Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

"Weird." Rudy turned the limb over in sticky fingers. "You got the back foot of this thing?"

She produced it from another corner of the table, scraped to the tendons. He held it close to the clustered glowstones, then summoned a brilliance of witchlight around him as well. "I've never seen this kind of deformation in the center of the bone shank. Look, it's on every one of the long bones, from the radius right down to the carpals. But from the joints I'd say this was some kind of rabbit."

"That's what I thought, too." Gil perched on a corner of the table, wiped her hands on the corner of a rag. "Now, that furry slug thing Ingold found in the woods after the storm, when you skin it down and chop out the fat, you find leg bones. Here's the skull. It's really deformed, look here. Same texture as the long bones of the rabbit, but most of that deformation's cartilage. Look at the teeth."

"Ferret," Rudy said immediately. "Holy cow-pies."

He set the greasy skull down next to the deformed rabbit feet. "But that takes thousands of years. Thousands of generations."

"Hundreds of thousands," Gil said. She crossed to fetch a basin and ewer from the sideboard, dunked her hands in the chilly water. The magelight showed up the harsh lines around her eyes, turned the bruises livid along cheekbone and chin. "Even with a really intensive program of selective breeding-like if you're trying to breed down to a teacup poodle-you're looking at fifteen or twenty years at the very least."

Rudy shook his head wonderingly. "Fifteen or twenty years' work for a teacup poodle. Some people need to get a life."

The wound made her grin lopsided, and it faded quickly. "So you're saying... what? Somebody's breeding these things? Who the hell would do that?" He'd said that before, he thought. Recently. Gray and Nila, standing on the slopes of the Devil's Grandmother... The deep pulse of anger in the ground...

"It's not that simple." She touched one of the roses, came back to his side. "You feel the quake a few hours ago?"

He shook his head. A few hours ago he'd been in bed, half blind with exhaustion, Minalde weeping in his arms.

"It wasn't a big one." She nodded toward the scrying table. "Here in the Keep you could barely feel it at all. See if it was caused by another volcano someplace."

It took a long time. Hours-Rudy wasn't sure. Though it could not be used for communication, the scrying table's range was greater than a small stone's, and the images that stirred within the central crystal were larger, clearer, tiny landscapes that absorbed the mind.

Using the table, scenes were visible to Rudy that would have been impossible to see in a smaller gem, people and places appearing sometimes without prior knowledge or any will of the scryer, displaying things unknown.

Staring into the glimmering depths, Rudy let his mind drift, first infinitely deep, then out across the arid wastes of Gettlesand and the burned-out, ash-white ruin of upland forest on the slopes of the Devil's Grandmother; over the Bones of God and the Sawtooth Mountains; then out to the Seaward Mountains, wreathed still by the limmerance of forgotten spells.

He saw green icebergs floating in oceans the color of asphalt; endless continents of slow- moving glacial pack. Warriors rode in a fragile line below the white cliffs of glacier; islands smoked in the heaving sea.

At last he saw in the south the tall cordillera of some unknown land, pale with drought and unwonted cold, plastered with unbroken miles of pus-colored slunch that stirred with uneasy, obscene movement. The trees on the mountainside were burning for miles, and dust and heat roiled skyward like the mushroom clouds of a holocaust of hydrogen bombs. The sky was black. Endless miles of tarry, starless, daytime black. "Got it."

He looked up, aware for the first time that his head ached. Gil had tidied away the bones, save for two or three sets, and was making notes again. By the heap of wax tablets at her elbow, she had been doing this for hours.

"Somewhere way the hell in the south, maybe even on some other continent. Big. The ash-fall looks about the size of Texas."

The square, sensitive lips tightened to a single cold line. "That's how many this year? Six? Eight? That we know about?" "Something like that."

"I wish I knew the statistical likelihood of that many volcanic eruptions in six months-or in thirty-six months, because the first couple of eruptions Ingold commented on were about three years ago. The summer before we found the first slunch up in Gae."

"Makes sense," Rudy said with a shrug. "Wherever it comes from, slunch is a cold-weather thing. The ice storm ripped it to hell at ground zero, but it didn't kill it. It was like you'd left a piece of plastic out overnight. Nedra Hornbeam tells me there's patches of it growing all the way down the pass now, little spots like that..." His fingers circled to something the size of a U.S. silver dollar. "She thinks the wind carried it, but I don't know."

Gil shook her head. "It's the cold, not physical seeding. And something else the Icefalcon told me: the tracks he's seen around the slunch, the really weird ones, are mostly rabbit-" She touched the aberrant bones. "-and ferret-" Her thin fingers brushed another. "-and wolverine."

Rudy was silent, filled with the sense he had so often in talking to Ingold, of following a dancing light over unseen ground in darkness. As if someone had handed him a pile of jigsaw puzzle pieces, which put together would form a message he really didn't want to read.

Around them the Keep was settled into the deep-night watch, when only the smallest sounds murmured in the black glass corridors: the light tread and harness-creak of a Guard's passing, the murmur of water in the pipes. The scurry of rats or the swift flick of a cat sliding serpentwise around corners in pursuit.

Darkness filled every crevice, like a liquid filling up the whole Keep from the crypts to the attics where the pumps churned with eternal, sourceless power; darkness and the breathing of sleepers, though Rudy was conscious that many within those walls wept in their dreams.

"Rudy," Gil said softly, "trust me when I say this sounds as weird to me as it does to you. Maybe weirder, because I don't know enough about magic to know whether it can be done or not. I really hope I am crazy, because if I'm not, I think we're all in real trouble. And I may be crazy," she added, rubbing the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger, her forehead suddenly creased with pain. "I feel so... so strange lately."

She shook her head, pushing the strangeness-and whatever it implied-aside. "But be that as it may... Doesn't it seem to you that somebody or something is using magic to terraform the world?"

Two nights later Rudy dreamed about the Bald Lady.

He recognized her, as he'd recognized the Guy with the Cats, from the record crystals: a tall, thin woman in a plain sheath of white gauze that fitted her rangy form closely. Though it was nearly transparent and left her flat breasts bare, he found her no more erotic than a ghost might have been.

Her head was shaved, as it was in the crystal's image, and, like the Guy with the Cats', patterned with a line of blue tattooing. She wore a dark blue cloak over her bare arms, and where her fingers curled around its edge, the blue lace of tattoo marked them like a glove.

She was walking in the Keep. There was no mistaking the black, sleek hardness of the walls, the uniformity of the square doorways. Rudy even thought he recognized one of the snailshell spirals of stair that led to the crypts below. She walked haloed in the white splendor of glowstones; once, she passed a fountain that sparkled with that clear radiance. She was alone. He thought there was no one else in the Keep, in all those vast black spaces-no one at all. Her face was calm but filled with unutterable grief.