To all of them at once?' There was something a little awesome in such a collective lapse of vigilance.

Ingold smiled. 'Of course.'

Rudy shivered. 'You know, those are the first Dark Ones we've seen on the plains?'

'Understandably.' The wizard fished in his many pockets and located the yellowed crystal in which he was wont to seek the images of things far away. 'I have reason to believe those Dark Ones have followed us since we left the mountains, or at least have been patrolling the road across the plains.'

'You mean, looking for us?'

'I don't know.' The wizard glanced at him across the dim glow of the fire. 'Because if that were so, it would mean that they know that we have lost contact with the wizards at Quo.'

'But how could they?'

Ingold shrugged. 'How do they know anything?' he asked. 'How do they perceive? What is the nature of their knowledge? They are utterly alien intelligences, Rudy, strangers to the very pattern of human thought.'

Rudy was silent for a moment. Then he said, 'But I'm thinking that the easiest way for them to know we've lost contact with Quo is if they know what happened to the wizards there.' He looked hesitantly across the fire. 'You understand?' 'I understand,' the old man agreed, 'and I would say so, too, but for one thing. I do not know what has befallen Quo, nor how the Dark Ones have contrived to hold the wizards under siege there. But if Lohiro were dead, I would know it. I would feel it.'

'Then what do you think has happened?' Rudy insisted.

But to that Ingold had no answer.

Neither had those they asked, the few straggling bands of refugees that they met upon the road, fleeing east through the searing iron wind. For days at a time the pilgrims would travel absolutely alone through a universe of brown, rippling grass and shallow sheets of water -water pocked like hammered silver by rains, or more often frozen in bleak and shining expanses of grey ice. But twice in those first few