Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

"As much of me as is left after coming over the glacier." What Rudy thought was one of the Four Ladies moved, and the frost he thought he'd seen dislimned itself into wispy hair and an unkempt beard. Ingold levered himself to his feet using his staff. Fingers and palms were bandaged, the rags that wrapped them crusted with blood.

"Did you bring food?"

"You want an appetizer first, or the salad?" Gil handed him the satchel.

"Appetizer, please." Ingold limped painfully between the rocks, leading them to a hollow under the shoulder of a granite dome.

He was soaked to the thighs from wading through the lake of meltwater; streaks of mud and niter mottled his robe. The hollow was about the size of a restaurant booth and only three or four feet high, and from its entrance the whole of the Vale could probably be seen by day. As it was, only the faintly glowing beds of slunch stood out in the darkness, islands in an iron sea.

The feeble witchlight on the tip of Ingold's staff brightened somewhat, to illuminate the little chamber. The wizard sank to the ground and opened the bundle Gil had brought. "I do hope there's an entire ox in here, with peppercorns and just the slightest suspicion of garlic," he said in a hopeful voice.

"Darn!" Gil smacked her forehead with the heel of her hand, as if she'd only just noticed, "you turned into a person again! I brought stuff for a falcon!"

"Gillifer, my dear," Ingold sighed with feigned patience, and held up the few scraps of what looked like road-kill, ''you really need to write these things down."

"What kind of wine you want with that, man?" Rudy ducked low under the slope of the ceiling, dropped crosslegged at the old man's side and uncorked the small bottle of what was called Blue Ruin around the Keep.

"All of it in the entire world." There was a time of silence.

At length Rudy asked, "The Dark tell you anything?"

The wizard's eyes glinted under scarred lids. "I didn't telephone them, you know." He leaned his shoulders carefully against the cold, dimpled rock of the wall, wiped the last bits of grease from his fingers, and examined the picked bones regretfully. Gil had managed to cadge an apple, one of the last from the previous winter. The wizard had devoured it core and all.

He sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose, as if to massage away the ache of the old wounds. "It was more like... oh, sorting through diaries or looking through the record crystals, trying to piece together information for which there is no context. Like dreaming someone else's dreams."

Rudy said nothing. He had gone down into a deserted Nest once before the Dark Ones had departed from this world, and two or three times afterward, and the images he had carried back with him were those of endless caverns of limestone sheathed in the withered remains of brown moss, strewn with the bones of the Dark Ones' pitiful herds.

Ceilings, walls, stalactites and stalagmites had all been polished silken by the crawling feet of untold numbers of the Dark, the rock discolored into a thousand hues of yellow and green and blue by the action of their body acids. He didn't like to think of the old man's mind leaving his body to walk into the places where the shapeless ones had left their memories.

Didn't like the thought of what form those dreams might take.

Almost as if speaking to himself, Ingold went on, "Part of the problem is that those we seek could not exist in the same world as the Dark. Like the Dark-or like the Dark in the end became-they were travelers, Void-walkers. As the Dark Ones eventually moved on to another world, so these came here, long before either the Dark Ones or humankind arose. The world was cold then, bitter, iron cold, nearly waterless and locked under sheets of ice miles thick. Strange things moved over the surface of its ground, or swam weightless in its air. Things that crystallized out of its few pools and streams or grew like sponges from the rock. A cruel world, but it suited Them."

He frowned, gazing out at the glimmering precipice of the ice and the dim speckle of reflected witchlight on the thread of the stream.

"How long ago?" Rudy's voice was almost a whisper, and Ingold shook his head.

"The Dark didn't know. The Travelers came and had their eons of dominion, and sank first into sleep and then into death when the Dark Ones' furthest ancestors were no more than grubs clinging to the hot volcanic vents on the ocean floors. The stars were different then, the sun weak behind a universe of dust."

His voice, rough-textured and deep, seemed far away, speaking of those dreams that were not his dreams, as if he were barely aware of the two friends who sat at his side. Perhaps, Rudy thought, he was not.

"This I... saw in dreams, lying on the rocks in the darkness. I don't even know whether what I saw was true or only what the Dark believed to have taken place. The awareness of the Dark is not like the awareness of humankind.

"The Dark were aware that the final remnant of all those things still existed, deep within caverns wrought of ice, beneath the bones of an eternal mountain. The Dark hated cold and kept their distance, but they heard the songs of Those Who Wait."

He shook his head, unfocused, gazing still into the alien dream.

"They sang of waiting, to the music of a chiten flute. Eternal sureness, treading a black eternal road, waiting for the world to become what it had been once again." Rudy shifted uncomfortably on his hunker-bones. Wind made cat-feet on the milky glacier lake and brought the smell of ice and high places. "And that's happening?" "The current cold cycle has been enough to wake them up, anyway." Gil's voice chipped into the dense texture of the Dark Ones' dreams, her long, thin fingers twisting dark curls away from the unhealed mess of her cheek. Ingold's eyes opened, bright and present once again. "For whatever reason, Those Who Wait have decided to quit waiting."

"Gil's sort of figured out what's happening," Rudy said, and quickly outlined her theory of terraforming. "We think the gaboogoos have to be growing out of the slunch," he said at the end. "They disregard magic, the same way magic doesn't touch the slunch. Gil thinks that after animals eat it, slunch starts to metabolize them from the inside. But why the critters are mutating into the forms they are is beyond me." "Is it?" Ingold blinked at him, appearing not in the slightest surprised. "I suppose it would be." He fell silent then, hands folded before his mouth, witch-blue shadows deepening in the lines of his face as he gazed back into the night, as if in the blackness he could see again the Dark Ones' dreams. "You knew about that?" Rudy demanded, miffed.

"Of course I knew it. I saw it," Ingold said. "In the vision. In the Nest. I saw it, but it seemed... without explanation. Insane. I can't tell you how pleased I am to discover that I'm not mad. Trust you, Rudy, and you, my Gil." He put out his hand and touched her wrist, and Rudy, who was looking in that direction, saw their eyes meet-saw the old man freeze. Ingold didn't flinch, but his eyes flared wide as he looked with shock and hurt and astonishment into Gil's face. Rudy didn't know what Ingold saw there, as Gil returned the wizard's gaze. In the shadows her eyes were uncertain, maybe doubting what Ingold detected as well, but he saw her mouth alter, and she turned her face quickly aside. In Ingold's gaze there was, for a moment, only shock, as if he had stumbled upon some new and dreadful knowledge. For a moment, before the wizard also looked away, Rudy thought he could see that shock followed by a grief past bearing, and bitterest pain.

Gil said nothing. Her stillness was like a bent bow whose arrow aimed at a human heart. Maybe, Rudy thought-he did not know why-maybe her own. Ingold drew breath to speak, but let the words leak away unvoiced. Whatever they were, they hung on the air, they and whatever he saw or thought he saw in Gil's face. It was a terrible silence, and Rudy, rather hastily, blithered into the breach. "Uh-so where are these guys waiting? The Dark tell you that?" There was a sleight-of-hand, a shift of expression, as if Ingold whisked away whatever he was feeling behind exasperation: "The Dark didn't tell me anything. They're not down there, you know." Rudy thought there was relief in his voice. "But yes. I know."