Mother of Winter

by Barbara Hambly

  “They’re poor folk,” Alde said softly. “There may be a lot of thievery.”

  “Yeah. It was up on this level that I saw the gaboogoo.” He walked forward again, listening, feeling with his mind …

  And there he was. The Guy with the Cats.

  Not literally, of course. Not physically. Not even visually in the form of an image or vision.

  But as surely as he knew his own name, Rudy knew the Guy with the Cats had been here, had worked some great magic here. The sense of him was as strong as if the old dude had stood on this spot yesterday.

  Rudy halted immobile, reaching out to touch the wall, eyes shut, trying to call the ancient mage’s image more clearly to his mind …

  And realized there were people in almost every one of the rooms around them.

  Alde started to speak, and Rudy held up a warning hand. He concentrated on the sound of all those thick-drawn breaths. On the hushed shufflings and pattings of moving flesh and moving clothing, behind those new locked wooden doors. The skitter of rat paws; a muttering voice asking something about Theepa’s baby.

  It was the middle of the afternoon. There was plowing, planting, foraging to be done—and in any case, who’d want to stay up here in the frowst?

  “Koram Biggar says there’s been illness here, since the ice storm,” Alde said as he and she retraced their steps soundlessly through the twisting ways, Rudy marking dabs of invisible light on the walls, to guide him back to the place.

  “There’s always malingering here, if they think they can get the headman of the section to let them get away with it. Sometimes Old Man Gatson or Garunna Brown don’t get off this level for weeks.”

  Alde frowned and paused to lean on the wall, her hand going to her belly while Rudy nearly swallowed his heart. Ohmigod, she’s going into labor, what am I going to …?

  “I didn’t like the smell up there,” she said, a little apologetic, straightening up and walking on, leaving Rudy feeling both very silly and profoundly glad that he hadn’t bolted down the corridor screaming for boiling water and towels. “I don’t mean the whole place didn’t smell like a privy,” she added with her shy grin. “But there was a kind of underlayer of something. Something wrong. Unfamiliar.”

  Rudy frowned, trying to call it back to mind. “I wasn’t noticing,” he admitted at last, shamefaced. “I was just thinking about how bad the whole place stank. I’ll watch for that when I go back there with the Cylinder.”

  “Will that show you anything?” She had released his hand, and even though she looked pale in the witchlight, she did not accept his proffered arm. They were down on the second level now, walking along the Royal Hall, one of the broad original corridors that stretched from the Royal Sector at the east end of the Keep almost to the front wall. Though everything was quiet here, too, the corridor passed through cells occupied by the House of Ankres and its henchmen, and Lord Ankres was conservative in his faith.

  “I dunno.” Rudy shrugged, hands tucked into his belt. “Can’t hurt to try. Ingold has a whole list of words that came out of one of the oldest manuscripts that are supposed to be magic, but they were handed down phonetically, and nobody knows what they mean or what they go to anymore. He says they might be connected with machinery that’s been lost.”

  “Like the hydroponics tanks?” she asked hopefully.

  Rudy shook his head—it had been one of the first experiments he’d made with the Cylinder. The glass rod had vouchsafed no change. The tanks remained as inefficient as ever. Figures, he thought wryly. The hardware’s still here but somebody lost the manual. With our luck, when we find the thing it’ll be in Japanese.

  “Do you think maybe Brother Wend and Ilae will be able to help when they get here?” Together they passed into the subdued bustle of the Aisle, the voices of the laundresses, the tailors, the flax-carders who worked there a gentle racket, like wind chimes in the flame-speckled dark.

  “Maybe,” Rudy said uneasily.

  He’d contacted Wend yesterday via scrying crystal, at the young priest’s camp somewhere among the Bones of God. Wend’s hair and beard were a dark, matted mess, his soft, brown, cowlike eyes worried: “I don’t know what it is,” he had said, bending close to his own scrying stone, held within his cupped hands, “but something has been following us for three days. Ilae and I both have tried to identify it, tried to see it, to no avail.” He’d glanced around; past his shoulder Rudy had seen Ilae, a thin red-haired young woman, fragile as she’d been as a witch-child taken in by the Wizards’ Corps, nervously watching the pine trees that shut them into an emerald twilight.

  “We lay awake, sleepless, all last night,” Wend had continued, his voice low. “We have heard nothing, sensed nothing … except that there is something there.”

  White Raiders? Rudy had wondered at the time, but in his heart he knew that what was stalking the two young wizards across the empty wastes of Gettlesand wasn’t anything as simple as that.

  “We can’t count on anything,” he said now to Alde, as they passed through the half-deserted watchroom of the Guards. The big training room was dark, for there’d been a problem of glowstone theft lately, and Janus took good care to lock up the Guards’ allotment. “And anyhow, Wend and Ilae aren’t much more than novices themselves. If—”

  He stopped on the threshold of his workroom, rage searing him like a sudden electrical charge. For a moment he could not even speak.

  “Goddamn little bitch,” he whispered. “Sneaky lying lagarta …!” As if the words had released him from physical restraint, he strode into the double cell, to where the Black Book of Lists lay open on the table, a handful of its pages ripped out, the smell of ashes heavy in the stove. He ran his hand over the book, though he didn’t need to. The echoes of Scala Hogshearer’s spite and malice lay all over it like vomit. His voice rose in a furious shout, “I’m gonna break that friggin’ little puta’s neck!”

  “No!” Alde grabbed him as he whirled for the door, putting herself in front of him, catching his sleeves, his vest. He rounded on her, panting with fury. She said firmly, “I’ll go.”

  “This isn’t your—”

  “I’ll go.” The cornflower eyes flashed with sudden command. “You’re angry.” All the gentleness was gone from her now. Her face was the face of a queen who had seen the worst that Fate can give.

  “God Christly damn right I’m angry,” Rudy yelled. “Ingold risked his goddamn life to retrieve that book! Everything in it—”

  “All the more reason I must speak to her, not you.” She thrust him to the rough log chair, forced him to sit, and as she did so he thought, Christ, this isn’t any of her business! She should lie down … Her face was pointy and white with exhaustion, and sweat stood out on her forehead beneath the soft black wings of her hair.

  Another part of him thought, She’s right. He knew if he saw his pupil now he’d cause an unforgivable breach, which the Keep absolutely and utterly could not afford. And furious as he was, he knew the book had been violated from teenage spite. He’d seen his sisters do that kind of thing all the time.

  He watched the woman he loved as she crossed the big room to the door, her shadow reeling over the plastered walls in the glowstone’s pallid light. There was a world of banked rage in the set of her back and shoulders—he wouldn’t have wanted to be either Scala or her father at this moment.

  In the door she turned. “She’ll lie, you know,” she said. “And her father will back her up.”

  Rudy sat for a long time in silence after she’d gone, struggling to calm his breathing, staring at the mutilated book. It was—thank God—the simplest of the early magic texts, and the lists it contained could be recompiled by Ingold and himself from memory—in our copious spare time, he reflected savagely. But he remembered Ingold, white and silent with shock and horror, crawling carefully under the precariously balanced weight of broken stone and tile to extract this book and two others from the wreckage of the library at Quo. He remembered all those long nights on the dese
rt carrying it back, and the sense he had of the long years of magic and hope and effort that clung to its faded covers.

  He couldn’t even really wish Scala ill, because on her well-being might depend so much of the future survival of the Keep.

  The little bitch.

  He drew out his scrying crystal and calmed his mind enough to call Ingold’s image to the stone. And got nothing.

  “Oh, Christ, don’t give me that again.”

  He tried contacting Thoth, and then Brother Wend, with similar nonresults. In the open state of his concentration he felt, not the deep-flowing, angry pressure he had sensed before—the weight of magic along the earth’s fault lines—but only a kind of hot heaviness on the fringes of his consciousness, a gray interference that would allow nothing through.

  Rudy mumbled a scatological comment and put the crystal away. He gathered the Black Book up, made a search for possibly dropped pages near the hearth—there were none, of course—and took it to the big oak cupboard that filled most of one wall. It was still locked, and the spells of Ward and Guard still in place. Everything on the shelves was as he had left it. For a moment he had a horrible vision of Scala going through and smashing everything in her rage, as his sister Teresa had done when she threw out all of his sister Yolanda’s makeup during that stupid business about who was going to date that dweeb Richard Clemente. But that didn’t seem to be the case.

  Yet, Rudy thought grimly. To Ingold’s spells of Ward and Guard he added his own, woven specifically with Scala’s name and image and the essence of her being. For good measure he placed the same Wards on the chest where Gil kept the record crystals, wrapped in their parchment indices.

  Someday everyone in the Keep might have to depend on Scala Hogshearer for their very lives.

  He hoped he’d be dead by that time.

  “Ah, Master Wizard,” came Lapith Hornbeam’s pleasant voice from the doorway. “I’m so glad I’ve found you in. About this idea my mother has, for locating stock …”

  All in all, it was nearly twenty-four hours before Rudy returned to the fifth level and the magic of the Guy with the Cats.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  As Alde had predicted, Scala denied having been anywhere near the workroom, and her father swore she had been with him and raged before the Council at Rudy’s prejudice against his daughter. Rudy didn’t think Scala would have the cojones to show up at the workroom that evening demanding a lesson, but she did. He blandly informed her that because some person or persons unknown had destroyed the relevant pages of the Black Book of Lists, he couldn’t teach her anything whatsoever until Ingold returned and the pages could be copied from memory.

  “You’re lying,” she yelled and kicked the leg of the table, making the glowstones jump. “You can teach me other things. You can teach me lots.” Her heavy brows pulled into a scowl. “Other spells. Real spells.”

  “Like I told you, kid, nothing works unless you memorize the lists,” Rudy said, though this wasn’t strictly true. There were spells for things like starting fires, and reading the weather, that could be taught in the absence of the concepts of Names and Essence, but damned if he was going to turn the little snake into a firestarter. Scala went beet-red and threw a temper tantrum, hurling everything within reach to the floor—Rudy had taken care that there was nothing breakable on hand—then stormed away to fetch her father.

  Rudy spent the rest of the afternoon trying to find time to go over every record crystal and every book of Ingold’s meager library to see if he couldn’t learn something that would increase the productivity of the hydroponics tanks. A comparison between the preliminary inventory of wheat and meat and the production rate of the tanks indicated an ugly hiatus right before the winter solstice. Coming back from the crypts themselves, Rudy passed a group of the Sketh henchmen in conversation with several of those farmers who owed allegiance, for one reason or another, to Lord and Lady Sketh—only after he’d passed them did he realize that they’d fallen silent at his approach and moved aside more than people customarily did to let him pass.

  On his way back from walking in the high woods behind the Keep the following morning, Rudy had another go at contacting Ingold, and this time reached the old man without trouble.

  “Yes, I can restore the pages from memory.” Ingold rubbed the bridge of his nose with his fore-knuckle. There was a half-healed cut over one eye and a dirty bandage on his wrist, but he appeared cheerful and more or less rested, and the weather in the south seemed sufficiently warm for him to have put aside the bearskin surcoat he’d been wearing.

  “I’ll dictate them to her when I return,” the old man said. “The penmanship exercise should make her regret her behavior, if she doesn’t already. We’ll have all the winter to work in.”

  Rudy shivered, for winters at the Keep were long. Even with spells to keep the area around the doors clear of snow, it sometimes lay up to twenty feet deep around the black walls. There was nowhere to go, and little to do except wonder whether the food would last and fight about trifles. Gil’s reputation as a storyteller was not based on idle amusement but on a genuine need.

  “In the meantime,” Ingold went on, “teach her cloud-herding and the Summonings of things like water, and heat, and cold, and air. Those are all things that work in almost direct proportion to how well one does one’s meditations. If she sloughs off on her meditation practice, she won’t get results. With luck, by the time I get back she’ll have learned a little self-discipline. And Rudy—” He half smiled ruefully. “—she’s far from the most obnoxious student I’ve known of.”

  Rudy shivered again, as the old man’s image faded.

  Winter.

  Looking up the valley, from where he sat at the edge of the woods, he could see the white horns of the St. Prathhes’ Glacier. Below him, separated from the Keep by the pear and apple orchards Minalde’s husband, Eldor, had ordered planted, years before the coming of the Dark—at least half of them dying, leafless, from the ice storm—the herdkids’ ashes lay buried in the cemetery, along with the skeletons of their dogs once the meat had been boiled off them. From up here the wooden steles looked like Popsicle sticks thrust into the earth. Rudy saw their parents coming and going to the place quite often, when the unending work of replanting gave them time.

  Through the hemlocks that grew at the southeast corner of the Keep, a small form was moving; even at this distance Rudy recognized Tir. Altir Endorion, Lord of the Keep and High King of Darwath, he walked the path alone in his bright blue knitted jerkin. Rudy watched the boy go from grave to grave, standing for a few moments at each stele, tracing with his forefinger the carved letters of his friends’ names.

  Rudy’s throat hurt, watching him. I would have done something if I could.

  After a time the boy raised his head, and Rudy knew he saw him, a still figure in mottled brown and black among the mottled brown and black of rocks, lichens, and trees. Without a sign the child turned and walked back alone to the Keep.

  Rudy gave him sufficient start to ensure that they wouldn’t meet, then followed slowly. In the workroom he found no evidence that Scala had attempted to see him. He had taken to carrying the Cylinder with him at all times—though it weighed heavy in the pocket of his buffalo-hide vest—and sleeping with it under his pillow at night. From the cupboard he now took Ingold’s fist of spell-words and the various shapings of power seen within the record stones. By the quiet back corridors of the nearly deserted daytime Keep, he made his way up to the fifth level, the tangle of corridors and of rooms with their new-made doors shut tight.

  The marks he had left on the wall, invisible to normal eyes, led him easily back to the place. Someone had replaced the glowstone in front of Saint Bounty; Rudy took it again, with a flash of irritation. The glowstones were supposedly reserved for the main junctions and stairways, and for those who had work inside, like spinning and weaving, though people were always swiping them. He suspected Varkis Hogshearer had a pile of them in his rooms, holding them for clan
destine sale.

  Rudy pushed the thought of the man away. The packed dirt on the floor here was so thick as to be uneven underfoot, like a forest path; the ceiling had been lowered at some time past to provide storage space overhead. Plaster and lath had fallen, leaving gaping holes. The smell was horrific, and, as Alde had said, there was something odd about it as well—sweetish, like a coloration that underlay everything else. He couldn’t identify it.

  It took Rudy a moment to realize that the soft snufflings, the whispered voices, were gone now. The doors that had been so tightly shut yesterday were ever so slightly ajar.

  He reached with his staff, gently pushing. The leather hinges squeaked. Mageborn, he could see in the dark within. Only a squalid room, two-thirds of an original cell with a lowered ceiling, over half of it for loft space. He stepped inside. Filthy mattresses, the smell of fresh ashes and chamber pots. A box for a table, a really awful icon of Saint Bounty on the wall. A mouse regarded him insolently from a small pile of blankets and clothing in a corner.

  The smell—with its undertone of oddness—was even stronger here.

  Rudy remembered from his bar-fighting days how a drinking man’s sweat carried the smell of alcohol, though he still couldn’t identify this disturbing, sickly-sweet stench. He returned to the corridor, uneasy, and listened again. Nothing. In all the cramped rooms, the smelly hallways, the dry pipes, and crotted lofts around him. Nothing.

  He didn’t like it one Christly little bit.

  The marks he’d left led him farther inward, to the place where the Guy with the Cats had worked the spell that caught his attention. The sense of it was strong, and Rudy, following it like a sound, came at last to the place where it was strongest, a half cell mostly lofted over, but with one wall still of the original black stone.