It was almost fully dark by the time the camp broke. Snow was coming down harder now, the wind whirling little flurries of grainy flakes into the ashes of the stamped-out fires and coating the churned mud in a thin layer of white. Word had been carried across the river over the makeshift bridge, and families were crossing slowly, men and women balancing precariously on the shaky spiderweb of rope and cottonwood poles, with their bundles on their shoulders. Oddly enough, when Rudy walked down to the jerry-built bridgehead with Ingold and Gil to see about the single wagon Alwir had negotiated from one of his merchant friends, he found that a spirit of optimism seemed to have seized the train, grossly at odds with the circumstances. The grumbling wasn’t any less prevalent, and the curses were just as loud and vivid. Men and women packed up their few belongings, rubbing chapped hands in the flaying cold, snapping, bickering, and fighting among themselves—but something had changed. The bitter desperation of the early part of the march was gone. An aliveness crackled through the blinding air that had not been felt before—a hope. This was the last march, if they could make it. They were within striking distance of the Keep.
“That should do,” Ingold remarked, watching Guards and Alwir’s private troops dragging the half-disassembled wagon box up the crooked trail. “Granted, it should make Minalde and Tir a target, but in this case that’s better than risking losing them in the snow. As for you two … ” He turned to them and laid a hand on each of their shoulders. “Whatever you do, stay close to that wagon; it’s your best hope of reaching the Keep alive. I’m going to be up and down the train; I may not see you. I realize none of this is any of your business—that you were hauled into it against your will, and neither of you owes me anything. But please, see that Alde and the child reach the Keep in safety.”
“Won’t you be there?” Gil asked uneasily.
“I don’t know where I’ll be,” the wizard said. Snow lodged in his beard and on his cloak. In the failing light Gil thought he looked worn out. Not surprising, she thought. She herself was operating on nervous energy alone. “Take care of yourselves, my children. I’ll get you safely out of this yet.”
He turned and was gone, the stray ends of his muffler whipping like banners in the wind.
“He looks bad,” Rudy said quietly, leaning on his staff as the snowy twilight swallowed the old man. “You guys must have had one hell of a trip.”
Gil chuckled dryly. “Never doubt he’s a wizard, Rudy. He has to be, to get people to follow him on crazy stunts like that.”
Rudy gave her a sidelong, thoughtful glance. “Well, you know, even back in California I thought the setup was crazy, but I just about believed him. You do. You have to.”
And Gil understood. Ingold had a way of making anything seem possible, even feasible—that an aimless motorcycle drifter could call forth fire from darkness, or that a mild-mannered and acrophobic Ph.D. candidate would follow him over the perilous roof of creation to do battle with bodiless, unspeakable foes.
Or that a ragged train of fugitives, split by dissensions, frozen half to death and at the end of their strength, could make a fifteen-mile forced march through storm and darkness to find at last a refuge they had never seen.
She sighed and hitched her too-large cloak over her narrow shoulders. The wind still bit through, as it had torn at her all day. She felt tired to the bones. The night, she knew, would be terrible beyond thinking. She started to move off, seeking the Guards, then paused in her steps. “Hey, Rudy?”
“Yeah?”
“Take care of Minalde. She’s a good lady.”
Rudy stared at her in surprise, for he had not thought she had known, much less that she would understand. Rudy still had much to learn about coldhearted women with pale schoolmarm eyes. “Thanks,” he said, unaccountably touched by her concern. “You ain’t so bad yourself. For a spook,” he added with a grin, which she returned wickedly.
“Well, it beats me why she’d hang out with a punk airbrush-jockey, but that’s her business. I’ll see you at the Keep.”
Rudy found Alde where the few remaining servants of the House of Bes were packing the single wagon. She herself was loading bedrolls into it; Medda, if she had still been alive, would have expired from indignation at the sight. He kissed her gently in greeting. “Hey, you were dynamite.”
“Dynamite?”
“You were great,” he amended. “Really. I didn’t think Alwir would go along with it.”
She turned back, Hushing suddenly in the diffuse glow of the torchlight. “I didn’t care whether he went along, as you say, or not. But I ought not to have called them fools. Not Alwir, and certainly not my lady Bishop. It was—rude.”
“So do penance for it at confession.” He drew her to him again. “You got your point across.”
She stared in silence for a moment into his eyes. “He’s right, isn’t he?” she whispered intently. “The Dark are in the mountains.”
“That’s what Gil tells me,” he replied softly. “He’s right. They’re nearer than we think.”
She stood for a moment, her hands clasped behind his neck, staring up into his face with wide, desperate eyes, as if unwilling to end this moment because of all that must come after. But a noise from the cart made her break away and scramble over the tailboard to replace her wandering son in his little nest among the blankets. He heard her whisper, “You lie down.” A moment later she reappeared around the curtains.
“You’re gonna need a leash for that kid once he starts crawling,” Rudy commented.
Alde shuddered. “Don’t remind me.” And she disappeared inside.
The convoy began to move. The wind increased in violence, howling down the canyons to fall on the pilgrims with iron claws. Rudy stumbled along beside the wagon, blinded by the snow, his fingers growing numb through his gloves. The road here was disused, but better than the road from Karst had been, with pavement down the center where it had not been broken up by tree-roots or buried by neglect. Still, the drifting snow made treacherous footing, and Rudy knew that those at the tail of the convoy would be sliding their way through a river of slush. Wind and darkness cut visibility to almost nothing. The shapes of the Guards surrounding the wagon grew dim and chaotic, like half-guessed shadows in a frightful dream.
Remembering Ingold’s teachings, Rudy tried to call light to him. He managed to throw a big, sloppy ball of it about three feet in front of him to light his steps. But the effort took most of his concentration and, as he slipped in the snow or staggered under the brutal flail of the wind, the light dimmed and scattered. The snow thickened in the air, like swirling gray meal all around him, except where it passed, unmelting, through the witchlight, which transformed it into a tiny roaring storm of diamonds that made his eyes ache. His cloak and boots dragged wetly on his limbs, and his hands passed quickly from insensibility to pain. Once, when the wind slacked like the slacking of a rope, he heard Minalde’s voice from the wagon, singing softly to her child:
“Hush, little baby, don’t say a word,
Papa’s gonna buy you a mockingbird … “
He wondered numbly how that song had ever leaked its way into the tongue of the Wathe.
He lost all track of time. How long he’d been struggling through the blinding wilderness he had no way of knowing, could not even guess. He felt as if it had been hours since they’d broken camp, the ground always rising under his slipping feet, the wind worrying at him like a beast at its prey. He hung onto the wagon grimly with one hand and onto his staff with the other; at tunes it seemed as if those were the only things keeping him on his feet He knew by then that if he went down, he would die.