Mother of Winter (13 page)

Don’t die
.

Two days’ walk to the Settlements. Two hours’ flight for a falcon.

If the night’s cold didn’t kill it. If it wasn’t brought down by some larger, fiercer creature, an eagle owl or a wolf. If it didn’t forget that it had once been a wizard; if it remembered that
there was a killing storm on the way; if it remembered how to transform itself back into a wizard again once its goal was reached.

It wasn’t that mages died of trying the spell, Thoth told her once. Some did, of course, for the strain of transformation was appalling. But many more simply continued their lives as animals, the memory of human magic, human faces, human families sliding from their small, intent animal brains. The most adept at transformation were the most in danger, it was said. There’d been at least four such dwelling in Quo when the City of Wizards was destroyed.

Gil had come from California—had turned down the chance to go back—to be in this world with him. She had accepted then that if he died—when he died—she would continue in this world without him. It was her world, now and forever.

Her face hurt her again, and she looked down at her hand, trying to recall why it pained her so sharply and what made her remember the blood running down her palm to drip into the slunch. There were dim images of a mountain with a core of ice, of a deep lake, blue as a jewel … of things like animate gems that looked at her and knew her name. Troubled by the recollections, she took from her jacket the leather wrappings that held the Cylinder.

It weighed heavy in her hand. Without crack, without bubble, without shadow or flaw; its surface wasn’t even pitted, and it had to be old, three thousand years, four thousand, maybe more. There was no way to tell. It gleamed in the smudgy lantern light as if oiled. Beyond the shadow of a doubt it was the product of magic, the product of the wizards who lived in the Times Before. Everything she had seen of this world before the Dark’s last rising had a decorated quality: the walls half timbered or ornamentally bricked, turreted and frilled with statuary and screens. The furniture was carved with flowers and beasts, the clothing—at least that of the rich—elaborate with trapunto and knotwork and embroidery. Of the Times Before, only the Keep itself remained, slick and enigmatic and black, a featureless rectangle immensely huge; the
Keep, and the crystals of light and images, likewise smooth and unblemished by eons of time. And this?

She turned it in her hand, seeking vainly for a flaw or a scratch or a clue. A communicator? A power-core? The leg of a footstool? Rudy would be able to feel magic in it, to touch it and sense something beyond its age. Ingold and Rudy both teased Gil about her complete lack of any sense of magic, her inability to feel it: odd, Ingold had once said, in someone who understood it so well.

She thought about him, staring into the depths of the glass core, but saw only the distorted image of her own hand closed around it and the tiny reflection of the lantern’s flame. Now, that was something they could use—a device that permitted communication of those who were not mageborn. A telephone.

He had left her alone.

The pain grew more intense, and she felt exhausted and nauseated, worse than ever before. Sword across her knees, she curled tighter within his robes, staring into the darkness that seemed to collect so thick in the buried chamber, above the mouth of the pit. Wherever he was, she thought, she was with him. Dead or alive, whatever the voices whispering in her brain told her.

There were other voices answering them, unanswerably.

 … thy sweet love remembered such joy brings
That I would scorn to change my state with kings
.

She felt the ice storm hit, far above her, as if all the world had been tipped over the edge into the pit of Fimbul Winter, the dark beyond the Norse Götterdämmerung, the cold that would see no spring, as if all the earth were sinking like a shipwreck through blackness to cosmos’ end.

“Look, guys, it’s not that I don’t appreciate the hospitality, but you gotta admit it’s getting a little thick in here.”

Rudy Solis started to rise, and George—the old dooic whom Rudy had decided bore a more than superficial resemblance to a comedian in his own world of that name—darted four-legged to the hole that led to the long and twisting passageway to the outer world, sat down in front of it, and bared his yellowing tusks. It was a ritual gesture—at this point Rudy didn’t really think George was going to bite him, though the discolored fangs were darn good for a guy that age—but he understood what it meant and backed to the wall again.

“Okay. I’m cool. So what the hell do you want?”

None of the dooic in the cave had laid a hand on Rudy, or come near him. There were perhaps a dozen of them, a small band as dooic went, mostly the wiry, dark-furred variety, though one or two of those with graying muzzles were large enough and scarred on the wrists and back in such a way that Rudy guessed they had been domestic slaves before the rising of the Dark. They huddled at the far side of the low-roofed, sandy-floored chamber around a fire that George had kindled by merely looking at the wood, in the age-old manner of wizards.

Rudy was still amazed.
I’ll be buggered. Dooic have magic
.

He could not have been more surprised if he’d learned the same thing about tree frogs.

He settled down to watch the movements of the band. With one worried dark eye still on Rudy, George moved away from the entrance again, to admit three or four more of
the tribe, who hauled after them dead branches and chunks of half-rotted logs. These they stacked in a corner of the cave. The cave itself, though wide and deep, was only about five feet high at its tallest, tapering at the back to little more than a horizontal crack that vanished into darkness, and the whole place reeked of carrion, smoke, and dooic. Not, Rudy thought, the place where he’d planned to spend the night, but it beat hell out of a slunch bed between the timberline and the glacier, with rubbery eyeless mushroom-critters dropping by for tiffin. For company he supposed it had a few points over Graw’s great hall.

On the other hand, it was the opportunity of a lifetime to study a dooic band close up. He’d tried on other occasions, in the Vale of Renweth, but dooic were elusive as foxes in the woods—and if some of them could use magic, it was no wonder he’d never been able to sneak up on them. Despite the fact that dooic would occasionally slaughter and devour lone travelers, he felt no threat. Unless George was a hell of a lot stronger wizard than he appeared to be, his own magic should protect him from concerted attack—and anyway, they’d shown no disposition to gang up on him. George had lured him here with a trail of magic, of signs traced in light in the dark air, and Rudy had followed out of a combination of intense curiosity and the knowledge that Ingold would smack him with his staff if he passed up the chance.

They wanted him here.

Had they asked him to dinner to thank him for saving the life of the hinny with the two babies? Did they think that action had made him responsible for her and them? Was she going to end up his wife, in the best tradition of pulp adventure tales?

Er—none for me
,
thanks
.

He could see her among the others in the corner, pups in tow, eyes gleaming in the almost impenetrable smoky darkness of the cave, but she had made no move to approach him; he’d christened her Rosie after a girl he’d gone to high school with. The other mares he labeled Mom, Margaret
Dumont, Alice the Goon, Gina, Cheryl, and Linda,
and two days from now I won’t recognize a single one of them …

George, who’d gone over to the wood-bearers—all of whom moved easily on all fours, under the low pitch of the roof—now turned, as if he’d heard a noise from the passageway. He glanced back at Rudy and grunted something, accompanied by a swift, complicated gesture with his hairy, short-fingered hands. Rudy must have looked blank, because George caught the attention of another male with a piglike squeal, made another gesture, then ran, apelike on his knuckles, to the passageway and vanished into the dark. The other males made a flurry of gestures among themselves, incomprehensible to Rudy but speaking clearly of consternation and fear—why fear? Then four of them ran to sit in a row across the entrance, watching Rudy intently with those surprisingly human eyes.

“I get it,” Rudy said. “Sit tight, right?” As he spoke he showed his hands, palms out, empty, then thought,
Oh, good. They communicate by gestures, and I’ve just told them all their mothers wear army boots
. He noted how the males were sitting, arms not wrapped around their knees, but crooked at the sides, hands palms down upon the drawn-up knees. He hunkered himself carefully into the same position.

They’d have shut the gates at the settlement hours ago. Whatever was going on up here, it would be an interesting night, provided they didn’t expect him to share the dead rabbits and voles a couple of them had pulled out from behind rocks. He was starving, but even from here he could tell supper had passed its sell-by date quite some time ago.

Everyone in the cave seemed to be listening, tense and on edge; the males across the doorway jumped at sounds, gestured, and signed to one another. At one point one of them went into the passageway, clearly to check and see if George was on his way back.

The gaboogoos? Rudy wondered. Had the old dooic gone to chase them off again? And if so, how?

More logs were heaped on the fire. The cave grew uncomfortably warm and phenomenally odiferous. Huge shadows
humped and jittered over the low walls as the dooic moved about in the ruddy light; now and then a couple would sit down and begin to groom each other, but it never lasted long. Whatever was happening, it was bothering the whole group.

In time the old one returned, carrying something in his enormous hands, and Rudy thought,
Did Mom send him to the local SuperGrocery for something fresh for dinner?

The bird the old dooic was carrying was not only fresh, but alive. It stirred, trying to shift bloody feathers and bating feebly with its head. As George brought it near, Rudy saw the hard gold eye, the hooked beak of a peregrine falcon, and thought,
Nice rock-throwing if you could bring one of those down, pal!

Or had something else wounded it, leaving it bleeding on the rocks below the caves? In that case, how had the old dooic located it in the dark? George held it carefully, hands wrapped gently around the bloody wings, rocking a little and muttering. The bird was either still stunned by whatever had brought it down or calmed by the dooic’s spells. It did not fight, but glared around with feral topaz eyes in the near-dark.

What was a peregrine doing flying after nightfall, anyway?

Silence deepened in the cave.

Then George handed the peregrine to Mom and hunkered close to the fire. A moment later Rudy felt the magic of a Summoning of some kind—heat?

It radiated from the close-curled, gray-furred body as if old George had turned himself into a stove. Coupled with the warmth of the fire, it was nearly unbearable, but the entire band crowded close around. Rosie the hinny scurried over to Rudy and caught his hand, trying to draw him toward the group. He followed, though the smell of the steaming group was Olympian.

This better be good
.

Rudy turned, halfway to the group, at the sudden shriek of wind in the passageway. Rosie dragged on his hand, fear in
her eyes—the wind flung back Rudy’s long hair, the cold striking hard and sudden and sharp enough to stab his sinuses like a knife. The wind’s voice rose, screaming in the turnings of the rock, as if a cyclone, a hurricane, the end of the world were taking place outside.

The real cold came.

And Rudy knew.

Oh Christ, it’s an ice storm
.

He stood numb as Rosie plunged back into the safe warmth of her family. For a moment Rudy felt only astonishment at the coming of such a phenomenon, out of place and season.

And then:
The Settlements!

It was too late. Knowledge of what an ice storm’s winds would do to even such stout constructions as the old stone villas, the tree-trunk walls, ripped his heart like a bayonet. Walls ruptured, roofs jerked away, humans and animals flung like rag dolls in a lawn-mower—he’d seen the ruins on the plains of Gettlesand.…

Old George grabbed him, dragged him with horrifying animal strength back into the close-mobbed dooic, as if he genuinely feared Rudy would go dashing out into the storm.

But Rudy only thought,
Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus!
over and over, knowing there was nothing he could do. They were dead already—frozen, pulped, and dead.

Cold rolled into the cave like the waters of doom. The dooic crowded tighter around the fire, around the old male whose spells had saved them from other peril before.

The Keep!
Those black walls had resisted the anger of the Dark and would, he thought, resist the fall of the mountains themselves. But the crops would be killed, the crops they’d broken themselves all spring to plant, the crops that were their only salvation. Every head of livestock in the byres outside the Keep would perish of the outer-space cold even if they weren’t dashed to pieces by the howling funnel of the wind.

And the herdkids with them.

Rudy screamed,
“No!!!”
barely aware that he had made a
noise, then curled against the rock of the wall and buried his head in his arms.

Like tornadoes, ice storms struck and passed quickly. Rudy lay listening to the mad howl of the wind, every contraction of his heart telling him that the children he’d seen questing for firewood under Lirta Graw’s command, the hunter whose nose he had broken, were dead now, their bodies sieved through the smashed palisade and the meat flash-frozen where it lay. So much for human plans, human aspiration, human love … So much for anyone we love or hate or who just has their own annoying agenda.

He shut his teeth hard against tears.

In time he stirred, turning his concentration to his own spells of Summoning heat. The repetition of the words, the drawing of the power, took his mind temporarily from the pain. These dooic, huddled around their meager fire, had saved his life, maybe because he’d saved Rosie’s and maybe because old George knew he was a wizard and could help them out—he didn’t know. But he owed them. So he snuggled closer into the fetid congregation, noting in surprise that Mom and some of the younger hinnies were wrapped in badly cured, flayed deer-hides, under which they held the cubs close to their bodies, the first evidence he’d seen of dooic using implements more complicated than a rock. Though of course, he thought, the domesticated ones had worn clothing in servitude and may have thought that was a good idea to bring back to the tribe.