Barbara Hambly - Mother of Winter

The quality of the wind changed above the timberline. It howled over the split domes of rock and tore at Rudy’s long dark hair, cutting through the sleeves of his woolen shirt as if he wore nothing, pouring through the gaping hole in his trouser leg like a carnivore ready to strip the meat off his bones. The small plants of the subalpine snatched at the invisible torrents of air like the wasted hands of the starving. Dozens of streams ribboned the lichenous rock up here, and behind a cracked spur of blue-black granite Rudy saw the terrible lavender wall of the glacier itself, a bled-out sapphire the size of the world.

Rudy thought, almost calmly, I’m going to freeze to death.

Below him, something white was working its way among the dwarf-willow and hemlock.

Shivering uncontrollably now, he headed northwest along the face of the slope, wondering if he could get past his pursuers and head down the Arrow Gorge. Something inside him whispered he was kidding himself, but he kept moving anyway. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if he stopped.

He couldn’t put from his mind the recollection of that white, spider-fingered hand inching over the rocks in his direction. He wondered if it was still trying to catch him.

I’m invisible, dammit!

Or unnoticeable, which was as close as wizards could get.

But unnoticeable by what? He seemed to hear Ingold’s voice in his mind. To elk you look like a deer, to saber-tooths you look like one of themselves. To bandits he’d look like a tree, and to White Raiders—who could probably pick any individual tree out of a nursery lineup and give the coordinates of where it stood on the mountain—he’d look like a weasel or an owl or something that had business up there.

But to a gaboogoo?

What is a gaboogoo?

Having no idea what shape their perceptions took, Rudy had no key to their minds—if they had minds—no paradigm with which to tailor illusion. He had no idea what they were.

Except ugly, mean guys who were after him.

Rudy kept moving.

He counted four of them as the afternoon light darkened, the rutilant glare of the sunset illuminating the white beds of slunch that lay, hundreds of feet long sometimes, over the rocks. The gaboogoo whose head he’d half severed had managed to lose it entirely but didn’t appear to notice. Like its hand, way back down the mountain, it kept on. The two others Rudy glimpsed among the columned pines below him weren’t as big, but seemed subtly different in configuration—one of them appeared to be moving on all fours. Or all sevens, or whatever. Rudy didn’t see whether it had a head or not.

He was genuinely scared. Years of living rough had given him a great deal of stamina, but as the gory sunset faded, Rudy was racked by profound shivering. In theory he could Summon heat, as he could Summon light, but he wasn’t good at that particular Summoning and didn’t think he could keep up his concentration while on the move. The vest of painted bison hide that kept him warm in the windless hollows by day wasn’t going to be enough as temperatures plunged. He knew that. And the gaboogoos were working him like wolves, keeping their distance, tiring him out. Under the open crater in his trouser leg Rudy’s thigh was black with bruises, a horrible tribute to the strength of that bloodless grip.

Well, Ingold old buddy, I think we can safely deduce that no, these buggers aren’t illusions.

And Jesus Christ, they’re in the Keep!

He had to get out of this. Had to get word back to Minalde, somehow, to sweep the Keep and sweep it now!

But even if there had been another mage at the Keep he could communicate with, he’d dropped his scrying stone during the gaboogoo’s first attack. He spared a quick stay-put spell for it—problematical at this distance, but scrying crystals were good about that kind of thing.

Ingold’s words about the Dark knowing that magic was humankind’s only defense came back. Maybe these guys knew it, too.

Who were they? And what the hell did they want?

Dead wizards. Rudy looked down at the bruise on his leg again. That part of the agenda was pretty unambiguous.

And as the wind numbed his fingers, his ears, and his feet, he had the increasing feeling they were going to get what they were after.

Dark wrapped itself over the slopes. Rudy crouched, trembling, against a boulder, tucking his hands into his armpits to warm them. To his left a U-shaped canyon curved between rocky walls, scattered with boulders and dotted with sheets of water, runoff of the glacier that blocked the way at the farther end. To his right, downslope, he could see all four of his pursuers now, shining dimly as the slunch that blanketed the lower slopes seemed to shine. Out across the falling black carpet of trees he could make out the Great Brown River where the Arrow flowed into it, dull snakes of orange-gold under the flammeous moon. Five little spots of jonquil light showed him where the Settlements lay among the trees. Black clouds were moving in overhead, and his breath, paining his lungs, poured from his lips in streams.

He’d been on the move since slightly after noon, with nothing to eat or drink.

A fire-spell he thought—not to warm himself, but to fight. Fire or lightning. He wondered if others would come, conjured a strange vision of them emerging like cheap plastic toys from a mammoth Cracker Jack box concealed somewhere in the trees. “A big surprise in every pack.”

But he couldn’t go farther. He knew that.

When he looked again, there were only three gaboogoo.

Rudy glanced automatically over his shoulder, half dreading the sight of the thing coming at him from up the glacier canyon. But there was nothing visible to his mageborn sight, and when he looked back, there was only one. While he watched, it, too, faded away into the night.

Oh, come on, you expect me to believe that one? Rudy shifted his weight uncomfortably. Why don’t you just point down and say, “Oh, look, your shoe is untied?”

His hands were so cold now he could barely grip his staff. His legs were numb and aching, his chest burned, and he had to fight the growing urge to say screw it and to crawl under the rocks to sleep.

Eyes flashed in the darkness. Rudy sprang to his feet, staggering with cramp. He’d been nearly dozing.

Eyes?

It was a dooic.

Even at this distance, and in the piercing cold, he could smell it, if he reached out only a little with his senses—the rank pong of an omnivore. It was an old male, the brown hair of its arms, back, and chest graying to frost, its fanged muzzle nearly white. It was small, probably born wild, though there were dooic in the river bands who’d been born in captivity and trained to simple tasks like cutting sugarcane and digging in the mines, who’d escaped with the coming of the Dark.

This one was standing on its short, bandy hind legs, and through the darkness Rudy could swear that in spite of his spells of concealment—which he had never relinquished throughout the day—it was looking at him.

Can’t be, he thought, puzzled and scared. Unless those things have somehow … What? Robbed me of power? That couldn’t happen … Could it?

He didn’t know.

But the dooic definitely saw him. It lumbered a few strides back toward the dark wall of the trees, then turned again, raising its face toward him. Retreated again and turned … Retreated and turned. Rudy could see the glint of its tusks in the dimness, smell the stink of it, and he wondered if the creature associated him in its mind with those jerks in the settlement who had tried to shoot that poor hinny yesterday, or if it was merely hungry.