Mother of Winter (34 page)

Niniak held out a second potsherd. “He said give you this three days from now, if he wasn’t back.”

Gil went cold to her heart.

Forgive me. It is all that I can ask. Please, please understand
.

They hear with your ears. They see with your eyes. This I guessed, leaving the Keep—but I also guessed that you would follow, against your own will, did I not bring you. It has been death in my heart daily, hourly, to do this to you
.

Without you at my side I stand some chance of reaching the cavern of the ice-mages before they realize I am on the mountain and rally the gaboogoos, the dooic, the mountain apes who because of the slunch are theirs to command—maybe even the armies of the warlords, for I cannot know now how far their power has reached. They knew of me through the minds of the Dark, in their dreaming, even as the Dark knew of them. As the Dark took my mind …

Gil turned the sherd over; the writing was worse on the back.

 … so the ice-mages saw. They know I am a danger, insofar as any can be. This may be my only chance
.

As if she heard their voices in the distance, she felt the outcry of them, realizing they had been circumvented, tricked—realizing he was on his way.

She felt them call out, drawing everything they could to them—gaboogoos, cave-apes, mutants. Readying themselves to crush him.

No
, she thought, her heart screaming as she felt that frantic, furious call.
NO!

I love you, Gil. If I have not returned by this time, I will not return. I bless you, I free you. I only regret—and I regret with all my heart—that I cannot see you safe again to the Keep. But I cannot be two men. I fear that with you, I have not even been one
.

Please understand, as a warrior understands. Please do not despise me for what I had to do
.

If I have not returned, it is because I met my death at the hands of the ice-mages; and I met it with your name on my lips
.

With all that is in me
—Inglorion

Cold jerked Rudy awake. Cold and pain, an overwhelming wrenching breathlessness. Then a sense of shock that he knew instantly was secondhand but was clear as a scream in his mind.
Ingold!
he thought, staring into the blackness of his cell, knowing immediately the source.
Ingold …!

The feeling didn’t fade, but grew. Dizziness, the swimming dots of fire that merged into a single, terrible light; the numbing of his left arm; the hammerblow of pain over his heart.

Ingold!

Rudy’s mind fumbled, disoriented, with his sense of time. He’d fallen asleep in a tangle of old books
ma
Gil’s notes after more vain hours of searching for the answers he knew had to be somewhere: to time and stasis, to the power that had come to him at call, the power he had never felt before. He wasn’t as good as Ingold yet at knowing immediately where the stars were at any moment of the day or night, but reaching out with his senses, he heard nothing in the watchroom of the Guards but the desultory click of the single worn set of pitnak tiles, and from their barracks only the soft draw of sleepers’ breath.

The cold, the pain, the breathlessness, were already pouring away like smoke into a hole in darkness. Rudy fumbled with trembling hands under his pillow for his crystal, body aching from the aftershock.
Christ, don’t do this to me, man!
The witchlight he summoned flared in the crystal’s heart.
Answer me! Tell me it ain’t so …

Nothing. The thick grayness of the ice-mages’ malice seemed to choke the air.

God damn it, God damn it, answer me!

He lowered his hands, the witchlight fading.
No. No
.

Don’t make me be the only wizard in this godforsaken world! Don’t make me have to go after the ice-mages myself
.

I’m not any good at this, dammit!

Pain. Breathlessness. Dizziness. Pain.

He couldn’t sort them easily in his mind, but he knew it was Ingold’s pain he’d felt. Knew it as surely as if he’d heard the old man’s voice.

It’s three o’clock in the Christly morning!
Rudy wanted to scream.
What the hell are you doing fighting monsters at three in the morning?

If Ingold were no longer alive, thought Rudy, he’d be able to see Gil even if she were with him …

But even that he could not do.

He can’t be dead
, he thought, whispering it to himself like a mantra, willing it to be true.
He can’t be dead
. It was an endless time until dawn.

Accompanied by Janus, Melantrys, and the Icefalcon, he left the Keep as soon as the Doors were opened, climbed to the high ground near the orchards, where the slunch was less, and drew a power-circle, Summoning to himself every scrap and whisper of magic to be had from the earth, from the streams, from the dawn-fading stars.

But whether Ingold was dead and Gil in some place where the influence of the ice-mages lay too thick to pierce, or whether Ingold lived and Gil were with him, he could get no shadow of either of them in his scrying stone’s heart. Head aching from the exertion, he tried to contact Thoth, but all that appeared in the amethyst’s facets were dim images of flabby, death-colored fungoid parodies of human and animal life crawling out of a wasteland of slunch to attack the patched, rambling pile of the Black Rock Keep.

Even that view was distant. He thought he could see men with weapons around the walls of black and gray stone, and brushwood stacked before the battered iron doors and along the north wall where the wizards had their little beehive hermitages,
but he could not be sure. Cold wind blew down on his back, and behind him he heard a swift scuffle, a slithering and then the heavy chunk, like someone hitting a watermelon with an ax. Blood-smell stung his nostrils as he turned.

“Better get back.” The Icefalcon struck his ax into the earth to clean it. Whatever had come out of the slunch-decayed woods to attack lay in bleeding pieces at his feet. “There’s more on the way. See anything?”

Rudy shook his head despairingly. Gaunt and tired, Janus and Melantrys were closing around them. At the foot of the slope the woods were thick with slunch, hanging in dirty mats and clumps from the branches of the dying trees. Something was moving deep in the infected glades, and Rudy shoved the crystal into the pocket of his vest and headed for the Keep. Fast.

“If Gil’s with the old boy, he can’t be too bad off,” Janus pointed out.

As they sprang up the shallow black steps of the Keep, Janus turned back to scan the woods, shifting his sword in his bandaged hand; the wound he’d taken three weeks ago from a mutated dire wolf hadn’t even begun to heal. This wasn’t like the rip in Gil’s face, attributable to some gaboogoo venom. Nobody’s wounds were healing these days.

The dark line of hemlocks that fringed the high woods shuddered suddenly, shook and parted. Rudy gasped, “Mother pus-bucket!” and Janus only said, “Pox rot it, but it; had to happen sooner or later. Get inside. We’ll take care of it.” Melantrys was already yelling for the rest of the Guards.

The thing plowing down the slope, head lolling and limbs and pseudolimbs churning the white slunch to scraps and powder, was a mutated mammoth.

Scala Hogshearer was in the workroom when Rudy got there. The Guards’ watchroom was a flurry of activity as he passed through it, men and women catching up weapons, heading fast for the door. He saw the girl’s shadow moving back and forth in the dim lamplight that was the chamber’s
only illumination, heard her furious sobbing in the corridor, and at the sound, his own anger rose in him, a poisonous, breathtaking heat.

He stopped in the doorway, fighting to keep calm.

She’d ripped to pieces the parchment on which he’d been remaking the
Black Book of Lists’
, had emptied boxes, scattered and broken the ivory rune sticks, smashed the porcelain scrying bowl and ground its pieces to dust under her wooden heels. The cupboard in which he locked all the truly precious stuff bore signs of ferocious battering, the hinges and lock surrounded by white, ripped wood where she’d tried to hack them free of the doors.

There was blood under her fingernails from the effort. She was clinging to the edge of the table as if on the verge of being sick, her dark, dirty hair hanging lank around a face bloated with tears.

“I can’t do magic!” she screamed at him when he finally stepped through the door. She picked up his astrolabe—or what was left of it—and smashed it again and again into the surface of the table, the edge of the dial leaving huge scars in the wood. “I can’t do magic anymore! I tried! I tried!”

She flung the metal circle into the corner and hurled herself at Rudy, pounding his chest with her fists as he grabbed her wrists and held her off. Even as heavy as she’d gotten recently, she was less strong than he expected.

“Scala, you can,” he said gently, a little surprised at his own patience. Part of him wanted to smash the spoiled little bitch’s head up against the wall, but that wasn’t the part in control.
Son of a gun
, he thought detachedly, in the back of his mind. I
must be growing up …

“Whoa,” he said, as she began to hack at his shins. “Whoa, whoa, whoa … Take it easy, kiddo.”

Her anger wasn’t personal. And underneath it, underneath the fear of losing the attention of important people like Lady Sketh, was the horror of a loss that only he, of all those in the Keep, could comprehend.

“You’re not teaching me right!” Her voice was a hysterical
wail. “You’re not teaching me what I need to know! Daddy says you have to! Daddy says he’ll make you sorry if you don’t! Daddy says—”

“Do you believe I’m not teaching you?”

“I can’t do it!” She pulled against him, the unexpected reversal breaking his grip. She staggered back against the edge of the table, slapping at him and missing. Her face was a pulp of tears and snot, looking almost black in the dim, wavery glow of the lamps. “I tried! I tried all morning! I’ve done all your stupid exercises and your stupid meditation and everything you said and I can’t do magic at all! I used to! I used to and now I can’t!”

She blundered past him, shoving him out of her way. He heard her smacking into the walls of the corridor as she fled, sobbing, into the dark.

Rudy made a step to go after her, then gave it up. “Swell,” he sighed. “So now I get a visit from Daddy. Just what I needed to top off the day. How lucky can a guy be?”

He rubbed his face, the ache of sleeplessness in his bones.
Ingold
, he thought. There had to be some way of learning what had happened to him. Of learning if he were still alive. He stopped to gather the torn parchments, the broken pieces of the ivory sticks. At least she hadn’t burned the parchments this time.

He paused, the parchment in his hand.

Anger?
he wondered.
Or something else? The voices of the ice-mages whispering in her mind?

Are you saying my girl isn’t a wizard?

His mind replayed the scene. Scala falling. The gaboogoos bounding past her, tripping over her, while she clutched her hair and screamed.

They only attack the mageborn
, Thoth had said.

“Rudy? Master Wizard?”

Tir was standing in the doorway.

He still wore his cool formality, the stiff pose of distance, hands folded over his belt knot. Rudy straightened up, brightened the witchlight that flickered on the wall spikes, and inclined his head.
This will pass
, he told himself, to quiet the
hurt in his heart at the boy’s wary aloofness.
Whether he ever ceases to blame you for the death of his friends, this coldness will one day pass
.

“What can I do for you, Tir?” He brought up a chair—by the look of it, the one Scala had used to pound on the cupboard doors. Tir gazed around him at the carnage but didn’t comment. He’d probably passed Scala in the hall.

“Rudy, there’s people disappearing.” He climbed up into the chair and sat with feet dangling. Like nearly everyone else in the Keep, he’d lost a lot of flesh, and in the frame of his black hair, his face seemed all eyes.

“Disappearing?” His fears for Ingold—his terror that he’d be the one, now, who had to deal with the ice-mages—vanished before the memory of the locked doors on the fifth level, the stink of the newly deserted rooms.

The child licked his lips, gathering his thoughts. “I didn’t think … You know how sometimes you don’t see somebody for a couple days, like they’re doing something for their mamas or something?” His voice was soft and scared. “But I got Linnet to make me a calendar, and I marked it, every day, who I saw and who I didn’t.”

He’s too young for this
, Rudy thought, looking into the lupine darkness of those eyes.
Too young to have to deal with this
.

“There’s people disappearing, Rudy. They really are. Brikky Gatson, and Noop Farrier, and Noop’s papa and his papa’s brother Yent and Melleka Biggar, and Rose White and both her brothers and their mama, too. Those were all the ones I started with. I hadn’t seen them and I’ve been keeping marks for three weeks, Rudy. Old Man Wicket and Rab Brown and a couple of others, they stopped coming around, too. Only I didn’t want anybody to know I’ve been asking about how long it’s been.”

“Fifth level north,” Rudy said softly. “All of them except the Farriers, and they’re fourth level north, right under the Biggars.”

“And there’s a stairway that leads from the Biggars’ warren down to there. They go up and down all the time. It
can’t be plague because you’re a Healer,” the boy went on. “The other Healers would have told you, or Mama. And nobody called the Guards or the Hunters to go look for them in the woods, and nobody talked to Mama about them being lost or asked you to find them with your crystal, did they?”

“No,” Rudy said softly. “Nobody asked.” He fished out his crystal, though he knew he wouldn’t be able to see anything. The slunch within the Keep, magnified and concentrated by the Keep’s walls, held inside the malice of the ice-mages. In any case it was sometimes difficult to see gaboogoos by crystal.