The thing plowing down the slope, head lolling and limbs and pseudolimbs churning the white slunch to scraps and powder, was a mutated mammoth.
Scala Hogshearer was in the workroom when Rudy got there. The Guards’ watchroom was a flurry of activity as he passed through it, men and women catching up weapons, heading fast for the door. He saw the girl’s shadow moving back and forth in the dim lamplight that was the chamber’s only illumination, heard her furious sobbing in the corridor, and at the sound, his own anger rose in him, a poisonous, breathtaking heat.
He stopped in the doorway, fighting to keep calm.
She’d ripped to pieces the parchment on which he’d been remaking the Black Book of Lists’, had emptied boxes, scattered and broken the ivory rune sticks, smashed the porcelain scrying bowl and ground its pieces to dust under her wooden heels. The cupboard in which he locked all the truly precious stuff bore signs of ferocious battering, the hinges and lock surrounded by white, ripped wood where she’d tried to hack them free of the doors.
There was blood under her fingernails from the effort. She was clinging to the edge of the table as if on the verge of being sick, her dark, dirty hair hanging lank around a face bloated with tears.
“I can’t do magic!” she screamed at him when he finally stepped through the door. She picked up his astrolabe—or what was left of it—and smashed it again and again into the surface of the table, the edge of the dial leaving huge scars in the wood. “I can’t do magic anymore! I tried! I tried!”
She flung the metal circle into the corner and hurled herself at Rudy, pounding his chest with her fists as he grabbed her wrists and held her off. Even as heavy as she’d gotten recently, she was less strong than he expected.
“Scala, you can,” he said gently, a little surprised at his own patience. Part of him wanted to smash the spoiled little bitch’s head up against the wall, but that wasn’t the part in control. Son of a gun, he thought detachedly, in the back of his mind. I must be growing up …
“Whoa,” he said, as she began to hack at his shins. “Whoa, whoa, whoa … Take it easy, kiddo.”
Her anger wasn’t personal. And underneath it, underneath the fear of losing the attention of important people like Lady Sketh, was the horror of a loss that only he, of all those in the Keep, could comprehend.
“You’re not teaching me right!” Her voice was a hysterical wail. “You’re not teaching me what I need to know! Daddy says you have to! Daddy says he’ll make you sorry if you don’t! Daddy says—”
“Do you believe I’m not teaching you?”
“I can’t do it!” She pulled against him, the unexpected reversal breaking his grip. She staggered back against the edge of the table, slapping at him and missing. Her face was a pulp of tears and snot, looking almost black in the dim, wavery glow of the lamps. “I tried! I tried all morning! I’ve done all your stupid exercises and your stupid meditation and everything you said and I can’t do magic at all! I used to! I used to and now I can’t!”
She blundered past him, shoving him out of her way. He heard her smacking into the walls of the corridor as she fled, sobbing, into the dark.
Rudy made a step to go after her, then gave it up. “Swell,” he sighed. “So now I get a visit from Daddy. Just what I needed to top off the day. How lucky can a guy be?”
He rubbed his face, the ache of sleeplessness in his bones. Ingold, he thought. There had to be some way of learning what had happened to him. Of learning if he were still alive. He stopped to gather the torn parchments, the broken pieces of the ivory sticks. At least she hadn’t burned the parchments this time.
He paused, the parchment in his hand.
Anger? he wondered. Or something else? The voices of the ice-mages whispering in her mind?
Are you saying my girl isn’t a wizard?
His mind replayed the scene. Scala falling. The gaboogoos bounding past her, tripping over her, while she clutched her hair and screamed.
They only attack the mageborn, Thoth had said.
“Rudy? Master Wizard?”
Tir was standing in the doorway.
He still wore his cool formality, the stiff pose of distance, hands folded over his belt knot. Rudy straightened up, brightened the witchlight that flickered on the wall spikes, and inclined his head. This will pass, he told himself, to quiet the hurt in his heart at the boy’s wary aloofness. Whether he ever ceases to blame you for the death of his friends, this coldness will one day pass.
“What can I do for you, Tir?” He brought up a chair—by the look of it, the one Scala had used to pound on the cupboard doors. Tir gazed around him at the carnage but didn’t comment. He’d probably passed Scala in the hall.
“Rudy, there’s people disappearing.” He climbed up into the chair and sat with feet dangling. Like nearly everyone else in the Keep, he’d lost a lot of flesh, and in the frame of his black hair, his face seemed all eyes.
“Disappearing?” His fears for Ingold—his terror that he’d be the one, now, who had to deal with the ice-mages—vanished before the memory of the locked doors on the fifth level, the stink of the newly deserted rooms.
The child licked his lips, gathering his thoughts. “I didn’t think … You know how sometimes you don’t see somebody for a couple days, like they’re doing something for their mamas or something?” His voice was soft and scared. “But I got Linnet to make me a calendar, and I marked it, every day, who I saw and who I didn’t.”
He’s too young for this, Rudy thought, looking into the lupine darkness of those eyes. Too young to have to deal with this.
“There’s people disappearing, Rudy. They really are. Brikky Gatson, and Noop Farrier, and Noop’s papa and his papa’s brother Yent and Melleka Biggar, and Rose White and both her brothers and their mama, too. Those were all the ones I started with. I hadn’t seen them and I’ve been keeping marks for three weeks, Rudy. Old Man Wicket and Rab Brown and a couple of others, they stopped coming around, too. Only I didn’t want anybody to know I’ve been asking about how long it’s been.”
“Fifth level north,” Rudy said softly. “All of them except the Farriers, and they’re fourth level north, right under the Biggars.”
“And there’s a stairway that leads from the Biggars’ warren down to there. They go up and down all the time. It can’t be plague because you’re a Healer,” the boy went on. “The other Healers would have told you, or Mama. And nobody called the Guards or the Hunters to go look for them in the woods, and nobody talked to Mama about them being lost or asked you to find them with your crystal, did they?”
“No,” Rudy said softly. “Nobody asked.” He fished out his crystal, though he knew he wouldn’t be able to see anything. The slunch within the Keep, magnified and concentrated by the Keep’s walls, held inside the malice of the ice-mages. In any case it was sometimes difficult to see gaboogoos by crystal.
“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 look
ed, 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.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
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.
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