They were all around him-he knew it, but their illusions screened them from his eyes as he prayed that his own covered him. He felt their stirring, though there was nothing that he could fix his eye upon-just a gleam of starlight on something that pulsed wetly and the sudden glitter of acid on chitinous claws. There was a buzzing, humming sensation in his brain... a drift of wind that stank of rotten blood...
Then suddenly it was above him, a delirium-vision of an obscene, squamous bulk, fifteen feet from the tucked, slobbering tentacles of that drooling mouth to the wriggling tip of the spined cable of tail. Huge, clawed legs dangled down, like the feet of a wasp; from them, acid dripped to smoke on the snow.
Rudy shut his teeth hard on a scream. Sweat was freezing on his face, and every muscle in his body fought to remain still against the instincts that shrieked at him to run. The effort and the revulsion at the nearness of that filthy dripping thing brought nausea burning to his throat. More than its evil, more than the terrible danger that breathed like smoke over him, he was filled with sickened loathing of its otherness -its utter alien ness to the world of the visible, the material.. the sane.
Then it was gone. The wind of its departure kicked a stinging gust of snow over him as he slowly folded to his knees in the drifts.
How long he knelt there in the darkness he didn't know. He was trembling uncontrollably, his eyes shut, as if to blot out the memory of that hideous, slobbering bulk swimming against the stars. Stupidly, he recalled a night last spring, a warm California evening, when he and his sister had been headed down the Harbor Freeway in downtown Los Angeles, and the old Chevy had a blowout in the fast lane of the interchange. His sister had managed to pull the veering car under control, to force it out of the hammering madhouse of sixty-mile-an-hour traffic and over onto the shoulder. Then she'd gotten out, calmly checked to see if the rim had been damaged, asked him if he was okay-and folded up on the car's steaming hood and gone into violent hysterics.
Rudy suddenly found himself in sympathy with how she had felt.
Something brushed his face, and he swung around, the cold searing his gasping lungs.
Behind him stood Ingold Inglorion, looking quizzically down at him in the faint blue starlight.
"Are you all right?"
Rudy collapsed slowly back to a sitting position, his gloved hands pressed tightly together to lessen their shaking. He managed to stammer, "Yeah, fantastic. Just give me a minute, then I'll go leap a tall building at a single bound."
The wizard knelt beside him, the full sleeves of his patched brown mantle brushing against him again, warm and rough and oddly reassuring. In spite of the cold, Ingold had pushed the mantle's hood back from his face, and his white hair and scrubby, close-clipped white beard gleamed like frost in the ghostly light.
"You did very nicely," the old man said, in a voice whose mellow beauty was overlaid by a grainy quality, scratchy without being harsh, and pitched, as a wizard's voice could be, for Rudy's ears alone.
"Thanks," Rudy croaked shakily. "But next time I think I'll let you test out your own new spells."
The white eyebrows quirked. Ingold's face as a whole was totally nondescript, redeemed only by the heavy erosion of years and by the curious, uncannily youthful appearance of his eyes.
"Well, I'm certainly not out here because it's the proper phase of the moon for harvesting slippery elm."
Rudy colored a little. "Scratch that," he mumbled. "You shouldn't be out here at all, man. You're the one the Dark Ones have been after."
"All the more reason for me to come," the old man said. "I can't remain walled in the Keep forever. And if it is true, as I suspect, that somehow I hold the key to the defeat of the Dark Ones, at some time or another I shall have to come forth and meet them. I had best assure myself of the efficacy of my cloaking-spells before that time."
Rudy shivered, awed at that matter-of-fact calm in Ingold's tone. Rudy feared the Dark Ones, as all humankind must fear them: the eaters of the flesh and of the mind, the eldritch spawn of the hideous night below the ground; and arcane intelligence beyond human magic or human comprehension. But at least he was reasonably certain that they did not know him-his name, his essence. He knew that he was not the target of their specific malice. It was not his personal flesh
they sought. He stammered, "But Christ, Ingold, you didn't have to come and check out the spell yourself. I mean, hell, if it works for me, it should work for you."
"Possibly," Ingold agreed. "But that is something that no one can ever wholly know." He drew his mantle closer about him. In the dim light, Rudy could see that the wizard was armed; the billowing folds of his outer garment broke over the long, hard line of the sword that he wore belted underneath. His right hand in its faded blue mitten was never far from the sword's grip-smoothed hilt.
"Do you remember how," he went on in his mild voice, "in the mazes of illusion that surrounded the City of Quo, you asked me once for a spell to break the wall of fog?"
"You told me the one I was using already would work just fine," Rudy recalled. "I can't say I was real pleased."
Calmly, the old man removed a speck of snow from his frayed sleeve. "If it is ever my aim to please you, Rudy, shall certainly ask you what methods I should employ." The gleam of mischief in his eyes turned his bearded face absurdly young. "But what I told you then was true. The strength of any spell is the strength of your magic-your spirit. Your power is shaped by your essence. You are your spells."
Rudy was silent, understanding this for the truth as he had not understood it in the mazes of the trackless Seaward Mountains. It was the key to human magic- perhaps the key to all things human.
"Do you feel sure of this spell, Rudy?" the wizard asked quietly. "Could you use
it again?"
"Yeah," Rudy said slowly, after long thought. "Yeah, I think so. I was scared to death, but..."
"But you kept your head," Ingold said. "And you kept your hold over the spell." Crusted frost gleamed in his scrubby beard as he nodded his head. "Do you think you could do so in the Nest of the Dark itself?"
The thought was like a hypo filled with ice water, injected directly into Rudy's heart. "Christ, I don't know! It's..." Then he saw the intentness, the calculation, in those crystal-blue eyes. "Hey, you mean- realty in the Nest of the Dark? I mean, that wasn't just a-a hypothetical question?"
The frost crackled a little as Ingold smiled. "Really, Rudy, you should know me well enough by this time to know that I seldom deal in hypotheses."
"Yeah," Rudy agreed warily. "And that's probably the scariest thing about you."
"It is the most frightening thing about any wizard. A hypothesis to anyone else is merely an overwhelming temptation to a wizard. Do you think you would be able to handle yourself in the Nest of the Dark?"
Rudy swallowed hard. "I think so." The vivid imagination which was the mainspring and curse of the mageborn sent a series of chills scampering up his spine. "That's what this is all about, isn't it?"
Ingold's eyes returned to focus from some private, inner reverie. In the starlight, they seemed bright and preternaturally clear. "The Chancellor Alwir cannot hope to reconquer Gae from the Dark without reconnaissance of their Nest there," he said quietly. "He has chosen Gae, partly because of its importance as the capital of the Realm and partly because it lies at the center of communications.
"But time is short. Our allies, from the Empire of Alketch and from the various landchiefs of the Realm, will be assembling here in the not-too-distant future. You will be leaving for Gae within a day or so."
"Okay," Rudy agreed shakily, with valiant mental adjustments. "Uh-just me?"
Ingold snorted. "Yes, just you, all by yourself," he snapped gruffly. "Of course not! For one thing, Gae is a flooded ruin-you could never hope to find your way through its streets to reach the Nest."