Ingold only said, 'Give me a rope.'
They gave it to him.
'Rudy?'
Obediently, Rudy called light to the tip of the spear he used for a walking stick. With his fingers numb and aching in their worn gloves, he held it out over the void while Ingold dropped his own staff over the edge, then shinned down the rope with the businesslike deftness of a mountain climber. As he watched the wizard picking his way back along the cavern floor, Rudy noticed that the scavenger rats gave Ingold a wide berth. He wondered if this were a spell in itself, or if they were merely under the carefully engineered impression that the wizard was a sabre-toothed tiger. From here, he was simply a little old man, the white glow of his staff like a dwindling star above his bowed head, the brown of his robes blending in with the dry, flaky moss that crumbled to dust beneath his light tread. Rudy watched that bobbing phosphorescence play in the shadows of the stalagmites for a time, while the wizard explored what lay beyond and among them. Then it vanished abruptly through a claw-smoothed doorway, seeking deeper darkness.
Behind him, Rudy heard Hoofprint of the Wind murmur, 'Not for all the horses nor all the hunting eagles nor all the willing women of the earth would I seek thus the Eaters in the Night. Death there is in that tunnel. Cannot he smell it? This ghost that the Eaters themselves fear, this has swept these caverns end to end and slain the Eaters and their victims alike. Yet he will go to seek it, like a little priest on foot.'
The cold grew deeper and more bitter, driving men and horses
together to huddle like sheep in the protection of one another's warmth. Rudy wondered if Ingold would freeze down there by himself among the rats and darkness. Now and then, searing winds shrieked along the tunnel from above, moaning through the cavern and sighing in the carpet of frost-bitten moss. Rudy had little sense of time, but suspected it was something over an hour before the light glimmered once again in the caverns below and Ingold returned, shivering like a frozen beggar in a killing snow. He handed his staff up to Rudy, who took the glowing end gingerly and found the blazing wood perfectly cold and solid to his touch. Ingold climbed the rope hand over hand, the powdering of frost on his cloak glittering like diamond dust. The Raiders made room for him among them.
'Well, Thief of the White Bird's Horses?" Hoofprint murmured. 'Found you, then, what you sought?'
'I never stole the White Bird's horses,' Ingold responded automatically. Even through the freezing cold, Rudy could smell the taint of corruption on his ice-encrusted cloak. In the pallid witchlight, he looked white and drawn - like a man, Rudy thought, who had just got done vomiting up his socks.
'And no,' the old man went on. 'I found only the dead. They're mostly skeletons by this time, but you can see they're all of the same date of death, not a gradual accumulation. Rats, worms, bloated white toads as big as your head... But that's all. Down to the farthest depths of these caverns, I can sense the presence of no living creature - neither the Dark Ones nor anything that might have driven them forth.'
Rudy hastily shoved away the images he had conjured from his too-vivid imagination. But something in the old man's scratchy, tired voice told him that Ingold would wander those caverns for many nights afterward in dreams. The sound of the furtive scampering in the deeps below turned him suddenly sick. 'But why?' he whispered.
'Why?' Ingold glanced over at him.'If something did kill off the Dark - which I'm not altogether certain it did - it could have killed the herds as well. But if the Dark simply evacuated the Nest to go elsewhere, they could hardly take their herds with them, now, could they?
'But could they not have defended this place against any ghost that came against them?' Hoofprint asked, and the frost crackled on his braided moustache.
'Perhaps,' Ingold replied softly. 'But we cannot even be sure that there was a ghost. I don't think so. I am not even certain that they left in fear.'
The Raider's dark, animal face grew thoughtful. 'If not in fear - then why?
'Perhaps at a command?'
'And who would command the Dark?'
'A good question,' the old man said. 'And one whose answer I will seek in Quo. If the wizards there cannot help me, perhaps that question and what I have seen here can help them. All I ask of you, Hoofprint of the Wind, is the leave to walk through your lands.'
The chieftain laughed softly. 'As if the leave of any man could bid the Desert Walker to go or stay. As soon can a man bid the Dark. Nevertheless, you have my leave. And what will you do, wise man, you and your Little Insect, together with all the wise men of the world in one place upon the Western Ocean?'
'Find a way to drive forth the Dark indeed,' the wizard replied quietly. 'Or perish together in trying.'
They emerged from beneath the earth to a world blasted and changed. As they struggled toward the livid remains of the daylight through the drifted snow that all but blocked the last twenty feet of the stairway, the cold seemed to grip Rudy's bones. Even after the bitter chill beneath the earth, it took his breath away with its brutal intensity. The small band of Raiders and horses came out to a surface landscape buried under hard, powdery snow so cold that it shrieked beneath the foot and to a sky black with clouds, where twisting columns of tornadoes wavered between dark air and frozen earth. Smaller winds chased each other aimlessly across the desolation, blowing snow now from one direction, now from another, in the confused remnants of the hurricane blast that had entombed the land.
'I thought you said the storm would be over,' Rudy managed to say through uncontrollable shivering.
'It is over.' Ingold swung himself lightly up on to his borrowed stallion. His breath crystallized to ice in his beard even as he spoke. This is only its aftermath.' On the way south through the sick darkness of the late afternoon, they passed a small herd of bison, half-buried in the drifted snow. The animals stood head-down, crusted with frost, their flesh and blood frozen to rock as they grazed. No wonder, Rudy thought, the Raiders will sacrifice one of their own people, if necessary, to propitiate whatever evil ghost it is that can do that.
It was long after dark before they made camp. Even the freezing desert night was warmer than the daylight after the ice storm. The Raiders set up a tiny war camp with silent efficiency, and Ingold sat awake for a long time by the fire, talking with Hoofprint of the Wind. Rudy could see them through the narrow entrance of his shelter, the flickering touch of the gold light on the chieftain's long braided moustaches and on the scars on Ingold's hands.
After a time Ingold came into the shelter and crawled under the fur robes. The fire outside had almost died. Rudy whispered, 'Ingold? What do you think?'
Ingold's voice murmured back out of the darkness. 'About what?'
'About the ghost, for Chrissake.'
One blue eye and part of a beard appeared from under the shaggy furs. The wizard raised himself up on one elbow. 'I don't believe there is one. Or at least, not as the Raiders fear it. At the bottom of those caverns, I could sense no living thing.'
'You think the Dark left on their own, then?'
'I think it's possible.'
'Could they have been driven out by an ice storm like today's?
Ingold was silent for a moment, considering. Finally he said, 'I hardly think so. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a previous storm this far south, and the Dark left their Nests in the plains, according to Hoofprint of the Wind, at the time of the first quarter moon of autumn, some seven weeks ago. The Dark are not weather-wise, Rudy. Even the most skilled wizard cannot predict when and where an ice storm will strike more than a few minutes before it happens.'
In the outer darkness, a horse whinnied, a comforting sound. There was no other noise except for the endless groan of the wind. Even the wolves were still.