Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

"Precisely what I am doing." He straightened up and turned his head to survey the glassy black monolith of the Keep, visible through the trees. Men and women toiled in the fields, the lack of draft animals painfully evident.

Apportionment of Yoshabel the 'Only Mule in the Vale' was another matter much discussed in Council. Blue haze still hung heavy around the walls, from the smoking fires-even half-spoiled meat was still being brought up from Wormswell and Manse by the exhausted scavenging crews.

"Deserting them... for what could very well be a madman's fancy. Just because I'm able to work magic doesn't mean I'm not subject to hallucinations, you know," he added, seeing the look of uncertainty on Rudy's face. "Or deception by the Dark." ''Uh..."..

"Somebody concerted those attacks on me," Gil said quietly. "And on you. Somebody is... talking to me. Whispering in my head."

Rudy saw between them that understanding again, blue gaze meeting blue, seeing the same thing. Silence hung on the air, deepening with unsaid words. At last Ingold broke it, softly. "My child, were there a way I could... do without you on this journey... I would. As it is..."

"You can tell," she said, inaudible, her face like marble. "Can't you?" If it hadn't been Gil, Rudy would have sworn that tears silvered her eyes. "You can see it."

He looked away and nodded. "Yes. I-''

She went on, reaching out to touch his hand, her voice very low. "If I knew how to fight it, I would, Ingold. I swear I would. But the dream comes back to me, telling me to kill you."

Rudy gulped, shocked, and Ingold raised his head quickly, looking again into her face, almost as if he had expected her to say something different. She didn't see, for her own attention seemed to be fixed suddenly on her hands where they laced over the hilt of her killing-sword.

She only went on, her fingers probing at her wrist bones again, "I swear it won't happen. If it gets too bad, I'll let you know, so you can tie my hands at night. I'm all right in the daytime. But I've looked at it six ways from Tuesday and I think I need to be with you."

Still she didn't meet his eyes, and her voice was quick and a little breathless, as if this were something she'd memorized beforehand. "I'd stay here if I could. It's going to be hard, and sometimes I wonder if I'm this sure you'll need me because They want me to be. Because They want me to be the one standing behind you with a sword in my hand. But I swear to you I'll die before I'll let you come to harm." Ingold was silent for a long time, studying her-two or three times Rudy saw him draw in breath to speak, but in the end he did not. At length he put a hand under her chin and turned her eyes to meet his.

"No, my dear," he said softly. "I will always need you." He started to say something else; again Rudy had the sense of words stopped on his lips, and when he went on

again, it was very different from the original. "Do you feel able to make the journey?" Gil drew a deep breath, squaring her shoulders. Rudy saw suddenly by the tight lines around her lips that she was far from well. "I don't think either of us has a choice about that."

"No," he said. "No, I don't think we do. Rudy..."

He turned to clasp Rudy's hands, the warm, rough strength of his grip reassuring. "I wish I could help you," he said quietly. "Even if I'm not insane-and I have no assurance that the visions I've seen and those that plague Gil's dreams have the slightest connection with the truth-I'm aware that I'm doing you perhaps the greatest disservice of my life, but... as Gil says, I don't think any of us has any choice." Rudy sighed. "And I wish I didn't agree with you, pal, but I do. And anyway, you know the spook's right more times than either of us."

Gil gave him the finger; Ingold smiled. The pain in his eyes did not lessen, and Rudy wondered suddenly what other vision might have come to the old man in the Nest of the Dark, what other truth he had learned that had fallen into place-Rudy could swear had fallen into place-when he touched Gil's hand.

"Two things are vital," Ingold said. "First, that you find these seeds, these earth-apples, that Tir spoke of."

"Hell, yes." Gil swiped at her eye with quick fingers bruised from sword practice, all her scholastic coldness upon her like armor again. "Potatoes completely revolutionized food production in the seventeenth century when they hit Ireland and Germany from the New World. If we can get hold of them we'll be home free." "More important even than that," Ingold went on, "is that you learn, as soon as possible, how the gaboogoos have gotten-or are getting-into the Keep. Even if I'm not mad, I'm not sure that I'm leaving you the easier task. Whatever waits for me in the ice beneath the Mother of Winter holds the key to what's happening here at the Keep. Of that I'm certain. But whether you'll be able to survive, whether you'll be able to protect the Keep and its people..."

"We'll get along," Rudy promised with an optimism he did not feel, and in Ingold's returning smile he saw that the old man wasn't fooled one bit. "Maybe things'll be tough here, but we'll kluge something together somehow. If you and I swapped places, I'd be sushi."

Ingold stepped close and embraced him as the son he had almost become, and Rudy had to fight not to think about what the hell would happen if the old man bought it down south.

"You watch your butt, man," he said again as they stepped apart. "With any luck, by the time you get back the whole Keep'll be ass-deep in french fries." If Tir ever speaks to me again, he thought bitterly, remembering how Alde's maid Linnet had clung to Tir's hand, had glared her hatred at Rudy for not being there to somehow save her child.

He watched the sturdy old vagabond, the thin ramshackle woman, hoist their packs to their backs and move like wraiths into the twilight flutter of aspen-shadow that surrounded the rocks of the Tall Gates, and followed them with a spell of inconspicuousness.

There was a faint oath as the watcher on the gates dropped his spear and bent down to pick it up while they crossed open ground; then Rudy turned back toward the black-walled fortress shining in the midst of the brown meadows, the only place he had ever really felt was his home.

What if Alde goes into labor before he gets back? he wondered desperately. What if there's another ice storm? Or some other cockamamie thing I don't have the experience to watch out for? What if the gaboogoos turn out to be way weirder than

even Ingold thinks? What do I do then?

It was true Thoth had said that Brother Wend and Ilae-who must be nineteen or twenty by now, and Rudy shook his head at the thought: the girl he remembered was a child of fourteen-were on their way, but what if something went wrong? All I got to say is, there better be some kid in the Keep I can start teaching, because if anything happens, we're toast.

He turned and looked back toward the crowding, grayyellow shoulders of rock that guarded the pass, the crumbling stone watchtowers and remnants of wall visible among the trees. There was no sign of the old wizard or of the woman who would follow him, Rudy knew, to the end of creation.

He was almost at the Keep when a spate of people poured out of its great doors, as if the Keep Council had collected all its family members and minor supporters for a rally: Barrelstave and the Skeths, Koram Biggar and his squad of grubby fifth-level chicken farmers, Maia and Hogshearer and a lot of Hornbeams and Ankres' men-at-arms, all shouting, all waving their fists, all furious about something... Screw this, Rudy thought and stopped in his tracks, deepening the cloak of illusion that had drifted around him and Gil all the way across the valley. I don't need this now. Have your agent call my agent.

But instead of parting to swarm past on either side, the mob stopped, too, and a shrill voice from within it screamed, "There he is!" Varkis Hogshearer's daughter Scala lumbered up to him, heavy chin jutting and malice in her squinty dark eyes. She yelled over her shoulder to her father, "I saw him meet old Ingold! I saw Ingold and Gil-Shalos run away down the pass together with a lot of food, like a couple of thieves..."