He must have, Rudy thought, // they made him Archmage. The most powerful wizard in the world, master of all the others. You really have to have your act together to stay straight under the weight of that one. Power-pure power. The rush from that must outdo any drug ever formulated.
'How long does it take?' he asked. 'How long do you have to study at Quo?'
'Most people stay there three to five years,' the old man said, turning away from the vanishing dust-cloud on the backward road and setting his face to the featureless west once again. 'But, as you see, not all mages take their training there. In times past, there were other centres of wizardry, the largest of which were centred around Penambra. And then, other mages learn by apprenticeship to itinerant conjurers, as Kara's mother probably did. The third echelon, the firebringers and finders and goodwords, operates purely instinctively, if it operates at all. But the centre is at Quo. Its towers are our home.'
The afternoon was wearing toward its pallid close, the darkness louring down upon the east. At the Keep of Dare they would be shutting the great doors soon, under Govannin's prayers and Bektis' mediocre spells.
'So where does Bektis fit into all this?' Rudy asked idly. 'Did he go to Quo, too?'
'Oh, yes; in fact, Bektis was about ten years senior to me. He feels I've come down in the world.'
'So you learned to be a wizard at Quo, too.'
'Well - not exactly.' Ingold glanced across at Rudy, the evening shadows blurring
his features within the shadows of his hood. 'I studied at Quo for seven years,' he went on, 'and I learned a great deal about magic, power, and the shaping of the fabric of the universe. But unfortunately, no one there managed to train me out of my vanity and stupidity and my fondness for playing God. As a result of this, my first act upon returning to my home was carelessly to set in motion a train of events which wiped out every member of my family, the girl whom I loved, and several hundred other perfectly innocent people, most of whom I had known all my life. At that point,' he continued mildly, into the silence of Rudy's shock and horror, 'I retired to the desert and became a hermit. And it was in the desert, Rudy, that I learned to be a wizard. As I believe I said once before,' he concluded quietly, 'true wizardry has very little to do with magic.'
And to that Rudy had no reply.
Chapter 6
By command of her brother, Minalde did not return to the refugee camp by the Tall Gates. But a week after her first visit there, Gil took the downward road again, as cautious as a hunter of leopards, conscious of Maia's warnings about the kind of man who might succeed him in command of the Penambrans.
The watch on the road was still kept, but far less strictly. The numbers of the Penambrans had dwindled alarmingly; a Guard named Caldern, a big, deceptively slow-looking north-countryman, had visited the camp and said they were but a handful, huddled around their pitiful fires, cooking a fox they'd snared. He had seen nothing of Maia, and at this news Minalde had wept.
Why, then, Gil wondered, standing in the overcast gloom beneath the silent trees, did she feel this prickle of danger, this sense of being watched? About her the winter woods were hushed, a sombre world of wet sepia bark and drab, snow-laden black pine needles, the bare, twisted limbs of shrubs sticking through the drifts like the frozen hands of corpses. It had not snowed in three days, and the ground was churned in muddy tracks where the Penambrans had been foraging and setting their snares. In the still air, she could smell the woodsmoke of the camp.
Why did the desolation have that sensation of hidden, watching life? What subliminal cues, she wondered, keyed her stretched nerves so badly? Or was it simply rumours of White Raiders and the old, half-buried wolf tracks she'd seen farther up the road?
The Icefalcon would know, she thought. The Icefalcon would not only sense the danger if there was danger but be able to identify its source.
But the Icefalcon was slogging his way down the drowned river valleys and dealing with dangers of his own.
Through the silence of the brooding woods, sounds came to her from the direction of the road - the smuch of hooves through frosty slush, the creaking of wheels, men's and women's voices, and the faint ringing of sword belts and mail - sounds comforting in their familiarity, if for no other reason. Gil hurried toward the road, thankfulness in her heart. The forage-train had returned in safety from the valleys below.
From the high bank of the road at this point, she saw them, the straining horses slipping in the frozen mud. She recognized Janus afoot, leading the way; his horse had been pressed into service to draw a wagonload of mouldy, filthy grain bags and the smoked carcasses of half a dozen swine. The road was bad here, and the Red Monks and Alwir's troops had fallen to, helping to lift and force the sinking wheels through the knee-deep slop. Every wagon was laden.
She saw Janus stop and raise a hand to signal a general halt. He was almost directly below her, and she noticed that, in the week of foraging in the valleys, he'd visibly lost flesh; his square face under a grimy, reddish stubble was drawn and marked with sleepless nights and bitter, exhausting labour by day. He stepped forward, probing the road with a stick he carried; it sank in the ice-skimmed slush. His whole body, like those of his troops, was plastered in half-dried, half-frozen mud, his dark surcoat scarcely distinguishable from the scarlet ones of the men he led, except for the places where the mud had been brushed off. With a gesture of disgust, he summoned the troop to him; Gil heard his voice, assigning men to collect pine boughs and branches to lay over the road, to make some kind of footing so they wouldn't be stuck there until this time next week.'
The men and women scattered, scrambling up the frozen banks, vanishing into the darkness of the woods. They were fewer than when they had gone down to the river valleys, worn,
exhausted, and muddied to the eyes.
Janus walked back to stand among the handful who were left, glancing uneasily at the crowding, close-ranked trees. There was something in all this that he, too, misliked. Then he saw Gil, and some of the tension lightened from his eyes. 'Gil-Shalos!' he called up to her. 'How goes it at the Keep?
The same,' she called back down. 'Little word of the Dark; a few broken heads. Did you pass the camp at the Tall Gates?'
He nodded, and his taut, over-keyed face seemed to harden with regret. 'Aye,' he said, more quietly. 'Curse Alwir, he could take in those who are left. There's few enough of 'em now; they wouldn't cause him trouble.'
Another voice, soft and gentle and a little regretful, replied, 'Perhaps more than you think.'
Gil looked up. Maia of Thran stood on the high bank of the road opposite her, looking like the rag-wrapped corpse of a starving beggar whose hair and beard had grown after death. There was a stirring in the woods. Clothed in the skins of beasts, with their matted hair like beasts themselves, half a hundred of his men appeared from the monochrome darkness of the trees. Among them they pushed the bound, gagged, and unarmed dozen or so of the Red Monks who had gone to look for pine boughs. Janus' call for help died on his lips. 'It is an easy matter,' the Bishop continued in his soft voice, 'even for starving warriors to ambush a warrior or two alone. Easier indeed than it has been to keep that road shovelled and churned into mud impassable by laden wagons and to watch here for you. If you had been gone three more days, I doubt we would have been able to keep it up. But now, as you see, we have food...' He gestured toward the stocked wagons.'... and the wherewithal, once we have recovered our strength, to go see for more.'