Mother of Winter

by Barbara Hambly

  Here, he thought. He’d stood here.

  He drew the Cylinder from his pocket and held it before him, opening his mind, breathing power into himself as if the magic of the air, the secrets of the dark earth, the pulse of the rivers that ran below the ground, all passed through him like white light. He formed the words in his mind without reference to the parchment in his belt. He hadn’t realized how familiar they’d become to him, with all those readings.

  Ancient words. Names of power. Half-guessed meanings and etymologies Gil had teased out from cognates and affixes.

  Memory. Memory.

  The Guy with the Cats was there.

  Rudy was shocked, not at his presence—he knew he’d be there—but at his appearance. In the crystals Rudy had put his age at sixty or seventy, though with wizards it was difficult to tell. He was of a gene pool with which Rudy was unfamiliar, short and broad-faced, mouth and chin neat and small under a Durante hatchet of schnozz. In two of the spells he’d worked in the crystals—abstruse magics concerning machines of incomprehensible function—he’d worn a wig, blue-dyed wool dressed with gold, and in the third he’d been neatly shaven bald. Now his own hair grew long upon his shoulders, thin and white and held back with a couple of painted sticks, the serpent tattoo showing through the baldness on the forehead like a blue snake half hidden in colorless grass.

  So thin was he, so worn, that Rudy almost didn’t recognize him—probably would not, had they not both been mages. He looked like a man eaten from within by cancer, the marks on his hands shapeless where the flesh had shrunk. And older. Infinitely older.

  Rudy looked around him. They were in a room, a double or triple cell extending to the front wall of the Keep. He could see the existing wood and plaster walls as well, not transparent or ghostly, but solid and real, though the other reality was just as visually clear. There were two or three other walls present that he knew immediately had been built and torn down in the interim, no longer there, but leaving echoes of what they had been.

  Everything that had ever happened within these rooms was absorbed into the walls. Remembered, as if the Keep itself were a living thing. Rudy felt that he could hear all the voices just by touching them, and knew he didn’t want to. Not ever.

  “These are the last,” the old man said. It had been so long since Rudy had spoken anything but the Wathe himself—or occasional English to Gil—that it came as a shock to hear something through the Spell of Tongues, the aural equivalent of the simultaneous vision of the walls. The record crystals were silent; Rudy had no idea what languages they spoke.

  The old man sighed. “They laugh at me, Brycothis. With the storerooms heaped with food, they say I’m like a miser hiring guards to watch his gold when he’s being fed and clothed and housed for free. But we’ve learned not to trust, you and I.”

  He laughed creakily, and Rudy looked around, searching for the one to whom he spoke. But there was no one. Because the old man was crazy? he wondered. Or because anyone who wasn’t standing in this particular spot just wasn’t visible to him? He had the strange impression that he’d grown suddenly tiny and was standing within the Cylinder on this spot, looking through it as through a window. He did not move as the old man walked forward, away from him—through all those intervening walls—to what Rudy knew was the front wall of the Keep.

  He passed his hand along it, and Rudy could feel through his skin the power the old man used, the way he shaped it with his mind: a different way of concentrating power, a different sense of its plasticity and heft. A rectangular hollow opened in the wall; a panel slid aside where Rudy would have sworn no panel existed, to reveal a niche perhaps four feet long and two high. Rudy could not see how deep. The old man carried a wicker satchel over his right shoulder, and as he set it within, Rudy could see that it was filled with round black things like marbles. Some of them rolled out onto the stone floor of the niche.

  The old man pushed them tidily back into the satchel and then made another pass of his hand. There was not even a whisper as the panel returned to its place, and no sign of a seam in the wall. The wizard tottered back to where he had originally been, a foot or so from Rudy’s elbow, and made other gestures, signs of greater power; he held his hands and arms differently from the way Rudy had been taught, though the direction and the form of the gesture were the same.

  Another wall appeared, in front of the actual Keep wall.

  Illusion, and a very good one. The old man stood blinking at it for a moment, and Rudy could see on the curve of his forehead the glimmer of sweat. With a slight tremor in his illustrated fingers, the old man raised his hands again and drew breath; dark eyes closed, jaw set, drawing himself together for some final effort. He made a pass, a motion with his arms, drawing power … from where?

  Rudy didn’t understand its source, for it was nothing he had encountered before. But he felt the power come, flooding bright and sparkling into the old man’s tired flesh. It was a spell such as Rudy had used when preserving the meat at the Settlements when his own power was exhausted, but as a wizard, he knew that its source was not the earth or the air, as he’d have known a tune was being played on a piano rather than a guitar.

  The illusion of the second wall seemed to settle and solidify. For all time. For all who saw. It was a tremendous power-sink, a marvelous spell, like watching someone shape-shift or walk on water; the old man was trembling all over with fatigue when he was done. He whispered, “Thank you, Brycothis,” and bowed his head.

  Then he was gone.

  It took Rudy four or five tries to work his way through the maze to the front wall of the Keep. He returned again and again to the place of the original vision, speaking the words of memory again and watching the scene through, observing, not the old man now, but the lay of the walls. Once he found the place where the niche had been, it took him a good deal of experimenting to work through the illusion of the false wall. He set his hands and his mind to make the gestures of Summoning, to call into himself the unknown power as the old man had, and the imaginary headline formed itself in his mind: Wizard Zaps Self With Diabolic Death Rays Out of Past—Film at Eleven.

  Or as my mother would say, he thought wryly, don’t pick that up, you don’t know where it’s been.

  It took considerable tinkering with more orthodox forms of summoning power, but at length Rudy was able to set aside the illusion. It was a fairly simple matter then to open the niche beyond.

  The black marbles were still there, scattered across the floor of the niche, which was about twenty inches deep in a wall that was, Rudy knew, almost fifteen feet through. Tinier seeds were scattered among them, like red-black beads. The satchel had perished, reduced to a scattering of desiccated fragments. The corners of the niche were filled with the skeletons and the droppings of mice. None of the marbles appeared to have been nibbled.

  He picked one up. Deep within, he knew that it was food: ensorcelled, protected from harm and rot and circumstance, reduced at almost a molecular level to its true essence—a potato. And, Rudy sensed, turning it over in his fingers, definitely viable—if that was the term Gil used—if a way could be found to unravel the spells that had protected it for all these thousands of years.

  Rudy drew a deep breath and let it out. Completely revolutionized food production.

  We might just make it.

  He picked out as many as would fit in the pockets of his vest, added a couple of the smaller seeds, and stepping back a little, spoke the spell-word to slide the cover over the niche and settle the spells of illusion back into place. All he’d need, he thought, was Scala going into another snit and hiding these things. Or taking them to her father to sell back to the Keep for whatever concessions he could get.

  God only knew whether he could get through the spells that had protected them, he thought, following the tracemarks of his magic back through the maze. That was damn big juju the old man had used, some of the strongest he’d ever encountered—he wondered again where the power had come from. Maybe Ingold
could work it out.

  If Ingold didn’t buy it in combat against Los Tres Geezers.

  Or wasn’t stabbed in the back by Gil.

  Or—

  “Master Wizard!” a voice called out to him from around a comer, and he heard the frantic running of feet. “Master Wizard! Quick! The Lady Minalde …!”

  Rudy whispered, “Jesus!” and began to run. “Where are you? Where …?”

  “Here!”

  Rudy turned right, following the voice, damning the maze, and would have walked straight into the trap if he hadn’t thought, There’s no reflection on the wall around the corner. The guy isn’t carrying a light.

  It was a man’s voice that had called him. And only children ran the maze lightless.

  The next second a man’s weight slammed into his back.

  Rudy was already backpedaling, ducking, weaving, when the smelly weight of a blanket was thrown over his head, twisting away from where a knife had to be coming; and he was right, he felt the blade score along arm and shoulder instead of plunging into his chest. He struck, kicking, cursing, blinded by the thick folds of fabric; he threw himself backward against the man’s weight and stumbled, fell, knocking his breath out of him, and when he tried to rise, the breath wouldn’t come back.

  He knew then that the dagger had been poisoned. Passion-flower, God knows where they’d gotten it … His mind swam, vision blurring in the darkness as he struck at the grabbing hands and kept moving, trying to pull the blanket clear. He’d dropped his staff—another knife went in, this one hard and deep, and the blood pouring out was a sickening lurch of weakness, a long sinking fall. He yelled, summoning lightning, the first spell he could think of, and through the blanket saw its purple-white blaze and heard someone scream.

  Footfalls. Swimming dizziness. Gasping, he pulled the blanket clear and found himself in the corridor alone.

  Rudy’s first, immediate thought was that he could not afford to waste energy swearing. Poison distilled from the passion-flower—which grew in Penambra and some parts of Gettlesand but no farther north that he knew of—numbed the facility to work magic in small doses and was fatal in large ones. The roaring, buzzing grayness in his head, dimly similar to the sensation he’d gotten looking into the crystal when he last tried to reach Thoth, seemed to close in his senses. It was as if he could not remember how to summon power, could not remember what part of his brain to channel it to.

  He took his hand from his side and looked at it. It was dark red, as if he had set it down in paint.

  Not good.

  Fumblingly, he gathered what magic he could still command, worked the spells against shock, against poison—healing of internal wounds. He didn’t know if he was doing it right. The power was running out of him like his blood. His mouth felt dry and his whole body cold. The mousy, dirty smell of the floor, the stench of the cells around him, were overlain by a stink of charring, the dangerous ozone of lightning, and the coppery harshness of his blood. He only wanted to sleep.

  Somewhere clothing rustled. The scritch of dirty hair slipping across shoulders as someone turned his head.

  Rudy raised his head, blinking, and caught fleeting movement from the open door of a cell a few yards away. A foot pulled back from view.

  They were in the cells all around him, watching. Waiting for him to pass out.

  “Tu madre,” Rudy whispered, anger scalding him back to consciousness. He tried to rise and couldn’t but managed to get to his hands and knees. When he crawled past the door, he turned to look within it—Make my day, hijoputa—but saw no one.

  Whoever they were, they were hiding. But he heard them in the corridor behind him. Heard them shifting, slipping, moving through the cells in front of him as well.

  Waiting.

  No, Rudy thought, every breath a separate labor, like ripping trees out of iron earth. No. His vision blurred. At one time he thought he saw the herdkid Geppy Nool, and Linnet’s little daughter Thya, running away down the corridor from him; at another, indescribable little critters, like things from an Escher drawing, that scampered down the wall on spidery legs or ran lightly along the dirty floor in pursuit of a terrified mouse. He became very conscious of his heart, trying to contract with muscle that grew weaker and weaker. He couldn’t seem to remember the spell to keep it going, couldn’t find the power to make that spell work.

  You’re the only wizard in the Keep. Alde’s gonna die in childbirth if you buy it here.

  The anger at them, at those unseen watchers, flared anew. Her death would be on their hands. And they wouldn’t care.

  The smell of their clothing, their flesh, grew stronger in his nostrils. He heard the scrape of an elbow, the tap of a weapon, against the flimsy wall behind him. Barely able to turn his head, he saw them only as darkness within a growing darkness. An eye flashed, and then a blade.

  Dammit, he whispered. Damn it, damn it …

  He stretched out his hand, formed in his mind the words, the gestures, the Summoning that had been done by the Guy with the Cats.

  It was like inhaling radioactive Stardust, like a shot glass full of hyperdrive fuel. Rudy gasped, turned, flung lightning at the approaching shapes and heard one cry out and fall, smelled charred flesh as he scrambled to his feet, ran and staggered around another corner and down another passageway before he fell. There was a ladder down, not too far from here—he could see his own spell-marks on the wall, guiding the way. He tried to rise and fell again, though his flesh still tingled with the power he’d called. He poured it inward, blocking the effects of the poison as best he could. C’mon, heart, do your stuff …

  In his hand he formed the illusion of a little purple fireball and set it on the floor. “Okay, Lassie,” he said to it. “Go get the Icefalcon.”

  The fireball rolled away down the corridor in a trail of violet sparks.

  Rudy listened behind him.

  Nothing.

  Slowly, he began to drag himself toward the stair.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  He sat on plank scaffolding in a corner of the Keep …

  The Keep?

  Dawnlight surrounded him, dove-colored and chilly. But everything within him knew that he was in the Keep.

  He seemed to be sitting at the outer edge of a maze of scaffolding, miles of it stretching away in both directions, thousands of feet along black glass walls that rose up unevenly against that orchid sky. He looked down and saw a chasm of shadow hundreds of feet deep, from which the spiderweb framework rose: planks and what looked like bamboo, rope bridges, all wreathed and woven with lines of magic. Machinery rested on some of the platforms, unfamiliar black shapes that glistened with cold crystal appurtenances in their circles of silver and smoke; more power-circles had been drawn on every jerry-built bridge and catwalk, their curves and lines reaching off into the twilight air to form a lace of unsupported magic.

  And on every one of those platforms and bridges and catwalks, he could see the bodies of sleeping men and women, like sentries felled by plague. Beside one, two cats were sleeping, too.

  It is the Keep, Rudy thought. The Keep before it was finished. And the woman who sat bowed, defeated, curled within herself on the black plinth that rose out of the center of the foundation—it was the Bald Lady. The scaffolding where he sat—he could feel the edge of the damp planks sharply against his thighs, smell the oil of the machine next to him and the heartbreaking cold—was close enough that he could see her face when she raised her head at the sound of hooves, close enough to see the stoic pain in her eyes at the sight of the man framed within the open square of what would be the Keep doors.

  “Rudy?”

  Alde’s voice. She sounded scared. As well she might, he thought.

  He opened his eyes to a brief vision of her, sitting on the edge of the bed where he lay. Then he slipped back to find himself once more in the darkness of the corridor, with strange chalky creatures like legless scorpions rolling pillbug fashion down the dirty floor, and the dead herdkids standing in a r
ow in front of him, hand in hand, watching him …

  “Rudy!”

  Pain went through his head as if it had been split with wedges, and he rolled over fast—someone barely got him a slop bucket before the tsunami of nausea hit.

  “Well, there’s a waste of good rations,” remarked the Icefalcon’s voice.

  Rudy made a weary but universal gesture and after a moment ventured to open his eyes again. He was in his own small chamber. Somebody had brought in half a dozen glowstones, so the place was fairly bright, and about two-thirds of the population of the Keep seemed to have packed itself into the seven-by-fifteen cell. He revised the number downward to a score or so, including the Bishop Maia, Varkis Hogshearer and his repellent offspring, Philonis Weaver—who was one of the several nonmage Healers in the Keep patronized by those whose religious scruples kept them from consulting wizards—Lord and Lady Sketh, Koram Biggar, a whole squad of fifth-level-north types and another phalanx of Sketh and Ankres henchmen, and about half the Keep Council.

  All of them were talking.

  “Did you see them?” Biggar demanded. “Do you know who they were?”

  “The Icefalcon found you near the Brass Fountain Stairway on the fifth north,” Minalde said. “It’s a deserted section; nobody Janus has questioned saw anything. It wasn’t a … a gaboogoo, was it?”

  “I teil you there’s none such in the Keep!” Old Man Wicket snapped, and Biggar groaned.

  “Don’t tell me you’re going to want the whole level searched again!”

  “Who else would do such a thing?”

  “Some I could name.”

  Rudy didn’t see who in the back had made that remark.

  Alde said quickly, “Whoever did it has to know that without a trained wizard in the Keep, the Keep itself is doomed.”

  “Doomed is what it is anyway, begging your pardon, lady.” Bannerlord Pnak Nenion pushed his way to her side, with several of his third-level-north dependents. “I tell you, there will be no good in remaining in this place, not if we had a hundred wizards.”