Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

Rudy tired.

"We'll have to kill them," Tir said very quietly, pressing his cheek to the back of Alde's hand. "Won't we?"

He looked as tired as they, his eyes years older than they had been that morning. Once upon a time there was a boy, Rudy thought, looking down at the hollowed face, the sad, steady blue-violet gaze. Oh, Ace, I'm sorry.

Alde brushed her thin hand over her son's hair. "We don't have to make that decision tonight, darling."

Tir looked up at her, saying nothing. Rudy wondered if the boy was thinking what he himself thought, what he knew Alde thought: If Ingold's dead, and the ice-mages aren't gonna be killed, how long do we go on feeding people who're gonna have to be gotten rid of anyway?

The Bald Lady had drawn a sphere to Summon not only water, but life. Reproducing it would be an all-day job, and the thought of Summoning the power to do so made his bones ache. But the memory of that single leaf, that single root, made him shiver. Tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow.

Tomorrow he'd have to go back to testing. There'd been thirty-five mutants, maybe half a dozen who'd been with them-like Biggar and Hogshearer and Scala-and another ten or so who hadn't changed physically but upon whom the slunch had worked to the extent that they hadn't been aware of illusion. And the vast bulk of the Keep's population remained untested.

And there were still the other problems, the hydroponics tanks that didn't work to capacity, the power-circles by the Tall Gates from which-according to Lady Sketh-he should still be sending out his Summons to all and any sorts of edible livestock. Probably some band of White Raiders is sitting at the bottom of the pass getting fat on the cattle and horses and sheep that come ambling up the trail. "By golly, Slaughters-Everything-in-Sight, this's the best hunting spot we've had in years!" Under the cool, brittle white lights Alde looked worn to the breaking point, and he remembered Biggar's stabbing finger. Look at her, with her bones staring through her skin...

And Ingold maybe not coming back.

Christ, I wish I could just go out with a goddamn sword and kill a goddamn monster and have goddamn done with it! As methods of saving the world go, this one really stinks.

No wonder old Ingold has white hair, being responsible for everyone and everything around him.

And then he thought, If Ingold really is dead, I'm gonna have to try to kill the ice-mages myself. Oh, Christ.

Alde slept that night in Rudy's small chamber, unwilling to return to the room in the Royal Sector that the gaboogoos had torn apart. Surrounded by Guards, she said she felt safe, but woke two or three times in the night sobbing and trembling. Given the fact that no one knew how many others in the Keep the ice-mages might be whispering to, not even Lord Ankres had anything to say. Tir slept in the barracks.

At dawn, when Alde seemed to be resting more deeply, Rudy slipped from beneath the blankets, bathed in the long, deserted chamber off the Guards' watchroom, with its worn black tubs and the aged copper boilers old King Eldor had had sent there when he'd ordered the Keep regarrisoned, and padded down through the silence of the Keep to the crypts. Turning a corner, he glimpsed Seya and the older of Lord Ankres' sons standing guard

outside the room where the mutants were kept. Dimly, he caught Varkis Hogshearer's voice, ranting, "... all a trick, a cabal, an effort to turn this Keep into a Warlockracy..."

Another corner muffled the sound, unless he cared to reach out his senses to listen. The long workroom where Ingold did his tinkering with machines, the low-ceilinged crypt whose floor was scratched and stained from apparatus that had vanished three millennia ago, was silent, dark, curiously comforting in its familiarity. Leftover bits of the ancient flamethrowers lay on the black stone wall-benches, the pine table that he and the wizard had hauled down. Wheels and pulleys and intricately jointed chains dangled from the ceiling. Water murmured softly in a black stone basin let into a niche in the wall.

From his belt Rudy took a packet of powdered silver mixed with herbs, another packet of incense, and a couple of burningstones. He was exhausted from yesterday, and knew today would be nearly as bad.

The sigils he marked, the circle of power he wove, he linked into the rhythm of the Earth and the phase of the moon, drawing power from those to lessen the drag on his own resources.

He laid out stringers, as Ingold had once shown him, to tap the veins of silver and copper he knew lay deep in the ground, and a curve that followed the watercourses through the floor that fed the still-deeper crypts below. Anything to help him get in touch with Ingold. Anything.

For a time he was afraid that if he relaxed to meditate, crosslegged in the circle's heart, he'd fall asleep. But when he breathed deep, his mind drifting down into the Now of magic, the weariness eased and the magic strength of the Keep seeped like a balm into his flesh and his soul.

I live, and that is enough, he thought as he drifted like an errant feather into the chasm where magic dwells. I breathe. I'm here.

Power flowed into him, dark rising up out of the earth and brightness soaking into his lungs from the air. In that sweet calm he collected strength and funneled it through the scrying stone, casting out his thought like a rope of light, calling Ingold's name. Nothing came to him. Nor could he summon any image of Gil.

What he saw of the Black Rock Keep-dim, faded, horrible-was only smoke and slunch and ash-hued monstrosities, glimpsed far off.

Dimly, he was aware of the sun rising above the Keep, of the great Doors opening for the workers in the fields, of other Guards in the bath-chamber. Of all life stirring and waking.

When he looked up, he saw Tir in the doorway of the crypt. The boy had been around magic all his life and knew not to interrupt, or to step on the Weirds. He'd brought a pine-knot torch with him, probably swiped from the Guards' watchroom. Even that dim, grubby light seemed bright beside the pinlights of the incense fires, the bluish chains of light shining softly along the lines of the power-circle.

"S'okay, Ace. I'm done here." He started to rise, and Tir held up his hand, staying him. "Do you need to go find him?" the boy asked.

"Ingold?" He'd never journeyed south, but Gil and the Icefalcon had told him of the road along the river valleys, the jungles of the border coasts, the brown hills around Khirsrit.

"If you turn yourself into a bird, like Ingold did," Tir said, a small figure forlorn against the darkness of the corridor outside, "you could get down there and kill the bad guys yourself. You said you know their secret now. You told Mama you saw it in

your dream."

Tir carefully propped his torch into an empty jar, thin in his bright blue jerkin. Rudy saw that under the jerkin he was wearing a scarf of dulled reds and browns, which had belonged to Geppy Nool.

"What about you, Ace?" Rudy asked gently. "You and your mom? C'mere..." He held out his arms. "I'm not gonna be using this thing again tonight." Tir ran across the lines of power to him, and Rudy felt them swirl away into the protecting shadows of the crypt. Tir put his arms around him, and Rudy hugged the compact little body close.

"He let them all die, to save the world," Tir said, face pressed to Rudy's shoulder, voice barely audible. Rudy felt a trickle of hot wetness in the bison fur of his collar, and against his cheek the sudden tightening of the boy's jaw.

"I saw him. I was him. They were all coming here, to get away from the Dark, and the King was mad at him-at the man-at Dare. All the wizards were making a spell to make the Keep, so people would have someplace to hide, and Dare didn't tell them, didn't ask them to come with him when he went down to stop the King from hurting his family."