Mother of Winter (24 page)

Rudy sighed and pulled Alde close, tasting the tang of betony tisane on her lips as he kissed her. “So,” he said, “you wanna go hunt for spuds?”

Whichever of Tir’s remote ancestors had seen or known anything about the western end of the fifth level north, he—and thus Tir—would not have recognized the place now. At some point in the Keep’s long history, the place had become a tight-congested slum, cells subdivided off cells, corridors cut into rooms, minor rights-of-way carved through corners of other cells. Walls of dirty, desiccated wood or insufficiently
plastered lath at once blocked and guided the way; pipes and conduits ran along the floors, or overhead, where water had been pirated from fountains. The place stank to heaven of rats and guano and abounded in statues of the smiling and ubiquitous Saint Bounty, adorned with stolen glowstones.

Rudy removed the glowstone from before a particularly refulgent image—there were limited quantities of the magic lights, far too few to let them be used as votives—and by its moony radiance studied the beneficent face, the tiny representations of woolpacks, fruits, hams, cheeses, eggs. “There anything wrong with that that you can see, babe?”

“Are you speaking theologically or aesthetically?” She considered it, tilting her head, her dark, heavy hair catching blue glints in the light. “I’ve never heard of Saint Bounty before this year—I mean, he’s not a real saint—and Tir could model a better figure than that and has better taste in colors.”

The foodstuffs represented were certainly garish, pinks and greens and reds and golds, like a lush photograph in a cookbook, and above the collar of his curiously chalky robe, Saint Bounty’s round, beaming countenance looked rouged. Rudy wondered if that was what Gil had meant. “Maybe he’s the patron saint of makeup? Like St. Maybelline in my world? Is that supposed to be a sheepskin he’s sitting on?”

“It has to be,” Alde said. “No one would portray a Holy One perched on a plate of pig entrails.”

Rudy shook his head sadly. “You never can tell, babe. Might be spaghetti. Let’s turn here. The original front wall’s got to be behind all this mess someplace.” He moved forward, sinking his mind into the listening trance of magic, and she followed, her hand in his like a trusting child’s.

Most of the little patches and sniffs of magic Rudy had found lay along the outer walls, maybe because the rest of the immense building had changed so in the ensuing millennia. Better than witchlight, the glowstone’s radiance showed up the black mold on the plastered walls, the water stains of the pipes, the accumulated filth, packed hard and inches deep, on the floor of the narrow, crazy-house passageways. The smell was
almost overwhelming. Many of the cells in this area had doors, Rudy noticed, solid plank structures shut tight in the old jambs. Most of the doors were new.

He brightened his own witchlight in addition to that of the stone. Strangely, it didn’t help. Rats and insects went scuttling, but the grating sense of being watched, of being listened for, did not lessen; the sense that something dreadful was about to happen abated not one whit at the increased wattage. Rudy pushed gently on a door and was not surprised in the least to find it locked.

“They’re poor folk,” Alde said softly. “There may be a lot of thievery.”

“Yeah. It was up on this level that I saw the gaboogoo.” He walked forward again, listening, feeling with his mind …

And there he was. The Guy with the Cats.

Not literally, of course. Not physically. Not even visually in the form of an image or vision.

But as surely as he knew his own name, Rudy knew the Guy with the Cats had been here, had worked some great magic here. The sense of him was as strong as if the old dude had stood on this spot yesterday.

Rudy halted immobile, reaching out to touch the wall, eyes shut, trying to call the ancient mage’s image more clearly to his mind …

And realized there were people in almost every one of the rooms around them.

Alde started to speak, and Rudy held up a warning hand. He concentrated on the sound of all those thick-drawn breaths. On the hushed shufflings and pattings of moving flesh and moving clothing, behind those new locked wooden doors. The skitter of rat paws; a muttering voice asking something about Theepa’s baby.

It was the middle of the afternoon. There was plowing, planting, foraging to be done—and in any case, who’d want to stay up here in the frowst?

“Koram Biggar says there’s been illness here, since the ice storm,” Alde said as he and she retraced their steps soundlessly
through the twisting ways, Rudy marking dabs of invisible light on the walls, to guide him back to the place.

“There’s always malingering here, if they think they can get the headman of the section to let them get away with it. Sometimes Old Man Gatson or Garunna Brown don’t get off this level for weeks.”

Alde frowned and paused to lean on the wall, her hand going to her belly while Rudy nearly swallowed his heart.
Ohmigod, she’s going into labor, what am I going to …?

“I didn’t like the smell up there,” she said, a little apologetic, straightening up and walking on, leaving Rudy feeling both very silly and profoundly glad that he hadn’t bolted down the corridor screaming for boiling water and towels. “I don’t mean the whole place didn’t smell like a privy,” she added with her shy grin. “But there was a kind of underlayer of something. Something wrong. Unfamiliar.”

Rudy frowned, trying to call it back to mind. “I wasn’t noticing,” he admitted at last, shamefaced. “I was just thinking about how bad the whole place stank. I’ll watch for that when I go back there with the Cylinder.”

“Will that show you anything?” She had released his hand, and even though she looked pale in the witchlight, she did not accept his proffered arm. They were down on the second level now, walking along the Royal Hall, one of the broad original corridors that stretched from the Royal Sector at the east end of the Keep almost to the front wall. Though everything was quiet here, too, the corridor passed through cells occupied by the House of Ankres and its henchmen, and Lord Ankres was conservative in his faith.

“I dunno.” Rudy shrugged, hands tucked into his belt. “Can’t hurt to try. Ingold has a whole list of words that came out of one of the oldest manuscripts that are supposed to be magic, but they were handed down phonetically, and nobody knows what they mean or what they go to anymore. He says they might be connected with machinery that’s been lost.”

“Like the hydroponics tanks?” she asked hopefully.

Rudy shook his head—it had been one of the first experiments he’d made with the Cylinder. The glass rod had
vouchsafed no change. The tanks remained as inefficient as ever.
Figures
, he thought wryly.
The hardware’s still here but somebody lost the manual. With our luck, when we find the thing it’ll be in Japanese
.

“Do you think maybe Brother Wend and Ilae will be able to help when they get here?” Together they passed into the subdued bustle of the Aisle, the voices of the laundresses, the tailors, the flax-carders who worked there a gentle racket, like wind chimes in the flame-speckled dark.

“Maybe,” Rudy said uneasily.

He’d contacted Wend yesterday via scrying crystal, at the young priest’s camp somewhere among the Bones of God. Wend’s hair and beard were a dark, matted mess, his soft, brown, cowlike eyes worried: “I don’t know what it is,” he had said, bending close to his own scrying stone, held within his cupped hands, “but something has been following us for three days. Ilae and I both have tried to identify it, tried to see it, to no avail.” He’d glanced around; past his shoulder Rudy had seen Ilae, a thin red-haired young woman, fragile as she’d been as a witch-child taken in by the Wizards’ Corps, nervously watching the pine trees that shut them into an emerald twilight.

“We lay awake, sleepless, all last night,” Wend had continued, his voice low. “We have heard nothing, sensed nothing … except that there is something there.”

White Raiders?
Rudy had wondered at the time, but in his heart he knew that what was stalking the two young wizards across the empty wastes of Gettlesand wasn’t anything as simple as that.

“We can’t count on anything,” he said now to Alde, as they passed through the half-deserted watchroom of the Guards. The big training room was dark, for there’d been a problem of glowstone theft lately, and Janus took good care to lock up the Guards’ allotment. “And anyhow, Wend and Ilae aren’t much more than novices themselves. If—”

He stopped on the threshold of his workroom, rage searing him like a sudden electrical charge. For a moment he could not even speak.

“Goddamn little bitch,” he whispered. “Sneaky lying
lagarta
…!” As if the words had released him from physical restraint, he strode into the double cell, to where the
Black Book of Lists
lay open on the table, a handful of its pages ripped out, the smell of ashes heavy in the stove. He ran his hand over the book, though he didn’t need to. The echoes of Scala Hogshearer’s spite and malice lay all over it like vomit. His voice rose in a furious shout, “I’m gonna break that friggin’ little
puta’
s neck!”

“No!” Alde grabbed him as he whirled for the door, putting herself in front of him, catching his sleeves, his vest. He rounded on her, panting with fury. She said firmly, “I’ll go.”

“This isn’t your—”

“I’ll go.” The cornflower eyes flashed with sudden command. “You’re angry.” All the gentleness was gone from her now. Her face was the face of a queen who had seen the worst that Fate can give.

“God Christly damn right I’m angry,” Rudy yelled. “Ingold risked his goddamn life to retrieve that book! Everything in it—”

“All the more reason I must speak to her, not you.” She thrust him to the rough log chair, forced him to sit, and as she did so he thought,
Christ, this isn’t any of her business! She should lie down
 … Her face was pointy and white with exhaustion, and sweat stood out on her forehead beneath the soft black wings of her hair.

Another part of him thought,
She’s right
. He knew if he saw his pupil now he’d cause an unforgivable breach, which the Keep absolutely and utterly could not afford. And furious as he was, he knew the book had been violated from teenage spite. He’d seen his sisters do that kind of thing all the time.

He watched the woman he loved as she crossed the big room to the door, her shadow reeling over the plastered walls in the glowstone’s pallid light. There was a world of banked rage in the set of her back and shoulders—he
wouldn’t have wanted to be either Scala or her father at this moment.

In the door she turned. “She’ll lie, you know,” she said. “And her father will back her up.”

Rudy sat for a long time in silence after she’d gone, struggling to calm his breathing, staring at the mutilated book. It was—thank God—the simplest of the early magic texts, and the lists it contained could be recompiled by Ingold and himself from memory—
in our copious spare time, he
reflected savagely. But he remembered Ingold, white and silent with shock and horror, crawling carefully under the precariously balanced weight of broken stone and tile to extract this book and two others from the wreckage of the library at Quo. He remembered all those long nights on the desert carrying it back, and the sense he had of the long years of magic and hope and effort that clung to its faded covers.

He couldn’t even really wish Scala ill, because on her well-being might depend so much of the future survival of the Keep.

The little bitch
.

He drew out his scrying crystal and calmed his mind enough to call Ingold’s image to the stone. And got nothing.

“Oh, Christ, don’t give me that again.”

He tried contacting Thoth, and then Brother Wend, with similar nonresults. In the open state of his concentration he felt, not the deep-flowing, angry pressure he had sensed before—the weight of magic along the earth’s fault lines—but only a kind of hot heaviness on the fringes of his consciousness, a gray interference that would allow nothing through.

Rudy mumbled a scatological comment and put the crystal away. He gathered the
Black Book
up, made a search for possibly dropped pages near the hearth—there were none, of course—and took it to the big oak cupboard that filled most of one wall. It was still locked, and the spells of Ward and Guard still in place. Everything on the shelves was as he had left it. For a moment he had a horrible vision of
Scala going through and smashing everything in her rage, as his sister Teresa had done when she threw out all of his sister Yolanda’s makeup during that stupid business about who was going to date that dweeb Richard Clemente. But that didn’t seem to be the case.

Yet
, Rudy thought grimly. To Ingold’s spells of Ward and Guard he added his own, woven specifically with Scala’s name and image and the essence of her being. For good measure he placed the same Wards on the chest where Gil kept the record crystals, wrapped in their parchment indices.

Someday everyone in the Keep might have to depend on Scala Hogshearer for their very lives.

He hoped he’d be dead by that time.

“Ah, Master Wizard,” came Lapith Hornbeam’s pleasant voice from the doorway. “I’m so glad I’ve found you in. About this idea my mother has, for locating stock …”

All in all, it was nearly twenty-four hours before Rudy returned to the fifth level and the magic of the Guy with the Cats.

As Alde had predicted, Scala denied having been anywhere near the workroom, and her father swore she had been with him and raged before the Council at Rudy’s prejudice against his daughter. Rudy didn’t think Scala would have the
cojones
to show up at the workroom that evening demanding a lesson, but she did. He blandly informed her that because some person or persons unknown had destroyed the relevant pages of the
Black Book of Lists
, he couldn’t teach her anything whatsoever until Ingold returned and the pages could be copied from memory.

“You’re lying,” she yelled and kicked the leg of the table, making the glowstones jump. “You can teach me other things. You can teach me lots.” Her heavy brows pulled into a scowl. “Other spells. Real spells.”