'You think there's anybody home?'
Moonlight drenched the town before them, a collection of little adobe boxes climbing the hills in back of the road. The distant trickle of water and thick clusters of date palms, black against the icy, glowing sky, marked where the stream came down out of the hills. Several houses had been blown apart by the Dark; but, by the look of them, it hadn't been recently. First quarter moon oj'autumn? 'Rudy wondered. Most of the bricks had been pillaged to reinforce the buildings that remained, turning them into little individual fortresses covered on the outside from foundation to rooftree with elaborately painted designs, pictures, and religious symbols. On the nearest one, a beautiful woman stood with her feet on the back of a crooked devil, her left hand raised against a swarm of inaccurate, fishlike representations of the Dark Ones, her right arm and cloak sheltering a crowd of kneeling supplicants. By the light of the waning and cloud-crossed moon, the painting had a startling and primitive beauty, the
colours lost in the moonlight but the outlines of the figures strikingly clear. For some reason, it reminded Rudy of the runes on the Keep doors.
'Possibly,' Ingold replied, in answer to his question. 'But I hardly think they will unbar their doors at night.'
'It's you and me for the Church, then,' Rudy sighed, and started off through the shadows of the narrow streets, with Ingold drifting like a ghost at his heels. The poison, Rudy thought, was working its way out of the old man's system; if he seldom spoke, at least he seemed to realize whom he was talking to when he did. But Rudy missed his humour, the wry fatalism of his outlook, and the brief, flickering grin that so changed his nondescript face.
When they reached the Church, however, Ingold surprised Rudy by leading the way around to the back, where a narrow cell was built on to the rear of the fortresslike structure. He knocked on the heavy door. There was movement inside and the sound of sliding bars. The door was opened quickly and quickly closed behind them.
A short and slightly chubby young priest had let them in, a candle in his hand. 'Be welcome...' he began, and then saw Ingold's face. In the soft amber light, the blood drained from his own face.
The priest's sudden silence called Ingold from his thoughts, and he looked at the young man, puzzled.
The priest whispered, 'It was you.'
Ingold frowned. 'Have we met?'
The priest turned hastily away and fumblingly set the candle on the room's small table. 'No no, of course not. I - please be welcome in this house. It is late for travellers -like yourselves -' He barred the door behind them, and Rudy saw that his hands were shaking. 'I am Brother Wend,' he said, turning back and revealing an earnest, young face for a man in his early twenties. He was wearing the grey robe of a Servant of the Church. His head was shaved; but, by- the colour of his black eyebrows and sincere brown eyes, Rudy guessed his hair had been black or dark brown, like his own.
'I am the priest of this village,' Brother Wend said, babbling to cover up nervousness or fear. 'The only one now, I'm afraid. Will you sup?'
'We've eaten, thanks,' Rudy said, which was true - and besides, he reflected, if things here were as bad as he'd seen them in the Keep, food was tight all over. 'All we ask is a bed on your floor and stabling for our burro.'
'Certainly - of course.'
The priest went with him to put Che in the stables. While Rudy bedded the donkey down, he filled the priest in on all the news he could - of the fall of Gae, the retreat to Renweth, Alwir's army, and the destruction of Quo. He did not mention that Ingold was a wizard, nor indicate his own powers. Ingold, after the briefest exchange of amenities, had withdrawn to sit beside the small fire on the hearth and brood in silence. But throughout the evening, as Rudy and Brother Wend talked quietly in the
shadows of the little room, the young priest's eyes kept straying back to Ingold, as if trying to match the man with some memory, and Rudy could see that the memory frightened him.
Rudy was just settling himself to sleep on the floor near the hearth when hurried knocking sounded at the door. Without hesitation, Brother Wend rose and slid back the bolts to let in two small children from the darkness outside. They were a pair of girls, eight and nine years of age, sandy-haired and hazel-eyed like the people of Gettlesand. In a babbling treble duet they outlined a confused tale of yellow sickness and fever and their mother and their little sister Danila, and last summer and tonight, clutching at the young man's sleeves and staring up at him with wide, frightened eyes. Wend nodded, murmuring soothingly to them, and turned back to his guests.
'I must go,' he said softly.
'One or the other of us will let you back in,' Rudy promised. 'Go carefully.'
When the priest had gone, Rudy got up to bar the door behind him. 'Are you going to sleep?' he asked the silent figure by the hearth.
Ingold, staring into the fire, shook his head. He seemed hardly to have heard.
Rudy slid back into his abandoned blankets before they had a chance to grow cold and pillowed his head on the heavy volumes he'd carried from Quo - the only use, so far, that he'd seen for them. 'You know that kid from some-place?' he asked.
Again Ingold shook his head.
Rudy had carried on a lot of these one-sided conversations in the last three weeks. Occasionally, he'd pursued them until he got an answer of some sort, usually monosyllabic, but tonight he gave it up. When he closed his eyes, Ingold was still brooding over whatever it was that he saw in the flames.
Rudy wondered what it was he sought there, but had never asked.
His mind went back over the glimpses that his own fire-watching had yielded, glimpses of Minalde mostly, scattered but comforting: Aide combing her hair by the embers of her small hearth, wrapped in her white wool robe, and singing to Tir, who crawled busily around the shadowy room; Aide sitting with her feet up in the dim study behind the Guards' quarters, reading aloud while Gil took notes, surrounded by a clutter of books and tablets; seeing Gil look up and grin and make somejoke, and Aide laugh; and once, frighteningly, Aide in a passionate argument with her brother, tears running down her white, furious face while he stood with his arms folded, shaking his head in cold denial. The images followed Rudy down into darkness, mingling with others: the empty Nest on the wind-blown desert to the north; the empty streets of Quo; the startled look in Brother Wend's big dark eyes when he had opened the door; and the way he'd whispered in terror, 'It was you.'
'Yes,' Ingold's voice said, soft and infinitely tired. 'It was me.'
Blinking in surprise, Rudy tasted the heaviness of lost sleep in his mouth and saw that the priest had returned. Ingold was barring the door behind him; in the shadows
thrown by the waning fire, his robes seemed to be dyed in blood.
The priest spoke shakily. 'What do you want of me?'
Defiance and terror mingled in the young man's voice. Ingold regarded him quietly for a moment, his arms folded, his scarred hands looking very bony and worn in the red flickering of the light. But he only asked, 'She's better, isn't she?'
'Who?'
'Those children's mother.'
The priest licked his lips nervously. 'Yes, by the grace of God.'
Ingold sighed and returned to his seat by the hearth, drawing his patched, stained mantle, which he'd been using for an extra blanket, back up around his shoulders. 'It wasn't the grace of God, though,' he said quietly. 'At least not in the sense that it's usually meant. They didn't come to ask for the sacraments, even though you know as well as I do that the yellow sickness, once it takes hold, is almost invariably fatal. They asked you to heal her, as you healed their little sister some months ago.' He reached across, picked up the poker, and stirred the fire, its sudden, leaping light doing curious things to the lines and scars of his hollowed face. He glanced back at Wend. 'Didn't you?'