02 The Walls of Air

'Of course not. The expedition never came anywhere near Quo. There was rain and fog, and the army became lost in the foothills. It was eventually deposited back on the main road, miles from where it had entered the hills. Wizards can fight, if need be. But we are all very good at evading the conflict. Stop a moment.'

Rudy halted, puzzled. Ingold took him by the arm and led him forward along the narrow path toward the edge of a cloud-filled gorge visible through the smooth, bare boles of the grey trees.

Ingold kept a little in the lead and advanced with what Rudy considered ridiculous caution -until it became suddenly apparent that the edge of the gorge was very much nearer than Rudy had thought. He found himself looking down a sheer drop of black-walled cliff to a bristle of torn rock and jagged, broken trees, half-hidden in the mists at the bottom. Head swimming, he stepped back hastily. He thought he had seen something else on the rocks below, like the broken limbs of the dead trees, but whiter.

He glanced around quickly. The path itself had changed. Fog was blowing softly down on them from the higher peaks, and the trees were receding around them like mocking spirits into the mists, the ferns spider-webbed in silver dew.

'We've come quite high,' Ingold said, his soft, scratchy voice calm and strangely disembodied in that cool, two-dimensional world. 'From here the way becomes more difficult. The illusions of the road alone will have turned aside the malicious or curious or idle. The only ones to come this high are those who seek to become mages and who can see the traps before they close - or those with the motivation to do the wizards real harm.'

'So - what can we do?' Rudy whispered, afraid.

'Do?' The fog had closed on them now, so that Ingold was only a flat shape in the mist, hooded darkness hiding his face. 'Dispel the fog, of course.'

Hesitantly, Rudy stammered out the words Ingold had taught him to summon and dismiss the weather. Chill as wraiths, the fog caressed his face. Now he could feel the spell that bound the mist, drawing it like a net around them. He put out his strength against it, but felt it greater than his own power, older and infinitely more complex. He stood alone, wrapped in mist, almost choked by its thickness, as if smothering in a wet shroud. Sweat as well as fog dampened his face. He fought the impulse to run shouting from it - it did not matter in which direction only to be away from the malicious strength of the hands that

held the net.

'I can't do it,' he whispered in despair.

Ingold clicked his tongue reprovingly. 'Can't! If you can't, then we shall stay here, or else walk sightlessly. It will be night soon.'

'Dammit!' Rudy wailed. 'Can't you give me a stronger spell?'

'Why? Yours is perfectly adequate.'

'It is not! You know you could sweep this stuff aside like a cobweb!'

'With the self-same spell, Rudy.' Ingold was no more than a dark blur in the mists, but his voice was warming, like a fire in a cold place. The strength of your spells is the strength of your soul. Haven't you realized that?' Ingold stepped closer to him, the coarse fibre of his robe sewn with pearls of dew. 'As you grow, your spells will grow also.'

'But can't you feel it?' Rudy demanded helplessly. 'It's -it's like a boy fighting a man. I'll never...'

'If you keep saying never,' Ingold replied mildly, 'you'll come to believe it. If his back is to the wall, a boy has to fight a man, doesn't he? And sometimes he can win.'

Rudy subsided into silence. Above the fog, the sky was growing perceptibly darker, the first chill winds of evening drifting down from the unseen heights...

Winds. The endless winds of the plains.

With meticulous bounding-spells and limits, Rudy summoned the winds.

They were icy cold, but they smelled of the stone and glaciers above. Thin, steady, and strong they blew, riding grey horses up from the gully, breaking the fog before them like startled ghosts. Cloudy shapes rolled away from the path and retreated

ponderously from the sloping land. Trees shook wetness down on the pilgrims disapprovingly in the new strength of the winds that whipped Rudy's long, wet hair into his eyes. He started down the path, Ingold leading the burro silently behind.

They camped that night in open ground, under the shadow of the higher peaks. Ingold circled the camp with spells of protection, visible to a wizard's sight as a faint ring of foxfire around the perimeter, but nothing threatened them throughout that whispering night. In the morning, the clouds had cleared somewhat, and Ingold pointed out the pass which they sought, a narrow notch in the blackness of the mountain wall. Throughout the day it seemed to shift unaccountably to the northward, and at times the trails Ingold chose appeared to lead nowhere near it.

They were in high, treeless country now, where rocks towered as proud as goddesses above the trail. An occasional twisted live oak or clumps of scented heather clung to the barren slopes, and water rushed down in veils of glimmering lace, or boiled in rock channels whose depths showed rust and pewter and the velvet green-black of moss. The trail here was perilous, switching back and forth across the steep stone of the mountain's flank, overhung by massive boulders. In places the trail was buried under single boulders or great spills of talus and boulders mixed, deadly testimony to the spells that guarded Quo. Rudy wondered what would have happened to him at this point, had Ingold not walked at his side.

Ingold led the way now, picking out the tangled trails with preternatural skill. Rudy was surprised at his own exhaustion following yesterday's efforts. Try as he would, he could not see half the illusions that Ingold did. It certainly would never have occurred to him to cross the boiling rapids of a swollen river, as Ingold did, wading through a ford at the place that looked to be the deepest and most deadly. Nor would he have found the trail that led over a seemingly sheer cliff.

And then there was the bridge.

'What's wrong with the bridge?' Rudy wanted to know. The

great span of moss-grown stone arched proudly over the canyon, its curved blue shadow faintly visible on the thorn and boulders that choked the thread of stream far below.

'It isn't there,' Ingold replied simply.

Rudy looked again, then walked to the threshold and struck the stone with his staff. Wood clunked solidly on rock.

'Pieces of this road are unfamiliar to me,' the wizard went on, 'and the road has changed recently - become more dangerous, I believe. But I have crossed this gorge here dozens of times. There is no bridge.'

'Maybe it has been put up since you were here last?'

'At the beginning of this summer? I hardly think so, with all the moss that's grown on it. Look at how worn the stones are, there along the railing. The bridge looks as if it were there from the beginning of time. And since I know it wasn't...' He shrugged. 'It was never there at all.'

'I seem to remember,' Rudy said judiciously, 'something you once said to me about disbelieving your own senses because of something you believe to be true...'

Ingold laughed, remembering their first conversation in the old shack in the California hills. 'I am paid,' he said humbly. 'If, when we cross by hardier means, the bridge proves to be real and not illusion, you may revile me in any terms you please, and I shall bow meekly to the lash.' But when they scrambled, scratched and bleeding from forcing the recalcitrant Che up the impossible trail out of the gorge, Rudy looked back and saw that the stone bridge was only a single strand of willow withe, as frail as a spider web, on which the wizards had threaded their illusion. From there he could see the bone dump, too, at the bottom of the cliff below.

Kara had come this way, Rudy thought. And Bektis, too, and Ingold, in his youth. Had it been this bad then? It was one hell of a price to pay for safety.

'Hey, Ingold? If Quo stands on the Western Ocean, and the walls of air defend the landward side - has anybody ever tried to assault it by sea?'