Mother Of Winter

Chapter Eleven

Needless to say, Scala Hogshearer's reaction to the realities of learning the craft of wizardry was precisely what Rudy's had been when he realized that she, of all the folk in the Keep, was to be his first pupil. "Yuck! That's stupid! I won't do it!"

"Fine." Rudy took back the book she'd slammed shut, the Black Book of Lists for which Ingold had nearly lost his life in the giddily balanced ruin of the Library Tower of Quo. "Don't. See you." He turned away.

"You can't!" She grabbed his arm, twisting his sleeve. He was reminded of a girl he'd been to junior high with, the daughter of the owner of the biggest used-car dealership in San Bernardino. She'd always had the newest clothes, which never fit her, and the reddest lipstick on her pouting mouth.

"Papa says you have to teach me." There was spiteful pleasure in her voice. "He says the whole Council voted you had to, because I'm a wizard like you. So you have to." Anger prickled through him like the heat of fever at the Council's self-important motion and vote. Rudy had been sorely tempted to tell the lot of them to go to hell-he'd teach whom he pleased. But from Hogshearer's smug handrubbing, he had looked across to Alde's white-faced grimness, and realized the seriousness of the danger in which Ingold had left them.

This girl was mageborn. The Keep would need her. One day her magic might very well save Alde's life. He still had to fight to keep his voice even and reasonable. "Great." He pushed the book back across the workroom table at her. "So learn." "I want to learn something real!" She thrust it away again, the overblown rosebud lips puckering with scorn. "I want to learn something I can use." "For what?" He was aware that his refusal to rise to her was driving her crazy. "To spy on Lala Tenpelts or Nilette Troop with their boyfriends, so you can tell their parents and get them in trouble again?" "They were mean to me."

"Well, that sure justifies your behavior, doesn't it?"

She threw him a glare of smoldering rage. "They're selfish. They wouldn't let me wear their necklaces. And they're liars. They tell lies about me all the time." She wasn't looking at him now, pushing one stubby forefinger back and forth on the waxed wood of the old table. "But I showed them. Nilette's papa beat her when I told him about what she and Yate Brown were doing. He pulled her dress off her back and beat her with a strap."

"Spied on that, too, did you?"

She glanced up at him, ugly anger in the small, pouchy dark eyes. Even as a nine-year-old, when he'd first met her, she'd been unpleasant, stealing food from the general stores of the Keep and begging for things other people had, though her father was one of the wealthiest men in the Keep.

It was now pretty clear how Hogshearer had learned about that merchant, earlier in the spring. For years the moneylender had been telling everyone that his only child would grow to be not only beautiful but brilliant.

"How'd you do it?" he asked, folding his arms and contemplating her across the table in the glow of the witchlight that he'd called forth to burn on the tips of the metal spikes which had long ago been driven into the walls. "In fire? In water? In a piece of glass?"

She looked as though she was about to say, Wouldn't you like to know? but thought better of it. "In fire," she said grudgingly. "All I have to do is look into fire, and I can see anybody in the Keep, anybody in the world."

"Fire's the easiest," Rudy said. It was, but he admitted to himself that he wanted to take the wind out of the little bitch's sails.

"It is not!"

"Okay," Rudy agreed affably. "I can see you know more about this than I do. But I'm telling you, Scala, learning magic is learning lists. Learning the True Names, the secret names, of everything, everything in the entire world. Every plant and leaf and pebble and animal has its own name, its real name. Learning the essence of these things, learning what they really are, gives you the power to Summon them, the power to command. I still have to memorize lists. Ingold still works on his lists. Until you learn that, you're just like everybody else."

Only hours after this conversation, Varkis Hogshearer cornered Rudy on one of the minor stairways to the fourth level.

"You don't fool me one bit, Master Wizard!" he rasped, shaking a bony forefinger in Rudy's face. "You're prejudiced against my girl because she stands up to you for her rights instead of bowing down and licking your boots and the boots of that sly old man! Well, I'm letting you know right now that I won't have it! You want to keep all the knowledge to yourself, you and that-"

"Master Hogshearer," Rudy said tightly. "If I'm prejudiced against Scala-and I admit that I am-it's because she's bone lazy, she's a sneak, and a liar, and a spy; because she likes to get other people into trouble for her own amusement; and because she won't work. All those things make her a bad student."

"Don't think you can say that about my girl!" the merchant roared. "If there was any law in this Keep willing to go up against the likes of you, I'd put an injunction on you for saying that about her! You're all prejudiced-prejudiced by that Woman who thinks she can keep hold on everything in this community! Prejudiced by sheer jealousy of me! Well, now my daughter's got what you want, what you need, and I swear you're not going to keep her down!"

He stormed down the stair without waiting for a reply-back to the five-cell complex he'd traded and bargained several other families out of, where he and his wife and Scala lived in comfort with all the pots and pans, needles and pins, plowshares and hoe heads, bought from those who needed a little money or food and held until someone in the Keep was desperate enough to pay what he wanted for those unobtainable commodities.

Rudy sighed, leaned his shoulders against the coarse mix of plaster and stone behind him, and knocked the back of his head gently but repeatedly against the wall. Ingold, he thought, you better be saving the world, because this sure ain't worth it if you're not.

Hell, I could be back at Wild David Wilde's Paint and Body Shop in Fontana. I'd have worked my way clear up to counterman by this time.

Nah, he reflected on further thought of that alternate future, that alternate life. By this time I'd have got some chick pregnant and be married with a coupla kids.

And wretched, he thought. Wretched beyond contemplation or guessing, with no idea what was wrong-only that there was something that he should be doing that he wasn't. That there was someone he loved to the marrow of his soul, who had not been born into that world.

Pain tightened hard around his heart at the memory of Minalde's cold anger-And rightfully so, he thought despairingly. Nobody knew better than he-except Alde-what a hell of a situation they were all in, facing starvation, facing the uncertainties of a world growing more hostile by the week with the inexorability of that pearlescent wall of ice creeping toward them down the valley. She must have been counting the weeks till the old boy got back. And he'd aided and abetted.

But I had to! he argued silently. Ingold had to be the one who went. Somebody had to go...

Yeah, right. There's these three old magic guys hiding under a glacier a thousand miles away, see, and they're gonna destroy the world in four or five years or so if they're not stopped.

Even to Rudy it sounded like the kind of logic espoused by those who wore colanders on their heads to stop the Martians from reading their brains. No wonder Alde was furious. A soft voice said, "Rudy?"

He opened his eyes. She was standing next to him, blue eyes almost plum-colored in the grubby glare of the pineknot torch at the head of the stairway. The shawl around her shoulders, which Linnet had knitted for her, made her look as frumpy and unstylish as that hypothetical shotgun bride back in Berdoo. She was as beautiful as daylight and sun. She said, "I'm sorry." Rudy sighed, feeling as if the weight of the Keep had evaporated off his back. "Naah." He put his arm gently around her shoulders, and just the movement of her, the thankfulness with which she settled into place against his body, was everything he could have asked for in life, Hogshearers and gaboogoos and the Fimbul Winter notwithstanding.

"Christ, you have every right to be sore. It's your job to take care of everybody, and I helped Ingold screw you big-time. I'm glad you're not mad at me anymore, but for God's sake don't apologize to me for getting mad. I sure deserved it." The worry passed from her eyes, and she rested her forehead against his chest. "You didn't. Even Ingold doesn't, not really."

The silence of the Keep closed them in; Rudy spared a residual spell to make anyone inclined to take this route from the fourth level urgently recall something they'd left back in their cell.

Her hair smelled of the sandalwood combs she arranged it with and the aromatics Linnet put in her soap.

Her arms tightened around his rib cage. "Those creatures under the ice you spoke of... they're real."

"I've never known Ingold to be wrong," Rudy said simply. "I don't think anybody ever has. It's in his contract or something."

The fragile bones of her, the too-thin flesh, rippled with a snort of laughter. "Eldor said to me once that Ingold got into more trouble with truth than most men did with error," she said, and after all these years it was possible for her to speak matter-of-factly the name of the man who had been her husband: someone she once knew, respected, and loved. "I didn't know Ingold in those days. He had a reputation for madness."

"I gotta admit," Rudy said, "this one sounds straight out of the supermarket tabloids-our version of street-corner ballads," he added.

"That's Ingold." Alde nodded philosophically. "I heard some of the most astonishing things about him. He'd been at Court three weeks after my marriage before I realized who he was. I talked to him about roses in the gardens-I thought he was the gardener's uncle from Gettlesand. I expected Ingold Inglorion to be six and a half feet tall with burning red eyes glaring out from the shadows of a black hood." She smiled a little, looking back at that timid sixteen year-old in her sunny rose garden. Rudy took her hand, and they ascended the dark stairs together, their feet creaking hollowly on the rough-chopped planks that were little more than the rungs of a ladder, "I wish... well, I could have sent someone else with him. A party of Guards,

not just Gil. She isn't well, Rudy. You saw that wound she took in Penambra. It shouldn't look like that."

I'll die before I'll let you come to harm, Gil had said, in the fawnspot shadows of the alders. Who'd guard Ingold against Gil?

He pushed the thought away. "I get the feeling we're gonna need everybody here before they get back," he said quietly.

Garunna Brown bustled past them, the slatternly matriarch of a whole web of kinship ties on fifth north. Rudy reached out a tiny spell to her sister-in-law Melleka, with whom she walked, so that Melleka said suddenly, "By Saint Bounty, I clean forgot to tell you about Treemut Farrier and Old Man Gatson's stepdaughter..." The two women were too absorbed in their gossip to even notice Rudy and Alde, much less notice that they were holding hands.

And anyway, Rudy thought uneasily, if someone could influence Gil's mind, why not the Icefalcon's? Or Melantrys'? Or Seya's or Yar's or anybody else's? A third party wouldn't have Gil's love to counter those commands.

But it was true, he reflected, that a third party would not have all those years of instinctive trust to build on. Ingold would keep one eye on anyone else guarding his back.

"You did what you had to do, babe," he said softly. "I guess it's just karma that the kid who turned out to be mageborn is Scala."

"At least we know it now," she pointed out. "She isn't some private little tool of her father's, like a covered tile in a hand of pitnak. Tir asked me to find you." Rudy stopped dead in the middle of the corridor. This part of the fourth level south was largely deserted on summer afternoons, its inhabitants working in the fields or scavenging the woods, or occupied in the water gardens in the crypts. To save fuel-even the pine knots that burned in clay or stone holders in the wall-the corridors up here were mostly dark. A whole generation of children lived here, who could run the labyrinthine passageways utterly without light. For Alde's sake he'd called a little flake of magefire to drift before them; it showed now the marks of strain around her mouth at her son's name. Tir had not spoken to Rudy since his return, beyond a polite, "I understand." The boy would remain in the room with him if held by the dictates of good manners. It was a knife in Rudy's heart every time Tir wouldn't meet his eyes. "He said," Alde went on, selecting her words with care, "that he has been thinking about these... these earthapples, these potatoes. He thinks there's something about the northeast corner of the fifth level north. Far forward, he says, almost to the front wall of the Keep. He says he doesn't know clearly, but you might want to go there." "And he thinks this'll help?" Rudy shut his mouth hard the moment the words were out, regretting the anger in his voice.

She averted her face from his shout, her beautiful, tender mouth motionless, trapped between her love for Rudy and her love for her son. At length she said, "Geppy was his friend. Thya was his friend. All the herdkids were." "For Chrissake, they were mine, too!" He almost yelled the words at her. She didn't answer.

Rudy bowed his head, breathing hard. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry. But even if I'd been here, there was nothing I could have done."

"I know that," Alde said softly. "But you're the only father he knows, and a wizard. He feels that if you had been here, you could have done something. I think he'll realize differently, in time."

Not if he keeps being looked after by Linnet, Rudy thought glumly. Not if he talks to the parents of those kids. He had seen the way they looked at him when they'd pass in

the corridors.

They stood silent for a time in the near-dark, her hands upon his waist and his on her shoulders, his head bowed so that their foreheads touched, not knowing what to say. Knowing there was nothing they could say. Far off someone called out, "Wrynna? Wrynna, are you home?" and rattled the makeshift shutters. Elsewhere a pair of cats snarled and swore at one another in age-old territorial dispute. Rudy sighed and pulled Alde close, tasting the tang of betony tisane on her lips as he kissed her. "So," he said, "you wanna go hunt for spuds?"

Whichever of Tir's remote ancestors had seen or known anything about the western end of the fifth level north, he, and thus Tir-would not have recognized the place now. At some point in the Keep's long history, the place had become a tight-congested slum, cells subdivided off cells, corridors cut into rooms, minor rights-of-way carved through corners of other cells.

Walls of dirty, desiccated wood or insufficiently plastered lath at once blocked and guided the way; pipes and conduits ran along the floors, or overhead, where water had been pirated from fountains. The place stank to heaven of rats and guano and abounded in statues of the smiling and ubiquitous Saint Bounty, adorned with stolen glowstones.

Rudy removed the glowstone from before a particularly refulgent image-there were limited quantities of the magic lights, far too few to let them be used as votives-and by its moony radiance studied the beneficent face, the tiny representations of woolpacks, fruits, hams, cheeses, eggs. "There anything wrong with that that you can see, babe?"

"Are you speaking theologically or aesthetically?" She considered it, tilting her head, her dark, heavy hair catching blue glints in the light. "I've never heard of Saint Bounty before this year-I mean, he's not a real saint-and Tir could model a better figure than that and has better taste in colors."

The foodstuffs represented were certainly garish, pinks and greens and reds and golds, like a lush photograph in a cookbook, and above the collar of his curiously chalky robe, Saint Bounty's round, beaming countenance looked rouged. Rudy wondered if that was what Gil had meant. "Maybe he's the patron saint of makeup? Like St. Maybelline in my world? Is that supposed to be a sheepskin he's sitting on?" "It has to be," Alde said. "No one would portray a Holy One perched on a plate of pig entrails."

Rudy shook his head sadly. "You never can tell, babe. Might be spaghetti. Let's turn here. The original front wall's got to be behind all this mess someplace." He moved forward, sinking his mind into the listening trance of magic, and she followed, her hand in his like a trusting child's.

Most of the little patches and sniffs of magic Rudy had found lay along the outer walls, maybe because the rest of the immense building had changed so in the ensuing millennia.

Better than witchlight, the glowstone's radiance showed up the black mold on the plastered walls, the water stains of the pipes, the accumulated filth, packed hard and inches deep, on the floor of the narrow, crazy-house passageways. The smell was almost overwhelming. Many of the cells in this area had doors, Rudy noticed, solid plank structures shut tight in the old jambs. Most of the doors were new.

He brightened his own witchlight in addition to that of the stone. Strangely, it didn't help. Rats and insects went scuttling, but the grating sense of being watched, of being listened for, did not lessen; the sense that something dreadful was about to happen abated not one whit at the increased wattage. Rudy pushed gently on a door and was

not surprised in the least to find it locked.

"They're poor folk," Alde said softly. "There may be a lot of thievery." "Yeah. It was up on this level that I saw the gaboogoo." He walked forward again, listening, feeling with his mind... And there he was. The Guy with the Cats.

Not literally, of course. Not physically. Not even visually in the form of an image or vision.

But as surely as he knew his own name, Rudy knew the Guy with the Cats had been here, had worked some great magic here. The sense of him was as strong as if the old dude had stood on this spot yesterday.

Rudy halted immobile, reaching out to touch the wall, eyes shut, trying to call the ancient mage's image more clearly to his mind...

And realized there were people in almost every one of the rooms around them. Alde started to speak, and Rudy held up a warning hand. He concentrated on the sound of all those thick-drawn breaths. On the hushed shufflings and pattings of moving flesh and moving clothing, behind those new locked wooden doors. The skitter of rat paws; a muttering voice asking something about Theepa's baby. It was the middle of the afternoon. There was plowing, planting, foraging to be done-and in any case, who'd want to stay up here in the frowst?

"Koram Biggar says there's been illness here, since the ice storm," Alde said as he and she retraced their steps soundlessly through the twisting ways, Rudy marking dabs of invisible light on the walls, to guide him back to the place. "There's always malingering here, if they think they can get the headman of the section to let them get away with it. Sometimes Old Man Gatson or Garunna Brown don't get off this level for weeks."

Alde frowned and paused to lean on the wall, her hand going to her belly while Rudy nearly swallowed his heart. Ohmigod,.she's going into labor, what am I going to...? "I didn't like the smell up there," she said, a little apologetic, straightening up and walking on, leaving Rudy feeling both very silly and profoundly glad that he hadn't bolted down the corridor screaming for boiling water and towels. "I don't mean the whole place didn't smell like a privy," she added with her shy grin. "But there was a kind of underlayer of something. Something wrong. Unfamiliar." Rudy frowned, trying to call it back to mind. "I wasn't noticing," he admitted at last, shamefaced. "I was just thinking about how bad the whole place stank. I'll watch for that when I go back there with the Cylinder."

"Will that show you anything?" She had released his hand, and even though she looked pale in the witchlight, she did not accept his proffered arm. They were down on the second level now, walking along the Royal Hall, one of the broad original corridors that stretched from the Royal Sector at the east end of the Keep almost to the front wall. Though everything was quiet here, too, the corridor passed through cells occupied by the House of Ankres and its henchmen, and Lord Ankres was conservative in his faith.

"I dunno." Rudy shrugged, hands tucked into his belt. "Can't hurt to try. Ingold has a whole list of words that came out of one of the oldest manuscripts that are supposed to be magic, but they were handed down phonetically, and nobody knows what they mean or what they go to anymore. He says they might be connected with machinery that's been lost."

"Like the hydroponics tanks?" she asked hopefully. Rudy shook his head-it had been one of the first experiments he'd made with the Cylinder. The glass rod had vouchsafed no change. The tanks remained as inefficient as ever. Figures, he thought wryly. The hardware's still here but somebody lost the manual.

With our luck, when we find the thing it'll be in Japanese. "Do you think maybe Brother Wend and Ilae will be able to help when they get here?" Together they passed into the subdued bustle of the Aisle, the voices of the laundresses, the tailors, the flax-carders who worked there a gentle racket, like wind chimes in the flame-speckled dark. "Maybe," Rudy said uneasily.

He'd contacted Wend yesterday via scrying crystal, at the young priest's camp somewhere among the Bones of God. Wend's hair and beard were a dark, matted mess, his soft, brown, cowlike eyes worried: "I don't know what it is," he had said, bending close to his own scrying stone, held within his cupped hands, "but something has been following us for three days. Ilae and I both have tried to identify it, tried to see it, to no avail."

He'd glanced around; past his shoulder Rudy had seen Ilae, a thin red-haired young woman, fragile as she'd been as a witch-child taken in by the Wizards' Corps, nervously watching the pine trees that shut them into an emerald twilight. "We lay awake, sleepless, all last night," Wend had continued, his voice low. "We have heard nothing, sensed nothing... except that there is something there." White Raiders? Rudy had wondered at the time, but in his heart he knew that what was stalking the two young wizards across the empty wastes of Gettlesand wasn't anything as simple as that.

"We can't count on anything," he said now to Alde, as they passed through the half-deserted watchroom of the Guards. The big training room was dark, for there'd been a problem of glowstone theft lately, and Janus took good care to lock up the Guards' allotment. "And anyhow, Wend and Ilae aren't much more than novices themselves. If-"

He stopped on the threshold of his workroom, rage searing him like a sudden electrical charge. For a moment he could not even speak. "Goddamn little bitch," he whispered. "Sneaky lying lagarta...!" As if the words had released him from physical restraint, he strode into the double cell, to where the Black Book of Lists lay open on the table, a handful of its pages ripped out, the smell of ashes heavy in the stove. He ran his hand over the book, though he didn't need to. The echoes of Scala Hogshearer's spite and malice lay all over it like vomit. His voice rose in a furious shout, "I'm gonna break that friggin' little puta's neck!"

"No!" Alde grabbed him as he whirled for the door, putting herself in front of him, catching his sleeves, his vest. He rounded on her, panting with fury. She said firmly, "I'll go."

"This isn't your-"

"I'll go." The cornflower eyes flashed with sudden command. "You're angry." All the gentleness was gone from her now. Her face was the face of a queen who had seen the worst that Fate can give.

"God Christly damn right I'm angry," Rudy yelled. "Ingold risked his goddamn life to retrieve that book! Everything in it-"

"All the more reason I must speak to her, not you." She thrust him to the rough log chair, forced him to sit, and as she did so he thought, Christ, this isn't any of her business! She should lie down... Her face was pointy and white with exhaustion, and sweat stood out on her forehead beneath the soft black wings of her hair. Another part of him thought, She's right. He knew if he saw his pupil now he'd cause an unforgivable breach, which the Keep absolutely and utterly could not afford. And furious as he was, he knew the book had been violated from teenage spite. He'd seen his sisters do that kind of thing all the time.

He watched the woman he loved as she crossed the big mom to the door, her shadow reeling over the plastered walls in the glowstone's pallid light. There was a world of banked rage in the set of her back and shoulders-he wouldn't have wanted to be either Scala or her father at this moment.

In the door she turned. "She'll lie, you know," she said. "And her father will back her up."

Rudy sat for a long time in silence after she'd gone, struggling to calm his breathing, staring at the mutilated book. It was-thank God-the simplest of the early magic texts, and the lists it contained could be recompiled by Ingold and himself from memory-in our copious spare time, he reflected savagely.

But he remembered Ingold, white and silent with shock and horror, crawling carefully under the precariously balanced weight of broken stone and tile to extract this book and two others from the wreckage of the library at Quo.

He remembered all those long nights on the desert carrying it back, and the sense he had of the long years of magic and hope and effort that clung to its faded covers. He couldn't even really wish Scala ill, because on her well-being might depend so much of the future survival of the Keep. The little bitch.

He drew out his scrying crystal and calmed his mind enough to call Ingold's image to the stone. And got nothing.

"Oh, Christ, don't give me that again."

He tried contacting Thoth, and then Brother Wend, with similar nonresults. In the open state of his concentration he felt, not the deep-flowing, angry pressure he had sensed before-the weight of magic along the earth's fault linesbut only a kind of hot heaviness on the fringes of his consciousness, a gray interference that would allow nothing through.

Rudy mumbled a scatological comment and put the crystal away. He gathered the Black Book up, made a search for possibly dropped pages near the hearth-there were none, of course-and took it to the big oak cupboard that filled most of one wall. It was still locked, and the spells of Ward and Guard still in place. Everything on the shelves was as he had left it. For a moment he had a horrible vision of Scala going through and smashing everything in her rage, as his sister Teresa had done when she threw out all of his sister Yolanda's makeup during that stupid business about who was going to date that dweeb Richard Clemente. But that didn't seem to be the case. Yet, Rudy thought grimly. To Ingold's spells of Ward and Guard he added his own, woven specifically with Scala's name and image and the essence of her being. For good measure he placed the same Wards on the chest where Gil kept the record crystals, wrapped in their parchment indices.

Someday everyone in the Keep might have to depend on Scala Hogshearer for their very lives.

He hoped he'd be dead by that time.

"Ah, Master Wizard," came Lapith Hornbeam's pleasant voice from the doorway. "I'm so glad I've found you in. About this idea my mother has, for locating stock..." All in all, it was nearly twenty-four hours before Rudy returned to the fifth level and the magic of the Guy with the Cats.