That wasn't me.'
'... and lost?'
'I won. And besides,' Ingold went on smoothly, 'it was all many years gone, and I
was a most young and foolish Desert Walker in those days.'
'You who are old and wise enough now to come striding into the camps of war, in the time when there are evil ghosts abroad upon the land?'
As if summoned by the speaking of the name, winds rattled in the glass and feathers of the magic-post, the white sunlight winked from the spinning metal, and the wild rose petals tore loose to lie in the grass like sacrificial blood. There was a stirring among the Raiders; a head or two turned, not toward the post, but toward the emptiness of the desert. Yet there was nothing there, nothing but the arctic cold.
Ingold leaned upon the spear. 'Tell me of these evil ghosts,' he said.
Zyagarnalhotep regarded these two ragged pilgrims from the lands of his enemies for a moment in silence, as if gauging what each of them was worth. Rudy had the uncomfortable feeling that they were far from out of it yet. But the chief only said, 'Come. Eat with me, you and your Little Insect who knows spells, and we will speak of this thing.'
Hoofprint of the Wind's shelter was larger than others in the camp, but, like most of them, indistinguishable from a thicket of mesquite at more than a few feet away. The faintest drift of smoke marked its fire, with a whiff of meat cooking. Ingold unerringly picked out the concealed entrance and led the way into the dugout room. 'Is it safe?' Rudy asked softly, with a worried glance back at the warriors still grouped and talking quietly outside.
'Is anything you've done for the past four days?' Ingold replied tartly. 'Sit down and let me see your leg.'
The place was narrow and low-roofed, intensely gloomy, and smelling of crushed sage, dirt, and wood-smoke. Bison and mammoth furs strewed the floor, and Rudy eased himself down on to one of these while Ingold sorted through the various pouches and packets he habitually carried concealed about his person.
Another horrible suspicion assailed Rudy. 'Hey -
Ingold glanced up.
'It wasn't all a test, was it? I mean, to see how well I'd get along on my own?'
'It was not,' the wizard stated drily and began to unwrap the crusted bandages on Rudy's ankle and calf. 'For one thing, you aren't fit to be tested on anything yet, and a test of this sort would be tantamount to murder. When I have call to murder my assistants, I do so deliberately and after fair warning. For another, I should have failed you the moment you went haring off out of camp into a storm without stopping to ascertain whether I had really vanished or not.'
'Yeah, but I-' The sense of what the old man said sank in. 'Hunh?'
Ingold sighed and sat back on his heels. 'It's the oldest trick in the book, Rudy,' he explained patiently. 'If you want to separate two partners, one of the quickest ways of doing so is to throw a cloak ing-spell of some kind over one of them when the other one's back is turned. You were asleep, weren't you? I thought so. The other partner is
bound to go pelting away in the opposite direction, yelling his friend's name, without stopping to make a careful search of the place or even take a second look. Merely a few minutes unguarded would have suited their purposes. The storm only made the situation worse.'
They - who?' Rudy winced as Ingold applied the thin paste of powdered herbs and water to the half-healed mess of his scabbing wound.
The old man looked up at him again and dried his hands on a corner of his patched and fraying mantle. 'The Dark Ones,' he said sombrely. The same ones, I think, that have followed us from Renweth. There weren't many of them, but there were enough to keep me pinned in a cave in the bank till morning. I'm going to need another piece out of your sur-coat, Rudy. We haven't anything else to bind this with.'
Rudy obliged him, reflecting philosophically that at this point a few more tatters made little difference. He knew he looked like some gorily exaggerated beggar out of an Ingmar Bergman movie, with his filthy rags, long hair, bruised face, and four days' worth of black stubble on his jaw. Ingold looked little better, worn out, filthy, and shabby, like a St. Francis after a bar fight. The last four days hadn't been easy ones on him, either.
'It wasn't neglect that kept me from tracking you and catching you up immediately,' Ingold went on, bending down to rewrap the wound. The Dark pursued me for two nights, and I couldn't afford to be far from shelter. I ended by killing most of them - which is the reason I believe that they came from Renweth and have pursued us all along.'
Rudy said, 'Hunh?' and then yelped with pain as Ingold's fingers probed gently at his damaged ribs.
'Sit still and this won't hurt.'
'Like hell it won't. How do you figure that about Renweth?'
'It is always difficult to count the Dark, Rudy.' The wizard paused in his ministrations, kneeling before him in the murky darkness of the shelter, his face grave in the gloom. 'But there were surely fewer on the second night than the first, and fewer still on the third. If the Dark can communicate among themselves and there had been others within call, there would have been more, not less. Hence their anxiety to separate us, rather than risk further decrease in their numbers by an open fight.' He turned back to his medicine bag. Those ribs are only cracked, by the way. I'll mix a gum plaster to hold them still while they heal, which they should do in a few weeks, provided you don't try any more spectacular feats like this afternoon's. I was also hampered in my pursuit of you because I had to keep track of Che.'
'Have you still got Che?'
'Yes,' Ingold replied mildly. 'At the moment he's concealed up my sleeve.' Seeing Rudy's expression, he grinned suddenly for the first time since they had met. 'He's hidden out in the desert, not far from here,' he explained 'I couldn't lose him I certainly didn't plan on journeying to the Seaward Mountains, grubbing for forage all the way. We're in too much of a hurry for that. Besides,' he added, 'the Bishop would
excommunicate me twice over if I lost her donkey.'
Rudy pulled the frayed remains of his surcoat back into place and tangled with the lacings, cursing the man or woman in this universe who had never invented zippers. 'Ingold, listen,' he said after a moment. 'You say the Dark didn't bring in reinforcements. I was four days out in the desert alone and I never saw the Dark Ones at all.' Ingold nodded, and Rudy had the curious feeling for a moment that the old man could read those solitary hours printed like the tracks of a piper on sand in the lines of his face. 'And you know what else? I never saw this ghost thing, either.'
'No,' Ingold said quietly. 'Neither did I. ' Meticulously, he gathered together his herbs and medicines, his hands deft and his face in shadow as he spoke. 'And the odd thing is that I never even felt its presence. I spent last night sitting awake in the darkness, without fire, watching, hearing, and feeling, as wizards can, the threads and fibres of the air for miles over the desert, seeking the smallest sign that the Dark Ones might still know where I was. But there was no trace of the Dark, and no trace of -anything. No breath, no sign, no spirit moving over the sands, except those night-walking creatures that are one with the being of the earth.'
Rudy nodded, understanding what Ingold had done. As he himself had extended his senses to reconnoitre the camp beyond his prison shelter of brush, so Ingold had done on a vastly greater scale. He had sought and understood the shift of every spear of wind-moved weed, every harsh little scattering of kicked sand, and every scent that rode the airs of night, with the web of his awareness thrown like a net over hundreds of miles, seeking danger in the night - and finding none.
'But in that case,' Rudy asked, 'where or what is the ghost?'
This do all my people ask,' a bass voice rumbled. Looking up, Rudy saw that Hoofprint had entered the shelter, bending his tall head beneath the low pitch of the roof. He was surrounded by the greasy aura of woodsmoke and stewed game. The warriors who entered behind him, lesser chiefs of the war band, Rudy guessed, bore a tightly woven basket plastered inside and out with hardened clay and filled with chunks of steaming meat. Others carried smaller vessels filled with some kind of green, sharp-smelling mush. Rudy took a second look and saw that some of the smaller vessels were the skulls of dooic. Others, judging by the shape of the cranium and the absence of a suborbital ridge, were not.