Turning around in despair, he struggled back toward where he thought the camp ought to be. But nothing in all that wind-ripped landscape was familiar. Wizard or no wizard, he could not see in the dark when the wind blinded his eyes. Against his numbed cheeks, he could already feel the stinging bite of powder snow.
If you lie down, you'll die, he told himself grimly. Keep moving till daybreak, for Chrissake, or it's one more contribution to the Starving Jackals' Benevolent Fund. But the
lure of sleep enticed him, the thought of that warmth beyond the dark wall. He thought of Minalde, of the sweetness of her arms, of the warm, golden afternoons of California, and of talking endless rounds of nothing with his buddies, throwing beer bottles at the trash can... Keep going, turkey, he commanded, forcing his mind from those soft temptations. Think about fingernails on the blackboard. Think about jumping in water. Think about anything but sleep.
He made himself move on.
There was no question of going anywhere or finding anything now only of putting one foot in front of the other, of keeping his blood circulating until morning. In the morning there would be time enough... For what? To find Ingold, when in all probability the old man was walking straight away from him and would continue to do so for however many hours it would be until dawn? To sleep, out in the middle of nowhere, exposed to the dangers of the desert without the old man's cloak of magic and expertise to cover him? He wondered if this was the ice storm Ingold had spoken of, the searing hurricane of cold that could freeze-dry a grazing mammoth complete with the buttercups in its mouth...
He fought back the urge to sleep. Gil's image returned to him, shouting through that other snowstorm that had covered their last flight to the Keep of Dare three weeks ago? A month ago? He pictured Gil dragging him up out of the snow and forcing him to move on when he would have lain down and died. / don't care if you are a goddam wizard, she had said, you're a coward and a quitter. And he was. He had always been. Only now he couldn't afford to be. Neither he nor anyone else could allow him that luxury. If the Dark Ones had taken Ingold from the camp, it would be up to him, Rudy Solis, the mage of San Berdoo, to find the Hidden City and present the problem to Lohiro. The despair he felt at that idea was enough to make him think about lying down right there and letting the snows have him.
Coward and quitter, Gil had said. He couldn't feel his feet or hands; his whole body was numb and sluggish, his mind darkening under the inexorable grip of cold and fatigue. He stumbled and went down, feeling the snow winds ride over him.
It was the tingling in his numbed fingertips that woke him. Without opening his eyes, he flexed his hand; he heard the thin crackle of the ice that had formed on his glove and the swift-flying whisk of animal feet fleeing across the snow. Through his eyelids he could see light. He knew he'd made it.
Rudy sighed. He was still cold and damp clear through to his bones. But the bitter cold of last night's storm had lessened, and the wind had dropped to its familiar steady whine. He was starvingly hungry, sore in every limb, and exhausted. It would be nice to lie here in this relatively sheltered space - had he dragged himself to the lee side of a dry wash last night or something? - and wait for rescue. Only there wasn't going to be any rescue. It came back to him with chilling and horrible finality that Ingold was gone. If Ingold is gone, he thought with sudden horror, how the hell am I going to get back to California?
Lohiro, he thought. Lohiro is Archmage and head of the Council. He's Ingold's superior. He'll know.
But grief took hold of his heart as he lay in the shaded snow. The old man was gone, never to sit across the flickering light of the campfires with that wicked humour in his sleepy eyes - never to blister Rudy with sarcasm if he mixed up the seed pods of kneestem and crannywort never to stand with cupped palms filled with white light, blazing in an aura of brilliance out of the darkness. Rudy bowed his head against the icy slush. He had loved the old man, not just for his magic, or because the wizard was his teacher. If Ingold had been some old, pensioned-off steel-worker living next door to him in San Bernardino, he knew he would still have loved the man.
Rudy thought of Lohiro and the vision he had seen in the crystal table at the Keep the serene, emotionless face in its frame of fire-gold hair, the emptiness of those kaleidoscope-blue eyes. What had Ingold said to Lohiro? That he was like a dragon, a creature of fire and power, gold and light. But the Archmage was nothing like the shabby, old, beer-drinking maverick whom Rudy had first seen stepping out of the blaze of silver glory into the dawn stillness of the California hills. Rudy knew it was time to go on. He opened his eyes and found himself stretched out in the shelter of the dry wash's overhanging bank. Snow lay drifted all around him, melted by the warmth of his body into a kind of hollow that had further protected him from the winds. He lay in the long blue ribbon of shade thrown by the bank. Just beyond its border, where the sun glittered brightly on the snows, perched half a dozen small animals with coats of white-streaked brown fur. They were about the size of cats but had the long-drawn-out snouts, wrinkled lips, and gleaming red eyes of rats. They sat up on their hind legs, whiskers twitching, and regarded him with malevolent disappointment. Rudy remembered the tingling of his fingers which had awakened him and looked at them quickly. The leather at the ends of his gloves had been chewed..
With a wholehearted shudder of disgust, he snatched up a rock and flung it at the rats, and they melted almost scornfully out of sight into the snowy brush. Irrationally, Rudy wiped the nibbled leather on the seat of his breeches. He had the ugly feeling that he had not seen the last of them.
Cautiously, he picked up his bow. He'd managed to keep that through the night, as well as his quiver of arrows. He had water in his flask, and there was enough snow on the ground so that this was not yet a problem. He also had a little dried meat and some fruit-leather in the wallet at his belt. In addition, he had a knife, a sword, and some extra bowstrings. Shivering in the wan, heatless light, he wrapped his damp cloak around him, to no great avail.
The cold leaking through his wet clothes would be a further drain on his energy, but there was no way to get dry. He scrambled to the top of the bank to have a look at the lands around him.
Only desolation met his eyes. There was no sign of the road anywhere. The overcast sky had broken enough so that the sun was remotely visible as a whitish patch in the endless roof of clouds. The wind was still bitter. The land sloped away before him in a pale reddish expanse of stony sand, barren of brush, cactus, or grass. Here and there, snow patched the sands, blown into fitful little whirlwinds.
The wind from the north and the sun in the east were the only guides for direction in all that empty land. He tried to remember whether he'd crossed the road last night and if he were north or south of it; he tried to recall the map Ingold had sketched out for him one night in the dUst beside the fire. All he remembered of that was that they'd have to leave the main road to Dele at some point and strike overland, due west, to reach the Seaward Mountains and the Hidden City of Quo.
That much he could do. Head straight west - and then what? Eventually reach the Seaward Mountains? How long? Two weeks afoot, lost and virtually helpless? Dream on. And supposing he did? The Seaward Mountains were now one great spider web of illusions. What the hell am I gonna do, stand in the foothills and yell, 'Let me in. Ingold sent me?'