Mother of Winter

by Barbara Hambly

  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.

  Rudy snatched up his staff and called the lightning again, called it to within inches of his fingertips. The room was a trap and the footfalls were closer, coming down the corridor. He was a wizard. They’d follow him, leave Linnet and Minalde where they were …

  “Stay here!” he yelled at Alde. “They’ll follow me!”

  She grabbed his wrist as he passed her, hanging on hard. “They tried to kill me! Linnet stopped them.”

  He didn’t pause to reason it, just grabbed her hand and ran.

  He flung a blast of white witchfire almost in the mutants’ faces as he pulled Alde down a cross corridor, heading for the stairs, threw it to blind them, as something light and swift and deadly snagged in the leather of his coat. In that light he saw them clearly: Koram Biggar and the fifth level north devotees of Saint Bounty.

  Rudy recognized some of them. It wasn’t easy. In the worst cases it wasn’t possible, the ones whose heads had mutated into bizarre blank parodies of gaboogoos, with eyes trying to mimic gaboogoo headstalks, and other little pendules protruding from what had been mouths and ears. No wonder they’d retreated behind locked doors. They were all armed—scythes, clubs, lengths of chain. Those that still possessed eyes were without expression, except for a sort of drunken, self-absorbed glassiness.

  Like the gaboogoos, they attacked without a sound.

  Rudy threw fire at them, everything he had, knowing that at least one had a dart-gun or a birding-bow or something that flung missiles steeped in poison. The heat of the incendiary spell was a thunderclap in the enclosed space. He didn’t dare pause to look behind him but only plunged on, ducking as others came out of doorways before them.

  A faceless thing dropped from a false ceiling overhead and cut at him with a scythe; he didn’t try to figure out who that had been. It bled, so it had to have been human once. It was like a crazyhouse, like a nightmare, plunging through darkness illuminated with the flash and glare of witchlight, lightning, fire. Gaboogoos only two or three feet tall skittered out of cells, flew at them like rubbery birds, clutching with improbable hands. Rudy slammed a cell door in front of them, threw lightning down the trapdoor of a stair to the level below to make sure the way was clear, then dropped down first, helping Alde after. Winding stairways, corridors, the slapping of feet and dragging gasp of breath through orifices that had ceased to have any resemblance to nostrils. Dodge, dodge, turn … Empty blackness and echoing halls, and the snail-shell curve of a stairway ceiling overhead.

  Rudy thought, I’ve been here.

  He caught Alde’s hand and they plunged down, heading for the crypts.

  The Bald Lady …

  He couldn’t remember which dream it had been, when he’d stood in this chamber, deep in the crypts now, had seen her descend this stair. But he remembered the wall niche she’d passed and knew that he’d never seen such a thing in his waking knowledge of the room.

  Hoping his memory was correct—calling down blessings on Ingold, who had chivvied and all but beat him into improving his memory—he fell against the blank black wall, gasped out the spells of opening the Guy with the Cats had used …

  And the niche opened.

  Five feet by five feet and as high as the chamber’s lofty ceiling, it was still there, hidden behind a panel that was invisible from the outside.

  The panel slid shut behind them, enclosing them in the cold black chimney—no false ceiling, no shelves, no spiderwebs, even. He summoned witchlight, so that Alde would not be frightened, and saw that from the inside the panel had exactly the same appearance as the walls. Then he thought, Idiot, what if there’s a crack under the door? He didn’t think it possible, but to make sure he scaled the light down to the barest thread of foxfire, just so that Minalde would not be sitting in the dark.

  Whatever it had once contained was gone now, or maybe it hadn’t been designed to hide record crystals or ur-food or weaponry. Maybe it had been designed for just this purpose: to conceal fugitives who knew magic, by the strongest spells possible, from people like St. Prathhes, with his cup and his lash and his crimson noose of spell-cord.

  Maybe the wizards that raised the Keep knew they’d eventually need someplace to hide from people like him.

  Minalde sank to the floor, hands pressed to her belly—Christ, don’t go into labor on me now!!! He fell to his knees beside her, clutched her hands. “Alde, are you okay? What’s the matter? Will you be all right?”

  She shook back her dark ocean of hair, a glint of exasperation in her eyes. “Of course I’m all right, Rudy. They just tried to kill me—tried to kill Linnet … tried to kill your child.”

  Rudy whispered, “Oh, Jeez.” He hadn’t thought of that.

  She managed a smile. “I’m not going into labor now, you know.”

  He swallowed hard. “Uh—sure. Of course not. I didn’t think you were. I was just—you know.”

&n
bsp; Their voices were barest whispers in the utter dark. Mage-sighted, he could see her smile widen, though she tried to conceal it. “I know.” She was taking in her breath to speak again, but he pressed his fingers to her lips. Someone was in the crypts. Searching.

  A scrape of boxes. The bumbly smack of bodies against the walls. Even through the wall he thought he could smell them, that nasty, sweetish stink that had been in Scala’s sweat.

  In time the squishy pad of their footfalls faded.

  “Linnet can get down to the Aisle.” His lips were touching her ear as he breathed the words, praying the gaboogoos—the mutants who were trying to transform into gaboogoos—didn’t hunt by hearing. He had no idea how they did hunt. He didn’t think they could break the door, but didn’t want to risk it. Radar in their heads? “The Guards will search for us. All we have to do is wait.”

  The silk of her hair tickled his nose as she nodded. In the enclosed space the scent of it, of sweetgrass and candlewax, permeated the air.

  She sank against his shoulder. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you.” Whether that was for rescuing her or for saving Linnet, who had vilified him, or what, he didn’t know. Her arms went around his ribs and within moments she was asleep.

  She’d been seventeen when she bore Tir, he thought, the sweet, obedient daughter of the ancient House of Bes, married to the cold-faced hero she loved from afar. But for the deep creases in the corners of her eyelids, she didn’t look much older than that now.

  Maybe it was the memory of Eldor Andarion, the recollection that the House of Bes also carried its memories, that made Rudy dream what he did. Maybe the fact that the tiny chamber, like a crystal within the greater crystal of the Keep, was a place wrought of magic. Maybe he didn’t dream at all. He was certainly aware that he listened all the while for the Guards’ voices, for the clank of their weapons.

  Curled together in the darkness, he dreamed—or saw or remembered—two figures within the glow of lamplight, little but shadows around them. A man and a woman—to his surprise he recognized the man as he who had ridden to the Keep in a welter of blood and spoken to the Bald Lady amid the webs of light and magic.

  He understood then, suddenly, who the man was. Who it had to be.

  “You’ll be all right?” Dare of Renweth asked.

  “I should be. If the High Lord knew, he’d have closed in on us before this. Since your father’s rebellion, he’s never trusted your line.” Their hands, Rudy noticed, were unmarked by tattoos—he supposed this was a thing only wizards did.

  “I know he still thinks the Dark Ones are something you and Brycothis have cooked up between you, to wrest our inheritance back. Did Brycothis reach Raendwedth Valley in safety?”

  “With about half the wizards.” Rudy had expected Dare of Renweth to be six feet tall and look like Gary Cooper—if anything, he bore a slight resemblance to Ernest Borgnine and was far older than Rudy had imagined him to be at the time of the Rising of the Dark. Fortyish, stocky, and gray-haired: his own hair, too, though almost everyone else in that era, including Dare’s lady, seemed to wear wigs. Hers was red, elaborately plaited, and caught up with white roses no bigger than a circle formed by a child’s fingers. Past the centuries, Rudy could smell them, a pearly sweetness unlike the scent of any flower he had known.

  “The fool,” Dare went on softly. “He’s been told. A thousand times he’s been told they’re our only hope.”

  “It’s not easy to believe.” She shook her head, the delicate braids swinging. He saw that under the wig she was older than her slim build and fresh complexion first showed, life and humor in the painted creases of her eyes. “I have trouble believing it, and I know you wouldn’t lie—she wouldn’t lie. But to say that these deaths aren’t being caused by sickness, but by these … these things from under the earth, things that fly in darkness, that are invisible. It sounds like madness, Dare. Like an evil dream.”

  “Would that it were, Gisa.” He took her hands, pressed them hard to his lips. “Would that it were. Bring them to Raendwedth,” he went on. “Everyone you can gather, any who’ll come. The fortress they’re building should hold everyone, should contain food for all …”

  “And that’s what the High Lord fears.” She rose from her chair—a chair Rudy could only dimly glimpse, but the shape of it was as unfamiliar, as alien to him, as their simple, gauzy clothes. “Be careful, my prince.”

  They kissed, gently, with an old passion whose heat had settled to a steady, cosmic core that would outlast darkness, death, and time: lives shared, children birthed and raised and set on their own roads, minds and hearts inextricably entwined. They were people nothing could separate.

  Like candleflame they were gone.

  Gently, so as not to wake Minalde, Rudy drew the Cylinder from his vest and looked into its darkness. He wanted to see Dare again and the Lady Gisa, but the image that was there—that seemed to have been there waiting for him forever—was that of the Bald Lady, in the black-walled chamber he recognized clearly this time as the crypt chamber.

  Thin traceries of silver light still marked the walls, like thaumaturgical scaffolding, but he sensed that the Keep above them, though whole now and complete, was deserted, filled only with a vast emptiness almost more frightening than the night outside. The Bald Lady sat in the center of a huge diagram of power, a sphere rather than a circle, wrought of silver and light and blood and moving lightning that hung in the air, penetrated the black stone underfoot, the whole of it pulsing and whispering with the radiance of unseen starlight.

  A small porcelain bowl was cradled in one hand, and as Ingold had said, she was performing the easiest, the simplest, the most basic and elemental of Summonings, the one he had tried to teach Scala. She was Summoning water.

  But it came to her through the great web of power. The water ran and trickled down traced threads of lightning and starlight, passed through the flames of the candles burning on the periphery of the diagram and through the ochre earth and silver of the sweeping power-curves. It was the simplest of Summonings, but it was done through the web of Life.

  When the vessel was full, she let the diagram fade and from the glass dish at her side took something like a little black bead, which she dropped into the water.

  “Making soup?” inquired a good-natured voice, and the Bald Lady turned, the ghost of what had been a smile flickering to her eyes.

  “In a sense.”

  Standing in the workroom doorway, the Guy with the Cats looked a little younger than Rudy had seen him on fifth north, though he still looked about a hundred fifty and leaned on his staff. It was before he’d grown his hair out, the scalp tattoos faded like much-washed denim. One of his cats lay over his shoulder, the big gray Rudy had seen snoozing on the table next to him in one of the videos.

  “Prathhes would have it you’ve gone off to commune with the Evil Ones.”

  She sighed and leaned her forehead on her illuminated hand. In a small voice she whispered, “I’m not far from it, my friend.”

  “My dear child …” He stepped forward quickly and put his hands on her shoulders, eyes filled with concern. “My dear child, we did everything we could. We worked the spell on the cusp of the stars’ movement, when the planets were aligned with moon and sun—of all this century, the single night where the whole sky was a reflecting glass of power …”

  “And as a result, Gisa and all the folk coming up from the valley—” she began, and the Guy with the Cats tightened his grip on her, shook his head.

  “It wasn’t our fault,” he said softly. “It wasn’t your fault. There was nothing you could have done. And there was nothing we could do about the other wizards whose help you called on for the Raising of Power, whom the High Lord put under arrest. We did what we could.”

  “And it wasn’t enough,” she said softly. “It wasn’t enough. The power in the Keep is not sufficient to preserve it, to keep it alive and working for who knows how long before it is safe to leave. Who knows what magic will be
summoned against it, and against those within? Though we bound the power of the stars, of the moon and the Earth, into the stone of the walls, there were not enough of us. And we are doomed, and all our world with us.”

  She passed her hand along the high, bald curve of her head, and Rudy saw how old the lids of her eyes were and how the fine lines settled in the corners of her mouth. The old man said nothing, only stood looking down at her with grief and pity in his eyes, stroking his big gray cat.

  “I had a dream last night, Amu Bel,” she said. “A dream within a dream. A dream of holding guardianship, of binding the power of the stars and the Earth into spells that would preserve forever. A dream of cold, and waiting in the cold; a dream of three sleepers who turned in their sleep, thinking it was time to wake. Three guardians, dreaming of that which they guarded and preserved. Or maybe—I cannot remember clearly—the guardians were dreamed of, dreamed into existence, by that which they guarded. Is this familiar to you, Amu Bel?”

  She rose to her feet, and her hand stretched forth. The shape of the gesture was familiar to Rudy, the angle and curve that old Amu Bel had used when he’d opened the niche on fifth north. But the woman sketched images, shapes that Rudy saw at once were figures of power, the ectoplasm of concentrated magic, though as unlike the diagrams of the magic he knew as the night-gliding polyps of the primordial sea floor were different from a New York taxicab.

  Alien shapes. Alien and frightening.

  For a moment she let the shapes float in the air between them, glowing cones that pulsed and shifted and moved in a dance that was the paradigm of their power, changing size in a curious fashion, as if they were coming closer or moving farther away through a dimension that lay at ninety degrees to all perceived reality.

  And yet, Rudy thought, in a way he understood that they were exactly the same as the circles of power that he drew, the sphere of light and shadow that the Bald Lady had formed. They existed for the same purpose and delineated the same things.

  She let the images fade.

  Amu Bel shook his head. “This is something of which I have never heard. I cannot even imagine how to call forth power from such … such configurations. This is what you dreamed?”