The Walls of Air Page 0,84

and horses

together to huddle like sheep in the protection of one another's warmth. Rudy wondered if Ingold would freeze down there by himself among the rats and darkness. Now and then, searing winds shrieked along the tunnel from above, moaning through the cavern and sighing in the carpet of frost-bitten moss. Rudy had little sense of time, but suspected it was something over an hour before the light glimmered once again in the caverns below and Ingold returned, shivering like a frozen beggar in a killing snow. He handed his staff up to Rudy, who took the glowing end gingerly and found the blazing wood perfectly cold and solid to his touch. Ingold climbed the rope hand over hand, the powdering of frost on his cloak glittering like diamond dust. The Raiders made room for him among them.

'Well, Thief of the White Bird's Horses?" Hoofprint murmured. 'Found you, then, what you sought?'

'I never stole the White Bird's horses,' Ingold responded automatically. Even through the freezing cold, Rudy could smell the taint of corruption on his ice-encrusted cloak. In the pallid witchlight, he looked white and drawn - like a man, Rudy thought, who had just got done vomiting up his socks.

'And no,' the old man went on. 'I found only the dead. They're mostly skeletons by this time, but you can see they're all of the same date of death, not a gradual accumulation. Rats, worms, bloated white toads as big as your head... But that's all. Down to the farthest depths of these caverns, I can sense the presence of no living creature - neither the Dark Ones nor anything that might have driven them forth.'

Rudy hastily shoved away the images he had conjured from his too-vivid imagination. But something in the old man's scratchy, tired voice told him that Ingold would wander those caverns for many nights afterward in dreams. The sound of the furtive scampering in the deeps below turned him suddenly sick. 'But why?' he whispered.

'Why?' Ingold glanced over at him.'If something did kill off the Dark - which I'm not altogether certain it did - it could have killed the herds as well. But if the Dark simply evacuated the Nest to go elsewhere, they could hardly take their herds with them, now, could they?

'But could they not have defended this place against any ghost that came against them?' Hoofprint asked, and the frost crackled on his braided moustache.

'Perhaps,' Ingold replied softly. 'But we cannot even be sure that there was a ghost. I don't think so. I am not even certain that they left in fear.'

The Raider's dark, animal face grew thoughtful. 'If not in fear - then why?

'Perhaps at a command?'

'And who would command the Dark?'

'A good question,' the old man said. 'And one whose answer I will seek in Quo. If the wizards there cannot help me, perhaps that question and what I have seen here can help them. All I ask of you, Hoofprint of the Wind, is the leave to walk through your lands.'

The chieftain laughed softly. 'As if the leave of any man could bid the Desert Walker to go or stay. As soon can a man bid the Dark. Nevertheless, you have my leave. And what will you do, wise man, you and your Little Insect, together with all the wise men of the world in one place upon the Western Ocean?'

'Find a way to drive forth the Dark indeed,' the wizard replied quietly. 'Or perish together in trying.'

They emerged from beneath the earth to a world blasted and changed. As they struggled toward the livid remains of the daylight through the drifted snow that all but blocked the last twenty feet of the stairway, the cold seemed to grip Rudy's bones. Even after the bitter chill beneath the earth, it took his breath away with its brutal intensity. The small band of Raiders and horses came out to a surface landscape buried under hard, powdery snow so cold that it shrieked beneath the foot and to a sky black with clouds, where twisting columns of tornadoes wavered between dark air and frozen earth. Smaller winds chased each other aimlessly across the desolation, blowing snow now from one direction, now from another, in the confused remnants of the hurricane blast that had entombed the land.

'I thought you said the storm would be over,' Rudy managed to say through uncontrollable shivering.

'It is over.' Ingold swung himself lightly up on to his borrowed stallion. His breath crystallized to ice in