Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

Thoth struck out with the point of his staff, impaling something in the slunch at his feet. He reversed the staff, holding the thing where he could see it stuck on the iron point: like a wet hat made of pinkish rubber, covered with hard rosettes like scabbed sores.

From his belt he took his dagger, scabbard and all, and with the scabbard tip reached to touch one of the rosettes. At that, all of them dilated open at once, like filthy little mouths, and spat fluid at him, gobbets of silvery diamonds that left weals on his flesh as if he had been burned with acid.

Thoth dropped staff and creature alike with a silent cry of pain and disgust. Overhead, dark shapes skated across the white sky, the flabby hovercraft thing pursuing a red-tailed hawk with silent, murderous speed. While she watched, it seized it with its pincers and hurled it in a cloud of bloody feathers to the earth. That isn't another planet. That is Gettlesand.

She smelled something cold and thin, as if someone who had neither nose nor taste buds were trying to counterfeit the scent of watermelon. Somewhere she thought she heard a trail of music, like a flute being played far beneath the earth.

The children had several names for Mr. Creepy-in-the-Woods. They, like Tir, called him a gaboogoo, but they used the term interchangeably with goblin and fairy. "They're too ugly for fairies, stupid," Lirta Graw declared, at which one of the smaller kids, a boy named Reppitep, started to cry. Reppitep had seen one, on the high wooded slopes above the fields, just within the line where the trees grew thick. He'd been gathering kindling.

"He's probably lying," Lirta said, and tossed her red head. "Anyway, his mother's a whore. I wouldn't be scared of no stupid gaboogoo. And Daddy says there's no such thing."

"Your daddy probably said that about the Dark Ones," Rudy said. Lirta's mother herded all the children away, glancing back furtively at him over her shoulder. His sleep that night, in a corner of the hall on a straw pallet, like most of the men of the household, was filled with imageless dreams of breathless, weighted anger, a pressure that seemed to clog the very ether.

Sometimes he thought he saw the plains and deserts of Gettlesand, felt the arid sunlight and smelled dust and stone and buffalo grass on the slopes of its jutting,

scrub- covered black mountains.

At other times he dreamed of California, as he hadn't for years. Dreamed of lying in his bed in his mother's crummy apartment in Roubidoux, feeling the whole building shake as the big trucks went by on the broken pavement of Arlington Avenue outside. Something was going on, something that troubled him deeply. He didn't know what. At dawn he went out to have another look at Fargin Graw's slunch. Graw went with him, grousing that members of the River Settlements Council-which he had resigned in annoyance when they wouldn't accept his leadership-were antiquated holdovers of a system designed to keep down "true men" like himself, as though the elderly Lord Gremmedge, who had pioneered Carpont Settlement five miles farther downriver, were an impostor of some kind.

Rudy had heard the same at the Keep, with variations. Technically, everyone at the Keep held their lands through Minalde, just as, technically, they were her guests in a building that belonged to Tir. But men of wealth like Varkis Hogshearer and Enas Barrelstave spoke of cutting back the power of the queen and the little king, and giving the Keep and its lands outright to those who held them-one of whom was, coincidentally enough, Enas Barrelstave himself.

There was also a good deal of feeling against the nobles, like Lord Ankres and Lord Sketh, and the lesser bannerlords, some of whom had arrived with more food than the poor of Gae and had parlayed that into positions of considerable power, though Rudy had noticed there was less of such talk when bandits or Raiders threatened the Keep. Most of the great Houses had never lost their ancient traditions of combat, and even ancients like Lord Gremmedge proved to be an asset on those few occasions when it came down to a question of defending the Vale.

For the most part, the lords looked down on men like Graw, on Enas Barrelstave-who had built up a considerable landholding of his own, although he was still the head of the Tubmaker's Guild-and on Varkis Hogshearer-and no wonder, in the latter case, thought Rudy dourly.

In addition to being the Keep moneylender, earlier that spring Hogshearer had somehow gotten word that the only trader from the South to come north in six months was a few days off from the Vale.

He'd ridden down to meet the merchant and had purchased his entire stock of needles, buttons, glass, seed, plowshares, and cloth, which he was currently selling for four and five times what the southern merchants generally asked. No other trader had appeared since, though Rudy scried the roads for them daily. As Rudy expected, the slunch in Graw's fields was pretty much like the slunch everywhere else. It was almost unheard of for slunch to spread that fast, and he suspected that the patch had been there-small but certainly not unnoticeable-when Graw planted the seed.

Nonetheless, he checked the place thoroughly, on the chance that a slight variation would show him something he and Ingold had missed. It didn't, however.

Slunch was slunch. It seemed to be vegetable, but had no seed pods or leaves or stems, and Rudy wasn't sure about the function of the hairlike structures that held its blubbery underground portions to the soil. There was no visible reason for the vegetation all around the slunch to die, but it did.

Worms lived in it: huge, sluggish, and, Rudy discovered, weirdly aggressive, lunging at him and snapping with round, reddish, maggotlike mouths. "Yuckers," he muttered, stepping back from not-very-efficient attack and flicking the thing several yards away with his staff. "I'll have to trap one of these buggers, before I start for home." A regular earthworm, swollen and made aggressive by eating the slunch? Or some species he'd never heard of or that had never heretofore made it this far south?

Ingold would know. Ingold's scholarship, concerning both old magical lore and natural history, was awesome-there were times when Rudy despaired of ever living up to his teacher.

But when he tried to contact Ingold, after Graw finally left him alone around noon, he could see nothing in his crystal.

He shifted the angle to the pale sunlight that fell through the blossoms of the apple tree under which he sat, a thin little slip of a thing in an orchard surrounded by a palisade that would have discouraged a panzer tank division; let his mind dip into a half- meditative trance, drifting and reaching out. They'd be on the road, he thought, but there was a good chance they'd have stopped for a nooning. Ingold...

But there was nothing. Only the same deep, angry pulling sensation, the feeling of weight, and heat, and pressure. And underneath that, the profound dread, as if he stood in the presence of some kind of magic that he could not understand.

"C'mon, man," Rudy whispered. "Don't do this to me." He cleared his mind, reordering his thoughts. Thoth of Gettlesand: he might have an answer, might indeed know what was going wrong with communications. Might know what that nameless feeling was, that haunting fear.

When no image came, he called again on the names of every single one of the Gettlesand mages, as he had last night. Failing them, he summoned the image of Minalde, whom he saw immediately, a small bright shape in the crystal, standing by the wheat fields in her coat of colored silks, arguing patiently with Enas Barrelstave about the placement of boundary hurdles.

Worried now, he tried again to reach Ingold.

"Dammit." He slipped the crystal back into its leather pouch and returned it to the pocket of his vest. The day was mild, warmer than those preceding it and certainly warmer here in the bottomlands than in the high Vale of Renweth. Maybe summer was finally getting its act together and coming in.