with this,' he said. The Icefalcon took it and turned it over in curious fingers. It was dark and smoke-stained, obviously old. Rudy had the impression that it was shaped like some living thing, but it was neither human nor any animal that he recognized. 'It is imbued with the Rune of the Veil,' Ingold explained, 'the rune that turns aside the eyes and the mind. It will by no means make you invisible, but it may help you on your journey.'
The Icefalcon inclined his head in thanks, while Ingold pulled on his worn blue mittens and wound ten feet of knitted grey muffler around his neck, so that the ends fluttered like banners in the chilly winds. Around the corner of the Keep, a gaggle of the herdkids appeared, Keep orphans in charge of looking after the stock. Most of them were running aimlessly, shrieking with laughter and hurling snowballs as if they hadn't been playing keep-away with death through the night. But a couple of them were leading a donkey, a scrawny miserable beast with the Earth Cross of the Faith branded on one bony hip. The donkey represented a major victory for Alwir and Ingold, since the Church owned most of the stock in the Kep. Rudy suspected Govannin had had the thing exorcised and blessed.
Other shadows appeared in the darkness of the gates. Alwir stepped forth into the wan light, dark and elegant and as unmarred as the walls, followed by Janus, Melantrys, Gnift of the Guards, and Tomec Tirkenson, who in a few days would himself be leaving with his troops, his stock, and his followers, to take the long road over the Pass to Gettlesand. Of Govannin the Bishop of Gae, there was no sign. True to her word, she would have no truck with the tools of Satan, nor lend her countenance to their endeavour.
Ingold left his friends and walked up the steps toward the Chancellor, Rudy heard the drift of words, Alwir's voice deep and melodious, Ingold's reply warm and grainy. He glanced sideways at Gil and saw her looking hard and strained, her eyes narrowed and cold. He felt the tension rising off her like smoke, misery and worry and fear. Well, hell, why not? he thought. If the old man buy sit out on the plains, she's in for a long stay.
We both are. The thought was frightening.
'Hey, spook!'
She glanced forbiddingly at him.
'Take care of yourself while we're gone, okay?"
She evidently told herself to relax and did so, slightly. 'I'm not the one who's gonna need taking care of,' she said. 'All I have to do is sit tight and keep the door shut.'
It was on the tip of Rudy's tongue to ask Gil to look after Aide for him, but on second thought, he couldn't imagine someone as tough and hard-hearted as Gil getting along with the shy, retiring Minalde.
Gil sighed. 'Have a good trip, punk,' she added. 'Don't screw up and turn yourself into a frog.'
'At this point, I doubt he could manage even that,' Ingold said judiciously, coming back down to them. The rulers of the Keep were disappearing back into the shadows of the gates. After a moment the Icefalcon followed them, his dark cloak sweeping the loose powder snow that sprinkled the steps. 'For the present he's quite harmless.' 'Thanks loads,' Rudy grumbled. 'Enjoy it,' Ingold urged. There's a great deal to be said for being unable to destroy inadvertently those whom you love. And you surely will not be harmless by the time we return, if we return.'
The pair of you,' Rudy sighed, 'are the worst couple of pessimists I've ever met in my life. No wonder you get along so well.'
Gil and Ingold unconsciously closed ranks against the common foe. 'Clear analysis of any situation,' Ingold declared, 'is often mistaken for pessimism.' The two shouldn't be confused,' Gil added. 'I'll explain the difference to you one day.' Thanks,' Rudy said glumly. 'I'll look forward to it.' He turned and started down the steps. For a moment Ingold and Gil stood alone before the doors of the Keep, but Rudy was collecting the lead-rope of the burro from the head herdkid and did not see what, if anything, passed between them there. A moment later the wizard came down to join him, huddling deeper into his dark mantle against the stinging wind. As they plowed their way along the buried path toward the road that would take them through and over Sarda Pass, Rudy glanced back once, to see Gil standing on the steps, her bruised hands tucked into her sword belt, watching them go. An icy skiff of breeze dashed blown snow into his eyes; he thought he saw another shape, black-cloaked and small, standing in the vast shadows of the gates; but when he looked again, there was no sign.
Chapter 3
Forever after, Rudy's memories of the journey to Quo were memories of the wind. It never ceased, as integral a part of that flat, brown, featureless world as the endless ripple of the dried grasses or the bleak, unbroken line where the dark planes of ground and overcast sky met in an infinity of cold and emptiness. The wind blew from the north always, as bitterly cold as the frozen breath of outer space. It streamed down off the great ice fields where, Ingold said, the sun had not shone in a thousand years and where not even the woolliest mammoth could survive. It roared like a river in spate down eight hundred miles of unbroken flatlands, to bite the flesh to the bone. Ingold said that he could not remember a winter when it had blown so cold or so steadily, nor a time when the snows had fallen this far south. Neither in his memory, he said, nor in the memory of any that he had ever spoken to.
'If it's usually even half this bad, it's no surprise we haven't met anybody,' Rudy commented, huddling as close to their wind-flattened fire as he could without the risk of self-immolation. They had made camp in a rolling depression of ground that Ingold identified as a beast wallow of some sort -bison or gelbu. 'Even without the Dark Ones, this part of the country would be a hell of a place to try and make a living.'
There are those who do,' the wizard replied without looking up. Wind twisted their fire into brief yellow ribbons that licked the dust. By the restless light, only the prominences of his curiously reticent face could be made out - the tip of his nose, the wide-set flattened triangles of the cheekbones, and the close, secretive mouth. These lands are too hard for the plough and too dry for regular farming, but in the south and out in the deserts, there are colonies of silver miners; and here, close to the mountains, lie the cattle lands and the horse lands of the Realm. The plainsmen are a hardy breed,' he said, strong fingers
twisting at the leaves of the fresh-water mallows he was braiding into a strand, 'as well they have to be.'
Rudy watched him weaving the plants together and picked out by the leaping glow of the fire the shapes of the seeds, the petals, leaf and pod and stamen, identifying and fixing the plant in his mind and recalling what Ingold had told him about its curative properties. 'Are we still in the Realm of Darwath?' he asked.
'Officially,' Ingold said. 'The great landchiefs of the plains owed allegiance to the High King at Gae - in fact, as a legal entity, the Realm stretches to the Western Ocean, for the Prince-Bishop of Dele takes - took - his laws from Gae. But Gettlesand and the lands along the Alketch border have carried on a long battle with the Empire to the south, and I doubt that the breach will be healed, whatever Alwir's policies may be.' He glanced up, a bright glint of crystal blue between the shadows of his hood and the muffler that wrapped the lower part of his face, the firelight reddish gold on his long, straight eyelashes. 'But as you can see,' he went on, 'the plains themselves are all but deserted.'
Rudy selected a long stick and poked at the tiny fire. 'How come? I mean, I see all these animals, antelope and bison and jillions of different kinds of birds. You could make a pretty good living in this part of the country.'
'You could,' Ingold agreed mildly. 'But it's very easy to die in the plains. Have you ever seen an ice storm? You get them in the north. Once in the lands around the White Lakes I found the remains of a herd of mammoth, chunks of frozen flesh scattered in head-high snow. The beasts had been literally ripped to shreds by the inferno of the winds. I've heard stories that the cold in the centre of those storms is such that grazing animals will be frozen solid so swiftly that they do not even fall, but stand, turned to ice and half-buried in snow, with the flowers they were eating frozen in their mouths. And the storms strike without warning, out of a clear sky.'