'What do you mean, there are no Dark in the Alketch?' Rudy asked, startled.

'So they say,' the patriarch told him. 'But to my mind, that's just the kind of thing the Emperor would put around to get slaves cheap.'

The second band they met, many days later, was smaller, two men and a couple of skinny towheaded kids, all that was left of a village of silver miners from the south. The children watched them from wary eyes through tangles of fair hair and stole a hatchet and packet of cornmeal when Rudy's back was turned, but to Ingold's question of wizards, the older of them only said, 'Dead, I reckon.'

'Why do you say that? Ingold asked gently.

The boy looked at him with bleak scorn. 'Ain't everyone?'

'In a way it isn't surprising,' Ingold said later as he and Rudy trudged on westward through that dry, silken sea of hissing grass. In the buffalo wallows and the ditches beside the road, last night's snow drifted in cold, gritty mounds or blew like sand over

the pavement. 'Lohiro called all of the ranked wizards to him, to gather at Quo. I don't wonder that nothing has been heard of them.'

Rudy was silent for a time, remembering the long road down from Karst and Ingold in darkness before the sounding doors of the belaboured Keep. 'You mean,' he said quietly, 'that no one else has any kind of magic help at all!'

'Well - not necessarily.' The old man scanned the skyline for a moment; then his eyes returned to Rudy's. 'There are those who never went to Quo at all, village goodywives, or self-taught spellweavers, or the closet-mages who never developed their powers, as well as the small-time fortunetellers whose art and ambition were insufficient to take them through the mazes to Quo.