Mother of Winter (6 page)

They had given them names; not respectful ones, perhaps, but convenient when Gil noted down the contents of each crystal.

The Dwarf.

Mr. Pomfritt—named less for his resemblance to a long-forgotten character in a TV show than for his precise, didactic way of explaining the massive spiral of stars, light, and silver-dust that funneled, Ingold said, a galaxy-wide sweep of power
into something kept carefully out of sight in a small black glass dish.

The Bald Lady.

Mother Goose.

Scarface.

Black Bart.

And the Guy with the Cats.

And now Tir said that the Guy with the Cats had been in the Keep. That meant whoever that old mage was, he’d been of the generation that first saw the Dark Ones come.

The generation that fought them first. The generation that built the Keep.

“The little boy got lost here once,” Tir confided in a whisper as they wound their way along a secondary corridor on third south. Night was a time of anthill activity in the Keep, as suppers were cooked, business transacted, courtships furthered, and gossip hashed in the maze of interlocking cells, passageways, warrens, and bailiwicks that sometimes more resembled a succession of tight-packed villages than a single community, let alone a single building. Rudy paused to get an update on Lilibet Hornbeam’s abscess from a cousin or second cousin of that widespreading family; nodded civil greetings to Lord Ankres, one of the several noblemen who had survived to make it to the Keep—His Lordship gave him the smallest of chilly bows—and stopped by Tabnes Crabfruit’s little ill-lit workshop to ask how his wife was doing.

Tir went on, “He was playing with his sisters—he had five sisters and they were all mean to him except the oldest one. He was pretty scared, here in the dark.”

What little boy?
Rudy wondered.
How long ago?
Sometimes Tir spoke as if, in his mind, all those little boys were one.

Him.

“They sent a wizard up to find him?” Rudy was frequently asked to search the back corners of the Keep, or the woods, for straying children.

They ascended a stair near the enclave owned by Lord Sketh and his dependents, a wooden one crudely punched through a hole in the ceiling to join the House of Sketh’s cells on the third
level with those on the fourth. Warm air breathed up around them, rank with the pungence of cooking, working, living, drawn by the mysterious ventilation system of the Keep.

One more point for the wizards who built the place, Rudy thought. However they’d powered the ventilator pumps and the flow of water, most of them still worked. He and Ingold had never been able to ascertain that one to their satisfaction. They’d found the pumps, all right, and the pipes and vents like capillaries through the black walls, the thick floors, but no clue as to why they still worked.

A young boy passed with two buckets of water on his shoulders, accompanied by a henchman wearing the three-lobed purple badge of the House of Sketh—Sketh was notorious for thinking it owned the small fountain in the midst of the section where most, but not all, of its servants and laborers lived. Alde suspected they were charging for access, but couldn’t prove it.

“Uh-huh,” Tir said. “There were three wizards in the Keep then, an old man and a lady and a little girl. The girl found the little boy.”

“So these were different from the guy who showed the King how to find the potatoes.”

Tir thought about this. “Uh-huh. That was … I think the King was before. Way before.” It was the first time he’d identified anything resembling a sequence to his memories. Eldor—Tir’s dead father—had had some of Dare of Renweth’s memories, toward the end of his pain-racked life; according to Ingold, few others of the line had. Ingold deduced that the wizards who built the Keep had engineered such memories into certain bloodlines to make sure of their preservation, but it was never possible to predict who would remember what, or when.

The boy frowned, fighting to reach back into that barely comprehended darkness, and they turned a couple of corners and cut through a quarter-cell somebody had chopped into a corridor: Tir still leading, still pursuing old recollections, matching in his mind the way the Keep had been three thousand years ago against the shortcuts of his current experience.

“There’s stairs way back there but we can go up here,” he said, pointing down another hall.

Here, toward the back of the fourth, many of the fountains had failed. The cells were inhabited by the Keep’s poorer folk, who’d received less productive land in the division of arable allotments or whose birthrate had outstripped what they were assigned; those whose land had been damaged by slunch or whose livestock had sickened and died; those who had sold, traded, or mortgaged first their land, then their time and freedom, to the wealthier inhabitants who had food to spare. Many of the cells, lying far from the stairways or the bridges that crossed the Aisle, weren’t inhabited at all. Around here the air smelled bad. It was all very well to be living in a place whose ventilation pumps were still operative after three thousand years, but over the millennia, as Rudy put it, somebody had lost the manual. When a pump broke, it stayed broken.

Rudy hadn’t mentioned it to Alde, but he lived in fear that a lot of this stuff would all give out at the same time, as the internal combustion engines of his experience generally had.
And then Shit Creek won’t even be the phrase for it
, he thought uneasily.

Toward the back of the Keep the corridors lay straighter, too, for no one had lived here long enough to alter the walls. The darkness seemed denser away from the pine-knot torches, the lamps of smoking grease, and the occasional glowstone in its locked bracket of iron.

The stairway Tir led him to was at the back of the fourth, a deserted area smelling of the rats that seemed to spontaneously generate in spite of all the purging-spells he or Ingold could undertake. Without the blue-white glow that burned from the head of Rudy’s staff, the long corridor would have been as lightless as the crawl spaces behind Hell. A smoke-stained image of a saint regarded them gloomily from a niche at the stair’s foot: St. Prool; Rudy recognized her by the broken ax she held in her hands.

He’d never figured out, when Gil told him the story, why God had broken the ax in half
after
ol’ Proolie got the chop.
The blood line around her neck was neatly drawn in red, like a sixties choker.

The stairs themselves were rough plank, almost as steep as a ladder. Tir darted ahead, feet clattering on the wood, and Rudy cast his magic before him so that a ball of witchlight would be burning over the child’s head when he got to the top.

He himself followed more slowly, thrusting his glowing staff-head up through the ragged hole in the stone ceiling to illuminate the cell above. The magelight was bright, filling the little room and showing Rudy, quite clearly when he came up level with the floor, the thing that stood in the cell’s doorway.

It was a little taller than his knee, and, he thought—trying to summon the image of it in his mind later—a kind of dirty yellowish or whitish-yellow, like pus except that there was something vaguely inorganic about the hue.

It had a head but it didn’t have eyes, though it turned the flattened, fist-sized nodule on its spindly neck in his direction as he emerged. It had arms and legs—afterward Rudy wasn’t sure how many of each.

He was so startled he almost fell, lurching back against the stone edge of the opening in the floor. He must have looked away, grabbing for his balance on the ladder, because when he looked back it was gone.

“Tir!” Rudy lunged up the last few rungs, flung himself at the door. “Tir, watch out!” He almost fell through the doorway, the blast of light he summoned flooding the corridor, an actinic echo of his panic and dread.

He looked left, then right, in time to see Tir emerge, puzzled, from another cell door perhaps fifty feet down the hall.

There was no sign of the thing he’d seen.

“Stay there!”

Tir looked scared—by the panic in Rudy’s tone as much as by anything else—and held on to the jamb of the doorway in which he stood, while Rudy summoned all the light he could manage. By that brilliant, shadowless wash Rudy checked every cell for fifty feet down the corridor, quick looks, loath to turn his back on the passage or on the other empty black openings. Most cells here were bare, scavenged long ago of everything remotely useful—boxes had been stripped of their metal nails, old barrels of their strapping, even the curtains or the rickety shutters that in other places in the Keep served to cover the openings. Here and there Rudy found a cell crammed, disgustingly, with the waste and garbage some family on five north thought Minalde’s quaestors wouldn’t notice.

Rudy stretched his senses out, listening, trying to scent above the overwhelming garbage stink. But his concentration wasn’t what it should have been. Thinking back, he recalled no odor connected with the creature, nor any sound, not even when it fled.

“Maybe it’s a gaboogoo,” Tir surmised, when Rudy returned to the boy at last. “They’re sort of fairy things that live in the forest and steal milk from cows,” he added, with the tone of one who has to explain things to grown-ups. “Geppy’s mama tells neat stories about them.”

Some of Ingold’s lore concerned gaboogoos, and they almost certainly didn’t exist, though legends of them persisted, mostly in the southeast. But in any case, according to most of those legends, gaboogoos were humanoid: blue, glowing, and
“clothed as richly as princes,” a description that made Rudy wonder where they and similar fairy folk purchased size minus-triple-zero petite doublets and gowns.
Same place superheroes order those nonwrinkle tights from, I guess
. On the other hand, of course, he hadn’t believed in dragons, either, until he’d been attacked by one.

“Whatever it is, it sure as hell isn’t supposed to be here.” Rudy looked around him uneasily, then down at the boy again. As the first shock and alarm wore off, the implications were coming home to him. Something was living in the upper reaches of the Keep. Something he’d never seen, had never heard of—which probably meant
Ingold
had never heard of it, either. The old man had sure never mentioned weird little eyeless gremlins to him. And that meant …

Rudy wasn’t entirely sure what it did mean, except that it meant big trouble somewhere. “I think it’s time we got you home, Ace.” He took Tir’s hand.

“But you said it was smaller than me,” Tir protested. “And it didn’t have a mouth or teeth or anything. And I want to see it. Maybe it’s got a treasure.”

“Maybe it’s got claws,” Rudy said firmly, leading the way back toward the cell where the steps descended. Oddly, he couldn’t remember whether it had or not. “Maybe it’s got great big long skinny fingers to strangle you with.”

Maybe it’s got a big brother. Or
lots
of big brothers
.

“But what about the … the earth-apples, the potatoes?” Tir pronounced the word carefully, and with a good imitation of Rudy’s clipped California accent, “If you’ve got to go to the River Settlements with Master Graw tomorrow, we won’t be able to look for them for days.”

“If they’ve kept for a couple thousand years, they’ll keep for another three, four days.” Rudy glanced behind him at the corridor as they entered the cell where the stair led down. His concentration had not been up to maintaining the full white magelight for more than a few minutes, and it had faded and shrunk around them until it was once more two smoky stars on the points of the metal crescent that topped his staff. “Besides,
I’ll be damned if I’m leaving this place till I figure out what’s going on, Master Graw or no Master Firetrucking Graw.”

He held the staff down through the hole that led back to the fourth level, to make sure the cell below was empty and safe, and watched Tir carefully as the boy climbed down. In the few seconds that took, he also managed to glance over his shoulder at the cell doorway behind him seven or eight or maybe ten times.

He hadn’t realized how much, in the past five years, he had taken for granted the safety within the walls of the Keep.

“You’re sure it wasn’t an illusion?” Ingold asked a short time later.

Rudy considered the matter, propping his shoulders against the dyed sheepskins, bison pelts, and pillows of knit-craft and leather that made homey the pine-pole bench in the big workroom on first south that he and Ingold shared.

“I dunno,” he said at length. He tilted the scrying crystal in his hand so that the older wizard’s image, tiny but clear, shone more brightly in the jewel’s depths. By the look of it, the old man was in a ruined villa at Willowchild, four or five days’ journey from Renweth Vale.

The sight filled him with relief. He didn’t feel capable of dealing with what he’d seen earlier that evening—or what he thought he’d seen.

“I’m usually pretty good at spotting an illusion,” he went on slowly. “And this didn’t feel like one.” At the other end of the bench, Alde curled up like a child, her feet tucked under her green wool gown and her long black hair loosened for sleep, as it had been when he and Tir had come in to tell her what he had seen. Despite the lateness of the hour—the Keep was settling into somnolence around them—the boy was wide-awake, watching Rudy’s end of the conversation with vivid interest.

“It didn’t have a sound or a smell to it. Pugsley and I were looking for stuff the old guys hid … And hey, you know what? The Guy with the Cats, from the record crystals? He was the one Tir remembered seeing in the Keep all those years ago! He
described him perfectly. So we know when he lived! But Tir didn’t see squat, did you, kid?”

“Not squat,” the boy affirmed. Though he had demonstrated an almost preternatural ability to separate the formal intonations of proper speech from the combination of peasant dialect and barrio slang that Rudy and most of the herdkids spoke, Alde rolled her eyes.

“Hmm,” Ingold said and scratched a corner of his beard. Rudy had been half hoping the older wizard would say,
Oh, THOSE eyeless, rubbery, mysterious critters
, but at least he hadn’t blanched, clutched his heart, and cried,
Dear God, stay together and barricade the doors!
either.