Ahead of him, Ingold walked through the ruins, following the line of corridors he had traversed in other years with the light, unthinking tread of a man in a hurry to do something else, passing doors he had knocked at casually, back in the days when those rooms had housed people he knew. He barely glanced at the open ruins and the cracked walls.
He's like a man with a mortal wound, Rudy thought, frightened. He's still numb from the shock. The nerve ends are still cauterized. God help him when he starts to hurt. In front of them the floor fell away. It had been blasted upward, the torn
beam ends clearly indicating that the explosion had come from below. Standing on the crumbling lip of the pit, Rudy could look down into the labyrinths of the lower vaults and see squat pillars and worn red tile floors, the dust of ages that had accumulated since the tower's founding, muddied by the sea rains. Below them the torn flooring revealed a second vault, founded on the ancient heart of the knoll. But instead of the grey of buried rock, smooth black basalt reflected the distant sky. From deep below, a draught of warmer air blew upward on to Rudy's face, bringing with it the smell of a yet deeper darkness.
Beside him, Ingold said, 'I should have guessed.' Rudy turned his head quickly. The wizard looked calm and rather detached, with the rising breath from below stirring at his ragged white hair. Rudy said hastily, There's no way you could have known.'
'Oh, I don't know,' the wizard said absently. 'I certainly got myself into enough trouble for warning everyone else of the possibility. I don't know why it shouldn't have occurred to me that all of the old schools of wizardry were built in cities that were later destroyed by the Dark.'
'Yeah, but a lot of cities were destroyed by the Dark,' Rudy argued quickly, hearing, under the deep calm of that scratchy voice, a note he didn't like, like the first fissure of an earthquake. 'They knew the direction your research took. Any one of them...'
Ingold sighed and shut his eyes. Very quietly, he said, 'Go away, Rudy.'
'Look...' Rudy began, and the eyes opened. In them was a black depth of pain that amounted almost to madness. Gently the rusty voice repeated, 'Go away.'
Rudy fled, terrified, as if an idly lifted pebble had turned into an H-bomb in his hand. When he reached the bottom of the knoll and looked back, he could not see that the old man had moved.
For a long time, it seemed, Rudy wandered the empty spaces of the ruined City of Wizards, listening to the booming of the sea. The crash of the breakers was somehow comforting, an echo of California winters. Whether it was because of the familiar damp cold of the seashore, the salt smell, or the magic that still lay over the town like an enormous silence, he felt at peace, as if he had come home. Home, he thought, his boots making barely a sound on the coloured marble marquetry of the pavement. To find home in ruins, and family - the family I should have known and never did - dead! He looked back at the solitary figure on the knoll, very dark against the white of the empty sky.
Quo - gone. Everyone you knew and loved and respected -gone. The Archmage gone - Lohiro, whom you loved like a son. The only ones left are novices like me, charlatans like Bektis, goodywives like Kara and her mother. Alwir's army is scratched, or worse, going into battle against the Dark with no backup, leaving the Keep unguarded for the Raiders or the Empire ofAlketch or the Dark. And only you left, the last wizard, a lost soul like I was in California.
And yes, you might have guessed, but no, it wasn't your fault. But he knew already that Ingold would never believe that.
Heartsick, Rudy turned away. He explored for a time the roofless remains of the ancient school, lecture halls where the carved benches had been swept and scarred by fire, laboratories and workrooms whose furnishings were torn and twisted by wild and incomprehensible violence, glittering in the chill, pale light with shattered glass and broken gemstones, and libraries, their couches and seats ripped, charred, and acid-eaten, with the leaves of books strewing the rain-damp pavements or plastered like wads of crumpled leaf mast in corners. In one such chamber he found a harp, half-hidden in a wall niche and protected by fallen timbers, the only whole and untouched thing in that world of ruin and desolation.
As he carried it down the steps, on which moss was already beginning to grow, to where they had tethered the burro, it came
to him what this.ruin meant. Without the school, later generations of wizards, no matter what their inborn talents, would be like him, untaught callers of fire, hopeless dreamers groping for a mode of expression that they could not find.
Or worse, he thought. A mage will have magic...
If vou can't find good love, then you will have bad.
Wind rippled in his long hair and chilled his fingers as he packed the harp on to Che's back. They could take at least one thing, he thought, from the ancient city by the Western Ocean. One thing, out of all this destruction. He pulled the coarse, heavy fur of his buffalohide coat tighter around his neck and stood for a time in the shifting, patchy light of white sun and opal mist, staring out at the sea.
He thought of the Keep of Dare.
Not as he had often remembered it - the candlelit darkness of Aide's quiet rooms and the mazes stretching in shadows within those ancient walls but from outside, as he had seen it only once, the morning he and Ingold had taken the road for Quo. An almost cinematic image of it formed in his thoughts - black and square and solid against the snow that lay thick around its walls, impenetrable, enigmatic, self-contained. He saw the black loom of the Snowy Mountains behind it and smelled the cold, biting freshness of the pine-sharp glacier winds. And with the image, he felt a need blossom in his heart, a yearning to be there, as urgent as lust or starvation. But he felt it from outside himself, as if the thoughts of another had been projected into his heart.
Looking up, he saw again the black and curiously regular shape of the knoll by the sea, the dark stump of Horn's Tower. Through the lacework of the bare trees he saw the small figure standing, arms raised, mantle billowing in the freshening winds from the sea. And he knew that what he felt was a call, and that the calling came from the man who stood alone at the heart of the last ruined citadel of wizardry. The last wizard, an exile gypsy vagabond with a sword at his hip and his back to the wall, was calling them all - the second-raters, the flunk-outs, the
novices, the charlatans, and the goodywives. He was calling anyone, in fact, capable of hearing - calling them to meet him at the Keep of Dare.
Ingold came striding down from the knoll soon after, his face set and harsh, his eyes bitter and frighteningly cold, a stranger's eyes. Rudy scrambled off his perch on the rail of the colonnade to greet him, but there was nothing to greet in that blind, icy stare. 'Come with me,' Ingold ordered briefly. 'There is one thing yet we must do.'
The wizard scarcely spoke to Rudy again that afternoon. Rudy fetched the burro in silence and in silence followed the old man down the blasted shore to the collapsed ruin beside the gatehouse. The terraced roofs had supported storey after storey of incomparable gardens, and these had fallen in on one another, tangling trees, masonry, flowers, earth, tumbled pillar, and broken beam into one colossal pyramid of wreckage. Ingold hunted around it until he found what had been a wide window that would still admit them to the ruined lower hall, then slipped like a cat among the precariously balanced blocks of half-fallen granite, working his way downward and inward. Rudy followed unquestioningly, although Ingold had bidden him neither to go nor to stay. In places, they could walk beneath ceilings that moved and groaned with the weight pressing on the damaged arches. In places, they had to climb piles of fallen rubble. Once they crouched to slide beneath a mighty lintel stone that was cracked right through the middle, supporting by equilibrium alone literally tons of coloured stone, decked incongruously with dangling curtains of trailing yellow leaves. As he scrambled, panting, to keep up, Rudy half-feared that Ingold was seeking his own death in this place, for the wizard had turned suddenly strange and frightening, remote in his bitterness and rage. It was possible - logical, even - that he would arrange to perish with the others, in the city that had been his home.