Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

Walking back to the workroom through the ebon stillness, the images of the gaboogoos had returned to him, the tall, vicious, palely glowing monstrosities that had pursued him over the mountainside, and the little kneehigh creature that had stood in the doorway of that room on fifth north, eyeless head turned in his direction as if it could, in fact, see.

"So who's this Saint Bounty?"

"Huh?" Rudy snapped back to reality. He realized she and Ingold had been gone for nearly two months. He'd kept them up on gossip and events, but there were always things he hadn't thought to mention. "Oh, him."

He moved aside one of the terra-cotta pots in which Ingold had been nursing seedling roses for years. Only two varieties had survived the downfall of civilization, and one of them didn't look any too robust.

Rudy had been baby-sitting them all spring, feeding them little bits of stinking fish and conjuring miniature spells to keep them warm. "His statues have been showing up all over the north half of the fifth level, around the Biggars and the Wickets and the other trailer-park types up there. I don't know who started it. Fat guy with a basket of food just who you'd figure to get popular when we're all looking at starvation. You're the saint expert."

"Well, yes, I am." Her eyes were thoughtful, cold and very blue in the dazzle of the glowstones. "And I've never heard of the guy. I asked Maia. He said there was no Saint Bounty in the official calendar, nor was there any local saint of that name he knows about. And I don't like the color of his robe."

"His robe?" Rudy had gotten used to Gil's trick of fixing her attention on bizarre tangents, clues visible to a scholar that even a wizard might miss. It was one of the things she had in common with Ingold, who was popularly considered to be slightly mad. But even so...

"The iconography of saints is very stylized." Gil carefully rolled up the scroll she had been studying, tied it, and carried it and her notes across to the big iron-bound oak cupboard. Rudy could see that her notes were almost entirely in the flowing bookhand of the Wathe, interspersed here and there with English, which neither of them used much anymore. "It's a teaching tool for the illiterate. There's a reason behind every image, every color, every tchotchke..."

"Gil- Shalos?" Shadows moved in the doorway that led through to the Guards' watchroom, the pale flower of a quatrefoil on dark clothing, and long ivory braids with dark fragments of bone woven into them, framing a narrow face.

The Icefalcon came in, carrying something in a scrap of burlap through which dirty brown fluid had soaked. If the whole Keep hadn't been faintly redolent of salvaged carrion, Rudy would have had more warning of his approach. "I had to wrench these from the Council's regulators of meat. I trust you're sufficiently grateful." "Kill anybody over it?" Gil carried it to the table.

"And have to clean my sword hilt again?" Gil grinned and picked apart the wrappings.

"Yuckers," Rudy said.

"Up your nose, punk." She turned one of the hacked-off limbs thoughtfully. It looked like the front leg of a wolverine, but there was something badly wrong with the proportion of it: too long in bone, the claws widened into short spades. "You seen tracks of this one?"

The White Raider nodded, hand resting lightly on the hilt of his sword. "The whole valley went under snow during the storm, but I saw this track during the winter, though I never saw the things themselves. Perhaps three, maybe four, all told, in the Vale."

"Always near the slunch?"

The Icefalcon nodded. He looked little the worse for the climb up from the Settlements, nor for days of hunting the woods for storm-kills. He carried two or three fresh bruises, from that evening's training session. Rudy privately suspected he was an android.

"I told Ingold of it, during the snows." He folded his arms and looked down over Gil's shoulder as she sorted through the other objects in the cloth: paws and limbs, mostly, but there was the head of something that might have been a woodchuck.

Gil considered the remains for a moment more, then went to fetch the remains of the thing that had attacked her in Penambra from the cupboard where they were stored. Rudy glanced across the table at the Guard and asked, "That wasn't you who saw Ingold leave the settlement last night, was it?" If anyone had been able to see through the wizard's illusions, it would have been the Icefalcon, but it was very unlike that cold- blooded young killer to mention such a thing, and certainly not to the daughter of Varkis Hogshearer.

The Icefalcon shook his head. "His name was spoken among the men today on the way up the mountain," he said. He moved a glowstone out of Gil's tidy circle, making patterns of them around the sticky bundle and its horrid contents. "Many things were said of him, most of them stupid, but no one spoke of his leaving the camp." "Then how the hell did-"

"What about insects in the slunch?" Gil came back to the table, set the crusted hempen wrappings of the Penambra thing down with a sodden thwack. "The slunch worms don't seem to attack crops."

"I've seen them," the Icefalcon said. He had a very soft voice, light like a young boy's, and seldom spoke above a whisper. His silvery eyes were without expression as he studied Gil's face, but he asked, "Are you well? I'll be returning to the Settlements at dawn. Everything in Manse and Carpont will be well and truly rotting, but there will be seed grain at least, and metal, do we get there before bandits do. Will you be all right?"

"Fine." It was a lie. Rudy could see that and so could the Icefalcon, for the tall warrior put his hand to the uninjured side of Gil's face and turned it to the light. He stood for a time, considering her, resembling a longlimbed pale cheetah but slightly less human. Then he turned to Rudy and said, "Look after her." He melted away into the shadows. At no time, Rudy realized, had he used his right hand or moved it out of reach of his sword hilt.

"I really am fine." Gil's voice was very small. She had turned her back on him, her head half bowed as she sorted through a revolting collection of animal parts with her dark hair half hiding her face.

In her baggy, too-big black clothing, she had a fragile look, like an alley cat in a hard winter. There was a tension in her, too, as if she were perpetually braced, perpetually fighting something or ready to fight something; a look of pain, a series of lines around eyes and brows and mouth, that went past the wound on the side of her face.

Her tone returned to business almost with her next breath. "Have you had time to look at any of this?"

"In between my painting class and ballet practice, you mean?"

In the quick beauty of her grin he saw the shy girl peek out from behind the warrior's

armor, then duck away to safety, again. As if half ashamed of appearing human, she turned her attention quickly back to the mess before her. "Ingold collected most of this during the salvage. The Icefalcon's helped me a lot in woodcraft, but you're the naturalist. Any of it look familiar?"

Rudy shook his head. "That's the whole problem, spook. Like the old man said, nobody's ever seen any of those critters before."

He stepped close to look, nevertheless, drawing his knife and scraping at the slimy meat. Under Ingold's guidance he'd boiled and disassembled and reassembled dozens of animal carcasses the way he used to break down cars, fascinated by the delicate interfitting of muscle and sinew and bone.

"I was a historian, not a biologist," Gil said, probing with her fingers. "But if you're an economic determinist, you pick up a little bit of science when you study stuff like climatology and demographics. Look at this one, the way it's put together. Look at the foot bones and the elbow joint."