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Rudy Solis and Ingold Inglorion entered the City of Wizards just after noon of the following day Fro that srouped around its faed from veils of pewter, pearl, and white

Even from the hills, Rudy did not think he had ever seen a place so completely destroyed by the Dark

In Gae, the houses had been crumpled, smoke-blackened, or had had holes blown in roofs and walls Here he could not find a single dwelling that had been left standing, not a roof that had not been ripped fro violence into the rubble-strewn streets In the da the broken stone

He and Ingold stood for a long tirass rippled around their feet, but there was no sound here but theof the sea birds and the boom of breakers The air smelt of salt A drift ofthe bare bones with a ulls rose froulls, wailing in their thin piping voices, hung ainst a featureless sky Rudy wondered what the place had looked like the day after the attack had happened Had the gulls blanketed the town like a visitation of death angels to pick the corpses, or had the rats been there first?

He hardly dared look at Ingold

The oldthat had been carved frorey of the sky see only the blue of his eyes under their short reddish lashes There was no expression on his face,

but not for anything in the world would Rudy have spoken to hi the doard path without a word

Bodies were scattered throughout the city Froht over the them to pieces Mechanically, Rudy identified tracks -fox, rat, coyote, and crow After this long in the open, there was little stink and few flies He could see Ingold checking the signs as une how the fire blackening striped the walls where it had been thrown or swept froular pattern to concentrate on the roof beams, as it did in other places where the inhabitants had siht, and how the bones lay in groups of two or three at ly The wizards, it seeether to make a stand

It surprised Rudy a little how small Quo was At no time could the City of Wizards have housed old, about a third izards or students Srouped around a main square or bordered the crooked lanes that trailed on out of the town Only in the centre of Quo were there large buildings, whose splintered frarirown rubble of the streets There the school proper ra with a long colonnade, through whose tinted pillars could be gliatehouse slumped like a shty building of many storeys and turrets, all but buried now under the trailing vines of its feral roof gardens To the right, at the end of the long curve of the bay, the black stump of a truncated tower stood alone on the farthest point of land

It was for this tower that Ingold unhesitatingly made

Since they had entered Quo, he had not spoken, and his face was still and very calers

and had not been the only home his heart had known for most of his adulthood The torn heon&039;s blood, brushed passingly over a picked skull and broken staff that lay half-buried in rubble and weeds Behind hihtened sense of deja vu

Forn&039;s Toas also s it were little ether, built on the big square knoll that jutted out into the sea The tower itself, or as left of it, looked no larger than one fair-sized room stacked on top of another The black, curved shell of its walls extended thirty feet into the air Fro up its side As he clih the ruins, he looked out over the half- down fro patterns of inlaid stone and, half-buried at the tide line, the remains of a crab-eaten skeleton

The two s surrounding it had been blasted and gutted, and the black stone spew of it lay scattered everywhere Granted, the place was built later than the Keep, and by another technology entirely, Rudy thought, stooping to pick up a splinter of rock and then hurrying his steps to catch up with Ingold again But it e could have kept the Dark out, as the spells Ingold set closed the doors to the the line of corridors he had traversed in other years with the light, unthinking tread of adoors he had knocked at casually, back in the days when those roolanced at the open ruins and the cracked walls

He&039;s like a htened He&039;s still numb from the shock The nerve ends are still cauterized God help him when he starts to hurt In front of them the floor fell away It had been blasted upward, the torn

bea that the explosion had co lip of the pit, Rudy could look down into the labyrinths of the lower vaults and see squat pillars and worn red tile floors, the dust of ages that had accu,revealed a second vault, founded on the ancient heart of the knoll But instead of the grey of buried rock, smooth black basalt reflected the distant sky Froht of war with it the sold said, &039;I should have guessed&039; Rudy turned his head quickly The wizard looked cal breath froed white hair Rudy said hastily, There&039;s no way you could have known&039;

&039;Oh, I don&039;t know,&039; the wizard said absently &039;I certainly goteveryone else of the possibility I don&039;t knohy it shouldn&039;t have occurred to me that all of the old schools of wizardry were built in cities that were later destroyed by the Dark&039;

&039;Yeah, but a lot of cities were destroyed by the Dark,&039; Rudy argued quickly, hearing, under the deep calm of that scratchy voice, a note he didn&039;t like, like the first fissure of an earthquake &039;They knew the direction your research took Any one of thehed and shut his eyes Very quietly, he said, &039;Go away, Rudy&039;

&039;Look&039; Rudy began, and the eyes opened In them was a black depth of pain that amounted almost to madness Gently the rusty voice repeated, &039;Go away&039;

Rudy fled, terrified, as if an idly lifted pebble had turned into an H-bomb in his hand When he reached the bottom of the knoll and looked back, he could not see that the oldtime, it seemed, Rudy wandered the e to the boo of the sea The crash of the breakers was so, an echo of California winters Whether it was because of the faic that still lay over the town like an enormous silence, he felt at peace, as if he had co barely a sound on the coloured marble marquetry of the pavement To find home in ruins, and family - the family I should have known and never did - dead! He looked back at the solitary figure on the knoll, very dark against the white of the eone Everyone you knew and loved and respected -gone The Archone - Lohiro, whom you loved like a son The only ones left are novices like oodywives like Kara and herinto battle against the Dark with no backup, leaving the Keep unguarded for the Raiders or the Empire ofAlketch or the Dark And only you left, the last wizard, a lost soul like I was in California

And yes, you uessed, but no, it wasn&039;t your fault But he knew already that Ingold would never believe that

Heartsick, Rudy turned away He explored for a time the roofless remains of the ancient school, lecture halls where the carved benches had been swept and scarred by fire, laboratories and workroos were torn and twisted by wild and incoht with shattered glass and broken gemstones, and libraries, their couches and seats ripped, charred, and acid-eaten, with the leaves of books strewing the rain-damp pavements or plastered like wads of crumpled leaf mast in corners In one such chamber he found a harp, half-hidden in a wall niche and protected by fallen ti in that world of ruin and desolation

As he carried it down the steps, on which row, to where they had tethered the burro, it caenerations of wizards, no ht callers of fire, hopeless drea for a mode of expression that they could not find

Or worse, he thought A ood love, then you will have bad

Wind rippled in his long hair and chilled his fingers as he packed the harp on to Che&039;s back They could take at least one thing, he thought, fro, out of all this destruction He pulled the coarse, heavy fur of his buffalohide coat tighter around his neck and stood for a tiht of white sun and opal ht of the Keep of Dare

Not as he had often remembered it - the candlelit darkness of Aide&039;s quiet roo in shadoithin those ancient walls but froold had taken the road for Quo An alhts - black and square and solid against the snow that lay thick around its walls, imatic, self-contained He saw the black loom of the Snowy Mountains behind it and slacier winds And with the i to be there, as urgent as lust or starvation But he felt it frohts of another had been projected into his heart

Looking up, he saw again the black and curiously regular shape of the knoll by the sea, the dark stuh the lacework of the bare trees he saw the s in the freshening winds from the sea And he knew that what he felt was a call, and that the calling came from the man who stood alone at the heart of the last ruined citadel of wizardry The last wizard, an exile gypsy vagabond with a sword at his hip and his back to the wall, was calling them all - the second-raters, the flunk-outs, the

novices, the charlatans, and the goodywives He was calling anyone, in fact, capable of hearing - calling the down from the knoll soon after, his face set and harsh, his eyes bitter and frighteningly cold, a stranger&039;s eyes Rudy scrareet hireet in that blind, icy stare &039;Coold ordered briefly &039;There is one thing yet we ain that afternoon Rudy fetched the burro in silence and in silence followed the old atehouse The terraced roofs had supported storey after storey of incoling trees, masonry, flowers, earth, tumbled pillar, and broken beaold hunted around it until he found what had been athat would still admit the the precariously balanced blocks of half-fallen granite, working his way doard and inward Rudy followed unquestioningly, although Ingold had bidden hio nor to stay In places, they could walk beneath ceilings that ed arches In places, they had to climb piles of fallen rubble Once they crouched to slide beneath a h theby equilibriuruously with dangling curtains of trailing yellow leaves As he scraold was seeking his own death in this place, for the wizard had turned suddenly strange and frightening, reical, even - that he would arrange to perish with the others, in the city that had been his hoed stairway into the broken vaults, Rudy understood why Ingold had co, narrow

hall It picked out the gold on the bindings of the books there, the smooth sheen of cured leather covers, and the spark of ehost returned to the land of the living, Ingoldtables, his blunt, scarred hands touching the books as a ht touch the face of a woman he had once loved

It was obvious they couldn&039;t take all There were hundreds of voluarnered wisdom of centuries But, fatally incoe was the heart of Quo, as it was the heart of wizardry To protect that knowledge was the reason for the city&039;s existence, the justification for the rings of spells that circled the place so tightly that even after the death of every person there, the ieold touched the locks and chains that bound the books to their slanted desks, and the chains clattered faintly as they fell away He brought two volumes back to where Rudy waited in the doorway and handed theer man as if he were a nameless servant &039;You&039;ll have to coold said curtly and turned away

In all, they salvaged two dozen books Rudy had no idea which they were, or why these were chosen and not others, but they were all large and heavy and loaded Che down uned h satchels for himself and Rudy to carry what could not be put in the packs; after one look at the old ht When they crept froold turned back and wove spells of ward and guard over the whole of the ruin, that neither rain nor s should reain

By then it was dark

They camped on the open beach If the Dark still lurked in that dead city, the ruins offered too ht, as line after line of the spelled circles

of protection faded, glittering, into the air around the cahosts walked those silent streets for coht was cool, with the smell of distant rain; but over the ocean, the clouds broke to reveal athe billowed clouds into ski slopes of dazzling white The crackling of the driftwood firewhisper of California

Hoht Home

He took the harp he&039;d found froers over its dark, shapely curves The fire caught in the silver of its strings and touched the patterns of red ena board Like eneration, Rudy had h epics like &039;Light My Fire&039;; but this instruned for ht the glint of Ingold&039;s watching eye &039;Do you kno to play this?&039; Rudy asked hesitantly &039;Or how it&039;s tuned?&039;

&039;No,&039; Ingold said harshly &039;And I&039;ll thank you not to play it, either, until you knohat you&039;re doing&039; He turned and looked out to sea

Quietly, Rudy wrapped up the harp again Maybe Aide can teach ht Anyway, somebody at the Keep should know He felt as if he half-knew already what its sound should be and understood Ingold&039;s not wanting to hear it bastardized

&039;Its naold added after a ht, the ind, the south wind on su in the heart like wind-borne seeds He strapped the harp into the packs, with ies to the hapless Che, and started back toward the fire In the dark beyond their camp, he could see the broken line of the colonnade, his wizard&039;s sight picking

the ed patterns of flowers, hearts, and eyes that flowed down the coloured stone Against the sky, the dark bulk of Forn&039;s Tower rose, like the burned stulow of the sea horizon Westward, e of the waves, opal lace on the white breast of the beach

Against the black wall of the cliffs, the elusive wink of starlight flashed on pointed metal

Rudy&039;s breath, his heart, and tiold looked up, then out into the darkness that even to Rudy&039;s sharpened perceptions revealed nothing htness of the fire showed hope in his face that was al while, there was nothing in the night but the surge of the ocean and the wild ha of Rudy&039;s heart

Then in the outer dark, that twinkle of pronged gold ca the beach Rudy started tohi

A distant flicker of ht shone on the crescent end of a staff and was echoed still htly on loose, fire-coloured hair The wind picked up theit briefly behind the e, his tracks dark, enig in the sand behind hi-spells fully as elusive as the walls of air that still circled the toht toward the stride quickened Ingold&039;s hand closed like a crushing vice on the bones of Rudy&039;s wrist

A dozen yards froold was on his feet instantly, striding out to ht showed the old old and on the gnawed skeleton that lay half-buried in the sand at their feet

&039;Ingold, you old vagabond,&039; Lohiro said softly &039;I knew you&039;d coold asked later, when they&039;d drawn the Archlanced up fro To Rudy&039;s eyes, he looked thin and hunted; the sharp face orn down to its elegant bones In the bright gold mane that fell alht the firelight His eyes were as they had been in Rudy&039;s vision in the crystal - wide and variegated blue, like a kaleidoscope, flecked all through with dark and light, and containing that odd, e Ingold before the ruins of Forn&039;s Tower, it et away&039; Lohiro laughed, briefly and bitterly, at the sharpness of Ingold&039;s glance &039;Oh, the Dark are gone,&039; he reassured theht, clouds of the the stars But I - It took the lot of us to weave the maze, my friend One man couldn&039;t pick that mesh apart&039;

&039;Yet they left?&039;

The skeletal white fingers gestured upward &039;Through the air,&039; he said &039;Over the old frowned &039;How could they? The mazes extend for miles above the town&039;

Lohiro paused, then shook his head wearily &039;I don&039;t know,&039; he said &039;I don&039;t know&039;

&039;Were you taken by surprise?&039; Ingold asked quietly

The Archht in the sand like a spear, the firelight gli off its points

&039;By the Dark Ones from the Nest in the plains as well?&039;

&039;No&039; Lohiro raised his head, a little surprised at the question &039;No, they had left their Nest to join the assault on Gae Didn&039;t you - Of course you wouldn&039;t know&039; He sighed and rubbed his eyes &039;We knew they&039;d left the plains to attack Gae -oh, the night it happened, I think We&039;d all been going crazy for weeks We had councils, coht Teah the old records in the library Thoth the Recorder turned out his ether by cobwebs and spells alone It reminded me of that old joke about the miser whose favourite caed The points of his shoulder bones stood out sharply under the dark cloth of his robe &039;But we turned up nothing ling with hi broere knotted in moain and shook his head &039;It was very late Thoth, Anamara, and I were still awake, but I think alone to his bed We&039;d all seen the fall of Gae, one way or another There was a great heaviness over the town Still, I don&039;t think any of us were uneasy for our own safety It happened - suddenly&039; He snapped his long fingers &039;Like that A great explosion -I&039;ve never seen the like You sahat it did to the tower&039;

Ingold nodded, and his voice was very tired &039;Like the experireed &039;You rerinned wryly &039;That was nothing,&039; he said, &039;compared to this This was like - I don&039;t know It shook the foundations of the tower to its roots I don&039;t think I did anything, just sat there like a fool, and that probably saved me Anamara ran to the door and threw it open The darkness rolled over her like a big wave I don&039;t think she had tiold looked away, and Rudy could see by the alow

of the fire every small muscle, from temple to jaw, thrown suddenly into harsh prominence

Lohiro went on &039;I think Thoth called one burst of light -I don&039;t know Then&039; He stopped, seeing Ingold&039;s face &039;I&039; down at his hands For a long e of the waves on the shining wetness of the sand &039;I didn&039;t know&039;

Ingold turned back to hied in his eyes &039;It&039;s nothing,&039; he said &039;It never was&039; And Lohiro, catching his eye, half-s of dia the curve of the old e continued quietly &039;I threw the strongest cloaking-spell I could find around ers wound together, unconsciously caressing the strong bones of those too-thin hands &039;The next second there was a roar as if the whole side of the toere going out - which it was, of course - and fro but a kind of dark hurricane as they ripped the roo else I could do, not even co blackness of theh the break in the wall of the tower, I could dimly see that the whole town lay under a cloud, as if I looked down into a storust of it stirring the thick, shining hair Lohiro shook his head and raised those tired, eold&039;s &039;They never had a chance,&039; he said softly &039;I could see lights, fire I could smell the power, thrown out into that storm and burned But there were so on Frole surrounded by hornets But mostly - they were taken in their beds so suddenly that none of theer, the voice of the waves

imperceptibly louder on the offshore rocks Rudy saw the clouds piling together to blot the blazing old said quietly, &039;why didn&039;t you get in touch with hed &039;The makers of theto contact you for weeks&039;

Ingold started to say soht, he looked suddenly harsh and old, and the dark lines of bitter care cut like wire into hislike a curtain over the beach as the linted on the white crests of the driven waves Even in the shelter of the rocks, their san to thresh wildly in the wind

&039;Yeah, but why couldn&039;t you?&039; Rudy began

Ingold cut in &039;What have you been living on?&039;