Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

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.

"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.