heather clung to the barren slopes, and water rushed down in veils of glimmering lace, or boiled in rock channels whose depths showed rust and pewter and the velvet green-black of moss. The trail here was perilous, switching back and forth across the steep stone of the mountain's flank, overhung by massive boulders. In places the trail was buried under single boulders or great spills of talus and boulders mixed, deadly testimony to the spells that guarded Quo. Rudy wondered what would have happened to him at this point, had Ingold not walked at his side.
Ingold led the way now, picking out the tangled trails with preternatural skill. Rudy was surprised at his own exhaustion following yesterday's efforts. Try as he would, he could not see half the illusions that Ingold did. It certainly would never have occurred to him to cross the boiling rapids of a swollen river, as Ingold did, wading through a ford at the place that looked to be the deepest and most deadly. Nor would he have found the trail that led over a seemingly sheer cliff.
And then there was the bridge.
'What's wrong with the bridge?' Rudy wanted to know. The
great span of moss-grown stone arched proudly over the canyon, its curved blue shadow faintly visible on the thorn and boulders that choked the thread of stream far below.
'It isn't there,' Ingold replied simply.
Rudy looked again, then walked to the threshold and struck the stone with his staff. Wood clunked solidly on rock.
'Pieces of this road are unfamiliar to me,' the wizard went on, 'and the road has changed recently - become more dangerous, I believe. But I have crossed this gorge here dozens of times. There is no bridge.'
'Maybe it has been put up since you were here last?'
'At the beginning of this summer? I hardly think so, with all the moss that's grown on it. Look at how worn the stones are, there along the railing. The bridge looks as if it were there from the beginning of time. And since I know it wasn't...' He shrugged. 'It was never there at all.'
'I seem to remember,' Rudy said judiciously, 'something you once said to me about disbelieving your own senses because of something you believe to be true...'
Ingold laughed, remembering their first conversation in the old shack in the California hills. 'I am paid,' he said humbly. 'If, when we cross by hardier means, the bridge proves to be real and not illusion, you may revile me in any terms you please, and I shall bow meekly to the lash.' But when they scrambled, scratched and bleeding from forcing the recalcitrant Che up the impossible trail out of the gorge, Rudy looked back and saw that the stone bridge was only a single strand of willow withe, as frail as a spider web, on which the wizards had threaded their illusion. From there he could see the bone dump, too, at the bottom of the cliff below.
Kara had come this way, Rudy thought. And Bektis, too, and Ingold, in his youth. Had it been this bad then? It was one hell of a price to pay for safety.
'Hey, Ingold? If Quo stands on the Western Ocean, and the walls of air defend the landward side - has anybody ever tried to assault it by sea?'
'Oh, yes,' the wizard said. 'It's been tried.'
Rudy thought about it and of his horror of the ocean and of deep water and of the many things that could happen out on those dark depths. The thought wasn't pleasant.
This, then, was the other side of power - the power that isolated wizards, that made them vagabonds, exiles in their own world, the power that drew them together. He remembered the look in Aide's eyes the first time he had called fire from cold wood.
You sought wizardry, he told himself. And here it is. A bridge of illusion and the bones below.
They travelled for hours through narrow canyons or followed rock ledges on the high peaks, slippery with ice. Twice they tried to force short cuts over the bare, tawny flanks of the mountain, only to be driven back by the steepness of the ground. In the end, the trail petered out entirely, vanishing into the stony wastes. As they stood panting on the dark slope of a tumbled ruin of shale, Rudy looked up toward the pass, only to find that somehow he and Ingold had overshot it by miles, and it now lay to the south of them,