Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

Sodden with fatigue, his muscles knifed with pain every time he moved. The meat was just beginning to go off, too, and the smell of it, in his clothing and that of everyone in the room, was something he felt he'd never be free of. "So he figured since I was in better shape, I could come back up here, while even if he couldn't work magic for a couple of days, at least he could sense danger on the way. So he stayed down there."

"He did not!" A lumbering, heavy form in an expensive blue dress shoved her way to the fore next to Hogshearer-the moneylender's daughter, Scala, a girl of fourteen with unwashed hair and piggy dark eyes.

"He ran away!" Hogshearer turned his head quickly, eyes eager-Rudy saw the interest flare in other eyes as well: Ankres and Lady Sketh. "Who told you that, girl?" "One of the men." There was smug delight in her voice at being the center of attention. In her blue gown she looked, if not exactly clean, at least like she hadn't been working, either. "One of the men said he saw Ingold run away from the camp the night before they left, and he never came back."

Everyone began talking at once, waving their arms. Koram Biggar said, "By Saint Bounty, I told you wizards couldn't be trusted!" and Janus of Weg's voice, under the general yammer, growled, "Birch the lying little-"

"Is that true?" Minalde's voice, soft as silver bells, seemed to cut through the clamor, as if she spoke to Rudy and Rudy alone. Her eyes were deeply troubled.

Rudy didn't want to, but before those blue eyes, he could do nothing but nod. "He had his reasons," he said as renewed shouting rose like the roar of the sea. "And if you think heading out alone, without magic, into the river valley these days is safer than sticking with a bunch of armed guys in what's left of a fort, remind me never to go camping with you, pal."

"Then I suppose we need to ask," Bannerlord Pnak said quietly, "why he departed without coming here to our aid? And for that matter, why it was that he, and you, Master Rudy, survived, and everyone else at the Settlements perished?"

"Nice goin', punk." Gil raised her head from the scroll she was deciphering when, many hours later, Rudy finally returned to the workroom.

She'd collected every glowstone in the place and grouped them around her on the big oak table in the middle of the room, and the upside-down light made her thin face skull- like and odd in its masses of unbound black hair.

She'd bathed and gotten someone in the Guards to change the dressing on her hurt cheek, but the bruises all around the area still looked dark and angry. "You know Pnak and Barrelstave have been itching for years to put Tir under a Council of Regency- ever since Alde socialized seed wheat instead of letting people speculate in it. If they can discredit Ingold-"

"Don't start on me, spook." He dropped in the corner the bundle of his grubby traveling clothes he'd changed out of in Alde's rooms and went to stand beside her. "Lemme have a look at that."

She turned her face obediently, unmoving while he peeled back the dressing. The bruises were fading some, but the bite itself didn't look like it was healing.

Malnutrition, Rudy thought. Spells of healing, even those of a master like Ingold, could only go so far without nutrients to work from.

Still, there was something about the discoloration that he didn't like.

"You manage to get in touch with Thoth?" she asked, and Rudy nodded. The interview-after Alde had slipped into sleep in his arms, long after the shouting in the Council chamber was done-had troubled him, partly for the obvious reasons and partly with a kind of subconscious worry, a tip-of-the-tongue sense of something deeply wrong.

The Gettlesand mage had looked as harried as it was possible for that sardonic, vulturine scribe to look, and although the sky beyond the windows of his rockpile hermitage-built against the outer wall of the old Black Rock Keep, for the wizards there did not as a rule sleep within the Keep walls-still held light, there had been an oddly bleached or faded appearance to the whole image, like a photograph badly exposed.

Thoth had disclaimed knowledge of gaboogoos-pronouncing the word in much the way a housewife might remove a dead mouse from the family casserole-but his yellow eyes had narrowed, and his spindle-knuckled fingers stirred in the gray sleeves of his robe.

"The dogs have barked all around the Keep, night after night for a fortnight past," he said. "Gray and Nila, when they spoke to us for the last time from the slopes of the Devil's Grandmother, said they had seen some kind of creature there."

"Gray and Nila?" Rudy recalled the two women, part of the original Wizards' Corps in the war against the Dark.

"What were they doing up on the Devil's Grandmother? Wasn't that the volcano that ...?"

"They followed the... the track, the spoor, of the power we sensed in the ground," Thoth said. "They were on the western slope of the mountain when it erupted. They spoke of things there, pale creatures that walked through Wards and illusion as if they were not there, whose tracks they found 'round their camp every morning."

Rudy shivered, remembering the ghostly shapes in the dark among the pines. He found himself hoping that wherever Ingold was, he was watching his back.

Hesitantly, because like everybody but Ingold he was a little afraid of Thoth, he said, "Could somebody-some wizard we don't know about-have been... I dunno, tapping the energy of the volcano, maybe? Drawing on it, the way Ingold or you would draw on the energy within the earth-lines or the stars?"

"Considering that he or she would have had to be directly on top of the volcano to derive benefit from such an exercise," the Serpentmage replied dryly, "such a source of power would have obvious limitations. And what wizard would be operating in the wilderness, without contact with human communities? Still," he added, tilting his head in a fashion that made him more than ever resemble some strange wise member of the buzzard clan, "it would not do harm to speak to Shadow of the Moon and ask him whether the shamans of the plains have heard aught."

The insectile fingers refolded themselves into another pattern. In the virulent light the old man's sunken features seemed skull-like, worn and weary under the bald curve of his brow.

"It is an ill time," Thoth said at length. "The Raiders move down from the far north, and settlers from the Alketch have been plaguing our herds. They say fever and civil war ride unchecked through those countries, that famine rules on the Emperor's throne and the cities have become infernos of lawlessness, blood, and smoke. Tirkenson deems it too perilous to send cattle toward Sarda Pass to your aid. It were folly, he says, to waste the lives of our riders only to feed our enemies. Brother Wend and the Lady Ilae have agreed to journey to Renweth, that you may not be without magic. It is true that we have been remiss; someone should have gone to you long ere this. Will this serve?"

"Well, Alde may get back with you on the cattle." Rudy rubbed his chin, still smarting from the razor, and glanced over at Minalde's sleeping form. "But thank Wend and llae, and tell 'em they'll be more than welcome. You guys had any luck with finding mageborn kids? Ingold and I have been watching..."

He fell silent, remembering that the Keep was over a dozen children shorter than it had been a week ago.

Thoth shook his gleaming head. "We gave the Dark too little credit in that," he said softly. "I begin to wonder whether we do these... gaboogoos, as you call them... enough."

Another damn thing to worry about, Rudy had thought as the crystal faded. I'll have to hire a secretary to keep track of them.

Standing now beside Gil in the deep late-night silence of the Keep, he remembered the conversation again, and his uneasiness returned.