Mother of Winter (25 page)

“Like I told you, kid,
nothing
works unless you memorize the lists,” Rudy said, though this wasn’t strictly true. There were spells for things like starting fires, and reading the weather, that could be taught in the absence of the concepts of Names and Essence, but damned if he was going to turn the little snake into a firestarter. Scala went beet-red and threw a temper tantrum, hurling everything within reach to the floor—Rudy had taken care that there was nothing breakable on hand—then stormed away to fetch her father.

Rudy spent the rest of the afternoon trying to find time to go over every record crystal and every book of Ingold’s meager library to see if he couldn’t learn something that would increase the productivity of the hydroponics tanks. A comparison between the preliminary inventory of wheat and meat
and the production rate of the tanks indicated an ugly hiatus right before the winter solstice. Coming back from the crypts themselves, Rudy passed a group of the Sketh henchmen in conversation with several of those farmers who owed allegiance, for one reason or another, to Lord and Lady Sketh—only after he’d passed them did he realize that they’d fallen silent at his approach and moved aside more than people customarily did to let him pass.

On his way back from walking in the high woods behind the Keep the following morning, Rudy had another go at contacting Ingold, and this time reached the old man without trouble.

“Yes, I can restore the pages from memory.” Ingold rubbed the bridge of his nose with his fore-knuckle. There was a half-healed cut over one eye and a dirty bandage on his wrist, but he appeared cheerful and more or less rested, and the weather in the south seemed sufficiently warm for him to have put aside the bearskin surcoat he’d been wearing.

“I’ll dictate them to her when I return,” the old man said. “The penmanship exercise should make her regret her behavior, if she doesn’t already. We’ll have all the winter to work in.”

Rudy shivered, for winters at the Keep were long. Even with spells to keep the area around the doors clear of snow, it sometimes lay up to twenty feet deep around the black walls. There was nowhere to go, and little to do except wonder whether the food would last and fight about trifles. Gil’s reputation as a storyteller was not based on idle amusement but on a genuine need.

“In the meantime,” Ingold went on, “teach her cloud-herding and the Summonings of things like water, and heat, and cold, and air. Those are all things that work in almost direct proportion to how well one does one’s meditations. If she sloughs off on her meditation practice, she won’t get results. With luck, by the time I get back she’ll have learned a little self-discipline. And Rudy—” He half smiled ruefully. “—she’s far from the most obnoxious student I’ve known of.”

Rudy shivered again, as the old man’s image faded.

Winter.

Looking up the valley, from where he sat at the edge of the woods, he could see the white horns of the St. Prathhes’ Glacier. Below him, separated from the Keep by the pear and apple orchards Minalde’s husband, Eldor, had ordered planted, years before the coming of the Dark—at least half of them dying, leafless, from the ice storm—the herdkids’ ashes lay buried in the cemetery, along with the skeletons of their dogs once the meat had been boiled off them. From up here the wooden steles looked like Popsicle sticks thrust into the earth. Rudy saw their parents coming and going to the place quite often, when the unending work of replanting gave them time.

Through the hemlocks that grew at the southeast corner of the Keep, a small form was moving; even at this distance Rudy recognized Tir. Altir Endorion, Lord of the Keep and High King of Darwath, he walked the path alone in his bright blue knitted jerkin. Rudy watched the boy go from grave to grave, standing for a few moments at each stele, tracing with his forefinger the carved letters of his friends’ names.

Rudy’s throat hurt, watching him. I
would have done something if I could
.

After a time the boy raised his head, and Rudy knew he saw him, a still figure in mottled brown and black among the mottled brown and black of rocks, lichens, and trees. Without a sign the child turned and walked back alone to the Keep.

Rudy gave him sufficient start to ensure that they wouldn’t meet, then followed slowly. In the workroom he found no evidence that Scala had attempted to see him. He had taken to carrying the Cylinder with him at all times—though it weighed heavy in the pocket of his buffalo-hide vest—and sleeping with it under his pillow at night. From the cupboard he now took Ingold’s fist of spell-words and the various shapings of power seen within the record stones. By the quiet back corridors of the nearly deserted daytime Keep, he made his way up to the fifth level, the tangle of corridors and of rooms with their new-made doors shut tight.

The marks he had left on the wall, invisible to normal eyes, led him easily back to the place. Someone had replaced the
glowstone in front of Saint Bounty; Rudy took it again, with a flash of irritation. The glowstones were supposedly reserved for the main junctions and stairways, and for those who had work inside, like spinning and weaving, though people were always swiping them. He suspected Varkis Hogshearer had a pile of them in his rooms, holding them for clandestine sale.

Rudy pushed the thought of the man away. The packed dirt on the floor here was so thick as to be uneven underfoot, like a forest path; the ceiling had been lowered at some time past to provide storage space overhead. Plaster and lath had fallen, leaving gaping holes. The smell was horrific, and, as Alde had said, there was something odd about it as well—sweetish, like a coloration that underlay everything else. He couldn’t identify it.

It took Rudy a moment to realize that the soft snufflings, the whispered voices, were gone now. The doors that had been so tightly shut yesterday were ever so slightly ajar.

He reached with his staff, gently pushing. The leather hinges squeaked. Mageborn, he could see in the dark within. Only a squalid room, two-thirds of an original cell with a lowered ceiling, over half of it for loft space. He stepped inside. Filthy mattresses, the smell of fresh ashes and chamber pots. A box for a table, a really awful icon of Saint Bounty on the wall. A mouse regarded him insolently from a small pile of blankets and clothing in a corner.

The smell—with its undertone of oddness—was even stronger here.

Rudy remembered from his bar-fighting days how a drinking man’s sweat carried the smell of alcohol, though he still couldn’t identify this disturbing, sickly-sweet stench. He returned to the corridor, uneasy, and listened again. Nothing. In all the cramped rooms, the smelly hallways, the dry pipes, and crotted lofts around him. Nothing.

He didn’t like it one Christly little bit.

The marks he’d left led him farther inward, to the place where the Guy with the Cats had worked the spell that caught his attention. The sense of it was strong, and Rudy, following it like a sound, came at last to the place where it
was strongest, a half cell mostly lofted over, but with one wall still of the original black stone.

Here, he thought. He’d stood here.

He drew the Cylinder from his pocket and held it before him, opening his mind, breathing power into himself as if the magic of the air, the secrets of the dark earth, the pulse of the rivers that ran below the ground, all passed through him like white light. He formed the words in his mind without reference to the parchment in his belt. He hadn’t realized how familiar they’d become to him, with all those readings.

Ancient words. Names of power. Half-guessed meanings and etymologies Gil had teased out from cognates and affixes.

Memory. Memory.

The Guy with the Cats was there.

Rudy was shocked, not at his presence—he knew he’d be there—but at his appearance. In the crystals Rudy had put his age at sixty or seventy, though with wizards it was difficult to tell. He was of a gene pool with which Rudy was unfamiliar, short and broad-faced, mouth and chin neat and small under a Durante hatchet of schnozz. In two of the spells he’d worked in the crystals—abstruse magics concerning machines of incomprehensible function—he’d worn a wig, blue-dyed wool dressed with gold, and in the third he’d been neatly shaven bald. Now his own hair grew long upon his shoulders, thin and white and held back with a couple of painted sticks, the serpent tattoo showing through the baldness on the forehead like a blue snake half hidden in colorless grass.

So thin was he, so worn, that Rudy almost didn’t recognize him—probably would not, had they not both been mages. He looked like a man eaten from within by cancer, the marks on his hands shapeless where the flesh had shrunk. And older. Infinitely older.

Rudy looked around him. They were in a room, a double or triple cell extending to the front wall of the Keep. He could see the existing wood and plaster walls as well, not transparent or ghostly, but solid and real, though the other
reality was just as visually clear. There were two or three other walls present that he knew immediately had been built and torn down in the interim, no longer there, but leaving echoes of what they had been.

Everything that had ever happened within these rooms was absorbed into the walls. Remembered, as if the Keep itself were a living thing. Rudy felt that he could hear all the voices just by touching them, and knew he didn’t want to. Not ever.

“These are the last,” the old man said. It had been so long since Rudy had spoken anything but the Wathe himself—or occasional English to Gil—that it came as a shock to hear something through the Spell of Tongues, the aural equivalent of the simultaneous vision of the walls. The record crystals were silent; Rudy had no idea what languages they spoke.

The old man sighed. “They laugh at me, Brycothis. With the storerooms heaped with food, they say I’m like a miser hiring guards to watch his gold when he’s being fed and clothed and housed for free. But we’ve learned not to trust, you and I.”

He laughed creakily, and Rudy looked around, searching for the one to whom he spoke. But there was no one. Because the old man was crazy? he wondered. Or because anyone who wasn’t standing in this particular spot just wasn’t visible to him? He had the strange impression that he’d grown suddenly tiny and was standing within the Cylinder on this spot, looking through it as through a window. He did not move as the old man walked forward, away from him—through all those intervening walls—to what Rudy knew was the front wall of the Keep.

He passed his hand along it, and Rudy could feel through his skin the power the old man used, the way he shaped it with his mind: a different way of concentrating power, a different sense of its plasticity and heft. A rectangular hollow opened in the wall; a panel slid aside where Rudy would have sworn no panel existed, to reveal a niche perhaps four feet long and two high. Rudy could not see how deep. The
old man carried a wicker satchel over his right shoulder, and as he set it within, Rudy could see that it was filled with round black things like marbles. Some of them rolled out onto the stone floor of the niche.

The old man pushed them tidily back into the satchel and then made another pass of his hand. There was not even a whisper as the panel returned to its place, and no sign of a seam in the wall. The wizard tottered back to where he had originally been, a foot or so from Rudy’s elbow, and made other gestures, signs of greater power; he held his hands and arms differently from the way Rudy had been taught, though the direction and the form of the gesture were the same.

Another wall appeared, in front of the actual Keep wall.

Illusion, and a very good one. The old man stood blinking at it for a moment, and Rudy could see on the curve of his forehead the glimmer of sweat. With a slight tremor in his illustrated fingers, the old man raised his hands again and drew breath; dark eyes closed, jaw set, drawing himself together for some final effort. He made a pass, a motion with his arms, drawing power … 
from where?

Rudy didn’t understand its source, for it was nothing he had encountered before. But he felt the power come, flooding bright and sparkling into the old man’s tired flesh. It was a spell such as Rudy had used when preserving the meat at the Settlements when his own power was exhausted, but as a wizard, he knew that its source was not the earth or the air, as he’d have known a tune was being played on a piano rather than a guitar.

The illusion of the second wall seemed to settle and solidify. For all time. For all who saw. It was a tremendous power-sink, a marvelous spell, like watching someone shape-shift or walk on water; the old man was trembling all over with fatigue when he was done. He whispered, “Thank you, Brycothis,” and bowed his head.

Then he was gone.

It took Rudy four or five tries to work his way through the maze to the front wall of the Keep. He returned again and
again to the place of the original vision, speaking the words of memory again and watching the scene through, observing, not the old man now, but the lay of the walls. Once he found the place where the niche had been, it took him a good deal of experimenting to work through the illusion of the false wall. He set his hands and his mind to make the gestures of Summoning, to call into himself the unknown power as the old man had, and the imaginary headline formed itself in his mind:
Wizard Zaps Self With Diabolic Death Rays Out of Past—Film at Eleven
.

Or as my mother would say
, he thought wryly,
don’t pick that up, you don’t know where it’s been
.

It took considerable tinkering with more orthodox forms of summoning power, but at length Rudy was able to set aside the illusion. It was a fairly simple matter then to open the niche beyond.

The black marbles were still there, scattered across the floor of the niche, which was about twenty inches deep in a wall that was, Rudy knew, almost fifteen feet through. Tinier seeds were scattered among them, like red-black beads. The satchel had perished, reduced to a scattering of desiccated fragments. The corners of the niche were filled with the skeletons and the droppings of mice. None of the marbles appeared to have been nibbled.