Darwath 2 - The Walls Of The Air (39 page)

Rudy had carried on a lot of these one-sided conversations in the last three weeks. Occasionally, he'd pursued them until he got an answer of some sort, usually monosyllabic, but tonight he gave it up. When he closed his eyes, Ingold was still brooding over whatever it was that he saw in the flames.

Rudy wondered what it was he sought there, but had never asked.

His mind went back over the glimpses that his own fire-watching had yielded, glimpses of Minalde mostly, scattered but comforting: Alde combing her hair by the embers of her small hearth, wrapped in her white wool robe, and singing to Tir, who crawled busily around the shadowy room; Alde sitting with her feet up in the dim study behind the Guards' quarters, reading aloud while Gil took notes, surrounded by a clutter of books and tablets; seeing Gil look up and grin and make some joke, and Alde laugh; and once, frighteningly, Alde in a passionate argument with her brother, tears running down her white, furious face while he stood with his arms folded, shaking his head in cold denial. The images followed Rudy down into darkness, mingling with others: the empty Nest on the windblown desert to the north; the empty streets of Quo; the startled look in Brother Wend's big dark eyes when he had opened the door; and the way he'd whispered in terror, “It was you.”

“Yes,” Ingold's voice said, soft and infinitely tired. “It was me.”

Blinking in surprise, Rudy tasted the heaviness of lost sleep in his mouth and saw that the priest had returned. Ingold was barring the door behind him; in the shadows thrown by the waning fire, his robes seemed to be dyed in blood.

The priest spoke shakily. “What do you want of me?”

Defiance
and terror mingled in the young man's voice. Ingold regarded him quietly for a moment, his arms folded, his scarred hands looking very bony and worn in the red flickering of the light. But he only asked, “She's better, isn't she?”

“Who?”

“Those children's mother.”

The priest licked his lips nervously. “Yes, by the grace of God.”

Ingold sighed and returned to his seat by the hearth, drawing his patched, stained mantle, which he'd been using for an extra blanket, back up around his shoulders. “It wasn't the grace of God, though,” he said quietly. “At least not in the sense that it's usually meant. They didn't come to ask for the sacraments, even though you know as well as I do that the yellow sickness, once it takes hold, is almost invariably fatal. They asked you to heal her, as you healed their little sister some months ago.” He reached across, picked up the poker, and stirred the fire, its sudden, leaping light doing curious things to the lines and scars of his hollowed face. He glanced back at Wend. “Didn't you?”

“It was in God's hands.”

“Perhaps that's what you choose to say, but you don't believe it.” The priest started as if he had been burned. “If you believed it, you wouldn't fear me,” Ingold went on reasonably.

“What do you want?” Wend demanded again in anguish.

Ingold set down the poker. “I think you know.”

“Who are your?”

“I am a wizard.” Ingold settled back against the wall, the shadows cloaking him.

The priest spoke again, his voice tense and crackling with passion. 'That's a lie,“ he whispered. 'They're all dead. He said so.”

Ingold shrugged. “He is a wizard also. His name is Rudy Soils. Mine is Ingold Inglorion.”

Rudy heard the harsh gasp of the priest's breath and saw him turn away, his face buried in his hands. His body shook as if with a deadly chill. “He said they were dead,” Wend repeated in a thin, cracked voice, muffled by his hands. “And, God forgive me, I rejoiced to hear it. It was a terrible thing, but I was glad to hear that the Lord had finally removed the temptation from me, after all these years. You have no right to bring it back.”

“No,” Ingold agreed quietly. “But you know as well as I do that God cannot remove temptation. It comes from inside you, and not from any outer cause. And you would be tempted as long as you lived—every time someone called upon you to use your powers for healing, and in times to come, when one of your people begs you to put the runes on his door to keep the Dark at bay. How could you refuse?”

The young man raised his face from his hands. “I never would,” he gasped.

“No!”

“I have no power,” the priest whispered hopelessly. “I gave it up—sacrificed it. I have no power.” He faced Ingold desperately in the wavering shadows, his full lips pressed tight together and trembling. “That power comes from the Devil, the Lord of Mirrors. Yes, God help me, I am tempted and will forever be tempted. But I will not trade my soul for power, not even the power to help others. That power comes from the Crooked Side, and I will have no dealings with it. And then—I dreamed—I saw that city that I have known in my heart all my life, how it would look… And you were there…”

“Do you know why you had the dream?” Ingold's voice was soft, coming from a form that was little more than a disembodied shadow among shadows, with a sunken glint of azure eyes.

“It was a summons,” Wend whispered. “A need. A call. To go somewhere…”

“To go to Renweth Keep at Sarda
Pass,” Ingold said, and that deep, grainy voice, though quiet, seemed to fill the tiny room. “To help me and Rudy—and whomever else we can find—to drive out the Dark.”

“And what else?” The young man's face shone with sweat, his eyebrows black against the whiteness of his high, shaven crown. 'To go openly to the Devil? To announce to my Bishop—if he survived—and to anyone else who cares to know that I am apostate? To put myself under judgment as a heretic?"

Rudy, remembering another pair of steely, dark eyes burning out of a shaven skull, reflected that the kid had a point.

“And wrongly,” Wend went on in a whisper. “Wrongly. This world, when all is said, is an illusion. It will go on without me. My soul is all I have, and if I lose it—it will be forever.”

A long silence followed, with priest and wizard facing each other across the dying ripple of the hearthlight. They were curiously alike, Rudy thought, in their colorless robes. He remembered his own days as a drifter on the California highways, drawn by yearnings that could find no expression, an outcast because nothing made sense in terms of what he knew to be true. He tried to picture a life of fighting those yearnings, tried to imagine deliberately putting the powers of wizardry aside.

A mage will have magic…

He could not conceive of putting it aside.

Ingold rose. “I am sorry,” he said quietly. “You have temptations enough; to add to them would be poor payment for your hospitality. We will go.”

“No.” Brother Wend caught his sleeve as he moved to wake Rudy, though a moment before the priest would have cut off his hand rather than touch the old man. “Wizard or devil, I cannot turn you out into the night. I—I'm sorry. It's only that I've fought it so long.”

Ingold moved his hand as if to lay it upon Wend's shoulder, but the young priest turned away, retreating into the shadows at the far end of the room where his own narrow pallet was. Rudy heard the creak of ropes as he lay down, followed by the slurred whisper of blankets. After a moment Ingold returned to his seat by the hearth, drawing his knees up before him and evidently preparing to stare broodingly into the fire until dawn.

Silence settled over the narrow cell as the fire burned low, but Rudy could hear no alteration in the young priest's shaken breathing and knew that he did not sleep.

“And he was right,” Rudy concluded, speaking of it many days later. “That's the damn thing. You remember how Govannin's always saying, The Devil guards his own.' Well, he doesn't, not anymore.” Snow lay deep around them, covering the foothills through which they had trudged for two laborious days, blanketing the steep, rocky rise of the ground. Above them the black cliffs were crisscrossed with heavy, white ledges of snow, and the dark furring of trees was weighted with it. A smother of clouds hid the higher peaks and filled the rocky notch of Sarda
Pass with nebulous gray.

Rudy's breath burned in his lungs. His long, wet hair hung damply around his face and over the collar of his buffalohide coat. The steel points of his pronged staff winked faintly in the wan afternoon light. Under the burden of books they'd brought all that long way from Quo, his shoulder ached, but his mind circled gull-like around a confusion of thoughts.

We're home.

Home to Minalde.

And to what else?

By now, he was long used to carrying on both sides of the conversation. “You said to me once to remember that we were outcasts. But that was back when we thought we'd have the Archmage to help us. And now we've got nothing, literally nothing. Anybody who declares himself a wizard is asking for it.” He shrugged, “I don't blame Wend for sitting tight.”

“Nor do I.”

He glanced around, startled at the response. Ingold had been silent for days.

To his surprise, the old man continued. “In fact, I should be amazed if anyone shows up at all. Kara and her mother might,” he added reflectively, “if nothing else happened to them. But—the opposition to wizardry will have redoubled. And those alive to hear my summoning would be those who could not overcome their fear of opposition in the first place.”

Ingold came up beside him, leaning on his staff, bowed under the weight of his burden of books, like a very old and very wretched beggarman, with his long white hair, grubby beard, and stained and tattered cloak. In the shadows between the rim of his hood and his ragged muffler, his eyes still looked sunken and tired. But at least he was talking.

Ingold went on. “Maybe now you understand my impulse to become a hermit.”

“Well, let me tell you, the way you've been acting, I was damn tempted to let you do it.”

The wizard ducked his head. “I am sorry,” he apologized quietly. “It was good of you to put up with the grieving of an old man.”

Rudy shrugged. “Well,” he said judiciously, “since I've been perfect myself all my life, I guess I can find it in my heart to forgive you.”

“Thank you,” the wizard replied gravely. “You are very kind. But having heard you play the harp, I feel your assertion of perfection is rather rash.”

Their eyes met, and Rudy grinned. “I had to get back at you somehow, didn't I?”

Ingold shuddered. “In that case I doubly apologize,” he said. “If that was meant as retribution, my conduct must have been execrable indeed.”

“Hey!” Rudy protested.

“It's the first time in my life that I've been thankful that I'm almost completely tone-deaf,” the wizard mused— not quite truthfully, Rudy knew. “So I suppose there is good to be derived from every state.”

“Well, then you and I better think real hard about what kind of good is to be derived from being in the doghouse,” Rudy said grimly. “Because that's sure as hell where we're gonna be when Alwir finds out what happened at Quo.” Then, in a different voice, he asked, “What did happen at Quo, Ingold?” Wind keened through the trees above the Pass, but only a breath of it touched the travelers laboring through the drifted snow. The clouds moved down the mountains, as gray and chill as the fogs that had surrounded Quo. “Was Lohiro acting for the Dark—or was that the Dark themselves?”

There was a long pause while Ingold scanned the tracks of rabbit and bird in the snow of the drifts, as if judging matters pertaining to wind and weather. When he finally spoke, his scratchy voice was tired. “I think it was the Dark themselves.” He sighed. “To this day, I don't know if they did release him, there at the end. If they did, I could have brought him back with us. At least we could then have had the benefit of his wisdom and the knowledge of whatever it was that the wizards unearthed before they were destroyed. But I couldn't risk it, Rudy,” he said in a soft, urgent tone. “I couldn't risk it.”

“Hell, no,” Rudy agreed. “With all his knowledge and the Dark behind him—no wonder every building in the town was smashed, the wizards destroyed, and Forn's Tower blown to flinders. If your power could hold them at bay before the gates of the Keep, his power could only double theirs.”

“As their powers could baffle, or channel, the powers of wizardry near their Nests. I should have guessed that when Hoof print of the Wind spoke of the Nest as a place of seeing. That was how Quo was spoken of, back in the old days—and of Gae, incidentally. It needed all the forces of the Dark to break Gae,” he added. “It wasn't ill-planned, Rudy, the final blow at Gae, Quo, Penambra—Dele, too, from what Kara said—all within a few days. The back of organized resistance was broken, and the hope of magical aid destroyed.”

Ingold sighed, his breath a thin rag of cloud in the fog. “I had to kill him, Rudy. I couldn't let them have his powers. Perhaps he was still some sort of prisoner in his own body. Certainly—whatever it was—it had his speech, his mannerisms, his skills. But it didn't have his knowledge. Lohiro would have known that Anamara the Red and I were old classmates from years ago.” He held up his hands, the first faint smile Rudy had seen glimmering wryly through his overgrown beard. “She knitted me these mittens the year we were lovers, back at Quo. For the fourth most powerful mage in the West of the World, she was very domestic. Lohiro would never have spoken to me casually of her death.”

“Was that what tipped you off?” Rudy asked quietly. “Partly. And—I didn't like his eyes. But from what he had been through, I didn't know.”

“So you trapped him.”

Ingold nodded miserably and trudged on through the snow. Che hung balkily back at the full stretch of his lead—neither of them had ever managed to train the stupid creature to follow, a failure that in his darker moments Rudy was inclined to attribute to the malice of the Bishop of Gae. “I trapped him,” Ingold said, “and I killed him. Maybe they did let him go. He spoke of the Dark as he was dying—that they are not many, but one. Maybe he had been one of them and, if I had healed him, we could have learned from him what they know, why they rose—and why they departed.”

“Yeah,” Rudy assented bluntly, “and maybe if you healed him, the wizards of Quo wouldn't have been the only ones to seal the Dark into the citadel with them.” Ingold sighed. “Maybe.”

“What else could you have done?” Ingold shook his head. “Been more clever to begin with. Realized the connection between the so-called fortunate places and the Dark. Pursued my own researches at Quo, instead of playing politics halfway across the continent. But the answer is gone, it there ever was an answer. The Dark made sure of that. And perhaps there never was an answer to begin with.”