-until it became suddenly apparent that the edge of the gorge was very much nearer than Rudy had thought. He found himself looking down a sheer drop of black-walled cliff to a bristle of torn rock and jagged, broken trees, half-hidden in the mists at the bottom. Head swimming, he stepped back hastily. He thought he had seen something else on the rocks below, like the broken limbs of the dead trees, but whiter.
He glanced around quickly. The path itself had changed. Fog was blowing softly down on them from the higher peaks, and the trees were receding around them like mocking spirits into the mists, the ferns spider-webbed in silver dew.
'We've come quite high,' Ingold said, his soft, scratchy voice calm and strangely disembodied in that cool, two-dimensional world. 'From here the way becomes more difficult. The illusions of the road alone will have turned aside the malicious or curious or idle. The only ones to come this high are those who seek to become mages and who can see the traps before they close - or those with the motivation to do the wizards real harm.'
'So - what can we do?' Rudy whispered, afraid.
'Do?' The fog had closed on them now, so that Ingold was only a flat shape in the mist, hooded darkness hiding his face. 'Dispel the fog, of course.'
Hesitantly, Rudy stammered out the words Ingold had taught him to summon and dismiss the weather. Chill as wraiths, the fog caressed his face. Now he could feel the spell that bound the mist, drawing it like a net around them. He put out his strength against it, but felt it greater than his own power, older and infinitely more complex. He stood alone, wrapped in mist, almost choked by its thickness, as if smothering in a wet shroud. Sweat as well as fog dampened his face. He fought the impulse to run shouting from it - it did not matter in which direction only to be away from the malicious strength of the hands that
held the net.
'I can't do it,' he whispered in despair.
Ingold clicked his tongue reprovingly. 'Can't! If you can't, then we shall stay here, or else walk sightlessly. It will be night soon.'
'Dammit!' Rudy wailed. 'Can't you give me a stronger spell?'
'Why? Yours is perfectly adequate.'
'It is not! You know you could sweep this stuff aside like a cobweb!'
'With the self-same spell, Rudy.' Ingold was no more than a dark blur in the mists, but his voice was warming, like a fire in a cold place. The strength of your spells is the strength of your soul. Haven't you realized that?' Ingold stepped closer to him, the coarse fibre of his robe sewn with pearls of dew. 'As you grow, your spells will grow also.'
'But can't you feel it?' Rudy demanded helplessly. 'It's -it's like a boy fighting a man. I'll never...'
'If you keep saying never,' Ingold replied mildly, 'you'll come to believe it. If his back is to the wall, a boy has to fight a man, doesn't he? And sometimes he can win.'
Rudy subsided into silence. Above the fog, the sky was growing perceptibly darker, the first chill winds of evening drifting down from the unseen heights...
Winds. The endless winds of the plains.
With meticulous bounding-spells and limits, Rudy summoned the winds.
They were icy cold, but they smelled of the stone and glaciers above. Thin, steady, and strong they blew, riding grey horses up from the gully, breaking the fog before them like startled ghosts. Cloudy shapes rolled away from the path and retreated
ponderously from the sloping land. Trees shook wetness down on the pilgrims disapprovingly in the new strength of the winds that whipped Rudy's long, wet hair into his eyes. He started down the path, Ingold leading the burro silently behind.
They camped that night in open ground, under the shadow of the higher peaks. Ingold circled the camp with spells of protection, visible to a wizard's sight as a faint ring of foxfire around the perimeter, but nothing threatened them throughout that whispering night. In the morning, the clouds had cleared somewhat, and Ingold pointed out the pass which they sought, a narrow notch in the blackness of the mountain wall. Throughout the day it seemed to shift unaccountably to the northward, and at times the trails Ingold chose appeared to lead nowhere near it.
They were in high, treeless country now, where rocks towered as proud as goddesses above the trail. An occasional twisted live oak or clumps of scented