Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

And Jesus Christ, they're in the Keep!

He had to get out of this. Had to get word back to Minalde, somehow, to sweep the Keep and sweep it now!

But even if there had been another mage at the Keep he could communicate with, he'd dropped his scrying stone during the gaboogoo's first attack. He spared a quick stayput spell for it-problematical at this distance, but scrying crystals were good about that kind of thing.

Ingold's words about the Dark knowing that magic was humankind's only defense came back. Maybe these guys knew it, too. Who were they? And what the hell did they want?

Dead wizards. Rudy looked down at the bruise on his leg again. That part of the agenda was pretty unambiguous. And as the wind numbed his fingers, his ears, and his feet, he had the increasing feeling they were going to get what they were after. Dark wrapped itself over the slopes. Rudy crouched, trembling, against a boulder, tucking his hands into his armpits to warm them. To his left a U-shaped canyon curved between rocky walls, scattered with boulders and dotted with sheets of water, runoff of the glacier that blocked the way at the farther end. To his right, downslope, he could see all four of his pursuers now, shining dimly as the slunch that blanketed the lower slopes seemed to shine. Out across the falling black carpet of trees he could make out the Great Brown River where the Arrow flowed into it, dull snakes of orange-gold under the flammeous moon. Five little spots of jonquil light showed him where the Settlements lay among the trees. Black clouds were moving in overhead, and his breath, paining his lungs, poured from his lips in streams.

He'd been on the move since slightly after noon, with nothing to eat or drink. A fire-spell, he thought-not to warm himself, but to fight. Fire or lightning.

He wondered if others would come, conjured a strange vision of them emerging like cheap plastic toys from a mammoth Cracker Jack box concealed somewhere in the trees.

"A big surprise in every pack. " But he couldn't go farther. He knew that.

When he looked again, there were only three gaboogoo. Rudy glanced automatically over his shoulder, half dreading the sight of the thing coming at him from up the glacier canyon. But there was nothing visible to his mageborn sight, and when he looked back, there was only one. While he watched, it, too, faded away into the night. Oh, come on, you expect me to believe that one? Rudy shifted his weight uncomfortably. Why don't you just point down and say, "Oh, look, your shoe is untied?"

His hands were so cold now he could barely grip his staff. His legs were numb and aching, his chest burned, and he had to fight the growing urge to say screw it and to crawl under the rocks to sleep.

Eyes flashed in the darkness. Rudy sprang to his feet, staggering with cramp. He'd been nearly dozing. Eyes?

It was a dooic.

Even at this distance, and in the piercing cold, he could smell it, if he reached out only a little with his senses-the rank pong of an omnivore. It was an old male, the brown hair of its arms, back, and chest graying to frost, its fanged muzzle nearly white.

It was small, probably born wild, though there were dooic in the river bands who'd been born in captivity and trained to simple tasks like cutting sugarcane and digging

in the mines, who'd escaped with the coming of the Dark.

This one was standing on its short, bandy hind legs, and through the darkness Rudy could swear that in spite of his spells of concealment-which he had never relinquished throughout the day-it was looking at him.

Can't be, he thought, puzzled and scared. Unless those things have somehow... What? Robbed me of power? That couldn't happen... Could it? He didn't know.

But the dooic definitely saw him. It lumbered a few strides back toward the dark wall of the trees, then turned again, raising its face toward him. Retreated again and turned...

Retreated and turned. Rudy could see the glint of its tusks in the dimness, smell the stink of it, and he wondered if the creature associated him in its mind with those jerks in the settlement who had tried to shoot that poor hinny yesterday, or if it was merely hungry.

He listened and scanned the edge of the woods, but could neither see nor smell any other dooic near. They hunted in bands and would bring down and slaughter a human being if they could, but Rudy knew that even without magic he could probably deal with a single attack.

Man, I don't need this, he thought tiredly, shifting his grip along the haft of his staff. See me tomorrow, pal, I've had a lousy day.

With a grunt, the dooic dropped to all fours. A moment later it settled to its knees and did something with its hand above a small pool of meltwater caught in the hollow of the rock.

And Rudy felt, strangely, the swift glimmer of something that almost seemed to be magic, like a drift of anomalous scent in the air. MAGIC???

The old dooic moved away again, using its long forearms for speed, the whitish flesh beneath its fur a mottled blur as it reached the edge of the trees. It turned, staring upslope at him again, waiting.

Cautiously, ready for anything, Rudy came forward. Where the dooic had knelt by the meltwater, Rudy bent down-one eye still on the trees-and looked into the water. In it he could see the pallid, fungoid shapes of the gaboogoo, as if in a scrying stone, moving away through the thick darkness of the woods.

"Jesus H. Christ on a bicycle." Clouds overhead covered the moon, but as a wizard Rudy could see clearly, and the tiny pool had definitely been ensorceled to show the gaboogoo departing.

Rudy half recognized the woods through which they passed, downslope and to the north in the hardwoods of the lower forest, toward the Arrow River gorge. By the way they moved, he could tell they were following something, tracking something other than himself.

Movement at the edge of the woods made him swing around, ready for a fight, and he saw that a second dooic had joined the first, a female by the flat pale dugs protruding through the body hair, with an infant clinging to her belly and another on her back. Male and hinny turned at once, ran a few steps back into the trees, then turned again, waiting for him. This time Rudy could almost see the flickering of magic-not human magic, but magic of some sort-that trailed from the old male's fingers as it beckoned him impatiently to follow.

Cast from my fist, shining in the sky, Brown wings lift and carry you from me. With earthbound hooves I trace the road you fly...

"Gil?" Gentle and uninsistent, the word seemed to come, not from Ingold, but from some darkness in her mind, the thought taking shape in the abyss of a bottomless well. Holding to the poem as to a lifeline in terrifying darkness, Gil managed to nod, to let him know that she heard, but she could not speak.

In a sense, she was still aware of the broken stone walls of an old stable around them-the house to which it had been attached consisted these days of a couple of charred walls overgrown with birch saplings-the rusted black scrollwork of the manger near her head. The smoke of the fire Ingold had built in a corner stung her eyes; she heard the far-off howl of wolves and the soft, restless blowing of Yoshabel's breath. But it was as if all those images, that awareness, came to her down a cable from the bright surface of water through which she was slowly sinking, swimming deeper and deeper toward a lightless and terrible depth.

As Ingold's spells drew her farther into the dark, her mind gyred back to images of the UCLA campus in Westwood, to the words of poems. Donne, Villon, Minalde's favorites Kaalis and Seredne, whom she, too, had come to love. Anything to avoid the fear that she sensed lay at the foundation of her dreams.