Mother of Winter

by Barbara Hambly

  In time the wind died. The cold grew deeper, the freezing air flowing in … Damn, it must have come down just about on top of us. And on the Settlements. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. Still in old George’s hands, the injured peregrine stared around the circle with mad yellow eyes.

  Only when his mageborn perceptions told him a crippled dawn was creeping up to warm the mountainside did Rudy wrap a deerhide over his shoulders for extra warmth and scramble, on hands and knees, up the low-roofed passageway to the surface of the ground again. The tunnel was slippery with ice, and absolutely black—at the top he found twenty or thirty feet of snow blocking the entrance. He gouged at it with the steel crescent of his staff, Summoning heat around the metal, so that meltwater ran down to soak his torn and filthy trousers.

  The world was a ruin in the violet gloom of snow-light and morning: pines snapped, branches stripped, birds spattered dead against the rocks. He saw what might have been gulls, though so badly damaged it was hard to tell—God knew how they got there. From a livid bank of cloud overhead a few funnels still dipped earthward, then retreated again, miles away. Five feet in front of the cave mouth a boar had been skewered on the blasted shards of an oak tree, frozen to USDA Choice.

  George and Mom emerged behind him, the graying female holding another deerskin around her, both peering uneasily, trading hand-signs, quick and small and silent. Rudy was barely aware of them. His mind felt erased. He was aware that he was looking at the end of the world, the beginning of Fimbul Winter indeed—the Ultimate Notification from the Great Darwinian Bureau in the Sky that said, “We regret to inform you that you have been selected against.” He couldn’t take it in.

  There’d be no crops, either at the Settlements or the Keep. Last night would have iced them where they stood. No animals left at all.

  Everyone in the Settlements—some nine hundred people—was dead.

  Everyone at the Keep would starve.

  George yowled a warning and flung up his hand. Underfoot the mountain moved, a hard, sharp twitch, then a few seconds of stillness, followed by a long slow roller-coaster sensation, as if they all stood on the belly of some monstrous anaconda as it swallowed a couple of deer.

  “Chill out.” Rudy caught his balance against the sprawled, uplifted roots of a broken tree as the old dooic and his mate clung to one another, looking for someplace to run. “It’s a five-two, tops. I wouldn’t even get out of bed for it back home.” Like many Southern Californians, Rudy was adept at playing Guess the Richter with local earthquakes. By the time lag between the kicker and the roller, he judged that the epicenter was far off.

  He picked his way through the smashed and uprooted trees, mortared together with snow frozen hard as concrete. Where the wind had scoured the snow away, weeds stood stiff, held upright by the water in their cells that had turned to ice, waiting for the touch of the sun that would let them lapse from pseudolife into brown and crumpled death.

  There was a little patch of slunch on the rocks. Though snow lodged in its folds, it seemed perfectly healthy.

  Rudy muttered, “Son of a …”

  He stepped around the rock and stopped again. Toeless footprints marked the thin snow beyond. A little blown snow had dusted into them, enough for Rudy to calculate the timing: after the winds had ceased, but during the worst of the cold. He didn’t even want to think about what the temperature had been.

  Behind him he heard old George grunt, and Mom yammer in fear. Seizing his staff, Rudy ducked around the rocks, skidding on the hard snow-crust as he ran back to the mouth of the cave.

  Ingold stood there, shivering and blinking, wrapped only in the flayed hide of one of the dooic’s deer.

  “I don’t know what happened.” The old man’s voice was hoarse and hesitant, and he flinched as Rudy turned his mangled arm to the light at the mouth of the tunnel entrance, where they had taken shelter against the cold. Rudy had gone back to the deeper chamber to fetch firewood and kindled a small blaze in the tunnel, the heat reflecting back from the rocks. Outside, the virulent clouds were breaking, the sun beginning to melt the snow.

  Ingold was unable to summon fire; unable, Rudy guessed, to summon heat or light or any of the small magics that were wizardry’s second nature. He lay against the rock shivering with exhaustion, barely responding as Rudy examined the wounds on his arms and back, and on the back of his head. He looked as if he’d been attacked by maniacs wielding chisels and cleavers. The wounds reminded him of something that might have been inflicted by pincers, like an enormous lobster or a Roger Corman–sized crab. Not claws, he thought. Not teeth either, really.

  And all the while he was marveling, Ingold really did it. I’ll be buggered. He actually turned himself into a goddamn bird. It was something he couldn’t imagine himself or anyone else even trying to accomplish. He was conscious of awe and an overwhelming wish that he’d been there to watch—to see it and to see how it was done.

  But he only said, “Man, if that storm had hit while you were still on your way, you’d be dead meat!”

  Ingold raised his head a little, brought up one hand to wipe at a gash over his brow. “I had to risk it. I couldn’t reach you by scrying stone—”

  “Couldn’t reach me? I was tryin’ all morning to get in touch with you, man! And Thoth, and the Gettlesand gang! Then I lost my crystal … I’ll have to go back and look for it. But whenever I tried, I just got this … this …”

  “Weight,” Ingold said, his voice almost dreamy, as if he were slipping again into sleep. He tried clumsily to pull the deerskin back over the bare, freckled gooseflesh of his shoulders, hands almost unworkable with cold. “Anger. Magic deep in the bones of the earth. Which is gone now, incidentally,” he added, rousing a little. “I expect that after the earthquake we should have no trouble reaching Thoth.”

  Rudy looked at him a little blankly, trying to work that one out. Mom emerged from the throat of the passageway to proffer an appalling double handful of what was almost certainly chewed leaves, and Rudy said, “Uh—thanks.” He sniffed it—borage and willow, and he’d handled worse in five years—and passed a quick hand over it, feeling the magic already in it and adding his own spells of disinfection and healing. Ingold’s mouth did not so much as twitch as Rudy spread the mess over the gaping, clotted wounds.

  “So what the Sam Hill is going on?”

  Ingold shook his head, pressed the side of his face to the rock of the wall, the long white bloodstained hair hanging down to half conceal his face.

  Rudy said, “You gonna be okay for a couple minutes more? I gotta stitch this one.”

  The old man nodded and signed for him to go ahead. Rudy threaded up a needle with the toughest line of sinew in his belt kit and turned Ingold’s shoulder so that his back took the direct patch of the in-falling morning light. Under blood and muck, the skin was crossed with the scars of old whip cuts, scores of them, white gouges that when fresh must have gone nearly to the bone.

  “We can find your crystal and contact Thoth and the others in Gettlesand, later in the day.” Ingold’s voice was barely a whisper, though Rudy had laid on him every spell he could to dull pain. Anyone else—anyone who had no magic of his own to combat it—would probably have been in shock, and by the old man’s coloring, he was pretty near it, anyway. He was shivering convulsively, fighting to steady his breath. “But our first duty lies in the Settlements. To burn them in death, since we could not save them in life.”

  Rudy gave Ingold his long woolen shirt and would have given him his trousers, too, if they’d have fit the wizard’s stockier frame. The shirt came down to his thighs, and Ingold wrapped strips of deerskin around his legs and feet. Rudy cut him a staff from an oak sapling, and the two descended, like a couple of shivering beggars, through the ghastly silence of ruined woods covered with snow to the dead land below.

  As they walked, Rudy told Ingold about the gaboogoos that had attacked him in the woods and how they had followed him despite every spell he had laid to throw them off the track; how he
had found their spoor in the lee of rock still dusted with the snow that had fallen during the worst of the night. He spoke to take his mind off what he knew was waiting for them, to turn it aside from all those questions about what they were going to do now. About what they could do.

  Long before they reached the Settlements, they found sheep, or parts of sheep, impaled on the broken trees, their wool brown clots of blood. The warming air melted the snow in patches, and the two men had to struggle to keep from slipping in the mud—Rudy kept a wary eye on Ingold and a hand ready to steady him should he fall, but though the older wizard’s pain and exhaustion slowed him, he seemed to recover as the day went on. Rudy looked at the birds—eagles or bull owls—crushed against the trees like bugs on a windshield, and wondered again what it was that had caused those pincerlike wounds; what had struck Ingold down before he’d gotten to the Settlements.

  Just before noon they passed the place where the storm funnel had touched down. The trees had been swept up by their roots and lay in a smashed heap against the mountain’s first rising slopes, mixed with rocks, laurel shrubs, the carcasses of animals, and ice and snow. It was melting at the edges, and there was a great dirty pool of water and blood below the tangle, like a colossal beaver dam of matchsticked spruces and bones.

  Barely a mile south of that unbelievable scour lay what was left of Fargin Graw’s fortress. At one end of the imploded wreck the two wizards uncovered the bodies of Graw, his wife and sons, and most of the other members of his household, mashed by the fallen roof beams and lying in a lake of snowmelt and gore. The child Lirta, a few of the servants, and the hunter whose bow had broken his nose had been carried by the wind nearly a dozen yards and smashed against the wreckage of the stables, where their bodies mixed with the slow-thawing rummage of cattle and sheep. They found the boy Reppitep later in the afternoon, when the sun strengthened enough to melt some of the larger drifts.

  “It will have happened very quickly,” Ingold said as he and Rudy dragged the far-flung bodies to lie in what would be their pyre among the thatch.

  Tears running down his face, Rudy yelled at him, “And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

  Ingold replied wearily, “In time.”

  The old man insisted, to Rudy’s rage and horror, on thoroughly looting the buildings, making a stack of kitchen utensils, clothing, plows, rake heads, needles, and harness buckles near the well. “Can’t you show a little respect, for Chrissake?”

  “No,” the old man said, slowly pulling on a pair of somebody’s boots. “Not in the circumstances.”

  He transformed himself into a bird, Rudy thought, watching him trying to wash some of the grime off with snow before dressing clumsily in a dark leather jerkin, baggy trousers, and a sheepskin vest Rudy remembered seeing on one of the hunters the night before last. Done one of the most crazily dangerous acts of magic possible in the outside hope of warning these people. It was only by sheerest chance and the wisdom of the dooic mage that he wasn’t a bloody blot on the snow someplace now. And everyone here would be just as dead.

  Rudy had to remind himself of that again when he saw the old man laboriously going through the corpses, removing knives from the men’s belts and needles from the sewing still in the women’s hands. When they passed the place where Rudy first met the gaboogoo, they had picked up his fallen scrying stone, half buried under snow, and now Rudy got up his courage to look into it and saw Minalde weeping as she straggled to drag wood to the pyre in front of the Keep on which they’d lined the bodies of fifteen little herdkids.

  Rudy watched until he saw Tir, stumbling at her heels with an armful of kindling. For a horrible time, Rudy had feared that last night had been one of the many occasions on which Tir had sneaked out to spend the night with the other kids.

  He let the image die. Once he’d ascertained Tir and Minalde lived, he didn’t want to see anything else.

  Mountain shadows stretched across them, blue and chill. Hating himself, Rudy went to the heap of garments Ingold was making where the gatehouse had been and found among them his own ramskin coat, its sleeves gay with painted flowers. The sky would remain soaked in summer light for hours. Looking up, he saw the air above the mountains streaked in peach and apricot, a phenomenal, overblown sunset such as Rudy had previously associated with the tackier variety of cowboy painters or photographs in inspirational magazines.

  He whispered, “Wow,” and Ingold, to whom he hadn’t spoken since his bitter railings about respect, limped to his side.

  “Come now, Rudy, don’t tell me you’re surprised.”

  “You’re predicting sunsets now?”

  “There was an earthquake this morning,” Ingold said. His hand was pressed to his side, his gored face gray. “I thought it might have been triggered by the eruption of another volcano in Gettlesand.”

  “You’re right,” Rudy said. “That makes—what? Three this winter? What you got there, pal?” he added, nodding at the gory wad of sacking in the old man’s hands. The limb of an animal—a rabbit? But no rabbit had claws like that—protruding from it at an awkward angle.

  “I haven’t any idea.” Ingold stooped agonizingly and unwrapped the thing on the remains of the foundation by which they stood.

  Rudy said, “Yike!” and took a step back, then came close again, staring. “What the hell is it?” In his own voice he heard the echo of a theme he’d been singing for days now, and looked across at Ingold, baffled and a little scared. “Where’d you find this thing?”

  He gestured with his eyes. “Against the palisade.” Only one wall of the palisade remained, the south one, into which the north wall and huge chunks of the old villa and outbuildings had been driven, a dune of wreckage. Stiffly, Ingold wrapped the carcass up again. His hands were swollen with the work he’d done, shifting timbers and grubbing for bodies under pools of half-frozen water, and the flesh around the cuts on the left side of his face was bruised nearly black. “I’ve noticed that—”

  At the sound of some noise, he turned, and there was nothing stiff or crippled about the smoothness with which he suddenly had one of the dead farmers’ shortswords in his hand.

  Rudy turned to follow his gaze. There were figures in the road, dozens of them, faces glimmering pale in the gathering dusk. Someone called, “Who’s there? Is anyone alive?”

  Rudy recognized the voice. “That you, Yar?” He left the darkness by the gatehouse and strode down in the direction of the straggling line of newcomers. “It’s Rudy and Ingold.” He almost didn’t need a mage’s sight to recognize Lank Yar, the Keep’s chief hunter, a drooping leather strap of a man who seemed, body and soul, to have been braided back together out of his own scar tissue following the rising of the Dark. Behind the hunter he identified others: Nedra Hornbeam, the matriarch of third level south, with her son and son-in-law; Lord Sketh, pushing fussily to the front with two or three of his purple-badged men-at-arms; several of the Dunk clan from second north with Bannerlord Pnak; Bok the Carpenter and half a dozen Guards under the command of the Icefalcon.

  “They’re dead here,” Rudy said quietly. “They’re all dead.”

  “Good God, man, we thought you were gone as well!” Bok strode forward and caught Rudy’s arms in huge hands, then enveloped him in a hug that was like being hugged by an iron tree. “And Lord Ingold …!”

  “Lord Ingold,” Yar the Hunter said quietly, “who ought never have left the Keep to begin with this spring. Had he stayed where he belonged, these folk would have been alive, and the children of the herds, too.”

  He turned and walked away. Lord Sketh came over quickly, caught Rudy’s hand in one of his own round moist ones, said quickly, “Ridiculous! Are you well, man?” There was scared relief in his eyes, desperate relief that the Keep would not, in the face of such catastrophe, be left wizardless as well. “What happened? Was it an ice storm, as the Icefalcon’s been saying? We heard nothing, only opened the Doors this morn to a wall of snow.”

  “It was an ice storm,” Ingold
said softly. “And Yar is right. I should not have left the Keep.”

  They worked through the fevered sunset and long into full dark, under a moon that came up gibbous and crimson, like a dirty blood-orange, as if the grue that lay soaking into the ground had stained its golden light. Under Lord Sketh’s orders, the hunters and volunteers and Guards dragged every horse, every head of stock, every deer, every boar, even the rats and rabbits and voles found crushed in the woods or mashed into the palisade, and made great thawing piles of them between the ruined house and the heap of matchwood that had been the gates. Rudy and Ingold laid spells of preservation on those dripping heaps, to arrest and postpone decay once they should begin to thaw, and men and women set to hacking the meat into chunks, to be carried up to the Keep. Through a haze of blind exhaustion, of pain in his frozen hands and toes, Rudy understood that this meat was all the Keep would have to live on, summer, winter, and into the following spring.

  And he could already see that it wasn’t going to be enough.

  While the meat thawed, Lord Sketh ordered a pyre built of broken timbers and the drying thatch; they kindled it an hour before dawn. The smell of the smoke was a vast, oily cloud over the charnel house of wet bones, ice-beaded meat, and glittering heaps of salvaged harness buckles and shoes. Lank Yar, more practical-minded, set parties to building sledges to carry the meat, and racks on which to smoke it, and the first group of bearers set off for the Keep with Fargin Graw’s food reserves and the news that the two wizards were alive just as dawn was staining red the waters of the Great Brown River to the east.

  When Rudy woke from exhausted sleep, Gil was there, her black hair braided to keep it out of the blood, her face half masked in field dressing and more bruised even than Ingold’s. She looked exhausted, sick, and deeply worried, and no wonder, Rudy thought. Some distance away he could see Ingold at work cutting up a sheep neatly as a butcher, and like a butcher soaked and spattered with blood from head to foot; he would answer if someone spoke to him, but he seemed, as Rudy knew he would, to have taken Lank Yar’s words completely to heart.