Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

He noted how the males were sitting, arms not wrapped around their knees, but crooked at the sides, hands palms down upon the drawn-up knees. He hunkered himself carefully into the same position.

They'd have shut the gates at the settlement hours ago. Whatever was going on up here, it would be an interesting night, provided they didn't expect him to share the dead rabbits and voles a couple of them had pulled out from behind rocks. He was starving, but even from here he could tell supper had passed its sell-by date quite some time ago.

Everyone in the cave seemed to be listening, tense and on edge; the males across the doorway jumped at sounds, gestured, and signed to one another. At one point one of them went into the passageway, clearly to check and see if George was on his way back.

The gaboogoos? Rudy wondered. Had the old dooic gone to chase them off again? And if so, how?

More logs were heaped on the fire. The cave grew uncomfortably warm and phenomenally odiferous. Huge shadows humped and jittered over the low walls as the dooic moved about in the ruddy light; now and then a couple would sit down and begin to groom each other, but it never lasted long. Whatever was happening, it was bothering the whole group.

In time the old one returned, carrying something in his enormous hands, and Rudy thought, Did Mom send him to the local SuperGrocery for something fresh for dinner?

The bird the old dooic was carrying was not only fresh, but alive. It stirred, trying to shift bloody feathers and bating feebly with its head. As George brought it near, Rudy saw the hard gold eye, the hooked beak of a peregrine falcon, and thought, Nice rock-throwing if you could bring one of those down, pal!

Or had something else wounded it, leaving it bleeding on the rocks below the caves? In that case, how had the old dooic located it in the dark? George held it carefully, hands wrapped gently around the bloody wings, rocking a little and muttering. The bird was either still stunned by whatever had brought it down or calmed by the dooic's spells. It did not fight, but glared around with feral topaz eyes in the near-dark. What was a peregrine doing flying after nightfall, anyway? Silence deepened in the cave.

Then George handed the peregrine to Mom and hunkered close to the fire. A moment later Rudy felt the magic of a Summoning of some kind-heat?

It radiated from the close-curled, gray-furred body as if old George had turned himself into a stove. Coupled with the warmth of the fire, it was nearly unbearable, but the entire band crowded close around. Rosie the hinny scurried over to Rudy and caught his hand, trying to draw him toward the group. He followed, though the smell of the steaming group was Olympian.

This better be good.

Rudy turned, halfway to the group, at the sudden shriek of wind in the passageway. Rosie dragged on his hand, fear in her eyes-the wind flung back Rudy's long hair, the cold striking hard and sudden and sharp enough to stab his sinuses like a knife. The wind's voice rose, screaming in the turnings of the rock, as if a cyclone, a hurricane, the end of the world were taking place outside.

The real cold came. And Rudy knew.

Oh Christ, it's an ice storm.

He stood numb as Rosie plunged back into the safe warmth of her family. For a moment Rudy felt only astonishment at the coming of such a phenomenon, out of place and season.

And then: The Settlements!

It was too late. Knowledge of what an ice storm's winds would do to even such stout constructions as the old stone villas, the tree-trunk walls, ripped his heart like a bayonet. Walls ruptured, roofs jerked away, humans and animals flung like rag dolls in a lawn-mower-he'd seen the ruins on the plains of Gettlesand...

Old George grabbed him, dragged him with horrifying animal strength back into the close- mobbed dooic, as if he genuinely feared Rudy would go dashing out into the storm.

But Rudy only thought, Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus! over and over, knowing there was nothing he could do. They were dead already-frozen, pulped, and dead.

Cold rolled into the cave like the waters of doom. The dooic crowded tighter around the fire, around the old male whose spells had saved them from other peril before. The Keep! Those black walls had resisted the anger of the Dark and would, he thought, resist the fall of the mountains themselves. But the crops would be killed, the crops they'd broken themselves all spring to plant, the crops that were their only salvation. Every head of livestock in the byres outside the Keep would perish of the outer- space cold even if they weren't dashed to pieces by the howling funnel of the wind.

And the herdkids with them.

Rudy screamed, "No!!!" barely aware that he had made a noise, then curled against the rock of the wall and buried his head in his arms.

Like tornadoes, ice storms struck and passed quickly. Rudy lay listening to the mad howl of the wind, every contraction of his heart telling him that the children he'd seen questing for firewood under Lirta Graw's command, the hunter whose nose he had broken, were dead now, their bodies sieved through the smashed palisade and the meat flash-frozen where it lay. So much for human plans, human aspiration, human love... So much for anyone we love or hate or who just has their own annoying agenda.

He shut his teeth hard against tears.

In time he stirred, turning his concentration to his own spells of Summoning heat. The repetition of the words, the drawing of the power, took his mind temporarily from the pain. These dooic, huddled around their meager fire, had saved his life, maybe because he'd saved Rosie's and maybe because old George knew he was a wizard and could help them out-he didn't know.

But he owed them. So he snuggled closer into the fetid congregation, noting in surprise that Mom and some of the younger hinnies were wrapped in badly cured, flayed deerhides, under which they held the cubs close to their bodies, the first evidence he'd seen of dooic using implements more complicated than a rock. Though of course, he thought, the domesticated ones had worn clothing in servitude and may have thought that was a good idea to bring back to the tribe. In time the wind died. The cold grew deeper, the freezing air flowing in... Damn, it must have come down just about on top of us. And on the Settlements. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

Still in old George's hands, the injured peregrine stared around the circle with mad yellow eyes.

Only when his mageborn perceptions told him a crippled dawn was creeping up to warm the mountainside did Rudy wrap a deerhide over his shoulders for extra warmth and scramble, on hands and knees, up the low-roofed passageway to the surface of the ground again.

The tunnel was slippery with ice, and absolutely black-at the top he found twenty or thirty feet of snow blocking the entrance. He gouged at it with the steel crescent of his staff, Summoning heat around the metal, so that meltwater ran down to soak his torn and filthy trousers.

The world was a ruin in the violet gloom of snow-light and morning: pines snapped, branches stripped, birds spattered dead against the rocks. He saw what might have been gulls, though so badly damaged it was hard to tell-God knew how they got there. From a livid bank of cloud overhead a few funnels still dipped earthward, then retreated again, miles away. Five feet in front of the cave mouth a boar had been skewered on the blasted shards of an oak tree, frozen to USDA Choice. George and Mom emerged behind him, the graying female holding another deerskin around her, both peering uneasily, trading hand-signs, quick and small and silent. Rudy was barely aware of them.

His mind felt erased. He was aware that he was looking at the end of the world, the beginning of Fimbul Winter indeed-the Ultimate Notification from the Great Darwinian Bureau in the Sky that said, "We regret to inform you that you have been selected against." He couldn't take it in.