A drift of wind stirred his mantle and ruffled Rudy's long hair. Rudy's muscles locked at the touch of it, but he made no move. A moment later he saw the flickering shadow of a little whirlwind dancing away over the snow. He let his breath out in a shimmer of silvery smoke.
"Of the mages who survived the coming of the Dark Ones," the wizard continued quietly, "less than a dozen have powers strong enough for me to have made this test on them. They, too, are abroad in the Vale tonight. Of those, only two hail from Gae-Saerlinn. who was a healer in the lower part of town, and me."
Rudy nodded. He'd become acquainted in the last week with the other survivors of the world's wizardry. Saerlinn was a fair-haired, rather nervous young man, a few years older than his own twenty-five. He was unusual not only in the fact that he wore spectacles-uncommon enough among mages, who could generally adjust their own senses and faculties-but also because he'd managed to preserve
them unbroken on the long and desperate trek from Gae to the Vale of Renweth.
"At one time I considered leading the Gae reconnaissance myself," the old man went on, and Rudy cast him a startled, protesting glance. "But aside from the fact that, as the head of the Wizards' Corps, I could ill be spared, I do take a rather academic and refined interest in the preservation of my own skin. Since the Dark are hunting me-for whatever reason-I would be in twice the danger of detection within the Nest. It would be folly to tempt them."
"It would be sort of pointless to get yourself killed on a routine mission," Rudy admitted.
Ingold smiled. "Precisely," he agreed. "I'm sending Thoth to head the reconnaissance of Penambra-he knows that city from his early days as a healer there. And I'm having the Raider shaman. Shadow of the Moon, take a couple of scouts to the Nest in the Vale of the Dark, some twenty miles north of here. She knows woodcraft-among other things."
In the black wall of woods to their right, branches stirred suddenly, rustling in dark, aimless winds. Clouds were moving down from the glacier-locked mountains that loomed above them to the west, swallowing the few remaining stars. Cold cut through Rudy's coat like a skinning knife.
"Kara of Ippit will go with you and Saerlinn to Gae," Ingold went on. "She's had the most formal training as a mage. Unless one counts the Chancellor Alwir's Court Mage Bektis, of course."
Rudy sniffed. He did not like Bektis. "If he's out here tonight, I'll eat my boots without even scraping the mud off 'em."
"If that's the case, I regret to inform you that you're going to miss a meal." Ingold sighed. "Bektis knows Gae, too. But I'm sure that his ever-pressing duties will not permit..."
He looked up suddenly, the words dying on his lips. A scream split the mountain stillness, a hopeless, echoing shriek that scaled up to a frenzied pitch of horror, then jarred and broke. Rudy sprang to his feet, the hair prickling on his neck, and was instantly arrested by the iron grip on his arm.
"Be still, you fool."
A figure broke from the edge of the woods on the far side of the valley, black and tiny against the hoarfrost landscape. A man , Rudy thought, watching the way he ran, young and slender, stumbling over his own cloak in his terrified haste.
A swirl of darkness passed like a whirlwind over the snow. The fugitive screamed again as he ran, his arms outstretched, plunging blindly down the hill toward the black monolith of the Keep of Dare. Darkness swelled from the trees behind him, a strange shifting of images that even the dark-sight of a wizard could not pierce. Something flashed, wet and sticky, and a last piercing cry rang out, as if ripped from the dissolving flesh. Then there was silence, and something scattered over the half-melted snow.
Even at this distance, Rudy could smell the blood on the backwash of the erratic winds.
"Who was it?" Rudy asked.
His voice was pitched low, audible only to certain beasts, or to another wizard. But still his words sounded sacrilegiously loud in the horrible stillness of the hillside.
Ingold straightened up from the sodden, stinking mess in the torn snow. Even the bones they had found had not only been stripped of flesh but seemed strangely deformed, as if the bone tissue itself had been melted. Nauseated, Rudy looked away from the black, half-liquefied remains, to Ingold's impassive face. Darkness masked the wizard's features, but mageborn eyes could penetrate ordinary night; Rudy could see no change of expression in that lined, nondescript countenance.
But then, he supposed, after what had taken place in the ruins of the City of Wizards, it was not likely that the old man would ever be shaken up by much of anything again.
"We shall come out with the others, when the sun is in the sky, to burn what remains," Ingold said quietly. "To do so now would only bring the Dark Ones once more upon us."
He dropped what he held in his hand back onto the fetid little heap. Round, discolored lenses flashed in the starlight in their twisted frames. Ingold said, "It seems that I shall be visiting the Dark Ones at Gae, after all."
Dawn was just thinning the stygian overcast of the night when Rudy and Ingold again reached the gates of the Keep. Against a charcoal sky, the ebony mass reared like a small mountain, close to a hundred feet from the top of the rock knoll on which it stood to its flat, snow-powdered roof and nearly half a mile in length. Its black, windowless walls faintly mirrored the trampled snow and dark trees that lay below it. Only its western face was broken by a gate and a short flight of broad steps. From a distance, the torchlight flickering in the square opening gave it the appearance of a single, small, baleful eye in the midst of an otherwise utterly featureless face.
As Rudy climbed the muddy path past the goat pens and ramshackle workshops that surrounded the Keep in a vast zone of trash, he could see most of the Wizards' Corps assembled on the icy steps. He could pick out those who, like himself, had spent the night outside. Kara of Ippit, tall and homely, in her threadbare mantle and the two cardigans her mother had recently knitted for her. Thoth the Scribe, called the serpentmage, sole survivor of the massacre at Quo, austere as a bald vulture-god of antiquity, his topaz eyes illuminating his narrow white face like a jack-o-lantern's. Dakis the Minstrel. A little fourteen-year-old witch-child from the north called Ilae, her dark eyes peering from behind a mane of red tangles. Others, a pitiful few, it seemed, huddling in the shadows like refugees in an old photograph of Ellis Island. And behind them stood those survivors of the massacre by the Dark who had been judged too lacking in power to participate in this trial of spells: itinerant conjurers, spellweavers, weatherwitches, and goodywives, the lower end of the spectrum of power that had not answered the dead Archmage's fatal summons to the City of Quo.
Rudy's heart sank at the sight of them. So few , he thought. And what the hell can we do, anyway, against the might of the Dark ?
Other shadows appeared in the firelit tunnel that pierced the wall, leading from the outer gates to the inner, their forms ghostlike in the steam where the warmer air within came in contact with the outer cold-the day watch of the Guards, rubbing their bruises from the morning's weapons practice and cursing one another and their deceptively elfin instructor good-naturedly. The Keep herdkids went tearing out in an enthusiastic boiling of infant energy to throw snowballs and milk goats. Soap boilers, hunters, woodcutters, and tanners emerged, men and women plying what trades they could from the scanty resources of this bitter and isolated valley.
And among them were a dark-haired girl in a black fur cloak and a peasant woman's rainbow skirts and a tall, rather gawky woman some five years older, dressed in an outsize black uniform and white quatrefoil emblem of the Guards.