01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

Rudy simply couldn't figure the guy. But something in that serene self-assurance prompted him to ask, "Yeah, but how can you be a wizard without magic?" He finished his beer, crumpled the aluminum with one hand, and tossed it into the corner of the bare room.

"Oh, wizardry has really very little to do with magic."

Taken off-balance, Rudy paused, the old man's voice and words touching some feeling in his soul that echoed, like the distant note of a long-forgotten guitar. "Yeah, but-" he began, and stopped again. "What is wizardry?" he asked quietly. "What is magic?"

"What isn't?"

There was silence for the space of about two long-drawn breaths, Rudy fighting the sudden, illogical, and overwhelming notion that that was the reply of a man who understood magic. Then he shook his head, as if to clear it of the webs of the old man's crazy fantasies. "I don't understand you."

Ingold's voice was soft. "I think you do."

He really did step out of that light.

In another minute you'll be as crazy as he is.

Confusion made Rudy's voice rough. "All I understand is that you're crazier than a loon... "

"Am I really?" The white eyebrows lifted in mock offense. "And just how do you define crazy?"

"Crazy is somebody who doesn't know the difference between what's real and what's just in his imagination."

"Ah," Ingold said, all things made clear. "You mean if I disbelieved something that I saw with my own eyes, just because I imagined it to be impossible, I would be crazy?"

"I did not either see it!" Rudy yelled.

"You know you did," the wizard said reasonably. "Come now, Rudy, you believe in thousands of things you've never seen with your own eyes."

"I do not!"

"You believe in the ruler of your country."

"Well, I've seen him! I've seen him on television."

"And have you not also seen people materializing out of showers of silver light on this television?" Ingold asked.

"Dammit, don't argue that way! You know as well as I do... "

"But I don't, Rudy. If you choose deliberately to disregard the evidence of your own senses, it's your problem, not mine. I am what I am... "

"You are not!"

Slowly, in an absent-minded imitation of Rudy's can-squashing ritual, Ingold crushed his empty beer can into a wad slightly smaller than his own fist. "Really, you're one of the most prejudiced young men I've ever met," he declared. "For an artist you have singularly little scope."

Rudy drew in his breath to reply to that one, then let it out again. "How did you know I'm an artist?"

Amused blue eyes challenged him. "A wild guess." In his heart Rudy knew it had been nothing of the kind. "You are, aren't you?"

"Uh- wen, I paint airbrush pictures on the sides of custom vans, and pinstripe motorcycle fuel tanks, that kind of stuff." Seeing Ingold's puzzled frown, he conceded, "Yeah, I guess you could call it art."

There was another silence, the old man looking down at his scarred hands in the sunlight on the table top, the isolated cabin utterly silent but for the fault creaking insect noises in the long grasses outside. Then he looked up and smiled. "And is it beneath your dignity to have friends with, I think you call it, nonstandard reality?"

Rudy thought about some of the people who hung around Wild David's bike shop. Nonstandard was one way of putting it. He laughed. "Hell, if I felt that way I'd have maybe about two friends. Okay, you win."

The old man looked startled and just a little worried, "You mean you believe me?"

"No- but it doesn't bother me if it doesn't bother you."

If he's schizo, Rudy found himself thinking later in the morning, he's got it all down. Wizardry, the mythical Realm of Darwath, the Hidden City of Quo on the Western Ocean where the garnered learning of a hundred generations of mages was stored in the dark labyrinths of Forn's Tower-Ingold had it all, seemed to know it as intimately as Rudy knew his own world of bars and bikes and body shops, of smog and steel. Through the long, warm morning, Rudy messed with the Chevy's engine, Ingold lending a hand occasionally when one was needed and staying out of the way when it wasn't, and their talk drifted over magic, the Void, engines, and painting. Ingold never slipped up.

Not only was he totally familiar with his own fantasy world, but Rudy noticed he had the lapses of knowledge that a man imperfectly acquainted with this world would have. He seemed totally fascinated with Rudy's world, with the wonders of radio and television, the complexities of the welfare system, and the mysteries of the internal combustion engine. He had the insatiable curiosity that, he had said, was the hallmark of wizards: the lust for knowledge, almost any kind of knowledge, that superseded even the most elementary considerations of physical comfort or safety.