Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

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 fence row, 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.

I guess 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.

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.