Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

"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 gets 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 wolftalk, 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.