Mother of Winter

by Barbara Hambly

  She compromised by walking down, holding out both her hands for him to clasp. Someone in the crowd yelled “Kiss her!” and was shushed by a shocked murmur from the religious conservatives; the look in her eyes, raised to his, was almost as good. She said softly, “When we opened the doors of the Keep—when we found the children frozen, the world dead …”

  The harrowing work, the horror and grief of the past four days, were marked on her face in the chalky pallor of fatigue and the black-circled redness of her swollen eyes. Her hair was still braided up for work. Looking down, he saw her hands were blistered.

  “God, the herdkids,” Rudy whispered, sickened again with the grief he had felt pulling the child Reppitep’s body out of the snow, with the hammerblow of realization he had felt in the dooic cave. “Was Geppy …?”

  She nodded quickly, and wiped her eyes. In a soft voice, still excluding those gathered on the steps, she said, “And Linnet’s daughter Thya.”

  “Thya?” The child had been barely Tir’s age. “What the hell was Thya doing …?”

  Linnet was standing among the Guards, at Tir’s side, holding his hand. Her face was like something cut out of stone, grief gouged into it as with acid. She saw Rudy’s eyes come to her, and she stared at him, cold, bitter, hating.

  “She sneaked out to spend the night with the herdkids,” Alde whispered. “You know they all did, all the children in the Keep, one time or another. Linnet knew. She said it wouldn’t do any harm.” She forced her voice steady with an effort. “Rudy—”

  “How’s Tir taking it?”

  In her eyes he saw that she’d feared all along the moment he’d ask this; her silence hit him in the pit of his belly and the way she avoided his glance. Quickly, almost involuntarily, he raised his head in time to see the child turn and disappear between the legs of the Guards, into the dark of the Keep’s great doors.

  Tir came to the meeting of the Keep Council, held once it grew too dark outside for those butchering and hanging the meat to smoke to see what they were doing. He sat beside his mother wearing a face like a little ivory mask, saying nothing; his eyes were dry but haunted by loss and uncomprehending grief. It was one thing, Rudy thought, to remember deaths of other friends, in other lifetimes, that whole succession of “little boys” whose awareness he sometimes shared. It was another to wake up one morning and find all your friends dead.

  Tir would not meet his eyes.

  “The first thing that needs to be done is to take an inventory of what we have,” said Nedra Hornbeam briskly. “That way we’ll know—”

  “And why is this the first thing?” Lord Ankres demanded. “My goats presumably remain my goats, in death or in life, to dispose of as I please.”

  Hornbeam’s son Lapith, a young man of startling good looks and unsurpassed conversational dullness, spoke up. He and close to two dozen other non-Council members had crowded into the Council chamber to speak for their segments of the Keep, their families, their neighbors. “And I suppose all those people out there helping you smoke the remains of your goats are doing so out of the goodness of their hearts?”

  “Of course we must pool our resources.” Maia of Thran, like an ugly but amiable scarecrow in badly dyed ecclesiastical red, raised one crippled hand. “In the face of this catastrophe—”

  “There’s no ‘of course’ about it,” retorted Varkis Hogshearer, one of the gate-crashers, a pale-faced, rather stoop-shouldered man who seemed, to Rudy’s eye, to be a whole lot cleaner than anybody else in the room, and didn’t walk as if he ached in every joint of his body from working—which, to do him justice, Lord Ankres did. “We have rights to our property …”

  And you’d just as soon nobody searched your cells, Rudy thought, recalling the man’s propensity for buying up anything he could from anyone who was in need. He was also fairly certain that the moneylender was one of the several, like Koram Biggar of the grubby tribe in fifth north, who had for years been keeping chickens illegally in the Keep. I can see my request to shake down the upper levels for gaboogoos is going to go over like an ejector seat on a roller coaster.

  “Our first concern,” put in Enas Barrelstave pompously, “is the whereabouts of Lord Ingold. Saving your presence, Master Rudy, you and not he should have been the one to stay at the Settlements with Master Yar. I must say that he has demonstrated throughout a complete lack of responsibility—”

  “Ingold stayed in the Settlements because trying to get back in time to warn them about the ice storm wiped every gram of magic out of his body,” snapped Rudy, who had had just about enough of the squabbling of the Council for one day. Between his return to the Keep just before sunset, and this Council, he had spent weary hours, first calling up the magic from his own heart and bones to lay spells of preservation and Bugs-Go-Away on the vast piles of thawing meat—the first flies had arrived that afternoon—and then awkwardly skinning the hunks and quarters to be smoked. Sodden with fatigue, his muscles knifed with pain every time he moved. The meat was just beginning to go off, too, and the smell of it, in his clothing and that of everyone in the room, was something he felt he’d never be free of.

  “So he figured since I was in better shape, I could come back up here, while even if he couldn’t work magic for a couple of days, at least he could sense danger on the way. So he stayed down there.”

  “He did not!” A lumbering, heavy form in an expensive blue dress shoved her way to the fore next to Hogshearer—the moneylender’s daughter, Scala, a girl of fourteen with unwashed hair and piggy dark eyes. “He ran away!”

  Hogshearer turned his head quickly, eyes eager—Rudy saw the interest flare in other eyes as well: Ankres and Lady Sketh. “Who told you that, girl?”

  “One of the men.” There was smug delight in her voice at being the center of attention. In her blue gown she looked, if not exactly clean, at least like she hadn’t been working, either. “One of the men said he saw Ingold run away from the camp the night before they left, and he never came back.”

  Everyone began talking at once, waving their arms. Koram Biggar said, “By Saint Bounty, I told you wizards couldn’t be trusted!” and Janus of Weg’s voice, under the general yammer, growled, “Birch the lying little—”

  “Is that true?” Minalde’s voice, soft as silver bells, seemed to cut through the clamor, as if she spoke to Rudy and Rudy alone. Her eyes were deeply troubled.

  Rudy didn’t want to, but before those blue eyes, he could do nothing but nod. “He had his reasons,” he said as renewed shouting rose like the roar of the sea. “And if you think heading out alone, without magic, into the river valley these days is safer than sticking with a bunch of armed guys in what’s left of a fort, remind me never to go camping with you, pal.”

  “Then I suppose we need to ask,” Bannerlord Pnak said quietly, “why he departed without coming here to our aid? And for that matter, why it was that he—and you, Master Rudy—survived, and everyone else at the Settlements perished?”

  “Nice goin’, punk.” Gil raised her head from the scroll she was deciphering when, many hours later, Rudy finally returned to the workroom. She’d collected every glowstone in the place and grouped them around her on the big oak table in the middle of the room, and the upside-down light made her thin face skull-like and odd in its masses of unbound black hair. She’d bathed and gotten someone in the Guards to change the dressing on her hurt cheek, but the bruises all around the area still looked dark and angry. “You know Pnak and Barrelstave have been itching for years to put Tir under a Council of Regency—ever since Alde socialized seed wheat instead of letting people speculate in it. If they can discredit Ingold—”

  “Don’t start on me, spook.” He dropped in the corner the bundle of his grubby traveling clothes he’d changed out of in Alde’s rooms and went to stand beside her. “Lemme have a look at that.”

  She turned her face obediently, unmoving while he peeled back the dressing. The bruises were fading some, but the bite itself didn’t look like it was healing. Ma
lnutrition, Rudy thought. Spells of healing, even those of a master like Ingold, could only go so far without nutrients to work from.

  Still, there was something about the discoloration that he didn’t like.

  “You manage to get in touch with Thoth?” she asked, and Rudy nodded.

  The interview—after Alde had slipped into sleep in his arms, long after the shouting in the Council chamber was done—had troubled him, partly for the obvious reasons and partly with a kind of subconscious worry, a tip-of-the-tongue sense of something deeply wrong. The Gettlesand mage had looked as harried as it was possible for that sardonic, vulturine scribe to look, and although the sky beyond the windows of his rockpile hermitage—built against the outer wall of the old Black Rock Keep, for the wizards there did not as a rule sleep within the Keep walls—still held light, there had been an oddly blenched or faded appearance to the whole image, like a photograph badly exposed.

  Thoth had disclaimed knowledge of gaboogoos—pronouncing the word in much the way a housewife might remove a dead mouse from the family casserole—but his yellow eyes had narrowed, and his spindle-knuckled fingers stirred in the gray sleeves of his robe. “The dogs have barked all around the Keep, night after night for a fortnight past,” he said. “Gray and Nila, when they spoke to us for the last time from the slopes of the Devil’s Grandmother, said they had seen some kind of creature there.”

  “Gray and Nila?” Rudy recalled the two women, part of the original Wizards’ Corps in the war against the Dark.

  “What were they doing up on the Devil’s Grandmother? Wasn’t that the volcano that …?”

  “They followed the … the track, the spoor, of the power we sensed in the ground,” Thoth said. “They were on the western slope of the mountain when it erupted. They spoke of things there, pale creatures that walked through Wards and illusion as if they were not there, whose tracks they found ’round their camp every morning.”

  Rudy shivered, remembering the ghostly shapes in the dark among the pines. He found himself hoping that wherever Ingold was, he was watching his back.

  Hesitantly, because like everybody but Ingold he was a little afraid of Thoth, he said, “Could somebody—some wizard we don’t know about—have been … I dunno, tapping the energy of the volcano, maybe? Drawing on it, the way Ingold or you would draw on the energy within the earth-lines or the stars?”

  “Considering that he or she would have had to be directly on top of the volcano to derive benefit from such an exercise,” the Serpentmage replied dryly, “such a source of power would have obvious limitations. And what wizard would be operating in the wilderness, without contact with human communities? Still,” he added, tilting his head in a fashion that made him more than ever resemble some strange wise member of the buzzard clan, “it would not do harm to speak to Shadow of the Moon and ask him whether the shamans of the plains have heard aught.”

  The insectile fingers refolded themselves into another pattern. In the virulent light the old man’s sunken features seemed skull-like, worn and weary under the bald curve of his brow. “It is an ill time,” Thoth said at length. “The Raiders move down from the far north, and settlers from the Alketch have been plaguing our herds. They say fever and civil war ride unchecked through those countries, that famine rules on the Emperor’s throne and the cities have become infernos of lawlessness, blood, and smoke. Tirkenson deems it too perilous to send cattle toward Sarda Pass to your aid. It were folly, he says, to waste the lives of our riders only to feed our enemies. Brother Wend and the Lady Ilae have agreed to journey to Renweth, that you may not be without magic. It is true that we have been remiss; someone should have gone to you long ere this. Will this serve?”

  “Well, Alde may get back with you on the cattle.” Rudy rubbed his chin, still smarting from the razor, and glanced over at Minalde’s sleeping form. “But thank Wend and Ilae, and tell ’em they’ll be more than welcome. You guys had any luck with finding mageborn kids? Ingold and I have been watching …”

  He fell silent, remembering that the Keep was over a dozen children shorter than it had been a week ago.

  Thoth shook his gleaming head. “We gave the Dark too little credit in that,” he said softly. “I begin to wonder whether we do these … gaboogoos, as you call them … enough.”

  Another damn thing to worry about, Rudy had thought as the crystal faded. I’ll have to hire a secretary to keep track of them.

  Standing now beside Gil in the deep late-night silence of the Keep, he remembered the conversation again, and his uneasiness returned. Walking back to the workroom through the ebon stillness, the images of the gaboogoos had returned to him, the tall, vicious, palely glowing monstrosities that had pursued him over the mountainside, and the little knee-high creature that had stood in the doorway of that room on fifth north, eyeless head turned in his direction as if it could, in fact, see.

  “So who’s this Saint Bounty?”

  “Huh?” Rudy snapped back to reality. He realized she and Ingold had been gone for nearly two months. He’d kept them up on gossip and events, but there were always things he hadn’t thought to mention. “Oh, him.”

  He moved aside one of the terra-cotta pots in which Ingold had been nursing seedling roses for years. Only two varieties had survived the downfall of civilization, and one of them didn’t look any too robust. Rudy had been babysitting them all spring, feeding them little bits of stinking fish and conjuring miniature spells to keep them warm.

  “His statues have been showing up all over the north half of the fifth level, around the Biggars and the Wickets and the other trailer-park types up there. I don’t know who started it. Fat guy with a basket of food—just who you’d figure to get popular when we’re all looking at starvation. You’re the saint expert.”

  “Well, yes, I am.” Her eyes were thoughtful, cold and very blue in the dazzle of the glowstones. “And I’ve never heard of the guy. I asked Maia. He said there was no Saint Bounty in the official calendar, nor was there any local saint of that name he knows about. And I don’t like the color of his robe.”

  “His robe?” Rudy had gotten used to Gil’s trick of fixing her attention on bizarre tangents, clues visible to a scholar that even a wizard might miss. It was one of the things she had in common with Ingold, who was popularly considered to be slightly mad. But even so …

  “The iconography of saints is very stylized.” Gil carefully rolled up the scroll she had been studying, tied it, and carried it and her notes across to the big iron-bound oak cupboard. Rudy could see that her notes were almost entirely in the flowing bookhand of the Wathe, interspersed here and there with English, which neither of them used much anymore. “It’s a teaching tool for the illiterate. There’s a reason behind every image, every color, every tchotchke …”

  “Gil-Shalos?” Shadow moved in the doorway that led through to the Guards’ watchroom, the pale flower of a quatrefoil on dark clothing, and long ivory braids with dark fragments of bone woven into them, framing a narrow face. The Icefalcon came in, carrying something in a scrap of burlap through which dirty brown fluid had soaked. If the whole Keep hadn’t been faintly redolent of salvaged carrion, Rudy would have had more warning of his approach. “I had to wrench these from the Council’s regulators of meat. I trust you’re sufficiently grateful.”

  “Kill anybody over it?” Gil carried it to the table.

  “And have to clean my sword hilt again?” Gil grinned and picked apart the wrappings. “Yuckers,” Rudy said.

  “Up your nose, punk.” She turned one of the hacked-off limbs thoughtfully. It looked like the front leg of a wolverine, but there was something badly wrong with the proportion of it: too long in bone, the claws widened into short spades. “You seen tracks of this one?”

  The White Raider nodded, hand resting lightly on the hilt of his sword. “The whole valley went under snow during the storm, but I saw this track during the winter, though I never saw the things themselves. Perhaps three, maybe four, all told, in the Vale.”r />
  “Always near the slunch?”

  The icefalcon nodded. He looked little the worse for the climb up from the Settlements, nor for days of hunting the woods for storm-kills. He carried two or three fresh bruises, from that evening’s training session. Rudy privately suspected he was an android.

  “I told Ingold of it, during the snows.” He folded his arms and looked down over Gil’s shoulder as she sorted through the other objects in the cloth: paws and limbs, mostly, but there was the head of something that might have been a woodchuck.

  Gil considered the remains for a moment more, then went to fetch the remains of the thing that had attacked her in Penambra from the cupboard where they were stored. Rudy glanced across the table at the Guard and asked, “That wasn’t you who saw Ingold leave the settlement last night, was it?” If anyone had been able to see through the wizard’s illusions, it would have been the Icefalcon, but it was very unlike that cold-blooded young killer to mention such a thing, and certainly not to the daughter of Varkis Hogshearer.

  The Icefalcon shook his head. “His name was spoken among the men today on the way up the mountain,” he said. He moved a glowstone out of Gil’s tidy circle, making patterns of them around the sticky bundle and its horrid contents. “Many things were said of him, most of them stupid, but no one spoke of his leaving the camp.”

  “Then how the hell did—”

  “What about insects in the slunch?” Gil came back to the table, set the crusted hempen wrappings of the Penambra thing down with a sodden thwack. “The slunch-worms don’t seem to attack crops.”

  “I’ve seen them,” the Icefalcon said. He had a very soft voice, light like a young boy’s, and seldom spoke above a whisper. His silvery eyes were without expression as he studied Gil’s face, but he asked, “Are you well? I’ll be returning to the Settlements at dawn. Everything in Manse and Carpont will be well and truly rotting, but there will be seed grain at least, and metal, do we get there before bandits do. Will you be all right?”