Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

And he could already see that it wasn't going to be enough. While the meat thawed, Lord Sketh ordered a pyre built of broken timbers and the drying thatch; they kindled it an hour before dawn.

The smell of the smoke was a vast, oily cloud over the charnel house of wet bones, ice- beaded meat, and glittering heaps of salvaged harness buckles and shoes. Lank Yar, more practical-minded, set parties to building sledges to carry the meat, and racks on which to smoke it, and the first group of bearers set off for the Keep with Fargin Graw's food reserves and the news that the two wizards were alive just as dawn was staining red the waters of the Great Brown River to the east.

When Rudy woke from exhausted sleep, Gil was there, her black hair braided to keep it out of the blood, her face half masked in field dressing and more bruised even than Ingold's.

She looked exhausted, sick, and deeply worried, and no wonder, Rudy thought. Some distance away he could see Ingold at work cutting up a sheep neatly as a butcher, and like a butcher soaked and spattered with blood from head to foot; he would answer if someone spoke to him, but he seemed, as Rudy knew he would, to have taken Lank Yar's words completely to heart.

At least it was too early for ants or flies to have commuted in. Thank God for small favors.

"I was worried about you, punk." Gil sat down next to him and handed him a bowl of gruel and a dried apple. They'd almost certainly come from the settlement store. Rudy thought about the people who should have been eating them for breakfast and felt nearly sick.

"I wish I could say the same about you, spook." He was too hungry and exhausted not to eat, and once he began, he felt better. He had eaten almost nothing yesterday and had worked cutting wood and hauling bodies to the pyre until he was ready to drop. "But until that thing hit, I was clueless, and when it did--" He paused and shook his head. "- I didn't really think about any one person, I guess. Just, like, 'Oh, Jesus, no.' I guess I figured if you were with the old man, you'd be okay. Did you-did you see him turn himself into a bird?"

She smiled crookedly-with the wound on her face, she could hardly help it-and nodded. But she only said, "I thought Lord Sketh was going to propose marriage when I showed up with the mule. The orneriest, nastiest old bizzom in the Keep, and now she's the only domesticated beast of burden in the Vale. That'll learn Enas Banelstave to argue against us borrowing the best instead of the worst critter when we go out scavenging. Sterile, too, of course."

"Oh, Christ," Rudy said. He hadn't thought of that-Gil was generally about two jumps ahead of him. "What're we gonna...? I mean, what about plowing next spring?"

"Don't worry about it, punk." Gil got to her feet and swept the ruined settlement with a gaze as chill and silvery as the heatless sky. "We're gonna starve by Christmas."

"Most of it's still frozen," the Icefalcon was saying as Rudy and Gil came up to the shambles where Ingold was jointing deer and pigs with an ax. "We'll probably be able to get it up to the Vale before it begins to go off, but on foot it will be a slow trek. Warmer weather's coming," he added, glancing to the north. "There'll be flies."

"I'll do what I can about that," Ingold said. He looked like ten miles of bad road, and moved as if he'd been beaten with a stick. Rudy guessed he hadn't slept at all.

"I expect there'll be parties coming down to clear out Manse and Carpont today," the young Guard continued, one bloodgummed hand tucked into his sash. "We may need spells to prevent decay then. When we go up to the Keep tomorrow morning, one of you should remain."

"One of 'em should stay just to tell us if there's another one of those what'd you call, ice storms, on the way," Yobet Troop threw in, stopping nervously beside them with dangling bundles of frozen chickens yoked to his shoulders. He glanced at Ingold with frightened eyes, and then at the sky. "You'll do that, won't you, m'lord wizard? That's your job."

"Yes," Ingold said gently. "That's my job."

He added to Gil, when Troop and the Icefalcon had gone their ways, "Things aren't as bad as you might suppose. The storm affected an area perhaps fifty miles across, and beyond that there will be game, and fruits in abandoned orchards if we can get parties out there quickly enough, and nuts in the woods. The Icefalcon spoke to me earlier about leading a raiding party against the bandits around Penambra, who will have horses if nothing else."

"I bet they'll be real efficient raiders on foot," Gil said. Ingold regarded her in mild surprise and mimed a dig through his pockets. "If you're willing to put money against the Icefalcon on foot in a contest with the average group of mounted bandits..." "The hell I am," Gil said, with the first grin Rudy had seen out of her all day.

"And I'm sure Lady Minalde will send to Tomec Tirkenson in Gettlesand for livestock as well, provided we can haul hay up from the river meadows below Willowchild to feed them." Moving as slowly as an old man, Ingold limped to the stack of carcasses and began to drag free a deer.

His hands fumbled their grip and Gil and Rudy hastened to help him; Rudy handed him the ax he'd been using, but after lifting it, Ingold set it down again, as if too wearied, for the moment, to go on.

"They're taking the mule, you know," Gil said, turning to the stump nearby, where several axes were stuck. It was the first time in years that Rudy had seen more implements than there were people. Gil judged her striking point on the carcass and buried the ax head just below the foreleg, bracing her foot and shoving to wrench free the ice- stiff limb.

"As well they must." Ingold looked across at Rudy. "Rudy, I'm counting on you to spell the books Gil and I brought from Penambra. I concealed them last night in the root cellar here. Between my peregrinations of the night before last and laying every fragment of magic I could summon on the meat last night and today, even should I get some rest between now and nightfall, I'm barely going to have the strength to do what I'll need to do."

Rudy didn't like the sound of that. Still less did he like the way the muscles of Ingold's jaw tightened when he hobbled slowly to the other side of the carcass, to help Gil reduce it to limbs and trunk.

"Every ward and guard you can summon," the old man went on without giving him time to reply. "Decay, water, fire, theft, insects, even notice by another wizard.

Goodness knows how long it will be before someone can be sent to fetch them. Those books are some of the oldest that exist outside the City of Wizards, and some of them are copies of texts even older than that city itself. They may contain the answer to questions necessary for our very survival."

Warily, Rudy said, "You sound like you ain't gonna be around."

Ingold scratched the side of his nose, leaving a streak of slightly fresher blood in the grime. "Well, I do feel badly about that." Don't do this to me, man. Don't leave me to deal with this alone. "I should not go," Ingold went on, very slowly. "For Yar was right, you know. I was culpable for leaving as I did. For assuming that such a disaster would not befall." "Who knew?" Rudy flung out his hands. "And who's gonna be dumb enough to say that it was our fault this happened? You can feel those things coming ten minutes ahead of time, tops; I can't feel 'em at all. Even before I feebed my crystal, I wasn't able to reach you. I still haven't figured out why..."

"You haven't?" Ingold appeared mildly surprised. "Be that as it may, it was my fault, and I am responsible. And I suspect that once we return to the Keep, there will be pressure brought to bear on both of us not to leave it again." He glanced over at Gil, then away.

"It isn't only for the sake of the art of wizardry itself that I've been searching for a mageborn child, Rudy. We desperately need more wizards at the Keep. We should never have gone from month to month, year to year, putting off sending for a few of the Gettlesand wizards... I've spoken to Thoth, by the way. "You did?" Contact with the Gettlesand wizards-and the entire subject of the gaboogoos-had completely slipped his mind. "Did he say what happened? Why we couldn't get in touch?"