Mother of Winter (47 page)

The attackers turned on their erstwhile friends and relatives and fought like demons, screaming and slashing. Yobet Troop had his forehead opened almost to the bone by a hoe before he disarmed the man who’d been trying to bludgeon Rudy to death. At the same time, one of the attackers flung himself at the locking-rings, wrenched them over and plunged down the dark passageway between the two sets of gates. Rudy rolled to his feet and pelted after him, gasping. The farmer was already wrenching and twisting at the rings of the outer gate. Rudy seized him, and was thrown back by a strength almost superhuman; rolled to his feet and grabbed him again …

The door opened. Gaboogoos poured through the gate in a pallid, filthy tide. Rudy screamed,
“Shut the friggin’ gate!”
and behind him heard the slam of iron, the snap of the locks, sealing him in the passageway with the mad farmer and the monstrous horde.

Rudy shouted the Word of Lightning, levin-fire spangling around him in sizzling bursts, cracking back and forth from the black stone of walls and ceiling and floor. Mutant animals were mixed with the gaboogoos, snarling and shrieking as the bolts hit them; the air in the close-cramped tunnel was filled with the stench of charring matter, the stink of smoke, the reek of his own hair and clothing singeing.

Someone was by the light of the gates, men’s forms struggling. Rudy saw the flash of a sword against the predawn gloom outside. Guards had slipped through the gate behind him. Janus was dragging the outer doors shut even now, while the Icefalcon hacked at the dog-sized gaboogoo spiders that struggled to come through even yet. The farmer lay headless underfoot. Rudy called a flare of witchlight as the outer doors slammed shut, and a moment later the commander strode back
to him through a reeking ruin of carcasses, coughing, “You cut that a mite close for comfort.”

Rudy was slumped back against the wall, panting. The floor was carpeted with dead gaboogoos, most of them tiny, pincered, too small for a man to kill with a sword. “The crypt!” he gasped.

“Ankres is on his way.”

By the time the inner doors were opened again, and Janus had summoned a heavy enough company to hold them, Rudy was halfway across the Aisle, running for the corner stairway that led down to the crypt. Even so, he reached the place almost too late for the battle. After the initial shock of being attacked by fourteen or fifteen men and women armed with makeshift weaponry, Seya and Melantrys, who’d been on guard, had been able to hold their own and hold the doors behind which the mutants were locked. The attacking slunch-eaters, none of whom had been tested yet and none of whom lived on the fifth level north, had fought like mad things, refusing surrender, as if they had no concept of anything but the death of those who kept them from opening the doors. Half were dead by the time Lord Ankres and his men got there, the black stone of the crypt corridor puddled with blood. The other half had died fighting, while the mutants in the crypt itself flung themselves against the door, screaming and pounding and cursing. Rudy arrived, breathless, in time to see the last of them die.

“Devils take them,” Lord Ankres whispered, turning one of the attackers over with his foot. It was one of Lady Sketh’s sewing-maids, with a scythe from the Sketh storerooms in her hands.

The day was a nerve-racking one, of meetings, of plans drawn up, of anger and rumor and fear. “What are we going to do about them?” demanded Barrelstave, Ankres, Janus, everyone, in Council. “We can’t just stay behind locked doors. We have to farm.”

But the answer was always the same. “If we open those doors, we’re screwed,” Rudy said. “Half those gaboogoos are the size of mice, and everybody in this room knows the
problems we have with mice in this Keep. Their goal isn’t just to destroy me. It’s to destroy the core of this Keep, which is made of magic, living magic. And if the core goes, everything goes—the ventilation, the water, the magic in the walls.”

“But we are, as you say, screwed as it is,” Lord Ankres reminded him, from his position at the foot of the Council table, a slim small man, seventyish and dark-browed, with a bandage from the fighting on his brow. “Are we not?”

“Not if Ingold can kill those things in the South,” Rudy said quietly. “And I think that’s what’s going on now. I think that’s why they’re attacking.”

“And if he can’t?” Maia asked.

Rudy sighed. “Then we’re in real trouble.”

All over the Keep, throughout that day, fights broke out: over food, over shoes, over fancied slights; fights between men who were rivals for the same woman or whose opinions had long differed about how food and power and space should be allotted; fights that had nothing to do with the squirming, yammering things that waited outside the doors, and everything to do with them.

After the Council meeting Rudy returned to the old storeroom at the very heart of the Keep, mounting paranoid watch over the great Sphere of Power he had wrought there the night before. Its long traceries spread over walls, ceiling, and floors once again, the influences of its power filling the air and sunk deep into the stone underfoot, calling on the stars, the phase of the moon, the position of the sun, readjusted for certain changes in the atmosphere as Brycothis had shown him. Drawing all power into the clay vessel of water at its heart.

“The gaboogoos don’t care about the food, do they?” Tir asked, sitting cross-legged on the floor outside the Sphere’s perimeter, a tuft of magefire floating over his head.

Rudy shook his head. “They just want to get rid of magic, Pugsley.”

He looked down into the clay vessel at the earth-apples, grown now to three times their original size. They were still dark, but from every eye a thread of white had sprouted. The
tinier beads, filling out slowly to their intended size, appeared to be rose hips.

Ingold would be pleased. Maybe more pleased, Rudy thought wryly, than he’d be about the potatoes. He could almost hear the old boy saying,
One can always get food
.

A lot you know, pal
.

But he did hope they were the tiny white ones Gisa of Renweth had worn, which even in dream had smelled so sweet.

In a day or two, depending on what happened outside with the gaboogoos—depending on what was happening, what he was positive was happening, somewhere in the South—he’d ask Brycothis how to alter the hydroponics tanks to produce the quantities of food needed to carry the Keep through autumn and winter.

Always supposing somebody or something didn’t kill him first. The screaming of the mutants in their crypts, audible even in this chamber like a faint, terrible whisper of wind, got on his nerves. He didn’t
think
they’d be able to break the door of their prison. Still

“And they only want to get rid of magic because we’re using it to keep them from putting back the world the way it was when they were alive.”

“Are they not alive?”

“Not really.” Rudy sighed and rubbed his face, decorated with two or three days’ worth of beard and the scabs and welts left by the gaboogoos who’d gotten through the gate. Looking back on it, he was astonished he hadn’t managed to kill himself, or Janus, with the lightning. “It’s just that we can’t live in the world they need, and they can’t live in ours. It’s like we’re taking turns on the planet, and it’s our turn, and they want their turn back again. That’s all.”

“Oh.” Tir studied the portions of the Sphere visible to him, the traced lines of silver and blood on the floor, the incense vessels filling the air with dreamy, pungent smoke. “Will Ingold kill them?”

“We’re in deep trouble if he don’t, Ace.”

Toward evening Minalde came down the curving stairs that Brycothis had walked long before her, exhausted and pale and
moving as if in pain, but clad in what Rudy privately called her “Royal drag,” her hair dressed to make her appear both taller and older. Not that she needed the latter, he thought uneasily, studying the thin face within the loops of pearled chains. She carried a covered clay dish and a vessel of water—Tir leaped up at once to help her, and Rudy quickly “unsealed” the opening to the Sphere and hurried out to the small unmarked portion of the chamber to fetch her a chair.

“Do you think you could come to tomorrow morning’s Council meeting and do that trick of yours with the lightning again?” she asked, sinking gratefully down and handing Rudy the dish with hands trembling with fatigue. “When Barrelstave rounded the turn of his first hour of speaking, I found myself thinking of it … longingly.”

Rudy laughed and hefted the dish. “Yummers—carrion and peas. My favorite.” He realized he was starving.
Probably literally
, he thought after a moment, pulling his horn spoon from a pocket of his vest.
But let’s not go into that
 … “What do they want?”

“They don’t know.” Alde sighed. Her thin fingers fumbled with the elaborate braids, the gold pins that held them, shaking her head to loosen the heavy midnight cascade. “They want to be told everything’s going to be all right, though that isn’t what they’re saying.”

She shivered, and in the silence the mad howling of the mutants in the crypt could be heard again. After a time she whispered, “Is there nothing we can do? I’ve just come from there. You hear them pounding on the doors—they’re using enough force to smash their own bodies, break their own bones. They haven’t had food since yesterday evening, and now nobody can take them any, or water.”

“I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do.” Rudy came over to her chair and took her hands. “How are the rest of the people taking it?”

“They’re scared.”

“Hell.” He knelt beside her and pressed his face to the velvet of her worn red dress.
“I’m
scared.”

She put her arms around his shoulders, and there was
somehow infinite comfort in that slight grip, the warmth of the unloosed swags of her hair, and the smell of sandalwood that permeated clothing and flesh.

“You can’t be scared.” Tir spoke up from her other side, where she held him, also, in the circle of her arms. “You’re a wizard.”

“Don’t you believe it, Ace,” Rudy mumbled. “
That
scares me worse than all the rest of it put together. If you—” He straightened up, his head snapping around to listen. “What’s that?”

Alde shook her head. “I don’t—”

He lifted his hand for quiet, got to his feet, and opened the door. The Icefalcon had stepped a few feet from the wall, face expressionless, the dirty yellow torchlight that barely illuminated the outer vault a wavery line along the edge of his drawn sword.

Like the eerie wail of wind—like the shrieking of the ice storm—the noise was audible through the farther door.

Screaming.

Gil woke up cold, with something crawling across her leg. She reached to brush it away and drew her hand back fast—a gaboogoo the size of a large cat staggered from her touch on crablike legs. Something warmer grasped her fingers. Ingold’s hand.

Nausea swamped her.

“Isn’t this where I came in?”

“I beg your pardon?”

She realized her speech was slurred, nearly unintelligible, but didn’t bother to repeat her comment. She didn’t recall what she meant.

Impenetrable white mist curtained the chamber, still as death. The blue glow around them had waned, and only the single dim magelight burning above Ingold’s head reflected on the fog. Gaboogoos continued to crawl in and out of the hazy ring of light, claws skidding and clicking on the ice, which had become slick around them from the heat of Bektis’ sphere of protection.

By the way the mists didn’t come near them, Gil guessed the spell of protection included a self-contained atmosphere. Given the amount of carbon dioxide now in the chamber, they’d have been quite dead without it.

Both wizards looked like a couple of teaspoons of warmed-over death. For once Bektis didn’t look indignant, or irritated, or anything but bone-tired. He reached out to help Ingold to his feet, and Ingold helped Gil.

“Come,” Ingold said softly. “You have a right to see this.”

Hurt arm hanging at his side, leaning heavily on his staff for
support, he led her to the edge of the pit, where the pool had been.

The liquescent, half-frozen oxygen was gone. Only shreds of smoke remained, curling from the black throat of the volcanic vent. The Mother of Winter lay on a ledge some fifty feet down; the chasm plunged beyond her to endless night in the bowels of the earth.

There was no contortion in the great, glistening shape of gelatinous flesh, no sign of struggle, of anger, of resistance. The treelike head lay turned away from them, the long mane of blue fern trailing wetly over the edge, mist-wreathed and phosphorescent in the witchlight, the whiplike, spiraling tail losing itself in the fathomless black. Where the flesh hung like a wet tent from the chitin that shaped her back, Gil could see what might have been the shape of eggs within her, millions on millions of them, a hard black roe beneath translucent skin.

“She’s beautiful.” She didn’t know why she said that, except that in its own weird way it was true. Mother-Wizard. Heart of the vanished world.

Ingold had been right. She had quite clearly died in her sleep, a very long time ago.

“That?” Bektis was recovering. His voice was an angry squeak. “Well, to each their own. Good riddance, I say.”

“Yes,” Ingold murmured, leading Gil away from the edge. “Yes, I suppose you would.” He paused and, holding carefully onto her arm for support, bent to retrieve his sword, which lay half under the decomposing black things whose whole duty for eons had been to keep the Mother of Winter alive at any cost, to await the day when the world would return to what it had been. The world would never, Gil thought, return to what it had been. Not for anyone.

Sergeant Cush, Lieutenant Pra-Sia, and the Eggplant met them in the tomb’s outer chamber, coughing and cursing, their torches burning sickly in the barely breathable gas emerging from the passageway. “Don’t come any farther,” Ingold called out, and limped more quickly to meet them in the knee-deep slunch of the chamber around the Blind King and his patient,
wise-eyed dog. He brushed the slimy strings of his white hair out of his eyes. “I take it the gaboogoos are gone?”