'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 grey 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 womerrltold 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 travelling 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 belaboured 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 colour 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 colour.