Mother of Winter

by Barbara Hambly

  “It takes time, kid.” Despite his knowledge that she was being used against him, he felt genuine pity for her, knowing what she had to be going through even without the Hollywood Father from Hell on her back. His high school math class was in his mind, his own voice asking the fascist numbskull at the blackboard to explain a proof: Well, Señor Solis … The mocking turn of inflection still stung. You’re using the same book everybody else is and nobody else seems to be having a problem? Now why do you think that is? If he’d known why that was, Rudy wanted to say, he’d have known why he wasn’t getting it. But he didn’t understand even enough to know what he didn’t understand.

  The glassy porcelain of the bowl’s interior was already running with droplets, pooling at the bottom. He emptied the water from the bowl, wiped it on a corner of his vest, fumbling for words. “Look, if you keep doing what you’re doing, I swear to you, it’ll come.”

  “That’s easy for you to say!” She had turned her face from him, no longer shouting, but he could see the swollen cheeks mottled beetroot, horrible next to that bright gown.

  “Magic isn’t something that comes fast.” He tucked the bowl carefully into the pocket of his vest, the Cylinder into another, and got to his feet. “God knows I don’t know a whole lot about magic, about why somebody’s born with the ability to change things in the physical world without touching them—about why it takes some people longer than others to get strong in it. When Ingold gets back—”

  “Oh, him.” She swung around to face him, her dark eyes ugly. “All he ever did was kill half the—”

  And she froze, staring past his shoulder with shock and horror on her face.

  Rudy ducked, zigzagged, grabbed her by the arms and thrust her ahead of him down the hill, knowing already what she had to see behind him and not waiting to look. Scala stumbled, trod on her train, and when he paused to catch her arm again, Rudy looked.

  He’d known it had to be gaboogoos.

  He hadn’t expected these.

  The same ones mutated? New and Improved Mark III model? He didn’t know. Most resemblance to the original biped shape had disappeared, except for the long arms with their enormous, reaching hands, the long legs that started from the shoulder. The fishlike bodies were still covered with bobbles and pendules.

  And they were big. Almost too big to be dealt with by a sword. The long legs covered twelve feet at a stride.

  Rudy yelled, “Run!!” and shoved Scala ahead of him toward the Keep, turned back, raising his staff, and cried out the Word of Lightning, spotting for the place the creature would be because he did not know the creature’s true name.

  Ozone crackled, white light blinded, and Rudy turned and fled the bounding things that raced for him with such horrible speed. Something came scuttling like a flying bug from the woods and seized on his leg just as he turned and fired off another blast of levin-fire at the closest gaboogoo, hitting it this time, then slashing down with the razor crescent on his staff to carve off the thing that had fastened to his boot. It bled, whatever it was—he plunged down the hill and heard Scala scream as she fell. Turning back, he saw them on her …

  … and springing over her without breaking stride as they came at him.

  Scala screamed again, rolled into a fetal ball and clutched at her dirty hair. Rudy yelled the Word of Lightning again as the two remaining gaboogoos reached out toward him, and this time his aim was better, purple-white brilliance lancing the nearer gaboogoo like a javelin, hot tendrils splintering in all directions. The gaboogoo exploded, charred pieces flying; the other one didn’t even stop. Rudy didn’t stop, either, pelting toward the doors of the Keep as if the legions of Hell were at his heels—a fairly accurate description. Yelling and curses came from the woods, and someone fired an arrow at the gaboogoo—an exercise in futility, though it smacked into the thing as if it had been a hay bale—and from the tail of his eye Rudy saw Lank Yar and his hunters racing to his aid. He stumbled on the steps of the Keep and the Guards emerged from the doors at a run, swords like the hunger of doom in their hands.

  “Inside!” Gnift grabbed him by the shoulders and hurled him through the doors as Rudy would have turned to fight. From the gate passage he saw the gaboogoo spring up the steps like a huge, deadly running bird. Guards, farmers, hunters closed upon it from three directions, hacking at the fungoid limbs. In its train ran other things, things from the woods, things that had once been animals and had the halfway, melted appearance of wolverines and rats. These things kicked and snapped at the Guards who tried to stop them, tried to slip past and come at Rudy, until the steps and the gate passage were runneled with blood and scattered with chalky, twitching limbs and gobbets. A gaboogoo’s long-fingered hand crawled along the passageway toward Rudy like a determined spider no matter how many times Seya stomped and crushed the thing with her heel; the Guard finally bent and cut off all seven or eight fingers, which lay flexing like dying worms round the curling and uncurling palm.

  Rudy clung to the doorpost of the inner set of gates. Lack of food made him light-headed, and the Word of Lightning had taken more out of him than he’d thought. His vision tunneled to gray, and he found himself staring fixedly at the remains of the mutant animal nearest him on the tunnel floor, something that might have started out as an eagle or a bull-owl, though mouth-armed tentacles dangled from its chest. The mouths were still champing as Melantrys kicked it away.

  Shadow in the outer door. He forced the grayness aside, raised his head. Scala was sobbing, her face covered with grass stains and snot and tears of terror, holding in her arms the ostentatious masses of claret skirt that had tripped her and would have cost her her life if she hadn’t …

  Hadn’t what?

  “What’d you do, kid?” Rudy asked. He trod halfway down the passageway to meet her, led her back gently into the Aisle. “How’d you keep them off you?”

  She shook her head, too upset to lie or posture or pose. “I didn’t!” she sobbed. “They didn’t keep off me! One of them stepped on me, look—”

  “But they didn’t kill you.” Rudy looked out again onto the steps, where Guards were pushing and nudging the twitching remains down into a pile. He wondered how big a dent another tub of vitriol was going to make in the sulfur supply and whether someone could be sent back to Gae to look for more. Which they’d carry here in their pockets?

  “Those things kill wizards, kid,” he said, as Scala stared past him, fascinated and repelled. “They attacked the Gettlesand Keep in force; I think they’ve been following Wend and Ilae … They just stayed off you?”

  She nodded slowly. A kind of smugness crept back into her face, a look of pleased calculation in her eyes, as she began to understand. “You mean I have some kind of magic I don’t even know about? Something that keeps them off?”

  “Looks like it,” Rudy said. His arm slipped from her shoulders and he was suddenly conscious of a desire to slap her.

  “You see!” Varkis Hogshearer pushed his way through the Guards, threw his arms around his daughter, and hugged her close. “You see, Master Know-It-All! You’ve got to give her true teaching now!” He hugged his daughter convulsively tight, then looked back at Rudy with righteous fury in his pouchy eyes. “I knew my girl would put you to shame! She’s the one who can defend against those things, the one who saved your life, saved your life, you understand, and maybe the lives of—”

  “Just because they goddamn tripped over her doesn’t mean she can kill them,” Rudy retorted. “And she didn’t save my life—she didn’t do a damn thing! Those things kill wizards—”

  “Are you saying my girl isn’t a wizard?” Hogshearer bellowed in fury. “You’re jealous, is all! Jealous of the power she’ll one day have! You’re seeking to keep her down!” He put his arm possessively around her, and the two of them pushed their way through the crowd in the Gate Passage, to where Koram Biggar and Lady Sketh were waiting for them.

  “Of all the nerve,” Lady Sketh muttered, enveloping Scala in a motherly hug. “You’l
l show him one day, Scala.”

  “Now, don’t you tell him a thing about what you did, you hear me, girl?” Their voices faded as they retreated into the shadows of the Aisle. “Not until he treats you right …”

  “Yes, Daddy.” She glanced over her shoulder at Rudy. There was a look of scared uncertainty in her eyes.

  In the sunlight at the foot of the steps, people were exclaiming over the deformed animals. Rudy looked down at the fang-gouges in his boot and worked his fingers into the slash to make sure it hadn’t broken skin—Gil’s illness, and Ingold’s account of the poison sacs on the thing that had hurt her, weighed uneasily in his mind.

  But there was no blood on the torn wool of his trousers. Rudy sighed, and took the porcelain water bowl from his pocket, turning it over in his hands.

  Are you saying my girl isn’t a wizard?

  Thoughtful and very troubled, Rudy walked slowly back to his workroom, and wondered if any of the suspicions forming in his mind were, or could be, true.

  That night, Rudy sat at the scrying table with the record crystals of magic and Gil’s parchment notes, searching for the Bald Lady.

  She appeared on two crystals, a total of six times. Rudy had been interested to note, when first they identified the various mages, that in her demonstrations of the more powerful spells—including the one he and Ingold had never been able to figure out—she was younger. Rudy had even asked whether that indecipherable spell was a restoration of youth. But Ingold had shaken his head: “In my younger days, if asked to be on such a—a video, as Gil calls it—I’d have chosen a spell of great complexity and power, too,” he had said. “Now, I’d do exactly what she’s doing in those demonstrations when she’s older: demonstrate the basic circles of power, the elementary formation of the Runes and sigils upon which all magic technique is founded. If those aren’t learned properly, all one’s later spells will be flawed with weaknesses that have a habit of manifesting themselves at the worst conceivable times.”

  In one long demonstration she cured an adolescent boy of madness—Gil had identified it as hysterical obsession, but added that she’d never been a psych student. Watching the Bald Lady now, Rudy could see her gentleness, her patience, the calm and luminous serenity of her eyes, which were the color of the ocean on the morning after a storm. Four of the six vignettes were performed in the same room, a circular white belvedere in what appeared to be a town garden. The shelves between its many tall windows were stacked with record crystals and scrolls, the pickled pine table neatly piled with wax note-tablets and bits of slate. Movable blinds of what appeared to be plain white linen, like Chinese sails, modified the windows’ light. Ingold had no idea what her name was.

  This was the room in which she appeared in the last, and longest, vignette. Silent, as they all were silent, the Bald Lady sat at her table with a great armillary sphere of jewels and gold before her, explaining something with a desperate earnestness in her sea-dark eyes.

  A sliver of night was visible around one of the window blinds. The room was drenched in witchlight, glittering in the interlocking circles of the armillary, in the jewels that marked the positions of certain critical stars. The stars deemed important differed in some cases from those in Ingold’s armillary or the ones he had worked with in Quo—he and Rudy had yet to determine why. The woman moved the various concentric rings, the long arms that showed cometary courses swinging free, catching light like nervous fireflies. The intricate workings of gyroscopic wire and gears rearranged themselves, showing now this configuration, now that.

  She pointed, explained, gestured with those long, delicate, sigil-traced fingers, and her eyes were filled with a most terrible fear.

  This is important, pleaded the sea-dark gaze. You have to believe me. You have to believe.

  She picked up a scarf of gray silk, no thicker than a breath of smoke, and drew it between two circles, demonstrating … something.

  You have to believe.

  I believe you, Rudy thought helplessly. I’d believe you if I could.

  The image ran its course and faded, and he found himself staring into the central crystal of the scrying table, at the small purplish glow that lived at its heart.

  And he thought, The Cylinder in the center of this table is the same as the Cylinder Ingold found in Penambra.

  He didn’t know why he hadn’t seen that before.

  He removed the Penambra Cylinder from the pocket of his vest and set it on top of the slick black stone of the scrying table. It was precisely the diameter of the drumlike table’s central crystal, which was, in repose, clear as glass.

  Well, I’ll be buggered.

  After a moment’s thought Rudy stood, his bones aching still with the exertion of the magic he had called upon that day. Tiredness pulled at him, whispering to him that what he really wanted to do was lie down on the bed and pass out. He felt hungry, but not as hungry as he had been last week.

  Not a good sign.

  He made himself cross to the cupboard, fumble apart the Ward-spells, and put away the record crystals. It seemed to take him a long time to remake the guards. He put his head through the doorway of the watchroom and saw, as he’d hoped, the Icefalcon practicing his knife-throwing, using as a target Melantrys, who was waxing her belts and scabbards. “There’s still nothing,” the woman was saying as she reached to the hearth to daub up another ragful of wax, and the Icefalcon’s dagger buried itself in the wall where her back had been half a second before—not bad, Rudy thought, considering the only illumination in the chamber came from the hearth and a couple of torches. She pulled it out and slid it back hilt-first across the floor to him. The plaster was chipped and pocked with a thousand cuts, old and recent, knife and ax and Patriot missile for all Rudy knew. “How long does it take for animals to come back to the woods after an ice storm?”

  “Sometimes a few months.” The Icefalcon threw the knife at Rudy without turning his head; it stuck in the doorjamb six inches from his nose. “Sometimes a year. The grass is only just growing back, though yesterday I found mushrooms. The berries were killed in the blossom, the nuts in the bud. Can we serve you, shaman?”

  “You can quit doing that.” Rudy slid the knife back to him across the floor. The Icefalcon scooped it into the top of his boot in one almost-invisible movement. “I need somebody to take a little walk with me.”

  Like Ingold, Rudy had long ago slipped into the habit of moving through the Keep by its most untenanted passageways, taking the unlighted, jerry-rigged backstairs, the long black stretches of corridor along the outer edges, in preference to the village-square bustle up closer to the Aisle. Now more than ever he relied on spells of misdirection to keep himself safe, Look-Over-There cantrips and the warnings of his own extended senses about who was around the corner.

  For five years, he had known the Keep as a place of refuge. But now he felt uneasy in its darkness, troubled by the soft scurryings and scufflings he thought he heard around every corner, always wondering if it were his imagination, or whether in fact he smelled beneath the pong of wood smoke and humanity the queer, alien sweetness of the slunch. Everywhere, he seemed to encounter the benign rotundity of the smiling Saint Bounty. And when he turned away, he felt on the back of his neck the gaze of unseen eyes.

  The corner chamber where Gil and Minalde first found the scrying table was on the third level south, concealed by a trick of shadow. The room still held an air of waiting, of expectation, like an indrawn breath. He doubted anyone had entered the place since he and Ingold and a small troop of Guards removed the table, rolling and manhandling it down to the workroom in the enclave of the Guards.

  Rudy left the Icefalcon in the corridor and settled himself on the rough circle of stone on the floor where the table had been, holding the Cylinder in his hands. He breathed in and let it go, sinking his mind into the Cylinder, into the dimness of the room.

  Breathe, release. Reaching toward the power.

  Breathe, release. Memory.

  As always, he
had the sensation of being somehow within the Cylinder, embedded like a bubble in the glass.

  The Bald Lady was alone in her white marble belvedere, the blinds up, the tall windows open into the garden and the night.

  There was no light within the room, though beyond the matte cutouts of the trees just visible past the windows, lights of some kind could be seen: lamplight, glowstone-light, domestic fires. The reflected radiance winked and flickered in the gems on the armillary sphere that stood motionless, all its calculating arms and gears and springs and wheels stilled, suspended, as the stars were suspended like diamond fruit in the hollow velvet of the sky.

  The chirping of crickets was clearly audible, and the deeper drum of cicadas. Carts clattered by with dimly jangling bells.

  In the garden, a nightingale sang.

  In the chamber someone moaned, very softly, a tiny whimper of pain, then the slow sob of ragged breath. The Bald Lady bowed her head.

  Rudy was aware of the low cot on the other side of the room and the emaciated herd-creature lying on it. Its wide eyes were open, glazing; its breathing stertorous. Now and then its small hands picked at its mouth, its hair.

  It’s dying, he thought.

  He remembered a girl he’d dated—how old had she been? Fifteen? Sixteen? He’d ditched school and gone over to her parents’ place to neck and found her pet parakeet dead of starvation in its filthy cage. No one in the household, it seemed, had thought to feed the poor thing for days.

  He hadn’t remained to do what he’d gone there to do.

  The herd-things ate moss, he remembered. Moss that didn’t grow on the surface of the ground. At the foot of the cot were trays containing bread, mushes of fruit, pulps of meat, a vessel of milk; a vain attempt to find anything that would keep the poor, wretched creature alive.

  While he watched it, the sluglike white chest sank and did not rise; the lard-colored face went slack. At the table, the Bald Lady looked back and closed her eyes, hearing, knowing. Pity, grief, compassion traced their lines in her face, and the unbearable knowledge that there was nothing that she could do. She had done everything.