Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

She should talk, Rudy thought-anybody that stout these days had to be a food-thief herself.

And then, as Minalde strode out of the group with genuine fury in her eyes, he thought, Oh, crikey.Shocked, he met the big teenager's red-faced gaze and realized what it meant, that she'd seen him through illusion and stealth. That she'd seen Ingold. This is who we've been watching for, these past five years. This is the next mageborn in the Keep.

Book Two

The Blind King'S Tomb

Rudy saw the Bald Lady again, the night after Ingold left the Keep. Her face was clearer to him in this dream, perhaps because he'd gazed into the crystal heart of the scrying table with his hand on one of the two record stones that held her images.

Like all those forgotten mages-the Guy with the Cats; the Dwarf whose stubby fingers sparkled with a festival of jewels as she worked her incomprehensible cantrips with water and flowers; Black Bart, solemn and wise with a twinkle in his golden eyes-Rudy had come to know her well, and he wasn't surprised to find himself dreaming about her again.

In the earlier of the several crystal images, she was young, and in the others, only middle aged. It was strange to see her now so old. It was like viewing all the films of Katharine Hepburn, assuming that there were no changes in hairstyle to contend with, and that somewhere between The Philadelphia Story and The Lion in Winter Ms. Hepburn had visited Hell.

The Bald Lady was still unshakably beautiful, descending the long obsidian stair through clouds of glowstone light; still wrapped in her night-colored cloak, her bald head held at a proud angle; still weeping, soundless, giving nothing away as she walked.

They were deeper in the Keep this time. Stone tanks lined the walls of the crypt where Rudy stood, water casting a crystalline moir on the ceilings and across the strangely angled metal faces of machines wrought of wire and glass and what looked like hanging threads of tiny jeweled beads.

Unusual, for the stark rectilineal design of the Keep, there were niches let into the wall of this chamber, four or five feet deep and the height of the tall ceiling; in a corner Rudy saw the black stone drum of a scrying table. Probably to read the tech manuals, he thought.

She touched the machines, one by one, as she passed them, as if drinking in their soft-glowing power through her long fingers, crossed to trail her hand over the scrying table's surface before turning toward the crypt's inner door. There was pain and defeat in her shoulders, grief unbearable in the line of her back.

Who are you? Rudy cried, and dreamlike found himself unable to make a sound. In any case, the Bald Lady did not turn her head. Where are you going? Where did you hide the answers?

He reached out to catch her arm but could not touch her. The white glowstone light flickered in a tear as it slid down her face, and she pressed out of sight again into darkness.

The first village of the Alketch lands that Gil and Ingold entered burned to the ground within hours of their arrival. Gil gathered that such a thing wasn't uncommon these days in the territory that lay between the Penambra hinterland and the Kingdom of D'haalac-Ar, northernmost of the Alketch realms. But it wasn't an auspicious start. "It's the end of the world," said the steward of the largest landholder in town, leaning in the doorway of the kitchen yard with an armload of shirts gathered to her bosom-she doubled as seamstress and brew-mistress of the house as well. "First it was the Dark, sent by the Lord of the Demons to divide the godly from those ungodly in their hearts. Since that time, it seems that demons have been loose in the land, what with the Golden Sickness, and famine, and the old Emperor and his son both dying and his daughter turning rebel and disobedient." She shook her head wearily. "That has to be the work of demons, too." Gil guessed her age at forty or so, though it was difficult to tell because her hair was hidden by the caps and veils customarily worn by women in the south. She looked sixty, with the slackness of flesh of one who had been fat five years before. "Now it's all armies on the march, Lord na-Chandros and General Esbosheth with his young king, as if him saying so could make the prince's concubine's little brother heir... pfui! And the bishop stripping the land of every standing man for troops, as if poor Father Crimael didn't have worries enough." Father Crimael, Gil had deduced, was the head of the household, not only priest of the Straight God but the wealthiest man in the village.

After five years of seeing no one but the population of the Keep and its settlements-with occasional visits from peripatetic bands of murderers-Gil found it strange to encounter whole communities of people she'd never met.

She hadn't realized she had become so insular. From the bench where she sat scouring rust from the harness buckles of every piece of tack in the stables, she found herself marveling at the freestanding house of soft local brick and pink-washed plaster, even as she had found herself subconsciously offended at the fact that the humans of the household shared living space with pigs and cows as well as the usual Keep fauna of cats, dogs, chickens, and rodents.

Odd to smell pepper and cinnamon in the steam that floated from the brick cookhouse on the other side of the court. Odder still to realize that not only was every female over the age of nine veiled, but to see their stares, to hear the catcalls and comments they had shouted at her because she was not.

The Dark had been here, that Gil could see. There were houses in the village that bore signs of extensive repair, and from conversation Gil understood that no one went out-of-doors after twilight for any reason whatsoever. But the scourge here and in all the Alketch lands was the political anarchy that had erupted in the wake of the Dark's rising.

The Golden Sickness had followed that-she and Ingold had passed the rock cairns of the mass graves on the outskirts of the village that morning-fueled by years of famine as warm-weather crops like rice and millet failed.

The steward's dress and zgapchinthe sacklike mob cap of country women-were faded to wan echoes of their original green and yellow, and the stables Ingold was currently cleaning would have accommodated a score of horses and cattle but bore signs of occupancy by only a few of each.

When Gil had suggested to Ingold that they earn food and shelter for the night by healing, as they'd done in the only other inhabited settlement they'd found, five days' walk north in the swamps of the delta, he'd shaken his head. "We're in the Alketch now, my child," he said softly. "Even herbalists are looked upon askance, be they not priests of the Church."

The only spells he had used since coming out of the forested highlands of the border had been those of concealment from the armed bands, sometimes hundreds strong, that had passed them, harness jingling in the dry heatless afternoons, and the Spell of Tongues that enabled her to understand the gummy, circumlocutory borderland patois. In the negotiations for lunch, the priest-landlord's steward evidently hadn't even been aware that Gil wasn't using the ha'al tongue.

They were a brown race, here in D'haalac-Ar, with the blue eyes of the Wathe or sometimes the silvery irises of the true Alketch, and in the town square Gil had seen children with the white Alketch hair. According to Ingold, the color bar was stringently observed in the more civilized lands around Khirsrit, both by blacks and by whites. From behind the parched yellow rocks yesterday she had seen a marching force of them, gray eyes startling in the coal-dark faces, long plumes of white hair-or raven- black, there didn't seem to be anything in between-gathered up through the tops of red leather helmets, like panaches moving in the wind.