Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

He felt her smile and understood that after all this time, the core of her was human still.

He'd been about to ask about the spells of stasis, but that smile made him ask instead, "Are you okay? Have you... have you been alive all this time? Trapped?" But he knew as the words came out of his mouth that she was no more trapped in the walls of the Keep than he could be described as trapped within the armature of his bones.

She was the heart of the Keep, transformed into it as Ingold had transformed himself into a peregrine, and for the same cause-to save those whom she loved. But she thanked him for asking-it was like the warmth of still midsummer.

Memories stirred and swirled, as if she were trying to bring them into focus: fragments of consciousness drifting in the light, scenes that flickered through Rudy's mind as if he had been there, as if he remembered someone else's memories, or dreamed someone else's dreams.

A cat that had liked to sleep curled up on her hip, one paw over its black-and-white nose. The way the needles had stung when they tattooed the sigils of power and focus, the Runes and patterns of force, on her hands and arms. Someone's laughter. The color of her daughter's hair.

And then, very clear, he saw the Mother of Winter, sleeping in her pool. Sleeping

truly, for she would move in sleep, dreaming of the eggs all safe within her body, dimly illumined by the soft glow of her living heart.

Only the living will use magic to preserve those they love. He didn't know if this was his own thought or hers, this woman's, in whose heart/dream/memory he now stood; he didn't know whether it was himself, or she, who wondered if it was for that reason that the Mother of Winter had sent the dream to Brycothis, to show her what she must do.

"Did it hurt?" he asked, desperately wanting that it had not.

He was reassured by the whisper of her laughter and the touch on his arm, palpable and immediate, of her warm fingers, though he saw nothing. A little sadness, when Amu Bel died, and Dare, and others, mages whom she could no longer protect.

The heart remembered. He was glad she was all right. "Look," he said diffidently, "we've got this problem I wondered if you could help me with. How do you get them spuds to grow?"

And he felt around him again the summer joy of her smile.

The following day the gaboogoos attacked the Keep in force.

Knowing that thick concentrations of slunch-or the creatures that grew out of the slunch- interfered with communications by scrying crystal, Rudy had ensorcelled a ball made of leather stuffed with grass, such as the children played with, laying on it spells to turn first blue, then red, then green, then black, then white. He'd driven three stakes in the ground a few yards before the Keep steps, to form a tripod, and had set the ball on them; every morning, before the doors of the Keep were opened, he looked into his crystal, to see whether the ball could be seen by such means and whether it was the color it was supposed to be.

This latter guard against the possibility of illusion was in fact doing the ice-mages too much credit. When he checked on the ball that morning, with the first stirrings of light outside, he saw nothing. There was only the dense gray anger of the icemages, faded shadows within the facets of the stone.

"Whoa!" Shoving the crystal in his pocket, he hurried to the Aisle, where the farmers had already begun to gather, chatting with the Guards and waiting for the opening of the gate.

"Sorry, folks, can't be done," he said, striding to the front of the crowd, where Caldern and Gnift stood before the inner doors. "They're out there, waiting. I don't know how many."

"Are you sure?" someone inevitably demanded.

"That's ridiculous!" another declared, equally inevitably. "We need to get to our work! The season's going to be short enough. If we're not to starve-" "And how do we know what you're seeing out there is true?"

Rudy planted himself before the doors, hands on his hips and the witchlight that burned above his head glittering on the locking-rings behind him and in the shadows of his eyes. "You don't believe me?"

There was silence.

"You're the people who made all the screaming fuss about me not being here to use my magic to protect you back when there was no way I could have protected you. Well, I'm here now. And I'm telling you: don't open those doors." Without a word five of them flung themselves at him, hoes and knives and billhooks raised. Rudy was so astonished-though he realized later he shouldn't have been-and the quarters were so close that they were on him, tearing his staff from his hands, slamming him against the doors behind him before he could raise a finger in his own defense.

He lashed out automatically, with fists and boots and elbows, hurling also the vicious spells of pain and suffocation that did, of course, absolutely nothing-Caldern wrenched a billhook away from one man and threw the weapon in one direction and the man in the other; Gnift beheaded a second farmer without an instant's hesitation; and the others in the forefront of the group, Barrelstave and Lapith Hornbeam and a couple of the Dunk clan, fell on the attackers and dragged them back. The attackers turned on their erstwhile friends and relatives and fought like demons, screaming and slashing. Yobet Troop had his forehead opened almost to the bone by a hoe before he disarmed the man who'd been trying to bludgeon Rudy to death. At the same time, one of the attackers flung himself at the locking-rings, wrenched them over and plunged down the dark passageway between the two sets of gates. Rudy rolled to his feet and pelted after him, gasping.

The farmer was already wrenching and twisting at the rings of the outer gate. Rudy seized him, and was thrown back by a strength almost superhuman; rolled to his feet and grabbed him again...

The door opened. Gaboogoos poured through the gate in a pallid, filthy tide. Rudy screamed, "Shut the friggin' gate!" and behind him heard the slam of iron, the snap of the locks, sealing him in the passageway with the mad farmer and the monstrous horde.

Rudy shouted the Word of Lightning, levin-fire spangling around him in sizzling bursts, cracking back and forth from the black stone of walls and ceiling and floor. Mutant animals were mixed with the gaboogoos, snarling and shrieking as the bolts hit them; the air in the close-cramped tunnel was filled with the stench of charring matter, the stink of smoke, the reek of his own hair and clothing singeing. Someone was by the light of the gates, men's forms struggling. Rudy saw the flash of a sword against the predawn gloom outside. Guards had slipped through the gate behind him.

Janus was dragging the outer doors shut even now, while the Icefalcon hacked at the dog-sized gaboogoo spiders that struggled to come through even yet. The farmer lay headless underfoot. Rudy called a flare of witchlight as the outer doors slammed shut, and a moment later the commander strode back to him through a reeking ruin of carcasses, coughing, "You cut that a mite close for comfort." Rudy was slumped back against the wall, panting. The floor was carpeted with dead gaboogoos, most of them tiny, pincered, too small for a man to kill with a sword. "The crypt!" he gasped. "Ankres is on his way."

By the time the inner doors were opened again, and Janus had summoned a heavy enough company to hold them, Rudy was halfway across the Aisle, running for the corner stairway that led down to the crypt.

Even so, he reached the place almost too late for the battle. After the initial shock of being attacked by fourteen or fifteen men and women armed with makeshift weaponry, Seya and Melantrys, who'd been on guard, had been able to hold their own

and hold the doors behind which the mutants were locked. The attacking slunch-eaters, none of whom had been tested yet and none of whom lived on the fifth level north, had fought like mad things, refusing surrender, as if they had no concept of anything but the death of those who kept them from opening the doors.