Mother of Winter (10 page)

Moose and glacier elk raised their heads from grazing to regard him mildly as he passed, under the magically engineered impression that he was some harmless cousin of the deer tribe. Farther up the slopes, where the erratics left by the last glaciation poked through a tangled chaparral of brush, fern, and vines, a saber-tooth sunning itself on a slab of rock rolled over and looked at him, and Rudy hastily morphed the spell into
I’m a saber-tooth, too—but smaller and milder and definitely beta to your alpha, sir
. The huge, sinewy beast blinked
and returned to its nap, surprisingly difficult to see against the splotchy gray-gold stone.

Wind breathed from the high peaks, carrying on it the glacier’s cold. Rudy shivered.

As carefully as any hunter, he worked the line of trees above the waste and pasture. Among the short grasses and weeds, he found mostly the tracks that he expected to find: half a dozen different sorts of deer, rabbits and coons, porcupines and weasels, voles and wolves. On the bark of a red fir he saw the scratchings of a cave-bear, higher than his head. Hidden carefully under the ferns of the denser woods were the droppings of a band of dooic, and Rudy wondered momentarily whether that poor hinny had made it safely back to her pals. Once or twice he came upon tracks that made him pause, puzzled. Rabbit spoor that hinted of movement no rabbit would have made—no rabbit in its right senses, anyway. Wolverine pugs from the biggest, weirdest damn wolverine he’d never hope to run across.

But nothing that would qualify as Mr. Creepy-in-the-Woods.

The sun curved toward the harsh white head of the Hammerking, barely visible above the Rampart Range’s broken-topped wall. A redstart called, Rudy identifying the almost conversational warble; farther down the long slope of rock a lark answered from the olive velvet of the pasture. Deep silence filled the earth, save for the eternal roaring of the wind in the pines. The sound seemed to wash away Fargin Graw’s grating voice and the petty small-town politicking of the Keep. Rudy felt himself relaxing slowly, as he did when he went on his solitary rambles in the Renweth Vale in quest of herbs or minerals or just information about what the edges of the woods looked like on any particular day.

He was alive. He was a wizard. Minalde loved him. What else mattered?

He came clear of the trees and settled himself with his back to a boulder at the top of a long slope of blackish rock peeled and scrubbed by the passage of long-ago ice.
Due back any day
, he thought, without any real sense of that event’s
imminence. Below him, at the distant foot of the slope, the squalid congeries of villa and stockade, outbuildings and byres, lay surrounded by moving figures in the dull browns and greens of homespun, going about their daily tasks. Still farther down the silver-riffled sepia line of the Arrow, other stockades could be made out among the trees: square log towers and tall, spindly looking watch-spires like masts. The squat stone donjon of Wormswell. From up here he could see the wheat fields and the stockaded orchard of Carpont, the next settlement over; a small group of half-naked men and women were clearing a drainage ditch.

Not bad
. For people whose civilization had collapsed out from under them in the wholesale slaughter of most of the world’s population by an incomprehensible force of monstrosities not terribly long ago, they’d recovered pretty quickly.

Not that they had a choice
, he reflected, closing his eyes, the sun comforting on his lids.
Who does have a choice? You recover and get a place to keep the rain off you, you plant some food, you get over the pain, or you die
. Many of those people had come from the ruins of Penambra to unfamiliar northern lands. Many were city folk, clerks, or Guildsmen unused to the scythe or the plow. Probably not a whole lot of them were comfortable being outside at night, even after five years. But they were managing.

He sighed, closing more tightly around himself the veils of illusion as he took out his scrying crystal once more. He let his mind dip toward the half-trance state from which most magic was worked.

But all that he felt in the depths of the crystal was the grinding of that anger, the pressure of some deep, otherworldly rage.

Ingold, dammit, where’d you go? Pick up the phone, man!

Had something happened to them? Now, there was a scary thought. Ingold was a tough old dude, and Gil was nobody Rudy would want to fool with, but there were White Raiders wandering in the valley, and bandits scavenging what they could from the ruins. A year and a half ago the merchant who’d brought Ingold the sulfur had told them that some
Alketch princeling, banished by the upheavals in the plague-riddled South, had marched up the Great Brown River with a midsize army, intent on conquest of the empty plantations and devastated acres of what had been the southernmost of the High King’s realms. Ingold had kept an eye on them by scrying crystal for about a month. Then one morning he’d tuned in to see only a campful of corpses.

True, Rudy reflected, turning the facets of his stone toward the fading sunlight, they didn’t have a wizard’s ability to make themselves look like scenery, but still …

Rudy looked up to see a gaboogoo standing three feet in front of him.

It was as tall as he was, reaching for him with hands like animate rope.

Rudy screamed, grabbed his staff from the rock beside him and slashed with the razor-edged crescent at the slick, whitish knotwork of the thing’s wrist. The hand fell onto his knee and clenched on like a machine of iron and cable, even as Rudy leapt to his feet and backward, cutting and slashing at the bloodless and undeterred thing that came at him with other hands outstretched.

It was fast. Rudy scrambled back, hacking at it and feeling the horrible grip of the severed hand shift its clutch on his leg, working its way up his thigh. He whipped the dagger from his belt with his free hand and slashed the leather of his trousers, pulling a great chunk of the buckskin loose, crawling hand and all. He hurled the thing as far as he could and spun to meet the gaboogoo again, slashing this time at the bobbing cluster of nodules on its head. They scattered like asparagus in a mower, and the thing kept coming on—
Well, they
might
have been sensory organs, dammit!
—and Rudy cut a third time, half severing the skinny, bobbing head from the stalk of the neck.

Movement on the ground caught his eye. The hand was creeping determinedly toward him over the rock.

Feet, don’t fail me now
.

Rudy bolted.

He plunged upslope and into the trees, wondering if the
gaboogoo would be hindered at all by the forest. He dodged and plunged over fallen pines gross with ear-shaped orange fungus, and leaped the fern-clogged tangle of a stream. Here in the higher woods, little undergrowth hampered his flight, only the yellow pine-straw that slithered beneath his boots. He ducked back along the slope with the intention of circling toward the settlement again but saw something palely gleam ahead of him in the gray-green twilight beneath the trees.

He flattened to a spruce trunk and had another look. It was a second gaboogoo. A little smaller than the first but still sizable. Rudy counted at least four arms—with this one’s bobbing nodules not confined to its head, it was somewhat hard to tell what was what. There seemed to be other growths on it as well.

Cloaking spells notwithstanding, it was coming in his direction.

The tag line of an old movie floated through Rudy’s head—
“Who
are
those guys?”
—but it did nothing to diminish the terror that had him by the throat. He headed upslope again.

The going was tougher, the ground now very steep. Above the trees the sun had slipped behind the high glaciers of the Rampart Range, and the light between the hoary spruces and lodgepole pines was like translucent slate-colored silk. His boots skidded on rocks and pine-straw as he climbed, the gloom all around him striped now with white birch and gray aspen. The birds had gone silent.

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.