Mother of Winter

by Barbara Hambly

  “Fine.” It was a lie. Rudy could see that and so could the Icefalcon, for the tall warrior put his hand to the uninjured side of Gil’s face and turned it to the light.

  He stood for a time, considering her, resembling a long-limbed pale cheetah but slightly less human. Then he turned to Rudy and said, “Look after her.” He melted away into the shadows. At no time, Rudy realized, had he used his right hand or moved it out of reach of his sword hilt.

  “I really am fine.” Gil’s voice was very small. She had turned her back on him, her head half bowed as she sorted through a revolting collection of animal parts with her dark hair half hiding her face. In her baggy, too-big black clothing, she had a fragile look, like an alley cat in a hard winter. There was a tension in her, too, as if she were perpetually braced, perpetually fighting something or ready to fight something; a look of pain, a series of lines around eyes and brows and mouth, that went past the wound on the side of her face.

  Her tone returned to business almost with her next breath. “Have you had time to look at any of this?”

  “In between my painting class and ballet practice, you mean?”

  In the quick beauty of her grin he saw the shy girl peek out from behind the warrior’s armor, then duck away to safety, again. As if half ashamed of appearing human, she turned her attention quickly back to the mess before her. “Ingold collected most of this during the salvage. The Icefalcon’s helped me a lot in woodcraft, but you’re the naturalist. Any of it look familiar?”

  Rudy shook his head. “That’s the whole problem, spook. Like the old man said, nobody’s ever seen any of those critters before.”

  He stepped close to look, nevertheless, drawing his knife and scraping at the slimy meat. Under Ingold’s guidance he’d boiled and disassembled and reassembled dozens of animal carcasses the way he used to break down cars, fascinated by the delicate interfitting of muscle and sinew and bone.

  “I was a historian, not a biologist,” Gil said, probing with her fingers. “But if you’re an economic determinist, you pick up a little bit of science when you study stuff like climatology and demographics. Look at this one, the way it’s put together. Look at the foot bones and the elbow joint.”

  “Weird.” Rudy turned the limb over in sticky fingers. “You got the back foot of this thing?”

  She produced it from another corner of the table, scraped to the tendons. He held it close to the clustered glowstones, then summoned a brilliance of witchlight around him as well. “I’ve never seen this kind of deformation in the center of the bone shank. Look, it’s on every one of the long bones, from the radius right down to the carpals. But from the joints I’d say this was some kind of rabbit.”

  “That’s what I thought, too.” Gil perched on a corner of the table, wiped her hands on the corner of a rag. “Now, that furry slug thing Ingold found in the woods after the storm—when you skin it down and chop out the fat, you find leg bones. Here’s the skull. It’s really deformed, look here. Same texture as the long bones of the rabbit, but most of that deformation’s cartilage. Look at the teeth.”

  “Ferret,” Rudy said immediately. “Holy cow-pies.” He set the greasy skull down next to the deformed rabbit feet. “But that takes thousands of years. Thousands of generations.”

  “Hundreds of thousands,” Gil said. She crossed to fetch a basin and ewer from the sideboard, dunked her hands in the chilly water. The magelight showed up the harsh lines around her eyes, turned the bruises livid along cheekbone and chin. “Even with a really intensive program of selective breeding—like if you’re trying to breed down to a teacup poodle—you’re looking at fifteen or twenty years at the very least.”

  Rudy shook his head wonderingly. “Fifteen or twenty years’ work for a teacup poodle. Some people need to get a life.”

  The wound made her grin lopsided, and it faded quickly.

  “So you’re saying … what? Somebody’s breeding these things? Who the hell would do that?” He’d said that before, he thought. Recently. Gray and Nila, standing on the slopes of the Devil’s Grandmother … The deep pulse of anger in the ground …

  “It’s not that simple.” She touched one of the roses, came back to his side. “You feel the quake a few hours ago?”

  He shook his head. A few hours ago he’d been in bed, half blind with exhaustion, Minalde weeping in his arms.

  “It wasn’t a big one.” She nodded toward the scrying table. “Here in the Keep you could barely feel it at all. See if it was caused by another volcano someplace.”

  It took a long time. Hours—Rudy wasn’t sure. Though it could not be used for communication, the scrying table’s range was greater than a small stone’s, and the images that stirred within the central crystal were larger, clearer, tiny landscapes that absorbed the mind. Using the table, scenes were visible to Rudy that would have been impossible to see in a smaller gem, people and places appearing sometimes without prior knowledge or any will of the scryer, displaying things unknown.

  Staring into the glimmering depths, Rudy let his mind drift, first infinitely deep, then out across the arid wastes of Gettlesand and the burned-out, ash-white ruin of upland forest on the slopes of the Devil’s Grandmother; over the Bones of God and the Sawtooth Mountains; then out to the Seaward Mountains, wreathed still by the limmerance of forgotten spells. He saw green icebergs floating in oceans the color of asphalt; endless continents of slow-moving glacial pack. Warriors rode in a fragile line below the white cliffs of glacier; islands smoked in the heaving sea. At last he saw in the south the tall cordillera of some unknown land, pale with drought and unwonted cold, plastered with unbroken miles of pus-colored slunch that stirred with uneasy, obscene movement. The trees on the mountainside were burning for miles, and dust and heat roiled skyward like the mushroom clouds of a holocaust of hydrogen bombs. The sky was black. Endless miles of tarry, starless, daytime black. “Got it.”

  He looked up, aware for the first time that his head ached. Gil had tidied away the bones, save for two or three sets, and was making notes again. By the heap of wax tablets at her elbow, she had been doing this for hours.

  “Somewhere way the hell in the south, maybe even on some other continent. Big. The ash-fall looks about the size of Texas.”

  The square, sensitive lips tightened to a single cold line. “That’s how many this year? Six? Eight? That we know about?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I wish I knew the statistical likelihood of that many volcanic eruptions in six months—or in thirty-six months, because the first couple of eruptions Ingold commented on were about three years ago. The summer before we found the first slunch up in Gae.”

  “Makes sense,” Rudy said with a shrug. “Wherever it comes from, slunch is a cold-weather thing. The ice storm ripped it to hell at ground zero, but it didn’t kill it. It was like you’d left a piece of plastic out overnight. Nedra Hornbeam tells me there’s patches of it growing all the way down the pass now, little spots like that …” His fingers circled to something the size of a U.S. silver dollar. “She thinks the wind carried it, but I don’t know.”

  Gil shook her head. “It’s the cold, not physical seeding. And something else the Icefalcon told me: the tracks he’s seen around the slunch, the really weird ones, are mostly rabbit—” She touched the aberrant bones. “—and ferret—” Her thin fingers brushed another. “—and wolverine.”

  Rudy was silent, filled with the sense he had so often in talking to Ingold, of following a dancing light over unseen ground in darkness. As if someone had handed him a pile of jigsaw puzzle pieces, which put together would form a message he really didn’t want to read.

  Around them the Keep was settled into the deep-night watch, when only the smallest sounds murmured in the black glass corridors: the light tread and harness-creak of a Guard’s passing, the murmur of water in the pipes. The scurry of rats or the swift flick of a cat sliding serpentwise around corners in pursuit. Darkness filled every crevice, like a liquid filling up th
e whole Keep from the crypts to the attics where the pumps churned with eternal, sourceless power; darkness and the breathing of sleepers, though Rudy was conscious that many within those walls wept in their dreams.

  “Rudy,” Gil said softly, “trust me when I say this sounds as weird to me as it does to you. Maybe weirder, because I don’t know enough about magic to know whether it can be done or not. I really hope I am crazy, because if I’m not, I think we’re all in real trouble. And I may be crazy,” she added, rubbing the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger, her forehead suddenly creased with pain. “I feel so … so strange lately.”

  She shook her head, pushing the strangeness—and whatever it implied—aside. “But be that as it may … Doesn’t it seem to you that somebody or something is using magic to terraform the world?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Two nights later Rudy dreamed about the Bald Lady.

  He recognized her, as he’d recognized the Guy with the Cats, from the record crystals: a tall, thin woman in a plain sheath of white gauze that fitted her rangy form closely. Though it was nearly transparent and left her flat breasts bare, he found her no more erotic than a ghost might have been. Her head was shaved, as it was in the crystal’s image, and, like the Guy with the Cats’, patterned with a line of blue tattooing. She wore a dark blue cloak over her bare arms, and where her fingers curled around its edge, the blue lace of tattoo marked them like a glove.

  She was walking in the Keep. There was no mistaking the black, sleek hardness of the walls, the uniformity of the square doorways. Rudy even thought he recognized one of the snail-shell spirals of stair that led to the crypts below. She walked haloed in the white splendor of glowstones; once, she passed a fountain that sparkled with that clear radiance. She was alone. He thought there was no one else in the Keep, in all those vast black spaces—no one at all.

  Her face was calm but filled with unutterable grief.

  She has the answer, he thought. The answer to the whole thing. How he knew this, he didn’t know, except that he knew it was true.

  She had the key.

  He thought he was standing at the foot of a stair—first level? Upper crypts? He wasn’t sure, the Keep had changed too much over the years—watching her come down the spiraling steps toward him, her blue cloak moving around her, he saw there were tears in her eyes. Her face was the face of death borne alone.

  But she can’t die, she can’t go away! he thought frantically. She knows the answer to all this! He tried to speak to her, tried to stop her, to ask her where she was going, but she passed him, and in the dream he could feel the warmth of her cloak contrasting to the cold of the air when it brushed against his arm, and he could smell the cardamom and vanilla of her perfume.

  She walked away from him, the glowstones picking up the midnight sheen of her cloak, the smooth line of her shoulders, the curve of her shaven head, as she vanished into the dark.

  Rudy. Ingold’s voice spoke very clearly in his mind.

  Rudy came awake at once. He’d been expecting this, and groped under his pillow for his scrying stone. Almost instinctively he knew it was early in the night, the Dancers, the Demon, the Star-Lord with his shining belt, not yet clearing the ice-tipped tusks of the Rampart Range. The witchlight he Summoned rested like a pale blue Tinker Bell on his hay-stuffed pillow, illuminating the scuffy patterns of the ancient brick wall that cut his own little half cell off the Guards’ storeroom and seeming to impart a secret significance to the pattern of faded lights and darks of the quilt on his bed.

  “I’m here, man.”

  “And I’m here,” Ingold said. “By the Four Ladies.”

  Past his shoulder Rudy could just make out the weathered shapes of the standing-stones that dominated the high meadow at the top of the Vale, blue dolomite found nowhere in the mountains: three on their feet, one lying among them, dead of grief, it was said, for her child. Though the stars burned faint and yellow through the thin overcast, their light glimmered in firefly threads on the glacier’s towering wall. “Can I bring you anything?”

  “Just some food.” His white hair hung in strings around his face, which was bruised black and gulched with strain. Rudy wondered when he’d last eaten or slept.

  “I’m on my way.”

  Gil was tossing, breathing fast, in the narrow bed in Ingold’s room, but she woke before Rudy could reach out to her with a spell of quiet. Her hand went to her sword and Rudy said quickly from the doorway, “It’s me, spook,” Summoning just enough witchlight so she could see him. Though he doubted that any Guard would comment on his slipping out of the Keep to meet Ingold, a couple of Lord Ankres’ warriors and one of Lord Sketh’s were in the watchroom as well—sarcastically rehashing Lady Sketh’s latest demands upon her hapless spouse—and Rudy didn’t believe in handing anyone any more ammunition than they already had.

  Gil rose and dressed without a word, while Rudy retreated to the workroom to wait for her. He stretched out his senses to pick up Melantrys’ always hilarious imitations of Barrelstave’s pontifications and Hogshearer’s incessant whining, but it was clear even to him, from remarks the Sketh warrior made, that someone—probably Lady Sketh—had been twisting the interpretations of Ingold’s motives and movements. “You got to admit, nine hundred people, near enough, died—and him the only one that survived?”

  “He’s a frigging wizard, you dolt. Of course he’d survive. And he’s Ingold Inglorion. He’d survive if the Earth fell on his head.”

  “Then why didn’t he save the others?”

  Gil emerged slinging on a thick sheepskin coat over her black uniform. From a cupboard she took a satchel of the bread and meat that she’d been sequestering from her own meager rations—with contributions from Rudy and the Icefalcon—for two days now. Minalde had had her way, and placed all food and all seed in the Keep under guard; they were still fighting in Council about distribution, and Rudy knew for a fact that Varkis Hogshearer was the center of a spanking black-market trade. Rudy had checked and rechecked the hydroponics crypts—including Gil’s suggestion about making sure the light there was full-spectrum—and it was obvious the yields were going to be too small to make much of a difference.

  Another thing to worry about.

  And Tir hadn’t spoken to him since his return.

  Only when they were out under the sable blanket of the night sky, Gil holding to Rudy’s cloak, her drawn sword in her free hand, did Rudy ask, “You okay?” There was no need to whisper. A trace of glamour had gotten them past the door Guards, and the wide-flung patrols had reported no sign of Raider or bandit anywhere near the Vale as of twilight. They had shut the Keep doors behind them, and in a weird way the Vale felt safe—safe in the moveless pall of death that lingered there still, like the oddly sculpted cones of unmelted snow remaining where the woods’ shadows lay thick. No owl hooted, nor cried wolf, coyote, or any living thing. Their bodies had all been taken up by scavenging parties—stripped, broken, smoked, and stored. Rudy’s mageborn eyes made out the black ranks of pine and cottonwood above the path, limp heaps of cold-killed summer vegetation rotting around their feet.

  “Nightmares.” There was casual dismissal in Gil’s voice.

  “About that thing in Penambra?”

  “Yeah.” Her tone was cool, the way it was when she was in pain and didn’t want to talk about it. She’d left off covering the wound in her face. It still wasn’t healing. “Some. No. I don’t know.” In the stillness he could hear the creak of her boot leather, the swish of the satchel against the hide coat, the faint scrunching of his own boots on the pine mast underfoot. Wind breathed a soughing sound from the trees and then fell still. Before them, St. Prathhes’ Glacier stretched in a pearly rampart, nearly two hundred feet high, poised between the black teeth of the rocks.

  “Jewels,” Gil said finally, but she sounded puzzled. “I dreamed about … jewels.”

  “You mean a treasure?”

  “No. It was inside a jewel. Things that looked like jewels.”
The steady pressure of her grip on his cloak altered as her hand moved a little, a fumbling gesture, as if trying to express something she wasn’t sure how to envision. “They hurt Ingold,” she said after a long time. “These three … things. Made of jewels. They were playing the flute to the thing that sleeps in the pool. Now and then things would crawl out of the slunch in the pit in front of them. Blood …” She frowned, like a sleeper disturbed by incongruity but unable to wake.

  “Are they up at the Nest?” Rudy pitched his words to be no more than a murmur in the dark, so as not to bring her away from the borderlands where she could still see down into her dream.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “In the Keep, maybe?”

  She thought about that for a long time. “They’re in this jewel,” she said at last. “It’s full of mist, and there’s a statue there without any eyes, staring ahead into the darkness. But there’s light where they are, only it isn’t really light.”

  Light that was not really light flickered ahead of Rudy, a wizard’s signal among the mourning humps of the stones. Five years ago Gil had shown Rudy the trail over which Ingold had led her from the Nest in what had once been a city of the Dark, and that trail was gone now, swallowed by St. Prathhes’ inexorable advance. Great heaps of wanly glittering ice lay all along the glacier’s feet, broken from the wall above, and all the ground between the Four Ladies and what had been the trail head lay under a sheet of water, milky in the night.

  The miniature elfwood of dwarf alder that had grown hereabouts was dying. One end of the meadow was leprous with slunch.

  “Ingold?” called Rudy softly. “You there, man?”

  “As much of me as is left after coming over the glacier.” What Rudy thought was one of the Four Ladies moved, and the frost he thought he’d seen dislimned itself into wispy hair and an unkempt beard. Ingold levered himself to his feet using his staff. Fingers and palms were bandaged, the rags that wrapped them crusted with blood. “Did you bring food?”