Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

About goddamn time. He didn't think the Keep could stand another winter like the last one.

Clear as a little steel bell on the still air, he heard Lirta Graw's voice, bossing someone about. Yep, there she was by the open gate of the log stockade, with a pack of the settlement kids.

In a couple of years she'd be as obnoxious as Varkis Hogshearer's daughter, Scala, an overbearing, sneaky adolescent who spied and, Rudy suspected, stole.

He wondered if there were some kind of karmic law of averages that required the presence of one of those in every group of thirty or more kids. There'd certainly been one in his high school.

He watched them from where he sat in his miniature fortress of sharpened stakes and apple trees, listened to their voices, as he watched and listened to the herdkids at the Keep and the children who tagged at their mothers' skirts by the stream when they did laundry.

Partly this was simply because he liked kids, but partly-and increasingly so in the last year or two, because, like Ingold, he was watching for someone.

Waiting for someone to show up.

"The Dark Ones knew that magic was humankind's only defense against them," Ingold had said to him one evening when he and Rudy had gone out to locate Tir during the first flush of the boy's livestock supervision phase.

The Keep herdkids, under the command of a skinny, towheaded boy named Tad, had been bringing in the cattle from the upper pastures: Rudy had known Tir should be safe enough with the older children, but the boy was then only four, after all.

"They attacked the City of Wizards, destroying nearly all its inhabitants; they knew me well enough to come after me." The old man frowned, leaning on his staff-a mild, unassuming, and slightly shabby old maverick, reminding Rudy of any number of overage truckers or bar-fighters he'd known in his Southern California days. "And in the past five years the fear has been growing on me that the Dark Ones-among all the hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children that they killed sought out also the children born with the talent for wizardry. The next generation of wizards."

Rudy said, "Oh, Christ.'' It made sense.

Talent or propensity for Magic usually manifested in very small children, Ingold had told him-five and younger-and then seemed to go underground until puberty. In the past five years, Ingold had kept a close eye on the children coming of age. Not one had shown the slightest bent toward magic. Tad, eldest of the herdkids-had elected himself a kind of lab assistant to Ingold in the wizard's chemical and mechanical endeavors, but had no apparent thaumaturgical gift. He just loved gadgets, spending all his free time in helping them adjust the mirrors that amplified the witchlight in the hydroponics crypts. So far, there had been no one. Rudy wondered how long it would be.

The children straggled off toward the thin coppices of the bottomlands, carrying kindling sacks. They'd have to collect more wood in the Settlements, he thought. Even though the nights here were less chill than in the Vale, the sprawling stone villa didn't hold heat the way the Keep did. His eye followed them, Lirta Graw-sackless, as befitted the Boss's Daughter striding ahead, and the little fair-haired child Reppitep in the rear, struggling to keep up.

As they disappeared into the cloudy green of hemlock and maples along the Arrow, Rudy turned his eyes back toward the slopes behind him; the rising glacis strewn with boulders and threaded with silvery streams, and above that the dense viridian gloom of the high forest.

Where the trees grew thick, the children had said. That was where several of them reported they'd seen Mr. Creepy-in-the-Woods.

It was an hour's steady climb to the edge of the trees. As he picked his way through fern and fox-grape up the rust- stained rocks of the streambed, Rudy wrapped himself in progressively thicker veils of illusion.

He'd learned the art of remaining unseen from Ingold, whom he nicknamed-not without reason-the Invisible Man. Three years ago the first bands of White Raiders had made their appearance in the valley of the Great Brown River, tracking the spoor of elk and mammoth driven by cold from the high northern plain, and one still sometimes found their Holy Circles on deserted uplands. The thought of being the messenger elected to carry a letter written in pain to the obscure Ancestors of the tribes made Rudy queasy.

Moose and glacier elk raised their heads from grazing to regard him mildly as he passed, under the magically engineered impression that he was some harmless cousin of the deer tribe. Farther up the slopes, where the erratics left by the last glaciation poked through a tangled chaparral of brush, fern, and vines, a saber-tooth sunning itself on a slab of rock rolled over and looked at him, and Rudy hastily morphed the spell into

I'm a saber-tooth, too-but smaller and milder and definitely beta to your alpha, sir. The huge, sinewy beast blinked and returned to its nap, surprisingly difficult to see against the splotchy gray-gold stone.

Wind breathed from the high peaks, carrying on it the glacier's cold. Rudy shivered. As carefully as any hunter, he worked the line of trees above the waste and pasture.

Among the short grasses and weeds, he found mostly the tracks that he expected to find: half a dozen different sorts of deer, rabbits and coons, porcupines and weasels, voles and wolves.

On the bark of a red fir he saw the scratchings of a cave-bear, higher than his head. Hidden carefully under the ferns of the denser woods were the droppings of a band of dooic, and Rudy wondered momentarily whether that poor hinny had made it safely back to her pals.

Once or twice he came upon tracks that made him pause, puzzled. Rabbit spoor that hinted of movement no rabbit would have made-no rabbit in its right senses, anyway. Wolverine pugs from the biggest, weirdest damn wolverine he'd never hope to run across.

But nothing that would qualify as Mr. Creepy-in-the-Woods. The sun curved toward the harsh white head of the Hammerking, barely visible above the Rampart Range 's broken-topped wall. A redstart called, Rudy identifying the almost conversational warble; farther down the long slope of rock a lark answered from the olive velvet of the pasture.

Deep silence filled the earth, save for the eternal roaring of the wind in the pines. The sound seemed to wash away Fargin Graw's grating voice and the petty small-town politicking of the Keep.

Rudy felt himself relaxing slowly, as he did when he went on his solitary rambles in the Renweth Vale in quest of herbs or minerals or just information about what the edges of the woods looked like on any particular day. He was alive. He was a wizard. Minalde loved him. What else mattered? He came clear of the trees and settled himself with his back to a boulder at the top of a long slope of blackish rock peeled and scrubbed by the passage of long-ago ice. Due back any day, he thought, without any real sense of that event's imminence. Below him, at the distant foot of the slope, the squalid congeries of villa and stockade, outbuildings and byres, lay surrounded by moving figures in the dull browns and greens of homespun, going about their daily tasks.

Still farther down the silver-riffled sepia line of the Arrow, other stockades could be made out among the trees: square log towers and tall, spindly looking watch-spires like masts. The squat stone donjon of Wormswell.

From up here he could see the wheat fields and the stockaded orchard of Carpont, the next settlement over; a small group of half-naked men and women were clearing a drainage ditch.

Not bad. For people whose civilization had collapsed out from under them in the wholesale slaughter of most of the world's population by an incomprehensible force of monstrosities not terribly long ago, they'd recovered pretty quickly. Not that they had a choice, he reflected, closing his eyes, the sun comforting on his lids. Who does have a choice? You recover and get a place to keep the rain off you, you plant some food, you get over the pain, or you die.