Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

Barely a mile south of that unbelievable scour lay what was left of Fargin Graw's fortress. At one end of the imploded wreck the two wizards uncovered the bodies of Graw, his wife and sons, and most of the other members of his household, mashed by the fallen roof beams and lying in a lake of snowmelt and gore. The child Lirta, a few of the servants, and the hunter whose bow had broken his nose

had been carried by the wind nearly a dozen yards and smashed against the wreckage of the stables, where their bodies mixed with the slow-thawing rummage of cattle and sheep. They found the boy Reppitep later in the afternoon, when the sun strengthened enough to melt some of the larger drifts.

"It will have happened very quickly," Ingold said as he and Rudy dragged the far-flung bodies to lie in what would be their pyre among the thatch. Tears running down his face, Rudy yelled at him, "And that's supposed to make me feel better?"

Ingold replied wearily, "In time."

The old man insisted, to Rudy's rage and horror, on thoroughly looting the buildings, making a stack of kitchen utensils, clothing, plows, rake heads, needles, and harness buckles near the well. "Can't you show a little respect, for Chrissake?" "No," the old man said, slowly pulling on a pair of somebody's boots. "Not in the circumstances."

He transformed himself into a bird, Rudy thought, watching him trying to wash some of the grime off with snow before dressing clumsily in a dark leather jerkin, baggy trousers, and a sheepskin vest Rudy remembered seeing on one of the hunters the night before last.

Done one of the most crazily dangerous acts of magic possible in the outside hope of warning these people.

It was only by sheerest chance and the wisdom of the dooic mage that he wasn't a bloody blot on the snow someplace now. And everyone here would be just as dead. Rudy had to remind himself of that again when he saw the old man laboriously going through the corpses, removing knives from the men's belts and needles from the sewing still in the women's hands.

When they passed the place where Rudy first met the gaboogoo, they had picked up his fallen scrying stone, half buried under snow, and now Rudy got up his courage to look into it and saw Minalde weeping as she struggled to drag wood to the pyre in front of the Keep on which they'd lined the bodies of fifteen little herdkids. Rudy watched until he saw Tir, stumbling at her heels with an armful of kindling. For a horrible time, Rudy had feared that last night had been one of the many occasions on which Tir had sneaked out to spend the night with the other kids. He let the image die. Once he'd ascertained Tir and Minalde lived, he didn't want to see anything else.

Mountain shadows stretched across them, blue and chill. Hating himself, Rudy went to the heap of garments Ingold was making where the gatehouse had been and found among them his own ramskin coat, its sleeves gay with painted flowers. The sky would remain soaked in summer light for hours.

Looking up, he saw the air above the mountains streaked in peach and apricot, a phenomenal, overblown sunset such as Rudy had previously associated with the tackier variety of cowboy painters or photographs in inspirational magazines. He whispered, "Wow," and Ingold, to whom he hadn't spoken since his bitter railings about respect, limped to his side. "Come now, Rudy, don't tell me you're surprised." "You're predicting sunsets now?"

"There was an earthquake this morning," Ingold said. His hand was pressed to his side, his gored face gray. "I thought it might have been triggered by the eruption of another volcano in Gettlesand."

"You're right," Rudy said. "That makes-what? Three this winter? What you got there, pal?" he added, nodding at the gory wad of sacking in the old man's hands. The limb of an animal-a rabbit? But no rabbit had claws like that-protruding from it at an

awkward angle.

"I haven't any idea." Ingold stooped agonizingly and unwrapped the thing on the remains of the foundation by which they stood.

Rudy said, "Yike!" and took a step back, then came close again, staring. "What the hell is it?" In his own voice he heard the echo of a theme he'd been singing for days now, and looked across at Ingold, baffled and a little scared. "Where'd you find this thing?"

He gestured with his eyes. "Against the palisade." Only one wall of the palisade remained, the south one, into which the north wall and huge chunks of the old villa and outbuildings had been driven, a dune of wreckage.

Stiffly, Ingold wrapped the carcass up again. His hands were swollen with the work he'd done, shifting timbers and grubbing for bodies under pools of half-frozen water, and the flesh around the cuts on the left side of his face was bruised nearly black. "I've noticed that-''

At the sound of some noise, he turned, and there was nothing stiff or crippled about the smoothness with which he suddenly had one of the dead farmers' shortswords in his hand. Rudy turned to follow his gaze. There were figures in the road, dozens of them, faces glimmering pale in the gathering dusk. Someone called, "Who's there? Is anyone alive?"

Rudy recognized the voice. "That you, Yar?" He left the darkness by the gatehouse and strode down in the direction of the straggling line of newcomers. "It's Rudy and Ingold." He almost didn't need a mage's sight to recognize Lank Yar, the Keep's chief hunter, a drooping leather strap of a man who seemed, body and soul, to have been braided back together out of his own scar tissue following the rising of the Dark.

Behind the hunter he identified others: Nedra Hornbeam, the matriarch of third level south, with her son and son-in-law; Lord Sketh, pushing fussily to the front with two or three of his purplebadged men-at-arms; several of the Dunk clan from second north with Bannerlord Pnak; Bok the Carpenter and half a dozen Guards under the command of the Icefalcon.

"They're dead here," Rudy said quietly. "They're all dead."

"Good God, man, we thought you were gone as well!" Bok strode forward and caught Rudy's arms in huge hands, then enveloped him in a hug that was like being hugged by an iron tree. "And Lord Ingold...!"

"Lord Ingold," Yar the Hunter said quietly, "who ought never have left the Keep to begin with this spring. Had he stayed where he belonged, these folk would have been alive, and the children of the herds, too."

He turned and walked away. Lord Sketh came over quickly, caught Rudy's hand in one of his own round moist ones, said quickly, "Ridiculous! Are you well, man?" There was scared relief in his eyes, desperate relief that the Keep would not, in the face of such catastrophe, be left wizardless as well. "What happened? Was it an ice storm, as the Icefalcon's been saying? We heard nothing, only opened the Doors this morn to a wall of snow."

"It was an ice storm," Ingold said softly. "And Yar is right. I should not have left the Keep."

They worked through the fevered sunset and long into full dark, under a moon that came up gibbous and crimson, like a dirty blood-orange, as if the grue that lay soaking into the ground had stained its golden light.

Under Lord Sketh's orders, the hunters and volunteers and Guards dragged every horse, every head of stock, every deer, every boar, even the rats and rabbits and voles found crushed in the woods or mashed into the palisade, and made great thawing piles of them between the ruined house and the heap of matchwood that had been the gates.

Rudy and Ingold laid spells of preservation on those dripping heaps, to arrest and postpone decay once they should begin to thaw, and men and women set to hacking the meat into chunks, to be carried up to the Keep.

Through a haze of blind exhaustion, of pain in his frozen hands and toes, Rudy understood that this meat was all the Keep would have to live on, summer, winter, and into the following spring.