Rudy took a deep breath, something seldom advisable in the vicinity of large numbers of wild dooic. Okay, man, it's your game, he thought grimly and hefted his sword, prepared to sell his life dearly.
Several paces in front of him, Ingold didn't even turn his head. 'Gently, Rudy. Never fight if you can pass unseen.' As he came close, the dooic seemed to forget why they were standing in the roadway. Some began looking aimlessly at the sky, the ground, and each other; others wandered off the road, scratching for vermin or picking among the skimpy brush for lizards to eat. Ingold, Rudy, and Che wound their way among them, but the only assault was olfactory.
'Always take the easiest way out,' Ingold counselled pleasantly, scratching the burrow's ears as they left the subhumans behind them. 'It saves wear and tear on the nerves.'
Rudy glanced back at the scattering Neanderthals, who had returned to the usual primate occupations of hunting bugs and picking lice. 'Yuck!' he said succinctly.
Ingold raised his brows, amused. 'Oh, come, Rudy. Barring rather crude table manners, they aren't the worst company I can think of. I once travelled through the northern part of the desert with a band of dooic for nearly a month, and though they weren't particularly elegant company, they did take care that I came to no harm.'
'You travelled with those things?
'Oh, yes,' Ingold assured him. This was back when I was village spellweaver for a little town in Gettlesand. It was hundreds of miles from their usual runs, but they evidently knew I was a wizard, for when the single water source in the midst of their territory went bad, they came south and carried me off one night to go there and make it good again.'
'And did you?' Rudy asked, both fascinated and appalled.
'Of course. Water is life in the desert. I couldn't very well force them to come in closer to the settlements for it, else they would have been trapped or killed.'
Rudy could only shake his head.
They had left the high plains and had passed the borders of the desert itself. They
moved through a dry, cold world where marches were measured from water to water and the wind whipped dust-devils across a barren horizon. In the great sunken flats that were like the beds of abandoned lakes, the wind played skeleton-tunes in the rattling bones of thorn and jumping cactus. But the high lands between were bare rock, clay, and lava, scoured into fantastic shapes by the unbroken cruelty of the elements, or ground to rock and pebble and sand. In places, dunes covered the road entirely, the sand printed with the laddering tracks of enormous sidewinders, six to eight feet long. Once Rudy glimpsed what looked like huge, two-legged birds dashing weightlessly along the red skyline. It was an eerie land, where for days, unless one of them spoke, there would be no sounds but the persistent whine of the wind, the tap of the burro's hooves on the roadbed, and the hissing slur of moving sand. It was like the silence of the hills back in Rudy's California home, the silence he had sought there on his solitary expeditions with shotgun or bow. In that unending stillness, the whirring of an insect was like the roar of an airplane engine and the only noises heard were those of the listener's own making - the creak of belt-leather and the draw and release of breath.
In all this empty vastness the travellers met no one, and the solitude, far from bringing loneliness, created a kind of measureless peace in Rudy's soul. They seldom spoke these days, but neither seemed to feel the lack. Sentences uttered two and three days apart took on the flow of conversation. Ingold would point out the burrow of the tarantula-hawk or the tracks of the little yellow cat-deer; sometimes Rudy would ask about an unfamiliar cactus or type of rock. Twice they felt the presence of the Dark Ones, seeking them on nights when the wind died down. But for the most part, they were utterly alone.
'How long were you in the desert?' Rudy asked, after a long time of walking in silence.
'Forever,' Ingold replied and smiled at the startled look Rudy gave him. Since the start of their journey, the pale cloud-cover had not broken; in the shadowless light, the wrinkles in his windburned face seemed very dark. 'You see, the desert is my home. Quo is my heart-home, the place of my belonging. But I was raised in the desert. I have travelled it from one end to the other, from the borders of the Alketch jungles to the lava hills that rim the northern ice, and still I do not know it all.'
'Was this when you were village spellweaver?'
'Oh, no. That came much later, after King Umar, Eldor's father, had me exiled from Gae. No. For fifteen years I was a hermit down in the split-rock country, the land of empty hills and sky. I would be months alone there, with nothing but the wind and stars for company. I think I once went for four years without seeing another human being's face.'
Rudy stared at the wizard, horrified but uncomprehending. It was inconceivable to him. Like most of his generation, he had seldom spent more than twelve hours alone at any one time. He could literally not imagine being alone, absolutely alone, for four years. 'What were you doing?
His feelings must have crept into his voice, for Ingold smiled again. 'Looking for food. You do a lot of that in the desert. And watching the animals and the sky. And thinking. Mostly thinking.'
'About what?'
Ingold shrugged. 'Life. Myself. Human stupidity. Death. Fear. Power. This was -oh, years ago. There was another hermit there then, a man of great power and kindness, who helped me at a time when I needed help desperately.' He frowned, remembering. Rudy saw in his eyes the brief echo of the young man he had been, wandering the solitudes of the wastelands alone. Then Ingold shook his head, as if dismissing an impossible thought. 'He is very likely dead by this time, for he was quite old when he first found me, and I was only a little older then than you are now.'
'Can you contact him?' Rudy asked curiously. 'If he's a wizard, he might have some word about the wizards at Quo.'
'Oh, Kta wasn't a wizard. He was -I don't know what he was, really. Just a little old man. But no, it would be impossible for me or anyone to contact him. He would be found, if he wanted to be found, and if not...' Ingold spread his hands, showing them empty. 'I haven't seen him in a good fifteen years.'
They walked on in silence for a time, Rudy's thoughts chasing one another randomly, his eyes picking out tiny tracks in the sand, patterns of wind, and the shapes and natures of plants that flickered dry and yellow against the empty sky. He was trying to picture Ingold as a young man, trying to picture any situation in which the wizard would be in desperate need of help, trying to envision someone capable of giving the old man what he could not find for himself.
The road mounted a small rise, coming out of its sunken bed to crest a barren ridge above yet another flat of salt-bush and stone. The veer of the wind whipped Rudy's long hair into his eyes. For a moment he wasn't sure if he saw or only imagined the distant glitter of something far out in the flatlands. Even when he paused to shade his eyes, he wasn't sure what it was - only that vultures circled over it, high in the wan air.
'What is it?' he asked softly as Ingold came back to stand beside him.
The old man didn't reply for a time. He stood, his eyes narrowed against the distance, showing no visible reaction. But Rudy could sense a tautness that grew in him, as if in readiness for a surprise attack.
'White Raiders,' Ingold said at last.
Rudy turned his eyes from the gruesome remains of the Raiders' sacrifice. It was nearly a week old. What the vultures and jackals hadn't got, ants had. But it was still fresh enough to be revolting. He concentrated instead on the cross that had been erected beyond the head of the stretched victim; it was seven feet tall and wreathed in complicated streamers of feather, polished bone, and glass. The cross itself was wood, rare in this treeless land, with a skull nailed in the join of the beams. The tufts of feathers and knotted grass twirled skittishly in the wind, reminding him weirdly of the candy skulls with roses in their eyes of the Fiesta de los Muertos.