Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

A faceless thing dropped from a false ceiling overhead and cut at him with a scythe; he didn't try to figure out who that had been. It bled, so it had to have been human once. It was like a crazyhouse, like a nightmare, plunging through darkness illuminated with the flash and glare of witchlight, lightning, fire. Gaboogoos only two or three feet tall skittered out of cells, flew at them like rubbery birds, clutching with improbable hands. Rudy slammed a cell door in front of them, threw lightning down the trapdoor of a stair to the level below to make sure the way was clear, then dropped down first, helping Alde after. Winding stairways, corridors, the slapping of feet and dragging gasp of breath through orifices that had ceased to have any resemblance to nostrils. Dodge, dodge, turn... Empty blackness and echoing halls, and the snail-shell curve of a stairway ceiling overhead. Rudy thought, I've been here.

He caught Alde's hand and they plunged down, heading for the crypts. The Bald Lady...

He couldn't remember which dream it had been, when he'd stood in this chamber, deep in the crypts now, had seen her descend this stair. But he remembered the wall niche she'd passed and knew that he'd never seen such a thing in his waking knowledge of the room.

Hoping his memory was correct-calling down blessings on Ingold, who had chivvied and all but beat him into improving his memory-he fell against the blank black wall, gasped out the spells of opening the Guy with the Cats had used And the niche opened.

Five feet by five feet and as high as the chamber's lofty ceiling, it was still there, hidden behind a panel that was invisible from the outside.

The panel slid shut behind them, enclosing them in the cold black chimney-no false ceiling, no shelves, no spiderwebs, even. He summoned witchlight, so that Alde would not be frightened, and saw that from the inside the panel had exactly the same appearance as the walls.

Then he thought, Idiot, what if there's a crack under the door? He didn't think it possible, but to make sure he scaled the light down to the barest thread of foxfire, just so that Minalde would not be sitting in the dark.

Whatever it had once contained was gone now, or maybe it hadn't been designed to hide record crystals or ur-food or weaponry. Maybe it had been designed for just this purpose: to conceal fugitives who knew magic, by the strongest spells possible, from people like St. Prathhes, with his cup and his lash and his crimson noose of spell-cord.

Maybe the wizards that raised the Keep knew they'd eventually need someplace to hide from people like him.

Minalde sank to the floor, hands pressed to her bellyChrist, don't go into labor on me now.!!!

He fell to his knees beside her, clutched her hands. "Alde, are you okay? What's the matter? Will you be all right`?"

She shook back her dark ocean of hair, a glint of exasperation in her eyes. "Of course I'm all right, Rudy. They just tried to kill me-tried to kill Linnet... tried to kill your child."

Rudy whispered, "Oh, Jeez." He hadn't thought of that. She managed a smile. "I'm not going into labor now, you know." He swallowed hard. "Uh-sure. Of course not. I didn't think you were. I was just-you know."

Their voices were barest whispers in the utter dark. Mage-sighted, he could see her smile widen, though she tried to conceal it. "I know." She was taking in her breath to speak again, but he pressed his fingers to her lips. Someone was in the crypts. Searching.

A scrape of boxes. The bumbly smack of bodies against the walls. Even through the wall he thought he could smell them, that nasty, sweetish stink that had been in Scala's sweat.

In time the squishy pad of their footfalls faded.

"Linnet can get down to the Aisle." His lips were touching her ear as he breathed the words, praying the gaboogoos-the mutants who were trying to transform into gaboogoos-didn't hunt by hearing.

He had no idea how they did hunt. He didn't think they could break the door, but didn't want to risk it. Radar in their heads? "The Guards will search for us. All we have to do is wait."

The silk of her hair tickled his nose as she nodded. In the enclosed space the scent of it, of sweetgrass and candlewax, permeated the air.

She sank against his shoulder. "Thank you," she whispered. "Thank you." Whether that was for rescuing her or for saving Linnet, who had vilified him, or what, he didn't know. Her arms went around his ribs and within moments she was asleep. She'd been seventeen when she bore Tir, he thought, the sweet, obedient daughter of the ancient House of Bes, married to the cold-faced hero she loved from afar. But for the deep creases in the corners of her eyelids, she didn't look much older than that now.

Maybe it was the memory of Eldor Andarion, the recollection that the House of Bes also carried its memories, that made Rudy dream what he did. Maybe the fact that the tiny chamber, like a crystal within the greater crystal of the Keep, was a place wrought of magic. Maybe he didn't dream at all. He was certainly aware that he listened all the while for the Guards' voices, for the clank of their weapons.

Curled together in the darkness, he dreamed-or saw or remembered-two figures within the glow of lamplight, little but shadows around them. A man and a woman-to his surprise he recognized the man as he who had ridden to the Keep in a welter of blood and spoken to the Bald Lady amid the webs of light and magic.

He understood then, suddenly, who the man was. Who it had to be.

"You'll be all right?" Dare of Renweth asked.

"I should be. If the High Lord knew, he'd have closed in on us before this. Since your father's rebellion, he's never trusted your line." Their hands, Rudy noticed, were unmarked by tattoos-he supposed this was a thing only wizards did.

"I know he still thinks the Dark Ones are something you and Brycothis have cooked up between you, to wrest our inheritance back. Did Brycothis reach Raendwedth Valley in safety?"

"With about half the wizards." Rudy had expected Dare of Renweth to be six feet tall and look like Gary Cooper-if anything, he bore a slight resemblance to Ernest Borgnine and was far older than Rudy had imagined him to be at the time of the Rising of the Dark.

Fortyish, stocky, and gray-haired: his own hair, too, though almost everyone else in that era, including Dare's lady, seemed to wear wigs. Hers was red, elaborately plaited, and caught up with white roses no bigger than a circle formed by a child's fingers. Past the centuries, Rudy could smell them, a pearly sweetness unlike the scent of any flower he had known.

"The fool," Dare went on softly. "He's been told. A thousand times he's been told they're our only hope."

"It's not easy to believe." She shook her head, the delicate braids swinging. He saw that under the wig she was older than her slim build and fresh complexion first showed, life and humor in the painted creases of her eyes. "I have trouble believing it, and I know you wouldn't lie-she wouldn't lie. But to say that these deaths aren't being caused by sickness, but by these... these things from under the earth, things that fly in darkness, that are invisible. It sounds like madness, Dare. Like an evil dream."

"Would that it were, Gisa." He took her hands, pressed them hard to his lips. "Would that it were. Bring them to Raendwedth," he went on. "Everyone you can gather, any who'll come. The fortress they're building should hold everyone, should contain food for all..."

"And that's what the High Lord fears." She rose from her chair-a chair Rudy could only dimly glimpse, but the shape of it was as unfamiliar, as alien to him, as their simple, gauzy clothes. "Be careful, my prince."

They kissed, gently, with an old passion whose heat had settled to a steady, cosmic core that would outlast darkness, death, and time: lives shared, children birthed and raised and set on their own roads, minds and hearts inextricably entwined. They were people nothing could separate.