Rudy looked inquiringly at Ingold but saw that he wasn't going to get any help there. He turned again to the vine-tangled banks above the road, wondering why he was so certain a road ought to be there. He sensed for the first time that feeling of Tightness about something that did not exist, or wrongness about something that supposedly did. But there was nothing to see. Only a damp, blackish clay bank, grown over with wild grape and soggy, brown fern, crowned with a thin screen of ghostly, black-flecked birches. Somewhere in the distance, a swollen river groaned and stormed through the trees that had once fringed its banks. The air was filled with its muted clamour and the scent of leaf-mast and water.
Cautiously, Rudy scuffed through the squishing yellow carpet of leaves toward the bank. A drainage ditch separated the road from the steepness of the overgrown cutting, brimming with
water from the bright, unseasonable rains. Impelled by he knew not what force- or maybe simply by the maddening itch of a wizard's curiosity Rudy started to wade into the ditch.
His foot touched stone.
He wondered how he could not have seen the little bridge that spanned it. It was directly underfoot, old and moss-covered, a few feet wide by a few feet long, jumping the ditch like a humpbacked dwarf. Trailing vines almost hid the milestone at its head; but peering closely at the worn granite, Rudy could discern the rune Yad had carved there. The Rune of the Veil.
And beyond the bridge was the path.
Rudy was sure he hadn't seen it before, but he felt as if he had known it would look like that. The sense of deja vu carried to the smallest details - the way the wine-brown tangles of wild grape cloaked the sides of the cutting like curtains in an untidy house, the ankle-deep mould of yellow leaves on the path, and the black-edged mushrooms that grew on the bank above. With his foot on the stone of the bridge, Rudy looked back to where Ingold stood, smiling, beside the burro. 'Can you see it?' he challenged.
Ingold's smile broadened. 'Of course.' He came forward, leading Che at his heels.
It had rained throughout the day, sheets of twisting silver rain that froze and soaked the travellers even through the comparative shelter of the trees. These eastern foot-slopes of the Seaward Mountains were wooded, and the roaring of the rain on the leaves had called to mind the voice of the sea booming in a storm. All yesterday and the day before it had rained, blinding them to the road ahead and swelling the creeks to rivers, turning the lowlands to wrinkled grey marshes all prickled with the dark spears of reeds. Above the trees, the day was still grey, cold, and threatening, but for all that, warmer than the frozen reaches of the plains or the bitterness of the wind-scoured desert. Rudy shivered in his buffalohide coat and wondered if he'd ever be
warm or dry again.
Even in the dying of the year, the Seaward Mountains were beautiful, lush and opulent after the spare grandeur of the treeless lands. Scuffing through the oozing leaves of the roadbed, Rudy found that beauty seeping into his soul. He rejoiced in the quiet of the woods, in the colour and richness of the life among the bronze and fawn of the carpeting ferns, in the black of the wet pine bark and the dark red of the oak, and in the alternation of darkness and silver. Movement and life surrounded them, the flick of the red squirrel's tail as it vanished around a tree and the high, harsh laugh of a jay. The path topped the cut bank and wound away through the woods, climbing a ridge cloaked in yellow tamarisk and leading down through a little pass that Rudy would have sworn was not there before.
The wet leaves underfoot made the ground slippery, but his leg barely twinged. He still used as a walking stick the spear shaft he'd got from the Raiders and wore the sleeved coat of buffalohide they'd given him. Another breeze shook down more rain and brought with it the cold, wet scent of the heights. Cloudy pillars of vapour hid the peaks, but the bright smell was like the distant music that called to the soul.
Against all his expectations, he and Ingold had reached the Seaward Mountains. It now only remained for them to find their way to Quo.
'RUDY!'
The desperation in Ingold's shout jerked him back to reality, and a split second later something collided with his head, a beating madness of black feathers and a beak that gored into his cheekbone and narrowly missed his eye. He struck at the tearing claws and heard the whine of Ingold's staff slashing down inches from his face. With a hoarse, mocking caw, the giant crow eluded the blow. With a bloody beak it went flapping heavily back toward its native trees. Rudy stood trembling in the road, gasping with shock and idiotically remembering a
Hitchcock film he'd seen on the late-late show. Blood dripped down his fingers as he touched the wound. Beside him, Ingold scanned the trees with cold fury in his face. Whirlwinds of black crows rose from their bare branches. Their obscene laughter drifted back down like stray black feathers, along with the dead leaves dislodged by their wings.
'Are you all right?' Ingold turned back to Rudy, dug a kerchief from somewhere in his robes, and dabbed at the cut.
'Yeah,' Rudy whispered. 'Fine, I guess. What the hell did that bird attack me for?'
The wizard shook his head. That happens here, if you take your guard off. That, or something like it.'
Rudy's hands were shaking as he took the cloth. The wound stung in the chilly air. In a way, even getting his leg slashed open by the dooic hadn't been this bad. He'd been ready for that.
There was no way to be entirely ready for the walls of air that encircled the City of Quo.
Often there was only a sense of being followed. Rudy caught himself constantly looking over his shoulder, uneasy in the silence of the dripping woods. Sometimes he had the conviction that he did not see things that were there. He would stop in such places, letting his mind drop into that state of unconcern that saw all things with crystal clarity, as once in the desert he had seen his own soul - the shapes of dead leaves, straw-coloured against the sepia background of decay, and the roll of the land under its cloak of fern. Often, while he sensed the illusion of such spots, he could not fathom it, though once he did find another path, threading away from the main one, winding around a thicket of thorn-choked aspens that he had thought lay wider and higher than was later proved. Ingold followed him down this new path without a word. Still other times, the illusion-spell took the shape of a curious, irrational fear, a loathing to continue at all, or a vile detestation at passing a certain tree. Once past it, Rudy looked back to see the faint
outlines of the Rune of the Chain all but obscured in the overgrowing bark.
'If you ask me, it would be damn easy to get lost in these woods,' Rudy muttered, after Ingold had stopped him from going on and had shown him a side turning through a dark glen that he had, for some reason, been completely unable to notice. Once on the path itself, it was completely visible, and he was not even sure that it had ever been out of his sight.
Ingold mimed a man shielding his eyes from too-brilliant light. 'Dazzling,' he murmured. The boy's intellect is simply dazzling.'
'What are they afraid of?' Rudy went on, ignoring him.
'Afraid?' Ingold raised his brows.
'I mean, they have their magic to protect them in case of trouble. If it came down to a fight, I mean, which it wouldn't. I mean, who'd take on a bunch of wizards?'
'Never underestimate human motivations,' Ingold advised. 'Especially under the impulse of the Church. Remember that the Archmage has been called the Devil's Left Hand. It wasn't so long ago that the Prince-Bishop of Dele mounted a major war on the Council and sent an expeditionary force to torch the town and burn as many wizards as might be found in the ruins.'
'Did the wizards fight them off?' Rudy asked, awed at the thought.