Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

There'd be no crops, either at the Settlements or the Keep. Last night would have iced them where they stood. No animals left at all. Everyone in the Settlements-some nine hundred people, was dead. Everyone at the Keep would starve.

George yowled a warning and flung up his hand. Underfoot the mountain moved, a hard, sharp twitch, then a few seconds of stillness, followed by a long slow roller-coaster sensation, as if they all stood on the belly of some monstrous anaconda as it swallowed a couple of deer.

"Chill out." Rudy caught his balance against the sprawled, uplifted roots of a broken tree as the old dooic and his mate clung to one another, looking for someplace to run. "It's a five-two, tops. I wouldn't even get out of bed for it back home." Like many Southern Californians, Rudy was adept at playing Guess the Richter with local earthquakes. By the time lag between the kicker and the roller, he judged that the epicenter was far off.

He picked his way through the smashed and uprooted trees, mortared together with snow frozen hard as concrete. Where the wind had scoured the snow away, weeds stood stiff, held upright by the water in their cells that had turned to ice, waiting for

the touch of the sun that would let them lapse from pseudolife into brown and crumpled death.

There was a little patch of slunch on the rocks. Though snow lodged in its folds, it seemed perfectly healthy. Rudy muttered, "Son of a..."

He stepped around the rock and stopped again. Toeless footprints marked the thin snow beyond. A little blown snow had dusted into them, enough for Rudy to calculate the timing: after the winds had ceased, but during the worst of the cold. He didn't even want to think about what the temperature had been.

Behind him he heard old George grunt, and Mom yammer in fear. Seizing his staff, Rudy ducked around the rocks, skidding on the hard snow-crust as he ran back to the mouth of the cave.

Ingold stood there, shivering and blinking, wrapped only in the flayed hide of one of the dooic's deer.

"I don't know what happened." The old man's voice was hoarse and hesitant, and he flinched as Rudy turned his mangled arm to the light at the mouth of the tunnel entrance, where they had taken shelter against the cold.

Rudy had gone back to the deeper chamber to fetch firewood and kindled a small blaze in the tunnel, the heat reflecting back from the rocks. Outside, the virulent clouds were breaking, the sun beginning to melt the snow.

Ingold was unable to summon fire; unable, Rudy guessed, to summon heat or light or any of the small magics that were wizardry's second nature. He lay against the rock shivering with exhaustion, barely responding as Rudy examined the wounds on his arms and back, and on the back of his head.

He looked as if he'd been attacked by maniacs wielding chisels and cleavers. The wounds reminded him of something that might have been inflicted by pincers, like an enormous lobster or a Roger Corman-sized crab. Not claws, he thought. Not teeth either, really.

And all the while he was marveling, Ingold really did it. I'll be buggered. He actually turned himself into a goddamn bird.

It was something he couldn't imagine himself or anyone else even trying to accomplish. He was conscious of awe and an overwhelming wish that he'd been there to watch-to see it and to see how it was done.

But he only said, "Man, if that storm had hit while you were still on your way, you'd be dead meat!"

Ingold raised his head a little, brought up one hand to wipe at a gash over his brow. "I had to risk it. I couldn't reach you by scrying stone-"

"Couldn't reach me? I was tryin' all morning to get in touch with you, man! And Thoth, and the Gettlesand gang! Then I lost my crystal... I'll have to go back and look for it. But whenever I tried, I just got this... this..."

"Weight," Ingold said, his voice almost dreamy, as if he were slipping again into sleep. He tried clumsily to pull the deerskin back over the bare, freckled gooseflesh of his shoulders, hands almost unworkable with cold.

"Anger. Magic deep in the bones of the earth. Which is gone now, incidentally," he added, rousing a little. "I expect that after the earthquake we should have no trouble reaching Thoth."

Rudy looked at him a little blankly, trying to work that one out. Mom emerged from the throat of the passageway to proffer an appalling double handful of what was almost certainly chewed leaves, and Rudy said, "Uh-thanks." He sniffed it-borage and willow, and he'd handled worse in five years-and passed a quick hand over it, feeling the magic already in it and adding his own spells of

disinfection and healing. Ingold's mouth did not so much as twitch as Rudy spread the mess over the gaping, clotted wounds. "So what the Sam Hill is going on?"

Ingold shook his head, pressed the side of his face to the rock of the wall, the long white bloodstained hair hanging down to half conceal his face. Rudy said, "You gonna be okay for a couple minutes more? I gotta stitch this one." The old man nodded and signed for him to go ahead. Rudy threaded up a needle with the toughest line of sinew in his belt kit and turned Ingold's shoulder so that his back took the direct patch of the in-falling morning light. Under blood and muck, the skin was crossed with the scars of old whip cuts, scores of them, white gouges that when fresh must have gone nearly to the bone.

"We can find your crystal and contact Thoth and the others in Gettlesand, later in the day." Ingold's voice was barely a whisper, though Rudy had laid on him every spell he could to dull pain.

Anyone else-anyone who had no magic of his own to combat it-would probably have been in shock, and by the old man's coloring, he was pretty near it, anyway. He was shivering convulsively, fighting to steady his breath. "But our first duty lies in the Settlements. To burn them in death, since we could not save them in life." Rudy gave Ingold his long woolen shirt and would have given him his trousers, too, if they'd have fit the wizard's stockier frame.

The shirt came down to his thighs, and Ingold wrapped strips of deerskin around his legs and feet. Rudy cut him a staff from an oak sapling, and the two descended, like a couple of shivering beggars, through the ghastly silence of ruined woods covered with snow to the dead land below.

As they walked, Rudy told Ingold about the gaboogoos that had attacked him in the woods and how they had followed him despite every spell he had laid to throw them off the track; how he had found their spoor in the lee of rock still dusted with the snow that had fallen during the worst of the night.

He spoke to take his mind off what he knew was waiting for them, to turn it aside from all those questions about what they were going to do now. About what they could do.

Long before they reached the Settlements, they found sheep, or parts of sheep, impaled on the broken trees, their wool brown clots of blood. The warming air melted the snow in patches, and the two men had to struggle to keep from slipping in the mud-Rudy kept a wary eye on Ingold and a hand ready to steady him should he fall, but though the older wizard's pain and exhaustion slowed him, he seemed to recover as the day went on.

Rudy looked at the birds-eagles or bull owls, crushed against the trees like bugs on a windshield, and wondered again what it was that had caused those pincerlike wounds; what had struck Ingold down before he'd gotten to the Settlements. Just before noon they passed the place where the storm funnel had touched down. The trees had been swept up by their roots and lay in a smashed heap against the mountain's first rising slopes, mixed with rocks, laurel shrubs, the carcasses of animals, and ice and snow. It was melting at the edges, and there was a great dirty pool of water and blood below the tangle, like a colossal beaver dam of matchsticked spruces and bones.