Mother of Winter (26 page)

He picked one up. Deep within, he knew that it was food: ensorcelled, protected from harm and rot and circumstance, reduced at almost a molecular level to its true essence—a potato. And, Rudy sensed, turning it over in his fingers, definitely viable—if that was the term Gil used—if a way could be found to unravel the spells that had protected it for all these thousands of years.

Rudy drew a deep breath and let it out.
Completely revolutionized food production
.

We might just make it
.

He picked out as many as would fit in the pockets of his vest, added a couple of the smaller seeds, and stepping back a little, spoke the spell-word to slide the cover over the niche and settle the spells of illusion back into place. All he’d need, he thought,
was Scala going into another snit and hiding these things. Or taking them to her father to sell back to the Keep for whatever concessions he could get.

God only knew whether he could get through the spells that had protected them, he thought, following the tracemarks of his magic back through the maze. That was damn big juju the old man had used, some of the strongest he’d ever encountered—he wondered again where the power had come from. Maybe Ingold could work it out.

If Ingold didn’t buy it in combat against Los Tres Geezers.

Or wasn’t stabbed in the back by Gil.

Or—

“Master Wizard!” a voice called out to him from around a comer, and he heard the frantic running of feet. “Master Wizard! Quick! The Lady Minalde …!”

Rudy whispered, “Jesus!” and began to run. “Where are you? Where …?”

“Here!”

Rudy turned right, following the voice, damning the maze, and would have walked straight into the trap if he hadn’t thought,
There’s no reflection on the wall around the corner. The guy isn’t carrying a light
.

It was a man’s voice that had called him. And only children ran the maze lightless.

The next second a man’s weight slammed into his back.

Rudy was already backpedaling, ducking, weaving, when the smelly weight of a blanket was thrown over his head, twisting away from where a knife had to be coming; and he was right, he felt the blade score along arm and shoulder instead of plunging into his chest. He struck, kicking, cursing, blinded by the thick folds of fabric; he threw himself backward against the man’s weight and stumbled, fell, knocking his breath out of him, and when he tried to rise, the breath wouldn’t come back.

He knew then that the dagger had been poisoned. Passion-flower, God knows where they’d gotten it … His mind swam, vision blurring in the darkness as he struck at the grabbing hands and kept moving, trying to pull the blanket clear. He’d
dropped his staff—another knife went in, this one hard and deep, and the blood pouring out was a sickening lurch of weakness, a long sinking fall. He yelled, summoning lightning, the first spell he could think of, and through the blanket saw its purple-white blaze and heard someone scream.

Footfalls. Swimming dizziness. Gasping, he pulled the blanket clear and found himself in the corridor alone.

Rudy’s first, immediate thought was that he could not afford to waste energy swearing. Poison distilled from the passion-flower—which grew in Penambra and some parts of Gettlesand but no farther north that he knew of—numbed the facility to work magic in small doses and was fatal in large ones. The roaring, buzzing grayness in his head, dimly similar to the sensation he’d gotten looking into the crystal when he last tried to reach Thoth, seemed to close in his senses. It was as if he could not remember how to summon power, could not remember what part of his brain to channel it to.

He took his hand from his side and looked at it. It was dark red, as if he had set it down in paint.

Not good
.

Fumblingly, he gathered what magic he could still command, worked the spells against shock, against poison—healing of internal wounds. He didn’t know if he was doing it right. The power was running out of him like his blood. His mouth felt dry and his whole body cold. The mousy, dirty smell of the floor, the stench of the cells around him, were overlain by a stink of charring, the dangerous ozone of lightning, and the coppery harshness of his blood. He only wanted to sleep.

Somewhere clothing rustled. The scritch of dirty hair slipping across shoulders as someone turned his head.

Rudy raised his head, blinking, and caught fleeting movement from the open door of a cell a few yards away. A foot pulled back from view.

They were in the cells all around him, watching. Waiting for him to pass out.

“Tu madre,”
Rudy whispered, anger scalding him back to consciousness. He tried to rise and couldn’t but managed to
get to his hands and knees. When he crawled past the door, he turned to look within it—
Make my day
, hijoputa—but saw no one.

Whoever they were, they were hiding. But he heard them in the corridor behind him. Heard them shifting, slipping, moving through the cells in front of him as well.

Waiting.

No
, Rudy thought, every breath a separate labor, like ripping trees out of iron earth.
No
. His vision blurred. At one time he thought he saw the herdkid Geppy Nool, and Linnet’s little daughter Thya, running away down the corridor from him; at another, indescribable little critters, like things from an Escher drawing, that scampered down the wall on spidery legs or ran lightly along the dirty floor in pursuit of a terrified mouse. He became very conscious of his heart, trying to contract with muscle that grew weaker and weaker. He couldn’t seem to remember the spell to keep it going, couldn’t find the power to make that spell work.

You’re the only wizard in the Keep. Alde’s gonna die in childbirth if you buy it here
.

The anger at them, at those unseen watchers, flared anew. Her death would be on their hands. And they wouldn’t care.

The smell of their clothing, their flesh, grew stronger in his nostrils. He heard the scrape of an elbow, the tap of a weapon, against the flimsy wall behind him. Barely able to turn his head, he saw them only as darkness within a growing darkness. An eye flashed, and then a blade.

Dammit
, he whispered.
Damn it, damn it …

He stretched out his hand, formed in his mind the words, the gestures, the Summoning that had been done by the Guy with the Cats.

It was like inhaling radioactive Stardust, like a shot glass full of hyperdrive fuel. Rudy gasped, turned, flung lightning at the approaching shapes and heard one cry out and fall, smelled charred flesh as he scrambled to his feet, ran and staggered around another corner and down another passageway before he fell. There was a ladder down, not too far from here—he could see his own spell-marks on the wall,
guiding the way. He tried to rise and fell again, though his flesh still tingled with the power he’d called. He poured it inward, blocking the effects of the poison as best he could.
C’mon, heart, do your stuff …

In his hand he formed the illusion of a little purple fireball and set it on the floor. “Okay, Lassie,” he said to it. “Go get the Icefalcon.”

The fireball rolled away down the corridor in a trail of violet sparks.

Rudy listened behind him.

Nothing.

Slowly, he began to drag himself toward the stair.

He sat on plank scaffolding in a corner of the Keep …

The Keep?

Dawnlight surrounded him, dove-colored and chilly. But everything within him knew that he was in the Keep.

He seemed to be sitting at the outer edge of a maze of scaffolding, miles of it stretching away in both directions, thousands of feet along black glass walls that rose up unevenly against that orchid sky. He looked down and saw a chasm of shadow hundreds of feet deep, from which the spiderweb framework rose: planks and what looked like bamboo, rope bridges, all wreathed and woven with lines of magic. Machinery rested on some of the platforms, unfamiliar black shapes that glistened with cold crystal appurtenances in their circles of silver and smoke; more power-circles had been drawn on every jerry-built bridge and catwalk, their curves and lines reaching off into the twilight air to form a lace of unsupported magic.

And on every one of those platforms and bridges and catwalks, he could see the bodies of sleeping men and women, like sentries felled by plague. Beside one, two cats were sleeping, too.

It is the Keep
, Rudy thought.
The Keep before it was finished
. And the woman who sat bowed, defeated, curled within herself on the black plinth that rose out of the center of the foundation—it was the Bald Lady. The scaffolding where he sat—he could feel the edge of the damp planks sharply against his thighs, smell the oil of the machine next to him and the heartbreaking cold—was close enough that he could see her
face when she raised her head at the sound of hooves, close enough to see the stoic pain in her eyes at the sight of the man framed within the open square of what would be the Keep doors.

“Rudy?”

Alde’s voice. She sounded scared. As well she might, he thought.

He opened his eyes to a brief vision of her, sitting on the edge of the bed where he lay. Then he slipped back to find himself once more in the darkness of the corridor, with strange chalky creatures like legless scorpions rolling pillbug fashion down the dirty floor, and the dead herdkids standing in a row in front of him, hand in hand, watching him …

“Rudy!”

Pain went through his head as if it had been split with wedges, and he rolled over fast—someone barely got him a slop bucket before the tsunami of nausea hit.

“Well, there’s a waste of good rations,” remarked the Icefalcon’s voice.

Rudy made a weary but universal gesture and after a moment ventured to open his eyes again. He was in his own small chamber. Somebody had brought in half a dozen glowstones, so the place was fairly bright, and about two-thirds of the population of the Keep seemed to have packed itself into the seven-by-fifteen cell. He revised the number downward to a score or so, including the Bishop Maia, Varkis Hogshearer and his repellent offspring, Philonis Weaver—who was one of the several nonmage Healers in the Keep patronized by those whose religious scruples kept them from consulting wizards—Lord and Lady Sketh, Koram Biggar, a whole squad of fifth-level-north types and another phalanx of Sketh and Ankres henchmen, and about half the Keep Council.

All of them were talking.

“Did you see them?” Biggar demanded. “Do you know who they were?”

“The Icefalcon found you near the Brass Fountain Stairway on the fifth north,” Minalde said. “It’s a deserted
section; nobody Janus has questioned saw anything. It wasn’t a … a gaboogoo, was it?”

“I teil you there’s none such in the Keep!” Old Man Wicket snapped, and Biggar groaned.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to want the whole level searched again!”

“Who else would do such a thing?”

“Some I could name.”

Rudy didn’t see who in the back had made that remark.

Alde said quickly, “Whoever did it has to know that without a trained wizard in the Keep, the Keep itself is doomed.”

“Doomed is what it is anyway, begging your pardon, lady.” Bannerlord Pnak Nenion pushed his way to her side, with several of his third-level-north dependents. “I tell you, there will be no good in remaining in this place, not if we had a hundred wizards.”

“And my daughter’s trained,” Hogshearer snapped. “Smart as a whip, she is—aren’t you, Princess?—and picking up the Knowledge like she was taught from babyhood. Show them how you call fire. Show them, girl.”

“But show them outside, please,” Philonis Weaver said in her soft voice. “Outside the Keep entirely, if you would, dear. Look at me, Master Rudy. Are you seeing double?”

He shook his head. Her fingers rested on his wrist, cool and competent, then shifted to take the second, inner pulse. Weaver and two or three others in the Keep operated out of the long Church medical tradition, a combination of anatomical study, herbalism, and dream interpretation, which Ingold had learned and Rudy was learning: Weaver, though devoutly religious, was willing and happy to teach them.

She checked under his eyelids and pressed his nails and gave him a bitter draught of betony and a tiny breath of foxglove as a stimulant, and herded out everyone except Minalde, who remained sitting quietly on the edge of Rudy’s bed.

As they passed through the door he saw Lady Sketh put an
arm around Scala Hogshearer’s shoulders and smile with toothy
noblesse oblige
.

The draught cleared Rudy’s mind. He was able to lay spells of healing on the deep wound in his side, though he could tell there was no infection and that the internal bleeding had already been competently stopped. He could feel traces of the poison still in his system, but even that was below danger level.

He was naked to the waist—no real discomfort in one of the warm inner rooms of the Keep—with a bandage over the stinging wound on the back of his right arm and a mass of dressings and plasters bound on his side.

His head ached like a thousand hangovers and his mouth tasted like a peat bog.

“My vest over there, babe?”

She made a long arm for it, where it lay with his blood-soaked shirt on top of the chest. By the way she picked it up, he knew it still had the Cylinder in it and some if not all the ensorcelled potatoes. It clattered faintly as she set it down. “What on earth do you have in there?”

He fished in the pockets, found the Cylinder unharmed, and scooped out the glassy dark nuggets he’d retrieved from the niche. “The Spuds of Doom,” he said.

Her blue eyes got huge. He’d told her what Gil had said about food and history—she knew the importance of what he’d found. She whispered, “Oh, thank God,” and closed her eyes, all the tension in her body seeming, in that one moment, to ease. “Thank God.”

“God and the Guy with the Cats.” Rudy counted them quickly; all were there, as well as the smaller, unidentifiable beads. “I took enough to experiment with and left the rest where they were. I don’t think there’s a soul in the Keep but me who can get to them.”