Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

"If Gil's with the old boy, he can't be too bad off," Janus pointed out.

As they sprang up the shallow black steps of the Keep, Janus turned back to scan the woods, shifting his sword in his bandaged hand; the wound he'd taken three weeks ago from a mutated dire wolf hadn't even begun to heal. This wasn't like the rip in Gil's face, attributable to some gaboogoo venom. Nobody's wounds were healing these days.

The dark line of hemlocks that fringed the high woods shuddered suddenly, shook and parted. Rudy gasped, "Mother pusbucket!" and Janus only said, "Pox rot it, but it had to happen sooner or later. Get inside. We'll take care of it." Melantrys was already yelling for the rest of the Guards.

The thing plowing down the slope, head lolling and limbs and pseudolimbs churning the white slunch to scraps and powder, was a mutated mammoth.

Scala Hogshearer was in the workroom when Rudy got there. The Guards' watchroom was a flurry of activity as he passed through it, men and women catching up weapons, heading fast for the door.

He saw the girl's shadow moving back and forth in the dim lamplight that was the chamber's only illumination, heard her furious sobbing in the corridor, and at the sound, his own anger rose in him, a poisonous, breathtaking heat.

He stopped in the doorway, fighting to keep calm.

She'd ripped to pieces the parchment on which he'd been remaking the Black Book of Lists; had emptied boxes, scattered and broken the ivory rune sticks, smashed the porcelain scrying bowl and ground its pieces to dust under her wooden heels. The cupboard in which he locked all the truly precious stuff bore signs of ferocious battering, the hinges and lock surrounded by white, ripped wood where she'd tried to hack them free of the doors.

There was blood under her fingernails from the effort. She was clinging to the edge of the table as if on the verge of being sick, her dark, dirty hair hanging lank around a face bloated with tears.

"I can't do magic!" she screamed at him when he finally stepped through the door.

She picked up his astrolabe--or what was left of it-and smashed it again and again into the surface of the table, the edge of the dial leaving huge scars in the wood. "I can't do magic anymore! I tried! I tried!"

She flung the metal circle into the corner and hurled herself at Rudy, pounding his chest with her fists as he grabbed her wrists and held her off. Even as heavy as she'd gotten recently, she was less strong than he expected.

"Scala, you can," he said gently, a little surprised at his own patience. Part of him wanted to smash the spoiled little bitch's head up against the wall, but that wasn't the part in control. Son of a gun, he thought detachedly, in the back of his mind. I must be growing up...

"Whoa," he said, as she began to hack at his shins. "Whoa, whoa, whoa... Take it easy, kiddo."

Her anger wasn't personal. And underneath it, underneath the fear of losing the attention of important people like Lady Sketh, was the horror of a loss that only he, of all those in the Keep, could comprehend.

"You're not teaching me right!" Her voice was a hysterical wail. "You're not teaching me what I need to know! Daddy says you have to! Daddy says he'll make you sorry if you don't! Daddy says-"

"Do you believe I'm not teaching you?"

"I can't do it!" She pulled against him, the unexpected reversal breaking his grip. She staggered back against the edge of the table, slapping at him and missing. Her face was a pulp of tears and snot, looking almost black in the dim, wavery glow of the lamps.

"I tried! I tried all morning! I've done all your stupid exercises and your stupid meditation and everything you said and I can't do magic at all! I used to! I used to and now I can't!"

She blundered past him, shoving him out of her way. He heard her smacking into the walls of the corridor as she fled, sobbing, into the dark.

Rudy made a step to go after her, then gave it up. "Swell," he sighed. "So now I get a visit from Daddy. Just what I needed to top off the day. How lucky can a guy be?" He rubbed his face, the ache of sleeplessness in his bones. Ingold, he thought. There had to be some way of learning what had happened to him. Of learning if he were still alive. He stopped to gather the torn parchments, the broken pieces of the ivory sticks. At least she hadn't burned the parchments this time.

He paused, the parchment in his hand.

Anger? he wondered. Or something else? The voices of the ice-mages whispering in her mind?

Are you saying my girl isn't a wizard?

His mind replayed the scene. Scala falling. The gaboogoos bounding past her, tripping over her, while she clutched her hair and screamed.

They only attack the mageborn, Thoth had said.

"Rudy? Master Wizard?"

Tir was standing in the doorway.

He still wore his cool formality, the stiff pose of distance, hands folded over his belt knot. Rudy straightened up, brightened the witchlight that flickered on the wall spikes, and inclined his head.

This will pass, he told himself, to quiet the hurt in his heart at the boy's wary aloofness. Whether he ever ceases to blame you for the death of his friends, this coldness will one day pass.

"What can I do for you, Tir?" He brought up a chair-by the look of it, the one Scala had used to pound on the cupboard doors. Tir gazed around him at the carnage, but didn't comment. He'd probably passed Scala in the hall.

"Rudy, there's people disappearing." He climbed up into the chair and sat with feet dangling. Like nearly everyone else in the Keep, he'd lost a lot of flesh, and in the frame of his black hair, his face seemed all eyes.

"Disappearing?" His fears for Ingold-his terror that he'd be the one, now, who had to deal with the ice-mages vanished before the memory of the locked doors on the fifth level, the stink of the newly deserted rooms.

The child licked his lips, gathering his thoughts. "I didn't think... You know how sometimes you don't see somebody for a couple days, like they're doing something for their mamas or something?" His voice was soft and scared. "But I got Linnet to make me a calendar, and I marked it, every day, who I saw and who I didn't."

He's too young for this, Rudy thought, looking into the lupine darkness of those eyes.

Too young to have to deal with this.

"There's people disappearing, Rudy. They really are. Brikky Gatson, and Noop Farrier, and Noop's papa and his papa's brother Yent and Melleka Biggar, and Rose White and both her brothers and their mama, too. Those were all the ones I started with. I hadn't seen them and I've been keeping marks for three weeks, Rudy. Old Man Wicket and Rab Brown and a couple of others, they stopped coming around, too. Only I didn't want anybody to know I've been asking about how long it's been." "Fifth level north," Rudy said softly. "All of them except the Farriers, and they're fourth level north, right under the Biggars."

"And there's a stairway that leads from the Biggars' warren down to there. They go up and down all the time. It can't be plague because you're a Healer," the boy went on. "The other Healers would have told you, or Mama. And nobody called the Guards or the Hunters to go look for them in the woods, and nobody talked to Mama about them being lost or asked you to find them with your crystal, did they?"

"No," Rudy said softly. "Nobody asked." He fished out his crystal, though he knew he wouldn't be able to see anything. The slunch within the Keep, magnified and concentrated by the Keep's walls, held inside the malice of the ice-mages. In any case it was sometimes difficult to see gaboogoos by crystal.

"Old Man Wicket, the Noops, the Whites," he said, half to himself. "Koram Biggar's the head man in that section of the Keep. He can't not know. He can't not have seen.. ."