Mother of Winter (17 page)

“Is that true?” Minalde’s voice, soft as silver bells, seemed to cut through the clamor, as if she spoke to Rudy and Rudy alone. Her eyes were deeply troubled.

Rudy didn’t want to, but before those blue eyes, he could do nothing but nod. “He had his reasons,” he said as renewed shouting rose like the roar of the sea. “And if you think heading out alone, without magic, into the river valley these days is safer than sticking with a bunch of armed guys in what’s left of a fort, remind me never to go camping with
you
, pal.”

“Then I suppose we need to ask,” Bannerlord Pnak said quietly, “why he departed without coming here to our aid? And for that matter, why it was that he—and you, Master Rudy—survived, and everyone else at the Settlements perished?”

“Nice goin’, punk.” Gil raised her head from the scroll she was deciphering when, many hours later, Rudy finally returned to the workroom. She’d collected every glowstone in the place and grouped them around her on the big oak table in the middle of the room, and the upside-down light made her thin face skull-like and odd in its masses of unbound black hair. She’d bathed and gotten someone in the Guards to change the dressing on her hurt cheek, but the bruises all around the area still looked dark and angry. “You know Pnak and Barrelstave have been itching for years to put Tir under a Council of
Regency—ever since Alde socialized seed wheat instead of letting people speculate in it. If they can discredit Ingold—”

“Don’t start on me, spook.” He dropped in the corner the bundle of his grubby traveling clothes he’d changed out of in Alde’s rooms and went to stand beside her. “Lemme have a look at that.”

She turned her face obediently, unmoving while he peeled back the dressing. The bruises were fading some, but the bite itself didn’t look like it was healing. Malnutrition, Rudy thought. Spells of healing, even those of a master like Ingold, could only go so far without nutrients to work from.

Still, there was something about the discoloration that he didn’t like.

“You manage to get in touch with Thoth?” she asked, and Rudy nodded.

The interview—after Alde had slipped into sleep in his arms, long after the shouting in the Council chamber was done—had troubled him, partly for the obvious reasons and partly with a kind of subconscious worry, a tip-of-the-tongue sense of something deeply wrong. The Gettlesand mage had looked as harried as it was possible for that sardonic, vulturine scribe to look, and although the sky beyond the windows of his rockpile hermitage—built against the outer wall of the old Black Rock Keep, for the wizards there did not as a rule sleep within the Keep walls—still held light, there had been an oddly blenched or faded appearance to the whole image, like a photograph badly exposed.

Thoth had disclaimed knowledge of gaboogoos—pronouncing the word in much the way a housewife might remove a dead mouse from the family casserole—but his yellow eyes had narrowed, and his spindle-knuckled fingers stirred in the gray sleeves of his robe. “The dogs have barked all around the Keep, night after night for a fortnight past,” he said. “Gray and Nila, when they spoke to us for the last time from the slopes of the Devil’s Grandmother, said they had seen some kind of creature there.”

“Gray and Nila?” Rudy recalled the two women, part of the original Wizards’ Corps in the war against the Dark.

“What were they doing up on the Devil’s Grandmother? Wasn’t that the volcano that …?”

“They followed the … the track, the spoor, of the power we sensed in the ground,” Thoth said. “They were on the western slope of the mountain when it erupted. They spoke of things there, pale creatures that walked through Wards and illusion as if they were not there, whose tracks they found ’round their camp every morning.”

Rudy shivered, remembering the ghostly shapes in the dark among the pines. He found himself hoping that wherever Ingold was, he was watching his back.

Hesitantly, because like everybody but Ingold he was a little afraid of Thoth, he said, “Could somebody—some wizard we don’t know about—have been … I dunno, tapping the energy of the volcano, maybe? Drawing on it, the way Ingold or you would draw on the energy within the earth-lines or the stars?”

“Considering that he or she would have had to be directly on top of the volcano to derive benefit from such an exercise,” the Serpentmage replied dryly, “such a source of power would have obvious limitations. And what wizard would be operating in the wilderness, without contact with human communities? Still,” he added, tilting his head in a fashion that made him more than ever resemble some strange wise member of the buzzard clan, “it would not do harm to speak to Shadow of the Moon and ask him whether the shamans of the plains have heard aught.”

The insectile fingers refolded themselves into another pattern. In the virulent light the old man’s sunken features seemed skull-like, worn and weary under the bald curve of his brow. “It is an ill time,” Thoth said at length. “The Raiders move down from the far north, and settlers from the Alketch have been plaguing our herds. They say fever and civil war ride unchecked through those countries, that famine rules on the Emperor’s throne and the cities have become infernos of lawlessness, blood, and smoke. Tirkenson deems it too perilous to send cattle toward Sarda Pass to your aid. It were folly, he says, to waste the lives of our
riders only to feed our enemies. Brother Wend and the Lady Ilae have agreed to journey to Renweth, that you may not be without magic. It is true that we have been remiss; someone should have gone to you long ere this. Will this serve?”

“Well, Alde may get back with you on the cattle.” Rudy rubbed his chin, still smarting from the razor, and glanced over at Minalde’s sleeping form. “But thank Wend and Ilae, and tell ’em they’ll be more than welcome. You guys had any luck with finding mageborn kids? Ingold and I have been watching …”

He fell silent, remembering that the Keep was over a dozen children shorter than it had been a week ago.

Thoth shook his gleaming head. “We gave the Dark too little credit in that,” he said softly. “I begin to wonder whether we do these … gaboogoos, as you call them … enough.”

Another damn thing to worry about
, Rudy had thought as the crystal faded.
I’ll have to hire a secretary to keep track of them
.

Standing now beside Gil in the deep late-night silence of the Keep, he remembered the conversation again, and his uneasiness returned. Walking back to the workroom through the ebon stillness, the images of the gaboogoos had returned to him, the tall, vicious, palely glowing monstrosities that had pursued him over the mountainside, and the little knee-high creature that had stood in the doorway of that room on fifth north, eyeless head turned in his direction as if it could, in fact, see.

“So who’s this Saint Bounty?”

“Huh?” Rudy snapped back to reality. He realized she and Ingold had been gone for nearly two months. He’d kept them up on gossip and events, but there were always things he hadn’t thought to mention. “Oh, him.”

He moved aside one of the terra-cotta pots in which Ingold had been nursing seedling roses for years. Only two varieties had survived the downfall of civilization, and one of them didn’t look any too robust. Rudy had been babysitting
them all spring, feeding them little bits of stinking fish and conjuring miniature spells to keep them warm.

“His statues have been showing up all over the north half of the fifth level, around the Biggars and the Wickets and the other trailer-park types up there. I don’t know who started it. Fat guy with a basket of food—just who you’d figure to get popular when we’re all looking at starvation. You’re the saint expert.”

“Well, yes, I am.” Her eyes were thoughtful, cold and very blue in the dazzle of the glowstones. “And I’ve never heard of the guy. I asked Maia. He said there was no Saint Bounty in the official calendar, nor was there any local saint of that name he knows about. And I don’t like the color of his robe.”

“His
robe
?” Rudy had gotten used to Gil’s trick of fixing her attention on bizarre tangents, clues visible to a scholar that even a wizard might miss. It was one of the things she had in common with Ingold, who was popularly considered to be slightly mad. But even so …

“The iconography of saints is very stylized.” Gil carefully rolled up the scroll she had been studying, tied it, and carried it and her notes across to the big iron-bound oak cupboard. Rudy could see that her notes were almost entirely in the flowing bookhand of the Wathe, interspersed here and there with English, which neither of them used much anymore. “It’s a teaching tool for the illiterate. There’s a reason behind every image, every color, every
tchotchke …
”

“Gil-Shalos?” Shadow moved in the doorway that led through to the Guards’ watchroom, the pale flower of a quatrefoil on dark clothing, and long ivory braids with dark fragments of bone woven into them, framing a narrow face. The Icefalcon came in, carrying something in a scrap of burlap through which dirty brown fluid had soaked. If the whole Keep hadn’t been faintly redolent of salvaged carrion, Rudy would have had more warning of his approach. “I had to wrench these from the Council’s regulators of meat. I trust you’re sufficiently grateful.”

“Kill anybody over it?” Gil carried it to the table.

“And have to clean my sword hilt again?” Gil grinned and picked apart the wrappings. “Yuckers,” Rudy said.

“Up your nose, punk.” She turned one of the hacked-off limbs thoughtfully. It looked like the front leg of a wolverine, but there was something badly wrong with the proportion of it: too long in bone, the claws widened into short spades. “You seen tracks of this one?”

The White Raider nodded, hand resting lightly on the hilt of his sword. “The whole valley went under snow during the storm, but I saw this track during the winter, though I never saw the things themselves. Perhaps three, maybe four, all told, in the Vale.”

“Always near the slunch?”

The icefalcon nodded. He looked little the worse for the climb up from the Settlements, nor for days of hunting the woods for storm-kills. He carried two or three fresh bruises, from that evening’s training session. Rudy privately suspected he was an android.

“I told Ingold of it, during the snows.” He folded his arms and looked down over Gil’s shoulder as she sorted through the other objects in the cloth: paws and limbs, mostly, but there was the head of something that might have been a woodchuck.

Gil considered the remains for a moment more, then went to fetch the remains of the thing that had attacked her in Penambra from the cupboard where they were stored. Rudy glanced across the table at the Guard and asked, “That wasn’t you who saw Ingold leave the settlement last night, was it?” If anyone had been able to see through the wizard’s illusions, it would have been the Icefalcon, but it was very unlike that cold-blooded young killer to mention such a thing, and certainly not to the daughter of Varkis Hogshearer.

The Icefalcon shook his head. “His name was spoken among the men today on the way up the mountain,” he said. He moved a glowstone out of Gil’s tidy circle, making patterns of them around the sticky bundle and its horrid contents.
“Many things were said of him, most of them stupid, but no one spoke of his leaving the camp.”

“Then how the hell did—”

“What about insects in the slunch?” Gil came back to the table, set the crusted hempen wrappings of the Penambra thing down with a sodden thwack. “The slunch-worms don’t seem to attack crops.”

“I’ve seen them,” the Icefalcon said. He had a very soft voice, light like a young boy’s, and seldom spoke above a whisper. His silvery eyes were without expression as he studied Gil’s face, but he asked, “Are you well? I’ll be returning to the Settlements at dawn. Everything in Manse and Carpont will be well and truly rotting, but there will be seed grain at least, and metal, do we get there before bandits do. Will you be all right?”

“Fine.” It was a lie. Rudy could see that and so could the Icefalcon, for the tall warrior put his hand to the uninjured side of Gil’s face and turned it to the light.

He stood for a time, considering her, resembling a long-limbed pale cheetah but slightly less human. Then he turned to Rudy and said, “Look after her.” He melted away into the shadows. At no time, Rudy realized, had he used his right hand or moved it out of reach of his sword hilt.

“I really am fine.” Gil’s voice was very small. She had turned her back on him, her head half bowed as she sorted through a revolting collection of animal parts with her dark hair half hiding her face. In her baggy, too-big black clothing, she had a fragile look, like an alley cat in a hard winter. There was a tension in her, too, as if she were perpetually braced, perpetually fighting something or ready to fight something; a look of pain, a series of lines around eyes and brows and mouth, that went past the wound on the side of her face.

Her tone returned to business almost with her next breath. “Have you had time to look at any of this?”

“In between my painting class and ballet practice, you mean?”

In the quick beauty of her grin he saw the shy girl peek out
from behind the warrior’s armor, then duck away to safety, again. As if half ashamed of appearing human, she turned her attention quickly back to the mess before her. “Ingold collected most of this during the salvage. The Icefalcon’s helped me a lot in woodcraft, but you’re the naturalist. Any of it look familiar?”

Rudy shook his head. “That’s the whole problem, spook. Like the old man said, nobody’s ever seen any of those critters before.”

He stepped close to look, nevertheless, drawing his knife and scraping at the slimy meat. Under Ingold’s guidance he’d boiled and disassembled and reassembled dozens of animal carcasses the way he used to break down cars, fascinated by the delicate interfitting of muscle and sinew and bone.

“I was a historian, not a biologist,” Gil said, probing with her fingers. “But if you’re an economic determinist, you pick up a little bit of science when you study stuff like climatology and demographics. Look at this one, the way it’s put together. Look at the foot bones and the elbow joint.”