Mother of Winter
Barbara Hambly
A RETURN TO THE REALM OF DARWATH…Five years after the departure of the Dark from Darwath strange occurrences begin to develop in the Vale of Renwath. There are geological upheavals and an increasing amount of 'slunch' – a heavy, inedible, juiceless fungus. Cave bears, woolly mammoths and sabretooths seem to be flocking to the area. Even stranger are the sightings of 'thaght’n' – creatures who possess a kind of magic which even magician Rudy Solis cannot defeat or deceive. Thus as Gil, who crossed the void from present day California, and her lover, the wizard Ingold, return to the Keep from the flooded delta city of Penambra, they realise that something is desperately wrong …Something, somewhere, is attempting to terraform the world by the use of magic: to accelerate the rate of chilling until the temperature reaches the point that it – whatever 'it' is – finds comfortable …
Voyager
BARBARA HAMBLY
Mother of Winter
Copyright (#ulink_6c465f04-8812-58cc-9337-88f77919be83)
HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
Published by Voyager 1997
Copyright © 1996 by Barbara Hambly
Barbara Hambly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006482291
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Version: 2016-12-28
For Robin
CONTENTS
Cover (#ua3bc841f-8b5a-5d91-ac02-897107aacdeb)
Title Page (#uc04cb692-f191-56d4-a240-e4842ce3c2a0)
Copyright (#ue1b5059a-3879-5ebd-a1af-fc526990c9b5)
Dedication (#u524b9205-37e1-59e3-ac8e-d31796b196cd)
Map (#u8be5261b-35a3-59bf-bea4-8177cd737090)
Prologue (#ub644023d-b6a1-5748-b80d-a0fb31ba14b5)
Book One: FIMBULTIDE (#u41a3ba8d-59da-503c-b4cd-3249e6bff2d6)
CHAPTER ONE (#uc133b77a-17ea-5ea2-917d-134afe94259e)
CHAPTER TWO (#u6009d956-1e63-5709-afbf-c93f97b9eef3)
CHAPTER THREE (#u94fb2edb-61da-5ccb-89f5-92f3cfbc41c8)
CHAPTER FOUR (#u66dcc859-7a24-5d6f-9e26-38fc690adad1)
CHAPTER FIVE (#u5a43a3b1-8ed4-502a-a1a6-32a249be109e)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
Book Two: THE BLIND KING’S TOMB (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_81c729bc-7820-52f7-9df8-a98b6b505f56)
In the moonstone dawn, the lone rider dismounted at the top of the steps, passed through the black square open eye where the doors would one day be, and halted on the edge of shadowed abyss. The woman who lay on the obsidian plinth in the chasm’s midst knew by the shape of his shoulders and back, by the way he carried his head, who he was; there was in any case only one person he could be. The wind that brought the smell of the glaciers down to her funneled past him through the passageway and carried on it the stench of blood.
When he stepped clear of the gate’s collected gloom, she saw he was covered with it, as if he had lain down in a butcher’s shambles. Some of it she knew was his, all mixed with the nitrous grease of torch smoke; there was also mud on his bare left forearm where he had fallen or been thrown from his horse, and on his bare knees above his boot tops, as if he had knelt in gore-soaked earth—to raise someone in his arms, perhaps.
The great clean-hewed pit of the foundation lay between them, deep as the cliffs that surrounded the Vale, and filled with the night’s last shade. The plinth that rose through it, nearly to the level of the ground, was circled by half-made levels and support pillars like the greatest trees in some primordial iron forest, dwarfed to fragility by the chasm’s sheer size. The machines that fused the black stone walls, insectile monsters of crystal and meteor iron, stood quiescent on platforms in the scaffolding; smaller slave-crystals and drones floated in the air between like exhausted stars, and here and there great sheets of wyr-web flashed softly in the nacreous light. Where the stairways and catwalks joined and crossed between the greater platforms, sleeping figures could be seen, lying where they had collapsed within the rings and spheres of silver dust, dried blood, smoke and light that trailed off the fragile plank flooring to float like sea-wrack on the air.
He looked down to meet the woman’s eyes.
Depleted by last night’s Great Spell, she propped herself up with her hands and coughed, feeling twice her sixty years. As the man picked his way across the spiderweb lines of bamboo and planking, descended ladders and stepped over gaps that fell away into a thousand feet of gloom, she saw that he, too, moved carefully, holding to the ropes and stopping now and then to stand half bowed over, gathering strength.
“It’s all right,” she said, when he looked down from a ladder at the intricate patterns woven on the plinth’s circular top. “The spells are accomplished, such as they are. Stay between those two lines and all will be well.”
He was a respecter of such things. Not everyone was these days. He looked around him again, and she wondered if, from the plinth, he could see what she saw: the whole of the future edifice called forth in those ghostly traceries, as if the fortress already existed, wrought of starlight and future time.
Every Rune, every circle, every sigil and smoke-trace had been placed individually, by her hand or the hands of those who slept all around her huddled in the lee of the Foci, broken by what they had done.
And to no avail, she thought. To no avail.
She asked him, “Are they dead?”
He nodded.
“All of them?”
“All.”
It was not the worst thing she had ever borne, but in some ways more painful than the knowledge that the world’s end was coming sooner than anyone had reckoned. She had loved many of those who died last night.
“You should have asked our help.”
He was unshaven under the filth; even the ends of his long hair, by which he was nicknamed at Court, were tipped with grue. “It was the only chance you had, of raising the power to do this.” He had a voice like gravel and clinkers in an iron pan. “The locking point of sun, moon, and stars, you said The time of greatest power.” He swallowed, fighting pain. “It was worth what it cost.”
She folded her arms across her breasts, bare beneath the midnight wool of her cloak. The morning was very cold. Below her the murmur of water was loud where springs had been broached in the rock. The smell of wet earth breathed up around them. Far down the Vale where the trees grew thick at the head of the pass, birds were waking.
“No,” she said. “For we failed. We put forth all our strength, and all our strength was not enough. And all this—” The movement of her hand took in the half-raised walls, the silent machines, the chasm of foundation, the whisper of water and of that half-seen skeleton of light. “—all this will pass away, and leave us with nothing.”
Her head bowed. She hadn’t wept for years, not since one night when she’d seen a truth too appalling to be contemplated in the color of the stars. But her grief was a leaden darkness, seeming to pull them both down into the beginning of an endless fall. “I’m sorry.”
Book One FIMBULTIDE (#ulink_ebc31360-1496-5f49-9773-79efefa85f8f)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_c88c14d9-2294-57d1-b8f5-b646092a2928)
“Do you see it?” Gil Patterson’s voice was no louder than the scratch of withered vines on the stained sandstone wall. Melding with the shadows was second nature to her by now. The courtyard before them was empty and still, marble pavement obscured by lichen and mud, and a small forest of sycamore suckers half concealed the fire-black ruins of the hall, but she could have sworn that something had moved. “Feel it?”
She edged forward a fraction of an inch, the better to see, taking care to remain still within the ruined peristyle’s gloom. “What is it?”
The possibility of ghosts crossed her mind.
The five years that had passed since eight thousand people died in this place in a single night had been hard ones, but some of their spirits might linger.
“I haven’t the smallest idea, my dear.”
She hadn’t heard him return to her from his investigation of the building’s outer court: he was a silent-moving man. Pitched for her hearing alone, his voice was of a curious velvety roughness, like dark bronze broken by time. In the shadows of the crumbling wall, and the deeper concealment of his hood, his blue eyes seemed very bright.
“But there is something.”
“Oh, yes.” Ingold Inglorion, Archmage of the wizards of the West, had a way of listening that seemed to touch everything in the charred and sodden waste of the city around them, living and dead. “I suspect,” he added, in a murmur that seemed more within her mind than outside of it, “that it has stalked us since we passed the city walls.”
He made a sign with his hand—small, but five years’ travel with him in quest of books and objects of magic among the ruins of cities populated only by bones and ghouls had taught her to see those signs. Gil was as oblivious to magic as she was to ghosts—or fairies or UFOs for that matter, she would have added—but she could read the summons of a cloaking spell, and she knew that Ingold’s cloaking spells were more substantial than most people’s houses.
Thus what happened took her completely by surprise.
The court was a large one. Thousands had taken refuge in the house to which it belonged, in the fond hope that stout walls and plenty of torchlight would prevent the incursion of those things called only Dark Ones. Their skulls peered lugubriously from beneath dangling curtains of colorless vines, white blurs in shadow. It was close to noon, and the silver vapors from the city’s slime-filled canals were beginning to burn off, color struggling back to the red of fallen porphyry pillars, the brave blues and gilts of tile. More than half the court lay under a leprous blanket of the fat white juiceless fungus that surviving humans called slunch, and it was the slunch that drew Gil’s attention now.
Ingold was still motionless, listening intently in the zebra shadows of the blown-out colonnade as Gil crossed to the edge of the stuff. “It isn’t just me, is it?” Her soft voice fell harsh as a blacksmith’s hammer in the unnatural hush. “It’s getting worse as we get farther south.” As Gil knelt to study the tracks that quilted the clay soil all along the edges of the slunch, Ingold’s instruction—and that of her friend the Icefalcon—rang half-conscious warning bells in her mind. What the hell had that wolverine been trying to do? Run sideways? Eat its own tail? And that rabbit—if those were rabbit tracks …? That had to be the mark of something caught in its fur, but …
“It couldn’t have anything to do with what we’re looking for, could it?” A stray breath lifted the long tendrils of her hair, escaping like dark smoke from the braid jammed under her close-fitting fur cap. “You said Maia didn’t know what it was or what it did. Was there anything weird about the animals around Penambra before the Dark came?”
“Not that I ever heard.” Ingold was turning his head as he spoke, listening as much as watching. He’d put back the hood of his heavy brown mantle, and his white hair, long and tatty from weeks of journeying, flickered in the gray air. He’d trimmed his beard with his knife a couple of nights ago, and resembled St. Anthony after ten rounds with demons in the wilderness.
Not, thought Gil, that anyone in this universe but herself—and Ingold, because she’d told him—knew who St. Anthony was. Maia of Thran, Bishop of Renweth, erstwhile Bishop of Penambra and owner of the palace they sought, had told her tales of analogous holy hermits who’d had similar problems.
Unprepossessing, she thought, to anyone who hadn’t seen him in action. Almost invisible, unless he wished to be seen.
“And in any case we might as easily be dealing with a factor of time rather than distance.” Ingold held up his six-foot walking staff in his blue-mittened left hand, but his right never strayed far from the hilt of the sword at his side. “It’s been … Behind you!”
He was turning as he yelled, and his cry was the only reason the thing didn’t take Gil full in the back like a bobcat fastening on a deer. She was drawing her own sword, still on her knees but cutting as she whirled, and aware at the same moment of Ingold drawing, stepping in, slashing. Ripping weight collided with Gil’s upper arm and she had a terrible impression of a short-snouted animal face, of teeth thrusting out of a lifted mass of wrinkles, of something very wrong with the eyes …
Pain and cold sliced her right cheek low on the jawbone. She’d already dropped the sword, pulled her dagger; she slit and ripped and felt blood and intestines gush hotly over her hand. The thing didn’t flinch. Long arms like an ape’s wrapped around her shoulders, claws cutting through her sheepskin coat. It bit again at her face, going for her eyes, its own back and spine wide open. Gil cut hard and straight across them with seven-inch steel that could shave the hair off a man’s arm. The teeth spasmed and snapped, the smell of blood clogging her nostrils. Buzzing dizziness filled her. She thought she’d been submerged miles deep in dry, living gray sand.
“Gil!” The voice was familiar but far-off, a fly on a ceiling miles above her head. She’d heard it in dreams, maybe …
Her face hurt. The lips of the wound in her cheek were freezing now against the heat of her blood. For some reason she had the impression she was waking up in her own bed in the fortress Keep of Dare, far away in the Vale of Renweth.
“What time is it?” she asked. The pain redoubled and she remembered. Her head ached.
“Lie still.” He bent over her, lined face pallid with shock. There was blood on the sleeves of his mantle, on the blackish bison fur of the surcoat he wore over that. She felt his fingers probe gently at her cheek and jaw. He’d taken off his mittens, and his flesh was startlingly warm. The smell of the blood almost made her faint again. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah.” Her lips felt puffy, the side of her face a balloon of air. She put up her hand and remembered, tore off her sodden glove, brushed her lips, then the corner of her right eye with her fingertips. The wounds were along her cheekbone and jaw, sticky with blood and slobber. “What was that thing?”
“Lie still a little more.” Ingold unslung the pack from his shoulders and dug in it with swift hands. “Then you can have a look.”
All the while he was daubing a dressing of herb and willow bark on the wounds, stitching them and applying linen and plaster—braiding in the spells of healing, of resistance to infection and shock—Gil was conscious of him listening, watching, casting again the unseen net of his awareness over the landscape that lay beyond the courtyard wall. Once he stood up, quickly, catching up the sword that lay drawn on the muddy marble at his side, but whatever it was that had stirred the slunch was still then and made no further move.
He knelt again. “Do you think you can sit up?”
“Depends on what kind of reward you offer me.”
His grin was quick and shy as he put a hand under her arm.
Dizziness came and went in a long hot gray wave. She didn’t want him to think her weak, so she didn’t cling to him as she wanted to, seeking the familiar comfort of his warmth.
She breathed a couple of times, hard, then said, “I’m fine. What the hell is it?”
“I was hoping you might be able to tell me.”
“You’re joking!”
The wizard glanced at the carcass—the short bulldog muzzle, the projecting chisel teeth, the body a lumpy ball of fat from which four thick-scaled, ropy legs projected—and made a small shrug. “You’ve identified many creatures in our world—the mammoths, the bison, the horrible-birds, and even the dooic—as analogous to those things that lived in your own universe long ago. I hoped you would have some lore concerning this.”
Gil looked down at it again. Something in the shape of the flat ears, of the fat, naked cone of the tail—something about the smell of it—repelled her, not with alienness, but with a vile sense of the half familiar. She touched the spidery hands at the ends of the stalky brown limbs. It had claws like razors.
What the hell did it remind her of?
Ingold pried open the bloody jaws. “There,” he said softly. “Look.” On the outsides of the gums, upper and lower, were dark, purplish, collapsed sacs of skin; Gil shook her head, uncomprehending. “How do you feel?”
“Okay. A little light-headed.”
He felt her hands again and her wrists, shifting his fingers a little to read the different depths of pulse. For all his unobvious strength, he had the gentlest touch of anyone she had ever known. Then he looked back down at the creature. “It’s a thing of the cold,” he said at last. “Down from the north, perhaps? Look at the fur and the way the body fat is distributed. I’ve never encountered an arctic animal with poison sacs—never a mammal with them at all, in fact.”
He shook his head, turning the hook-taloned fingers this way and that, touching the flat, fleshy ears. “I’ve put a general spell against poisons on you, which should neutralize the effects, but let me know at once if you feel in the least bit dizzy or short of breath.”
Gil nodded, feeling both slightly dizzy and short of breath, but nothing she hadn’t felt after bad training sessions with the Guards of Gae, especially toward the end of winter when rations were slim. That was something else, in the five years since the fall of Darwath, that she’d gotten used to.
Leaving her on the marble bench, with its carvings of pheasants and peafowl and flowers that had not blossomed here in ten summers, Ingold bundled the horrible kill into one of the hempen sacks he habitually carried, and hung the thing from the branch of a sycamore dying at the edge of the slunch, wreathed in such spells as would keep rats and carrion feeders at bay until they could collect it on their outward journey. Coming back to her, he sat on the bench at her side and folded her in his arms. She rested her head on his shoulder for a time, breathing in the rough pungence of his robes and the scent of the flesh beneath, wanting only to stay there in his arms, unhurried, forever.
It seemed to her sometimes, despite the forty years’ difference in their ages, that this was all she had ever wanted.
“Can you go on?” he asked at length. Carefully, he kissed the unswollen side of her mouth. “We can wait a little.”
“Let’s go.” She sat up, putting aside the comfort of his strength with regret. There was time for that later. She wanted nothing more now than to find what they had come to Penambra to find and get the hell out of town.
“Maia only saw the Cylinder once.” Ingold scrambled nimbly ahead of her through the gotch-eyed doorway of the colonnade and up over a vast rubble heap of charred beams, shattered roof tiles, pulped woodwork, and broken stone welded together by a hardened soak of ruined plaster. Mustard-colored lichen crusted it, and a black tangle of all-devouring vines in which patches of slunch grew like dirty mattresses dropped from the sky. The broken statue of a female saint regarded them sadly from the mess: Gil automatically identified her by the boat, the rose, and the empty cradle as St Thyella of lifers.
“Maia was always a scholar, and he knew that people were using fire as a weapon against the Dark Ones. Whole neighborhoods gathered wherever they felt the walls would hold—though they were usually wrong about that—and burn whatever they could find, hoping a bulwark of light would serve should bulwarks of stone fail. They were frequently wrong about that as well.”
Gil said nothing. She remembered her first sight of the Dark. Remembered the fleeing, uncomprehending mobs, naked and jolted from sleep, men and women falling and dying as the blackness rolled over them. Remembered the thin, directionless wind, the acid-blood smell of the predators, and the way fluid and matter would rain over her when she slashed the amorphous, floating things in half with her sword.
They picked their way off the corpse of the building into a smaller court, its wooden structures only a black frieze of ruin buried in weeds. On a fallen keystone the circled cross of the Straight Faith was incised. “Asimov wrote a story like that,” she said.
“ ‘Nightfall.’ “ Ingold paused to smile back at her. “Yes.”
In addition to her historical studies in the archives of the Keep of Dare, Gil had gained quite a reputation among the Guards as a spinner of tales, passing along to them recycled Kipling and Dickens, Austen and Heinlein, Doyle and Heyer and Coles, to ease the long Erebus of winter nights.
“And it’s true,” the old man went on. “People burned whatever they could find and spent the hours of day hunting for more.” His voice was grim and sad—those had been, Gil understood, people he knew. Unlike many wizards, who tended to be recluses at heart, Ingold was genuinely gregarious. He’d had dozens of friends in Gae, the northern capital of the Realm of Darwath, and here in Penambra: families, scholars, a world of drinking buddies whom Gil had never met. By the time she came to this universe, most were dead.
Three years ago she had gone with Ingold to Gae, searching for old books and objects of magic in the ruins. Among the shambling, pitiful ghouls who still haunted the broken cities, he recognized a man he had known. Ingold had tried to tell him that the Dark Ones whose destruction had broken his mind were gone and would come no more, and had narrowly missed being carved up with rusty knives and clamshells for his pains.
“I can’t say I blame them for that.”
“No,” he murmured. “One can’t.” He stopped on the edge of a great bed of slunch that, starting within the ruins of the episcopal palace, had spread out through its windows and across most of the terrace that fronted the sunken, scummy chain of puddles that had been Penambra’s Grand Canal. “But the fact remains that a great deal was lost.” Motion in the slunch made him poke at it with the end of his staff, and a hard-shelled thing like a great yellow cockroach lumbered from between the pasty folds and scurried toward the palace doors. Ingold had a pottery jar out of his bag in seconds and dove for the insect, swift and neat. The roach turned, hissing and flaring misshapen wings; Ingold caught it midair in the jar and slapped the vessel mouth down upon the pavement with the thing clattering and scraping inside. It had flown straight at his eyes.
“Most curious.” He slipped a square of card—and then the jar’s broad wax stopper—underneath, and wrapped a cloth over the top to seal it. “Are you well, my dear?” For Gil had knelt beside the slunch, overwhelmed with sudden weariness and stabbed by a hunger such as she had not known for months. She broke off a piece of the slunch, like the cold detached cartilage of a severed ear, and turned it over in her fingers, wondering if there were any way it could be cooked and eaten.
Then she shook her head, for there was a strange, metallic smell behind the stuff’s vague sweetness—not to mention the roach. She threw the bit back into the main mass. “Fine,” she said.
As he helped her to stand, there was a sound, a quick, furtive scuffling in the slate-hued night of the empty palace. The dizziness returned nauseatingly as Gil slewed to listen. She gritted her teeth, fighting the darkness from her eyes.
“Rats, you think?” They were everywhere in the city, and huge.
Ingold’s blue eyes narrowed, the small scars on the eyelids and on the soft flesh beneath pulling in a wrinkle of knife-fine lines. “It smells like them, yes. But just before you were attacked, there were five separate disturbances of that kind in all directions around me, drawing my attention from you. The vaults are this way, if I remember aright.”
Since her coming to this world in the wake of the rising of the Dark, Gil had guarded Ingold’s back. The stable crypt opening into the vaults had been half torn apart by the Dark Ones, and Gil’s hair prickled with the memory of those bodiless haunters as she picked her way after him through a vestibule whose mud floor was broken by a sea-wrack of looted chests, candlesticks, and vermin-scattered bones. An inner door gave onto a stairway. There was a smell of water below, a cold exhalation like a grave.
“When the vigilantes started hunting the city for books—for archives, records, anything that would burn—Maia let them have what he could spare as a sop and hid the rest.” Ingold’s voice echoed wetly under the downward-sloping ceiling, and something below, fleeing the blue-white light that burned from the end of his staff, plopped in water.
“He bricked up some of the archives in old cells of the episcopal dungeon and sounded walls in the vaults to find other rooms that had been sealed long ago, where he might cache the oldest volumes, of which no other known copy existed. It was in one of these vaults that he found the Cylinder.”
Water lay five or six inches deep in the maze of cells and tunnels that constituted the palace vaults. The light from Ingold’s raised staff guttered sharply on it as Gil and the old mage waded between decaying walls plastered thick with slunch, mold, and dim-glowing niter. The masonry was ancient, of a heavy pattern far older than the more finished stones of Gae. Penambra predated the northern capital at Gae; predated the first rising of the Dark thousands of years ago—long predated any memory of humankind’s. Maia himself came to Gil’s mind, a hollow-cheeked skeleton with arthritis-crippled hands, laughing with Ingold over his own former self, a foppish dilettante whose aristocratic protector had bought the bishopric for him long before he was of sufficient years to have earned it.
Perhaps he hadn’t really earned it until the night he hid the books—the night he led his people out of the haunted ruins of their city to the only safe place they knew: Renweth Vale and the black-walled Keep of Dare.
Before a bricked-up doorway, Ingold halted. Gil remained a few paces behind him, calf-deep in freezing water, analyzing every sound, every rustle, every drip and dull moan of the wind, fighting not to shiver and not to think of the poison that might be in her veins. Still, she thought, if the thing’s bite was poisoned, it didn’t seem to be too serious. God knew she’d gone through sufficient exertion for it to have killed her twice if it was going to.
Ingold passed his hand across the dripping masonry and murmured a word. Gil saw no change in the mortar, but Ingold set his staff against the wall—the light still glowing steadily from its tip, as from a lantern—and pulled a knife from his belt, with which he dug the mortar as if it were putty desiccated by time. As he tugged loose the bricks, she made no move to help him, nor did he expect her to. She only watched and listened for the first signs of danger. That was what it was to wear the black uniform, the white quatrefoil emblem, of the Guards of Gae.
Ingold left the staff leaning in the corridor, to light the young woman’s watch. As a mage, he saw clearly in the dark.
Light of a sort burned through the ragged hole left in the bricks, a sickly owl-glow shed by slunch that grew all over the walls of the tiny chamber beyond, illuminating nothing. The stuff stretched a little as Ingold pulled it from the trestle tables it had almost covered; it snapped with powdery little sighs, like rotted rubber, to reveal leather wrappings protecting the books. “Archives,” the wizard murmured. “Maia did well.”
The Cylinder was in a wooden box in a niche on the back wall. As long as Gil’s hand from wrist bones to farthest fingertip, and just too thick to be circled by her fingers, it appeared to be made of glass clear as water. Those who had lived in the Times Before—before the first rising of the Dark Ones—seemed to have favored plain geometrical shapes. Ingold brushed the thing with his lips, then set it on a corner of the table and studied it, peering inside for reflections, Gil thought. By the way he handled it, it was heavier than glass would have been.
In the end he slipped it into his rucksack. “Obviously one of Maia’s predecessors considered it either dangerous or sacrilegious.” He stepped carefully back through the hole in the bricks, took up his staff again. “Goodness knows there were centuries—and not too distant ones—during which magic was anathema and people thought nothing of bricking up wizards along with their toys. That room was spelled with the Rune of the Chain, which inhibits the use of magic … Heaven only knows what they destroyed over the course of the years. But this …” He touched the rucksack.
“Someone thought this worth the guarding, the preserving, down through the centuries. And that alone makes it worth whatever it may have cost us.”
He touched the dressings on the side of her swollen face. At the contact, she felt stronger, warmer inside. “It is not unappreciated, my dear.”
Gil looked away. She had never known what to say in the presence of love, even after she’d stopped consciously thinking, When he finds out what kind of person I am, he’ll leave. Ingold, to her ever-renewed surprise, evidently really did love her, exactly as she was. She still didn’t know why. “It’s my job,” she said.
Scarred and warm, his palm touched her unhurt cheek, turning her face back to his, and he gathered her again into his arms. For a time they stood pressed together, the old man and the warrior, taking comfort among the desolation of world’s end.
They spent two days moving books. Chill days, though it was May and in times past the city of Penambra had been the center of semitropical bottomlands lush with cotton and sugarcane; wet days of waxing their boots every night while the spares dried by the fire; nerve-racking days of shifting the heavy volumes up the crypt stairs to where Yoshabel the mule waited in the courtyard, wreathed in spells of “there-isn’t-a-mule-here” and “this-creature-is-both-dangerous-and-inedible.” The second spell wasn’t far wrong, in Gil’s opinion. On the journey down to Penambra she had grown to thoroughly hate Yoshabel, but knew they could not afford to lose her to vermin or ghouls.
Sometimes, against the code of the Guards, Gil worked. Mostly Ingold would send her to the foot of the stairs from the stable crypt, where she listened for sounds in the court as well as watching the corridor outside the cell where the books were. He left his staff with her, the light of it glistening on the vile water underfoot and on the wrinkled, cranial masses of the slunch. What they couldn’t load onto Yoshabel, Ingold rehid, higher and drier and surrounded by more spells, to keep fate and rats and insects at bay until someone could be sent again on the long, exhausting journey from Renweth Vale to retrieve them.
In addition to books—of healing, of literature, of histories and law—they found treasure, room after room of Church vessels of gold and pearl and carven gems, chairs crusted with garnets, ceremonial candleholders taller than a man and hung with chains of diamond fruit; images of saints with jeweled eyes, holding out the gem-encrusted instruments of their martyrdom; sacks of gold and silver coin. These they left, though Ingold took as much silver as he could carry and a few of the jewels flawless enough to hold spells in their crystalline hearts. The rest he surrounded with Ward-signs and spells. One never knew when such things would come in handy.
They took turns at watch that night. Even in lovemaking, which they did by the glow of the courtyard fire, neither fully relaxed—it would have been more sensible not to do it, but the strange edge of danger drew at them both. Now and then a shift in the wind brought them the smells of wood smoke and raw human waste, and they knew there were ghouls—or perhaps bandits—dwelling somewhere in the weedy desolation along the canals. Gil, her face discolored and aching in spite of all Ingold’s spells of healing, fell asleep almost at once and slept heavily; wrapped in his fur surcoat, Ingold sat awake by the bead of their fire, listening to the dark.
This was how Gil saw him in her dream the second night, when she realized that he had to die.
They had made love, and she dreamed of making love to him again, in the cubicle they shared, a small inner cell in the maze of cells that were the territory of the Guards on the first level of the windowless Keep. She dreamed of falling asleep in the gentle aftermath, her smoky dark wilderness of hair strewed like kelp on the white-furred muscle of his chest, the smell of his flesh and of the Guards’ cooking, of leather oil from her weaponry and coat, filling her nostrils, smells for which she had traded the car exhaust and synthetic aromatics of a former home.
She dreamed that while still she slept he sat up and drew the blankets around him. His white hair hung down on his shoulders, and under the scarred lids his eyes were hard and thoughtful as he looked down at her. There was no gentleness in them now, no love—barely even recognition.
Then he began, while she slept, to work magic upon her, to lay words on her that made her foolish with love, willing to leave her friends and family, her studies at the University of California, as she had in fact left all the familiar things of the world of her birth. He lay on her words that made her, from the moment of their meeting, his willing slave.
All the peril she had faced against the Dark Ones, all the horror and fire, the wounds she had taken, the men she had killed, the tears she had shed … all were calculated, part of his ploy. Taken from her with his magic, rather than freely given for love of him.
Her anger was like a frozen volcano, outraged, betrayed, surging to the surface and destroying everything in its path. Rape, her mind said. Betrayal, greed, lust, hypocrisy … rape.
But he had laid spells on her that kept her asleep.
She would not be free of him, she thought, until he was dead.
She woke and found that she had her knife in her hand. She lay in the comer of the bishop’s courtyard, fire between her and the night. Yoshabel, tethered nearby, had raised her head, long ears turning toward the source of some sound. Ingold, his back to the embers, listened likewise, the shoulders of his robe and the mule’s shaggy coat dyed rose with the embers’ reflection. Gold threads laced the wet edges of the slunch bed, the leather wrappings of the books. Somewhere a voice that might have been human, half a mile or more away, was blubbering and shrieking in agony as something made leisurely prey of its owner.
Good, she thought, calm and strangely clear. He’s distracted.
Why did she feel that the matter had been arranged?
The blanket slid from her as she rose to hands and knees, knife tucked against her side. In her bones, in her heart, with the same awareness by which she knew the hapless ghoul was being killed for her benefit, she also knew herself to be invisible to the stretched-out fibers of Ingold’s senses, invisible to his magic. If she kept low, practiced those rites of silence the Guards had taught, she could sever his spine as easily as she’d severed that of the thing that had torn open her face.
His fault, too, she thought bitterly, surveying the thin fringe of white hair beneath the close-fit lambskin cap. His doing. His summoning, if the truth were known.
I was beautiful before …
She knew that wasn’t true. Thin-faced, sharp-featured, with a great witchy cloud of black hair that never would do what she wanted of it, she had never been more than passably pretty, a foil for the glamour of a mother and a sister whose goals had been as alien to her scholarly pursuits as a politician’s or a religious fanatic’s might have been.
The awareness of the lie pulled her back—pulled her fully awake—and she looked down at the knife in her hand.
Jesus, she thought. Oh, Jesus …
“Ingold …”
He moved his head a little, but did not take his eyes from the dark of the court. “Yes, child?”
“I’ve had a dream,” she said. “I want to kill you.”
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_1d0b63fc-d9a5-5f97-ae9b-c4250dc8b33a)
“Once upon a time there was a boy …” Rudy Solis began.
“Once upon a time there was a boy.” Altir Endorion, Lord of the Keep of Dare, wriggled his back against the side of the big chest-bed to get comfortable and folded his small hands, the low glare of the hearth’s embers shining in his speedwell-blue eyes.
“And he lived in a great big palace …”
“And he lived in a great big palace.”
“With lots of servants to wait on him and do whatever he asked.”
The blue eyes closed. Tir was thinking about that one. He had long black lashes, almost straight, and his black forelock, escaping from the embroidered sheepskin cap he wore, made a diacritical squiggle between cap rim and the drawn-down strokes of his brows. In thought like this he seemed older than five years.
“He went riding every morning on horses by the river and all his servants had to go with him,” Tir went on after a moment. “They’d all carry bows and arrows, except the boy’s servants had to carry the boy’s bows and arrows for him. They’d shoot birds by the river …”
His frown deepened, distressed. “They shot birds that were pretty, not because they wanted to eat them. There was a black bird with long legs wading in the river, and it had a little crown of white feathers on its head, and the boy shot at it with his arrows. When it flew away, the boy told his servants, ‘I would that you take this creature with net and lime,’ “ his voice stumbled over unfamiliar words, an antique inflection, “ ‘and bring it to me, for I will not be robbed of my … my quarry …’ What’s quarry, Rudy?” He opened his eyes.
“Quarry is what you catch when you go hunting.” Rudy gazed into the hearth, wondering how long it had been since black egrets had haunted the marshlands below the royal city of Gae. A hundred years? Two hundred? It was part of his wizardry to know, but at the moment he couldn’t remember. Ingold could have provided the information out of his head, along with a mild remark about junior mages who needed their notes about such things tattooed on their arms—along with their own names—for lagniappe. “Sounds like a mean boy to me, Pugsley.”
“He was.” Tir’s eyes slipped shut again, but his face was troubled now, as he picked and teased at the knot of deep-buried memories, the recollections of another life. “He was mean because he was scared all the time. He was scared … he was scared …” He groped for the thought. “He thought everybody was going to try to hurt him, so they could make somebody else king and not him. His daddy’s brothers, and their children. His daddy told him that. His daddy was mean, too.”
He looked up at Rudy, who had an arm around his shoulders where they sat side by side on the sheepskin rugs of the cell floor. Even the royal chambers of the Keep of Dare were mostly small and furnished simply with ancient pieces found in the Keep, or with what had been hewn or whittled since the coming of the remnant of the Realm’s people. The journey down the Great South Road, and up the pass to the Vale of Renweth at the foot of the still higher peaks, had been a harsh one. Those who’d gone back along the route the following spring in quest of furnishings thrown aside to lighten the wagons had found them not improved by a season under mud and snow.
“But why would being scared all the time make him be mean?” Tir wanted to know. “Wouldn’t people be nastier to him if he was mean?”
“If they were his daddy’s servants, they couldn’t be mean back,” pointed out Rudy, who’d learned a good deal about customary behavior in monarchies since abandoning his career as a motorcycle painter and freelance screw-up in Southern California. “And maybe when he was mean he was less scared.”
Tir nodded, seeing the truth of that but still bothered. As far as Rudy could ascertain, Tir didn’t have a mean bone in his body. “And why would his daddy’s brothers want to be king instead of the boy? Being king is awful.”
“Maybe they didn’t know that.”
Tir looked unconvinced.
As well he might, Rudy thought. Tir remembered being king. Over, and over, and over.
Most of what he recalled today would be of more interest to Gil than to himself, Rudy reflected. She was the one who was engaged—between relentless training with the Guards and her duties on patrol and watching the Keep’s single pair of metal doors—in piecing together the vast histories of the realms of Darwath and its tributary lands; its relationships with the wizards, with the great noble Houses, with the Church of the Straight God, with the southern empires and the small states of the Felwood and the distant seaboard to the east. She could probably figure out which king this mean boy who shot at netted birds had grown up to be, and who his daddy was, and what politics exactly had caused his uncles to want to snuff the little bastard—no loss, by the sound of it.
Except that if that boy had not grown up and married, he would not have passed down his memories with his bloodline and eventually have created the child Tir.
And that would have been tragedy.
The wizard in Rudy noted the details remembered about the palace, identifying flowers in the garden, birds and beasts glimpsed in the trees, picturing clearly the place that he himself had only seen in ruins. But mostly what fascinated him were the workings of that far-off child’s life and family, how cruelty had meshed with cruelty, how anger had answered angers formed by fathers and grandfathers; how constant suspicion and unlimited power had resulted in a damn unpleasant little brat who quite clearly worked hard to make everyone around him as miserable as he possibly could.
No wonder Tir’s eyes were a thousand years old.
“Rudy?” A tousled blond head appeared around the doorway after a perfunctory knock. “M’lord Rudy,” the boy hastily amended, and added with a grin, “Hi, Tir. M’lord Rudy, Her Majesty asks if you’d come to the Doors, please. Fargin Graw’s giving her a bad time,” he added as Rudy reached for his staff and started to rise.
“Oh, great.” Fargin Graw was someone whose nose Rudy had considered breaking for years. “Thanks, Geppy.”
“May I go play with Geppy, Rudy?”
“Yeah, go ahead, Ace. If I know Graw, this’ll take a while.”
With Geppy and Tir pelting on ahead of him, Rudy walked down the broad main corridor of the royal enclave—one of the few wide halls in the Keep not to have been narrowed millennia ago by the owners of cells breaking walls to cadge space from the right of way—and down the Royal Stair. Someone had taken advantage of the draught on the stair and stretched a clothesline across the top of the high archway where the stair let into the Aisle, the black-walled cavern that ran more than three-quarters of the Keep’s nearly half-mile length. Rudy ducked under the laundry, scarcely a wizardly figure in his deerskin breeches, rough wool shirt, and gaudily painted bison-hide vest, his dark hair hanging almost to his shoulders. Only his staff, pale wood worn with generations of hand grips and tipped by a metal crescent upon whose sharpened points burned blue St. Elmo’s fire, marked him as mageborn.
The Aisle’s roof was lost in shadow above him, though pin lights of flame delineated the bridges that crossed it on the fourth and fifth levels. The glasslike hardness of the walls picked up the chatter of the launderers working in the basins and streams that meandered along the stone immensity of the open floor; some of them called greetings to him as he passed.
Fargin Graw’s voice boomed above those homier echoes like flatulent thunder on a summer afternoon.
“If we’re supporting them, they’d damn well better earn their keep!” He was a big man—Rudy could identify his silhouette against the chilly light that streamed through the passageway between the two sets of open Doors while he was still crossing the last of the low stone bridges over the indoor streams. “And if they’re not earning their keep, which I for one can’t see ‘em doing, then they better find themselves a useful trade or get out! Like some others I could name sitting around getting fat … There’s not a man in the River Settlements who doesn’t get out in the fields and pull his stint at guarding—”
“And boy, after all day in the fields, they must be just sharp as razors on night-watch.” Rudy hooked his free hand through the buckle of his belt as he came out to join the little group on the Keep’s broad, shallow steps, blinking a little in the pallid brightness of the spring sun.
Graw swung around angrily, a brick-faced man with the fair hair not often seen in the lands once called the Realm of Darwath, perhaps five years older than Rudy’s thirty years. Janus of Weg, commander of the elite corps of the Keep Guards, hid a smile—he’d lost warriors twice due to the inefficiency of Graw’s farmer militia—and the Lady Minalde, last High Queen of Darwath and Lady of the Keep, raised a hand for silence.
“Rudy.” Her low, sweet voice was pleasantly neutral in greeting, as if he had not spoken. “Master Graw rode up from the Settlements with the tribute sheep today to hear from your own lips why there hasn’t been further progress in eliminating slunch from the fields.”
Rudy said, “What?” In three years, slunch in the fields—and in huge areas of meadow and woods, both here in Renweth Vale and down by the River Settlements—had become an endemic nuisance, indestructible by any means he or Ingold or anyone else had yet been able to contrive. It would burn after a fashion but grew back within days, even if the dirt it had grown upon were sown with salt, soaked with oil of vitriol at any strength Ingold could contrive, or dug out and heaped elsewhere: the slunch grew back both in the dirt heap and in the hole. It simply ignored magic. It grew. And it spread, sometimes slowly, sometimes with alarming speed.
“How about asking me something simple, like why don’t we get rid of rats in the Keep? Or ragweed pollen in the spring?”
“Don’t you get smart with me, boy,” Graw snapped in his flat, deaf man’s voice. “You think because you sit around reading books and nobody makes you do a hand’s turn of work you can give back answers to a man of the land, but …”
Rudy opened his mouth to retort that until the rising of the Dark, Graw had been a man of the paint-mixing pots in Gae—his wife and sons did most of the work on his acres down in the River Settlements, by all accounts, as they’d done here in the Vale before the nine hundred or so colonists had moved down to the river valleys to found settlements three years ago. But Alde said, still in resolutely friendly, uninflected tones, “I think what Rudy is trying to say is that there are some problems, not amenable to any remedy we know, which have been with us for thousands of years, and that slunch may turn out to be one of them.” The glass-thin breeze from the higher mountain peaks stirred tendrils of her long black hair, fluttering the new leaves of the aspen and mountain laurel that rimmed the woods, a hundred yards from the Keep on its little mound. “We don’t know.”
“The stuff’s only been around for three years,” pointed out Rudy, upon whose toe Alde had inconspicuously trodden.
“And in those three years,” Graw retorted, “it’s cut into the fields we’ve sweated and bled to plant, it’s killed the wheat and the trees on which our lives and the lives of our children depend.” One heavy arm swept toward the farms downslope from the Keep, the fields with their lines of withe separating one plot holder’s land from the next. Like purulent sores, white spots of slunch blotched the green of young wheat in three or four places, the wrinkled white fungus surrounded by broad rings of brown where the grain was dying.
Graw’s mouth clamped into a settled line, and his pale tan eyes, like cheap beads, sliced resentfully between the slim black-haired woman beside him, the young wizard in his painted vest, and the heavy-shouldered, black-clothed shape of the Commander of the Guards, as if he suspected them of somehow colluding to withhold from him the secret of comfort and survival.
“It’s sickening the crops, and if the River Settlements are sending wheat and milk and beasts for slaughter up here to the Keep every year, we’re entitled to something for our sweat.”
“Something more than us risking our necks to patrol your perimeter, you mean?” Janus asked thinly, and Graw scoffed.
“My men can do their own patrolling! What the hell good is it to know about saber-teeth or some bunch of scroungy dooic ten miles from the nearest fields?” He conveniently neglected to mention the warning the Guards had brought him of the White Raiders last winter, or the battle they and the small force of nobles and men-at-arms had fought with a bandit company the autumn before. “But if our labor and our strength are going out to support a bunch of people up here at the Keep who do nothing or next to nothing …” His glance slid back to Rudy, and from him to Alde’s belly, rounded under the green wool of her faded gown.
The Lady of the Keep met his eye. “Are you saying then that the Settlements Council has voted to dispense with sending foodstuffs to the Keep in return for patrols by the Guards and advice from the mages who live here?”
“Dammit, we haven’t voted on anything!” snapped Graw, who, as far as Rudy knew, wasn’t even on the Settlements Council. “But as a man of the land whose labor is supporting you, I have the right to know what’s being done! Not one of your wizards has come down to have a look at my fields.”
“The slunch is different down there?”
“Thank you very much for coming to us, Master Graw.” Minalde’s voice warmed as she inclined her head. As Graw made a move to stride toward the Keep, she added, with impeccably artless timing, “And I bid you welcome to the Keep, you and your riders, and make you free of it.”
He halted, his jaw tightening, but he could do no more than mutter, “I thank you, lady. Majesty,” he added, under the cool pressure of that morning-glory gaze. He glared at Rudy, then jerked his hand at the small band of riders who’d accompanied the herd of tribute sheep up the pass. They fell in behind him, bowing awkward thanks to Alde as they followed him up the shallow black stone steps and vanished into the dark tunnel of the Doors.
Rudy set his jaw, willing the man’s hostility to slide off him like rain.
In a sweet voice trained by a childhood spent with relentless deportment masters, Minalde said, “One of these days I’m going to break that man’s nose.”
“Y’ want lessons?” Janus asked promptly, and they all laughed.
“Why is it,” Minalde asked with a sigh, later, as she and Rudy walked down the muddy path toward the Keep farms, “that one always hears of spells that will turn people into trees and frogs and mongrel dogs, but never one that will turn a … a lout like that into a good man?”
Rudy shrugged. “Maybe because if I said, ‘Abracadabra, turn that jerk into a good man,’ there’d be no change.” He shook his head. “Sheesh. I’ve been around Ingold too long.”
She laughed and touched his hand. His fingers fitted with hers as if designed to do so at the beginning of time. The farms—which, contrary to Graw’s assertions, were in fact the chief business of the Keep, and always had been—were far enough from the walls that wizard and lady could walk handfast without exacerbating the sensibilities of the conservative. Everyone knew that the Keep wizard’s pupil was the lady’s lover and the father of the child she carried, but it was a matter seldom mentioned: the religious teachings of a less desperate age died hard.
“You’re going to have to go down there, you know,” Alde said in time.
“Now?”
Their eyes met, and she rested her free hand briefly on the swell beneath her gown. “I think so,” she said matter-of-factly. “It’s the second or third time he’s been up here, demanding that something be done about slunch. He has a lot of influence in the Settlements, not with the nobles, but with the hunters, and some of the farmers. If he broke away from Keep rule, he’d probably turn bandit himself. The child isn’t due for another two months, you know.”
Rudy knew. Though he’d helped to birth dozens of babies in the five years he’d been Ingold’s pupil, the thought of Alde being brought to bed while the master wizard was still on the road somewhere terrified him.
With Alde, it was different.
The Lady of the Keep. The widow of the last High King. Tir’s mother.
The mother of the child that would be his.
The thought made him shiver inside, with longing and joy and a strange disbelief. He’d be a father. That child inside her—inside the person he most loved in the whole of his life, the whole of two universes—was a part of him.
Involuntarily—half kiddingly, but half not—he thought, Poor kid. Some gene pool.
And yet …
Under the all-enveloping bulk of her quilted silk coat she barely showed, even this far along. But she had the glowing beauty he’d seen in those of his sisters who’d married happily and carried children by the men who brought them joy. Ingold had early taught him the spells that wizards lay upon their consorts to keep them from conceiving, but she had pleaded with him not to use them. Nobody in the Keep talked about their lady carrying a wizard’s child, but even Bishop Maia, usually tolerant despite the Church’s official rulings, had his misgivings.
“It can’t wait till Ingold gets back?”
“It’s only a day’s journey.” He could hear the uneasiness in her voice, see it in the set of her shoulders and the way she released his hand to fold her arms around herself as she walked. “Much as I hate to agree with anything that man says, he’s right about slunch destroying crops. Unless the harvest is better this year than last, our stores will barely get us through next winter.”
“It was a bad year.” Rudy shifted his grip uneasily on the hand-worn smoothness of his staff. “Last winter was rough, and if Gil was right about the world getting colder, we’re in for a lot more of them.”
Beyond the shaggy curtain of pines, the Snowy Mountains lifted to the west, towering above the narrow valley, the glittering cliff of the Sarda Glacier overhanging the black rock. Far up the valley, St. Prathhes’ Glacier had moved down from the peaks of the spur range called the Ramparts, a tsunami of frozen diamond above the high pastures. Edged wind brought the scent of sterile ice and scraped rock with the spice of the spruce and new grass. It wailed a little in the trees, counterpoint to the squeak of Alde’s sheepskin boots in the mud and the purl of the stream that bordered the fields. The mountains may have been safer from the Dark, Rudy thought, but they sure didn’t make good farmland.
Cows regarding them over the pasture fences moved aside at Rudy’s wave. He clambered over the split rails and helped Alde after, not liking the lightness of her frame within its faded patchwork of quilting and fur. Spring was a time of short rations. Even with last year’s stored grain and the small surplus sent up from the Settlements, everyone in the Keep had been on short commons for months. Crypt after crypt of hydroponics tanks lay in the foundations deep beneath the Keep, but Rudy didn’t have to be a technician to know they weren’t operating as effectively as they could be. In any case, grain and corn had to be grown outdoors, and in the thin soil of the mountain valley, good arable was short.
The withy fences around the slunch in the west pasture had been moved again. The stuff had almost reached the stream. Past the line of the fences the grass was dying; the fences would have to be moved farther still. Three years ago, when slunch first started growing near the Keep, he and Ingold had agreed that neither humans nor animals should be allowed to eat it until they knew exactly what it was.
And that was something neither of them had figured out yet.
Short meadow grasses stirred around his feet, speckled bright with cow-lilies and lupine. There were fewer snakes this year, he noted, and almost no frogs. The herdkids waved to him from the other side of the pasture fence and choused the Settlements’ tribute sheep into the main flock. He spotted Tir’s bright blue cap among them, beside Geppy Nool’s blond curls. Geppy’s promotion to herdkid—with the privilege of sleeping in the byres and smelling permanently of dung—had consumed the smaller boy’s soul with envy, and for several days Tir seriously considered abdicating as High King of Darwath in favor of a career in livestock supervision.
“Damn crazy stuff.” Rudy waved back, then ducked through the hurdles that made up the fence. Alde followed more clumsily, but kept pace with him as he walked the perimeter of the rolling, thick-wrinkled plant—if plant it was. Sometimes Rudy wasn’t sure. He’d never found anything that looked like seeds, spores, roots, or shoots. Slunch didn’t appear to require either water or light to grow. It just spread, some six inches high in the middle of the bed, down to an inch or so at the edges, where wormlike whitish fingers projected into the soil bared by the dying grass.
Rudy knelt and pulled up one of the tendrils, like a very fat ribbon stood on its edge. He hated the touch of it, cold and dry, like a mushroom. By the tracks all around it there were animals that ate it, and so far neither the Guards nor the Keep hunters had reported finding dead critters in the woods …
But Rudy’s instincts shrank from the touch of it. Deep inside he knew the stuff was dangerous. He just didn’t know how. He squeezed it, flinching a little at the rubbery pop it gave before it crumbled, then wiped his hands on his soft deerhide trousers. With great effort Ingold had acquired enough sulfur from a dyer’s works in Gae to manufacture oil of vitriol—sulfuric acid—and had tried pouring that on slunch. It killed it but rendered the ground unfit for further use. And the slunch grew back within three or four weeks. It was scarcely worth the risk and hardship of another trip to the ruins of Gae for that.
“Do you think that thing Maia described to Ingold—the Cylinder he found in the vaults at Penambra—might hold some clue about the slunch?” Alde kept her distance. The dark fur of her collar riffled gently around her face, and the tail of her hair made a thick sable streak in the colors of old gowns, old curtains, and old hangings that had gone into her coat.
“It might.” Rudy came back to her, uneasily dusting the sides of his breeches and boots. “Ingold and Gil haven’t found zip about slunch in any archive they’ve searched so far, but for all we know it may have been common as daisies back before the first rising of the Dark. One day Pugsley’s going to look up at me and say, ‘Oh, we always dumped apple juice on it—shriveled it right up.’ And that’ll be that.”
Alde laughed, and Rudy glanced back at the cold, thick mass behind them, inert and flaccid and yet not dead. He said, “But we better not count on it.”
The sun had slipped behind the three great peaks that loured over Sarda Pass: Anthir, the Mammoth, and the Hammerking. The air above glacier and stone was still filled with light, the clouds streaked crimson, ochre, pink, and amber by the sunset, and the eternal snowfields picked up the glory of it, stained as if with liquid gold. Like a black glass rectangle cut from the crystallized bone of the mountain, the Keep of Dare caught the reflection, burning through the trees: a fortress built to guard the remnant of humankind through the times of darkness, until the sun should shine again.
Looking below it, beyond it, to the scant growth of wheat and corn in the fields along the stream, the white patches of slunch and the thinness of the blossom on the orchard trees, Rudy wondered if those ancient walls would be protection enough.
Just my luck. I make it to the world where I belong, the world where I have magic, the world where the woman I love lives—and we all starve to death.
It figures.
“The range of my tribe lay at the feet of the Haunted Mountain, between the Night River and the groves along the Cursed Lands, and northward to the Ice in the North.” The Icefalcon slipped his scabbarded killing-sword free of his sash, set it where it could be drawn in split instants, and shed vest and coat and long gray scarf in a fashion that never seemed to engage his right hand. “Never in all those lands, in all my years of growing up, did I hear speak of this slunch.”
Only a few glowstones dispersed white light in the Guards’ watchroom. Most of the Guards’ allotment of the milky polyhedrons illuminated the training floor where Gnift put a small group of off-shift warriors—Guards, the men-at-arms of the Houses of Ankres and Sketh, and the teenage sons of Lord Ankres—through a sparring session more strenuous than some wars. Hearthlight winked on dirty steel as the incoming shift unbuckled harness, belts, coats; ogre shadows loomed in darkness, and across the long chamber someone laughed at Captain Melantrys’ wickedly accurate imitation of Fargin Graw feeling sorry for himself.
Rudy sighed and slumped against the bricks of the beehive hearth. “You ever ride north into the lands of the Ice?”
The young warrior elevated a frost-pale brow in mild surprise. “Life among the tribes is difficult enough,” he said. “Why would anyone ask further trouble by going there?”
“People do,” said Seya, an older woman with short-cropped gray hair.
“Not my people.”
“Well,” Rudy said, “slunch is obviously arctic—at least it started to show up when the weather got colder….”
“But never was it seen near the lands of the Ice,” the White Raider pointed out logically. His long ivory-colored braids, weighted with the dried human finger-bones thonged into them, swung forward as he chaffed his hands before the fire. Like all the other Guards, he was bruised, face and arms and hands, from sword practice. It was a constant about them all, like the creak of worn leather harnesswork or the smell of wood smoke in their clothing. “Nor did our shamans and singers speak of such a thing. Might slunch be the product of some shaman’s malice?”
“What shaman?” Rudy demanded wearily. “Thoth and the Gettlesand wizards tell me the stuff grows on the plains for miles now, clear up to the feet of the Sawtooth Mountains. Why would any shaman lay such a … a limitless curse?”
The Icefalcon shrugged. As a White Raider, he had been born paranoid.
“As for foods that will grow in the cold,” he went on, settling with a rag to clean the mud from his black leather coat, “when game ran scarce, we ate seeds and grasses; insects and lizards as well, at need.” Constant patrols in the cold and wind had turned the Icefalcon’s long, narrow face a dark buff color, against which his hair and eyes seemed almost white. Rudy observed that even while working, the Icefalcon’s right hand never got beyond grabbing range of his sword. All the Guards were like that to a degree, of course, but according to Gil there were bets among them as to whether the Icefalcon closed his eyes when he slept.
“Sometimes in days of great hunger we’d dig tiger-lily bulbs and bake them in the ground with graplo roots to draw the poison out of them.”
“Sounds yummy.”
“Pray to your ancestors you never discover how yummy such fare can be.”
“We used to eat these things like rocks.” Rudy hadn’t heard Tir come up beside him. Small for his age and fragile-looking, Tir had a silence that was partly shyness, partly a kind of instinctive fastidiousness. Partly, Rudy was sure, it was the result of the subconscious weight of adult memories, adult fears.
“They were hard like rocks until you cooked them, and then they got kind of soft. Mama—the other little boy’s mama—used to mash them up with garlic.”
The Icefalcon raised his brows. He knew about the heritable memories—an old shaman of his tribe, he had told Rudy once, had them—and he knew enough not to put in words or questions that might confuse the child.
Rudy said casually, “Sounds like …” He didn’t know the word in the Wathe. “Sounds like what we call potatoes, Ace. Spuds. What’d that little boy call them?”
Tir frowned, fishing memories chasms deep. “Earth-apples.” He spoke slowly, forming a word Rudy had never heard anyone say in the five years of his dwelling in this world. “But they raised them in water, down in the tanks in the crypt. Lots and lots of them, rooms full of them. They showed that little boy,” he added, with a strange, distant look in his eyes.
“Who showed him, Ace?”
Melantrys, a curvy little blonde with a dire-wolf’s heart, was offering odds on the likelihood of Graw finding a reason not to send up any of the hay that was part of the Settlements’ tribute to the Keep come July—betting shirt-laces, a common currency around the watchroom, where they were always breaking—and there were shouts and jeers from that end of the room, so that Rudy had to pitch his voice soft, for Tir’s hearing alone.
Tir thought about it, his eyes unfocused. He was one of the cleanest little boys Rudy had ever encountered, in California or the Wathe. Even at the end of an afternoon with the herdkids, his jerkin of leather patches and heavy knitted blue wool was fairly spotless. God knew, Rudy thought, how long this phase would last.
“An old, old man,” Tir said after a time. He stared away into the darkness, past the lurching shadows of the Guards, the stray wisps of smoke and the flash of firelight on dagger blade and boot buckle. Past the night-black walls of the Keep itself. “Older than Ingold. Older than Old Man Gatson up on fifth north. He was bald, and he had a big nose, and he had blue designs on his arms and the backs of his hands, and one like a snake like this, all the way down his head.” Tir’s fingers traced a squiggly line down the center of his scalp, back to front. Rudy’s breath seemed to stop in his lungs with shock. “And it wasn’t a little boy,” Tir went on. “It was a grown-up man they showed. A king.”
It was the first time he had made the distinction. The first time he seemed to understand that all the little boys whose memories he shared had grown up to be men—and after living their lives, had died.
Rudy tried to keep his voice casual, not speaking the great wild whoop of elation that rang inside him. “You want to go exploring, Pugsley?”
“Okay.” Tir looked up at him and smiled, five years old again, rather solemn and shy but very much a child ready for whatever adventures time would bring his way.
“They won’t thank you, you know,” the Icefalcon remarked, not even looking up from his cleaning as they rose to go. “The know-alls of the Keep—Fargin Graw, and Enas Barrelstave, and Bannerlord Pnak, and Lady Sketh. Whatever you find, you know they shall say, ‘Oh, that. We could have found that any day, by chance.’ “
“You’re making me feel better and better about this,” Rudy said.
The White Raider picked a fragment of dried blood out of the tang of his knife. “Such is my mission in life.”
It’s him! Rudy thought as, hand in hand, he and Tir ascended the laundry-festooned Royal Stair. It’s him! For the first time, Tir’s memories had touched something that lay verifiably in the original Time of the Dark.
The old man with the big nose and the bald head and the tattoos on his scalp and hands was—had to be—the Guy with the Cats.
Records did not stretch to the first rising of the Dark. Gil and Ingold had unearthed archives dating back seven hundred years at Gae; two of the books salvaged from the wreck of the City of Wizards were copies of copies—said to be accurate—of volumes two thousand years old. The Church archives the ill-famed and unlamented Bishop Govannin had carried from the broken capital contained scrolls nearly that age, in dialects and tongues with which Ingold, for all his great scholarship, was wholly unfamiliar. When the mage and Gil had a chance to work on them, they had arrived at approximate translations of two or three—at least two of the others Gil guessed had been copied visually, without any knowledge of their meaning at all.
But in the Keep attics above the fifth level, in the hidden crypts below, and in the river caves up the valley, they had found gray crystalline polyhedrons, the size and shape of the milk-white glowstones: remnants of the technology of the Times Before. And when Gil figured out that the gray crystals were records, and Ingold learned how to read the images within, they got their first glimpse of what the world had been like before that catastrophe over three millennia ago.
The Guy with the Cats was in two of the record crystals.
The crystals themselves were magic, and readable only through the object Rudy described to himself as a scrying table found hidden in an untouched corner chamber of the third level south. But less than a dozen of the thirty-eight were about magic, about how to do magic. Even silent—neither Rudy nor Ingold had figured out how to activate the soundtrack, if there was a soundtrack—they were precious beyond words. Magic was used very differently in those days, linked with machines that Ingold had tried repeatedly—and failed repeatedly—to reproduce in the laboratory he set up in the crypts. But the crystals showed spells and power-circles that were clearly analogous to the methods wizards used now. These Rudy and Ingold studied, matching similarities and differences, trying with variable success to re-create the forgotten magic, even as Gil studied the silent images in the other stones to put together some idea of that vanished culture and world.
On the whole, Rudy guessed that their conclusions were about as accurate as the spoofs written in his own world about the conclusions “scientists of the distant future” would draw about American motels, toilets, and TV Guides.
But in the process, he and Gil had come to recognize by sight a bunch of people who died about the time of the Trojan War.
They had given them names; not respectful ones, perhaps, but convenient when Gil noted down the contents of each crystal.
The Dwarf.
Mr. Pomfritt—named less for his resemblance to a long-forgotten character in a TV show than for his precise, didactic way of explaining the massive spiral of stars, light, and silver-dust that funneled, Ingold said, a galaxy-wide sweep of power into something kept carefully out of sight in a small black glass dish.
The Bald Lady.
Mother Goose.
Scarface.
Black Bart.
And the Guy with the Cats.
And now Tir said that the Guy with the Cats had been in the Keep. That meant whoever that old mage was, he’d been of the generation that first saw the Dark Ones come.
The generation that fought them first. The generation that built the Keep.
“The little boy got lost here once,” Tir confided in a whisper as they wound their way along a secondary corridor on third south. Night was a time of anthill activity in the Keep, as suppers were cooked, business transacted, courtships furthered, and gossip hashed in the maze of interlocking cells, passageways, warrens, and bailiwicks that sometimes more resembled a succession of tight-packed villages than a single community, let alone a single building. Rudy paused to get an update on Lilibet Hornbeam’s abscess from a cousin or second cousin of that widespreading family; nodded civil greetings to Lord Ankres, one of the several noblemen who had survived to make it to the Keep—His Lordship gave him the smallest of chilly bows—and stopped by Tabnes Crabfruit’s little ill-lit workshop to ask how his wife was doing.
Tir went on, “He was playing with his sisters—he had five sisters and they were all mean to him except the oldest one. He was pretty scared, here in the dark.”
What little boy? Rudy wondered. How long ago? Sometimes Tir spoke as if, in his mind, all those little boys were one.
Him.
“They sent a wizard up to find him?” Rudy was frequently asked to search the back corners of the Keep, or the woods, for straying children.
They ascended a stair near the enclave owned by Lord Sketh and his dependents, a wooden one crudely punched through a hole in the ceiling to join the House of Sketh’s cells on the third level with those on the fourth. Warm air breathed up around them, rank with the pungence of cooking, working, living, drawn by the mysterious ventilation system of the Keep.
One more point for the wizards who built the place, Rudy thought. However they’d powered the ventilator pumps and the flow of water, most of them still worked. He and Ingold had never been able to ascertain that one to their satisfaction. They’d found the pumps, all right, and the pipes and vents like capillaries through the black walls, the thick floors, but no clue as to why they still worked.
A young boy passed with two buckets of water on his shoulders, accompanied by a henchman wearing the three-lobed purple badge of the House of Sketh—Sketh was notorious for thinking it owned the small fountain in the midst of the section where most, but not all, of its servants and laborers lived. Alde suspected they were charging for access, but couldn’t prove it.
“Uh-huh,” Tir said. “There were three wizards in the Keep then, an old man and a lady and a little girl. The girl found the little boy.”
“So these were different from the guy who showed the King how to find the potatoes.”
Tir thought about this. “Uh-huh. That was … I think the King was before. Way before.” It was the first time he’d identified anything resembling a sequence to his memories. Eldor—Tir’s dead father—had had some of Dare of Renweth’s memories, toward the end of his pain-racked life; according to Ingold, few others of the line had. Ingold deduced that the wizards who built the Keep had engineered such memories into certain bloodlines to make sure of their preservation, but it was never possible to predict who would remember what, or when.
The boy frowned, fighting to reach back into that barely comprehended darkness, and they turned a couple of corners and cut through a quarter-cell somebody had chopped into a corridor: Tir still leading, still pursuing old recollections, matching in his mind the way the Keep had been three thousand years ago against the shortcuts of his current experience.
“There’s stairs way back there but we can go up here,” he said, pointing down another hall.
Here, toward the back of the fourth, many of the fountains had failed. The cells were inhabited by the Keep’s poorer folk, who’d received less productive land in the division of arable allotments or whose birthrate had outstripped what they were assigned; those whose land had been damaged by slunch or whose livestock had sickened and died; those who had sold, traded, or mortgaged first their land, then their time and freedom, to the wealthier inhabitants who had food to spare. Many of the cells, lying far from the stairways or the bridges that crossed the Aisle, weren’t inhabited at all. Around here the air smelled bad. It was all very well to be living in a place whose ventilation pumps were still operative after three thousand years, but over the millennia, as Rudy put it, somebody had lost the manual. When a pump broke, it stayed broken.
Rudy hadn’t mentioned it to Alde, but he lived in fear that a lot of this stuff would all give out at the same time, as the internal combustion engines of his experience generally had. And then Shit Creek won’t even be the phrase for it, he thought uneasily.
Toward the back of the Keep the corridors lay straighter, too, for no one had lived here long enough to alter the walls. The darkness seemed denser away from the pine-knot torches, the lamps of smoking grease, and the occasional glowstone in its locked bracket of iron.
The stairway Tir led him to was at the back of the fourth, a deserted area smelling of the rats that seemed to spontaneously generate in spite of all the purging-spells he or Ingold could undertake. Without the blue-white glow that burned from the head of Rudy’s staff, the long corridor would have been as lightless as the crawl spaces behind Hell. A smoke-stained image of a saint regarded them gloomily from a niche at the stair’s foot: St. Prool; Rudy recognized her by the broken ax she held in her hands.
He’d never figured out, when Gil told him the story, why God had broken the ax in half after ol’ Proolie got the chop. The blood line around her neck was neatly drawn in red, like a sixties choker.
The stairs themselves were rough plank, almost as steep as a ladder. Tir darted ahead, feet clattering on the wood, and Rudy cast his magic before him so that a ball of witchlight would be burning over the child’s head when he got to the top.
He himself followed more slowly, thrusting his glowing staff-head up through the ragged hole in the stone ceiling to illuminate the cell above. The magelight was bright, filling the little room and showing Rudy, quite clearly when he came up level with the floor, the thing that stood in the cell’s doorway.
It was a little taller than his knee, and, he thought—trying to summon the image of it in his mind later—a kind of dirty yellowish or whitish-yellow, like pus except that there was something vaguely inorganic about the hue.
It had a head but it didn’t have eyes, though it turned the flattened, fist-sized nodule on its spindly neck in his direction as he emerged. It had arms and legs—afterward Rudy wasn’t sure how many of each.
He was so startled he almost fell, lurching back against the stone edge of the opening in the floor. He must have looked away, grabbing for his balance on the ladder, because when he looked back it was gone.
“Tir!” Rudy lunged up the last few rungs, flung himself at the door. “Tir, watch out!” He almost fell through the doorway, the blast of light he summoned flooding the corridor, an actinic echo of his panic and dread.
He looked left, then right, in time to see Tir emerge, puzzled, from another cell door perhaps fifty feet down the hall.
There was no sign of the thing he’d seen.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_648e0cfc-ee2f-5c98-a135-71f829c836cb)
“Stay there!”
Tir looked scared—by the panic in Rudy’s tone as much as by anything else—and held on to the jamb of the doorway in which he stood, while Rudy summoned all the light he could manage. By that brilliant, shadowless wash Rudy checked every cell for fifty feet down the corridor, quick looks, loath to turn his back on the passage or on the other empty black openings. Most cells here were bare, scavenged long ago of everything remotely useful—boxes had been stripped of their metal nails, old barrels of their strapping, even the curtains or the rickety shutters that in other places in the Keep served to cover the openings. Here and there Rudy found a cell crammed, disgustingly, with the waste and garbage some family on five north thought Minalde’s quaestors wouldn’t notice.
Rudy stretched his senses out, listening, trying to scent above the overwhelming garbage stink. But his concentration wasn’t what it should have been. Thinking back, he recalled no odor connected with the creature, nor any sound, not even when it fled.
“Maybe it’s a gaboogoo,” Tir surmised, when Rudy returned to the boy at last. “They’re sort of fairy things that live in the forest and steal milk from cows,” he added, with the tone of one who has to explain things to grown-ups. “Geppy’s mama tells neat stories about them.”
Some of Ingold’s lore concerned gaboogoos, and they almost certainly didn’t exist, though legends of them persisted, mostly in the southeast. But in any case, according to most of those legends, gaboogoos were humanoid: blue, glowing, and “clothed as richly as princes,” a description that made Rudy wonder where they and similar fairy folk purchased size minus-triple-zero petite doublets and gowns. Same place superheroes order those nonwrinkle tights from, I guess. On the other hand, of course, he hadn’t believed in dragons, either, until he’d been attacked by one.
“Whatever it is, it sure as hell isn’t supposed to be here.” Rudy looked around him uneasily, then down at the boy again. As the first shock and alarm wore off, the implications were coming home to him. Something was living in the upper reaches of the Keep. Something he’d never seen, had never heard of—which probably meant Ingold had never heard of it, either. The old man had sure never mentioned weird little eyeless gremlins to him. And that meant …
Rudy wasn’t entirely sure what it did mean, except that it meant big trouble somewhere. “I think it’s time we got you home, Ace.” He took Tir’s hand.
“But you said it was smaller than me,” Tir protested. “And it didn’t have a mouth or teeth or anything. And I want to see it. Maybe it’s got a treasure.”
“Maybe it’s got claws,” Rudy said firmly, leading the way back toward the cell where the steps descended. Oddly, he couldn’t remember whether it had or not. “Maybe it’s got great big long skinny fingers to strangle you with.”
Maybe it’s got a big brother. Or lots of big brothers.
“But what about the … the earth-apples, the potatoes?” Tir pronounced the word carefully, and with a good imitation of Rudy’s clipped California accent. “If you’ve got to go to the River Settlements with Master Graw tomorrow, we won’t be able to look for them for days.”
“If they’ve kept for a couple thousand years, they’ll keep for another three, four days.” Rudy glanced behind him at the corridor as they entered the cell where the stair led down. His concentration had not been up to maintaining the full white magelight for more than a few minutes, and it had faded and shrunk around them until it was once more two smoky stars on the points of the metal crescent that topped his staff. “Besides, I’ll be damned if I’m leaving this place till I figure out what’s going on, Master Graw or no Master Firetrucking Graw.”
He held the staff down through the hole that led back to the fourth level, to make sure the cell below was empty and safe, and watched Tir carefully as the boy climbed down. In the few seconds that took, he also managed to glance over his shoulder at the cell doorway behind him seven or eight or maybe ten times.
He hadn’t realized how much, in the past five years, he had taken for granted the safety within the walls of the Keep.
“You’re sure it wasn’t an illusion?” Ingold asked a short time later.
Rudy considered the matter, propping his shoulders against the dyed sheepskins, bison pelts, and pillows of knit-craft and leather that made homey the pine-pole bench in the big workroom on first south that he and Ingold shared.
“I dunno,” he said at length. He tilted the scrying crystal in his hand so that the older wizard’s image, tiny but clear, shone more brightly in the jewel’s depths. By the look of it, the old man was in a ruined villa at Willowchild, four or five days’ journey from Renweth Vale.
The sight filled him with relief. He didn’t feel capable of dealing with what he’d seen earlier that evening—or what he thought he’d seen.
“I’m usually pretty good at spotting an illusion,” he went on slowly. “And this didn’t feel like one.” At the other end of the bench, Alde curled up like a child, her feet tucked under her green wool gown and her long black hair loosened for sleep, as it had been when he and Tir had come in to tell her what he had seen. Despite the lateness of the hour—the Keep was settling into somnolence around them—the boy was wide-awake, watching Rudy’s end of the conversation with vivid interest.
“It didn’t have a sound or a smell to it. Pugsley and I were looking for stuff the old guys hid … And hey, you know what? The Guy with the Cats, from the record crystals? He was the one Tir remembered seeing in the Keep all those years ago! He described him perfectly. So we know when he lived! But Tir didn’t see squat, did you, kid?”
“Not squat,” the boy affirmed. Though he had demonstrated an almost preternatural ability to separate the formal intonations of proper speech from the combination of peasant dialect and barrio slang that Rudy and most of the herdkids spoke, Alde rolled her eyes.
“Hmm,” Ingold said and scratched a corner of his beard. Rudy had been half hoping the older wizard would say, Oh, THOSE eyeless, rubbery, mysterious critters, but at least he hadn’t blanched, clutched his heart, and cried, Dear God, stay together and barricade the doors! either.
“Well, we can’t rule out that it was an illusion,” Ingold finally said. “And considering the stringency with which the Guards protect the Doors, and the spells of Ward written over the steps, the doorposts, and the inner and outer doors themselves, it’s difficult to see how something could have gotten in, though of course that doesn’t mean it didn’t. The Ward captains at the back end of the fifth aren’t going to like it much—Koram Biggar and Old Man Wicket and the Gatsons have been raising chickens illegally up there, and never mind what it does to the rat population of their neighbors’ cells—but I think you need to have the Guards make a thorough sweep.”
He considered the matter a moment, his sharp blue eyes distant with thought, then added, “Tell them to take dogs.”
The Guards swept that night. And the Guards found nothing. It was after midnight when they began their search, and it was not a popular one. They swept the fourth level and the fifth, back away from the inhabited regions around the Aisle, where the corridors lay straight and cold and uncompromising far from the water sources and curled tight and thick where they had been, or still were, perhaps. They questioned those who lived there about things seen or smelled or found, and heard no word of strange droppings, or food missing, or odd or unwarranted smells.
Not that one could tell in some places, Rudy reflected dourly, and there was trouble, as Ingold had predicted, with the Biggar clan, and the Browns, and the Gatsons, and the Wickets, and others who resented being taken to task for their disregard of Keep health regulations. “Hell, it ain’t botherin’ no one!” protested Old Man Gatson, a sour-faced patriarch whose family occupied the least desirable tangle of cells on fifth north—least desirable because there was no waste disposal for many hundred feet.
“What about the people who live directly underneath?” Janus of Weg demanded, disgusted and exasperated at the sight of the stinking, swarming boxes and jars heaped up in an abandoned cell. “Who get your cockroaches?”
“Pah,” the old man snarled. “It’s Varkis Hogshearer that lives underneath and he can have my cockroaches—and what they live off, too! Twenty-five percent he charged me for the loan of seed wheat—twenty-five percent! He’s lucky I don’t—”
“That’ll be enough of that,” the commander snapped, while Rudy and the Icefalcon drifted silently down the corridor toward the empty darkness beyond the Gatsons’ warren, listening. Up here, away from the thick-settled regions of the Keep, Rudy sensed the ghosts of old magic in the smooth black stone of the walls. Magic that had defeated the Dark Ones; magic that turned the eyes of ordinary folk aside. Magic that did things Rudy could not identify. But he could feel it as he might feel cold or heat, a kind of magnetism, a tingling in his fingertips or a sense that someone stood quite close beside him whispering words in a language he could not understand.
Wizards had raised the Keep. Their laboratory still existed, deep in the crypts near the hydroponics chambers. Of the great machines that had been made and stored there, nothing remained but scratches and stains on the floor—what had become of them, Rudy hated to think. Smaller, largely incomprehensible equipment of gold and glass and shining tubes of silver had been found, hidden when the old mages themselves had vanished. Echoes of their spells lingered in places: in addition to selected cells in the Church sector, where no magic whatsoever would work, there was a cell on second north where Rudy’s powers, and Ingold’s, were sometimes magnified, sometimes disturbingly randomized, so that spells had different effects from those intended, and a Summoning would frequently result in the appearance of something appallingly other than that which had been called. Ingold had found a three-foot-long section of corridor on fifth south where he could speak in a whisper and Rudy, if he stood at a particular spot in the third level of the crypts, could hear every word.
There was a room in the crypts that would kill any animal, except a cat, that walked into it—including the one human being who had tried it—and a corner of what had been a chamber on third south where from time to time letters would appear on the wall, smudgily written in light as if traced with someone’s fingertip, spelling out words not even Ingold understood. The corner had been bricked off from the main cell in a subsequent renovation—the main cell itself was currently used as a store-room.
So why couldn’t the Guy with the Cats have guarded his bewitched potatoes with visions of little eyeless gremlins?
Rudy didn’t think so, however.
Arms folded, he probed at the sunless silence, listened deeply into the chambers all around him and down that empty hall, tracking the footfalls of the Guards as they carried their torches and glowstones from doorway to doorway. Grimy streaks of yellowish light marked flea-ridden curtains or shutters with broken slats. Skinny men and women, feral children with hungry eyes, came to the doors of cells, resentful at being waked and asked, “Any food missing? Anything disturbed, prints … Cats afraid? Any places the children have spoken of as wrong, or odd?”
“No, sir … No, sir. Why, my Jeddy, she been all over this level like it was her own warren. She’d have let me know soon enough if there was suthin’ amiss in the corners in the dark. You tell the man, Jeddy.”
The statue of an enormously plump saint in a chalky, yellowy-white robe smiled beneficently from a niche between two tallow candles, and Rudy felt uneasy, filled with a sense of looking at clues he did not understand.
Ingold sat for a long time after Rudy ceased speaking—after Gil presumed that Rudy had ceased speaking, for she could hear nothing of what Ingold heard when he used the scrying crystal—turning the two-inch shard of yellowish quartz over and over in scarred, thick-muscled fingers, firelight honeying the white hairs that dusted their backs. Outside the villa’s crumbling walls Gil could hear the far-off ululations of wolf-talk, and nearby, Yoshabel the mule stamped and laid back her ears, her eyes green-gold mirrors of brainless malice.
Waking to the sound of Ingold’s voice, Gil had for a time been so overwhelmed with rage at him, so filled with the conviction that the throbbing agony in her face and all the sorrows in her life were his doing, that she had had to close her hands around a broken projection of marble in the packed earth near her blankets and stare at the dim pattern of firelight among her knuckle bones until the anger went away.
For no particular reason, she thought of Sherry Reinhold, the beautiful blond, tanned, aerobics-perfect classmate who’d been one of the few to be friendly with her in high school. Sherry had become an airline stewardess and had married a dentist and acquired a house the size of one of the smaller campus buildings. Meanwhile, Gil herself was still struggling with the poverty and frustration of the UCLA graduate program in medieval history.
She remembered Sherry sitting across from her at the Bicycle Shop Café in Westwood, saying, “I don’t know why I do it. I don’t even like the taste of alcohol. I know getting drunk isn’t going to solve anything, or help anything, or do anything but screw me up worse. And then I’m sitting there with eleven empty glasses in front of me telling some man I’ve never seen before my telephone number and the directions to my house.” That had been after the divorce. “It’s like the words ‘Oh, have another one’ come out of the empty air, not connected to anything—not the past or the future or anything real—and it’s the rightest and sanest and most sensible thing in the universe. I have to do it.”
Kill him. Kill Ingold.
The rightest and most sensible thing in the universe.
She closed her eyes. Wondered what she had dreamed—about her mother and sister?—that had made her at once angry and convinced that nothing she would ever do would bring her happiness again.
Though she had spoken to him of the dreams, of the terrible urgings that swamped her mind, he had refused to bind her hands. “You may need your weapons, my dear, at any moment,” he had said. “And I trust you.”
“You shouldn’t.” They were standing under the dying sycamore tree in the courtyard where she had first been attacked, looking down at the ripped sack that lay on the ground. It contained what little was left of the thing that had attacked her, torn down and chewed by vermin as if no spells had been placed upon it, as if no Wards had ringed the tree.
“Then I trust myself,” he had said, picking up the maggoty hindquarter and stowing it—and the remains of the original bag—in another sack pulled from Yoshabel’s numerous packs. “Whatever it is that is driving you to assault me, if it can quicken your timing and get you out of the lamentable habit of telegraphing your side lunges, I’d like to meet it.”
He’d smiled at her—with Ingold as one of her sword-masters, she could take on almost any of the other Guards and win—and Gil responded to his teasing with a grin and a flick at him with the pack rope. Even that small and playful assault he’d sidestepped as effortlessly, she knew, as he would have avoided a lethal blow.
“Thoth?” she heard Ingold say softly now. “Thoth, can you hear me? Are you there?”
She turned her head and looked. A slice of amber light lay across one scarred eyelid and down his cheekbone, refracted from the crystal in his hand. His brows, down-drawn in a bristle of fire-flecked shadow, masked the sockets of his eyes.
“Has that ever happened before?” she asked. “Before last week, I mean?”
He raised his head, startled. “I’m sorry, my dear, did I wake you? No,” he answered her question, when she signed that it didn’t matter. “And the troubling thing is, I’ve frequently had the sensation that Thoth—or one of the other Gettlesand wizards—is trying to signal me, but for some reason cannot get through.”
He got up from his place by the fire, crossed the room to her, a matter of two or three steps only. The former library was one of the few remaining chambers with four walls and a roof, though the wooden latticework of the three wide windows had been broken out. Wickering ember-light revived the velvety crimson memory of the frescoes on the wall, lent renewed color to the faces of those attenuated ghosts acting out scenes from a once-popular romance.
She curved her body a little to make room, and Ingold sat beside her, still turning the crystal in his hand. “I had hoped,” he went on quietly, “that if Rudy could get through to me I would be able to get through to Thoth, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. There’s only a deep sense of … of pressure, of heat, like a river far beneath the earth. Like a rope pulled taut and about to snap.” He put the crystal away and sat silent for a time, gazing at the broken window bars and toying one-fingered with a corner of his beard.
“What did Rudy have to say?”
Ingold told her. At his description of the thing Rudy called a gaboogoo, she was seized with the flashing sensation of familiarity, a tip-of-the-tongue impression that she had seen such a thing, or dreamed about it, but the next instant it was gone. Her dreams had been strange, and even deeper than the urge to hurt Ingold, to destroy him, was the reluctance to speak to him of the things she saw in them … And indeed, when she tried to frame those bleak, fungoid landscapes of pillowlike vegetation, the amorphous, shining shapes that writhed through it or flopped heavily a few feet above its surface, the very memory of those visions dissolved and she couldn’t recall what it was that she had seen.
And so it happened here. When Ingold paused, raising his eyebrows at her intaken breath, her words jammed in her throat, like a stutter, or like tears that refused to be wept, and she could not remember whether she had dreamed about such a thing or not. She shook her head, embarrassed, and was deeply thankful when Ingold only nodded and said, “Interesting.”
And she thought, almost as if she heard a voice saying it in the back of her mind, It will appear at the window. She didn’t know what it was, but she automatically checked her hand’s distance from the sword that lay next to her blankets and mentally triangulated on where Ingold’s back would be when he turned his head. Her mind was starting to protest, … like Sherry Reinhold … when Yoshabel threw up her head and squealed in terror.
Ingold swung around; Gil came out of her blankets like a coiled spring, catching up the scabbarded blade and drawing in a single fluid, killing move. She had a dim awareness of something large and pale clinging to the lattice with limbs more like pincers than claws, of a round fanged mouth where no mouth should be and of a wet flopping sound, all subsumed by the vicious calculation of target and stroke. She wrenched the blade around and drove it into the dirt with a chop that nearly dislocated her wrists, hardly aware that she cried out as she did so, only knowing afterward, as she stood shaking like a spent runner with her hair hanging in her eyes, that her throat hurt and the painted walls were echoing with an animal scream.
Ingold was already moving back toward her; she rasped “Not!” and fell to her knees, sweating, the wound in her face radiating a heat that consumed her being. There was an interim when she wasn’t able to see anything beyond her own white-knuckled hands gripping the sword hilt, was conscious of nothing but a wave of nausea, but he must have used the moment to stride to the window. In any case, he returned instants later. The thing outside had vanished.
“Are you all right?”
His voice came from a great distance away, a dull roaring like the sound within a shell. Though her eyes were open, she saw for a moment a vision of red laced with tumbling diamond fire. Then he was holding her, and she was clinging to the coarse brown wool of his robe, her face crushed to his shoulder, gripping the barrel chest and the hard rib cage to her as if they both floated in a riptide and she feared to be washed away.
“Gilly …” He whispered her nicknames. “Gillifer, beloved, it’s all right … it’s all right.”
The desire to pull out her knife and shove it up between his ribs drowned her in a red wave, nauseating her again. She locked her hands behind his back, fighting the voices in her mind. Then the rage ebbed, leaving in its wake only the wet shingle of failure and utter despair.
As Rudy suspected, Graw’s urgent demand that something be done about slunch meant that patches of it had developed in his fields and pastures—which happened to lie on the best and most fertile ground in that section of the Arrow River bottomlands. Though the sun had long since vanished behind the Hammerking’s tall head when the little party reached its goal—what had once been a medium-sized villa, patched and expanded with log-and-mud additions and surrounded by what Rudy still thought of as a Wild West-style wooden palisade—Graw insisted that Rudy make a preliminary investigation of the problem.
The villa and fort were Graw’s homestead, and everyone in them a member of the red-haired man’s family, an outright servant, or a smallholder who had pledged fealty in exchange for protection. Three of the nobles who had made the journey to the Keep from Gae had established such settlements as well, populated both by retainers and men-at-arms who had served them before the rising of the Dark, and by those farmers who sought their protection or owed them money.
Even had Gil not filled Rudy in on their own world’s Dark Ages, he’d have been able to see where that practice was leading. It was one reason he’d acceded to Minalde’s pleading, in spite of his own unwillingness to leave the Keep with the gaboogoo question unanswered. That, and the white look around her mouth when she’d said, “It’s only a day’s journey.” The livestock at the Keep would need hay from the river-bottoms to survive the winter. Not all the broken remnants of the great Houses were particularly mindful of their vows to Alde as the Lady of the Keep.
She didn’t need more problems than the ones she already had.
“Now, when you folk up there started putting all kinds of rules on us instead of letting us go our own way,” Graw groused in his grating, self-pitying caw, “I had my doubts, but I was willing to give Lady Alde consideration. I mean, she’d been queen all her life and was used to it, and I thought maybe she did know more about this than me.” He shoved big rufous hands into the leather of his belt as he strode along the edge of the fields, Rudy trailing at his heels. The split rails of the fences had been reinforced with stout earth banks and a chevaux-de-frise of sharpened stakes, heavier even than the ones around the Keep wheat fields that discouraged moose and the great northern elk. This looked designed to keep out mammoths.
“I did ask why we were supposed to send back part of our harvest, and everybody said, ‘Oh, shut up, Graw, it’s because the Keep is the repository of all True Laws and wonderful knowledge and everything that makes civilization—’ “
“I thought the vote went that way because you were taking Keep seed, Keep axes and plows, and Keep stock,” Rudy said, cutting off the heavy-handed sarcasm, vaulting over the fence in his host’s wake.
Graw’s face reddened still further in the orange sunset light. “Any organism that doesn’t have the courage to grow will die!” he bellowed. “The same applies to human societies. Those who try to hang on to all the old ways, to haggle as if the votes of ten yapping cowards are somehow more significant than a true man of the land who’s willing to go out and do something—”
“When did this stuff start to grow here?” Rudy had had about enough of the Man of the Land. He halted among the rustling, leathery cornstalks, just where the plants began to droop lifeless. They lay limp and brown in a band a yard or so wide, and beyond that he could see the fat white fingers of the slunch.
“Just after the first stalks started to come up.” Graw glared at him as if he’d sneaked down from the Vale in the middle of the night and planted the slunch himself. “You don’t think we’d have wasted the seed in a field where the stuff was already growing, do you?”
Rudy shook his head, though he privately considered Graw the sort of man who’d do precisely that rather than waste what he wanted to consider good acreage, particularly if that acreage was his. Silly git probably told himself the situation wouldn’t get any worse. “So it’s gone from nothing to—what? About twelve feet by eighteen?—in four weeks? Have the other patches been growing this fast?”
“How the hell should I know?” Graw yelled. “We’ve got better things to do than run around with measuring tapes! What I want to know is what you plan to do about it!”
“Well, you know,” Rudy said conversationally, turning back toward the fence, “even though I’ve known the secret of getting rid of this stuff for the past three years, I’ve kept it to myself and just let it grow all over the fields around the Keep. But I tell you what: I’ll tell you.”
“Don’t you get impertinent with me, boy!”
“Then don’t assume I’m not doing my job to the best of my ability,” Rudy snapped. “I’ll come out here in the morning to take a good look at this stuff, but—”
Voices halooed in the woods beyond the field, and there was a great crashing in the thickets of maple and hackberry along the dense green verge of the trees. Someone yelled, “Whoa, there she goes!” and another cried, “Oh, mine, mine!”
There was laughter, like the clanging of iron pots.
Rudy ran to the fence, swung himself up on the rails between two of the stakes in time to see a dark figure break from the thickets, running along the waste-ground near the fence for the shelter of the rocks by the stream. Two of Graw’s hunters pelted out of the woods, young ruffians in deer leather dyed brown and green, arrows nocked, and Graw called out, exasperated but tolerant, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, it’s only a damn dooic!”
It was a female—mares, some people called them, or hinnies—with one baby clutched up against the fur of her belly and another, larger infant clinging hard around her neck, its toes clutching at the longer fur of her back. She ran with arms swinging, bandy legs pumping hard, dugs flapping as she zigzagged toward the tangle of boulders and willow, but Rudy could see she wasn’t going to make it. One hunter let fly with an arrow, which the hinny dodged, stumbling. The smaller pup jarred loose as she scrambled up, and the other hunter, a snaggle-haired girl, laughed and called out, “Hey, you dropped one, Princess!”
The bowman fired again as the hinny wheeled, diving for the silent pup in the short, weedy grass.
The hinny jerked back from the arrow that seemed to appear by magic in the earth inches from her face. For an instant she stared, transfixed, at the red-feathered shaft, at the man who had fired and the wriggling black shape of the pup: huge brown eyes under the heavy pinkish shelf of brow, lips pressed forward like pale velvet from the longer fur around them in an expression of panic, trying to think.
Graw muttered, “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” and whipped an arrow from the quiver at his belt. He carried his bow strung, on his back, as most of the men in the Settlements did; nocking and firing was a single move.
Rudy reached with his thought and swatted Graw’s arrow as if it had been a stinging fly. At the same moment he spoke a word in the silence of his mind, and the bowstring of the male hunter snapped, the weapon leaping out of his hands and the nocked arrow, drawn back for another shot, jerking wild. The man cursed—seventy-five pounds of tension breaking does damage—and the hinny, gauging her chance, slipped forward, grabbed the pup by one foot, and flung herself in a long rolling dive for the rocks.
“You watch what you’re goddamn doing!” Graw bellowed, snatching Rudy by the shoulder and throwing him backward from the fence. As he hit the ground, Rudy could hear the girl hunter screaming and the retreating, furious rustle of the streamside laurels as the hinny made good her escape. Breath knocked out of him, he rolled, in case Graw were moved to kick him, and got back to his feet, panting, his long reddish-black hair hanging in his eyes. Graw was standing foursquare in front of him, braced as for a fight: “Go on, use your magic against me!” he yelled, slapping his chest. “I’m unarmed! I’m helpless! I’m just trying to protect our fields from those stinking vermin!”
Rudy felt his whole body heat with a blister of shame.
Ingold had taught him what he had to do next, and his soul cringed from it as his hand would have cringed from open flame. The man was hurt, and Rudy was a healer.
Turning his back on Graw, he slipped through the stakes in the fence and strode up the broken slope toward the hunter who lay among the weeds. The buckskin-clad girl knelt over him, her wadded kerchief held to his broken nose. Both raised their heads as Rudy approached through the tangle of hackberry and fern, hatred and terror in their eyes; before he got within ten yards of them the girl had pulled the hunter to his feet, and snatching up their bows, both of them fled into the green shadows of the pines.
The shame was like being rolled in hot coals. He had used magic against a man who had none and who was not expecting an attack. He had, he realized, damaged the position of wizards and wizardry more by that single impulsive act than he could have by a year of scheming for actual power.
Ingold would have something to say to him. He didn’t even want to think about what that would be.
He stood still, feeling suffocated, hearing behind him Graw’s bellowing voice without distinguishing words beyond, “I shoulda known a goddamn wizard would …”
Rudy didn’t stay to hear what Graw knew about goddamn wizards. Silently he turned and made his way down the rough, sloping ground to the fence, and along it toward the fort as the half-grown children of the settlement were driving in the cattle and sheep from the fields. The long spring evening was finally darkening toward actual night, the tiger-lily brilliance of reds and golds above the mountains rusting to cinnabar as indigo swallowed the east. Crickets skreeked in the weeds along the fencerow, and by the stream Rudy could hear the peeping of frogs, an orchestral counterpoint to Graw’s bellowed commentary.
Well, he thought tiredly, so much for supper.
He was not refused food when the extended household set planks on trestles in the main hall to eat. What he was offered was some of the best in the household. But it was offered in silence, and there was a wariness in the eyes of everyone who looked at him and then looked away. The bowman whose nose he’d broken sat at the other end of the table from him, bruises darkening horribly; he was, Rudy gathered, an extremely popular man. Rudy recalled what Ingold had told him about wizards being poisoned, or slipped drugs like yellow jessamine or passion-flower elixirs that would dull their magic so they could be dealt with, and found himself without much appetite for dinner. The huntress’ eyes were on him from the start of the meal to its finish, cold and hostile, and he heard her whispering behind his back whenever he wasn’t looking.
After the meal was over, no one, not even those who were clearly sick, came to speak to him.
Great, Rudy thought, settling himself under a smoky pine torch at the far end of the hall and pulling his mantle and bison-hide vest more closely around him. The women grouped by the fire to spin and sew had started to gather up their things to leave when he approached, so he left them to work in the warmth, and contented himself with the cold of the far end of the hall. Iguess this is why Ingold makes himself so damn invisible all the time. It didn’t take a genius to realize that from fear like this it was only a short step to bitter resentment. Especially with little Miss Buckskin helping things along with her mouth.
Ingold—and Minalde—would have to put in weeks of P.R. and cleanup over this one.
From a pocket of the vest he took his scrying stone, an amethyst crystal twice the width of his thumb and nearly as long as his palm, and tilted its facets toward the light.
And there she was. Alde, cutting out a new tunic for herself by the light of three glowstones, working carefully around the unaccustomed bulk of her belly—smiling a little and reaching up to adjust the gold pins in her hair, final jeweled relics of the wealth of the High King’s realm. Tir and Geppy Nool and a little girl named Thya made cat’s cradles of the wool from the knitting basket, and Thya’s mother, Linnet—a slim brown woman of thirty or so who was Alde’s maid and good friend—knitted and talked. The black walls of the chamber were bright with familiar hangings; Alde’s cat Archbishop stalked a trailing end of yarn, dignified lunacy in his golden eyes.
Uneasy, Rudy tilted the crystal, calling to being in it the corridors of the fourth level, and the fifth; picturing in his mind the chalky little gremlin he had seen.
But there was nothing. No sign of the creature anywhere in the Keep. That didn’t mean it wasn’t there. The Dead Cells in the Church territory and some of the royal prisons were proof against Rudy’s scrying—there were other cells as well from which he could not summon an image.
But it was hard to believe that the eyeless critter, whatever it was, knew where those were.
Whatever it was …
On impulse he cleared his mind and summoned to his thoughts the image of Thoth Serpentmage, Recorder of Quo: shaven-headed, yellow-eyed, hawk-nosed, brooding over broken fragments of pottery and scrolls in the patched, eroded Black Rock Keep in Gettlesand, the scribe of the wizards of the West.
But no image came. Nothing showed in the crystal, where a moment ago he’d seen the distant reflection of Minalde and Tir and the room he knew so well. No wizard could be seen without that wizard’s consent, of course, but a wizard would know, would feel, the scrying crystal calling to him. And Rudy felt only a kind of blankness, like a darkness; and below that a curious deep sense of something … some power, like the great heavy pull of a tidal force.
He shook his head to clear it. “What the hell …?”
After a moment’s consideration he called in his mind the image of the mage Kara of Black Rock, wife to its lord, Tomec Tirkenson. But only that same deep darkness met his quest, the same sense of … of what? he wondered. Foreboding. Power, spells … a breathlessness fraught with a sensation of crushing, a sensation of movement, a sensation of anger. Anger? Like a river under the earth, the thought came to him …
And yet there was something about it that was familiar to him, that he almost knew.
Why did he think of California?
One by one he summoned them to mind: red-haired, beautiful Ilae; shy Brother Wend; Dakis the Minstrel, who could herd the clouds with the sound of his lute; and even Kara’s horrible old mother, Nan—all the wizards who had taken refuge in the Keep of Gettlesand, when five years ago they had been exiled from Renweth by one of the stupider orders of the fanatic Bishop Govannin, now mercifully departed.
It was the same. It was always the same.
With an automatic reflex Rudy shook the crystal, as if to jar loose molecules back to their proper place. Delighted shrieking from the center of the big room drew his attention. The settlement children were playing some kind of jump-out-and-scream game. Rudy looked up as they scattered, in time to see a child hidden beneath a bench brandishing a homemade doll above the level of the seat. “It’s Mr. Creepy-in-the-Woods! Mr. Creepy-in-the-Woods is gonna get you!”
The children all screamed as if enveloped by goblins.
With its long stalky arms, its minute legs—with its tasseled, beaded bud of an eyeless head swinging wildly on a spindle neck—Mr. Creepy-in-the-Woods was the tiny twin of the thing Rudy had seen in the Keep.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_00a283b2-d825-52ad-ba2a-2d375a4a7ee9)
In the country of Gil’s dreaming there was light without sun. The sky had a porcelain quality, shadowless and bone-colored; the earth was the alien earth of her fleeting visions. Slunch padded the ground to the horizons, save in one direction—she wasn’t sure which, for there were no shadows—where treeless mountains thrust up like dirty headstones. Far off, something leaped and cavorted drunkenly in the slunch. Closer, the vision she’d had at the window lattices repeated itself, a curling lozenge of flabby flesh, heavy pincers projecting from what looked like an enormous mouth at the front, gliding like a hovercraft over the surface of the ground.
In the stillness an old man was walking, leaning on his staff, and with some surprise Gil recognized Thoth Serpentmage, who had been recorder for the Council of Wizards at Quo. What’s Thoth doing on another planet? she wondered as the old man paused, straightened his flat, bony shoulders and scanned the horizon with those chilly yellow eyes. He’s supposed to be in Gettlesand.
Thoth struck out with the point of his staff, impaling something in the slunch at his feet He reversed the staff, holding the thing where he could see it stuck on the iron point: like a wet hat made of pinkish rubber, covered with hard rosettes like scabbed sores. From his belt he took his dagger, scabbard and all, and with the scabbard tip reached to touch one of the rosettes. At that, all of them dilated open at once, like filthy little mouths, and spat fluid at him, gobbets of silvery diamonds that left weals on his flesh as if he had been burned with acid.
Thoth dropped staff and creature alike with a silent cry of pain and disgust. Overhead, dark shapes skated across the white sky, the flabby hovercraft thing pursuing a red-tailed hawk with silent, murderous speed. While she watched, it seized it with its pincers and hurled it in a cloud of bloody feathers to the earth.
That isn’t another planet. That is Gettlesand. She smelled something cold and thin, as if someone who had neither nose nor taste buds were trying to counterfeit the scent of watermelon. Somewhere she thought she heard a trail of music, like a flute being played far beneath the earth.
The children had several names for Mr. Creepy-in-the-Woods. They, like Tir, called him a gaboogoo, but they used the term interchangeably with goblin and fairy. “They’re too ugly for fairies, stupid,” Lirta Graw declared, at which one of the smaller kids, a boy named Reppitep, started to cry. Reppitep had seen one, on the high wooded slopes above the fields, just within the line where the trees grew thick. He’d been gathering kindling.
“He’s probably lying,” Lirta said, and tossed her red head. “Anyway, his mother’s a whore. I wouldn’t be scared of no stupid gaboogoo. And Daddy says there’s no such thing.”
“Your daddy probably said that about the Dark Ones,” Rudy said. Lirta’s mother herded all the children away, glancing back furtively at him over her shoulder.
His sleep that night, in a corner of the hall on a straw pallet, like most of the men of the household, was filled with imageless dreams of breathless, weighted anger, a pressure that seemed to clog the very ether. Sometimes he thought he saw the plains and deserts of Gettlesand, felt the arid sunlight and smelled dust and stone and buffalo grass on the slopes of its jutting, scrub-covered black mountains. At other times he dreamed of California, as he hadn’t for years. Dreamed of lying in his bed in his mother’s crummy apartment in Roubidoux, feeling the whole building shake as the big trucks went by on the broken pavement of Arlington Avenue outside.
Something was going on, something that troubled him deeply. He didn’t know what.
At dawn he went out to have another look at Fargin Graw’s slunch.
Graw went with him, grousing that members of the River Settlements Council—which he had resigned in annoyance when they wouldn’t accept his leadership—were antiquated holdovers of a system designed to keep down “true men” like himself, as though the elderly Lord Gremmedge, who had pioneered Carpont Settlement five miles farther downriver, were an impostor of some kind.
Rudy had heard the same at the Keep, with variations. Technically, everyone at the Keep held their lands through Minalde, just as, technically, they were her guests in a building that belonged to Tir. But men of wealth like Varkis Hogshearer and Enas Barrelstave spoke of cutting back the power of the queen and the little king, and giving the Keep and its lands outright to those who held them—one of whom was, coincidentally enough, Enas Barrelstave himself. There was also a good deal of feeling against the nobles, like Lord Ankres and Lord Sketh, and the lesser bannerlords, some of whom had arrived with more food than the poor of Gae and had parlayed that into positions of considerable power, though Rudy had noticed there was less of such talk when bandits or Raiders threatened the Keep. Most of the great Houses had never lost their ancient traditions of combat, and even ancients like Lord Gremmedge proved to be an asset on those few occasions when it came down to a question of defending the Vale.
For the most part, the lords looked down on men like Graw, on Enas Barrelstave—who had built up a considerable land-holding of his own, although he was still the head of the Tubmaker’s Guild—and on Varkis Hogshearer—and no wonder, in the latter case, thought Rudy dourly. In addition to being the Keep moneylender, earlier that spring Hogshearer had somehow gotten word that the only trader from the South to come north in six months was a few days off from the Vale. He’d ridden down to meet the merchant and had purchased his entire stock of needles, buttons, glass, seed, plowshares, and cloth, which he was currently selling for four and five times what the southern merchants generally asked. No other trader had appeared since, though Rudy scried the roads for them daily.
As Rudy expected, the slunch in Graw’s fields was pretty much like the slunch everywhere else. It was almost unheard of for slunch to spread that fast, and he suspected that the patch had been there—small but certainly not unnoticeable—when Graw planted the seed.
Nonetheless, he checked the place thoroughly, on the chance that a slight variation would show him something he and Ingold had missed.
It didn’t, however.
Slunch was slunch. It seemed to be vegetable, but had no seed pods or leaves or stems, and Rudy wasn’t sure about the function of the hairlike structures that held its blubbery underground portions to the soil. There was no visible reason for the vegetation all around the slunch to die, but it did.
Worms lived in it: huge, sluggish, and, Rudy discovered, weirdly aggressive, lunging at him and snapping with round, reddish, maggotlike mouths. “Yuckers,” he muttered, stepping back from the not-very-efficient attack and flicking the thing several yards away with his staff. “I’ll have to trap one of these buggers before I start for home.”
A regular earthworm, swollen and made aggressive by eating the slunch? Or some species he’d never heard of or that had never heretofore made it this far south?
Ingold would know. Ingold’s scholarship, concerning both old magical lore and natural history, was awesome—there were times when Rudy despaired of ever living up to his teacher.
But when he tried to contact Ingold, after Graw finally left him alone around noon, he could see nothing in his crystal. He shifted the angle to the pale sunlight that fell through the blossoms of the apple tree under which he sat, a thin little slip of a thing in an orchard surrounded by a palisade that would have discouraged a panzer tank division; let his mind dip into a half-meditative trance, drifting and reaching out. They’d be on the road, he thought, but there was a good chance they’d have stopped for a nooning. Ingold …
But there was nothing. Only the same deep, angry pulling sensation, the feeling of weight, and heat, and pressure. And underneath that, the profound dread, as if he stood in the presence of some kind of magic that he could not understand.
“C’mon, man,” Rudy whispered. “Don’t do this to me.” He cleared his mind, reordering his thoughts. Thoth of Gettlesand: he might have an answer, might indeed know what was going wrong with communications. Might know what that nameless feeling was, that haunting fear.
When no image came, he called again on the names of every single one of the Gettlesand mages, as he had last night. Failing them, he summoned the image of Minalde, whom he saw immediately, a small bright shape in the crystal, standing by the wheat fields in her coat of colored silks, arguing patiently with Enas Barrelstave about the placement of boundary hurdles.
Worried now, he tried again to reach Ingold.
“Dammit.” He slipped the crystal back into its leather pouch and returned it to the pocket of his vest. The day was mild, warmer than those preceding it and certainly warmer here in the bottomlands than in the high Vale of Renweth. Maybe summer was finally getting its act together and coming in.
About goddamn time. He didn’t think the Keep could stand another winter like the last one.
Clear as a little steel bell on the still air, he heard Lirta Graw’s voice, bossing someone about. Yep, there she was by the open gate of the log stockade, with a pack of the settlement kids. In a couple of years she’d be as obnoxious as Varkis Hogshearer’s daughter, Scala, an overbearing, sneaky adolescent who spied and, Rudy suspected, stole. He wondered if there were some kind of karmic law of averages that required the presence of one of those in every group of thirty or more kids. There’d certainly been one in his high school.
He watched them from where he sat in his miniature fortress of sharpened stakes and apple trees, listened to their voices, as he watched and listened to the herdkids at the Keep and the children who tagged at their mothers’ skirts by the stream when they did laundry. Partly this was simply because he liked kids, but partly—and increasingly so in the last year or two—because, like Ingold, he was watching for someone.
Waiting for someone to show up.
“The Dark Ones knew that magic was humankind’s only defense against them,” Ingold had said to him one evening when he and Rudy had gone out to locate Tir during the first flush of the boy’s livestock supervision phase. The Keep herdkids, under the command of a skinny, towheaded boy named Tad, had been bringing in the cattle from the upper pastures: Rudy had known Tir should be safe enough with the older children, but the boy was then only four, after all.
“They attacked the City of Wizards, destroying nearly all its inhabitants; they knew me well enough to come after me.” The old man frowned, leaning on his staff—a mild, unassuming, and slightly shabby old maverick, reminding Rudy of any number of overage truckers or bar-fighters he’d known in his Southern California days. “And in the past five years the fear has been growing on me that the Dark Ones—among all the hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children that they killed—sought out also the children born with the talent for wizardry. The next generation of wizards.”
Rudy said, “Oh, Christ.” It made sense.
Talent or propensity for magic usually manifested in very small children, Ingold had told him—five and younger—and then seemed to go underground until puberty. In the past five years, Ingold had kept a close eye on the children coming of age.
Not one had shown the slightest bent toward magic. Tad—eldest of the herdkids—had elected himself a kind of lab assistant to Ingold in the wizard’s chemical and mechanical endeavors, but had no apparent thaumaturgical gift. He just loved gadgets, spending all his free time in helping them adjust the mirrors that amplified the witchlight in the hydroponics crypts. So far, there had been no one. Rudy wondered how long it would be.
The children straggled off toward the thin coppices of the bottomlands, carrying kindling sacks. They’d have to collect more wood in the Settlements, he thought. Even though the nights here were less chill than in the Vale, the sprawling stone villa didn’t hold heat the way the Keep did. His eye followed them, Lirta Graw—sackless, as befitted the Boss’s Daughter—striding ahead, and the little fair-haired child Reppitep in the rear, struggling to keep up.
As they disappeared into the cloudy green of hemlock and maples along the Arrow, Rudy turned his eyes back toward the slopes behind him; the rising glacis strewn with boulders and threaded with silvery streams, and above that the dense viridian gloom of the high forest.
Where the trees grew thick, the children had said. That was where several of them reported they’d seen Mr. Creepy-in-the-Woods.
It was an hour’s steady climb to the edge of the trees. As he picked his way through fern and fox-grape up the rust-stained rocks of the streambed, Rudy wrapped himself in progressively thicker veils of illusion. He’d learned the art of remaining unseen from Ingold, whom he nicknamed—not without reason—the Invisible Man. Three years ago the first bands of White Raiders had made their appearance in the valley of the Great Brown River, tracking the spoor of elk and mammoth driven by cold from the high northern plain, and one still sometimes found their Holy Circles on deserted uplands. The thought of being the messenger elected to carry a letter written in pain to the obscure Ancestors of the tribes made Rudy queasy.
Moose and glacier elk raised their heads from grazing to regard him mildly as he passed, under the magically engineered impression that he was some harmless cousin of the deer tribe. Farther up the slopes, where the erratics left by the last glaciation poked through a tangled chaparral of brush, fern, and vines, a saber-tooth sunning itself on a slab of rock rolled over and looked at him, and Rudy hastily morphed the spell into I’m a saber-tooth, too—but smaller and milder and definitely beta to your alpha, sir. The huge, sinewy beast blinked and returned to its nap, surprisingly difficult to see against the splotchy gray-gold stone.
Wind breathed from the high peaks, carrying on it the glacier’s cold. Rudy shivered.
As carefully as any hunter, he worked the line of trees above the waste and pasture. Among the short grasses and weeds, he found mostly the tracks that he expected to find: half a dozen different sorts of deer, rabbits and coons, porcupines and weasels, voles and wolves. On the bark of a red fir he saw the scratchings of a cave-bear, higher than his head. Hidden carefully under the ferns of the denser woods were the droppings of a band of dooic, and Rudy wondered momentarily whether that poor hinny had made it safely back to her pals. Once or twice he came upon tracks that made him pause, puzzled. Rabbit spoor that hinted of movement no rabbit would have made—no rabbit in its right senses, anyway. Wolverine pugs from the biggest, weirdest damn wolverine he’d never hope to run across.
But nothing that would qualify as Mr. Creepy-in-the-Woods.
The sun curved toward the harsh white head of the Hammerking, barely visible above the Rampart Range’s broken-topped wall. A redstart called, Rudy identifying the almost conversational warble; farther down the long slope of rock a lark answered from the olive velvet of the pasture. Deep silence filled the earth, save for the eternal roaring of the wind in the pines. The sound seemed to wash away Fargin Graw’s grating voice and the petty small-town politicking of the Keep. Rudy felt himself relaxing slowly, as he did when he went on his solitary rambles in the Renweth Vale in quest of herbs or minerals or just information about what the edges of the woods looked like on any particular day.
He was alive. He was a wizard. Minalde loved him. What else mattered?
He came clear of the trees and settled himself with his back to a boulder at the top of a long slope of blackish rock peeled and scrubbed by the passage of long-ago ice. Due back any day, he thought, without any real sense of that event’s imminence. Below him, at the distant foot of the slope, the squalid congeries of villa and stockade, outbuildings and byres, lay surrounded by moving figures in the dull browns and greens of homespun, going about their daily tasks. Still farther down the silver-riffled sepia line of the Arrow, other stockades could be made out among the trees: square log towers and tall, spindly looking watch-spires like masts. The squat stone donjon of Wormswell. From up here he could see the wheat fields and the stockaded orchard of Carpont, the next settlement over; a small group of half-naked men and women were clearing a drainage ditch.
Not bad. For people whose civilization had collapsed out from under them in the wholesale slaughter of most of the world’s population by an incomprehensible force of monstrosities not terribly long ago, they’d recovered pretty quickly.
Not that they had a choice, he reflected, closing his eyes, the sun comforting on his lids. Who does have a choice? You recover and get a place to keep the rain off you, you plant some food, you get over the pain, or you die. Many of those people had come from the ruins of Penambra to unfamiliar northern lands. Many were city folk, clerks, or Guildsmen unused to the scythe or the plow. Probably not a whole lot of them were comfortable being outside at night, even after five years. But they were managing.
He sighed, closing more tightly around himself the veils of illusion as he took out his scrying crystal once more. He let his mind dip toward the half-trance state from which most magic was worked.
But all that he felt in the depths of the crystal was the grinding of that anger, the pressure of some deep, otherworldly rage.
Ingold, dammit, where’d you go? Pick up the phone, man!
Had something happened to them? Now, there was a scary thought. Ingold was a tough old dude, and Gil was nobody Rudy would want to fool with, but there were White Raiders wandering in the valley, and bandits scavenging what they could from the ruins. A year and a half ago the merchant who’d brought Ingold the sulfur had told them that some Alketch princeling, banished by the upheavals in the plague-riddled South, had marched up the Great Brown River with a midsize army, intent on conquest of the empty plantations and devastated acres of what had been the southernmost of the High King’s realms. Ingold had kept an eye on them by scrying crystal for about a month. Then one morning he’d tuned in to see only a campful of corpses.
True, Rudy reflected, turning the facets of his stone toward the fading sunlight, they didn’t have a wizard’s ability to make themselves look like scenery, but still …
Rudy looked up to see a gaboogoo standing three feet in front of him.
It was as tall as he was, reaching for him with hands like animate rope.
Rudy screamed, grabbed his staff from the rock beside him and slashed with the razor-edged crescent at the slick, whitish knotwork of the thing’s wrist. The hand fell onto his knee and clenched on like a machine of iron and cable, even as Rudy leapt to his feet and backward, cutting and slashing at the bloodless and undeterred thing that came at him with other hands outstretched.
It was fast. Rudy scrambled back, hacking at it and feeling the horrible grip of the severed hand shift its clutch on his leg, working its way up his thigh. He whipped the dagger from his belt with his free hand and slashed the leather of his trousers, pulling a great chunk of the buckskin loose, crawling hand and all. He hurled the thing as far as he could and spun to meet the gaboogoo again, slashing this time at the bobbing cluster of nodules on its head. They scattered like asparagus in a mower, and the thing kept coming on—Well, they might have been sensory organs, dammit!—and Rudy cut a third time, half severing the skinny, bobbing head from the stalk of the neck.
Movement on the ground caught his eye. The hand was creeping determinedly toward him over the rock.
Feet, don’t fail me now.
Rudy bolted.
He plunged upslope and into the trees, wondering if the gaboogoo would be hindered at all by the forest. He dodged and plunged over fallen pines gross with ear-shaped orange fungus, and leaped the fern-clogged tangle of a stream. Here in the higher woods, little undergrowth hampered his flight, only the yellow pine-straw that slithered beneath his boots. He ducked back along the slope with the intention of circling toward the settlement again but saw something palely gleam ahead of him in the gray-green twilight beneath the trees.
He flattened to a spruce trunk and had another look. It was a second gaboogoo. A little smaller than the first but still sizable. Rudy counted at least four arms—with this one’s bobbing nodules not confined to its head, it was somewhat hard to tell what was what. There seemed to be other growths on it as well.
Cloaking spells notwithstanding, it was coming in his direction.
The tag line of an old movie floated through Rudy’s head—”Who are those guys?”—but it did nothing to diminish the terror that had him by the throat. He headed upslope again.
The going was tougher, the ground now very steep. Above the trees the sun had slipped behind the high glaciers of the Rampart Range, and the light between the hoary spruces and lodgepole pines was like translucent slate-colored silk. His boots skidded on rocks and pine-straw as he climbed, the gloom all around him striped now with white birch and gray aspen. The birds had gone silent.
The quality of the wind changed above the timberline. It howled over the split domes of rock and tore at Rudy’s long dark hair, cutting through the sleeves of his woolen shirt as if he wore nothing, pouring through the gaping hole in his trouser leg like a carnivore ready to strip the meat off his bones. The small plants of the subalpine snatched at the invisible torrents of air like the wasted hands of the starving. Dozens of streams ribboned the lichenous rock up here, and behind a cracked spur of blue-black granite Rudy saw the terrible lavender wall of the glacier itself, a bled-out sapphire the size of the world.
Rudy thought, almost calmly, I’m going to freeze to death.
Below him, something white was working its way among the dwarf-willow and hemlock.
Shivering uncontrollably now, he headed northwest along the face of the slope, wondering if he could get past his pursuers and head down the Arrow Gorge. Something inside him whispered he was kidding himself, but he kept moving anyway. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if he stopped.
He couldn’t put from his mind the recollection of that white, spider-fingered hand inching over the rocks in his direction. He wondered if it was still trying to catch him.
I’m invisible, dammit!
Or unnoticeable, which was as close as wizards could get.
But unnoticeable by what? He seemed to hear Ingold’s voice in his mind. To elk you look like a deer, to saber-tooths you look like one of themselves. To bandits he’d look like a tree, and to White Raiders—who could probably pick any individual tree out of a nursery lineup and give the coordinates of where it stood on the mountain—he’d look like a weasel or an owl or something that had business up there.
But to a gaboogoo?
What is a gaboogoo?
Having no idea what shape their perceptions took, Rudy had no key to their minds—if they had minds—no paradigm with which to tailor illusion. He had no idea what they were.
Except ugly, mean guys who were after him.
Rudy kept moving.
He counted four of them as the afternoon light darkened, the rutilant glare of the sunset illuminating the white beds of slunch that lay, hundreds of feet long sometimes, over the rocks. The gaboogoo whose head he’d half severed had managed to lose it entirely but didn’t appear to notice. Like its hand, way back down the mountain, it kept on. The two others Rudy glimpsed among the columned pines below him weren’t as big, but seemed subtly different in configuration—one of them appeared to be moving on all fours. Or all sevens, or whatever. Rudy didn’t see whether it had a head or not.
He was genuinely scared. Years of living rough had given him a great deal of stamina, but as the gory sunset faded, Rudy was racked by profound shivering. In theory he could Summon heat, as he could Summon light, but he wasn’t good at that particular Summoning and didn’t think he could keep up his concentration while on the move. The vest of painted bison hide that kept him warm in the windless hollows by day wasn’t going to be enough as temperatures plunged. He knew that. And the gaboogoos were working him like wolves, keeping their distance, tiring him out. Under the open crater in his trouser leg Rudy’s thigh was black with bruises, a horrible tribute to the strength of that bloodless grip.
Well, Ingold old buddy, I think we can safely deduce that no, these buggers aren’t illusions.
And Jesus Christ, they’re in the Keep!
He had to get out of this. Had to get word back to Minalde, somehow, to sweep the Keep and sweep it now!
But even if there had been another mage at the Keep he could communicate with, he’d dropped his scrying stone during the gaboogoo’s first attack. He spared a quick stay-put spell for it—problematical at this distance, but scrying crystals were good about that kind of thing.
Ingold’s words about the Dark knowing that magic was humankind’s only defense came back. Maybe these guys knew it, too.
Who were they? And what the hell did they want?
Dead wizards. Rudy looked down at the bruise on his leg again. That part of the agenda was pretty unambiguous.
And as the wind numbed his fingers, his ears, and his feet, he had the increasing feeling they were going to get what they were after.
Dark wrapped itself over the slopes. Rudy crouched, trembling, against a boulder, tucking his hands into his armpits to warm them. To his left a U-shaped canyon curved between rocky walls, scattered with boulders and dotted with sheets of water, runoff of the glacier that blocked the way at the farther end. To his right, downslope, he could see all four of his pursuers now, shining dimly as the slunch that blanketed the lower slopes seemed to shine. Out across the falling black carpet of trees he could make out the Great Brown River where the Arrow flowed into it, dull snakes of orange-gold under the flammeous moon. Five little spots of jonquil light showed him where the Settlements lay among the trees. Black clouds were moving in overhead, and his breath, paining his lungs, poured from his lips in streams.
He’d been on the move since slightly after noon, with nothing to eat or drink.
A fire-spell he thought—not to warm himself, but to fight. Fire or lightning. He wondered if others would come, conjured a strange vision of them emerging like cheap plastic toys from a mammoth Cracker Jack box concealed somewhere in the trees. “A big surprise in every pack.”
But he couldn’t go farther. He knew that.
When he looked again, there were only three gaboogoo.
Rudy glanced automatically over his shoulder, half dreading the sight of the thing coming at him from up the glacier canyon. But there was nothing visible to his mageborn sight, and when he looked back, there was only one. While he watched, it, too, faded away into the night.
Oh, come on, you expect me to believe that one? Rudy shifted his weight uncomfortably. Why don’t you just point down and say, “Oh, look, your shoe is untied?”
His hands were so cold now he could barely grip his staff. His legs were numb and aching, his chest burned, and he had to fight the growing urge to say screw it and to crawl under the rocks to sleep.
Eyes flashed in the darkness. Rudy sprang to his feet, staggering with cramp. He’d been nearly dozing.
Eyes?
It was a dooic.
Even at this distance, and in the piercing cold, he could smell it, if he reached out only a little with his senses—the rank pong of an omnivore. It was an old male, the brown hair of its arms, back, and chest graying to frost, its fanged muzzle nearly white. It was small, probably born wild, though there were dooic in the river bands who’d been born in captivity and trained to simple tasks like cutting sugarcane and digging in the mines, who’d escaped with the coming of the Dark.
This one was standing on its short, bandy hind legs, and through the darkness Rudy could swear that in spite of his spells of concealment—which he had never relinquished throughout the day—it was looking at him.
Can’t be, he thought, puzzled and scared. Unless those things have somehow … What? Robbed me of power? That couldn’t happen … Could it?
He didn’t know.
But the dooic definitely saw him. It lumbered a few strides back toward the dark wall of the trees, then turned again, raising its face toward him. Retreated again and turned … Retreated and turned. Rudy could see the glint of its tusks in the dimness, smell the stink of it, and he wondered if the creature associated him in its mind with those jerks in the settlement who had tried to shoot that poor hinny yesterday, or if it was merely hungry.
He listened and scanned the edge of the woods, but could neither see nor smell any other dooic near. They hunted in bands and would bring down and slaughter a human being if they could, but Rudy knew that even without magic he could probably deal with a single attack. Man, I don’t need this, he thought tiredly, shifting his grip along the haft of his staff. See me tomorrow, pal, I’ve had a lousy day.
With a grunt, the dooic dropped to all fours. A moment later it settled to its knees and did something with its hand above a small pool of meltwater caught in the hollow of the rock.
And Rudy felt, strangely, the swift glimmer of something that almost seemed to be magic, like a drift of anomalous scent in the air.
MAGIC???
The old dooic moved away again, using its long forearms for speed, the whitish flesh beneath its fur a mottled blur as it reached the edge of the trees. It turned, staring upslope at him again, waiting.
Cautiously, ready for anything, Rudy came forward. Where the dooic had knelt by the meltwater, Rudy bent down—one eye still on the trees—and looked into the water.
In it he could see the pallid, fungoid shapes of the gaboogoo, as if in a scrying stone, moving away through the thick darkness of the woods.
“Jesus H. Christ on a bicycle.” Clouds overhead covered the moon, but as a wizard Rudy could see clearly, and the tiny pool had definitely been ensorceled to show the gaboogoo departing. Rudy half recognized the woods through which they passed, downslope and to the north in the hardwoods of the lower forest, toward the Arrow River gorge. By the way they moved, he could tell they were following something, tracking something other than himself.
Movement at the edge of the woods made him swing around, ready for a fight, and he saw that a second dooic had joined the first, a female by the flat pale dugs protruding through the body hair, with an infant clinging to her belly and another on her back. Male and hinny turned at once, ran a few steps back into the trees, then turned again, waiting for him. This time Rudy could almost see the flickering of magic—not human magic, but magic of some sort—that trailed from the old male’s fingers as it beckoned him impatiently to follow.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_88c60246-f9a3-5cc4-bee0-6adecbf8914d)
Cast from my fist, shining in the sky,
Brown wings lift and carry you from me.
With earthbound hooves I trace the road you fly …
“Gil?” Gentle and uninsistent, the word seemed to come, not from Ingold, but from some darkness in her mind, the thought taking shape in the abyss of a bottomless well. Holding to the poem as to a lifeline in terrifying darkness, Gil managed to nod, to let him know that she heard, but she could not speak.
In a sense, she was still aware of the broken stone walls of an old stable around them—the house to which it had been attached consisted these days of a couple of charred walls overgrown with birch saplings—the rusted black scrollwork of the manger near her head. The smoke of the fire Ingold had built in a corner stung her eyes; she heard the far-off howl of wolves and the soft, restless blowing of Yoshabel’s breath.
But it was as if all those images, that awareness, came to her down a cable from the bright surface of water through which she was slowly sinking, swimming deeper and deeper toward a lightless and terrible depth. As Ingold’s spells drew her farther into the dark, her mind gyred back to images of the UCLA campus in Westwood, to the words of poems—Donne, Villon, Minalde’s favorites Kaalis and Seredne, whom she, too, had come to love. Anything to avoid the fear that she sensed lay at the foundation of her dreams.
His magic was like the warmth of the fire, reassuring her with his measureless calm.
“What do you see, Gilly?” he asked. “What do you see?”
The wide lake upon whose stone verge she stood steamed like a cauldron in the air’s cruel chill. In contrast to most of her dreams, Gil felt the cold and smelled the sulfurous tang of the waters: the jewel-indigo of enormous depths, an almost perfect circle miles across, ringed by a toothed wall of high lava escarpments. Steam drifted across a verge of reddish-black basalt, smeared near the shores with garish lichens—purples, golds, virulent reds. A volcanic cone, she thought. And above her a second volcano reared, infinitely tall, crowned with ice. All things, she knew—she didn’t know how she knew—were ice-covered beyond the rim of those encircling cliffs.
Something crawled across her foot. It was another of the blubbery hat-shaped things Thoth had found. Like odd slugs with their calcined rosettes, they were creeping everywhere on the few yards of basalt beach that separated the sharp rise of the crater rims from the night-blue waters to her left.
Things like small scorpions, armed but legless, tails upcurled, floated above the steaming waters. The only sound was the groaning of the wind in the rocks.
“What do you see, Gil?”
She could not say.
An entrance squinted at her in the rock wall of the secondary cone, black, deadly; a tunnel into the mountain’s ice-locked heart. She could feel the cold on her face as she stepped into the rift, and knew that the volcano, huge and ancient, had a core of ice. In the rock chamber where the tunnel to the ice began there was a statue: cut of black basalt, a man sitting in a chair and gripping with one hand the collar of a dog. The bearded face was stylized, but even so it held an expression of profound sadness, and the sculptor had forgotten or chosen not to cut pupils in the staring eyes.
The anachronistic image seemed to float, detached, in a lake of white ground fog that surged utterly soundless around Gil’s knees.
Gil knew full well that this world filled with ice and silence had never been trodden by foot of man.
Ingold’s voice came to her, very far away now, asking something, she did not know what In any case, she could not have answered him. Even the memories of who she had once been seemed to have slipped beyond immediate recollection; whom she was seeking here, why she had come. Cold smoke flowed from a crack in the rock at the top of a flight of stone-cut stairs, and a smell of wet sweetness, sugary and attenuated. Gil followed, drawn by music she thought she had heard once before: music and the murmur of half-heard words.
They were speaking her name. How did they know her name?
At the top of the stair she looked down at her hands. She drew her dagger and slid the blade along her palms—the pain shocking even in the dream, but she could not help herself.
The voices grew clearer in her mind and she thought, My blood knows my name, and they are a part of the poison that’s in my blood.
They were telling her Ingold had caused her that pain, but even in her dream she knew that wasn’t true. As she walked deeper down the crack in the ice, the tension in her chest grew, the terrible anxiety tightening.
Looking down, she saw the dark bones of the rock, and through them, like horribly shining ropes, lines of tension and power in the ground, coursing into the earth.
Her blood dripped down onto the ice, hot against her cold fingers. Looking back over her shoulder, she thought she could see Ingold standing in the crevice that led to the surface of the ground, unable to cross its threshold. It was Ingold as he actually was—sometimes a glowing core of magic light, sometimes the arrogant, red-haired princeling who had caused the last of the great Gettlesand wars. Her lover. Her friend. The other half of her life. He held out his hand to her, but he could come no farther, and she could no longer hear his voice.
The singing filled her ears, and she followed.
The singers knelt in a world of lightless color, their magic shining into the ice of which the chamber was composed and reflecting back, allowing her to see. Glowing smoke surrounded them, rising from the fumarole in the chamber’s heart; not the smoke of volcanic heat, but the smoke of cold, for the chasm was filled with something that wasn’t lava, wasn’t water—something gelid, thick, clear as diamonds, something that moved in slow glutinous waves with the stirrings of that which dwelt within.
The singers were wrought of jewels. They were making magic, performing a rite over and over again in the flat space before the chamber’s door; a rite they had performed for eons, until the hard black stone of the floor had been worn into a pit, filled thick now with slunch. Every now and then something crawled out of the slunch: wriggling pale arthropods with masses of tentacles where their heads should have been or those flat, raylike, pincered flying things that she had seen chasing the hawk.
She couldn’t see the singers clearly, but she knew they were calling her name. The blood that ran down off her fingers dripped into the slunch and began to crawl in thin red snakes in their direction, glittering with jeweled diamond flecks. The jewel things raised their heads, blue-fire gazes surrounding her. There was a profound cold stirring in the slow-throbbing pool.
“Gil, come back.”
It would rise out of the lake, she thought. The ice-mages knew her name already. They would give her name to the thing in the pool, the thing that knew all names, and it would know her.
“Gil, come back now.”
She had a dreamy sense of wanting to scream, watching her blood wriggle toward the ice-priests, who extended long hands down to gather it in; watching little whitish spiderlike blobs wriggle up out of the slunch, watching the slow emergence of the thing in the pool.
“Gil!” She felt his hands on her arms, very strong and warm. “You have to come back now. Can you follow my voice? You have to come back.”
I have to go back. I have to go back and kill him.
She drew her knife again, her blood sticky all over its leather-wrapped hilt. She wondered if she killed herself in this dream whether she’d really be dead. Then they couldn’t make her hurt him.
Or maybe, she thought, they could.
“Can you follow my voice?” She heard it then, the buried urgency under the calm tones. He was scared.
Her mouth felt as though it had been shot up with lidocaine. She managed to say, “Yes.”
He led her out of the cavern by the hand. She felt his hand in hers but couldn’t see him—something that sometimes happened in dreams—and once they were out of the cavern, past the stone room with the statue of the Blind King and the dog, on the lichen-grown basalt beside the great, cold lake, she felt him spring upward, flying, drawing her by the hand to fly after him.
In her dreams she could fly, if he was holding her hand.
They drifted upward a long way, through black waters again, heading for the light. Looking down, she could see the deep blue crater of the vast lake, like an open eye: the monster volcano beside it, dead and full of ice. It seemed to her she could still smell that sugary odor, still hear the singing of the ice-mages behind her, and the poison in her blood whispered the echo of that song.
Then there was only dark.
“What is it?”
He was kneeling in front of her. She sat on a broken chunk of stone in an old stable in the valley of the Great Brown River, cold to her marrow. “What did I do to my hand?” She withdrew it from his grip to look. Though the heel of her left hand ached as if it had been cut—and cut deep—there was no wound on the flesh.
“Are you all right?”
Why was he scared? His hands were warm on her frozen ones and there was both concern and fear in the sea-blue brightness of his eyes.
She made herself nod, though she didn’t feel all right. She felt nauseated and exhausted, as if she had run for miles; her palm hurt like the dickens, and the unhealed bite on the side of her face throbbed as if the flesh had reopened and bled.
“I couldn’t reach you.” He pushed her hair away from the side of her face, quickly traced spell-marks over her cheek, her shoulder, her arm, warming the tracks of nerves and blood. “You slipped from me. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to bring you back in time.”
“In time?” She was still groping in her mind, wondering what the hell she’d say to him if he asked her where she had been all that time, what she’d seen. She couldn’t remember a thing, except that she’d been cold.
“We have to go. Now, at once, if we’re to reach safety. I don’t know—even now I can’t be sure—but I think there’s an ice storm on its way.”
“Here? This side of the mountains?” She added an expression she’d picked up from the Guards, almost as an afterthought, for in that first moment she was too shocked to feel fear. She should, she thought reasonably, have been panicking. “I take it there isn’t a cellar on the premises?”
“Not one deep enough. But we’re only eleven miles from the old gaenguo at Hyve.”
Only a few years ago Ingold couldn’t have predicted an ice storm more than ten minutes in advance. But sketchy as it was, Gil’s knowledge of air-pressure systems had aligned with one of the demonstrations in the record crystals, allowing Ingold to formulate—theoretically, at least—more advanced symptoms of warning.
Ice storms being a phenomenon of the far north and the high plains, his theory about the changes in the temperature, pressure, and smell of the air that heralded one remained untried, but lack of hard evidence about a subject had never stopped him from making eerily accurate long-shot guesses. In any case, Gil would have been willing to run eleven miles and hide in the deepest hole she could find on the old man’s bare word, even were an ice storm—a pocket Götterdämmerung and Fimbul Winter rolled into one—not involved.
“Is that deep enough?” Gil had been to the place a few years earlier. The old chamber of sacrifice had been used at various times as either a dungeon or a wine vault, depending on the political circumstances of the surrounding countryside.
“I think we’re going to find that out,” the wizard replied mildly, and pulled on his mittens. “Are you able to start loading the mule? I have to reach Rudy at the Keep, warn him to get everyone—and the livestock—inside. I’ll help you in a moment …”
“Ingold, I got my face cut up, not my arms broken.” She breathed hard, fighting a wave of dizziness as she stood, and wondered at the flash of some half-recalled vision of her own blood creeping in two trails through the slunch … Creeping where? She looked at her palm, surprised anew to find it whole. Why surprised?
“What about the Settlements? Can they flash a message that complicated down from the watchtowers?” She pulled the Cylinder from its hiding place in Ingold’s blankets, stowed it in her own jacket, pulled tight her sash and twisted her dark, crazy hair back from her face with a thong. “It’s not a standard message. I mean, they won’t have a code for it. There’s never been an ice storm this side of the mountains, has there?”
“One last year, north of Gae but still this side of the mountains.” He angled his scrying stone toward the fading embers of the fire.
Yoshabel, sensing that somebody was going to make work for her, bared her yellow teeth and snapped at Gil, who hammer-handed her hard in the side of the face.
“I don’t want any lip from you, cupcake. You’ll thank me for this.”
“You underestimate our girl, my dear.” Ingold tilted the crystal, the reflection darting over the scars around his eyes, the straggle of his knife-trimmed beard. “Even if she did know we were saving her life, she wouldn’t thank us in the least. The word-code is longer, but they should have time to reach the caves on the mountainside.”
This shouldn’t be happening. Gil slung a blanket and a saddle buck over Yoshabel’s back. An ice storm—that’s like getting hurricane warnings in Kansas City!
Only hurricanes didn’t kill everything aboveground.
Ingold was silent, bowed over his crystal, listening, Gil thought, to the turning of the air over the far-off mountains, to the pressure shifts, the unseen colors of the livid night. She worked quickly, thankful they always hobbled the mule when they made camp for the night. Balked of breaking Gil’s shin with her foot, Yoshabel settled for lashing her across the face with her tail and puffing her belly as big as she could with air.
“Don’t give me that.” Gil drove her knee hard into the animal’s gut. Even with Yoshabel’s usual complete noncooperation, years of practice had made Gil very quick at saddling up, and the terror of the coming catastrophe added to her speed. She expected Ingold to come help her, at least with the loading of the books; dizziness returned twice as she worked, swift waves of it that swiftly passed, leaving her holding on to the wall and gasping. The second time it happened, she looked past her shoulder and saw the old man still bent over the fire, the crystal an arrowhead of flame in his hand.
“Rudy, are you there?” His voice was hoarse with strain. “Are you there?”
Oh, cripes. The vision of the Dead Cell deep within the Keep flashed across her mind, where the wizards had been imprisoned by Bishop Govannin when she decided to make the Keep conform to her version of the Straight Faith. It was ridiculous to think anything of the sort could happen with Minalde ruling the Keep, but Gil knew the stresses pregnancy put on a woman’s health; knew, too, that in the event of a power struggle among the nobles or even the wealthier merchants, anything might happen.
Getting rid of the wizards at this point would be an utterly lunatic thing to do. As a historian, Gil had read accounts of greater lunacy than that, and she knew exactly how quickly power could shift.
She finished roping down the sacks, then crossed to the fire at a run. Loading had taken ten minutes. Even at a fast walk it would be more than two hours before they reached the eroded artificial hill where the Big House at Hyve had stood. God knew what they might meet on the way.
“Ingold, we have to go.”
He didn’t stir. His eyes were wide, staring into the crystal, willing Rudy to appear.
“Ingold, we have to get out of here. If you haven’t reached him by now you’re not going to.”
Flèches of refracted brightness chased across cheekbones and eye sockets as he raised his head. “They’ll die.” He spoke as if waked from a dream, half disoriented with shock. “I think the winds are going to strike somewhere between here and Sarda Pass. Even if they aren’t torn apart by the blast, the cold—”
“What’s preventing you from making contact?”
He shook his head, anguish in his face, the horror of a man whose power has made him responsible for everyone and everything around him. She saw all the dead whose deaths he had been unable to prevent: his parents, the people he had grown up with in the long-vanished principality of Gyrfire. His student Lohiro, and a woman he had once loved. All the blood-dabbled, shrunken corpses in the streets and courts and alleyways of Gae when the Dark arose.
Tir’s father, who had been Ingold’s student, patron, and friend.
“What about shape-shifting?” Gil forced her voice to a rationality she was far from feeling. “Can you do that? Into something like a peregrine? Something that’s fast and big enough to take the regular night cold for a couple hours? I think I can get to Hyve by myself.”
The haunted look in the blue eyes turned to alarm—at the thought of leaving her to make her own way through the hostile dark of the countryside, Gil was certain, rather than at the hideous risk involved in changing shape and flying under the descending hammer of the coming storm. He hesitated, knowing already he’d have to leave her to her own devices, have to do as she suggested …
“I’ll be all right.” She added, “It’s not like you have a choice.” Thirty percent of the mages who tried shape-shifting didn’t survive the first attempt, but she knew herself to be speaking the literal truth. In the absence of communication by scrying crystal, there was no other way for the warning to be given, for the lives of the herdkids, every man, woman, and child of the Settlements—the stock—to be saved.
She could see the calculation fleeting behind his eyes, gauging not the hideous stresses to body, mind, and the ability to use magic, but only how those stresses might best be circumvented. “No,” he said at length. “No.”
He rose in a single lithe move and made his way half at a run down the brick walk between the marble-faced stalls, shedding as he walked the heavy bearskin surcoat, the rough brown mantle, his face set like stone. Gil, at his heels, felt a sudden blowback of heat, as if she had stepped from the icy night into a summer afternoon: spells gathered around him for protection from the outer cold. Brown leaves in the corners of the broken carriage chamber whirled with the wind of warm air meeting cold, and as Ingold pulled off his boots, laid down his sword belt with a soft ringing of metalwork on brick, fog billowed around him, frailly lit from within by the blue galaxy of magelight above his head.
He slammed open the crazy stable doors, stepped through into the night, naked and shrouded with swirling cloud. Gil stepped into that core of heat and smoky brilliance, clasped him hard to her: “Watch out,” she whispered.
“I always do, my dear.” His long white hair lifted in the stirring of the magical warmth, his white beard surprisingly soft against her face, while the muscles of his bare arms were like rock. “Guard the Cylinder,” he said. In the chaos of dark and mist, he seemed little more than a voice, strong arms, eyes that could have been summer stars. An old scar like a time-dimmed furrow marked the point of his shoulder; there was a bump where his collarbone had been broken long ago.
“If I don’t return, send for Thoth or Kta or one of the powerful mages, for at all costs we must find out what it is and what it does. My child—”
Their lips met, the passion seldom spoken between them like unexpected flame: the fierce, cold, scholarly woman and the man who feared loving as he feared neither death nor foe.
She stepped back from him, like stepping through a door into the cold again. Ghostly streams of vapor whirlpooled around him as he lifted his arms and spoke in his great deep broken voice the True Names of the stars. Though she had heard the mages speak of it, Gil had never seen shape-changing; because of its terrible dangers, it was not anything she had ever thought she would see.
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