The Walls of Air Page 0,79

of what he'd found there still turned him sick. But, raised as he had been on Maverick and Paladin, he had been under the impression that there was nothing much to leaping aboard a horse and thundering away into the sunset. He had recently found out he was wrong.

The horses of the White Raiders were taller and longer-limbed than those bred in the Realm of Darwath and, from foraging on the scant saltbush and wiregrass of the desert, they were narrow-built and of prominent vertebrae. They were also skittish and half-wild, and Rudy's humiliation was complete when, in the iron darkness before the freezing desert dawn, he got chucked unceremoniously off the mildest old mare of the herd, the one Hoofprint of the Wind had chosen for him deliberately on account of her gentleness. He looked up from the dirt in bitter envy at Ingold, who was sitting a fire-snorting buckskin stallion like a patriarch of the Cossacks.

'Were you ever in the cavalry, by any chance?' he asked, as several of the Raiders went to catch the mare, their soundless laughter almost palpable in the leaden gloom. 'In a manner of speaking,' the wizard replied cryptically. His breath smoked faintly in the starlight; he held the single rawhide rein in one mittened hand, the other hand resting relaxedly on his thigh.

Rudy remembered hearing somewhere - from Gil? the rumour about Ingold's having been in his youth a slave in the Alketch and he also remembered how the Alketch cavalry trained. Being chained to a practice post and having the local

hotshots try sabre charges at him wouldn't improve his riding much; but, if the story were true, it would sure as hel! account for the old man's iron nerves. He muttered under his breath. 'It figures.'

The Raiders returned, solemn-faced with inward amusement, leading the mild and gentle mare.

They were riding north before dawn and continued throughout the day. The clouds that had broken the previous afternoon regathered, and the day grew colder instead of warmer as the small band of horsemen galloped north beneath a pale and heatless sky. At midday their breath was visible smoke, and the backs of the horses were steaming. Patchy snow covered the red sands and grew thicker as they proceeded north. Here and there Rudy saw tracks unfamiliar to his experience, and Ingold told him they were the sign of creatures native to the far north. But deeper and more frightening than the cold was the silence that covered the land. Nothing seemed to move or live in these wastes of sand and snow. At a casual look, even the winds that whirled like dust-devils across them appeared to be gone. When the riders stopped to rest or to change horses from the small cavvy of spares they had brought, Hoofprint of the Wind prowled restlessly on the edges of the group, talking softly with the dozen or so of his warriors who accompanied them or listening across the plains for some sound Rudy could not hear. The warriors who had come with them were silent, edgy as animals before summer lightning, keeping close together in the endless expanses of the snowy waste.

There,' the chieftain whispered, pointing to where the mottled red and white of the land seemed to slope upward to a far and hazy horizon. 'There it lies.'

Rudy shaded his eyes against the distance. He could make out a flat, dark gleam, like a sunken lake of oil. Though he wore a coat of buffalohide that the Raiders had given him, he felt suddenly cold.

'Do you have such places in your home in the north?'

Ingold asked Hoofprint of the Wind as they turned the heads of their horses toward the dark gleam.

'Not in our own lands,' the chieftain of the Twisted Hills replied. 'The Lava Hills People to the south of our runs, they had such a place. The tuar, they call them, and others spoke of them, out in the Salt Plain to the east.'

'Tuar?' the wizard said curiously. 'Seeing?'

'At such places it is said that the shamans, the wise men of my own people, can stand and, having made proper respect to the ghosts of the Earth, can see far away. They say, too, among the Lava Hills People that once they hunted in this fashion, the wise man seeing and leading the people to the track of the antelope; but they hunt so no more.'

'Why not?'

Zyagarnalhotep shook his head. They do not say. Healing there was also, worked upon those