Barbara Hambly - Mother of Winter

Wizards had raised the Keep. Their laboratory still existed, deep in the crypts near the hydroponics chambers. Of the great machines that had been made and stored there, nothing remained but scratches and stains on the floor—what had become of them, Rudy hated to think. Smaller, largely incomprehensible equipment of gold and glass and shining tubes of silver had been found, hidden when the old mages themselves had vanished. Echoes of their spells lingered in places: in addition to selected cells in the Church sector, where no magic whatsoever would work, there was a cell on second north where Rudy’s powers, and Ingold’s, were sometimes magnified, sometimes disturbingly randomized, so that spells had different effects from those intended, and a Summoning would frequently result in the appearance of something appallingly other than that which had been called. Ingold had found a three-foot-long section of corridor on fifth south where he could speak in a whisper and Rudy, if he stood at a particular spot in the third level of the crypts, could hear every word.

There was a room in the crypts that would kill any animal, except a cat, that walked into it—including the one human being who had tried it—and a corner of what had been a chamber on third south where from time to time letters would appear on the wall, smudgily written in light as if traced with someone’s fingertip, spelling out words not even Ingold understood. The corner had been bricked off from the main cell in a subsequent renovation—the main cell itself was currently used as a store-room.

So why couldn’t the Guy with the Cats have guarded his bewitched potatoes with visions of little eyeless gremlins?

Rudy didn’t think so, however.

Arms folded, he probed at the sunless silence, listened deeply into the chambers all around him and down that empty hall, tracking the footfalls of the Guards as they carried their torches and glowstones from doorway to doorway. Grimy streaks of yellowish light marked flea-ridden curtains or shutters with broken slats. Skinny men and women, feral children with hungry eyes, came to the doors of cells, resentful at being waked and asked, “Any food missing? Anything disturbed, prints … Cats afraid? Any places the children have spoken of as wrong, or odd?”

“No, sir … No, sir. Why, my Jeddy, she been all over this level like it was her own warren. She’d have let me know soon enough if there was suthin’ amiss in the corners in the dark. You tell the man, Jeddy.”

The statue of an enormously plump saint in a chalky, yellowy-white robe smiled beneficently from a niche between two tallow candles, and Rudy felt uneasy, filled with a sense of looking at clues he did not understand.

Ingold sat for a long time after Rudy ceased speaking—after Gil presumed that Rudy had ceased speaking, for she could hear nothing of what Ingold heard when he used the scrying crystal—turning the two-inch shard of yellowish quartz over and over in scarred, thick-muscled fingers, firelight honeying the white hairs that dusted their backs. Outside the villa’s crumbling walls Gil could hear the far-off ululations of wolf-talk, and nearby, Yoshabel the mule stamped and laid back her ears, her eyes green-gold mirrors of brainless malice.

Waking to the sound of Ingold’s voice, Gil had for a time been so overwhelmed with rage at him, so filled with the conviction that the throbbing agony in her face and all the sorrows in her life were his doing, that she had had to close her hands around a broken projection of marble in the packed earth near her blankets and stare at the dim pattern of firelight among her knuckle bones until the anger went away.

For no particular reason, she thought of Sherry Reinhold, the beautiful blond, tanned, aerobics-perfect classmate who’d been one of the few to be friendly with her in high school. Sherry had become an airline stewardess and had married a dentist and acquired a house the size of one of the smaller campus buildings. Meanwhile, Gil herself was still struggling with the poverty and frustration of the UCLA graduate program in medieval history.

She remembered Sherry sitting across from her at the Bicycle Shop Café in Westwood, saying, “I don’t know why I do it. I don’t even like the taste of alcohol. I know getting drunk isn’t going to solve anything, or help anything, or do anything but screw me up worse. And then I’m sitting there with eleven empty glasses in front of me telling some man I’ve never seen before my telephone number and the directions to my house.” That had been after the divorce. “It’s like the words ‘Oh, have another one’ come out of the empty air, not connected to anything—not the past or the future or anything real—and it’s the rightest and sanest and most sensible thing in the universe. I have to do it.”

Kill him. Kill Ingold.

The rightest and most sensible thing in the universe.

She closed her eyes. Wondered what she had dreamed—about her mother and sister?—that had made her at once angry and convinced that nothing she would ever do would bring her happiness again.

Though she had spoken to him of the dreams, of the terrible urgings that swamped her mind, he had refused to bind her hands. “You may need your weapons, my dear, at any moment,” he had said. “And I trust you.”

“You shouldn’t.” They were standing under the dying sycamore tree in the courtyard where she had first been attacked, looking down at the ripped sack that lay on the ground. It contained what little was left of the thing that had attacked her, torn down and chewed by vermin as if no spells had been placed upon it, as if no Wards had ringed the tree.

“Then I trust myself,” he had said, picking up the maggoty hindquarter and stowing it—and the remains of the original bag—in another sack pulled from Yoshabel’s numerous packs. “Whatever it is that is driving you to assault me, if it can quicken your timing and get you out of the lamentable habit of telegraphing your side lunges, I’d like to meet it.”

He’d smiled at her—with Ingold as one of her sword-masters, she could take on almost any of the other Guards and win—and Gil responded to his teasing with a grin and a flick at him with the pack rope. Even that small and playful assault he’d sidestepped as effortlessly, she knew, as he would have avoided a lethal blow.

“Thoth?” she heard Ingold say softly now. “Thoth, can you hear me? Are you there?”

She turned her head and looked. A slice of amber light lay across one scarred eyelid and down his cheekbone, refracted from the crystal in his hand. His brows, down-drawn in a bristle of fire-flecked shadow, masked the sockets of his eyes.

“Has that ever happened before?” she asked. “Before last week, I mean?”

He raised his head, startled. “I’m sorry, my dear, did I wake you? No,” he answered her question, when she signed that it didn’t matter. “And the troubling thing is, I’ve frequently had the sensation that Thoth—or one of the other Gettlesand wizards—is trying to signal me, but for some reason cannot get through.”

He got up from his place by the fire, crossed the room to her, a matter of two or three steps only. The former library was one of the few remaining chambers with four walls and a roof, though the wooden latticework of the three wide windows had been broken out. Wickering ember-light revived the velvety crimson memory of the frescoes on the wall, lent renewed color to the faces of those attenuated ghosts acting out scenes from a once-popular romance.

She curved her body a little to make room, and Ingold sat beside her, still turning the crystal in his hand. “I had hoped,” he went on quietly, “that if Rudy could get through to me I would be able to get through to Thoth, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. There’s only a deep sense of … of pressure, of heat, like a river far beneath the earth. Like a rope pulled taut and about to snap.” He put the crystal away and sat silent for a time, gazing at the broken window bars and toying one-fingered with a corner of his beard.