'Hey!' Rudy protested.
'It's the first time in my life that I've been thankful that I'm almost completely tone-deaf,' the wizard mused - not quite truthfully, Rudy knew. 'So I suppose there is good to be derived from every state.'
'Well, then you and I better think real hard about what kind of good is to be derived from being in the doghouse,' Rudy said grimly. 'Because that's sure as hell where we're gonna be when Alwir finds out what happened at Quo.' Then, in a different voice, he asked, 'What did happen at Quo, Ingold?' Wind keened through the trees above the Pass, but only a breath of it touched the travellers labouring through the drifted snow. The clouds moved down the mountains, as grey and chill as the fogs that had surrounded Quo. 'Was Lohiro acting for the Dark or was that the Dark themselves?'
There was a long pause while Ingold scanned the tracks of rabbit and bird in the snow of the drifts, as if judging matters pertaining to wind and weather. When he finally spoke, his scratchy voice was tired. 'I think it was the Dark themselves.' He sighed. To this day, I don't know if they did release him, there at the end. If they did, I could have brought him back with us. At least we could then have had the benefit of his wisdom and the knowledge of whatever it was that the wizards unearthed before they were destroyed. But I couldn't risk it, Rudy,' he said in a soft, urgent tone. 'I couldn't risk it.'
'Hell, no,' Rudy agreed. 'With all his knowledge and the Dark behind him - no wonder every building in the town was smashed, the wizards destroyed, and Forn's Tower blown to flinders. If your power could hold them at bay before the gates of the Keep, his power could only double theirs.'
'As their powers could baffle, or channel, the powers of wizardry near their Nests. I should have guessed that when Hoofprint of the Wind spoke of the Nest as a place
of seeing. That was how Quo was spoken of, back in the old days - and of Gae, incidentally. It needed all the forces of the Dark to break Gae,' he added. 'It wasn't ill-planned, Rudy, the final blow at Gae, Quo, Penambra - Dele, too, from what Kara said - all within a few days. The back of organized resistance was broken, and the hope of magical aid destroyed.'
Ingold sighed, his breath a thin rag of cloud in the fog. 'I had to kill him, Rudy. I couldn't let them have his powers. Perhaps he was still some sort of prisoner in his own body. Certainly - whatever it was - it had his speech, his mannerisms, his skills. But it didn't have his knowledge. Lohiro would have known that Anamara the Red and I were old classmates from years ago.' He held up his hands, the first faint smile Rudy had seen glimmering wryly through his overgrown beard. 'She knitted me these mittens the year we were lovers, back at Quo. For the fourth most powerful mage in the West of the World, she was very domestic. Lohiro would never have spoken to me casually of her death.'
'Was that what tipped you off? Rudy asked quietly.
'Partly. And - I didn't like his eyes. But from what he had been through, I didn't know.'
'So you trapped him.'
Ingold nodded miserably and trudged on through the snow. Che hung balkily back at the full stretch of his lead -neither of them had ever managed to train the stupid creature to follow, a failure that in his darker moments Rudy was inclined to attribute to the malice of the Bishop of Gae. 'I trapped him,' Ingold said, 'and I killed him. Maybe they did let him go. He spoke of the Dark as he was dying - that they are not many, but one. Maybe he had been one of them and, if I had healed him, we could have learned from him what they know, why they rose - and why they departed.'
'Yeah,' Rudy assented bluntly, 'and maybe if you healed him, the wizards of Quo wouldn't have been the only ones to seal the Dark into the citadel with them.'
Ingold sighed. 'Maybe.'
'What else could you have done?
Ingold shook his head. 'Been more clever to begin with. Realized the connection between the so-called fortunate places and the Dark. Pursued my own researches at Quo, instead of playing politics halfway across the continent. But the answer is gone, if there ever was an answer. The Dark made sure of that. And perhaps there never was an answer to begin with.'
'Sure there was,' Rudy said. He glanced over at the old man as they clambered up the last steep grade of the road, the crusted snow squeaking under their boots. 'And there is. There's got to be.'
'Does there? Ingold scrambled through the drifts at his heels, dragging the unwilling burro with his load of books behind. 'At one time I used to think there was a reason for things happening as they do and that somewhere all questions have answers. I'm not so sure of that anymore. What makes you think this one does?
'Because even after Quo was destroyed, the Dark have been after you. They've chased you from here to hell and back again to keep you from finding that answer. The Dark think you have it, and they've been one jump ahead of us through this whole game.'
Ingold sighed and stood still in the drifted road, his head bowed and his face hidden in the shadows of his hood. A flurry of snow blew down on them from above and brought with it the smell of the high peaks, of glacier ice and rock. The fog surrounded them, grey, drifting wraiths haunting the gathering darkness in the throat of the Pass. 'So we're back where we began,' he said at last. 'With the question and the answer. I'm the one they want, but they've wiped out everyone but me. Is that question or answer?
Rudy shrugged. 'Which one are you going to make it?'
Ingold glanced up at him sharply and continued walking without a reply. Rudy followed behind, testing with his staff the solid ground under the blankets of drifts. Evening was drawing on. The sharp, chill dampness of the mists seemed to eat into his bones.
Ahead of him, the old man stopped; and following his gaze, Rudy looked up to the grey boil of clouds that shrouded the Pass.
Out of the evening mists, dark forms were materializing there, melting into being from shadow and wind. A draught caught a cloak and blew it out into a great dark wing; the gathering forms solidified, massing against the fog. Ingold stood still, his hood fallen back from his face, doubt and fear and a strange, wild hope moving behind those still eyes.
Rudy came softly up behind him. 'Is it the Bishop's people?'
Ingold whispered, 'I don't know...'
Then a man's voice rolled down the Pass, deep and harsh, like the sound a stone might make when it was dislodged in an avalanche from the side of its parent cliff. 'INGOLD!' the voice cried, and Ingold's face was suddenly white in the grey light, looking upward at that assembled host.
Suddenly he shouted, 'Thoth!' and struggled forward through the drifts at a speed which Rudy knew he could never match. Like a gangling bird of prey, the tallest of the watchers detached himself from their midst, striding down to Ingold in a black billow of robes. They met like long-lost brothers and embraced in the flurrying fog and snow, while the others came streaming down the path on Thoth's heels.
Coming closer, Rudy saw Kara among them, her scarred face smiling hesitantly. The others he did not know, but he knew who they must be. There were at least thirty of them, of all ages, both sexes, and all kinds; many of them were old, but one or two seemed very young. Thoth and Ingold still had their arms around each other's shoulders. Thoth, with his hood thrown back, was revealed to be a grim old man whose shaven head and beaked nose reminded Rudy of Bishop Govannin; his eyes were the colour of pale honey.
Out of the crowd, another form pushed itself, an incredibly tiny, impossibly ancient little hermit, so shrivelled with age that he looked as if he'd dried and bleached for a hundred years in the desert sun.
'Kta!' Ingold cried delightedly, throwing his free arm around the narrow shoulders. 'You came after all!' And the tiny old man smiled his sweet, toothless smile and nodded.
'Rudy,' Ingold said, and Rudy mused to himself that in the last six weeks he'd probably seen more emotion out of the usually unruffled wizard than anyone else had seen in decades. 'Rudy, these are our people.' Ingold had one arm around Thoth and the other around the ancient Kta, and among and between them and this knot of enchanted strangers on the snowy Pass, there seemed to lie an unbreakable bond, a chain made of light that bound them together. Ingold's face almost shone with joy. 'These are the wizards who came in answer to my call. They've been waiting here to welcome us back to the Keep. My friends,' he said, 'this is Rudy. He is my student and one of us.'