Mother of Winter (35 page)

“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 He extended his hand, and after a doubtful moment Tir took it, eyes still wary and withdrawn.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.

Koram Biggar and Old Man Wicket
. Rudy’s shadow poured itself out of the darkness behind him like a monster ghost, ran along the wall as he strode past the glowstone in its iron-strapped niche and streamed ahead of him to darkness again.
“Whatever Lady Sketh tells me” indeed!

He wondered whether Lady Sketh and her hapless lord were followers of Saint Bounty’s gluttonous cult, or whether they were just allied with Biggar and his ilk because Biggar was hiding his illicit chickens in the Sketh enclave and giving them a cut; whether Lady Sketh—or Lord Ankres—even knew where those people went, who “disappeared.”

He shivered, thinking about the deformed bones Gil had showed him, and the things that attacked him in the woods. The deformed mammoth that was even at this moment throwing itself against the impregnable doors of the Keep.

Alde would be in her chambers at this time of the morning, resting. She rested as much as she could these days. She was due in a month, maybe less. Rudy had assisted at a birth last week; Lythe Crabfruit, a woman taller and sturdier than Alde, even accounting for the malnutrition endemic in the Keep these days. She had died, in spite of everything he could do, and her baby with her. Not all the magic he could summon could breathe strength into her, could prevent the slipping away of those two lives from beneath his hands. Afterward he’d gone to the watchroom and gotten drunk on Blue Ruin. Now, with the grain shortage in the Keep, there wasn’t even much of that.

Ingold can’t be dead
, Rudy thought desperately.
He can’t be!

Every time he saw Minalde he was filled with fear. He literally couldn’t imagine what he’d do without her in his life.

Something skittered, scratching in a cell somewhere behind him. A cat fled yowling and Rudy swung around, listening, stretching his senses to hear …

Nothing. Or almost nothing. He’d taken the Royal Way, the wide main corridor on third south, glowstones all the way—they
couldn’t
be pursuing him straight into the Royal Sector. He moved on, uneasy, his soft boots making little sound on the black stone floor. As usual in daytime, the Keep was nearly empty, the weavers and scribes attached to Minalde’s service having taken their work outside.

Saint Bounty. Patron saint of slunch
. No wonder the gaboogoos hadn’t touched Scala the day of the attack on the Hill of Execution. No wonder she’d gradually lost the ability to work magic, as greediness—and almost certainly the stress of her father’s expectations and demands—had driven her to gorge herself on Saint Bounty’s magical abundance.

He wondered if it was something that would work itself out of her system eventually. She hadn’t begun to change physically, though some people obviously had. If anything had happened to Ingold, if Wend and Ilae bought it, they’d need another wizard bad.

There!

He swung around again, his whole body prickling with the sense of being followed, of danger, of pursuit. He shifted his staff in his hand, and ball lightning flickered on the horns of its crescent. He rubbed his fingertips, summoning the power to within a breath of reality, until he could feel it crackle beneath his skin.

Minalde had two rooms tucked away behind the Council chamber, close to the Bronze Bird Fountain, in the warmest and most protected portion of the Royal Sector. Her door was open, a trapezoidal throw rug of amber lamplight lying on black stone floor. The other rooms along that corridor were closed off with shutters or heavy curtains. She sometimes sang
as she sewed, but there was no sound, not even the scratching of her stylus on the wax writing tablets.

“Alde?” he called out, quickening his stride. “Alde, it’s—”

Something in the room fell with a crash. A table toppled over, glass or a dish broken … 
(And still no reaction?)
Rudy stopped in his tracks. Given the scarcity of glass, even the soft-spoken Minalde would have sworn at that one.

So he was already bringing up his pronged staff for action when the gaboogoos flung themselves out the door at him as if they’d been shot from a gun.

Lightning lanced from the metal of the staff head, splitting the thing that looked like a blubbery, flying squid as it flew toward his face; he cut and slashed off the hand of another with the razor crescent, then impaled the thing, shoved it back, called down ball lightning that half blinded him in a roar of purple-white glare. The corridor stank of smoke and what smelled like burned rubber, and with a scratching grate of claws two things that had started out genetically as rats sprang at him from behind. He turned, cutting, slashing with lightning, terrified to use it in these confined quarters; the rat-thing rolled over and over, burning, and then lay still.

Rudy was already in Minalde’s room. She was just stumbling out of the wardrobe whose heavy black-oak door was ripped and chewed and holed in a dozen places, black hair in a streaming tangle down her back, sobbing with shock and relief. The maid Linnet was stretched on the floor against the wall, throat a mass of sucker marks and bruises—Alde collapsed to her knees beside the body. The table Linnet had kicked over as a warning lay on its side amid smashed glass and spilled ink. Rudy dropped beside the woman and felt her hand.

Gold. Pulseless.

The life was there, though; he pressed his hands to her throat, to her chest, to her temples, calling on her—calling her to return.
Linnet! Linnet, dammit …!

He thought he heard her whisper her daughter’s name. The name of the man who had been killed by the Dark on the long road from Penambra, leaving her with child in that awful time.

Linnet, come back!

Alde needs you, for Chrissake!

Though his body did not move, crouched over the bruised and waxen tangle of flesh and hair, in that gray otherworld he held out his hand.

The gaboogoos were coming. He heard them.

Not gaboogoos. Mutants. Voices and footfalls, and the soggy thump of bodies staggering into corners and walls. He smelled them, like dirty rubber and ammonia mixed.

Linnet …!

He saw her, with the same queer doubled perception he had known through the Cylinder, as if the experience with that ancient magic had taught him to see more clearly. Saw Alde’s friend standing alone in the gray country, looking much as she had when he first saw her on the march up from the river valley, her dark hair unstitched with gray and her young face unlined. She knew him, and for a moment anger passed across her face, anger and grief. Behind her there were shadows—a man and a little girl. Waiting, he thought.

Alde was calling his name. Warning …

Linnet turned from the man and the child, stretched out her hand to take his.

It all seemed to happen in seconds. Linnet’s hand clutched convulsively at his sleeve and she began to gasp like a landed fish; Alde swung back around from the wall where she’d taken down the halberd Gnift the Swordmaster made her learn to use three years ago, when there’d been danger of a bandit attack on the Vale. Her night-dark eyes flooded with tears in the unsteady lamplight, but she didn’t leave the door of the room.