through Rudy’s head—
“Who
are
those guys?”
—but it did nothing to diminish the terror that had him by the throat. He headed upslope again.
The going was tougher, the ground now very steep. Above the trees the sun had slipped behind the high glaciers of the Rampart Range, and the light between the hoary spruces and lodgepole pines was like translucent slate-colored silk. His boots skidded on rocks and pine-straw as he climbed, the gloom all around him striped now with white birch and gray aspen. The birds had gone silent.
The quality of the wind changed above the timberline. It howled over the split domes of rock and tore at Rudy’s long dark hair, cutting through the sleeves of his woolen shirt as if he wore nothing, pouring through the gaping hole in his trouser leg like a carnivore ready to strip the meat off his bones. The small plants of the subalpine snatched at the invisible torrents of air like the wasted hands of the starving. Dozens of streams ribboned the lichenous rock up here, and behind a cracked spur of blue-black granite Rudy saw the terrible lavender wall of the glacier itself, a bled-out sapphire the size of the world.
Rudy thought, almost calmly,
I’m going to freeze to death
.
Below him, something white was working its way among the dwarf-willow and hemlock.
Shivering uncontrollably now, he headed northwest along the face of the slope, wondering if he could get past his pursuers and head down the Arrow Gorge. Something inside him whispered he was kidding himself, but he kept moving anyway. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if he stopped.
He couldn’t put from his mind the recollection of that white, spider-fingered hand inching over the rocks in his direction. He wondered if it was still trying to catch him.
I’m invisible, dammit!
Or unnoticeable, which was as close as wizards could get.
But unnoticeable by what? He seemed to hear Ingold’s voice in his mind. To elk you look like a deer, to saber-tooths you look like one of themselves. To bandits he’d look like a tree, and to White Raiders—who could probably pick any individual tree out of a nursery lineup and give the coordinates of where it stood on the mountain—he’d look like a weasel or an owl or something that had business up there.
But to a gaboogoo?
What
is
a gaboogoo?
Having no idea what shape their perceptions took, Rudy had no key to their minds—if they had minds—no paradigm with which to tailor illusion. He had no idea what they were.
Except ugly, mean guys who were after him.
Rudy kept moving.
He counted four of them as the afternoon light darkened, the rutilant glare of the sunset illuminating the white beds of slunch that lay, hundreds of feet long sometimes, over the rocks. The gaboogoo whose head he’d half severed had managed to lose it entirely but didn’t appear to notice. Like its hand, way back down the mountain, it kept on. The two others Rudy glimpsed among the columned pines below him weren’t as big, but seemed subtly different in configuration—one of them appeared to be moving on all fours. Or allsevens, or whatever. Rudy didn’t see whether it had a head or not.
He was genuinely scared. Years of living rough had given him a great deal of stamina, but as the gory sunset faded, Rudy was racked by profound shivering. In theory he could Summon heat, as he could Summon light, but he wasn’t good at that particular Summoning and didn’t think he could keep up his concentration while on the move. The vest of painted bison hide that kept him warm in the windless hollows by day wasn’t going to be enough as temperatures plunged. He knew that. And the gaboogoos were working him like wolves, keeping their distance, tiring him out. Under the open crater in his trouser leg Rudy’s thigh was black with bruises, a horrible tribute to the strength of that bloodless grip.
Well, Ingold old buddy, I think we can safely deduce that no, these buggers aren’t illusions
.
And Jesus
“Who
are
those guys?”
—but it did nothing to diminish the terror that had him by the throat. He headed upslope again.
The going was tougher, the ground now very steep. Above the trees the sun had slipped behind the high glaciers of the Rampart Range, and the light between the hoary spruces and lodgepole pines was like translucent slate-colored silk. His boots skidded on rocks and pine-straw as he climbed, the gloom all around him striped now with white birch and gray aspen. The birds had gone silent.
The quality of the wind changed above the timberline. It howled over the split domes of rock and tore at Rudy’s long dark hair, cutting through the sleeves of his woolen shirt as if he wore nothing, pouring through the gaping hole in his trouser leg like a carnivore ready to strip the meat off his bones. The small plants of the subalpine snatched at the invisible torrents of air like the wasted hands of the starving. Dozens of streams ribboned the lichenous rock up here, and behind a cracked spur of blue-black granite Rudy saw the terrible lavender wall of the glacier itself, a bled-out sapphire the size of the world.
Rudy thought, almost calmly,
I’m going to freeze to death
.
Below him, something white was working its way among the dwarf-willow and hemlock.
Shivering uncontrollably now, he headed northwest along the face of the slope, wondering if he could get past his pursuers and head down the Arrow Gorge. Something inside him whispered he was kidding himself, but he kept moving anyway. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if he stopped.
He couldn’t put from his mind the recollection of that white, spider-fingered hand inching over the rocks in his direction. He wondered if it was still trying to catch him.
I’m invisible, dammit!
Or unnoticeable, which was as close as wizards could get.
But unnoticeable by what? He seemed to hear Ingold’s voice in his mind. To elk you look like a deer, to saber-tooths you look like one of themselves. To bandits he’d look like a tree, and to White Raiders—who could probably pick any individual tree out of a nursery lineup and give the coordinates of where it stood on the mountain—he’d look like a weasel or an owl or something that had business up there.
But to a gaboogoo?
What
is
a gaboogoo?
Having no idea what shape their perceptions took, Rudy had no key to their minds—if they had minds—no paradigm with which to tailor illusion. He had no idea what they were.
Except ugly, mean guys who were after him.
Rudy kept moving.
He counted four of them as the afternoon light darkened, the rutilant glare of the sunset illuminating the white beds of slunch that lay, hundreds of feet long sometimes, over the rocks. The gaboogoo whose head he’d half severed had managed to lose it entirely but didn’t appear to notice. Like its hand, way back down the mountain, it kept on. The two others Rudy glimpsed among the columned pines below him weren’t as big, but seemed subtly different in configuration—one of them appeared to be moving on all fours. Or allsevens, or whatever. Rudy didn’t see whether it had a head or not.
He was genuinely scared. Years of living rough had given him a great deal of stamina, but as the gory sunset faded, Rudy was racked by profound shivering. In theory he could Summon heat, as he could Summon light, but he wasn’t good at that particular Summoning and didn’t think he could keep up his concentration while on the move. The vest of painted bison hide that kept him warm in the windless hollows by day wasn’t going to be enough as temperatures plunged. He knew that. And the gaboogoos were working him like wolves, keeping their distance, tiring him out. Under the open crater in his trouser leg Rudy’s thigh was black with bruises, a horrible tribute to the strength of that bloodless grip.
Well, Ingold old buddy, I think we can safely deduce that no, these buggers aren’t illusions
.
And Jesus
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