Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

The sun had slipped behind the three great peaks that loured over Sarda Pass, Anthir, the Mammoth, and the Hammerking. The air above glacier and stone was still filled with light, the clouds streaked crimson, ochre, pink, and amber by the sunset, and the eternal snowfields picked up the glory of it, stained as if with liquid gold. Like a black glass rectangle cut from the crystallized bone of the mountain, the Keep of Dare caught the reflection, burning through the trees; a fortress built to guard the remnant of humankind through the times of darkness, until the sun should shine again.

Looking below it, beyond it, to the scant growth of wheat and corn in the fields along the stream, the white patches of slunch and the thinness of the blossom on the orchard trees, Rudy wondered if those ancient walls would be protection enough. Just my luck. I make it to the world where I belong, the world where I have magic, the world where the woman I love lives-and we all starve to death. It figures.

"The range of my tribe lay at the feet of the Haunted Mountain, between the Night River and the groves along the Cursed Lands, and northward to the Ice in the North." The Icefalcon slipped his scabbarded killing-sword free of his sash, set it where it could be drawn in split instants, and shed vest and coat and long gray scarf in a fashion that never seemed to engage his right hand. "Never in all those lands, in all my years of growing up, did I hear speak of this slunch."

Only a few glowstones dispersed white light in the Guards' watchroom. Most of the Guards' allotment of the milky polyhedrons illuminated the training floor where Gnift put a small group of off-shift warriors-Guards, the men-at-arms of the Houses of Ankres and Sketh, and the teenage sons of Lord Ankres-through a sparring session more strenuous than some wars.

Hearthlight winked on dirty steel as the incoming shift unbuckled harness, belts, coats; ogre shadows loomed in darkness, and across the long chamber someone laughed at Captain Melantrys' wickedly accurate imitation of Fargin Graw feeling sorry for himself. Rudy sighed and slumped against the bricks of the beehive hearth. "You ever ride north into the lands of the Ice?"

The young warrior elevated a frost-pale brow in mild surprise. "Life among the tribes is difficult enough," he said. "Why would anyone ask further trouble by going there?"

"People do," said Seya, an older woman with shortcropped gray hair.

"Not my people."

"Well," Rudy said, "slunch is obviously arctic-at least it started to show up when the weather got colder..."

"But never was it seen near the lands of the Ice," the White Raider pointed out logically. His long ivory-colored braids, weighted with the dried human finger-bones thonged into them, swung forward as he chaffed his hands before the fire. Like all the other Guards, he was bruised, face and arms and hands, from sword practice. It was a constant about them all, like the creak of worn leather harnesswork or the smell of wood smoke in their clothing.

"Nor did our shamans and singers speak of such a thing. Might slunch be the product of some shaman's malice?"

"What shaman?" Rudy demanded wearily. "Thoth and the Gettlesand wizards tell me the stuff grows on the plains for miles now, clear up to the feet of the Sawtooth Mountains. Why would any shaman lay such a... a limitless curse?"

The Icefalcon shrugged. As a White Raider, he had been born paranoid.

"As for foods that will grow in the cold," he went on, settling with a rag to clean the mud from his black leather coat, "when game ran scarce, we ate seeds and grasses; insects and lizards as well, at need."

Constant patrols in the cold and wind had turned the Icefalcon's long, narrow face a dark buff color, against which his hair and eyes seemed almost white. Rudy observed that even while working, the Icefalcon's right hand never got beyond grabbing range of his sword. All the Guards were like that to a degree, of course, but according to Gil there were bets among them as to whether the Icefalcon closed his eyes when he slept. "Sometimes in days of great hunger we'd dig tiger-lily bulbs and bake them in the ground with graplo roots to draw the poison out of them."

"Sounds yummy."

"Pray to your ancestors you never discover how yummy such fare can be." "We used to eat these things like rocks." Rudy hadn't heard Tir come up beside him. Small for his age and fragile looking, Tir had a silence that was partly shyness, partly a kind of instinctive fastidiousness. Partly, Rudy was sure, it was the result of the subconscious weight of adult memories, adult fears.

"They were hard like rocks until you cooked them, and then they got kind of soft. Mama- the other little boy's mama-used to mash them up with garlic."

The Icefalcon raised his brows. He knew about the heritable memories-an old shaman of his tribe, he had told Rudy once, had them-and he knew enough not to put in words or questions that might confuse the child.

Rudy said casually, "Sounds like..." He didn't know the word in the Wathe. "Sounds like what we call potatoes, Ace. Spuds. What'd that little boy call them?"

Tir frowned, fishing memories chasms deep. "Earth-apples." He spoke slowly, forming a word Rudy had never heard anyone say in the five years of his dwelling in this world. "But they raised them in water, down in the tanks in the crypt. Lots and lots of them, rooms full of them. They showed that little boy," he added, with a strange, distant look in his eyes.

"Who showed him, Ace?"

Melantrys, a curvy little blonde with a dire-wolf's heart, was offering odds on the likelihood of Graw finding a reason not to send up any of the hay that was part of the Settlements' tribute to the Keep come July-betting shirt-laces, a common currency around the watchroom, where they were always breaking-and there were shouts and jeers from that end of the room, so that Rudy had to pitch his voice soft, for Tir's hearing alone.

Tir thought about it, his eyes unfocused. He was one of the cleanest little boys Rudy had ever encountered, in California or the Wathe. Even at the end of an afternoon with the herdkids, his jerkin of leather patches and heavy knitted blue wool was fairly spotless. God knew, Rudy thought, how long this phase would last. "An old, old man," Tir said after a time. He stared away into the darkness, past the lurching shadows of the Guards, the stray wisps of smoke and the flash of firelight on dagger blade and boot buckle. Past the night-black walls of the Keep itself. "Older than Ingold. Older than Old Man Gatson up on fifth north. He was bald, and he had a big nose, and he had blue designs on his arms and the backs of his hands, and one like a snake like this, all the way down his head."

Tir's fingers traced a squiggly line down the center of his scalp, back to front. Rudy's breath seemed to stop in his lungs with shock. "And it wasn't a little boy," Tir went on. "It was a grown-up man they showed. A king."

It was the first time he had made the distinction. The first time he seemed to understand that all the little boys whose memories he shared had grown up to be men-and after living their lives, had died.

Rudy tried to keep his voice casual, not speaking the great wild whoop of elation that rang inside him. "You want to go exploring, Pugsley?"

"Okay." Tir looked up at him and smiled, five years old again, rather solemn and shy but very much a child ready for whatever adventures time would bring his way. "They won't thank you, you know," the Icefalcon remarked, not even looking up from his cleaning as they rose to go. "The know-alls of the Keep-Fargin Graw, and Enas Barrelstave, and Bannerlord Pnak, and Lady Sketh. Whatever you find, you know they shall say, 'Oh, that. We could have found that any day, by chance.' " "You're making me feel better and better about this," Rudy said. The White Raider picked a fragment of dried blood out of the tang of his knife. "Such is my mission in life."