Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

She has the answer, he thought. The answer to the whole thing. How he knew this, he didn't know, except that he knew it was true. She had the key.

He thought he was standing at the foot of a stair-first level? Upper crypts? He wasn't sure, the Keep had changed too much over the years-watching her come down the spiraling steps toward him, her-blue cloak moving around her, he saw there were tears in her eyes. Her face was the face of death borne alone.

But she can't die, she can't go away! he thought frantically. She knows the answer to all this! He tried to speak to her, tried to stop her, to ask her where she was going, but she passed him, and in the dream he could feel the warmth of her cloak contrasting to the cold of the air when it brushed against his arm, and he could smell the cardamom and vanilla of her perfume.

She walked away from him, the glowstones picking up the midnight sheen of her cloak, the smooth line of her shoulders, the curve of her shaven head, as she vanished into the dark.

Rudy. Ingold's voice spoke very clearly in his mind.

Rudy came awake at once. He'd been expecting this, and groped under his pillow for his scrying stone. Almost instinctively he knew it was early in the night, the Dancers, the Demon, the Star-Lord with his shining belt, not yet clearing the ice-tipped tusks of the Rampart Range.

The witchlight he Summoned rested like a pale blue Tinker Bell on his hay-stuffed pillow, illuminating the scuffy patterns of the ancient brick wall that cut his own little half cell off the Guards' storeroom and seeming to impart a secret significance to the pattern of faded lights and darks of the quilt on his bed. "I'm here, man."

"And I'm here," Ingold said. "By the Four Ladies."

Past his shoulder Rudy could just make out the weathered shapes of the standing-stones that dominated the high meadow at the top of the Vale, blue dolomite found nowhere in the mountains: three on their feet, one lying among them, dead of grief, it was said, for her child. Though the stars burned faint and yellow through the thin overcast, their light glimmered in firefly threads on the glacier's towering wall. "Can I bring you anything?"

"Just some food." His white hair hung in strings around his face, which was bruised black and gulched with strain. Rudy wondered when he'd last eaten or slept. "I'm on my way."

Gil was tossing, breathing fast, in the narrow bed in Ingold's room, but she woke before Rudy could reach out to her with a spell of quiet. Her hand went to her sword and Rudy said quickly from the doorway, "It's me, spook," Summoning just enough witchlight so she could see him.

Though he doubted that any Guard would comment on his slipping out of the Keep to meet Ingold, a couple of Lord Ankres' warriors and one of Lord Sketh's were in the watchroom as well-sarcastically rehashing Lady Sketh's latest demands upon her hapless spouse-and Rudy didn't believe in handing anyone any more ammunition than they already had.

Gil rose and dressed without a word, while Rudy retreated to the workroom to wait for her. He stretched out his senses to pick up Melantrys' always hilarious imitations of Barrelstave's pontifications and Hogshearer's incessant whining, but it was clear even to him, from remarks the Sketh warrior made, that someone-probably Lady Sketh-had been twisting the interpretations of Ingold's motives and movements. "You got to admit, nine hundred people, near enough, died-and him the only one that survived?"

"He's a frigging wizard, you dolt. Of course he'd survive. And he's Ingold Inglorion. He'd survive if the Earth fell on his head." "Then why didn't he save the others?"

Gil emerged slinging on a thick sheepskin coat over her black uniform. From a cupboard she took a satchel of the bread and meat that she'd been sequestering from her own meager rations-with contributions from Rudy and the Icefalcon-for two days now.

Minalde had had her way, and placed all food and all seed in the Keep under guard; they were still fighting in Council about distribution, and Rudy knew for a fact that Varkis Hogshearer was the center of a spanking black-market trade. Rudy had checked and rechecked the hydroponics crypts-including Gil's suggestion about making sure the light there was full-spectrum-and it was obvious the yields were going to be too small to make much of a difference. Another thing to worry about. And Tir hadn't spoken to him since his return.

Only when they were out under the sable blanket of the night sky, Gil holding to Rudy's cloak, her drawn sword in her free hand, did Rudy ask, "You okay?" There was no need to whisper.

A trace of glamour had gotten them past the door Guards, and the wide-flung patrols had reported no sign of Raider or bandit anywhere near the Vale as of twilight. They had shut the Keep doors behind them, and in a weird way the Vale felt safe-safe in the moveless pall of death that lingered there still, like the oddly sculpted cones of unmelted snow remaining where the woods' shadows lay thick. No owl hooted, nor cried wolf, coyote, or any living thing. Their bodies had all been taken up by scavenging parties-stripped, broken, smoked, and stored. Rudy's mageborn eyes made out the black ranks of pine and cottonwood above the path, limp heaps of cold-killed summer vegetation rotting around their feet. "Nightmares." There was casual dismissal in Gil's voice. "About that thing in Penambra?"

"Yeah." Her tone was cool, the way it was when she was in pain and didn't want to talk about it. She'd left off covering the wound in her face. It still wasn't healing. "Some. No. I don't know." In the stillness he could hear the creak of her boot leather, the swish of the satchel against the hide coat, the faint scrunching of his own boots on the pine mast underfoot. Wind breathed a soughing sound from the trees and then fell still. Before them, St. Prathhes' Glacier stretched in a pearly rampart, nearly two hundred feet high, poised between the black teeth of the rocks.

"Jewels," Gil said finally, but she sounded puzzled. "I dreamed about... jewels."

"You mean a treasure?"

"No. It was inside a jewel. Things that looked like jewels." The steady pressure of her grip on his cloak altered as her hand moved a little, a fumbling gesture, as if trying to express something she wasn't sure how to envision.

"They hurt Ingold," she said after a long time. "These three... things. Made of jewels.

They were playing the flute to the thing that sleeps in the pool. Now and then things would crawl out of the slunch in the pit in front of them. Blood..." She frowned, like a sleeper disturbed by incongruity but unable to wake.

"Are they up at the Nest?" Rudy pitched his words to be no more than a murmur in the dark, so as not to bring her away from the borderlands where she could still see down into her dream.

"I don't think so."

"In the Keep, maybe?"

She thought about that for a long time. "They're in this jewel," she said at last. "It's full of mist, and there's a statue there without any eyes, staring ahead into the darkness. But there's light where they are, only it isn't really light."

Light that was not really light flickered ahead of Rudy, a wizard's signal among the mourning humps of the stones. Five years ago Gil had shown Rudy the trail over which Ingold had led her from the Nest in what had once been a city of the Dark, and that trail was gone now, swallowed by St. Prathhes' inexorable advance.

Great heaps of wanly glittering ice lay all along the glacier's feet, broken from the wall above, and all the ground between the Four Ladies and what had been the trail head lay under a sheet of water, milky in the night.

The miniature elfwood of dwarf alder that had grown hereabouts was dying. One end of the meadow was leprous with slunch.

"Ingold?" called Rudy softly. "You there, man?"