At least it was too early for ants or flies to have commuted in. Thank God for small favors.
“I was worried about you, punk.” Gil sat down next to him and handed him a bowl of gruel and a dried apple. They’d almost certainly come from the settlement store. Rudy thought about the people who should have been eating them for breakfast and felt nearly sick.
“I wish I could say the same about you, spook.” He was too hungry and exhausted not to eat, and once he began, he felt better. He had eaten almost nothing yesterday and had worked cutting wood and hauling bodies to the pyre until he was ready to drop. “But until that thing hit, I was clueless, and when it did—” He paused and shook his head. “—I didn’t really think about any one person, I guess. Just, like, ‘Oh, Jesus, no.’ I guess I figured if you were with the old man, you’d be okay. Did you—did you see him turn himself into a bird?”
She smiled crookedly—with the wound on her face, she could hardly help it—and nodded. But she only said, “I thought Lord Sketh was going to propose marriage when I showed up with the mule. The orneriest, nastiest old bizzom in the Keep, and now she’s the only domesticated beast of burden in the Vale. That’ll learn Enas Barrelstave to argue against us borrowing the best instead of the worst critter when we go out scavenging. Sterile, too, of course.”
“Oh, Christ,” Rudy said. He hadn’t thought of that—Gil was generally about two jumps ahead of him. “What’re we gonna …? I mean, what about plowing next spring?”
“Don’t worry about it, punk.” Gil got to her feet and swept the ruined settlement with a gaze as chill and silvery as the heatless sky. “We’re gonna starve by Christmas.”
“Most of it’s still frozen,” the Icefalcon was saying as Rudy and Gil came up to the shambles where Ingold was jointing deer and pigs with an ax. “We’ll probably be able to get it up to the Vale before it begins to go off, but on foot it will be a slow trek. Warmer weather’s coming,” he added, glancing to the north. “There’ll be flies.”
“I’ll do what I can about that,” Ingold said. He looked like ten miles of bad road, and moved as if he’d been beaten with a stick. Rudy guessed he hadn’t slept at all.
“I expect there’ll be parties coming down to clear out Manse and Carpont today,” the young Guard continued, one blood-gummed hand tucked into his sash. “We may need spells to prevent decay then. When we go up to the Keep tomorrow morning, one of you should remain.”
“One of ’em should stay just to tell us if there’s another one of those what’d you call, ice storms, on the way,” Yobet Troop threw in, stopping nervously beside them with dangling bundles of frozen chickens yoked to his shoulders. He glanced at Ingold with frightened eyes, and then at the sky. “You’ll do that, won’t you, m’lord wizard? That’s your job.”
“Yes,” Ingold said gently. “That’s my job.”
He added to Gil, when Troop and the Icefalcon had gone their ways, “Things aren’t as bad as you might suppose. The storm affected an area perhaps fifty miles across, and beyond that there will be game, and fruits in abandoned orchards if we can get parties out there quickly enough, and nuts in the woods. The Icefalcon spoke to me earlier about leading a raiding party against the bandits around Penambra, who will have horses if nothing else.”
“I bet they’ll be real efficient raiders on foot,” Gil said.
Ingold regarded her in mild surprise and mimed a dig through his pockets. “If you’re willing to put money against the Icefalcon on foot in a contest with the average group of mounted bandits …”
“The hell I am,” Gil said, with the first grin Rudy had seen out of her all day.
“And I’m sure Lady Minalde will send to Tomec Tirkenson in Gettlesand for livestock as well, provided we can haul hay up from the river meadows below Willowchild to feed them.” Moving as slowly as an old man, Ingold limped to the stack of carcasses and began to drag free a deer. His hands fumbled their grip and Gil and Rudy hastened to help him; Rudy handed him the ax he’d been using, but after lifting It, Ingold set it down again, as if too wearied, for the moment, to go on.
“They’re taking the mule, you know,” Gil said, turning to the stump nearby, where several axes were stuck. It was the first time in years that Rudy had seen more implements than there were people. Gil judged her striking point on the carcass and buried the ax head just below the foreleg, bracing her foot and shoving to wrench free the ice-stiff limb.
“As well they must.” Ingold looked across at Rudy. “Rudy, I’m counting on you to spell the books Gil and I brought from Penambra. I concealed them last night in the root cellar here. Between my peregrinations of the night before last and laying every fragment of magic I could summon on the meat last night and today, even should Iget some rest between now and nightfall, I’m barely going to have the strength to do what I’ll need to do.”
Rudy didn’t like the sound of that. Still less did he like the way the muscles of Ingold’s jaw tightened when he hobbled slowly to the other side of the carcass, to help Gil reduce it to limbs and trunk.
“Every ward and guard you can summon,” the old man went on without giving him time to reply. “Decay, water, fire, theft, insects, even notice by another wizard. Goodness knows how long it will be before someone can be sent to fetch them. Those books are some of the oldest that exist outside the City of Wizards, and some of them are copies of texts even older than that city itself. They may contain the answer to questions necessary for our very survival.”
Warily, Rudy said, “You sound like you ain’t gonna be around.”
Ingold scratched the side of his nose, leaving a streak of slightly fresher blood in the grime. “Well, I do feel badly about that.”
Don’t do this to me, man. Don’t leave me to deal with this alone.
“I should not go,” Ingold went on, very slowly. “For Yar was right, you know. I was culpable for leaving as I did. For assuming that such a disaster would not befall.”
“Who knew?” Rudy flung out his hands. “And who’s gonna be dumb enough to say that it was our fault this happened? You can feel those things coming ten minutes ahead of time, tops; I can’t feel ’em at all. Even before I feebed my crystal, I wasn’t able to reach you. I still haven’t figured out why …”
“You haven’t?” Ingold appeared mildly surprised. “Be that as it may, it was my fault, and I am responsible. And I suspect that once we return to the Keep, there will be pressure brought to bear on both of us not to leave it again.” He glanced over at Gil, then away.
“It isn’t only for the sake of the art of wizardry itself that I’ve been searching for a mageborn child, Rudy. We desperately need more wizards at the Keep. We should never have gone from month to month, year to year, putting off sending for a few of the Gettlesand wizards … I’ve spoken to Thoth, by the way.”
“You did?” Contact with the Gettlesand wizards—and the entire subject of the gaboogoos—had completely slipped his mind. “Did he say what happened? Why we couldn’t get in touch?”
“He told me a number of extremely disquieting things, but no, he had no idea why communication by scrying stone was impossible. But I suspect that the night before last was not the first time that such a thing has happened. I haven’t time to go into that now—maybe later, or more likely you can speak to him yourself. The important thing is that something very strange is going on—strange and appalling and, as far as I know, completely unprecedented.”
“Well,” Rudy said sarcastically, heaving up one severed hindquarter of the deer and manhandling it onto the nearby sledge for transport, “I’d kinda guessed that.”
“You always did have a good, solid grasp of the obvious,” the mage replied approvingly. “But I’m not sure you are aware how rare the completely unprecedented actually is: never-heard-of; beyond human experience. Gil’s a historian. She knows the truth that was said by the Lord of the Sigils: There is no new thing beneath the sun. It’s not just a wise platitude—it’s the basis of all lore, all scholarship, all
the method of magic.
“But these gaboogoos seem to be precisely that. And as such, they bear fairly close investigation.”
Ingold straightened up and wiped the sticky gum of half-frozen blood from his hands.
“That’s why magic won’t work on them, huh?” Rudy said slowly. “Because we don’t really know what the hell they are. They don’t bleed, I’ll tell you that. And if they sweat or smell or excrete or eat or spit, they do it damn inconspicuously. They sure walked through my spells of concealment like they were a cheesy plastic bead curtain.”
“Precisely.” Under the bloody grime of his overgrown mustache, Ingold’s mouth was hard. “And the trouble is, it isn’t just the gaboogoos. The creature that attacked Gil—almost certainly in concert with other beings that I did not see—was utterly unfamiliar to my lore or the lore of anyone I have ever read or spoken to. Last night the Icefalcon and his scavengers brought to me three other totally unknown animals, at least insofar as I could tell from the parts that remained. And there is no record—none—in the most ancient books or the tales of the most wide-ranging travelers, of what slunch is.”
“Slunch?” Rudy blinked at the sudden reversion to the mundane … if it was mundane. His first reaction—slunch is slunch—was automatic and, he found on reflection a second later, rather unsettling. He’d gotten used to it. Everyone had. “I don’t get it.”
“Nor do I.” The blue eyes glittered, very pale and very bright, against the gruesome dark of bruises, old blood, and filth. “And considering that I have spent the longer if not the better part of my sixty-eight years learning to get it in every conceivable and inconceivable situation, I find that fact, in itself, extremely unsettling. And therefore,” he went on, turning back to the vast heap of frozen beasts for another to hew, “I am leaving you tonight, to seek an answer outside of and beyond the bounds of human experience. I am going to visit the Nest of the Dark.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
It made sense. Rudy had to admit that.
The Dark had a hive consciousness, a single sentience cloned into millions upon millions of protoplasmic, magic-imbued cells. What any Dark One learned, they all then knew. Thus, what any Dark One at any time in the past had learned was remembered by all, down through the ages, from the deepest gulfs of infinite time.
When the Dark had invaded Ingold’s mind—in a fashion that Rudy preferred not to think about—Ingold had been, for a time, in touch with the mind of the Dark and had gained as much understanding of it as any human could deal with sanely. Once they had broken his resistance and absorbed his consciousness into their thoughts, he had understood the essence of their reality and the shape of their magic.
As a wizard, Rudy knew that the structures of certain types of crystal could absorb and retain both magic and memory. The ancient sages of the Times Before had certainly been able to ensorcel the smoke-gray record crystals to hold images and information and goodness knew what else, and to feed them back through the great black scrying table.
Therefore it made sense that the collective memories of the Dark would have soaked into the rock walls of their Nest, memory that stretched back in an unbroken thread to the days of the white, shambling apes of the warm savannahs, when first the shamans of those frightened tribes had evolved the single most important trait for survival: the ability, at need, to call fire from cold wood. And it made sense that one whose mind had been in the mind of the Dark could draw forth those memories from the rock and know them again.
The whole idea still gave Rudy the creeps.
“I miscalculated the depth of peril in which we stood after the Dark departed—miscalculated it badly.” Ingold wrapped his surcoat more tightly about him and shivered in the hard cold of the utterly silent dark. It was the hour, in spring, when birds first begin to call their territories, halfway between midnight and morning. Not even a stirring of wind in the pine trees broke the silence. In the ebony lake of the bottomlands below the ridge where the old man stood with Rudy and Gil, small spots of amber campfire-light glowed, and beyond them, sickly streaks and patches of moony slunch.
“With all you’ve told me about the way weather is made, Gil, I should have guessed that six volcanoes erupting in the past year or so would have some effect. Yar is right. I had no business leaving the Keep.”
“Like hell,” Gil said. Her face, and the white quatrefoil emblems of the Guard, were pale blurs in the thin flicker of magelight that floated before their feet, and Rudy heard the faint whisper of fabric as she hooked her left thumb under her sword sash and shook back her hair. “Who else would have gone after the books? Who else could have found them, or retrieved them, from Penambra? Who else would have known which ones were most likely to help us, somewhere down the line? You can’t do everything.”
“It’s still my fault.”
“Maybe,” Gil said. Then she added, in a conversational tone, “So what makes you think these gaboogoos present a greater threat than the possibility of another ice storm? Even one that hits in the daytime, when everybody’s in the fields?”
“Christ!” Rudy said, appalled. “Another one? Can we get clobbered again this quick?”
“Beats the hell out of me,” the wizard replied, an expression he’d picked up from his two friends. “Ice storms are a little-studied phenomenon, due to the fact that those areas subject to them tend to be completely uninhabited—or become so in very short order. As for the gaboogoos …”
He frowned, and shifted the straps of his pack on his shoulders: barely more than a bedroll, Rudy thought uneasily. Ingold could have helped himself to the summer’s stores of Fargin Graw’s bins and granaries, Guards or no Guards; that he hadn’t was a measure of his concern about what rations would be like in the Keep in a couple of months. It didn’t make Rudy feel any better.
In time he went on, “Thoth tells me that three men in the Gettlesand Keep went mad about an hour before the volcano erupted in the north and tried to kill the wizards Dakis and Kara. When prevented from doing so, they turned their knives upon one another. I have no idea what, if anything, that has to do with the gaboogoo, or with the power along the fault lines of the ground that caused the scrying crystals to fail, or with the thing that attacked Gil. I need information.”
His blue eyes glinted under their long white brows, catching the witchlight’s foxfire gleam and the far-off sparks within the circle of the broken palisade. The pine trees on the slope above them whispered, a sound like a heavy sigh that quickly passed; Ingold’s heavy mantle and the fur surcoat over it stirred and lifted with the movement of the wind, then fell still.
“I’ve told Lord Sketh I’m remaining to help with the butchering for another day or two, until my powers return to what they were. Yar would send someone after me if he knew I was leaving, and aside from the nuisance of evading them in the woods, I know they can’t spare the workers. I trust the two of you to lend what verisimilitude you can to my story.”
“The two of us?” Rudy said, surprised, and glanced over at Gil. He saw her gaze cross Ingold’s and lock. Her eyes held a shuttered expression; Ingold’s, a shadow of deepest concern. It was almost unheard of for the wizard to go into any kind of danger without Gil watching his back, and traveling with his magic only the bruised shadow of its former strength certainly qualified.
Gil only said, “I don’t think it would be a good idea right now for me to go with him,” and looked away.
Ingold touched her chin, drew her face around so that his eyes met hers. After a moment she stepped close to him, pressed her uninjured cheek to his shoulder while he folded her in his arms. Rudy heard him whisper, “All will be well, Gilly, my love. All will be well.”
Her face was like stone, but after a moment her body relaxed and she nodded. They kissed, like a spell against darkness.
Then he gave Rudy a breathtaking bear hug, kissed Gil again, and melted into the dark like a great, battered brown owl. Gil shook her head and said, “If there were a war, Ingold would blame himself for the i
nvention of gunpowder. Or swords, in this case. Let’s go, punk. It’s a long way up the mountain tomorrow.”
Only a small crowd was gathered on the steps of the Keep when the second party of foragers from the Settlements came into sight from among the trees, but they set up a ragged cheer nevertheless. The watchers permanently posted on the Tall Gates, the ruined towers at the head of the pass to the Arrow River gorge, must have signaled the Keep that they were coming. Even at that distance, Rudy identified Minalde, small and slim in her many-colored cotehardie; the black-uniformed cluster of Guards and the crimson scarecrow that was Bishop Maia; the Lords Ankres and Pnak—and Lord Brig Canthorion, who still retained his title and honors in spite of the fact that with the collapse of civilization, he’d cheerfully abandoned his position as scion of the highest family in the land to become a farmer and move in with Nedra Hornbeam. That would be Lady Sketh on the end there, in her gown of very expensive crimson wool, and Lady Ulas Canthorion …
And that small, dark form clinging to Alde’s side would be Tir.
The smell of wood smoke hung over the whole of the valley, blue and heavy. Beyond the Keep, in the fields where the early wheat lay withered now on the turned black soil, long rows of wooden racks had been set up over snaky mounds of wood, and most of the population of the Keep could be seen, butchering the carcasses of the herds as they thawed. Farther up the Vale, beneath the blue scarf of the mountain shadows, Rudy could see a small party emerging from the woods carrying bundles that he knew were the hacked-up quarters of something they’d found, and baskets of dead foxes, rabbits, birds.
Lord Sketh lifted his hand in a wave and pointed to Rudy—there was another cheer. As they came close to the steps, Rudy met Minalde’s eyes and saw them filled with tears, relief, the ache to run down the steps and into his arms …
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