Mother Of Winter

Chapter Seventeen

Cold jerked Rudy awake. Cold and pain, an overwhelming wrenching breathlessness. Then a sense of shock that he knew instantly was secondhand but was clear as a scream in his mind. Ingold! he thought, staring into the blackness of his cell, knowing immediately the source. Ingold...!

The feeling didn't fade, but grew. Dizziness, the swimming dots of fire that merged into a single, terrible light; the numbing of his left arm; the hammerblow of pain over his heart. Ingold!

Rudy's mind fumbled, disoriented, with his sense of time. He'd fallen asleep in a tangle of old books and Gil's notes after more vain hours of searching for the answers he knew had to be somewhere: to time and stasis, to the power that had come to him at call, the power he had never felt before.

He wasn't as good as Ingold yet at knowing immediately where the stars were at any moment of the day or night, but reaching out with his senses, he heard nothing in the watchroom of the Guards but the desultory click of the single worn set of pitnak tiles, and from their barracks only the soft draw of sleepers' breath. The cold, the pain, the breathlessness, were already pouring away like smoke into a hole in darkness. Rudy fumbled with trembling hands under his pillow for his crystal, body aching from the aftershock. Christ, don't do this to me, man! The witchlight he summoned flared in the crystal's heart. Answer me! Tell me it ain't so... Nothing. The thick grayness of the ice-mages' malice seemed to choke the air. God damn it, God damn it, answer me! He lowered his hands, the witchlight fading. No. No.

Don't make me be the only wizard in this godforsaken world! Don't make me have to go after the ice-mages myself. I'm not any good at this, dammit! Pain. Breathlessness. Dizziness. Pain.

He couldn't sort them easily in his mind, but he knew it was Ingold's pain he'd felt. Knew it as surely as if he'd heard the old man's voice.

It's three o'clock in the Christly morning! Rudy wanted to scream. What the hell are you doing fighting monsters at three in the morning?

If Ingold were no longer alive, thought Rudy, he'd be able to see Gil even if she were with him...

But even that he could not do.

He can't be dead, he thought, whispering it to himself like a mantra, willing it to be true. He can't be dead. It was an endless time until dawn.

Accompanied by Janus, Melantrys, and the Icefalcon, he left the Keep as soon as the Doors were opened, climbed to the high ground near the orchards, where the slunch was less, and drew a power-circle, Summoning to himself every scrap and whisper of magic to be had from the earth, from the streams, from the dawn-fading stars. But whether Ingold was dead and Gil in some place where the influence of the ice-mages lay too thick to pierce, or whether Ingold lived and Gil were with him, he could get no shadow of either of them in his scrying stone's heart. Head aching from the exertion, he tried to contact Thoth, but all that appeared in the amethyst's facets were dim images of flabby, death-colored fungoid parodies of human and animal life crawling out of a wasteland of slunch to attack the patched, rambling pile of the Black Rock Keep.

Even that view was distant. He thought he could see men with weapons around the walls of black and gray stone, and brushwood stacked before the battered iron doors and along the north wall where the wizards had their little beehive hermitages, but he could not be sure.

Cold wind blew down on his back, and behind him he heard a swift scuffle, a slithering and then the heavy chunk, like someone hitting a watermelon with an ax. Blood- smell stung his nostrils as he turned.

"Better get back." The Icefalcon struck his ax into the earth to clean it. Whatever had come out of the slunch-decayed woods to attack lay in bleeding pieces at his feet.

"There's more on the way. See anything?"

Rudy shook his head despairingly. Gaunt and tired, Janus and Melantrys were closing around them. At the foot of the slope the woods were thick with slunch, hanging in dirty mats and clumps from the branches of the dying trees. Something was moving deep in the infected glades, and Rudy shoved the crystal into the pocket of his vest and headed for the Keep. Fast.

"If Gil's with the old boy, he can't be too bad off," Janus pointed out.

As they sprang up the shallow black steps of the Keep, Janus turned back to scan the woods, shifting his sword in his bandaged hand; the wound he'd taken three weeks ago from a mutated dire wolf hadn't even begun to heal. This wasn't like the rip in Gil's face, attributable to some gaboogoo venom. Nobody's wounds were healing these days.

The dark line of hemlocks that fringed the high woods shuddered suddenly, shook and parted. Rudy gasped, "Mother pusbucket!" and Janus only said, "Pox rot it, but it had to happen sooner or later. Get inside. We'll take care of it." Melantrys was already yelling for the rest of the Guards.

The thing plowing down the slope, head lolling and limbs and pseudolimbs churning the white slunch to scraps and powder, was a mutated mammoth.

Scala Hogshearer was in the workroom when Rudy got there. The Guards' watchroom was a flurry of activity as he passed through it, men and women catching up weapons, heading fast for the door.

He saw the girl's shadow moving back and forth in the dim lamplight that was the chamber's only illumination, heard her furious sobbing in the corridor, and at the sound, his own anger rose in him, a poisonous, breathtaking heat.

He stopped in the doorway, fighting to keep calm.

She'd ripped to pieces the parchment on which he'd been remaking the Black Book of Lists; had emptied boxes, scattered and broken the ivory rune sticks, smashed the porcelain scrying bowl and ground its pieces to dust under her wooden heels. The cupboard in which he locked all the truly precious stuff bore signs of ferocious battering, the hinges and lock surrounded by white, ripped wood where she'd tried to hack them free of the doors.

There was blood under her fingernails from the effort. She was clinging to the edge of the table as if on the verge of being sick, her dark, dirty hair hanging lank around a face bloated with tears.

"I can't do magic!" she screamed at him when he finally stepped through the door.

She picked up his astrolabe--or what was left of it-and smashed it again and again into the surface of the table, the edge of the dial leaving huge scars in the wood. "I can't do magic anymore! I tried! I tried!"

She flung the metal circle into the corner and hurled herself at Rudy, pounding his chest with her fists as he grabbed her wrists and held her off. Even as heavy as she'd gotten recently, she was less strong than he expected.

"Scala, you can," he said gently, a little surprised at his own patience. Part of him wanted to smash the spoiled little bitch's head up against the wall, but that wasn't the part in control. Son of a gun, he thought detachedly, in the back of his mind. I must be growing up...

"Whoa," he said, as she began to hack at his shins. "Whoa, whoa, whoa... Take it easy, kiddo."

Her anger wasn't personal. And underneath it, underneath the fear of losing the attention of important people like Lady Sketh, was the horror of a loss that only he, of all those in the Keep, could comprehend.

"You're not teaching me right!" Her voice was a hysterical wail. "You're not teaching me what I need to know! Daddy says you have to! Daddy says he'll make you sorry if you don't! Daddy says-"

"Do you believe I'm not teaching you?"

"I can't do it!" She pulled against him, the unexpected reversal breaking his grip. She staggered back against the edge of the table, slapping at him and missing. Her face was a pulp of tears and snot, looking almost black in the dim, wavery glow of the lamps.

"I tried! I tried all morning! I've done all your stupid exercises and your stupid meditation and everything you said and I can't do magic at all! I used to! I used to and now I can't!"

She blundered past him, shoving him out of her way. He heard her smacking into the walls of the corridor as she fled, sobbing, into the dark.

Rudy made a step to go after her, then gave it up. "Swell," he sighed. "So now I get a visit from Daddy. Just what I needed to top off the day. How lucky can a guy be?" He rubbed his face, the ache of sleeplessness in his bones. Ingold, he thought. There had to be some way of learning what had happened to him. Of learning if he were still alive. He stopped to gather the torn parchments, the broken pieces of the ivory sticks. At least she hadn't burned the parchments this time.

He paused, the parchment in his hand.

Anger? he wondered. Or something else? The voices of the ice-mages whispering in her mind?

Are you saying my girl isn't a wizard?

His mind replayed the scene. Scala falling. The gaboogoos bounding past her, tripping over her, while she clutched her hair and screamed.

They only attack the mageborn, Thoth had said.

"Rudy? Master Wizard?"

Tir was standing in the doorway.

He still wore his cool formality, the stiff pose of distance, hands folded over his belt knot. Rudy straightened up, brightened the witchlight that flickered on the wall spikes, and inclined his head.

This will pass, he told himself, to quiet the hurt in his heart at the boy's wary aloofness. Whether he ever ceases to blame you for the death of his friends, this coldness will one day pass.

"What can I do for you, Tir?" He brought up a chair-by the look of it, the one Scala had used to pound on the cupboard doors. Tir gazed around him at the carnage, but didn't comment. He'd probably passed Scala in the hall.

"Rudy, there's people disappearing." He climbed up into the chair and sat with feet dangling. Like nearly everyone else in the Keep, he'd lost a lot of flesh, and in the frame of his black hair, his face seemed all eyes.

"Disappearing?" His fears for Ingold-his terror that he'd be the one, now, who had to deal with the ice-mages vanished before the memory of the locked doors on the fifth level, the stink of the newly deserted rooms.

The child licked his lips, gathering his thoughts. "I didn't think... You know how sometimes you don't see somebody for a couple days, like they're doing something for their mamas or something?" His voice was soft and scared. "But I got Linnet to make me a calendar, and I marked it, every day, who I saw and who I didn't."

He's too young for this, Rudy thought, looking into the lupine darkness of those eyes.

Too young to have to deal with this.

"There's people disappearing, Rudy. They really are. Brikky Gatson, and Noop Farrier, and Noop's papa and his papa's brother Yent and Melleka Biggar, and Rose White and both her brothers and their mama, too. Those were all the ones I started with. I hadn't seen them and I've been keeping marks for three weeks, Rudy. Old Man Wicket and Rab Brown and a couple of others, they stopped coming around, too. Only I didn't want anybody to know I've been asking about how long it's been." "Fifth level north," Rudy said softly. "All of them except the Farriers, and they're fourth level north, right under the Biggars."

"And there's a stairway that leads from the Biggars' warren down to there. They go up and down all the time. It can't be plague because you're a Healer," the boy went on. "The other Healers would have told you, or Mama. And nobody called the Guards or the Hunters to go look for them in the woods, and nobody talked to Mama about them being lost or asked you to find them with your crystal, did they?"

"No," Rudy said softly. "Nobody asked." He fished out his crystal, though he knew he wouldn't be able to see anything. The slunch within the Keep, magnified and concentrated by the Keep's walls, held inside the malice of the ice-mages. In any case it was sometimes difficult to see gaboogoos by crystal.

"Old Man Wicket, the Noops, the Whites," he said, half to himself. "Koram Biggar's the head man in that section of the Keep. He can't not know. He can't not have seen.. ."

"Seen what?" Tir asked. "That they've disappeared?"

"Seen what they're turning into. Seen why they can't go out in the open anymore." He pocketed the crystal, got to his feet, knowing coldly, clearly, with hard-etched certainty in his heart that what he suspected was true.

"Scala, too," he said softly. "Poor kid... Thanks."

He extended his hand, and after a doubtful moment Tir took it, eyes still wary and withdrawn. "You keep a good eye on things."

He released his grip after one quick clasp, making it thanks only and nothing else.

"Whatever else they tell you, keeping an eye on things is a king's job. I think it's time to tell your mama about this, and about some other stuff that's been going on. One more thing."

Tir paused, having scrambled down from his chair. Cautious, not ready to give.

"Don't look for these guys yourself, okay?" Hands on hips, Rudy regarded the boy, heart- wrung at how fragile he looked, how vulnerable. "You've told me, so now it's my job. I'll get some Guards and go visit Biggar and Wicket and that whole section. You're not walking around the back halls of the Keep by yourself, are you?" Kids did, he knew.

Tir shook his head. "There's bad places there," he said softly. "Spooky places. They smell weird. It's safe where people are."

"Good," Rudy said. "After I've talked with your mama, would you be willing to take me around the Keep and show me where these bad places are?"

The boy hesitated, tallying in his head whether this familiarity would constitute a betrayal of his dead friends. Then he nodded. "All right." His voice was barely a whisper. As he disappeared into the dark of the corridor again, Rudy saw a king's duty in his eyes.

People disappearing.

Rudy thought the matter over as he fingernailed up the tiniest slivers of enchanted ivory and porcelain from the floor.

You eat the slunch and pretty soon Los Tres Geezers start talking to you in your head, and you don't notice that Uncle Albert is turning into a pus-colored eyeless monster-or else you think, Hey, it ain't so bad.

And meanwhile the noose around the Keep was tightening. For the past four days he and his bodyguard had had to fight off at least one attack daily by mutated wolves or eagles or wolverines on the way back to the Keep from the circles of power drawn under the watchtowers. It was becoming almost impossible for him to go outside of the Keep to scry.

There'd been another temblor yesterday, and the daylight was noticeably wan. After a long search in the scrying table he'd found the culprit, a dark cone of ash and lava pouring fire and blackness from the bleak marble white of the southern wastes. Cripes, he thought, sitting back on his haunches now, staring sightlessly into the shadowless pale light of the workroom. What the hell are we gonna do? What're we gonna do if Ingold's dead?

He got up, unfastened the locks on the cupboard and cleared away the spells of Ward-which didn't seem to have stopped Scala's attack-and looked at the half-dozen little black knobs of protospuds, the tinier reddish beads.

He hefted one of the potatoes in his hand. Smooth, like polished hematite. He could just see the little eyes on its hard black belly, as if someone had taken the true essence of a potato, the genetic coding of what it actually was, and condensed it into this shorthand facsimile, designed to withstand all of time.

But it was alive. Deep within its heart, buried under all those spells of stasis, he could feel the unmistakable glow of sleeping life.

It's the answer, he thought. Goddammit, I know it's the answer. Why'd I have to be the one to stay here? Gil should be doing this. She's the scholar. But he was the wizard. He was the one who understood magic. Gil might be able to decipher hidden clues from the record crystals-from Tir's memories-from the visions he'd had through the Cylinder, all of which he'd meticulously written down. But he was the one who should be able to know what to do with the information. And he didn't.

Without Ingold, they'd never survive.

He thought back on the hideous sensations of last night. An attack? Somehow it had felt more like something else, heart failure, maybe. A few days ago, by exhaustive efforts at weaving a power-circle, he'd managed to contact Ingold for a few minutes, enough to learn that they'd made it safely to the Alketch capital of Khirsrit, where they were working as gladiators, of all things: Ingold with his hair bound up in a topknot and looking like an overage thug. But after that, nothing.

Scala's footfalls shuffled in the hallway. There was no mistaking that full-bodied sniffle. She was alone, thank God. He closed the cupboard door and locked it, casually draping Ward-spells all over it again as she sidled into the room. Her face was puffy and blotched and he saw again how her gown strained over her plump shoulders, and anger tweezered him again, remembering the fragile pointiness of Tir's cheekbones, the way Alde's shoulder blades seemed to be coming out through her colorless skin.

Scala was holding a covered pottery dish about the size of a mixing bowl, and her eyes slipped furtively from side to side.

"Rudy, you've got to teach me right." She sniffed again; her voice trembled with desperation. "You've got to find out why I can't do magic anymore. You've got to help me, Rudy, please. Daddy..." Her mouth worked briefly, then she got it under control.

"You don't know what it's like with Daddy. He says I'm not trying, but I am trying. I just-I just can't do it." She wiped her nose on her sleeve, then her eyes. "Please help me."

The pleading in her eyes was genuine. He wondered what Dear Old Dad's reaction would be when it became clear that he couldn't make good on his promises of future services to those who were counting on having a mage on their side. He could almost feel sorry for this spoiled, angry, self-important child, who faced for the first time in her life something she couldn't do and couldn't get anyone else to give her. The fact that she had once had magic made it all the worse. "Scala," he said quietly, "I'll do what I can. But--''

"I promise you I won't use magic against you, whatever Lady Sketh and the others tell me," she whispered. "I'll tell them I can't, that you're too strong. I'll do whatever you say. Only please, please give me something I can show Daddy." She set the bowl on the table. "I brought you this." Her words were a bare breath now, and she glanced over her shoulder again at the door. "We're not supposed to tell, because then everyone in the Keep will want it and there isn't enough. Master Biggar and Old Man Wicket only give us so much. But if you teach me., I'll make sure you always have some. You and whoever else you want, Queen Minalde or Prince Tir or anybody. I'll steal it for you. Just help me. Please teach me something I can do. I don't want Daddy mad at me again."

Rudy uncovered the bowl. The smell of it rose around his face, familiar and chalky-sweet, like medicine half recalled from childhood. In the cool bright witchlight the stuff had a waxy glimmer, and Rudy looked up from it to his pupil's bloated face. It was a porridge made of slunch.