The Walls of Air Page 0,77

be far from shelter. I ended by killing most of them - which is the reason I believe that they came from Renweth and have pursued us all along.'

Rudy said, 'Hunh?' and then yelped with pain as Ingold's fingers probed gently at his damaged ribs.

'Sit still and this won't hurt.'

'Like hell it won't. How do you figure that about Renweth?'

'It is always difficult to count the Dark, Rudy.' The wizard paused in his ministrations, kneeling before him in the murky darkness of the shelter, his face grave in the gloom. 'But there were surely fewer on the second night than the first, and fewer still on the third. If the Dark can communicate among themselves and there had been others within call, there would have been more, not less. Hence their anxiety to separate us, rather than risk further decrease in their numbers by an open fight.' He turned back to his medicine bag. Those ribs are only cracked, by the way. I'll mix a gum plaster to hold them still while they heal, which they should do in a few weeks, provided you don't try any more spectacular feats like this afternoon's. I was also hampered in my pursuit of you because I had to keep track of Che.'

'Have you still got Che?'

'Yes,' Ingold replied mildly. 'At the moment he's concealed up my sleeve.' Seeing Rudy's expression, he grinned suddenly for the first time since they had met. 'He's hidden out in the desert, not far from here,' he explained 'I couldn't lose him I certainly didn't plan on journeying to the Seaward Mountains, grubbing for forage all the way. We're in too much of a hurry for that. Besides,' he added, 'the Bishop would

excommunicate me twice over if I lost her donkey.'

Rudy pulled the frayed remains of his surcoat back into place and tangled with the lacings, cursing the man or woman in this universe who had never invented zippers. 'Ingold, listen,' he said after a moment. 'You say the Dark didn't bring in reinforcements. I was four days out in the desert alone and I never saw the Dark Ones at all.' Ingold nodded, and Rudy had the curious feeling for a moment that the old man could read those solitary hours printed like the tracks of a piper on sand in the lines of his face. 'And you know what else? I never saw this ghost thing, either.'

'No,' Ingold said quietly. 'Neither did I. ' Meticulously, he gathered together his herbs and medicines, his hands deft and his face in shadow as he spoke. 'And the odd thing is that I never even felt its presence. I spent last night sitting awake in the darkness, without fire, watching, hearing, and feeling, as wizards can, the threads and fibres of the air for miles over the desert, seeking the smallest sign that the Dark Ones might still know where I was. But there was no trace of the Dark, and no trace of -anything. No breath, no sign, no spirit moving over the sands, except those night-walking creatures that are one with the being of the earth.'

Rudy nodded, understanding what Ingold had done. As he himself had extended his senses to reconnoitre the camp beyond his prison shelter of brush, so Ingold had done on a vastly greater scale. He had sought and understood the shift of every spear of wind-moved weed, every harsh little scattering of kicked sand, and every scent that rode the airs of night, with the web of his awareness thrown like a net over hundreds of miles, seeking danger in the night - and finding none.

'But in that case,' Rudy asked, 'where or what is the ghost?'

This do all my people ask,' a bass voice rumbled. Looking up, Rudy saw that Hoofprint had entered the shelter, bending his tall head beneath the low pitch of the roof. He was surrounded by the greasy aura of woodsmoke and stewed game. The warriors who entered behind him, lesser chiefs of the war band, Rudy guessed, bore a tightly woven basket plastered inside and out with hardened clay and filled with chunks of steaming meat. Others carried smaller vessels filled with some kind of green, sharp-smelling mush. Rudy took a second look and saw that some of the smaller vessels were the skulls of dooic. Others, judging by the shape of the cranium and the absence of a suborbital ridge, were not.

The lesser chiefs settled down in a group a little apart, sitting on the