Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

She remembered Sherry sitting across from her at the Bicycle Shop Cafe 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 swordmasters, 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.

Flickering 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 "No!" 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 whiteknuckled 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.