Darwath 2 - The Walls Of The Air by Barbara Hambly Read Free Book Online Page A

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. 'Tor 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 Three
    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 wooliest 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 plow and too dry for regular fanning, 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