04 Mother Of Winter d-4

by Barbara Hambly

  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 struggled 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 purplebadged 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.

  At least it was too early for ants or flies to have commuted in. Thank God for small favors.

  "I was worried about you, punk." Gil sat down next to him and handed him a bowl of gruel and a dried apple. They'd almost certainly come from the settlement store. Rudy thought about the people who should have been eating them for breakfast and felt nearly sick.

  "I wish I could say the same about you, spook." He was too hungry and exhausted not to eat, and once he began, he felt better. He had eaten almost nothing yesterday and had worked cutting wood and hauling bodies to the pyre until he was ready to drop. "But until that thing hit, I was clueless, and when it did--" He paused and shook his head. "- I didn't really think about any one person, I guess. Just, like, 'Oh, Jesus, no.' I guess I figured if you were with the old man, you'd be okay. Did you-did you see him turn himself into a bird?"

  She smiled crookedly-with the wound on her face, she could hardly help it-and nodded. But she only said, "I thought Lord Sketh was going to propose marriage when I showed up with the mule. The orneriest, nastiest old bizzom in the Keep, and now she's the only domesticated beast of burden in the Vale. That'll learn Enas Banelstave to argue against us borrowing the best instead of the worst critter when we go out scavenging. Sterile, too, of course."

  "Oh, Christ," Rudy said. He hadn't thought of that-Gil was generally about two jumps ahead of him. "What're we gonna...? I mean, what about plowing next spring?"

  "Don't worry about it, punk." Gil got to her feet and swept the ruined settlement with a gaze as chill and silvery as the heatless sky. "We're gonna starve by Christmas."

  "Most of it's still frozen," the Icefalcon was saying as Rudy and Gil came up to the shambles where Ingold was jointing deer and pigs with an ax. "We'll probably be able to get it up to the Vale before it begins to go off, but on foot it will be a slow trek. Warmer weather's coming," he added, glancing to the north. "There'll be flies."

  "I'll do what I can about that," Ingold said. He looked like ten miles of bad road, and moved as if he'd been beaten with a stick. Rudy guessed he hadn't slept at all.

  "I expect there'll be parties coming down to clear out Manse and Carpont today," the young Guard continued, one bloodgummed hand tucked into his sash. "We may need spells to prevent decay then. When we go up to the Keep tomorrow morning, one of you should remain."

  "One of 'em should stay just to tell us if there's another one of those what'd you call, ice storms, on the way," Yobet Troop threw in, stopping nervously beside them with dangling bundles of frozen chickens yoked to his shoulders. He glanced at Ingold with frightened eyes, and then at the sky. "You'll do that, won't you, m'lord wizard? That's your job."

  "Yes," Ingold said gently. "That's my job."

  He added to Gil, when Troop and the Icefalcon had gone their ways, "Things aren't as bad as you might suppose. The storm affected an area perhaps fifty miles across, and beyond that there will be game, and fruits in abandoned orchards if we can get parties out there quickly enough, and nuts in the woods. The Icefalcon spoke to me earlier about leading a raiding party against the bandits around Penambra, who will have horses if nothing else."

  "I bet they'll be real efficient raiders on foot," Gil said. Ingold regarded her in mild surprise and mimed a dig through his pockets. "If you're willing to put money against the Icefalcon on foot in a contest with the average group of mounted bandits..." "The hell I am," Gil said, with the first grin Rudy had seen out of her all day.

  "And I'm sure Lady Minalde will send to Tomec Tirkenson in Gettlesand for livestock as well, provided we can haul hay up from the river meadows below Willowchild to feed them." Moving as slowly as an old man, Ingold limped to the stack of carcasses and began to drag free a deer.

  His hands fumbled their grip and Gil and Rudy hastened to help him; Rudy handed him the ax he'd been using, but after lifting it, Ingold set it down again, as if too wearied, for the moment, to go on.

  "They're taking the mule, you know," Gil said, turning to the stump nearby, where several axes were stuck. It was the first time in years that Rudy had seen more implements than there were people. Gil judged her striking point on the carcass and buried the ax head just below the foreleg, bracing her foot and shoving to wrench free the ice- stiff limb.

 
"As well they must." Ingold looked across at Rudy. "Rudy, I'm counting on you to spell the books Gil and I brought from Penambra. I concealed them last night in the root cellar here. Between my peregrinations of the night before last and laying every fragment of magic I could summon on the meat last night and today, even should I get some rest between now and nightfall, I'm barely going to have the strength to do what I'll need to do."

  Rudy didn't like the sound of that. Still less did he like the way the muscles of Ingold's jaw tightened when he hobbled slowly to the other side of the carcass, to help Gil reduce it to limbs and trunk.

  "Every ward and guard you can summon," the old man went on without giving him time to reply. "Decay, water, fire, theft, insects, even notice by another wizard.

  Goodness knows how long it will be before someone can be sent to fetch them. Those books are some of the oldest that exist outside the City of Wizards, and some of them are copies of texts even older than that city itself. They may contain the answer to questions necessary for our very survival."

  Warily, Rudy said, "You sound like you ain't gonna be around."

  Ingold scratched the side of his nose, leaving a streak of slightly fresher blood in the grime. "Well, I do feel badly about that." Don't do this to me, man. Don't leave me to deal with this alone. "I should not go," Ingold went on, very slowly. "For Yar was right, you know. I was culpable for leaving as I did. For assuming that such a disaster would not befall." "Who knew?" Rudy flung out his hands. "And who's gonna be dumb enough to say that it was our fault this happened? You can feel those things coming ten minutes ahead of time, tops; I can't feel 'em at all. Even before I feebed my crystal, I wasn't able to reach you. I still haven't figured out why..."

  "You haven't?" Ingold appeared mildly surprised. "Be that as it may, it was my fault, and I am responsible. And I suspect that once we return to the Keep, there will be pressure brought to bear on both of us not to leave it again." He glanced over at Gil, then away.