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
draught. '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 centred 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 it 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 story-telling, or drawing, but done differently. Rudy could already call fire and mould 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 humour. 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 night 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?'