Darwath 2 - The Walls Of The Air (12 page)

Ingold smiled, and the swift, sudden warmth of his expression captivated her completely. She continued to study him as if trying to place him. Her eyes changed from puzzlement to surprise and then to awe. She whispered, “You're Ingold Inglorion.”

He sighed. “That is my unfortunate fate.”

She was instantly covered in gawky confusion, like Gil when told that she'd done something right. “I'm sorry, sir,” she stammered. “I didn't realize…”

“Please,” Ingold begged her. “You're making me feel horribly old.” He reached out and took her hands. “One thing more, Kara. There's a band of White Raiders somewhere in the area—I think a hunting band some thirty strong. We came upon a magic-post two days ago. I'd suggest you double your guard and widen your point-men. The Raiders are afraid. They may want one of your people for another sacrifice and they're certainly going to want your sheep.”

One of the men in the group behind Kara asked worriedly, “Afraid? What do they fear? The Dark?” At the name of the Raiders, a whisper had passed through the train, like the smell of a wolf through a herd of cattle.

Well, Rudy thought, they're desert dwellers. Maybe some of them have seen the leftovers from the Raiders' propitiations of the local spooks.

“Possibly,” Ingold said. “But the magic-post we found wasn't raised against the Dark. I have no idea what it is that they fear, but I do know that they fear it.”

Kara frowned thoughtfully. “It's the wrong time of the year for fires,” she said. “And it wouldn't be ice storms this far south. Unless they're a deep-north band with no idea how far south they've come…”

“I should hesitate to believe that a band of Raiders, under any circumstances, has no idea where it is,” Ingold said. “But I've seen the propitiations for all of those. It isn't any of them. Have you heard any rumor, any story, any hint of tracks or signs of anything else abroad in the lands?”

A bearded farmer with a longbow grinned. “That would scare the Raiders? Maybe a million stampeding mammoth followed up by a flock of horrible birds, or a sun-cat with a thorn in its paw…”

Ingold shook his head and returned the grin. “No— they don't make magic-posts against anything they can kill.”

“Disease?” the woman suggested doubtfully. He hesitated. “Maybe. But the Raiders have a rather simple way of dealing with disease.”

“Well,” she admitted. “But in a big epidemic you can't leave everybody behind.”

“I seen 'em dump as many as twenty out of a band, ma'am, and that's a fact,” the farmer said, scratching his head. “And there has been a lot of sickness and famine this winter, what with this consarn weather.”

“Maybe,” Ingold said again. “But on the whole, the Raiders regard disease as an internal weakness of the will, rather than as an incursion from the outside. The Raiders don't see things the way we do. Sometimes they fear some very odd things. But in any case, there is something out there; and against it—and against all other ills of the road —may you be safe, Kara of Ippit, and those who walk in your shadow.” Reaching out, he made a swift sign above her head. “A good outcome to your journeyings.”

She smiled shyly and repeated his sign. “And to yours— sir.”

With this they parted, Rudy and Ingold continuing on their road, Kara and her village on theirs. The dust of the train swamped the two pilgrims, and they found themselves for a time surrounded in a white fog, moving among the crowding shapes of wagons, weaving among women, children, chickens, and goats. Craftsmen passed them with barrows full of tools, farmers bearing plows upon their backs, and makeshift warriors with swords and halberds. Dogs drove sheep along the fringes of the train, amid a faint, flat clatter of bells. More than one villager raised hands in greeting as the two wizards passed. An old granny knitting in the back of a wagon croaked cheerily, “You're headed the wrong way, boys!” Kara's voice was faintly heard to exclaim in shocked disapproval, “Mother!”

Rudy grinned. “So that's an untaught mage, than which there's nothing in the world more dangerous?”

“She knows her own limitations.” Ingold smiled at the memory of that shy, homely woman. “As a rule, half-taught mages are worse even than the untaught, but she has the goodness of heart that wizards often lack. Among wizards she is an exception, in her way.”

“Is she?”

Ingold shrugged. “Wizards are not nice people, Rudy. Kindliness of heart is seldom the leading characteristic of a mage. Most of us are proud as Satan, especially those with only a few months' training. That's the reason for the Council. Something must exist to counterbalance the effects of the knowledge that you can, in fact, alter the paths of the universe. Haven't you felt it—that euphoria that comes with knowing that you can braid fire in your hands and twist the winds of Heaven to your bidding?”

Rudy shot him an uneasy glance and met eyes that were far too knowing and a smile of wicked amusement at having read his mind. He grumbled unwillingly, “Yeah—well —I mean, so what?”

The last of the herds was passing them, the whitish dust skating on the wind. Under a featureless sky, the stony emptiness stretched away to nothing. “So what indeed?” Ingold smiled. “Except that the ecstasy of power has a terrible way of getting out of hand. The Council and the Archmage have their work cut out for them to hold in check, not the power itself, but the souls of those who wield it.”

Rudy thought for a moment about that, remembering the feeling that had sprung to his heart when he called fire, the quick, gleeful sparkle of triumph when his illusions worked. And he saw suddenly the trailhead of a path that could lead to evil past contemplating. But it was evil he understood. It was seeking knowledge for the sake of knowledge and power for power's sake, leaving Minalde to search for his own destiny, and staying in that hidden chamber to fathom a crystal's mysteries, while Ingold faced death and the Keep's destruction outside. He saw in himself the potential for unchecked power.

Even as his mind shied from that thought, he wondered, Does Ingold feel it, too? Does Lohiro? Like a young and golden dragon, with those empty, glittering eyes, the picture of the Archmage returned to him. Has he wrestled •with the ecstasy of unlimited horizons?

He must have, Rudy thought, If they made him Archmage. The most powerful wizard in the world, master of all the others. You really have to have your act together to stay straight under the weight of that one. Power—pure power. The rush from that must outdo any drug ever formulated.

“How long does it take?” he asked. “How long do you have to study at Quo?”

“Most people stay there three to five years,” the old man said, turning away from the vanishing dust-cloud on the backward road and setting his face to the featureless west once again. “But, as you see, not all mages take their training there. In times past, there were other centers of wizardry, the largest of which were centered around Penambra. And then, other mages learn by apprenticeship to itinerant conjurers, as Kara's mother probably did. The third echelon, the firebringers and finders and goodwords, operates purely instinctively, if it operates at all. But the center is at Quo. Its towers are our home.”

The afternoon was wearing toward its pallid close, the darkness pouring down upon the east. At the Keep of Dare they would be shutting the great doors soon, under Govannin's prayers and Bektis' mediocre spells.

“So where does Bektis fit into all this?” Rudy asked idly. “Did he go to Quo, too?”

“Oh, yes; in fact, Bektis was about ten years senior to me. He feels I've come down in the world.”

“So you learned to be a wizard at Quo, too.”

“Well—not exactly.” Ingold glanced across at Rudy, the evening shadows blurring his features within the shadows of his hood. “I studied at Quo for seven years,” he went on, “and I learned a great deal about magic, power, and the shaping of the fabric of the universe. But unfortunately, no one there managed to train me out of my vanity and stupidity and my fondness for playing God. As a result of this, my first act upon returning to my home was carelessly to set in motion a train of events which wiped out every member of my family, the girl whom I loved, and several hundred other perfectly innocent people, most of whom I had known all my life. At that point,” he continued mildly, into the silence of Rudy's shock and horror, “I retired to the desert and became a hermit. And it was in the desert, Rudy, that I learned to be a wizard. As I believe I said once before,” he concluded quietly, “true wizardry has very little to do with magic.”

And to that Rudy had no reply.

By command of her brother, Minalde did not return to the refugee camp by the Tall Gates. But a week after her first visit there, Gil took the downward road again, as cautious as a hunter of leopards, conscious of Maia's warnings about the kind of man who might succeed him in command of the Penambrans.

The watch on the road was still kept, but far less strictly. The numbers of the Penambrans had dwindled alarmingly; a Guard named Caldern, a big, deceptively slow-looking north-countryman, had visited the camp and said they were but a handful, huddled around their pitiful fires, cooking a fox they'd snared. He had seen nothing of Maia, and at this news Minalde had wept.

Why, then, Gil wondered, standing in the overcast gloom beneath the silent trees, did she feel this prickle of danger, this sense of being watched? About her the winter woods were hushed, a somber world of wet sepia bark and drab, snow-laden black pine needles, the bare, twisted limbs of shrubs sticking through the drifts like the frozen hands of corpses. It had not snowed in three days, and the ground was churned in muddy tracks where the Penambrans had been foraging and setting their snares. In the still air, she could smell the woodsmoke of the camp.

Why did the desolation have that sensation of hidden, watching life? What subliminal cues, she wondered, keyed her stretched nerves so badly? Or was it simply rumors of White Raiders and the old, half-buried wolf tracks she'd seen farther up the road?

The Icefalcon would know
, she thought. The Icefalcon would not only sense the danger—if there was danger— but be able to identify its source.

But the Icefalcon was slogging his way down the drowned river valleys and dealing with dangers of his own.

Through the silence of the brooding woods, sounds came to her from the direction of the road—the smuch of hooves through frosty slush, the creaking of wheels, men's and women's voices, and the faint ringing of sword belts and mail—sounds comforting in their familiarity, if for no other reason. Gil hurried toward the road, thankfulness in her heart. The forage-train had returned in safety from the valleys below.

From the high bank of the road at this point, she saw them, the straining horses slipping in the frozen mud. She recognized Janus afoot, leading the way; his horse had been pressed into service to draw a wagonload of moldy, filthy grain bags and the smoked carcasses of half a dozen swine. The road was bad here, and the Red Monks and Alwir's troops had fallen to, helping to lift and force the sinking wheels through the knee-deep slop. Every wagon was laden.

She saw Janus stop and raise a hand to signal a general halt. He was almost directly below her, and she noticed that, in the week of foraging in the valleys, he'd visibly lost flesh; his square face under a grimy, reddish stubble was drawn and marked with sleepless nights and bitter, exhausting labor by day. He stepped forward, probing the road with a stick he carried; it sank in the ice-skimmed slush. His whole body, like those of his troops, was plastered in half-dried, half-frozen mud, his dark surcoat scarcely distinguishable from the scarlet ones of the men he led, except for the places where the mud had been brushed off. With a gesture of disgust, he summoned the troop to him; Gil heard his voice, assigning men to collect pine boughs and branches to lay over the road, to make some kind of footing so they wouldn't be stuck there until this time next week.

The men and women scattered, scrambling up the frozen banks, vanishing into the darkness of the woods. They were fewer than when they had gone down to the river valleys, worn, exhausted, and muddied to the eyes. Janus walked back to stand among the handful who were left, glancing uneasily at the crowding, close-ranked trees. There was something in all this that he, too, misliked. Then he saw Gil, and some of the tension lightened from his eyes. “Gil-Shalos!” he called up to her. “How goes it at the Keep?”

“The same,” she called back down. “Little word of the Dark; a few broken heads. Did you pass the camp at the Tall Gates?”

He nodded, and his taut, over-keyed face seemed to harden with regret. “Aye,” he said, more quietly. “Curse Alwir, he could take in those who are left. There's few enough of 'em now; they wouldn't cause him trouble.”

Another voice, soft and gentle and a little regretful, replied, “Perhaps more than you think.”

Gil looked up. Maia of Thran stood on the high bank of the road opposite her, looking like the rag-wrapped corpse of a starving beggar whose hair and beard had grown after death. There was a stirring in the woods. Clothed in the skins of beasts, with their matted hair like beasts themselves, half a hundred of his men appeared from the monochrome darkness of the trees. Among them they pushed the bound, gagged, and unarmed dozen or so of the Red Monks who had gone to look for pine boughs.

Janus' call for help died on his lips.

“It is an easy matter,” the Bishop continued in his soft voice, “even for starving warriors to ambush a warrior or two alone. Easier indeed than it has been to keep that road shoveled and churned into mud impassable by laden wagons and to watch here for you. If you had been gone three more days, I doubt we would have been able to keep it up. But now, as you see, we have food…” He gestured toward the stocked wagons. “… and the wherewithal!, once we have recovered our strength, to go see for more.”

Gil heard a noise behind her. Penambrans were coming out of the woods on her side of the road as well—grimy, wolflike, so thin that the women could be distinguished from the men only by their absence of beards. Those who did not have steel weapons had clubs or makeshift armament. One woman carried an iron frying pan whose bloodstained undersurface proclaimed successful use. They were already scrambling down the banks to the road to carry away the contents of the wagons.