'Didn't mean... they took... made me.' He choked again, fighting for air with a horrible wheezing. His fingers clamped hard over Ingold's soiled mantle, shaking at it, like a tugging child. 'Heal... you can. They let me go.'
Ingold's voice was a murmur for the dying man's ears alone. 'I'm sorry. They might be able to take you back, you see.'
'No,' Lohiro gasped; for a moment, his face twisted again, with anger as much as with pain. Then that passed, and he coughed, bringing up more blood. 'Don't know,' he whispered. 'Stupid... I never could... beat you. They take you... but they don't know.' He coughed again, struggling to draw himself up. Over Ingold's shoulder, Rudy could see that the younger wizard's chest bore a dark, glistening river of blood. 'They want you,' he went on, his voice fading. 'You...' 'Why?'
The blue eyes closed and gold lashes showed sharply against white skin that was already growing waxy. Lohiro rolled his head from side to side, his face convulsed with pain. 'One of them,' he whispered. 'Became one of them. They are not many
... they're one. They want you...' 'Why?' Ingold demanded.
Lohiro went on as if he had not heard. 'I know... But stupid. I'm sorry. I know...' he whispered. 'The moss... the herds of the Dark...' He coughed yet again, as if gagging on blood. '... the ice in the north...'
The gold head lolled back. A moment later the long, white fingers slipped down from Ingold's sleeves and the nimble, bony body became a dead weight in his arms. For as long, Rudy guessed, as it would take to count to a hundred, Ingold sat in the darkness, cradling the friend he had slain. Then he laid the body down gently and got to his feet, his face harsh, terrible, and as empty as that of a stone image.
'Come,' he said quietly. 'If the Dark are below, they'll be after us now.' He disappeared through a doorway, to return a few moments later leading Che. He found and sheathed his sword, while Rudy collected his own weapon and the gold-pronged spear Lohiro had carried.
Outside, the storm continued unabatedly, rain and wind slashing the town with redoubled fury. Ingold pulled up his hood, shadowing his face, and wrapped over it his sodden muffler with its trailing ends. Then he paused, turning back, gazing at Lohiro's body. It lay crumpled in the shadows where the Archmage had fallen, blood pooling on the leaf-strewn floor.
For a long time Ingold stood so, as if fixing some memory in his heart. Then, without warning, the twisted body of the dead Archmage burst into flame, the red-gold light showing clearly the sharp-boned face, the long, elegant hands, and the bright hair now transmuted to real fire. The pyre roared ceiling-high, a spreading column of heat that licked the rafters, its glare illuminating Ingold's calm, almost disinterested face and tortured eyes. Rudy watched until the body began to blacken, flesh curling from the bones in the midst of those topaz veils of heat, then turned away, unable to bear the sight. The room was filled with the odour of charred flesh.
After a time, he heard Ingold lead Che up the stairs, and he followed them out into the rain.
Thus they slipped from Quo like thieves, under cover of the hurricane winds. The Dark they left trapped within the walls of air. They left also in that town the ruins of the world's wizardry and the hopes of magical aid for humankind. Toward morning they made a cold camp in the hills above, and Rudy slept the profound sleep of total exhaustion. He woke in the afternoon to see Ingold sitting as he had last seen him, knees drawn up and arms linked around them, staring sightlessly down at the ruins by the grey ocean and weeping without a sound.
Chapter 15
Firelight touched the rocks of the arroyo and shivered like rain down the strings of Rudy's harp. He respected Ingold's dictum that he should not play it, but night after night, in the windy darkness of the desert, he was drawn to it, unwrapping it from its bindings and testing its twenty-six strings. He learned them as he had learned the runes, each note in its sequence, each with its separate beauty and use.
On the other side of the fire, Ingold was silent, as he had been silent going on five days now.
On the whole, Rudy preferred the old man's silence to his bitter sarcasm, or to that blistering politeness with which he had treated any offer of comfort regarding what had happened at Quo. If Rudy had even doubted that Ingold's nature had its cruel side - which, he supposed, he must have, back in the days when he had been naive - he did not doubt now. There were days when, if he had not been too afraid of the old man, Rudy would have told him to go to hell and left him - except that there was nowhere else to go in the midst of the winter-ridden plains.
Winter had locked down over the empty lands. The sky and ground were alike made of iron, the going slow, the hunting poor. Rudy did most of the hunting, as he did most of everything else. It was he who lay for hours in the brush blinds to shoot meat that Ingold seldom touched, he who washed the stains of Lohiro's blood from the old man's robe and patched the tears in his mantle. When Ingold did eat, it was because Rudy forced him to; when he spoke, it was with an impersonal bitterness that bordered on contempt. He seemed to be drawing further and further into some remote part of himself, walling himself into his private hell of guilt and grief and pain.
And why not? Rudy thought, his mind turning back to the
illusion- circled city on the shores of the Western Ocean, and the body of the golden-haired mage blackening like a straw in the flames. Who's to say Lohiro didn't have the answer? Who's to say he couldn't have given it to us, once the Dark Ones let go of his mind?
If, of course, they really did let go.
And if Ingold didn't simply let him die when he could have saved him, out of rage at his having betrayed them all.
Rudy glanced across the fire once again. Ingold was staring into the flames that were multiplied a hundredfold in his bleak eyes. He looked old, exhausted, and shabby, his long white hair fluttering around the sunken cheeks and brooding eyes. Out in the darkness, the wail of a coyote curled, thin and hopeless, on the wind, the cry of a lost soul wandering dry and empty wastes. The cloud-cover had broken, and the full moon stared down upon them from the rim of the broken-toothed western hills. Rudy wondered what Ingold saw in the blaze.
Was it Quo as it had been in the warm beauty of that last summer, unaware of the horror underlying its heart? Lohiro's empty eyes? Things that could have been, had Ingold thought to send them warning of the Dark? Or the Keep, black amid the snows under remote and freezing stars, now that the wizards of the world could literally be counted on the fingers of one hand?
Ingold, Bektis, Kara, me, and Kara's mother, Rudy enumerated glumly. What the hell kind of chance have we got against all the forces of the Dark? What kind of chance has anyone got?
No wonder Ingold walked in silence, a tumbleweed ghost on the desert road.
Only occasionally would the wizard rouse himself to give lessons in power that were, for days on end, their only means of communication. But his teaching was like everything else, brittle and bitter and cruel. He seemed to care very little whether Rudy learned anything or not; for him, Rudy felt, the lessons were simply a means of temporarily forgetting. He would throw unexplained illusions into Rudy's path, or deliberately wrap himself in a cloaking-spell and leave Rudy to search. For two days he had blindfolded Rudy, forcing him to rely on his other senses as they marched on in sightless silence. Without warning, Ingold had called forth blinding torrents of wind and rain and deadly flash floods in the washes, with which Rudy must cope or drown. By scorn and sarcasm and vicious invective, he pushed the younger man to learn stronger spells and taught him the tricky and terrible secrets of divination by water and bone.