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

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 center 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.”
    “That would sure kill the property values,” Rudy assented with a shiver. But something undefined stirred in his memory, something he had read, or had heard read to him… Wild David's Body Shop in Fontana came back to him, with himself slouched in the erupted mess of split vinyl and filthy padding of David's old swivel chair, leafing through decayed copies of the Reader's Digest while a crowd of the local bikers argued profanely about what they wanted him to paint on the tank of somebody's Harley…
    “And if you haven't seen the effects of an ice storm,” Ingold continued, “at least you have seen the work of the White Raiders.”
    An almost physical memory returned to Rudy in a rush—the sweetness of the opalescent mist of the river valleys below Karst, and the sour tang of nausea in his throat. The drift of smoke in the foggy air, the bloody ruin of what had been a human being, the raucous laughter of the carrion crows, and Ingold, like a gray ghost in the pewter light, his robe beaded with dew and a tag of bloody leather in his hands, saying to Janus, “This is the work of the White Raiders…”
    Rudy shivered. “Who are the White Raiders?” he asked.
    The old man shrugged. “What can I tell you of them?” he replied. “They are the People of the Plains, the kings of the wind. They say that once upon a time their home was only in the far north, in the high meadows along the rim of the ice. But they haunt all the northern plains now and, as we have seen, have begun to invade the river valleys at the heart of the Realm.”
    On the edge of the narrow circle of the firelight, the donkey Rudy had named Che Guevara snorted and stamped at some sound in the distant night, his long ears laid back along his head. Distantly, Rudy caught the howling of prairie wolves. “You know,” he said with forced casualness, “I don't think the whole time we were on the road down from Karst I ever actually saw a White Raider. I knew they were following the train, but I never saw one.”
    “Well, they're most dangerous when you don't see them.” Ingold smiled. “And you're wrong, in any case. You did see one. The Icefalcon is a White Raider.”
    Of course
    
     , Rudy