But that, he realized, was exactly why Ingold had brought him along. Punk airbrush-jockey and half-trained screw-up artist that he was, he was the only free and trustworthy mage in the West of the World. Ingold, over whose stripped bones the scavenger rats must be fighting by this time, was counting on him.
And besides, where else was he going to go?
He headed west. The emptiness of the desert engulfed him.
He had thought before, travelling with Ingold through the wastelands, that he had come to understand the solitude and silence of those empty places, but he saw now that this had been a delusion. He was totally alone, totally forgotten. He was the only human soul in all this great emptiness. The sun climbed, strengthening a little. His cloak dried, and his shadow drifted, pale and watery, before him. Once or twice in the rocky wastes he glimpsed jackrabbits or huge lizards the length of his arm, and once in the distance he heard the unmistakable dry buzzing of a rattler. But he knew himself to be alone. If he shouted at the top of his lungs, his voice would roll unheard through those silvery distances and die without ever reaching a human being's ear. He moved through the emptiness like a tortoise, with slow, dogged steps in a single direction, not to be turned aside.
A distant thicket of mesquite and greasewood proclaimed ground-water; he found a catch basin of rocks there, half-filled with melted snow. In the empty silence of noon, he ate as little of the dried meat and fruit as he could manage, resting, letting his thoughts drift. He wondered what Minalde was doing, how Tir was. He wondered about the White Raiders and the ghost that they feared. Had it been that, he wondered, which had taken Ingold so silently from his own camp? Or had it been the Dark, who had dogged their footsteps from Renweth? Would Lohiro know that? Had Lohiro, who was like a son to Ingold, watched him in the fire, even as Rudy had watched Aide? The vision in the crystal flashed disturbingly before his thoughts, the cold, empty blue eyes and the brush of a cloak hem across the wet gleam of a crab-crawling skull. A small movement in the mesquite caught his eye; a moment later a rabbit hobbled cautiously into view, nose and ears a-twitch with apprehension. Poor little bastard, Rudy thought, and his hand stole smoothly toward his bow. Many nights on watch he had observed the jackrabbits and felt rather a kinship with them. They didn't hurt anyone and, like himself, were mainly concerned with food and fornication and staying out of trouble. The rabbit's ears swung like radar receivers; the timid little creature stared around, hoping against hope that the scenery
concealed no greedy, bright-toothed death, which would end those mild rabbity dreams of sweet mesquite tops and nymphomaniac does. It's a tough life, Rudy thought, but it's you or me, and I'd rat her it was you.
As he drew the bow to him, the end snagged on a root and the arrow rolled sideways. The rabbit, galvanized into instant frenzy, rocketed wildly into the distance, leaving Rudy once again alone.
Great White Hunter blows it again. He returned to his meditations.
Eventually he shot three rabbits, one where he sat and two later in the early twilight. He found another mesquite thicket, this one among rocks. After sweeping away his tracks, he made a kind of fort by piling thornbushes between the largest of the boulders to defend his camp. He built a small fire and wondered if it was safe to sleep. Probably not, he reflected, but he knew himself incapable of remaining awake all night. After a day of semi-starvation, it was hard not to eat all three bunnies the minute they were cooked, but he reminded himself that he didn't know where his next meal was coming from and crawled into his spiny shelter to dream of superburgers and sun.
Deep in the night, he was wakened by the muffled padding of animal feet and the soft scratching of blunt claws on the rocks. He lay sweating in the darkness, seeing nothing beyond the tangles of interwoven thorn. In the morning he saw wolf tracks as large as his own hands all around the shelter in the dust.
The next day was colder, sunless, and grey. By the scent of the wind, he decided the rain would hold off and he filled his water flask with snow gleaned from a hollow in the rocks. The land was lower, thinly grown now with mesquite, small sagebrush, greasewood, and ocotillo that rattled like dry bones in the wind. The wind grew bitter, clawing at his face and cloak. He saw nothing that could remotely be construed as edible and he began to feel desperately lonely and frightened.
By afternoon he realized that he was being stalked.
The knowledge came upon him gradually. At first it was only a vague sensation, a wariness about open ground, a subliminal wondering about the anomalous rustlings in the mesquite on both sides of him. He had lived long enough with the wind to recognize the pattern of its sounds. He knew when the pattern broke.
He stood still, quieting his breath to absorb the sound and smell of the land. He could hear nothing but the whining of the wind through the chaparral, which lay like a waist-high forest over the desolation through which he had moved all day. He looked slowly around him, searching for something, anything, to tell him what he was up against and in which direction he might flee. Like the jackrabbits, he had no other course of action; he only wished it were possible for him to go streaking madly away through the sagebrush at eighty miles an hour as they did.
A sound riveted his attention. He turned his eyes back toward a clump of brush he'd already scanned before. There had been no movement that he could see; but he now saw a big male dooic, squatting in its shelter, holding a huge wedge of rock in its hands, and staring at him with that same hungry malice he had seen in the eyes of the scavenger rats. Like them, it melted slowly backward and edged out of sight into the
brush beyond.
Rudy swung around, hearing more surreptitious stirrings in the brush. Another hunched body was making its stealthy retreat. He felt himself grow clammy with sweat.
He was now aware of them all around. What had Ingold said - that he'd travelled with a band of them? But these dooic didn't look as if they had that kind of friendly intentions; they were armed with crudely chipped hand-axes and had tusks like those of wild pigs. Rudy moved on cautiously. He'd come pretty close to getting killed several times since his arrival in this world; but freezing to death, having the Dark Ones put the munch on him, or even having Ingold run him through with his own sword suddenly seemed a whole lot more comfortable and dignified than being dirtily mauled to pieces by a gang of Neanderthals. He was scanning the skyline and finally found what he was looking for - a distant clump of trees marking a water hole. He wondered how well dooic climbed. But in the trees he could at least get his back to something and fend them off. As it was, with his being surrounded in open ground, it looked like a losing proposition.
As he moved, he was conscious of the whole ring of them on both sides of him as well as behind. He could hear them shifting up through the brush to get ahead of him. If he let that happen, he figured it would be kiss-off time. He quickened his pace toward the trees - cottonwoods, he saw now - some two miles off. Without breaking stride, he unbuckled his sword belt and shifted the weapon up over his back, getting ready to run for it. On second thought, he also pulled off his cloak, rolling it up and bundling it under the sword belt. All he needed, he thought wryly, was to trip over the damn thing. He tried to judge the distance to the trees but couldn't; the dry, clear air of the desert made things look closer than they really were. He knew that, once he broke into a run, he had damn well better stay ahead of the pack.
He glimpsed movement in the sagebrush ahead of him and to the sides humped, skittering shapes making a dash across open ground. Here goes nothing, Rudy thought. He broke into a run.