Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

The spilled alcohol made the cell smell like a taproom. Ingold reached to touch her wrist, but his hand fell short, dangling from the bench with the weight of the chains. "I'm coming with you." She didn't even look around at him as she spoke. "That rather depends on where I'm going." She heard the jingle and slide of metal links, leaden rune plaques as he tried to sit, and the tearing gasp of his breath with the effort.

Her eyes were still on the captain, the lieutenant behind him, and the others, counting who bore the signs of the eaters of slunch and who looked clean. Working out who to go for first, once she killed the captain and got his sword. Through her teeth she said, "No, it doesn't."

The captain said, "The bishop has sent for you, old man. Give us trouble and the girl dies."

"My dear captain." Rather carefully, but with a perfectly steady hand, Ingold was pulling straight the rags of his blood-crusted robes, as well as he could under the drag of the chains. "Although I assure you of my complete cooperation, I don't believe I could make any trouble for you if I tried."

"Ingold, where are you? Pick up the phone, man!"

Cold mountain shadow fell across him, the sky above the Hammerking insanguinated with garish light. Downslope, near the track left by the mammoth that morning, the Icefalcon and Melantrys stood guard again. All they needed, Rudy thought, was black suits and sunglasses.

"You gotta answer me," he whispered, hopeless. "You gotta hear this. I know the shape of the ice-mages' magic. I know the spells they use to raise power." It can't be too late.

The shape he had seen in the vision was still clear in his mind, the floating cones of what looked like glowing water, preserved as the Bald Lady had reproduced it from her own long-ago dream with a trained wizard's eidetic memory. The precise arrangement of large and small shapes, and the way they seemed to move nearer and farther away. The pattern of their dance. Ingold had to be able to do something with that. It had to tell him something. If he still lived. "My lord wizard."

Rudy looked up. The Bishop Maia, Lank Yar, and Lord Ankres stood just beyond the edge of the power-circle, a couple of Ankres' white-clothed troopers and three or four of Yar's hunters in the background. They looked grim, and rather white around the mouths.

Maia said, "I think we have them all."

The Guards were holding them on the training floor, one of the largest open spaces within the Keep to which access could be limited.

Even those who had made the biggest fuss about searching the Keep for gaboogoo-Lady Sketh and Enas Barrelstave-were silent in the presence of the eyeless, mewing things that had been Clanith White and Old Man Wicket.

Koram Biggar, who had not begun to change, was blustering, "When all's said, they don't look so bad." He waved at Noop Fattier, whose wife had cut holes in his jerkin to accommodate the pseudolimbs growing from his chest and back. "You can't say that's really bad, my lady. What's the way you look, anyway, compared to being full-fed?"

He glared defiantly around him. The Guards and Lord Ankres' soldiers, who'd helped them in the sweep, looked a little queasy, but kept their weapons at the ready. At the sight of Rudy, Varkis Hogshearer pushed to the fore of the prisoners. "You have no right to name me as one of these!" he yelled. "You wait, Master Know-All Wizard! You wait till my girl's powers come in strong!"

Beside him, Scala was silent, tears running down her red, swollen cheeks. "It's we who're full-fed, you know," Biggar went on, as the Guards began pushing and chivvying the shambling mob toward the stairway that led down to the makeshift prison in the first level of the crypts.

"You lot are fools for not taking Saint Bounty's gifts! Look at her!" His finger stabbed out toward Minalde, still as marble with her dark hair disheveled, holding Tir's hand. Linnet stood beside her, throat mottled with bruises. Tir's eyes were somber, unsurprised, like water miles deep.

"Look at her, with her bones staring out of her flesh, ne'er mind the wizard's child she carries! It's we who'll live!"

"Aye," Janus of Weg said softly as the fifty or so mutants and those unchanged others whose names Tir had given Rudy-were led away. "Aye, you'll live. But in what form?"

"It isn't all of them," Rudy said as the watchers emptied slowly out of the training floor, murmuring uneasily to themselves. Minalde moved her head a little, no.

The small group closed up around them: Ankres, Maia, Janus-the core of Alde's power. The lines of her face seemed deeper in the brittle light, more drawn. "It's a dangerous precedent to set," the bishop said gently. "We can't simply say that those who have been against us must be under the control of these ice-mages." "Should be easy to tell," Rudy said. "Thanks to a man named John W. Campbell and a little story called 'Who Goes There?' "

Alde's morning-glory eyes widened in alarm. "You mean people in your world have to deal with this kind of problem?" Rudy grinned, and just barely remembered not to kiss her, out of respect for Maia's position and Ankres' scruples. She'd regained a little of her color and looked not much the worse for their chase through the vaults, but he wished she'd pack up for the day and go to bed. She was just too damn pregnant for him to relax. "All the time, babe," he said. "All the time."

The Old Testament Hebrews had used the pronunciation of the word "shibboleth." The fictitious fighters against Antarctic alien intruders had used a hot wire and samples of everybody's blood. Rudy used illusion, which gaboogoos walked straight through without seeing.

Lord Ankres jumped and flinched when Rudy summoned the illusion of a large and highly colored insect walking up his leg. That particular image did it for most people. For stoics like the Icefalcon, who wouldn't have reacted to a giant squid doing Groucho Marx imitations, Rudy simply drew a line of Ward across the empty cell he was using as a testing chamber and casually said, "Come over here, would you?" The young Guard stopped, baffled that he couldn't come more than halfway into the room. He tested all the Guards, all Lord Ankres' men, and all of Yar's hunters first. He tested everybody who lived on fifth north.

Rather to his regret, Lord and Lady Sketh both passed with flying colors. But as Maia said, you couldn't arrest those who simply disagreed with you.

"You know why they interfered with the searches?" Alde said tiredly. It was deep in the night, and Rudy had been testing people for hours. Melantrys and her work party had just locked up the Doors after hauling out the last loads of slunch, room after room of it, tucked away in the mazes behind the Sketh and Ankres enclaves. "My guess is Biggar and his boys hid their chickens with Sketh." Alde nodded. "And stolen food. They simply swore fealty to Ankres, in the old style, and for Ankres that was enough to extend his protection to them." She perched awkwardly on the stool that Rudy had relinquished the moment she and Tir entered the training floor-Gnift the Swordmaster sometimes used it for demonstrations. The iron cages in which the glowstones hung overhead threw faded lattices of shadow over her face and across the worn wood of the raised training floor. "They knew he was never going to let any of my troops go poking around in even the deserted areas behind his storerooms. He was livid when he learned Biggar had also sworn fealty to Sketh."

Rudy rubbed his eyes. In the squirming, glowing masses that he'd seen dragged through the Aisle to the doors he saw things like squamous fruit: half-formed gaboogoos taking shape. Dozens of the things of various sizes had been flushed out of the corners of the fifth-level mazes, out of the deserted storerooms and corridors that were officially the enclaves of the Keep nobility, though nobody ever went there. Just the thought of trying to destroy those foul heaps now piled in front of the Keep made