Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

"He told me a number of extremely disquieting things, but no, he had no idea why communication by scrying stone was impossible. But I suspect that the night before last was not the first time that such a thing has happened. I haven't time to go into that now-maybe later, or more likely you can speak to him yourself. The important thing is that something very strange is going on-strange and appalling and, as far as I know, completely unprecedented."

"Well," Rudy said sarcastically, heaving up one severed hindquarter of the deer and manhandling it onto the nearby sledge for transport, "I'd kinda guessed that." "You always did have a good, solid grasp of the obvious," the mage replied approvingly. "But I'm not sure you are aware how rare the completely unprecedented actually is: never-heard-of; beyond human experience. Gil's a historian. She knows the truth that was said by the Lord of the Sigils: There is no new thing beneath the sun. It's not just a wise platitude, it's the basis of all lore, all scholarship, all the method of magic.

"But these gaboogoos seem to be precisely that. And as such, they bear fairly close investigation."

Ingold straightened up and wiped the sticky gum of half-frozen blood from his hands. "That's why magic won't work on them, huh?" Rudy said slowly. "Because we don't really know what the hell they are. They don't bleed, I'll tell you that. And if they sweat or smell or excrete or eat or spit, they do it damn inconspicuously. They sure walked through my spells of concealment like they were a cheesy plastic bead curtain."

"Precisely." Under the bloody grime of his overgrown mustache, Ingold's mouth was hard. "And the trouble is, it isn't just the gaboogoos. The creature that attacked Gil-almost certainly in concert with other beings that I did not see-was utterly unfamiliar to my lore or the lore of anyone I have ever read or spoken to. Last night the Icefalcon and his scavengers brought to me three other totally unknown animals, at least insofar as I could tell from the parts that remained. And there is no record-none-in the most ancient books or the tales of the most wide-ranging travelers, of what slunch is." "Slunch?" Rudy blinked at the sudden reversion to the mundane... if it was mundane. His first reaction-slunch is slunch-was automatic and, he found on reflection a second

later, rather unsettling. He'd gotten used to it. Everyone had. "I don't get it." "Nor do I." The blue eyes glittered, very pale and very bright, against the gruesome dark of bruises, old blood, and filth. "And considering that I have spent the longer if not the better part of my sixty-eight years learning to get it in every conceivable and inconceivable situation, I find that fact, in itself, extremely unsettling. And therefore," he went on, turning back to the vast heap of frozen beasts for another to hew, "I am leaving you tonight, to seek an answer outside of and beyond the bounds of human experience. I am going to visit the Nest of the Dark."

It made sense. Rudy had to admit that.

The Dark had a hive consciousness, a single sentience cloned into millions upon millions of protoplasmic, magic imbued cells. What any Dark One learned, they all then knew. Thus, what any Dark One at any time in the past had learned was remembered by all, down through the ages, from the deepest gulfs of infinite time. When the Dark had invaded Ingold's mind-in a fashion that Rudy preferred not to think about-Ingold had been, for a time, in touch with the mind of the Dark and had gained as much understanding of it as any human could deal with sanely. Once they had broken his resistance and absorbed his consciousness into their thoughts, he had understood the essence of their reality and the shape of their magic. As a wizard, Rudy knew that the structures of certain types of crystal could absorb and retain both magic and memory. The ancient sages of the Times Before had certainly been able to ensorcel the smoke-gray record crystals to hold images and information and goodness knew what else, and to feed them back through the great black scrying table.

Therefore it made sense that the collective memories of the Dark would have soaked into the rock walls of their Nest, memory that stretched back in an unbroken thread to the days of the white, shambling apes of the warm savannahs, when first the shamans of those frightened tribes had evolved the single most important trait for survival: the ability, at need, to call fire from cold wood. And it made sense that one whose mind had been in the mind of the Dark could draw forth those memories from the rock and know them again.

The whole idea still gave Rudy the creeps.

"I miscalculated the depth of peril in which we stood after the Dark departed-miscalculated it badly." Ingold wrapped his surcoat more tightly about him and shivered in the hard cold of the utterly silent dark.

It was the hour, in spring, when birds first begin to call their territories, halfway between midnight and morning. Not even a stirring of wind in the pine trees broke the silence.

In the ebony lake of the bottomlands below the ridge where the old man stood with Rudy and Gil, small spots of amber campfire-light glowed, and beyond them, sickly streaks and patches of moony slunch.

"With all you've told me about the way weather is made, Gil, I should have guessed that six volcanoes erupting in the past year or so would have some effect. Yar is right. I had no business leaving the Keep."

"Like hell," Gil said. Her face, and the white quatrefoil emblems of the Guard, were pale blurs in the thin flicker of magelight that floated before their feet, and Rudy heard the faint whisper of fabric as she hooked her left thumb under her sword sash and shook back her hair.

"Who else would have gone after the books? Who else could have found them, or retrieved them, from Penambra? Who else would have known which ones were most likely to help us, somewhere down the line? You can't do everything." "It's still my fault."

"Maybe," Gil said. Then she added, in a conversational tone, "So what makes you think these gaboogoos present a greater threat than the possibility of another ice storm? Even one that hits in the daytime, when everybody's in the fields?" "Christ!" Rudy said, appalled. "Another one? Can we get clobbered again this quick?" "Beats the hell out of me," the wizard replied, an expression he'd picked up from his two friends.

"Ice storms are a little studied phenomenon, due to the fact that those areas subject to them tend to be completely uninhabited-or become so in very short order. As for the gaboogoos..."

He frowned, and shifted the straps of his pack on his shoulders: barely more than a bedroll, Rudy thought uneasily. Ingold could have helped himself to the summer's stores of Fargin Graw's bins and granaries, Guards or no Guards; that he hadn't was a measure of his concern about what rations would be like in the Keep in a couple of months. It didn't make Rudy feel any better.

In time he went on, "Thoth tells me that three men in the Gettlesand Keep went mad about an hour before the volcano erupted in the north and tried to kill the wizards Dakis and Kara. When prevented from doing so, they turned their knives upon one another. I have no idea what, if anything, that has to do with the gaboogoo, or with the power along the fault lines of the ground that caused the scrying crystals to fail, or with the thing that attacked Gil. I need information."

His blue eyes glinted under their long white brows, catching the witchlight's foxfire gleam and the far-off sparks within the circle of the broken palisade. The pine trees on the slope above them whispered, a sound like a heavy sigh that quickly passed; Ingold's heavy mantle and the fur surcoat over it stirred and lifted with the movement of the wind, then fell still.