt. The colours shifted, aqua to teal to river-reed green, as they were shaken by the sobbing of the woman who lay there, her black hair thrown about her like scattered silk.
I can't leave her, he thought in despair. I've known her such a short time.
And miss Quo? the other half of his mind asked. And not speak with the A rchmage? Not have Ingold teach you the ways of power?
He closed his eyes. Like a tingling through his skin, he became aware again of the Dark and the building fury of them, riddling the night like the coming of an electrical storm. / have to go, he thought, with a sudden chill of panic. But still he stayed, paralyzed between his choices -Minalde on the one hand, Ingold and the Archmage Lohiro on the other.
He opened his eyes, and the image in the crystal changed again.
Small and distant, the stars were visible - more stars than he had ever imagined, filling a luminous sky that hung low and glittering over the endless roll of the blue-black sea. Their piercing brightness touched the curl of foam on the silver curve of the beach. Outlined against that burning sky, he thought he could make out the shape of a tower, looming storey on turreted storey from the trees that crowded an angular point of land thrusting out into the ocean. But the tower seemed strangely elusive, slipping his eyes past it, turning them again to the stars. He tried to look inland, but found his gaze eluded there, too. Half-guessed shapes of buildings clustered there, twining patterns of colour on stone columns muted by darkness, briefly visible and then swallowed by mists. Try as he would to focus on the land, he found his eyes coming back to the sand, the sea, and the midnight sky, as if in a gentle refusal to answer his questioning.
Against the dark bulk of that square knoll and half-seen tower, he glimpsed the sudden flash of starlight on metal, winking momentarily and then gone. He looked again, releasing all thoughts of striving from his soul. The metal twinkled once more, and he caught the long swirl of a cape brushing sand, the scuff of a foot above the tide line. Like a sudden wash of spilling opals, the stroke of a wave eradicated footsteps from the sand. The man whose prints they were walked slowly on, and Rudy could see the starlight now on his bright gold hair hair the colour of sun-fire.
It surprised him, for he had expected the Archmage Lohiro to be old.
But this man wasn't. He was surely less than forty, with a young, clean-shaven face. Only the firm lines of the mouth and the creases in the corners of eyes that were a flecked and changeable kaleidoscope blue betrayed the harshness of experience. His
hand around the hard, gleaming wood of his staff reminded Rudy of Ingold's hand, nicked with the scars of sword practice, very deft and strong. The staff itself was tipped with a metal crescent some five inches across, whose inner edge glinted razor-bright. The starlight caught in it, as it caught in those wide blue eyes and on the spun-glass glimmer of foam that washed the beach in a surge of lace and dragged at something half-buried in the sand.
Looking down, Rudy saw that it was