Mother Of Winter

Chapter Twenty-Three

They left Khirsrit before the dawn in barges with muffled oarlocks, and the marsh-birds lifted in startled ribbons from the head-high forests of sedge and mist along the lakeside walls. Wrapped in the gaudy coat the Eggplant bought her, Gil watched them; behind her in the barge, a mare that bore food or weaponry or armor or whatever it was, wrapped under oiled sheets, blew softly and shook her head, the clinking of bridle-rings like the distant tap of a hammer in the morning still. Her head ached. The ice-mages had whispered to her through the night, to slip the dagger from beneath her pillow and cut the throat of the man who sat awake at her side. The effort of silencing them, of telling them to go to hell, made her feel as if she'd spent the night at hard labor.

Whenever she awakened, Ingold's hand had touched her hair, her shoulder, her cheek. The brown velvet voice had whispered to her, words she no longer recalled. And she had slept again, the diamond safe in its silken bag beneath her hands. Only now, looking across to where he sat huddled in his red-and-black robes of novitiate in the prow beside her, did it occur to her that he had not slept at all. He politely hid a smile as a small contingent of Sergeant Cush's gladiators brought Bektis down the yellow sandstone steps of the bishop's private watergate-extended by newer wooden ones, for like all water, the lake stood lower this year than it had in centuries-his wrists heavy with spell-chains and amulets of Silence, and his back rigid with the indignity of it all.

Ingold got to his feet and went to welcome him, nimble in the floating craft, so that it barely moved on the water's surface. The water made Gil profoundly uneasy. The opal brightness near the city walls changed within a dozen feet of embarkation to deeper and deeper tourmaline, then the otherworldly blue of the darkest morning glory.

The barges were passing over the heart of the old volcanic funnel. Gil was not much of a swimmer. If they capsized, she thought, they would never reach bottom, only sink forever into the heart of that azure world.

She fought the desire to seize Ingold around the throat and fling herself overboard. What the hell, she thought. He probably can walk on water. She had to loop the throng of her knife hilt tight around her fingers and twist it hard to keep the thought at bay.

Before them, the Mother of Winter shimmered, nacre-crowned coal. No smoke darkened the rising colors of the sky. Niniak the Thief had done his work well, spreading rumor among the city's various gangs-all of whom had connections to the warlords-that a shipment of food was due from the distant coast, though it was never specified which pass this fictive train would use or who had sent for it; some credit, Gil thought, should be left to the imagination of the generals involved. Her hand strayed to the silken bag again, and she thought, If l dropped it overside now, there would be no retrieving it.

For a moment the thought of the ensorcelled diamond flashing in the water amused her, fascinated her; how the water around it would be first brilliant, then darker and darker, colder and colder, as it sank away toward the world's heart. But her mind recoiled from the thought of losing that second heart, that blood of her blood. A warm hand fell on her shoulder, and she looked up into Ingold's face; standing behind her, feet spread to take the roll of the boat, haggard in the growing light. She took her hand away from the silk latches of her coat and put it over his. I will bear his child. It was as if she were thinking of someone else. If I live. They reached the Blind King's Tomb shortly after noon. The gaboogoos were waiting for them.

"St. Bes' drawers!" Sergeant Cush dragged at the spiked bit in his stallion's mouth as the terrified beast wheeled to flee. "What in the name of the Seven Hells?"

"Oh, very good." Ingold smiled with genuine pleasure in his eyes at the things that crawled, spiderlike, squidlike, squatty and scuttling and barbed and toothed like scorpions, down the rocks in a pulpy white gush.

"Good?" The gladiators were backing their horses fast; Bektis was screaming invective that could have been heard in Penambra. "What the bloody demon-festering hell is goddamn good about it?"

None of the things was bigger than a cat. A bodyguard of five hundred couldn't have dealt with them all.

"It's always gratifying when one's communications are received and acted upon."

The wizard dropped lightly from the saddle of his own mare and tossed the reins to Gil. She was one of the few holding her horse rock-steady, knowing it was no part of Ingold's plan to flee. She didn't even wonder how she would cope when the scuttering things reached them.

"I must beg your forgiveness, my dear," he went on, and ripped the oiled cover from the pack- mare's burden. "But when one's enemies are so obliging as to give one a line direct to them, they have no business being surprised when one uses it to relay information about plans-even if that information is misleading."

The mare was carrying four tall terra-cotta vessels about the size of butter churns; each equipped with a pump

and a leathern hose pipe. Gil laughed, the first sound that had passed her lips since last night. "You bastard!" He smiled up at her, like a sleepy and mischievous elf. "Well-I try."

Gil- who'd been given charge of the pack-mare's lead upon disembarkation that morning- wheeled both her own horse and the mare, holding them in position as the squid- things, spider-things, scorpion-things wavered, hesitant, their advance already broken by the knowledge flooding from her consciousness into that of their masters. The Eggplant had dismounted already and stood at Ingold's side as the wizard unhitched the metal nozzle of the hose.

"Pump it "

Anything big enough to be proof against vitriol was big enough to be cut to pieces with a sword-and therefore dealt with by a bodyguard. But the reverse was also true. "Where'd you get the sulfur?" she asked as the first stinking wave of it sprayed over those small, foul, and wholly undefended bodies.

"My dear, you ask that in a country that lives by the mining of copper?"

"Do we take it in with us?"

The smell was astonishing as the gaboogoos blackened, curled, fizzled on the stone steps like slugs under a drench of salt. Gil realized why Ingold had insisted everyone wear thicksoled boots.

"When you've fought as many renegade wizards as I have, my dear," Ingold said, wrapping his scarf over nose and mouth, "you learn one thing: never take as a weapon anything more complicated than a sword. And never take anything that can be blown up, or splashed back, or whipped around in your hand. Bektis, are you coming?"

"Have I a choice?" Sergeant Cush and Lieutenant Pra-Sia had already pulled the bishop's mage from his saddle, were stripping the chains of Silence from his wrists. A gaboogoo that had only been spattered with the acid staggered drunkenly out of the blackening mess on the tomb steps and snapped with its pincers at the hem of the old man's robe; Cush smashed it under his boot heel.

It made a horrible noise as it flattened. Bektis looked as if he would willingly have scrambled up on the training director's shoulders had no one been watching. "No." Ingold's blue eyes were suddenly icy under the scarred lids. "You haven't. I'm only going to say this once, because I'm sure the ice-mages have reserves of creatures large enough to be proof against vitriol."

He stepped close to the taller wizard, his sword in his hand now and power radiating from his dusty, sweat-streaked face. "If you flee, or betray us, or so much as flinch back, Bektis, I lay upon you a death-curse of pain, of humiliation, of cold, of filth, of regret. I lay upon you a body devoured before your mind departs it; a mouth filled with worms; flesh given over to ants and roaches. Do you understand?" Bektis swallowed hard. Gil thought, Ingold is the Archmage. It was something she seldom had cause to remember. Ruler of the wizards of the West. His words are the words of command.

As through a mouth filled with dust, Bektis managed to say, "I understand." "Gil's life is to be protected above my own. At all costs." The bishop's mage nodded again. He stared as if hypnotized into what lay beyond the mist-filled gate of the Blind King's Tomb.

Things reached and snapped at them from within, drawing back from the puddles of stinking acid smoking on the steps. Within the vaporous, glowing dimness, the very walls pulsed with the movement of the slunch. Bektis looked about to throw up. "If you flee," Ingold continued in a voice as soft as the darkness of summer night, "I think you're going to find that curse awaiting you about two strides away from the steps. Now come. It is time."

The voices filled Gil's mind, like the roaring of the sea, the flute crying birdlike above them.

They waded forward through the mist, into the dark.

In her dream last night she had seen the Mother of Winter. Unhuman and beautiful, flashing greens and blues and violets, she had risen from the heaving pool of stasis and cloud, and Gil had thought, If she looks at me, I will die. If she looks at me... Mother-Wizard and guardian of the world long past, she had floated in her enchanted pool that stretched down, down the volcanic vent into the world's heart. Beautiful and alien as a snowflake, she had held out her arms, her three acolytes bowing at her feet. The life-forms of all that vanished world had waited in her shining body, peered from the forest of her blue mane, from the contents of her prodigal, scintillant memory. She was back from her long sleep, with all her children singing in her train. Joyful to be living again.

And in Gil's dream the beautiful eyeless gaze had fallen upon her, from those spreading wilds of ferny cloud, a flashing of jewels in mist. The Mother of Winter had spoken her name. And she had died.

They shrilled in her mind. You will die. If you do not kill him, do not stop him, you will die, and your child, your single egg, will die with you.

Gil closed her mind. There was a reason she followed Ingold, through the ground-fog streaming around their boots, through the writhing slunch that sizzled under the spattering blasts of ball-lightning that hissed from the ends of his staff and Bektis'. She could not remember what it was, but she made that not matter. Creatures unimaginable flopped and whistled, struck at them from the air or flashed snakelike from crevices in the rock. Simulacra wrought from the slunch, she thought, striking at them with her sword, decapitating, slicing off legs and tentacles and pincers. She was a Guard, and Ingold her teacher. Only that existed, like a steel sphere within

the red shrieking maelstrom of illusion and visions in her head. She thought the Blind King turned his head and watched them, eyeless, as they passed.

She thought her own hands were white as the slunch, and that she bore two swords-maybe more-in several sets of hands: one to fight the gaboogoos, but another to decapitate Bektis, who walked close before her, clinging almost to Ingold's red-and-black garments in horror and revulsion. To decapitate Bektis, and then Ingold himself. And then she could rest.

The slunch was knee-deep in the inner chamber where Ingold had fought, shoulder-deep where it ran into the walls; heaving, moving, quivering with pseudopods and stalks.

Ingold plowed ahead, cutting a way to the entry to the ice tunnel itself, and the bloated, mutated insects that had fattened themselves on the decomposing cave-apes and dooic Ingold had slain came roaring at their heads.

Bektis spattered at them with lightning and fire: Bektis against whom she had rather foolishly pictured herself protecting Ingold. The tall mage looked grim and scared and furious, but showed no disposition to turn tail.

He understood, as Gil understood, that Ingold was the only thing protecting them from death.

Cold smoke poured at them from the tunnel that led to the glacier's heart, smoke and pallid light. White snakes of lightning ran from Ingold's fingers, skating along the slunch and running before them into the blue eternity of the ice, and Gil heard-maybe in reality, maybe only in her head-the flute that she knew from dreams. The ground stirred beneath them, and Gil caught at the rock of the wall, willing herself not to feel terror-willing herself to feel nothing. Bektis hesitated, and Ingold said, "They're bluffing. They know perfectly well a cave-in will make it impossible for the Mother of Winter to seed."

Movement in the mist. Ingold leveled his staff, fire pouring from its tip, and something like a plasmoid flounder struggled out of the burning slunch underfoot and threw itself at him. He cut it down automatically with his sword, slicing it in half and crushing it underfoot as he led the way down the inferno of charred matter and dim, brainhurting glow.

Yori- Ezrikos had taken refuge here, Gil thought, with the small corner of her mind still capable of thought at all. It hadn't been as bad then, granted; but it was a gauge of her terror and loathing of Vair na-Chandros that she had come this far at all. Or had she only fallen in sleep on the feet of the Blind King and dreamed of the music of the ice-mages and the beautiful, eternal thing sleeping in the pool? The blue light deepened, dense as the bottom of the sea on the glassy curve of the walls. The white swirl of mists around them dimly defined the heat-spell in which they all now walked. Phosphorus shimmered, and all around her the glacier ice picked up eerie ghosts of their movements; she felt cold, cold unto death. Streaked with smoke and grime and blood where two or three gaboogoos had made it past the lightning, Ingold's face was serene, calm with concentration, witchlight seeming to flicker in his beard and hair and along the blade of his sword. They had left the slunch behind. They were within the glacier, walking to its center as if into the heart of a geode, and the dense blue light grew colder, thinner where it hid within the ice.

The ice- mages were not anything like they had appeared to Gil in her dreams, not even at the end.

Maybe they weren't anything like she saw them now: Gil was no longer certain how much of what she saw was real. The floor underfoot-ice, not stone-was worn away with their magic, and a little slunch grew in the pit, but it might not have been real slunch, just something conjured out of the wanting of their minds.

Things crawled up out of it now and then; one of them attacked Bektis' foot, and he crushed it, horrified loathing on his face.

The mages were waiting, crouched together. Aware. Shapes of light like vast jellyfish drifted and danced over the smoking waters of the pool that filled most of that enormous cavern, and in all that chamber there was no single sound but the thick slurp and heave of the liquid in the pool, and the breathing of the three who stood within the cavern's entrance, their breath smoking hard in the heat-spell's despite. Ingold said, "Protect her." Gil could just see the protective shapes he called into being as he walked forward, boots squeaking; cones and spheres and curious, moving rods of power that glimmered and vanished in the air all around him, tenuous beside the shining power-shapes of the priests.

Gil heard them screaming something at her, but shut it out of her mind.

Nothing existed. Nothing. Nothing.

Only that she was a Guard, and when something happened to let her, she would react. From her tunic she slipped the silken bag and felt within the jewel that was her flesh and blood and heart.

The smaller two ice-mages circled sideways to surround the small red-and-black figure walking toward them. The central mage, the great enchanter, reared like a rising black cloud above the pit.

Gil couldn't even find an analogy to describe the domed shielding-if that's what it was- of the head-if that's what that was: the covered orifices; the long muddle of tubes and striking heads or hands or whatever they were, probing in and out like eels from rocks; and cold nonlight pouring from every crack and crevice of it, ultraviolet, pallid, searing. It spread itself out, bubbling, and Ingold stood before it with the quicksilver light glistening along his sword blade, gazing into its heart. Waiting.

Then moving lightly, he circled past it, and the thing turned to watch him as he stepped to the very brink of the oxygen pool. White fog frothed around his feet as he stood, staring into the depths with the shapes of the alien magic moving like living sails almost invisibly over his head, strange reflections of blue and green and rose passing over his face and hair.

Slowly, the shapes dwindled, faded, and died. An old man with a stick and a sword, in borrowed clothing, he stood among his enemies unprotected, his left arm held stiff where he'd taken it out of the sling. His face was sad as he raised it at last to the dark, shining thing that hovered above him.

"I'm sorry." He spoke soft, but in the utter silence his flawed, beautiful voice carried to the farthest ends of the cave. "I didn't realize. She's dead."

The great mage-priest crouched lower, tentacles shortening, thickening, shifting. The other priests seemed to shrink in on themselves, readying like cats to spring, and Gil felt malice and fury, a heavy pain pounding in her belly and head.

The voices in her mind fell still. Their anger had no time for her now, no time for anything, drawing in on itself, denser and denser, an imploding universe of time and power and rage.

Ingold went on, very gently, "I didn't know it when last I came here, because I could not see the shape of your magic. Things were hidden from me. Maybe from you as well. But I think she's been dead for many centuries now."

His hand shifted a little on the worn wood of his staff, his sword lowered, tip touching the ice at the very brink of the pool. "She lasted a long time," he murmured, almost to himself. "But all seeds perish, if they lie unquickened in the womb of time."

(not dead)

Gil felt/heard like a hot grip on her vitals the leaden rage of their denial. The dark volcanic heat they had called in the earth was nothing more than a clanging echo to this refusal and fury and grief.

(not dead back alive if back alive if) (world will be the same) (back alive if world will

be the same) (make it all the same put it back put it back)

(not dead)

Ingold had to have heard them, had to have felt the swelling of that poison-storm of rage, and Gil could not understand why he didn't flee. Could not imagine standing there in front of them, under the growing horror of that rage, unflinching, only sad. But he said, "She is dead," and his voice was the voice of a relative breaking the news to a grieving child. "You did your duty well. She could have asked for no better children than you, no better gift than your love. There was nothing you could have done to prevent it, nothing you could have done to bring that world back in time. It was only time that out lasted her. I'm sorry."

And the dark condensed, spread and thickened through the blue thin unworldly dimness of the ice-shimmer. Anger. Denial and anger. Hammerblows of rage.

(not so)

(not dead)

(not failed not failed not failed)

Ingold turned away from them, and they fell upon him like nuclear storm.

Gil screamed warning, throat burning, and he turned with staff outflung in a searing explosion of nova-scale light. They struck him in bursting sub-purple glare, like the colors in the back of the brain when the eyes are closed, saw him fall to one knee, raising his sword. She saw no more, though she heard him cry out. But she was moving already, running, the carbon stone bursting fire in her hand.

Mist filled the chamber, surging up from the shapes of dark and X-ray glare, lightning and weighted rage. Mist whirled around her as Bektis shouted, touched her with thrown spells of warmth that could not seem to shake free of the searing cold slicing her mind.

The pool was before her somewhere, covered in cloud-she saw Ingold brace himself, stabbing and thrusting with his staff, saw darkness encompass him at the same moment her foot caught on something under the drowning swirls of mist. She fell, panting, the diamond bruising her palm. The clouds heaved up around her, and the next moment the heat-spells shifted, caught the cold air in an eddy of wind that swept aside the mist.

For one instant she saw before her bare rock, black ice, and purple depths going down to infinite darkness, the slow cold liquid of her dreams heaving and churning with the rage of the mages whose spells had so long held it intact.

And in the dark of the pool she saw it, that floating, drifting wonder in its ferny universe of mane, like a shadow, suspended in what had once been its dream. In her dream it-She-had spoken Gil's name, called forth the life from her body. Now Gil raised the diamond heart, the blood of her blood, the life of her life, while her own blood dripped to the rock and ice underfoot.

The weight of the icemages' fury slammed down on her mind, crushing her consciousness toward darkness, but for some reason the pain in her hand, the sight of her blood trickling like thin red snakes, kept her mind focused. She heard Ingold cry out again and turned, arm upraised, to see him throw himself between her and the three shadows as they reached out for her.

The flash and crack of lightning seemed to split the world, and Gil threw the diamond with all her strength.

Bektis, I hope that spell of protection's a doozy.

The world exploded in a holocaust of smoke and light.

Too much had altered in the Keep over the course of the years to have left the crypts unchanged. What had been, Rudy guessed, the small chamber at the heart of the grid, had long ago been incorporated into one of the less efficient hydroponics vaults, which had then itself been let go to dust.

Thank God we didn't decide to lock the devotees of Saint Bounty in here, he thought, coming through the rough doorway-which Gil had dated at late in the Keep's original period of habitation, whatever that meant. Most of the tanks had been taken out, and those that remained had been converted to storage of grain and dried fruits. Studying the floor, he could see where three chambers had been joined into one. And the central of those three chambers had been round, small... and had contained, he saw now, brightening the light and kneeling to more closely examine the dirty black stone underfoot, a scrying table.

Only the fact that the room was so little frequented let him see anything at all, because no one cleaned here. But in spite of the thin coating of dust and grime, there was no mistaking the round patch of roughness where it had been taken up and moved.

Moved where? Carried away from the Keep entirely, when the place had finally been abandoned? Maybe to Gae, to the palaces of the Kings of Dare's line? Maybe broken up, during some upsurge of antiwizard sentiment? From the pocket of his vest he took the Cylinder and set it in the center of the rough stone circle on the floor. "Brycothis?" he said. "You here?"

He shut his eyes. He was inside the Cylinder, inside the dark small circular chamber in the heart of the Keep. "I'm here," the Bald Lady said. He wasn't sure what he expected. Not this.

At times it seemed to him that he was standing beside the ocean on a January morning, the world an opal of pewter and cold; or that he was in a garden on a summer night, just outside a white marble belvedere through whose blinds light streamed golden, looking at the shadow of a woman bending over an armillary sphere.

Sometimes he had the impression of looking at her sleeping-on a couch? In a cylinder of glass?-though oddly, he could not tell whether she was young or old. Sometimes he didn't know exactly what he perceived. The smell of vanilla and cinnamon.

That bone-deep sense of trust, of caring, of friendly peace. He wasn't sure how to address her, or which way to look.

"I, uh- I'm Rudy Solis. I'm the Keep wizard this summer. But you probably already know that."

He felt her smile and understood that after all this time, the core of her was human still.

He'd been about to ask about the spells of stasis, but that smile made him ask instead, "Are you okay? Have you... have you been alive all this time? Trapped?" But he knew as the words came out of his mouth that she was no more trapped in the walls of the Keep than he could be described as trapped within the armature of his bones.

She was the heart of the Keep, transformed into it as Ingold had transformed himself into a peregrine, and for the same cause-to save those whom she loved. But she thanked him for asking-it was like the warmth of still midsummer.

Memories stirred and swirled, as if she were trying to bring them into focus: fragments of consciousness drifting in the light, scenes that flickered through Rudy's mind as if he had been there, as if he remembered someone else's memories, or dreamed someone else's dreams.

A cat that had liked to sleep curled up on her hip, one paw over its black-and-white nose. The way the needles had stung when they tattooed the sigils of power and focus, the Runes and patterns of force, on her hands and arms. Someone's laughter. The color of her daughter's hair.

And then, very clear, he saw the Mother of Winter, sleeping in her pool. Sleeping

truly, for she would move in sleep, dreaming of the eggs all safe within her body, dimly illumined by the soft glow of her living heart.

Only the living will use magic to preserve those they love. He didn't know if this was his own thought or hers, this woman's, in whose heart/dream/memory he now stood; he didn't know whether it was himself, or she, who wondered if it was for that reason that the Mother of Winter had sent the dream to Brycothis, to show her what she must do.

"Did it hurt?" he asked, desperately wanting that it had not.

He was reassured by the whisper of her laughter and the touch on his arm, palpable and immediate, of her warm fingers, though he saw nothing. A little sadness, when Amu Bel died, and Dare, and others, mages whom she could no longer protect.

The heart remembered. He was glad she was all right. "Look," he said diffidently, "we've got this problem I wondered if you could help me with. How do you get them spuds to grow?"

And he felt around him again the summer joy of her smile.

The following day the gaboogoos attacked the Keep in force.

Knowing that thick concentrations of slunch-or the creatures that grew out of the slunch- interfered with communications by scrying crystal, Rudy had ensorcelled a ball made of leather stuffed with grass, such as the children played with, laying on it spells to turn first blue, then red, then green, then black, then white. He'd driven three stakes in the ground a few yards before the Keep steps, to form a tripod, and had set the ball on them; every morning, before the doors of the Keep were opened, he looked into his crystal, to see whether the ball could be seen by such means and whether it was the color it was supposed to be.

This latter guard against the possibility of illusion was in fact doing the ice-mages too much credit. When he checked on the ball that morning, with the first stirrings of light outside, he saw nothing. There was only the dense gray anger of the icemages, faded shadows within the facets of the stone.

"Whoa!" Shoving the crystal in his pocket, he hurried to the Aisle, where the farmers had already begun to gather, chatting with the Guards and waiting for the opening of the gate.

"Sorry, folks, can't be done," he said, striding to the front of the crowd, where Caldern and Gnift stood before the inner doors. "They're out there, waiting. I don't know how many."

"Are you sure?" someone inevitably demanded.

"That's ridiculous!" another declared, equally inevitably. "We need to get to our work! The season's going to be short enough. If we're not to starve-" "And how do we know what you're seeing out there is true?"

Rudy planted himself before the doors, hands on his hips and the witchlight that burned above his head glittering on the locking-rings behind him and in the shadows of his eyes. "You don't believe me?"

There was silence.

"You're the people who made all the screaming fuss about me not being here to use my magic to protect you back when there was no way I could have protected you. Well, I'm here now. And I'm telling you: don't open those doors." Without a word five of them flung themselves at him, hoes and knives and billhooks raised. Rudy was so astonished-though he realized later he shouldn't have been-and the quarters were so close that they were on him, tearing his staff from his hands, slamming him against the doors behind him before he could raise a finger in his own defense.

He lashed out automatically, with fists and boots and elbows, hurling also the vicious spells of pain and suffocation that did, of course, absolutely nothing-Caldern wrenched a billhook away from one man and threw the weapon in one direction and the man in the other; Gnift beheaded a second farmer without an instant's hesitation; and the others in the forefront of the group, Barrelstave and Lapith Hornbeam and a couple of the Dunk clan, fell on the attackers and dragged them back. 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.