The Walls of the Air

by Barbara Hambly

  Of course, Rudy thought, more surprised by the fact that the Raiders didn't resemble the Huns or the Sioux than he was to learn that the Icefalcon was a foreigner among the dark-haired, blue-eyed people of the Wath. And now that he came to think if it, the Icefalcon wasn't of Bishop Govannin's Faith; at least he'd only sniffed in disdain at Gil's question on the subject. Rudy remembered the farmhouse in the mists again and shuddered.

  "That's the chief reason Alwir sent him on the mission to Alketch," Ingold continued, setting aside his herbs and rising. "Of anyone, a Raider would have the best chances of surviving the journey." He picked up his staff, preparing to make his usual brief inspection of their campsite before settling down to guard duty.

  "Yeah, but if he's the enemy, how did he get to be a Guard?" Rudy protested uneasily, and Ingold paused in the act of turning away, a shapeless dark blur against the paler sand of the bank beyond.

  "What is an enemy?" His scratchy voice seemed to come disembodied from the surrounding darkness. "A great variety of strange people find their way into the Guards. I'm sure if the Icefalcon wanted you to know, he would tell you." And though Rudy could not see him move, the wizard seemed to fade from sight.

  Rudy shook his head in a kind of amazement. Ingold could be the least visible man he had ever met, seen when he wanted to be seen and otherwise all but invisible. It wasn't that he was shy, Rudy knew. The wizard observed the world like a hunter from an unseen blind; concealment appeared to be his second nature. Rudy wondered if all wizards were like that.

  He huddled, shivering, next to the tiny fire. The cold of the night was so intense that he could feel only a little of the fire's warmth, even at a distance of twelve inches. Already in the treeless plains, wood was scarce, and they were burning brushwood and buffalo chips. Unlike the more volatile wood fires, the chips gave off a steady, cherry-red glow, and the heart of the fire was like a rippling amber well of heat. In that well, images took shape under his idle attention—the jeweled darkness of Alde 's rooms at the Keep, with the single sphere of gold floating around the flame of the candle as pure and beautiful as a fruit of light or a single note of music, and Minalde's face, bent over a book, the sudden gleam of a tear on her cheek.

  Although he was fairly certain the tear was not for him, but for the fate of the heroine of her book, Rudy still ached to go to her, to be with her and comfort her. At first he had shied from seeking her image in the fire this way, not wanting to spy on her. But his longing to see her, to know that she was all right, had proved too much for him. He wondered if Ingold knew.

  For that matter, had Ingold ever sought the image of a woman he loved in the fire?

  Sudden wind lashed at the fire, tearing the image from its heart. Like ripped silk in a cyclone, the fire twisted first one way, then another… And Rudy realized that the wind was not from the north.

  It came from no direction—thin, cold, twisting. He looked up, light-blinded, at the sky; but by the time his eyes adjusted, he could see only the chaos of darkness. He started to rise, and a voice said quietly behind him, "Stay where you are."

  Somewhere in the night, he saw the flutter of trailing muffler ends and the glint of eyes. Wind stirred at the fire once more, and the renewed light flashed in the burro's glassy green stare and picked out the shape of Ingold's cloak. Turning his eyes skyward again, Rudy saw them, black against the black of the churning sky, a sinuous ripple of movement and the glint of claws and wet, shining backs. The Dark Ones rode like a cloud, north against the wind.

  Rudy realized his hand had gone to his sword hilt and slowly released it as they passed on by. His heart was hammering irregularly, his flesh cold. "We were lucky," he whispered.

  "Really, Rudy." Ingold stepped from the darkness to join him. "Luck had nothing to do with it."

  "You mean you made us invisible?"

  "Oh, not invisible." The wizard settled down by the fire and set his staff within easy reach of his hand. "Merely persistently unnoticed."

  "Hunh?"

  Ingold shrugged. "Surely you've had the experience of not noticing someone? Perhaps you turned your head, or were momentarily distracted by something else, or dropped your keys, or sneezed. It is very easy to arrange for that to happen."

  "To all of them at once?" There was something a little awesome in such a collective lapse of vigilance,

  Ingold smiled. "Of course."

  Rudy shivered. "You know, those are the first Dark Ones we've seen on the plains?"

  "Understandably." The wizard fished in his many pockets and located the yellowed crystal in which he was wont to seek the images of things far away. "I have reason to believe those Dark Ones have followed us since we left the mountains, or at least have been patrolling the road across the plains."

  "You mean, looking for us?"

  "I don't know." The wizard glanced at him across the dim glow of the fire. "Because if that were so, it would mean that they know that we have lost contact with the wizards at Quo."

  "But how could they?"

  Ingold shrugged. "How do they know anything?" he asked. "How do they perceive? What is the nature of their knowledge? They are utterly alien intelligences, Rudy, strangers to the very pattern of human thought."

  Rudy was silent for a moment. Then he said, "But I'm thinking that the easiest way for them to know we've lost contact with Quo is if they know what happened to the wizards there." He looked hesitantly across the fire. "You understand?"

  "I understand," the old man agreed, "and I would say so, too, but for one thing. I do not know what has befallen Quo, nor how the Dark Ones have contrived to hold the wizards under siege there. But if Lohiro were dead, I would know it. I would feel it."

  "Then what do you think has happened?" Rudy insisted.

  But to that Ingold had no answer.

  Neither had those they asked, the few straggling bands of refugees that they met upon the road, fleeing east through the searing iron wind. For days at a time the pilgrims would travel absolutely alone through a universe of brown, rippling grass and shallow sheets of water— water pocked like hammered silver by rains, or more often frozen in bleak and shining expanses of gray ice. But twice in those first few weeks, Ingold and Rudy encountered the decimated remains of clans or villages, fleeing cold and fear and darkness. The stories those men and women told were always the same: of small things that crawled down cold chimneys, or slipped between the window bars; of huge things that ripped doors from their hinges, or blasted down stone walls with the wrath of all the devils of the night; and of chill, directionless wind and the scatter of stripped bones upon the ground.

  "And wizards?" Ingold asked of those circling the low glow of the dim campfire light.

  "Wizards." A fat, heavy-muscled woman with a face like a leathery potato spat scornfully into the fire. "Lot of good their wizardry did them or any of us. I talked to a student out of Quo. They're all gone, hidden, locked up in a ring of spells, and they've left us to fend for ourselves. We won't see them till the Dark have gone."

  "Indeed?" Ingold said, wrapping together and stowing away his packets of medicines. He had returned the band's hospitality within the makeshift circle of guards by healing the wounds either incurred in battle against the Dark or the White Raiders, or the effects of exhaustion and exposure. "When was this?"

  She shrugged. "Months gone," she said. "He spent a night with us. We buried his bones and my husband's in the morning. Never knew his name."

  "Fled, I say," the big patriarch of the clan rumbled. In the firelight, his greenish eyes, so common in Gettlesand, regarded them askance, but he did not ask how they came to be traveling alone and westward in these bitter times. "Fled south, to the jungles and the Emperor of Alketch."

  Ingold paused in surprise. "Where did you hear this?"

  The big man shook his head. "Stands to reason," he said. Far out over the plains rose the thin silvery chorus of wolves crying the moon. The camp guards shifted, calculating their distance; nearby an ox lowed in fear and jingled its
tether chain. "There are no Dark in the Alketch, they say. But I'd sooner die free than live there."

  "What do you mean, there are no Dark in the Alketch?" Rudy asked, startled.

  "So they say," the patriarch told him. "But to my mind, that's just the kind of thing the Emperor would put around to get slaves cheap."

  The second band they met, many days later, was smaller, two men and a couple of skinny towheaded kids, all that was left of a village of silver miners from the south. The children watched them from wary eyes through tangles of fair hair and stole a hatchet and packet of cornmeal when Rudy's back was turned, but to Ingold's question of wizards, the older of them only said, "Dead, I reckon."

  "Why do you say that?" Ingold asked gently.

  The boy looked at him with bleak scorn. "Ain't everyone?"

  "In a way it isn't surprising," Ingold said later as he and Rudy trudged on westward through that dry, silken sea of hissing grass. In the buffalo wallows and the ditches beside the road, last night's snow drifted in cold, gritty mounds or blew like sand over the pavement. "Lohiro called all of the ranked wizards to him, to gather at Quo. I don't wonder that nothing has been heard of them."

  Rudy was silent for a time, remembering the long road down from Karst and Ingold in darkness before the sounding doors of the belabored Keep. "You mean," he said quietly, "that no one else has any kind of magic help at all? "

  "Well—not necessarily." The old man scanned the skyline for a moment; then his eyes returned to Rudy's. "There are those who never went to Quo at all, village goodywives, or self-taught spellweavers, or the closet-mages who never developed their powers, as well as the small-time fortunetellers whose art and ambition were insufficient to take them through the mazes to Quo. And below them there is a third echelon of wizardry, people born with a single talent—firebringers, finders, goodwords; children who can light dry tinder just by looking at it, or who can find things that are lost; women who say, 'Bless you,' and it seems to stick; healers who pretend their power comes from their learning, rather than from the palms of their hands; people who generally suppress such powers in childhood and deny them in the confessional; and people whose powers are so slight as to deny them the dubious prestige of wizardry, who seek to avoid the social stigma of being mageborn. These are the only wielders of magic left to defend against the Dark."

  "And you," Rudy said.

  "And me," the old man agreed.

  As day followed day and the silver westward road dwindled out of existence under a black-clouded sky, Ingold spoke more of wizardry. He told Rudy of its long conflict with the Church, of its ancient strongholds, and of the great mages of past eras, Forn and Kedmesh and Pnak, who ran with the wild horse herds of the northern plains. Sometimes Ingold would point out animal signs, or identify the few creatures hardy enough to be abroad in the savage cold—huge, shaggy-coated bison, gelbu like short-necked, humpless camels, tabby-striped wild horses, or the many birds of the endless grasslands. He spoke of their ways and habits, not as a hunter would see them, but as the beasts saw themselves, with their narrow intelligence and their cautious world wisdom. In time Rudy found himself understanding even some of Che the burro's thought processes and motivations, such as they were, though it didn't make the balky and chicken-hearted animal any easier to live with. Now and then the old man would ask about something he had mentioned earlier. After the first few times Rudy was forced to admit he hadn't been paying attention, he listened more closely. And as he listened, it made more sense, as with any branch of knowledge as more is learned of it.

  Often in the course of that journey, Rudy wished he hadn't been so successful in avoiding the efforts of a well-meaning school system to educate him. Most of what he learned seemed to him to be not magic at all, only a prerequisite course in knowledge he should have had but didn't: how plants grow, and why; the shape of the land and the sky; the motions of the air, and why wind blows as it does; how to meditate, to still the restlessness of the mind and focus it on a star, or a flame, or a single wisp of grass twisting in the wind; how to listen; and how to see the subtle differences in the silence and emptiness of the plains, the variations in the shapes of pebbles, the subtle shifts of wind and color and the pitch of the ground. Besides being a wizard, Rudy figured, Ingold must be at least an Eagle Scout, for he understood survival, how to set up a camp unseen, how to find water in the dry places, and how to scrounge food from this most barren and unyielding of countrysides.

  As they walked, Ingold would occasionally stop to pick a plant from the roadside or point one out where it grew in the arroyos that laced the land as they moved south. After he had pointed out such a plant and described its growth and uses if any, Rudy found he had damn well better be able to repeat back everything about that plant As a sometime artist, he had learned to observe; and after studying eight or ten different plants, he found he knew what to look for when he came across new ones. After a time it got to be a game, and he would seek them out for himself, asking Ingold about the unfamiliar ones and coming to the sudden enlightenment that any biology major could have introduced to him years ago—namely that there are similarities of structure and function in different groups of living things. The orderliness of it amazed and delighted him, as if he had walked for twenty-five years in a world of black and white and, turning a corner, had discovered color.

  "Wizardry is knowledge," Ingold said one afternoon as they sat on the white boulders that lined the bottom of an arroyo where they had taken shelter from the wind. The land was growing higher and less grassy, the waving fields of long brown grasses giving way to short bunchgrass and huge, scraggy-barked sagebrush. Dry washes cut the land, scattering it with stone and gravel. At the bottom of this one, a thin trickle of water ran, edged with ice even at high noon. It burned Rudy's fingers through his gloves as he filled the drinking bottles. Ingold sat on the rocks behind him, idly drawing the dry, yellowish blossoms of a dead stalk of kneestem through his fingers as he scanned, without seeming to, the banks of the gully against the pallid sky. "Even the most talented adept is useless without knowledge, without the awareness of every separate facet of the world within which he must work."

  "Yeah," Rudy said,, sitting back and stoppering the flask with stiff, clumsy fingers. "But a lot of what you've been teaching me sometimes seems kind of useless. Like that kneestem you've got—I mean, it doesn't have anything to do with magic. It's just a weed. You said yourself it's worthless."

  "It is worthless to us and to animals, having no value either as medicine or as food," Ingold agreed, turning the dry wisp in his mittened fingers. "But we ourselves are useless to other forms of life—except, I might point out, as sustenance to the Dark Ones. Kneestem, like you and me, exists for its own sake, and we must take that into account in all our dealings with the world that we hold in common with it."

  "I see your point," Rudy said, after a moment's consideration of how much of what he loved and valued was, objectively, pretty useless. "But I didn't know jack about anything when I started magic. I called fire because I had to."

  "No," the wizard contradicted. "You called fire because you knew it could be done."

  "But I didn't know that."

  "Then why did you try? I think you knew in your heart that you could do it. I think you might even have done it as a child."

  Rudy was silent for some time, sitting on the bleached bones of the rock. The wind moaned faintly along the banks above them, and Che flicked his long ears at the sound. There was no wind in the gullies. It was so still he could hear the water clucking softly at the ice. "I don't know," he said finally, his voice small and a little frightened. "I dreamed about it, I think. I used to dream about a lot of stuff like that when I was a real little kid, like three or four years old, I remember dreaming—I think it was a dream—I picked up a dry branch in our back yard and, holding it in my hand, I knew I could make it flower. And I did. These white flowers budded out all over it, just from my holding it, just from my knowing they would. Then I ran and t
old my mother about it, and she hit me upside the head and told me not to imagine stuff." The memory came back to him now, as clear as vision, but distant, as if it had happened to someone else. There was no sorrow in his voice, no anger, only wonderment at the memory itself.

  Ingold shook his head. "What a thing to tell a child."

  Rudy shrugged it away. "But I was always interested in how stuff was put together. Like cars—or anyway, I think that's why I was good with cars. How they work, and the sound and feel of whether they're right or wrong. The human body's the same way, I guess. And I think that's why I drew. Just to know what it was and how it all fits."

  The wizard sighed and laid the dead plant stem among the rocks. "Perhaps it's just as well," he said finally. "You could never have gotten the proper teaching, you know. And there are few more dangerous things in the world than an untaught mage." New winds threaded down the gully. Ingold stood up, shivering, and pulled his hood over his face once more, wrapping his long muffler over it so that all that showed of his face was the end of his nose and the deep-set glitter of bright azure eyes. Rudy got up also, hung the water bottles over the various projections of the pack-saddle, and led Che up the narrow trail that had taken them down into the draw. Ingold moved nimbly ahead of him.

  "Ingold?"

  They scrambled up the last few feet to level ground and made their way back toward the road. A covey of prairie hens went skittering away almost under their feet Che flung up his head in panic. The skies had darkened perceptibly, and in the distance Rudy could see the rain sheeting down.

  "Why is an untaught mage so dangerous?"

  The wizard glanced back at him. "A mage will have magic," he said quietly. "It's like love, Rudy. You need it and you will find it. You will be driven to find it. And if you can't find good love, you will have bad, or what passes in some circles for love. And it can hurt you and destroy everyone you touch. That is why there is a school at Quo," he went on, "and a Council.

  The wizardry at Quo is the mainstream, the centerpoint of teaching. Since Forn the Old retired there and began to gather all the lore of wizardry in his black tower by the sea, the Archmage and the Council of Quo have been the teachers of all those who were capable of understanding what was taught. Its principles are the principles handed down from the old wizardry, the legacy of the empires that existed before the first coming of the Dark, three thousand years ago. They are older than any kingdom of the earth, older than the Church."