Mother of Winter (30 page)

He was silent, but his breath came hard, clouding white in the lurid, fading glare of the sunset. If he fought anyone, he knew, the loser would be Alde. She would lose Tir. Maybe, if the Guards put up a fight, if the factions chose up sides, they all might lose the Keep entirely.

As they approached the dying orchards, the graveyard with its steles that seemed to reach like the skinny fingers of buried hands to plead with some unfair god, he heard Varkis Hogshearer’s voice: “Don’t you fret about it, my lady. My girl’s powers are growing every day. Why, in no time at all she’ll be able to get you what you want …”

Rudy thought, among the gray boles of the withered trees, that he could make out the dark red gown and particolored veils he remembered seeing on Lady Sketh, down by the pit where they’d burned the slunch.

Slowly, he said, “So what do we do? Wait? Let the stuff keep growing in the Keep? I swear that’s the reason I can’t contact Ingold from inside the Keep—the slunch is interfering with magic in there, concentrating itself within the walls. What’s it gonna interfere with next? The ventilators? The pumps?”

His mind went back to the Bald Lady, walking through what he would have sworn was some deep crypt within the Keep, passing the sparkling webs, the columns of crystal, the glimmering lights. Walking in magic.

We have failed
. Sitting on her black glass plinth in the unfinished foundations, she had looked up into the long-haired warrior’s eyes.
I’m sorry
.

But she’d been wrong.

She’d walked the halls of the Keep, weeping; passed through its crypts, deeper and deeper, tears running down her face …

All of this will pass away
.

But it hadn’t.

“We can’t let the Keep go, Alde,” he said softly. “No matter what Barrelstave and his fugheads say about moving downriver or resettling where it’s warmer or making deals with whoever rules Alketch. No matter what kind of answer that idiot Pnak sends back, if he isn’t playing postman to the White Raiders’ ancestors by this time. No matter who we have to kill. The answer is there. The food is there. It was made as a shelter, to last for all of time. It’s our only hope, if we can figure out … whatever it is we need to figure out.”

They had reached the high ground, where the land steepened still farther toward the upper meadows and glacier streams. Westward the Keep reared, huge, black, slick, its half-mile bulk biding the notch of Sarda Pass that led away into the west, hiding the knoll of execution itself.

Rudy recalled again being chained on that hill, the night the Dark had passed over the Keep in a silent, inky, inexorable river. The night Gil had killed Alde’s brother in the moonlit snow. He still got the willies, being outside at night.

Now he thought about those pillars, that hill, the way they framed Sarda Pass like a gun sight if you stood on the steps of the Keep the way the bloodied warrior of his vision had stood.

They had the whole lower meadow to build a hill on. Why put one there?

The images came almost at once.

As before, it seemed to Rudy that he had grown tiny and was sitting within the Cylinder itself, rather than holding it in his hands where he knelt between the black pillars on the knoll.

It was night in his vision, a quarter-moon glistening like
meringue on the glaciers, which were themselves no more than a thin rime above the coal backbone of the mountain walls. The grass that grew thick underfoot was diamonded with dew. The warmth of the night was almost palpable, warmer than the morning in which he actually sat, and he knew somehow that the scents of grass, of water, of the pine trees that grew thick over the floor of the valley, were drenching and heavy, like an exquisite drug.

Even the shape of the land was different. The whole Vale babbled with streams, bright and multifarious in the moonlight: streams and ponds and freshets where the big wheat field was now, fat with standing cattails and willows, wild grape, ivy. A sense of sleeping birds. The knoll had not existed then.

Where it would be, the grass had been scythed, burned over, and scattered with sand in a wide circle. Marshlights like will o’ the wisp flickered in the tall sedges beyond the circle’s bounds, delineating the Warden-spells of certain more ancient forms of the craft. A shape had been traced in the sand, three long lines, glowing circles knotted and inter-knotted with trackways—Roads, they were called in the oldest books, or Weirds. Flames burned where they crossed.

All this he saw as clearly as he still saw the Keep, the knoll, the wheat fields, and the present course of the stream. But the realities were equal, and for a time he did not know which was the dream and which present life.

The Bald Lady knelt in a protective circle only a few feet before him, but several yards down, at the old level of the ground. She was making the signs of what Rudy recognized as a dispersal, clearing up the ambient power from the air at the end of a rite. She wore a simpler version of the gauze sheath that she’d had on in his earlier visions, over it only a kind of sleeveless robe, also of gauze.

When she stood, the lines of multicolored light sinking back into the sand and the blue Warden-fires dying to coals, Rudy saw that she was young.

Younger than he was now.

She turned her head as at some sound in the deep woods
of oak and hemlock, and a breeze Rudy could not feel lifted the gauze of her dress to a momentary, shimmering veil. Her straight, dark eyebrows dove in unalarmed puzzlement, and he followed her eyes to the thing that stood pallid and ghostly against the black trees.

His first thought was that it was a dooic. But the next second he saw that the thing was entirely human in shape, a naked, whitish, hairless grub raising tiny malformed hands to protect its huge eyes even from moonlight. It turned to flee, but the Bald Lady stretched out her hands, and Rudy felt the Word she laid on the warm night air:
Safety. Peace. Good
. The gentle strength of the spell was such that could he have done so, he would have stepped down out of the Cylinder and gone to her, too.

She gathered her gauzy clothes around her knees and waded through the summer lupine toward the newcomer.

She laid on words of trust at the white and pitiful thing—trust in her own strength, her serene power to protect—and watching her, Rudy felt his heart clutch up at the awareness of her own trust, the confident kindness in her step, the way she held out her hands. But as it stepped toward her, with its scratched, bloody hands, its tiny mouth gaping, huge eyes blinking helplessly—Rudy understood what it was.

It was a herd-thing. Of human descent, its race had been bred by the Dark Ones in their caverns below the earth, bred for thousands of generations as food.

Rudy sat for a long time between the black pillars of the knoll, thinking about what he had seen after the images were gone.

Our strength was not enough
, she had said.
All this will pass away
.

He remembered her face, old and weary beyond words. Remembered the tears on her face and the fact that though she wept, she still bore herself like a queen.

And her secret was still there, whatever it was. Locked within the heart of the Keep.

He looked up, the night vision melting back to daylight, and saw Scala, the Bald Lady’s prospective successor,
toiling sweatily up the knoll with the martyred air of one bearing an almost impossible burden for the good of all. He noticed again the unhealthy plumpness of her cheeks and neck, and the way her too-expensive crimson gown strained across the breasts and hips.
Food theft?
Or was Hogshearer holding something out for himself and his family?

A horrible vision flashed across his mind of Hogshearer having somehow found and broached the old food caches; of Scala disenchanting them; of everyone digging in and eating them instead of saving them for seed …

Don’t be ridiculous. If
you
can’t get the things to quit being rocks
, she
sure as hell won’t be able to …

When she was ten feet away from him, Scala pulled back her arm and flung at him the thing she had in her hand. Rudy saw what it was the instant she released it and grabbed in a panic, barely saving it from breaking. “For Chrissake, Scala! We’ve only got a few of these things, and—”

“It doesn’t work!” she screamed at him. “It’s a stupid, crummy, worthless piece of trash and I don’t care if it breaks! I’m doing it right! I know I’m doing it right!”

Yeah, and you’re talented and beautiful like your daddy says
. He stifled his anger, bit back his words, the little porcelain spell-bowl cradled protectively in his hands. “Yeah, but how smart is it to get mad at the bowl?” he asked gently, looking into the bloated, red, furious face. “Let me try.” He held it cupped in his hands and spoke the Name of Water in his mind. “You been practicing your—”

“Of course I’ve been doing my stupid meditation!” she yelled. “Daddy makes me, hours longer than you said. And that doesn’t work, either! It’s stupid! You lied to me! Everybody lies to me!”

“It takes time, kid.” Despite his knowledge that she was being used against him, he felt genuine pity for her, knowing what she had to be going through even without the Hollywood Father from Hell on her back. His high school math class was in his mind, his own voice asking the fascist numbskull at the blackboard to explain a proof:
Well, Señor Solis …
The mocking turn of inflection still stung.
You’re
using the same book everybody else is and nobody else seems to be having a problem? Now why do you think that is?
If he’d known why that was, Rudy wanted to say, he’d have known why he wasn’t getting it. But he didn’t understand even enough to know what he didn’t understand.

The glassy porcelain of the bowl’s interior was already running with droplets, pooling at the bottom. He emptied the water from the bowl, wiped it on a corner of his vest, fumbling for words. “Look, if you keep doing what you’re doing, I swear to you, it’ll come.”

“That’s easy for you to say!” She had turned her face from him, no longer shouting, but he could see the swollen cheeks mottled beetroot, horrible next to that bright gown.

“Magic isn’t something that comes fast.” He tucked the bowl carefully into the pocket of his vest, the Cylinder into another, and got to his feet. “God knows I don’t know a whole lot about magic, about why somebody’s born with the ability to change things in the physical world without touching them—about why it takes some people longer than others to get strong in it. When Ingold gets back—”

“Oh, him.” She swung around to face him, her dark eyes ugly. “All he ever did was kill half the—”

And she froze, staring past his shoulder with shock and horror on her face.

Rudy ducked, zigzagged, grabbed her by the arms and thrust her ahead of him down the hill, knowing already what she had to see behind him and not waiting to look. Scala stumbled, trod on her train, and when he paused to catch her arm again, Rudy looked.

He’d known it had to be gaboogoos.

He hadn’t expected these.

The same ones mutated? New and Improved Mark III model?
He didn’t know. Most resemblance to the original biped shape had disappeared, except for the long arms with their enormous, reaching hands, the long legs that started from the shoulder. The fishlike bodies were still covered with bobbles and pendules.

And they were big. Almost too big to be dealt with by a sword. The long legs covered twelve feet at a stride.

Rudy yelled,
“Run!!”
and shoved Scala ahead of him toward the Keep, turned back, raising his staff, and cried out the Word of Lightning, spotting for the place the creature would be because he did not know the creature’s true name.

Ozone crackled, white light blinded, and Rudy turned and fled the bounding things that raced for him with such horrible speed. Something came scuttling like a flying bug from the woods and seized on his leg just as he turned and fired off another blast of levin-fire at the closest gaboogoo, hitting it this time, then slashing down with the razor crescent on his staff to carve off the thing that had fastened to his boot. It bled, whatever it was—he plunged down the hill and heard Scala scream as she fell. Turning back, he saw them on her …

 … and springing over her without breaking stride as they came at him.

Scala screamed again, rolled into a fetal ball and clutched at her dirty hair. Rudy yelled the Word of Lightning again as the two remaining gaboogoos reached out toward him, and this time his aim was better, purple-white brilliance lancing the nearer gaboogoo like a javelin, hot tendrils splintering in all directions. The gaboogoo exploded, charred pieces flying; the other one didn’t even stop. Rudy didn’t stop, either, pelting toward the doors of the Keep as if the legions of Hell were at his heels—a fairly accurate description. Yelling and curses came from the woods, and someone fired an arrow at the gaboogoo—an exercise in futility, though it smacked into the thing as if it had been a hay bale—and from the tail of his eye Rudy saw Lank Yar and his hunters racing to his aid. He stumbled on the steps of the Keep and the Guards emerged from the doors at a run, swords like the hunger of doom in their hands.

“Inside!” Gnift grabbed him by the shoulders and hurled him through the doors as Rudy would have turned to fight. From the gate passage he saw the gaboogoo spring up the steps like a huge, deadly running bird. Guards, farmers,
hunters closed upon it from three directions, hacking at the fungoid limbs. In its train ran other things, things from the woods, things that had once been animals and had the halfway, melted appearance of wolverines and rats. These things kicked and snapped at the Guards who tried to stop them, tried to slip past and come at Rudy, until the steps and the gate passage were runneled with blood and scattered with chalky, twitching limbs and gobbets. A gaboogoo’s long-fingered hand crawled along the passageway toward Rudy like a determined spider no matter how many times Seya stomped and crushed the thing with her heel; the Guard finally bent and cut off all seven or eight fingers, which lay flexing like dying worms round the curling and uncurling palm.