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.