'It was in God's hands.'
'Perhaps that's what you choose to say, but you don't believe it.' The priest started as if he had been burned. 'If you believed it, you wouldn't fear me,' Ingold went on reasonably.
'What do you want?' Wend demanded again in anguish.
Ingold set down the poker. 'I think you know.'
'Who are you?'
'I am a wizard.' Ingold settled back against the wall, the shadows cloaking him.
The priest spoke again, his voice tense and crackling with passion. That's a lie,' he whispered. 'They're all dead. He said so.'
Ingold shrugged. 'He is a wizard also. His name is Rudy Soils. Mine is Ingold Inglorion.'
Rudy heard the harsh gasp of the priest's breath and saw him turn away, his face buried in his hands. His body shook as if with a deadly chill. 'He said they were dead,' Wend repeated in a thin, cracked voice, muffled by his hands. 'And, God forgive me, I rejoiced to hear it. It was a terrible thing, but I was glad to hear that the Lord had finally removed the temptation from me, after all these years. You have no right to bring it back.'
'No,' Ingold agreed quietly. 'But you know as well as I do that God cannot remove temptation. It comes from inside you, and not from any outer cause. And you would
be tempted as long as you lived - every time someone called upon you to use your powers for healing, and in times to come, when one of your people begs you to put the runes on his door to keep the Dark at bay. How could you refuse?'
The young man raised his face from his hands. 'I never would,' he gasped. 'No?'
'I have no power,' the priest whispered hopelessly. 'I gave it up - sacrificed it. I have no power.' He faced Ingold desperately in the wavering shadows, his full lips pressed tight together and trembling. 'That power comes from the Devil, the Lord of Mirrors. Yes, God help me, I am tempted and will-forever be tempted. But I will not trade my soul for power, not even the power to help others. That power comes from the Crooked Side, and I will have no dealings with.it. And then -I dreamed -I saw that city that I have known in my heart all my life, how it would look... And you were there...'
'Do you know why you had the dream?' Ingold's voice was soft, coming from a form that was little more than a disembodied shadow among shadows, with a sunken glint of azure eyes.
'It was a summons,' Wend whispered. 'A need. A call. To go somewhere...'
To go to Renweth Keep at Sarda Pass,' Ingold said, and that deep, grainy voice, though quiet, seemed to fill the tiny room. To held me and Rudy - and whomever else we can find - to drive out the Dark.'
'And what else?' The young man's face shone with sweat, his eyebrows black against the whiteness of his high, shaven crown. To go openly to the Devil? To announce to my Bishop - if he survived - and to anyone else who cares to know that I am apostate?To put myself under judgement as a heretic?'
Rudy, remembering another pair of steely, dark eyes burning out of a shaven skull, reflected that the kid had a point.
'And wrongly,' Wend went on in a whisper. 'Wrongly. This world, when all is said, is an illusion. It will go on without me. My soul is all I have, and if I lose it - it will be forever.'
A long silence followed, with priest and wizard facing each other across the dying ripple of the hearthlight. They were curiously alike, Rudy thought, in their colourless robes. He remembered his own days as a drifter on the California highways, drawn by yearnings that could find no expression, an outcast because nothing made sense in terms of what he knew to be true. He tried to picture a life of fighting those yearnings, tried to imagine deliberately putting the powers of wizardry aside.
A mage will have magic...
He could not conceive of putting it aside.
Ingold rose. 'I am sorry,' he said quietly. 'You have temptations enough; to add to them would be poor payment for your hospitality. We will go.'
'No.' Brother Wend caught his sleeve as he moved to wake Rudy, though a moment before the priest would have cut off his hand rather than touch the old man.
'Wizard or devil, I cannot turn you out into the night. I -I'm sorry. It's only that I've fought it so long.'
Ingold moved his hand as if to lay it upon Wend's shoulder, but the young priest turned away, retreating into the shadows at the far end of the room where his own narrow pallet was. Rudy heard the creak of ropes as he lay down, followed by the slurred whisper of blankets. After a moment Ingold returned to his seat by the hearth, drawing his knees up before him and evidently preparing to stare broodingly into the fire until dawn.
Silence settled over the narrow cell as the fire burned low, but Rudy could hear no alteration in the young priest's shaken breathing and knew that he did not sleep.
'And he was right,' Rudy concluded, speaking of it many days later. 'That's the damn thing. You remember how Govannin's always saying, "The Devil guards his own." Well, he doesn't, not anymore.' Snow lay deep around them, covering the foothills through which they had trudged for two laborious days, blanketing the steep, rocky rise of the ground. Above them the black cliffs were criss-crossed with heavy, white ledges of snow, and the dark furring of trees was weighted with it. A smother of clouds hid the higher peaks and filled the rocky notch of Sarda Pass with nebulous grey.
Rudy's breath burned in his lungs. His long, wet hair hung damply around his face and over the collar of his buffalohide coat. The steel points of his pronged staff winked faintly in the wan afternoon light. Under the burden of books they'd brought all that long way from Quo, his shoulder ached, but his mind circled gull-like around a confusion of thoughts.
We're home.
Home to Minalde.
And to what else?
By now, he was long used to carrying on both sides of the conversation. 'You said to me once to remember that we were outcasts. But that was back when we thought we'd have the Archmage to help us. And now we've got nothing, literally nothing. Anybody who declares himself a wizard is asking for it.' He shrugged. 'I don't blame Wend for sitting tight.'
'Nor do I.'
He glanced around, startled at the response. Ingold had been silent for days.
To his surprise, the old man continued. 'In fact, I should be amazed if anyone shows up at all. Kara and her mother might,' he added reflectively, 'if nothing else happened to them. But - the opposition to wizardry will have redoubled. And those alive to hear my summoning would be those who could not overcome their fear of opposition in the first place.'
Ingold came up beside him, leaning on his staff, bowed under the weight of his burden of books, like a very old and very wretched beggarman, with his long white hair, grubby beard, and stained and tattered cloak. In the shadows between the rim of
his hood and his ragged muffler, his eyes still looked sunken and tired. But at least he was talking.
Ingold went on. 'Maybe now you understand my impulse to become a hermit.'
'Well, let me tell you, the way you've been acting, I was damn tempted to let you do it.'
The wizard ducked his head. 'I am sorry,' he apologized quietly. 'It was good of you to put up with the grieving of an old man.'
Rudy shrugged. 'Well,' he said judiciously, 'since I've been perfect myself all my life, I guess I can find it in my heart to forgive you.'
Thank you,' the wizard replied gravely. 'You are very kind. But having heard you play the harp, I feel your assertion of perfection is rather rash.'
Their eyes met, and Rudy grinned. 'I had to get back at you somehow, didn't I?'
Ingold shuddered. 'In that case I doubly apologize,' he said. 'If that was meant as retribution, my conduct must have been execrable indeed.'