Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

"Sometimes a few months." The Icefalcon threw the knife at Rudy without turning his head; it stuck in the doorjamb six inches from his nose. "Sometimes a year. The grass is only just growing back, though yesterday I found mushrooms. The berries were killed in the blossom, the nuts in the bud. Can we serve you, shaman?" "You can quit doing that." Rudy slid the knife back to him across the floor. The Icefalcon scooped it into the top of his boot in one almost-invisible movement. "I need somebody to take a little walk with me."

Like Ingold, Rudy had long ago slipped into the habit of moving through the Keep by its most untenanted passageways, taking the unlighted, jerry-rigged backstairs, the long black stretches of corridor along the outer edges, in preference to the village-square bustle up closer to the Aisle. Now more than ever he relied on spells of misdirection to keep himself safe, Look-Over-There cantrips and the warnings of his own extended senses about who was around the corner.

For five years, he had known the Keep as a place of refuge. But now he felt uneasy in its darkness, troubled by the soft scurryings and scufflings he thought he heard around every corner, always wondering if it were his imagination, or whether in fact he smelled beneath the pong of wood smoke and humanity the queer, alien sweetness of the slunch.

Everywhere, he seemed to encounter the benign rotundity of the smiling Saint Bounty. And when he turned away, he felt on the back of his neck the gaze of unseen eyes.

The corner chamber where Gil and Minalde first found the scrying table was on the third level south, concealed by a trick of shadow.

The room still held an air of waiting, of expectation, like an indrawn breath. He doubted anyone had entered the place since he and Ingold and a small troop of Guards removed the table, rolling and manhandling it down to the workroom in the enclave of the Guards.

Rudy left the Icefalcon in the corridor and settled himself on the rough circle of stone on the floor where the table had been, holding the Cylinder in his hands. He breathed in and let it go, sinking his mind into the Cylinder, into the dimness of the room. Breathe, release. Reaching toward the power. Breathe, release. Memory. As always, he had the sensation of being somehow within the Cylinder, embedded like a bubble in the glass.

The Bald Lady was alone in her white marble belvedere, the blinds up, the tall windows open into the garden and the night. There was no light within the room, though beyond the matte cutouts of the trees just visible past the windows, lights of some kind could be seen: lamplight, glowstone-light, domestic fires. The reflected radiance winked and flickered in the gems on the armillary sphere that stood motionless, all its calculating arms and gears and springs and wheels stilled, suspended, as the stars were suspended like diamond fruit in the hollow velvet of the sky.

The chirping of crickets was clearly audible, and the deeper drum of cicadas. Carts clattered by with dimly jangling bells. In the garden, a nightingale sang. In the chamber someone moaned, very softly, a tiny whimper of pain, then the slow sob of ragged breath. The Bald Lady bowed her head.

Rudy was aware of the low cot on the other side of the room and the emaciated herd-creature lying on it. Its wide eyes were open, glazing; its breathing stenorous. Now and then its small hands picked at its mouth, its hair. It's dying, he thought.

He remembered a girl he'd dated-how old had she been? Fifteen? Sixteen? He'd ditched school and gone over to her parents' place to neck and found her pet parakeet dead of starvation in its filthy cage. No one in the household, it seemed, had thought to feed the poor thing for days. He hadn't remained to do what he'd gone there to do.

The herd- things ate moss, he remembered. Moss that didn't grow on the surface of the ground. At the foot of the cot were trays containing bread, mushes of fruit, pulps of meat, a vessel of milk; a vain attempt to find anything that would keep the poor, wretched creature alive.

While he watched it, the sluglike white chest sank and did not rise; the lard-colored face went slack. At the table, the Bald Lady looked back and closed her eyes, hearing, knowing. Pity, grief, compassion traced their lines in her face, and the unbearable knowledge that there was nothing that she could do. She had done everything. All for nothing...

After a moment she unwound the scarf from around her hands and dragged it again over the armillary, until the crystalline brightness of its gems was veiled, as if in a cloud of dust. Then she got to her feet and crossed to the window. She was still so young, standing there like a queen, but the youth was gone from her face, and Rudy knew that it never came back. The dark, strangely colored eyes were terrible to behold.

He had seen that look in Ingold's eyes. She had knowledge she would give anything to unknow, had seen what she would never unsee. Closing her eyes, she folded her fist into a white-and-blue hammer and beat it slowly, angrily, on the flawless white wall. As if that could change what she knew would come, could break the wall of what must be.

In time she returned to the table, and laying her head down side the veiled stars of the armillary sphere, she wept.

Swordsmen, Guardsmen, and other professional warriors are always on the lookout for new teachers and new techniques, and Ingold was a welcome addition to the staff of the St. Marcopius Gladiatorial Barracks. Once the men got used to Gil's presence-and the Alketch men were for the most part astonishingly shy of being less than completely dressed around women-she worked as a sparring partner, too, and learned a good deal about different methods of combat.

She learned, among other things, how to deal with men who resented the presence of an armed woman and felt called upon to teach her a lesson, but at least two-the Boar and a bouncy, perpetually cheerful Delta Islander called the Little Cat-welcomed the chance to learn about Guards' technique and would push her hard in a bout without malice.

Gil and Ingold had arrived at the tail end of the Hummingbird Games, dedicated to one of the thirty thousand obscure local Alketch saints and financed by Generalissimo Vair na Chandros to the tune of several hundred thousand silver crowns. There was a certain amount of talk about this in the noisy and garlic-smelling tenement behind the Arena, where they got a room through the good offices of the Boar, a big, inarticulate man with a mustache the size of a sheep. His ring-name in the c'uatal language, Bizjek-the monster red pigs of the deep southern jungles-was pronounced almost the same as the ha'al word for eggplant-bezji'ik-and within a day Gil and Ingold were calling him Eggplant, as everyone else had for years. Niniak, an eleven-year-old thief who shared the room next to theirs with several of his younger sisters and brothers, explained to Gil as they toted water from the nearest fountain one night, that Vair na-Chandros was trying to buy popularity after forcing marriage with the old Emperor's daughter Yori-Ezrikos. "She sent out letters to every other general and nobleman in the, realm offering marriage when her da and her brother croaked but na-Chandros, he just camped out with his army and told 'em he'd kill all comers." The boy shifted his chewing gum to the other side of his mouth. Everyone, Gil had found, chewed gum, except for the very high nobility, who smoked opium in quantities that would have embarrassed nineteenth century Chinese mandarins.

"Esbosheth, he came up with some second cousin or something of the old Emp who happened to be his nephew, and why didn't Yori-Ezrikos marry this brat and everybody would live happily ever after, and they been fighting ever since." He shrugged. He had been six at the rising of the Dark, Gil thought. He'd lived through four major wars, plague, and a fire that wiped out a good quarter of the city; he would not remember much of the world before that time. She felt ancient, and-with her nervousness about crowds, her increasing desire to remain out of sight, and her longing for the silence of the empty lands-extremely provincial.