Mother of Winter (39 page)

If he still lived.

“My lord wizard.”

Rudy looked up. The Bishop Maia, Lank Yar, and Lord Ankres stood just beyond the edge of the power-circle, a couple of Ankres’ white-clothed troopers and three or four of Yar’s hunters in the background. They looked grim, and rather white around the mouths.

Maia said, “I think we have them all.”

The Guards were holding them on the training floor, one of the largest open spaces within the Keep to which access could
be limited. Even those who had made the biggest fuss about searching the Keep for gaboogoo—Lady Sketh and Enas Barrelstave—were silent in the presence of the eyeless, mewing things that had been Clanith White and Old Man Wicket.

Koram Biggar, who had not begun to change, was blustering, “When all’s said, they don’t look so bad.” He waved at Noop Farrier, whose wife had cut holes in his jerkin to accommodate the pseudolimbs growing from his chest and back. “You can’t say that’s really bad, my lady. What’s the way you look, anyway, compared to being full-fed?”

He glared defiantly around him. The Guards and Lord Ankres’ soldiers, who’d helped them in the sweep, looked a little queasy, but kept their weapons at the ready. At the sight of Rudy, Varkis Hogshearer pushed to the fore of the prisoners. “You have no right to name me as one of these!” he yelled. “You wait, Master Know-All Wizard! You wait till my girl’s powers come in strong!”

Beside him, Scala was silent, tears running down her red, swollen cheeks.

“It’s we who’re full-fed, you know,” Biggar went on, as the Guards began pushing and chivvying the shambling mob toward the stairway that led down to the makeshift prison in the first level of the crypts. “You lot are fools for not taking Saint Bounty’s gifts! Look at her!” His finger stabbed out toward Minalde, still as marble with her dark hair disheveled, holding Tir’s hand. Linnet stood beside her, throat mottled with bruises. Tir’s eyes were somber, unsurprised, like water miles deep.

“Look at her, with her bones staring out of her flesh, ne’er mind the wizard’s child she carries! It’s we who’ll live!”

“Aye,” Janus of Weg said softly as the fifty or so mutants—and those unchanged others whose names Tir had given Rudy—were led away. “Aye, you’ll live. But in what form?”

“It isn’t all of them,” Rudy said as the watchers emptied slowly out of the training floor, murmuring uneasily to themselves.

Minalde moved her head a little, no.

The small group closed up around them: Ankres, Maia, Janus—the core of Alde’s power. The lines of her face seemed deeper in the brittle light, more drawn.

“It’s a dangerous precedent to set,” the bishop said gently. “We can’t simply say that those who have been against us must be under the control of these ice-mages.”

“Should be easy to tell,” Rudy said. “Thanks to a man named John W. Campbell and a little story called ‘Who Goes There?’ ”

Alde’s morning-glory eyes widened in alarm. “You mean people in your world have to deal with this kind of problem?”

Rudy grinned, and just barely remembered not to kiss her, out of respect for Maia’s position and Ankres’ scruples. She’d regained a little of her color and looked not much the worse for their chase through the vaults, but he wished she’d pack up for the day and go to bed. She was just too damn pregnant for him to relax.

“All the time, babe,” he said. “All the time.”

The Old Testament Hebrews had used the pronunciation of the word “shibboleth.” The fictitious fighters against Antarctic alien intruders had used a hot wire and samples of everybody’s blood. Rudy used illusion, which gaboogoos walked straight through without seeing.

Lord Ankres jumped and flinched when Rudy summoned the illusion of a large and highly colored insect walking up his leg. That particular image did it for most people. For stoics like the Icefalcon, who wouldn’t have reacted to a giant squid doing Groucho Marx imitations, Rudy simply drew a line of Ward across the empty cell he was using as a testing chamber and casually said, “Come over here, would you?” The young Guard stopped, baffled that he couldn’t come more than halfway into the room.

He tested all the Guards, all Lord Ankres’ men, and all of Yar’s hunters first. He tested everybody who lived on fifth north.

Rather to his regret, Lord and Lady Sketh both passed with flying colors. But as Maia said, you couldn’t arrest those who simply disagreed with you.

“You know why they interfered with the searches?” Alde said tiredly. It was deep in the night, and Rudy had been testing people for hours. Melantrys and her work party had just locked up the Doors after hauling out the last loads of slunch, room after room of it, tucked away in the mazes behind the Sketh and Ankres enclaves.

“My guess is Biggar and his boys hid their chickens with Sketh.”

Alde nodded. “And stolen food. They simply swore fealty to Ankres, in the old style, and for Ankres that was enough to extend his protection to them.” She perched awkwardly on the stool that Rudy had relinquished the moment she and Tir entered the training floor—Gnift the Swordmaster sometimes used it for demonstrations. The iron cages in which the glowstones hung overhead threw faded lattices of shadow over her face and across the worn wood of the raised training floor.

“They knew he was never going to let any of my troops go poking around in even the deserted areas behind his storerooms. He was livid when he learned Biggar had also sworn fealty to Sketh.”

Rudy rubbed his eyes. In the squirming, glowing masses that he’d seen dragged through the Aisle to the doors he saw things like squamous fruit: half-formed gaboogoos taking shape. Dozens of the things of various sizes had been flushed out of the corners of the fifth-level mazes, out of the deserted storerooms and corridors that were officially the enclaves of the Keep nobility, though nobody ever went there. Just the thought of trying to destroy those foul heaps now piled in front of the Keep made Rudy tired.

“We’ll have to kill them,” Tir said very quietly, pressing his cheek to the back of Alde’s hand. “Won’t we?”

He looked as tired as they, his eyes years older than they had been that morning.
Once upon a time there was a boy
, Rudy thought, looking down at the hollowed face, the sad, steady blue-violet gaze.
Oh, Ace, I’m sorry
.

Alde brushed her thin hand over her son’s hair. “We don’t have to make that decision tonight, darling.”

Tir looked up at her, saying nothing. Rudy wondered if
the boy was thinking what he himself thought, what he knew Alde thought:
If Ingold’s dead, and the ice-mages aren’t gonna be killed, how long do we go on feeding people who’re gonna have to be gotten rid of anyway?

The Bald Lady had drawn a sphere to Summon not only water, but life. Reproducing it would be an all-day job, and the thought of Summoning the power to do so made his bones ache. But the memory of that single leaf, that single root, made him shiver.
Tomorrow
, he thought.
Tomorrow
.

Tomorrow he’d have to go back to testing. There’d been thirty-five mutants, maybe half a dozen who’d been with them—like Biggar and Hogshearer and Scala—and another ten or so who hadn’t changed physically but upon whom the slunch had worked to the extent that they hadn’t been aware of illusion. And the vast bulk of the Keep’s population remained untested.

And there were still the other problems, the hydroponics tanks that didn’t work to capacity, the power-circles by the Tall Gates from which—according to Lady Sketh—he should still be sending out his Summons to all and any sorts of edible livestock.

Probably some band of White Raiders is sitting at the bottom of the pass getting fat on the cattle and horses and sheep that come ambling up the trail. “By golly, Slaughters-Everything-in-Sight, this’s the best hunting spot we’ve had in years!”

Under the cool, brittle white lights Alde looked worn to the breaking point, and he remembered Biggar’s stabbing finger.
Look at her, with her bones staring through her skin …

And Ingold maybe not coming back.

Christ, I wish I could just go out with a goddamn sword and kill a goddamn monster and have goddamn done with it! As methods of saving the world go, this one
really
stinks
.

No wonder old Ingold has white hair, being responsible for everyone and everything around him
.

And then he thought,
If Ingold really is dead, I’m gonna have to try to kill the ice-mages myself. Oh, Christ
.

*  *  *

Alde slept that night in Rudy’s small chamber, unwilling to return to the room in the Royal Sector that the gaboogoos had torn apart. Surrounded by Guards, she said she felt safe, but woke two or three times in the night sobbing and trembling. Given the fact that no one knew how many others in the Keep the ice-mages might be whispering to, not even Lord Ankres had anything to say.

Tir slept in the barracks.

At dawn, when Alde seemed to be resting more deeply, Rudy slipped from beneath the blankets, bathed in the long, deserted chamber off the Guards’ watchroom, with its worn black tubs and the aged copper boilers old King Eldor had had sent there when he’d ordered the Keep regarrisoned, and padded down through the silence of the Keep to the crypts.

Turning a corner, he glimpsed Seya and the older of Lord Ankres’ sons standing guard outside the room where the mutants were kept. Dimly, he caught Varkis Hogshearer’s voice, ranting, “… all a trick, a cabal, an effort to turn this Keep into a Warlockracy …”

Another corner muffled the sound, unless he cared to reach out his senses to listen.

The long workroom where Ingold did his tinkering with machines, the low-ceilinged crypt whose floor was scratched and stained from apparatus that had vanished three millennia ago, was silent, dark, curiously comforting in its familiarity. Leftover bits of the ancient flamethrowers lay on the black stone wall-benches, the pine table that he and the wizard had hauled down. Wheels and pulleys and intricately jointed chains dangled from the ceiling. Water murmured softly in a black stone basin let into a niche in the wall.

From his belt Rudy took a packet of powdered silver mixed with herbs, another packet of incense, and a couple of burning-stones. He was exhausted from yesterday, and knew today would be nearly as bad. The sigils he marked, the circle of power he wove, he linked into the rhythm of the Earth and the phase of the moon, drawing power from those to lessen the drag on his own resources. He laid out stringers, as Ingold had
once shown him, to tap the veins of silver and copper he knew lay deep in the ground, and a curve that followed the watercourses through the floor that fed the still-deeper crypts below.

Anything to help him get in touch with Ingold. Anything.

For a time he was afraid that if he relaxed to meditate, cross-legged in the circle’s heart, he’d fall asleep. But when he breathed deep, his mind drifting down into the Now of magic, the weariness eased and the magic strength of the Keep seeped like a balm into his flesh and his soul.

I live, and that is enough
, he thought as he drifted like an errant feather into the chasm where magic dwells. I
breathe. I’m here
.

Power flowed into him, dark rising up out of the earth and brightness soaking into his lungs from the air. In that sweet calm he collected strength and funneled it through the scrying stone, casting out his thought like a rope of light, calling Ingold’s name.

Nothing came to him.

Nor could he summon any image of Gil.

What he saw of the Black Rock Keep—dim, faded, horrible—was only smoke and slunch and ash-hued monstrosities, glimpsed far off.

Dimly, he was aware of the sun rising above the Keep, of the great Doors opening for the workers in the fields, of other Guards in the bath-chamber. Of all life stirring and waking.

When he looked up, he saw Tir in the doorway of the crypt.

The boy had been around magic all his life and knew not to interrupt, or to step on the Weirds. He’d brought a pine-knot torch with him, probably swiped from the Guards’ watchroom. Even that dim, grubby light seemed bright beside the pinlights of the incense fires, the bluish chains of light shining softly along the lines of the power-circle.

“S’okay, Ace. I’m done here.” He started to rise, and Tir held up his hand, staying him.

“Do you need to go find him?” the boy asked.

“Ingold?” He’d never journeyed south, but Gil and the Icefalcon had told him of the road along the river valleys, the jungles of the border coasts, the brown hills around Khirsrit.

“If you turn yourself into a bird, like Ingold did,” Tir said, a small figure forlorn against the darkness of the corridor outside, “you could get down there and kill the bad guys yourself. You said you know their secret now. You told Mama you saw it in your dream.”

Tir carefully propped his torch into an empty jar, thin in his bright blue jerkin. Rudy saw that under the jerkin he was wearing a scarf of dulled reds and browns, which had belonged to Geppy Nool.

“What about you, Ace?” Rudy asked gently. “You and your mom? C’mere …” He held out his arms. “I’m not gonna be using this thing again tonight.”

Tir ran across the lines of power to him, and Rudy felt them swirl away into the protecting shadows of the crypt. Tir put his arms around him, and Rudy hugged the compact little body close.

“He let them all die, to save the world,” Tir said, face pressed to Rudy’s shoulder, voice barely audible. Rudy felt a trickle of hot wetness in the bison fur of his collar, and against his cheek the sudden tightening of the boy’s jaw. “I saw him. I was him. They were all coming here, to get away from the Dark, and the King was mad at him—at the man—at Dare. All the wizards were making a spell to make the Keep, so people would have someplace to hide, and Dare didn’t tell them, didn’t ask them to come with him when he went down to stop the King from hurting his family.”

His voice broke, a thin treble breathless with remembered pain. “The King’s men caught Dare’s family down by the river where the Settlements are, and there was a battle. Everybody was killed except Dare and a couple of his men. Dare’s wife, and his oldest son, and all them. But if the wizards had gone with him, the Keep wouldn’t have been safe for people afterward.”