Barbara Hambly - Mother of Winter

For the most part, the lords looked down on men like Graw, on Enas Barrelstave—who had built up a considerable land-holding of his own, although he was still the head of the Tubmaker’s Guild—and on Varkis Hogshearer—and no wonder, in the latter case, thought Rudy dourly. In addition to being the Keep moneylender, earlier that spring Hogshearer had somehow gotten word that the only trader from the South to come north in six months was a few days off from the Vale. He’d ridden down to meet the merchant and had purchased his entire stock of needles, buttons, glass, seed, plowshares, and cloth, which he was currently selling for four and five times what the southern merchants generally asked. No other trader had appeared since, though Rudy scried the roads for them daily.

As Rudy expected, the slunch in Graw’s fields was pretty much like the slunch everywhere else. It was almost unheard of for slunch to spread that fast, and he suspected that the patch had been there—small but certainly not unnoticeable—when Graw planted the seed.

Nonetheless, he checked the place thoroughly, on the chance that a slight variation would show him something he and Ingold had missed.

It didn’t, however.

Slunch was slunch. It seemed to be vegetable, but had no seed pods or leaves or stems, and Rudy wasn’t sure about the function of the hairlike structures that held its blubbery underground portions to the soil. There was no visible reason for the vegetation all around the slunch to die, but it did.

Worms lived in it: huge, sluggish, and, Rudy discovered, weirdly aggressive, lunging at him and snapping with round, reddish, maggotlike mouths. “Yuckers,” he muttered, stepping back from the not-very-efficient attack and flicking the thing several yards away with his staff. “I’ll have to trap one of these buggers before I start for home.”

A regular earthworm, swollen and made aggressive by eating the slunch? Or some species he’d never heard of or that had never heretofore made it this far south?

Ingold would know. Ingold’s scholarship, concerning both old magical lore and natural history, was awesome—there were times when Rudy despaired of ever living up to his teacher.

But when he tried to contact Ingold, after Graw finally left him alone around noon, he could see nothing in his crystal. He shifted the angle to the pale sunlight that fell through the blossoms of the apple tree under which he sat, a thin little slip of a thing in an orchard surrounded by a palisade that would have discouraged a panzer tank division; let his mind dip into a half-meditative trance, drifting and reaching out. They’d be on the road, he thought, but there was a good chance they’d have stopped for a nooning. Ingold …

But there was nothing. Only the same deep, angry pulling sensation, the feeling of weight, and heat, and pressure. And underneath that, the profound dread, as if he stood in the presence of some kind of magic that he could not understand.

“C’mon, man,” Rudy whispered. “Don’t do this to me.” He cleared his mind, reordering his thoughts. Thoth of Gettlesand: he might have an answer, might indeed know what was going wrong with communications. Might know what that nameless feeling was, that haunting fear.

When no image came, he called again on the names of every single one of the Gettlesand mages, as he had last night. Failing them, he summoned the image of Minalde, whom he saw immediately, a small bright shape in the crystal, standing by the wheat fields in her coat of colored silks, arguing patiently with Enas Barrelstave about the placement of boundary hurdles.

Worried now, he tried again to reach Ingold.

“Dammit.” He slipped the crystal back into its leather pouch and returned it to the pocket of his vest. The day was mild, warmer than those preceding it and certainly warmer here in the bottomlands than in the high Vale of Renweth. Maybe summer was finally getting its act together and coming in.

About goddamn time. He didn’t think the Keep could stand another winter like the last one.

Clear as a little steel bell on the still air, he heard Lirta Graw’s voice, bossing someone about. Yep, there she was by the open gate of the log stockade, with a pack of the settlement kids. In a couple of years she’d be as obnoxious as Varkis Hogshearer’s daughter, Scala, an overbearing, sneaky adolescent who spied and, Rudy suspected, stole. He wondered if there were some kind of karmic law of averages that required the presence of one of those in every group of thirty or more kids. There’d certainly been one in his high school.

He watched them from where he sat in his miniature fortress of sharpened stakes and apple trees, listened to their voices, as he watched and listened to the herdkids at the Keep and the children who tagged at their mothers’ skirts by the stream when they did laundry. Partly this was simply because he liked kids, but partly—and increasingly so in the last year or two—because, like Ingold, he was watching for someone.

Waiting for someone to show up.

“The Dark Ones knew that magic was humankind’s only defense against them,” Ingold had said to him one evening when he and Rudy had gone out to locate Tir during the first flush of the boy’s livestock supervision phase. The Keep herdkids, under the command of a skinny, towheaded boy named Tad, had been bringing in the cattle from the upper pastures: Rudy had known Tir should be safe enough with the older children, but the boy was then only four, after all.

“They attacked the City of Wizards, destroying nearly all its inhabitants; they knew me well enough to come after me.” The old man frowned, leaning on his staff—a mild, unassuming, and slightly shabby old maverick, reminding Rudy of any number of overage truckers or bar-fighters he’d known in his Southern California days. “And in the past five years the fear has been growing on me that the Dark Ones—among all the hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children that they killed—sought out also the children born with the talent for wizardry. The next generation of wizards.”

Rudy said, “Oh, Christ.” It made sense.

Talent or propensity for magic usually manifested in very small children, Ingold had told him—five and younger—and then seemed to go underground until puberty. In the past five years, Ingold had kept a close eye on the children coming of age.

Not one had shown the slightest bent toward magic. Tad—eldest of the herdkids—had elected himself a kind of lab assistant to Ingold in the wizard’s chemical and mechanical endeavors, but had no apparent thaumaturgical gift. He just loved gadgets, spending all his free time in helping them adjust the mirrors that amplified the witchlight in the hydroponics crypts. So far, there had been no one. Rudy wondered how long it would be.

The children straggled off toward the thin coppices of the bottomlands, carrying kindling sacks. They’d have to collect more wood in the Settlements, he thought. Even though the nights here were less chill than in the Vale, the sprawling stone villa didn’t hold heat the way the Keep did. His eye followed them, Lirta Graw—sackless, as befitted the Boss’s Daughter—striding ahead, and the little fair-haired child Reppitep in the rear, struggling to keep up.

As they disappeared into the cloudy green of hemlock and maples along the Arrow, Rudy turned his eyes back toward the slopes behind him; the rising glacis strewn with boulders and threaded with silvery streams, and above that the dense viridian gloom of the high forest.

Where the trees grew thick, the children had said. That was where several of them reported they’d seen Mr. Creepy-in-the-Woods.

It was an hour’s steady climb to the edge of the trees. As he picked his way through fern and fox-grape up the rust-stained rocks of the streambed, Rudy wrapped himself in progressively thicker veils of illusion. He’d learned the art of remaining unseen from Ingold, whom he nicknamed—not without reason—the Invisible Man. Three years ago the first bands of White Raiders had made their appearance in the valley of the Great Brown River, tracking the spoor of elk and mammoth driven by cold from the high northern plain, and one still sometimes found their Holy Circles on deserted uplands. The thought of being the messenger elected to carry a letter written in pain to the obscure Ancestors of the tribes made Rudy queasy.