Mother of Winter (15 page)

At the sound of some noise, he turned, and there was nothing stiff or crippled about the smoothness with which he suddenly had one of the dead farmers’ shortswords in his hand.

Rudy turned to follow his gaze. There were figures in the
road, dozens of them, faces glimmering pale in the gathering dusk. Someone called, “Who’s there? Is anyone alive?”

Rudy recognized the voice. “That you, Yar?” He left the darkness by the gatehouse and strode down in the direction of the straggling line of newcomers. “It’s Rudy and Ingold.” He almost didn’t need a mage’s sight to recognize Lank Yar, the Keep’s chief hunter, a drooping leather strap of a man who seemed, body and soul, to have been braided back together out of his own scar tissue following the rising of the Dark. Behind the hunter he identified others: Nedra Hornbeam, the matriarch of third level south, with her son and son-in-law; Lord Sketh, pushing fussily to the front with two or three of his purple-badged men-at-arms; several of the Dunk clan from second north with Bannerlord Pnak; Bok the Carpenter and half a dozen Guards under the command of the Icefalcon.

“They’re dead here,” Rudy said quietly. “They’re all dead.”

“Good God, man, we thought you were gone as well!” Bok strode forward and caught Rudy’s arms in huge hands, then enveloped him in a hug that was like being hugged by an iron tree. “And Lord Ingold …!”

“Lord Ingold,” Yar the Hunter said quietly, “who ought never have left the Keep to begin with this spring. Had he stayed where he belonged, these folk would have been alive, and the children of the herds, too.”

He turned and walked away. Lord Sketh came over quickly, caught Rudy’s hand in one of his own round moist ones, said quickly, “Ridiculous! Are you well, man?” There was scared relief in his eyes, desperate relief that the Keep would not, in the face of such catastrophe, be left wizardless as well. “What happened? Was it an ice storm, as the Icefalcon’s been saying? We heard nothing, only opened the Doors this morn to a wall of snow.”

“It was an ice storm,” Ingold said softly. “And Yar is right. I should not have left the Keep.”

They worked through the fevered sunset and long into full dark, under a moon that came up gibbous and crimson, like a dirty blood-orange, as if the grue that lay soaking into the ground had stained its golden light. Under Lord Sketh’s orders,
the hunters and volunteers and Guards dragged every horse, every head of stock, every deer, every boar, even the rats and rabbits and voles found crushed in the woods or mashed into the palisade, and made great thawing piles of them between the ruined house and the heap of matchwood that had been the gates. Rudy and Ingold laid spells of preservation on those dripping heaps, to arrest and postpone decay once they should begin to thaw, and men and women set to hacking the meat into chunks, to be carried up to the Keep. Through a haze of blind exhaustion, of pain in his frozen hands and toes, Rudy understood that this meat was all the Keep would have to live on, summer, winter, and into the following spring.

And he could already see that it wasn’t going to be enough.

While the meat thawed, Lord Sketh ordered a pyre built of broken timbers and the drying thatch; they kindled it an hour before dawn. The smell of the smoke was a vast, oily cloud over the charnel house of wet bones, ice-beaded meat, and glittering heaps of salvaged harness buckles and shoes. Lank Yar, more practical-minded, set parties to building sledges to carry the meat, and racks on which to smoke it, and the first group of bearers set off for the Keep with Fargin Graw’s food reserves and the news that the two wizards were alive just as dawn was staining red the waters of the Great Brown River to the east.

When Rudy woke from exhausted sleep, Gil was there, her black hair braided to keep it out of the blood, her face half masked in field dressing and more bruised even than Ingold’s. She looked exhausted, sick, and deeply worried, and no wonder, Rudy thought. Some distance away he could see Ingold at work cutting up a sheep neatly as a butcher, and like a butcher soaked and spattered with blood from head to foot; he would answer if someone spoke to him, but he seemed, as Rudy knew he would, to have taken Lank Yar’s words completely to heart.

At least it was too early for ants or flies to have commuted in.
Thank God for small favors
.

“I was worried about you, punk.” Gil sat down next to him and handed him a bowl of gruel and a dried apple. They’d
almost certainly come from the settlement store. Rudy thought about the people who should have been eating them for breakfast and felt nearly sick.

“I wish I could say the same about you, spook.” He was too hungry and exhausted not to eat, and once he began, he felt better. He had eaten almost nothing yesterday and had worked cutting wood and hauling bodies to the pyre until he was ready to drop. “But until that thing hit, I was clueless, and when it did—” He paused and shook his head. “—I didn’t really think about any one person, I guess. Just, like, ‘Oh, Jesus, no.’ I guess I figured if you were with the old man, you’d be okay. Did you—did you see him turn himself into a bird?”

She smiled crookedly—with the wound on her face, she could hardly help it—and nodded. But she only said, “I thought Lord Sketh was going to propose marriage when I showed up with the mule. The orneriest, nastiest old bizzom in the Keep, and now she’s the only domesticated beast of burden in the Vale. That’ll learn Enas Barrelstave to argue against us borrowing the best instead of the worst critter when we go out scavenging. Sterile, too, of course.”

“Oh, Christ,” Rudy said. He hadn’t thought of that—Gil was generally about two jumps ahead of him. “What’re we gonna …? I mean, what about plowing next spring?”

“Don’t worry about it, punk.” Gil got to her feet and swept the ruined settlement with a gaze as chill and silvery as the heatless sky. “We’re gonna starve by Christmas.”

“Most of it’s still frozen,” the Icefalcon was saying as Rudy and Gil came up to the shambles where Ingold was jointing deer and pigs with an ax. “We’ll probably be able to get it up to the Vale before it begins to go off, but on foot it will be a slow trek. Warmer weather’s coming,” he added, glancing to the north. “There’ll be flies.”

“I’ll do what I can about that,” Ingold said. He looked like ten miles of bad road, and moved as if he’d been beaten with a stick. Rudy guessed he hadn’t slept at all.

“I expect there’ll be parties coming down to clear out Manse and Carpont today,” the young Guard continued, one blood-gummed hand tucked into his sash. “We may need spells to
prevent decay then. When we go up to the Keep tomorrow morning, one of you should remain.”

“One of ’em should stay just to tell us if there’s another one of those what’d you call, ice storms, on the way,” Yobet Troop threw in, stopping nervously beside them with dangling bundles of frozen chickens yoked to his shoulders. He glanced at Ingold with frightened eyes, and then at the sky. “You’ll do that, won’t you, m’lord wizard? That’s your job.”

“Yes,” Ingold said gently. “That’s my job.”

He added to Gil, when Troop and the Icefalcon had gone their ways, “Things aren’t as bad as you might suppose. The storm affected an area perhaps fifty miles across, and beyond that there will be game, and fruits in abandoned orchards if we can get parties out there quickly enough, and nuts in the woods. The Icefalcon spoke to me earlier about leading a raiding party against the bandits around Penambra, who will have horses if nothing else.”

“I bet they’ll be real efficient raiders on foot,” Gil said.

Ingold regarded her in mild surprise and mimed a dig through his pockets. “If you’re willing to put money against the Icefalcon on foot in a contest with the average group of mounted bandits …”

“The hell I am,” Gil said, with the first grin Rudy had seen out of her all day.

“And I’m sure Lady Minalde will send to Tomec Tirkenson in Gettlesand for livestock as well, provided we can haul hay up from the river meadows below Willowchild to feed them.” Moving as slowly as an old man, Ingold limped to the stack of carcasses and began to drag free a deer. His hands fumbled their grip and Gil and Rudy hastened to help him; Rudy handed him the ax he’d been using, but after lifting It, Ingold set it down again, as if too wearied, for the moment, to go on.

“They’re taking the mule, you know,” Gil said, turning to the stump nearby, where several axes were stuck. It was the first time in years that Rudy had seen more implements than there were people. Gil judged her striking point on the carcass and buried the ax head just below the foreleg, bracing her foot and shoving to wrench free the ice-stiff limb.

“As well they must.” Ingold looked across at Rudy. “Rudy, I’m counting on you to spell the books Gil and I brought from Penambra. I concealed them last night in the root cellar here. Between my peregrinations of the night before last and laying every fragment of magic I could summon on the meat last night and today, even should Iget some rest between now and nightfall, I’m barely going to have the strength to do what I’ll need to do.”

Rudy didn’t like the sound of that. Still less did he like the way the muscles of Ingold’s jaw tightened when he hobbled slowly to the other side of the carcass, to help Gil reduce it to limbs and trunk.

“Every ward and guard you can summon,” the old man went on without giving him time to reply. “Decay, water, fire, theft, insects, even notice by another wizard. Goodness knows how long it will be before someone can be sent to fetch them. Those books are some of the oldest that exist outside the City of Wizards, and some of them are copies of texts even older than that city itself. They may contain the answer to questions necessary for our very survival.”

Warily, Rudy said, “You sound like you ain’t gonna be around.”

Ingold scratched the side of his nose, leaving a streak of slightly fresher blood in the grime. “Well, I do feel badly about that.”

Don’t do this to me, man. Don’t leave me to deal with this alone
.

“I should not go,” Ingold went on, very slowly. “For Yar was right, you know. I was culpable for leaving as I did. For assuming that such a disaster would not befall.”

“Who knew?” Rudy flung out his hands. “And who’s gonna be dumb enough to say that it was our fault this happened? You can feel those things coming ten minutes ahead of time, tops; I can’t feel ’em at all. Even before I feebed my crystal, I wasn’t able to reach you. I still haven’t figured out why …”

“You haven’t?” Ingold appeared mildly surprised. “Be that as it may, it was my fault, and I am responsible. And I suspect that once we return to the Keep, there will be pressure brought
to bear on both of us not to leave it again.” He glanced over at Gil, then away.

“It isn’t only for the sake of the art of wizardry itself that I’ve been searching for a mageborn child, Rudy. We desperately need more wizards at the Keep. We should never have gone from month to month, year to year, putting off sending for a few of the Gettlesand wizards … I’ve spoken to Thoth, by the way.”

“You did?” Contact with the Gettlesand wizards—and the entire subject of the gaboogoos—had completely slipped his mind. “Did he say what happened? Why we couldn’t get in touch?”

“He told me a number of extremely disquieting things, but no, he had no idea why communication by scrying stone was impossible. But I suspect that the night before last was not the first time that such a thing has happened. I haven’t time to go into that now—maybe later, or more likely you can speak to him yourself. The important thing is that something very strange is going on—strange and appalling and, as far as I know, completely unprecedented.”

“Well,” Rudy said sarcastically, heaving up one severed hindquarter of the deer and manhandling it onto the nearby sledge for transport, “I’d kinda guessed that.”

“You always did have a good, solid grasp of the obvious,” the mage replied approvingly. “But I’m not sure you are aware how rare the
completely
unprecedented actually is:
never-
heard-of; beyond human experience. Gil’s a historian. She knows the truth that was said by the Lord of the Sigils:
There is no new thing beneath the sun
. It’s not just a wise platitude—it’s the basis of all lore, all scholarship, all the method of magic.

“But these gaboogoos seem to be precisely that. And as such, they bear fairly close investigation.”

Ingold straightened up and wiped the sticky gum of half-frozen blood from his hands.

“That’s why magic won’t work on them, huh?” Rudy said slowly. “Because we don’t really know what the hell they are. They don’t bleed, I’ll tell you that. And if they sweat or smell
or excrete or eat or spit, they do it damn inconspicuously. They sure walked through my spells of concealment like they were a cheesy plastic bead curtain.”

“Precisely.” Under the bloody grime of his overgrown mustache, Ingold’s mouth was hard. “And the trouble is, it isn’t just the gaboogoos. The creature that attacked Gil—almost certainly in concert with other beings that I did not see—was utterly unfamiliar to my lore or the lore of anyone I have ever read or spoken to. Last night the Icefalcon and his scavengers brought to me three other totally unknown animals, at least insofar as I could tell from the parts that remained. And there is no record—none—in the most ancient books or the tales of the most wide-ranging travelers, of what slunch is.”

“Slunch?” Rudy blinked at the sudden reversion to the mundane … if it was mundane. His first reaction—slunch is slunch—was automatic and, he found on reflection a second later, rather unsettling. He’d gotten used to it. Everyone had. “I don’t get it.”

“Nor do I.” The blue eyes glittered, very pale and very bright, against the gruesome dark of bruises, old blood, and filth. “And considering that I have spent the longer if not the better part of my sixty-eight years learning to
get it
in every conceivable and inconceivable situation, I find that fact, in itself, extremely unsettling. And therefore,” he went on, turning back to the vast heap of frozen beasts for another to hew, “I am leaving you tonight, to seek an answer outside of and beyond the bounds of human experience. I am going to visit the Nest of the Dark.”