Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

He thought of them together, in his vision of the unfinished Keep; the Bald Lady looking up with despair in her eyes, the bloodied, middle-aged warrior with his long hair hanging over his shoulders, who had just, Rudy knew somehow, lost everything he had.

All this will pass away, she had said, and leave us with nothing. I'm sorry. "Rudy?"

The tiny voice behind him almost didn't register. The words In a minute, Ace formed on his lips and froze there as he realized that what had once been a completely commonplace communication was now fraught with meaning. He drew his breath and let the images within the Cylinder fold away on themselves. Let his thoughts settle and return home. Another breath, for good measure. Then he turned in his chair. Small and clean in his shabby jersey and patched jerkin, Tir came into the workroom. His azure eyes were uncertain as they considered Rudy, and by the lines at the corners of his small mouth, he wasn't finding this easy. He was angry still and struggling to put it aside.

He carried a bundle in his hands. "What can I do for you, Prince Altir?"

Instinct told Rudy not to assume anything about Tir's visit, and Tir relaxed the smallest fraction at the formality of Rudy's attitude.

I understand you don't want to be my friend anymore and I respect your choice, Rudy said, looking into the eyes of the child who had been like a son to him. Tir's voice was stiff. "Rudy, I found this today in one of the rat traps. I thought you had to see it."

He set the bundle on the scrying table in front of Rudy and climbed onto the other stool to unwrap it. Rudy could see by the way the small hands worked at the dirty washrags that Tir didn't want to touch the thing inside. "Yikes!" Rudy drew back hastily from what was revealed. "What the...?"

Tir was watching him with grave eyes. A king's eyes, Rudy thought. A king who guessed his people were in danger and was checking the problem out with the local mage in spite of the fact that that mage had been responsible for the deaths of all his friends.

The rat was the size of a small terrier, and of a shape no rat had any business to be-a shape Rudy had never seen in a lifetime that had encompassed Wilmington wrecking yards and cities choked with the bodies of slain men.

His mind clicked to Gil's thin hands, scraping and picking at the collection of sticky and deformed bones. To the Icefalcon, showing him the slunch beds in the woods and the tracks around them. To the rubbery wastes of sickly herbiage that plowed in the twilight and the revolting sense of things bouncing and scuttling around their verges.

He whispered, "Friggin' hell."

Tir looked up at him, the distance he had set between them momentarily put aside in their shared responsibility for the Inhabitants of this small, beleaguered domain. Rudy saw in his frightened face that he'd guessed already what was going on; that he was hoping he was wrong. But he wasn't.

Knowing it to be true, Rudy said, "There's slunch growing in the Keep."

Two girls from the fifth floor north found it: a deserted cell in one of the many waterless areas near the back wall, with slunch covering two walls and most of the ceiling. Rudy was interested to note, brightening the magelight above his head as Janus of Weg ordered his Guards to scrape the stuff down with shovels, that the organism had attached itself only to the partitions of wood and plaster that long postdated the building of the Keep.

"Pull down that ceiling," Janus ordered, squinting up at the rude beams that indicated a storage area jerry-rigged overhead. "Those walls have to come out as well. Biggar, send a couple of your boys down to the crypts for barrels..." "On your authorization," the head of the Biggar clan said quickly. "I'm not having that thief Enas saying those barrels are charged to me."

"Seya, go with them," said Janus, who since the minor coup of the Keep Council had become very tired of details like this. "Tell Enas I'm asking for them and we've got authorization from Her Majesty. That suit you?" he added sarcastically, and the People's Representative of the fifth level north drew himself up, a greasy-haired, repellent man with a fleshiness sharply in contrast to the rather gaunt look that most of the Guards, and most of the people in the Keep had these days. "There's no need to be abusive," Biggar said. "I just like to keep these things clear." "Tear down the whole thing." Janus had already turned back to his Guards. "Even what doesn't have the stuff on it. Rudy, what do we do? Burn it?" Rudy straightened up. He'd been on one knee, studying the rat droppings that strewed the floor. Their size and configuration gave him a queasy feeling about what must be scuttling around the Keep.

"Ingold's got enough sulfur in the crypts to make vitriol." He came back over to the Guards, brushing off his hands. CaIdren, the tallest, snagged a ceiling beam with a billhook and threw his weight on it; the whole thing sagged, and Rudy ducked aside as the skeletons and droppings of rats, plus an unspeakable rummage of disintegrated baskets, cracking brown rags, old dishes, and featherbeds rotted with rodent pests and insects came pouring down. Rudy could see slunch growing on the upper side of the false ceiling as well. "What a Christly mess.''

The Guards moved by torchlight and glowstone through the filth level and the fourth, their numbers augmented by the warriors and livery servants of Lords Ankres and Sketh and assorted volunteers.

Rudy didn't like this latest development, because of a suspicion that was growing in his mind, but when he voiced his desire to limit the search to the Guards, Lord Sketh retorted, "So, have you decided to rule the Keep by yourself now, Lord Wizard?" Rather than subject Alde to yet another round of hair-pulling among the factions, he had held his peace.

But later in the day he spoke of it to her, when they stood together in the cold twilight on the Hill of Execution, watching the Guards pour oil of vitriol on the pitful of slunch and the still squirming pieces of the one gaboogoo that Biggar's mother-in-law Blocis Hump had cornered and cut up in a back corridor on the fifth. "Remember all those shufflings and whispering behind locked doors up in that area of the fifth that was supposed to be deserted?" he said quietly, turning his face aside from the acrid smoke that hissed up from the burning. "And what Gil said about not liking the color of Saint Motherless Bounty's robes?"

"I asked Maia about Saint Bounty," Alde said. "He said there is no such saint-not in the canon, anyway. But small villages did have their local saints, whom no one else had ever heard of."

"Maybe," Rudy said grimly. He made a move to lean his shoulders against the two iron pillars that crowned the hill, but at the last moment avoided their touch. He had been chained between them one cold winter night, and left for the Dark Ones-it was a memory that lingered.

"But I had another look at those statues, and I figured out what it is Gil didn't like about the color of Saint Bounty's robes. They're the same color as slunch. And the stuff he's sitting on, that looks like spaghetti or pig entrails or whatever? It also looks like slunch."

He cast a quick glance around, to see if any of the Ankres henchmen were near, and then, taking Minalde's hand, led her down the hill toward the narrow path that led around the south wall of the Keep and on to the higher ground, the orchards and the graveyard in the rear.

"I think there are people in the Keep who are raising slunch and eating it."

Alde drew back with an exclamation of disgust. "How could-" She stopped herself. In the five years of Gil and Ingold's career as scavengers in the decaying cities of the Realm, they had brought back tales of things far worse. Instead she said, "Janus and the Guards searched."