The Walls of the Air

by Barbara Hambly

  "Is that why the Church has it in for us?"

  Wind had begun to blow down rain upon them, mixed with hard, tiny spits of hail. Rudy pulled up his hood resignedly. He had long since gotten used to the idea that if it rained, he got wet. There was no shelter in the open plains.

  "The Church finds us unbiddable," Ingold said mildly. They talk of the power as a manifestation of the illusions of the Devil, but it all comes down to the fact that we have the power to change the universe materially and we owe neither them nor their God allegiance. As you've already guessed, we are excommunicates, ranking with heretics, parricides, and doctors who poison wells to drum up business for themselves. 1% the Church wanted to press the point, they could give Alwir considerable trouble for employing Bektis or even associating with me. The Church will make no marriage when one of the parties is mage-born; and when we die, we are buried like criminals in unhallowed ground, if we aren't simply burned like murrained beasts. Whatever happens, Rudy, remember that no law protects wizards."

  The darkness of the vaults beneath the palace at Karst came back to Rudy's mind—the narrow doorless cell and the Rune of the Chain, spelled to hold Ingold there until he starved. No wonder, he thought, those with only a single power choose to lie about it. The surprising thing is that anyone becomes a wizard at all.

  Rain drummed down around them, black and freezing, from a dark sky. It pooled in the ditches beside the road, sheeted the low ground, and ran in rivulets down Rudy's cloak, slowly soaking him through. He tried to remember the last time he'd seen a clear sky and wondered wretchedly if he ever would see one again.

  Ingold was still speaking, more to himself than to his companion. "This is why the bonds between us are so strong. We are the only ones who truly understand each other, as Lohiro and I know one another's mind. It's why he and I traveled together, bound as allies against all the world, why he was like a son to me, and why he picked me to be his father. We are all we have, Rudy—wizards, and those very few people who, not mageborn themselves, understand. Quo is more than the center of wizardry on earth; it is our heart-home. It is all we have."

  The cloudburst was slackening. Light and mists rolled in the lowering air, but no sign of sun or sky. It seemed as if all the world were blanketed in cloud and the sun would never break through again.

  Rudy asked, "Do wizards—uh—marry among themselves? Or could a wizard, like, marry an ordinary person?"

  Ingold shook his head. "Not legally. There is no legal marriage with excommunicates such as we, at least not anymore, though matters used to be different in times past." He glanced sharply sideways at him, and Rudy had the uncomfortable feeling, as he often did with Ingold, that his mind was being read. "There used to be a saying, 'A wizard's wife is a widow." We are wanderers, Rudy. We make that choice in accepting the power, in admitting to ourselves what we are. There are those who are not mageborn who understand us, but mostly they also understand that we cannot be like them. It's a rare person, woman or man, who can accept a long-term relationship on that basis. In a sense we are born damned, though not in the way the Church means it."

  "Do wizards love?"

  A look of pain crossed behind the blue eyes, like a quick shiver in the wake of a draft "God help us, yes."

  All of this strange miscellany of knowledge and information only served as a background to quiet Rudy's mind and help him to focus and understand. The step between understanding the world and understanding magic was a very small one.

  One night Ingold scratched the runes in the dust by their tiny campfire, and Rudy, who had guessed by this time that the wizard did not repeat himself, spent the evening studying their shape and sequence in the dim, ruddy light. After that he periodically drew them out for himself while he sat his guard watches, laboriously memorizing shapes, names, and attributes—the constellations of forces which centered on each separate symbol Ingold sometimes talked about them as the two men ate supper or settled down for the night, explaining how they might be used for meditation or divination, telling where they came from, who had first drawn them, and why. Slowly their pattern came to make sense to Rudy, until he saw how a single rune, properly made with the appropriate words and thoughts, could draw its attributes to itself and surround itself with them. This was how Yad would protect and turn aside the gaze of a seeker from that on which if was drawn, how Traw would make invisible things visible, and how Pern would focus the thoughts of those who looked upon it for rationality, justice, and law.

  Ingold never drew them all out for him again.

  He taught Rudy other things as the plains country gave way entirely to the fringes of the cold sagebrush deserts. He showed simple tricks of illusion that could be woven around a wizard to make other people see things they did not really see. A mage could spot the illusion, but most people, who operated on surface impressions, could easily be led to think that they saw a person of different appearance, or a tree, or an animal, or a flaming whirlwind—or simply nothing there at all. It was less like magic, Rudy thought, than it was like acting, or storytelling, or drawing, but done differently. Rudy could already call fire and mold the white witchlight into a ball to illuminate without heat, like St. Elmo's fire on the end of his staff. He had learned to use his ability better to see in darkness and, by experiment, to draw visible things in the air with his fingers. As they came into the true desert and water grew scarcer, Ingold showed him how to make a water compass by witching the twigs of a certain plant and how to tell by magic if a plant were poisonous.

  One night they spoke of power, of the central key of each person or being or living thing—and Ingold's definition of living things was very different from Rudy's. He spoke of the focus of all being, the innermost truth that Plato had called the essence; the understanding of that was the key to the Great Magic, and the ability to see it was the mark of a mage. Watching those bright crystal eyes across the fire, Rudy saw reflected in them the vision of his own soul, lying, like the silver runes on the Keep doors, beneath the surface of the familiar body. He saw with calm and pitiless detachment his own feelings about himself, the interlocking of vanity and love and yearning and laziness, a kind of bright, glittering perpetual-motion machine of affection, cowardice, and sloth that drove his restless soul. He saw it with Ingold's pure, unforbearing gaze, seeing faults and virtues alike, and was neither surprised nor ashamed. It only existed, being what it was. And in that timeless and bodiless trance, he became aware of that other essence beside him, like a lightning-riddled rock, lambent with power, fired within by a magic that permeated from its visible core. Ingold, he thought, startled and shocked, for the momentary vision of those scarred depths of love and grief and loneliness dwarfed his own bright, shallow emotions to insignificance. He felt an overwhelming awe of the wizard again, as he had before the ringing doors of the assaulted Keep and as he had one night in the valleys of the river, when Ingold had asked him why he wanted to be a mage. It was an awe that Rudy usually kept hidden, half-forgotten in the face of that shabby little old man with his scarred hands and mild, sarcastic humor. But the awe never fully left him; it increased as he came to understand this scruffy old pilgrim. He would now no longer question how Ingold knew whether Lohiro of Quo were alive or dead.

  "Magic isn't like I thought it would be," Rudy said much later that same night as he gathered his blankets about him, while Ingold settled down by the fire to take first shift at guard. "I mean, I used to think it was like— oh, people turning themselves into wolves, or slaying dragons, or blasting walls down, or flying through the air, or walking on water—stuff like that. But it's not."

  "But it is, really," Ingold said easily, prodding at the ashes of their tiny fire. "You yourself know that one does not turn oneself into a wolf—for to transpose your personality into the heart and brain of a wolf, aside from being very dangerous in terms of the structure of the universe, might prove too great a temptation to you."

  Distantly, the wolves answered his words, their faint howling riding down the ni
ght wind. In the darkness of their arroyo camp, Rudy caught the bright, hard glitter of Ingold's eyes and heard the dreamy edge to his voice.

  "Wolves love what they are, Rudy. To be strong—to kill—to live with the wind and the pack—it would call to the wolf in your own soul. There would always be the danger, you see, that you would not want to come back. And as for slaying dragons," he went on in a milder tone, "well, dragons are really rather timid creatures, tricky and dangerous, but only likely to attack humans if driven by hunger."

  "You mean—there are dragons? Real live dragons?"

  The wizard looked startled at the question. "Oh, yes, I have actually even slain a dragon. Rather, I acted as decoy and Lohiro did the sword work. As for the rest of it— blasting down walls and walking on water…" He smiled. "Need has simply not arisen."

  "You mean," Rudy said uneasily, "that—you could? If you had to?

  "Walk on water? I could probably find a boat."

  "But if there wasn't a boat?" Rudy pursued.

  Ingold shrugged. "I'm quite a good swimmer."

  Rudy was silent for a time, his head pillowed on his hands, staring up into the black and featureless sky, hearing the belling of the wolves on their hunting trail, sweet with distance and incredibly lonely, and remembering the men he had known who had chosen to live as human wolves on a hunting trail of steel and gasoline. To live •with the wind and the pack… That he understood. That mind he knew.

  Another thought came to him. "Ingold? When you said that the Dark Ones are—'alien intelligences'—you meant that humans can't understand their essence, didn't you? And because of that, we can't comprehend the source of their magic?"

  "Exactly."

  "But if—if you took on the being of the Dark, if you took the form of a Dark One, then wouldn't you understand them? Wouldn't you know then what they are and how they think?"

  Ingold was silent for such a long time that Rudy began to fear he had offended the old man. But the wizard only stared into the fire, drawing the stem of a dried stalk of grass through his restless fingers, the flame repeated a thousandfold in his eyes. When he spoke, his soft, scratchy voice was barely audible over the keening of the winds.

  "I could do that," he said. "In fact, I have thought of it many times." He glanced over at Rudy. Gleaming from the wizard's eyes, Rudy could see the overwhelming temptation to knowledge, the curiosity that amounted in the mageborn to an almost unslakable lust. "But I won't Ever. The risk would be too great." He dropped the grass stem he held into the fire and watched it idly as it curled and blackened in the veils of burning gold like a corpse upon a pyre. "For you see, Rudy—I might like being a Dark One."

  Chapter Four

  "I never thought it would come to this so soon." Gil lobbed a hunk of snow down at the trampled muck of the valley road below.

  Seya set down her bow and quiver, shook the powdered snow from her black cloak, and gave a perfunctory glance at the dark pine woods that rose behind the little watchpost. "Come to what?" she asked.

  Gil got to her feet, cramped from her long watch in the icy afternoon. "Come to guarding the road against our own people."

  Seya said nothing.

  "I've been watching the smoke of their campfires," Gil went on casually, gathering up her own weapons, bow and sword and spear. "I figure they camped at the ruined watchtowers where the road comes into the Vale, the ones Janus called the Tall Gates. There were several thousand when they came up the road yesterday. By the fires, I don't think there's near that many today. The Dark must have come in the night." She turned, prickled by the older Guard's silence. "You know, we didn't have to drive them on like beggars."

  Seya looked uncomfortable. She hadn't cared for it, either. The newcomers had been nearly frozen, in rags and starving, when they'd trudged up the valley road. It hadn't taken much of a show of force to send them on their way. But she only said, "When you put on the emblem of the Guards, Gil-Shalos, you gave up the right to have an opinion. We serve the King of Gae—in this case, Prince Altir. Or the Queen."

  Gil folded her arms, trying vainly to warm her hands under her dark, shabby cloak. In the distance she could still see the thin plumes of bluish woodsmoke rising in the clear, freezing air. It wasn't the Queen who gave the orders, she thought. It was Alwir. But it might as well have been her Majesty, for all the difference it made.

  She thought of the Queen, a shy, dark-haired girl standing in her brother's elegant shadow. She saw the two now as they had been yesterday, standing in the dark gateway of the Keep with their guards ranged around them, the bullion on their embroidered robes flashing palely in the wan sunlight. We have neither food nor space to take you in, Alwir had said to the tall, ragged monk who had led the refugees up the Pass and who had stood at their head with his stained red robes as brown as old blood against the snow. What food we have will barely take us 'til spring.

  There had been a stirring among Alwir's guards and a leathery rattle, like a dragon's scales, of fingered scabbards. The refugees had turned away, retracing their plowed tracks through the crusted snow.

  "Look." Seya's voice broke Gil from her reverie, and she turned her head quickly, following the older Guard's pointing finger. A single rider had appeared on the road, his tall, bony bay horse picking carefully through the slippery mess of ice-scummed potholes that was all that remained of the way. Even without the ivory braids that lay on the man's dark shoulders, Gil would have recognized the tall, thin body and the easy way he sat a horse. The colorless eyes sought the women; a gloved hand was lifted in hail and farewell.

  Gil raised her hand in answer, not certain whether to laugh or feel sadness. It was typical of the Icefalcon that he would set forth on a journey from which he might never return with no more than a wave at his closest friends. It would be a long journey and a slow one—he had only the single horse. Stock was precious in the Keep of Dare.

  As the dark woods of the Pass swallowed him again, she glanced worriedly at the blur of campfire smoke veiling the black trees and said, "You think he'll have trouble passing their camp?"

  Seya raised one eyebrow. "Him?"

  Given the Icefalcon's coldblooded ferocity, Gil had to admit it wasn't too likely.

  Seya went on. "It's more probable that Janus and the foragers will have trouble. When I left, Alwir and Govannin were still going at it hammer and tongs about how big a guard should go with the wagons and how many of them should be mounted. Alwir kept saying we can't afford to strip the Keep of any more manpower than we can help—and he has a point, considering the attack the Dark Ones made on us last week—and Govannin's on the verge of apoplexy because most of the wagons they're sending with the foragers are hers."

  "I agree with Govannin," Gil said. She set aside the weapons of guarding—the bow and spear—for Seya's use and shook the snow from the blanket. "The refugees didn't look as if they were in any shape to take on even a small band of armed men; but once Janus hits the river valleys, he may have to contend with the White Raiders. There's supposed to be a band of them there."

  Seya scrambled down the rocks and settled herself into the one niche under the overhanging boulders that provided both a view of the road and shelter from the biting winds. Four hours of guard duty had given Gil ample time to scout it out. 'It's anybody's guess what's in the river valleys now," she said quietly. 'They'll have enough problems with brigands and wolves and the Dark Ones."

  Gil resettled her sword belt around her waist. "Where are they heading, do you know?"

  Seya shook her head. "Anywhere there was stored food. Deserted towns, well-known farms—anywhere they can find stored corn or straying stock." She laughed suddenly, wrinkles stitching her lined face like the folds in wet silk. "That's the other thing they've been warring about all morning. Tomec Tirkenson and his people finally got on their way over Sarda Pass for Gettlesand."

  "I knew they were planning on leaving as soon as the snows let up." Gil shrugged into her damp cloak, drawing its dark, heavy, smoke-smelling folds abo
ut her. "Alwir should be pleased; it makes for fewer mouths to feed."

  "And fewer defenders." Seya pulled the spare blanket over her feet. "But what really stuck in Govannin's craw was that Tirkenson took all his own cattle with him. She forbade him to take them, since the people of the Keep had greater need; she threatened to excommunicate him if he did. He said she'd excommunicated him ten years ago, he was walking around damned anyway, the cattle were his, he'd bought them in Gae, and he'd break the neck of anyone who tried to stop him from taking them back to Gettlesand with him. He had all his cowpunchers lined up behind him, so there wasn't much her Grace could say, and Alwir wasn't about to start a fight with the only landchief still loyal to the Realm. When I left, the Bishop was burning candles in the pious hope that he fries in Hell."

  Gil laughed. She liked the landchief of Gettlesand. But if he had left, taking not only his cattle but his horses, it was no wonder Govannin was anxious about those that remained. Starved as the refugees encamped in the Pass were, they might try to kill the horses simply for meat.

  The wind veered around the shoulder of the mountain, blowing a light skiff of snow down upon them from the rocks above. The cloud-cover lay high that day, just skimming the tips of the white-blanketed peaks; when it shifted, Gil thought she could see the cold flash of the glaciers. Growing or retreating? she wondered idly. Growing, I bet, if they've had many winters as cold and overcast as this one. Just what we need to add to our problems. A goddam ice age!