04 Mother Of Winter d-4 Read online

  Looking below it, beyond it, to the scant growth of wheat and corn in the fields along the stream, the white patches of slunch and the thinness of the blossom on the orchard trees, Rudy wondered if those ancient walls would be protection enough. Just my luck. I make it to the world where I belong, the world where I have magic, the world where the woman I love lives-and we all starve to death. It figures.

  "The range of my tribe lay at the feet of the Haunted Mountain, between the Night River and the groves along the Cursed Lands, and northward to the Ice in the North." The Icefalcon slipped his scabbarded killing-sword free of his sash, set it where it could be drawn in split instants, and shed vest and coat and long gray scarf in a fashion that never seemed to engage his right hand. "Never in all those lands, in all my years of growing up, did I hear speak of this slunch."

  Only a few glowstones dispersed white light in the Guards' watchroom. Most of the Guards' allotment of the milky polyhedrons illuminated the training floor where Gnift put a small group of off-shift warriors-Guards, the men-at-arms of the Houses of Ankres and Sketh, and the teenage sons of Lord Ankres-through a sparring session more strenuous than some wars.

  Hearthlight winked on dirty steel as the incoming shift unbuckled harness, belts, coats; ogre shadows loomed in darkness, and across the long chamber someone laughed at Captain Melantrys' wickedly accurate imitation of Fargin Graw feeling sorry for himself. Rudy sighed and slumped against the bricks of the beehive hearth. "You ever ride north into the lands of the Ice?"

  The young warrior elevated a frost-pale brow in mild surprise. "Life among the tribes is difficult enough," he said. "Why would anyone ask further trouble by going there?"

  "People do," said Seya, an older woman with shortcropped gray hair.

  "Not my people."

  "Well," Rudy said, "slunch is obviously arctic-at least it started to show up when the weather got colder..."

  "But never was it seen near the lands of the Ice," the White Raider pointed out logically. His long ivory-colored braids, weighted with the dried human finger-bones thonged into them, swung forward as he chaffed his hands before the fire. Like all the other Guards, he was bruised, face and arms and hands, from sword practice. It was a constant about them all, like the creak of worn leather harnesswork or the smell of wood smoke in their clothing.

  "Nor did our shamans and singers speak of such a thing. Might slunch be the product of some shaman's malice?"

  "What shaman?" Rudy demanded wearily. "Thoth and the Gettlesand wizards tell me the stuff grows on the plains for miles now, clear up to the feet of the Sawtooth Mountains. Why would any shaman lay such a... a limitless curse?"

  The Icefalcon shrugged. As a White Raider, he had been born paranoid.

  "As for foods that will grow in the cold," he went on, settling with a rag to clean the mud from his black leather coat, "when game ran scarce, we ate seeds and grasses; insects and lizards as well, at need."

  Constant patrols in the cold and wind had turned the Icefalcon's long, narrow face a dark buff color, against which his hair and eyes seemed almost white. Rudy observed that even while working, the Icefalcon's right hand never got beyond grabbing range of his sword. All the Guards were like that to a degree, of course, but according to Gil there were bets among them as to whether the Icefalcon closed his eyes when he slept. "Sometimes in days of great hunger we'd dig tiger-lily bulbs and bake them in the ground with graplo roots to draw the poison out of them."

  "Sounds yummy."

  "Pray to your ancestors you never discover how yummy such fare can be." "We used to eat these things like rocks." Rudy hadn't heard Tir come up beside him. Small for his age and fragile looking, Tir had a silence that was partly shyness, partly a kind of instinctive fastidiousness. Partly, Rudy was sure, it was the result of the subconscious weight of adult memories, adult fears.

  "They were hard like rocks until you cooked them, and then they got kind of soft. Mama- the other little boy's mama-used to mash them up with garlic."

  The Icefalcon raised his brows. He knew about the heritable memories-an old shaman of his tribe, he had told Rudy once, had them-and he knew enough not to put in words or questions that might confuse the child.

  Rudy said casually, "Sounds like..." He didn't know the word in the Wathe. "Sounds like what we call potatoes, Ace. Spuds. What'd that little boy call them?"

  Tir frowned, fishing memories chasms deep. "Earth-apples." He spoke slowly, forming a word Rudy had never heard anyone say in the five years of his dwelling in this world. "But they raised them in water, down in the tanks in the crypt. Lots and lots of them, rooms full of them. They showed that little boy," he added, with a strange, distant look in his eyes.

  "Who showed him, Ace?"

  Melantrys, a curvy little blonde with a dire-wolf's heart, was offering odds on the likelihood of Graw finding a reason not to send up any of the hay that was part of the Settlements' tribute to the Keep come July-betting shirt-laces, a common currency around the watchroom, where they were always breaking-and there were shouts and jeers from that end of the room, so that Rudy had to pitch his voice soft, for Tir's hearing alone.

  Tir thought about it, his eyes unfocused. He was one of the cleanest little boys Rudy had ever encountered, in California or the Wathe. Even at the end of an afternoon with the herdkids, his jerkin of leather patches and heavy knitted blue wool was fairly spotless. God knew, Rudy thought, how long this phase would last. "An old, old man," Tir said after a time. He stared away into the darkness, past the lurching shadows of the Guards, the stray wisps of smoke and the flash of firelight on dagger blade and boot buckle. Past the night-black walls of the Keep itself. "Older than Ingold. Older than Old Man Gatson up on fifth north. He was bald, and he had a big nose, and he had blue designs on his arms and the backs of his hands, and one like a snake like this, all the way down his head."

  Tir's fingers traced a squiggly line down the center of his scalp, back to front. Rudy's breath seemed to stop in his lungs with shock. "And it wasn't a little boy," Tir went on. "It was a grown-up man they showed. A king."

  It was the first time he had made the distinction. The first time he seemed to understand that all the little boys whose memories he shared had grown up to be men-and after living their lives, had died.

  Rudy tried to keep his voice casual, not speaking the great wild whoop of elation that rang inside him. "You want to go exploring, Pugsley?"

  "Okay." Tir looked up at him and smiled, five years old again, rather solemn and shy but very much a child ready for whatever adventures time would bring his way. "They won't thank you, you know," the Icefalcon remarked, not even looking up from his cleaning as they rose to go. "The know-alls of the Keep-Fargin Graw, and Enas Barrelstave, and Bannerlord Pnak, and Lady Sketh. Whatever you find, you know they shall say, 'Oh, that. We could have found that any day, by chance.' " "You're making me feel better and better about this," Rudy said. The White Raider picked a fragment of dried blood out of the tang of his knife. "Such is my mission in life."

  It's him! Rudy thought as, hand in hand, he and Tir ascended the laundry-festooned Royal Stair. It's him! For the first time, Tir's memories had touched something that lay verifiably in the original Time of the Dark.

  The old man with the big nose and the bald head and the tattoos on his scalp and hands was-had to be-the Guy with the Cats.

  Records did not stretch to the first rising of the Dark. Gil and Ingold had unearthed archives dating back seven hundred years at Gae; two of the books salvaged from the wreck of the City of Wizards were copies of copies-said to be accurate-of volumes two thousand years old.

  The Church archives the ill-famed and unlamented Bishop Govannin had carried from the broken capital contained scrolls nearly that age, in dialects and tongues with which Ingold, for all his great scholarship, was wholly unfamiliar. When the mage and Gil had a chance to work on them, they had arrived at approximate translations of two or three-at least two of the others Gil guessed had been copied visually, wit
hout any knowledge of their meaning at all. But in the Keep attics above the fifth level, in the hidden crypts below, and in the river caves up the valley, they had found gray crystalline polyhedrons, the size and shape of the milk-white glowstones: remnants of the technology of the Times Before. And when Gil figured out that the gray crystals were records, and Ingold learned how to read the images within, they got their first glimpse of what the world had been like before that catastrophe over three millennia ago.

  The Guy with the Cats was in two of the record crystals. The crystals themselves were magic, and readable only through the object Rudy described to himself as a scrying table found hidden in an untouched corner chamber of the third level south. But less than a dozen of the thirty-eight were about magic, about how to do magic. Even silent-neither Rudy nor Ingold had figured out how to activate the soundtrack, if there was a soundtrack-they were precious beyond words. Magic was used very differently in those days, linked with machines that Ingold had tried repeatedly-and failed repeatedly-to reproduce in the laboratory he set up in the crypts. But the crystals showed spells and power-circles that were clearly analogous to the methods wizards used now. These Rudy and Ingold studied, matching similarities and differences, trying with variable success to recreate the forgotten magic, even as Gil studied the silent images in the other stones to put together some idea of that vanished culture and world.

  On the whole, Rudy guessed that their conclusions were about as accurate as the spoofs written in his own world about the conclusions "scientists of the distant future" would draw about American motels, toilets, and TV Guides. But in the process, he and Gil had come to recognize by sight a bunch of people who died about the time of the Trojan War.

  They had given them names; not respectful ones, perhaps, but convenient when Gil noted down the contents of each crystal. The Dwarf.

  Mr. Pomfritt named less for his resemblance to a long forgotten character in a TV show than for his precise, didactic way of explaining the massive spiral of stars, light, and silverdust that funneled, Ingold said, a galaxy-wide sweep of power into something kept carefully out of sight in a small black glass dish. The Bald Lady. Mother Goose. Scarface. Black Bart. And the Guy with the Cats.

  And now Tir said that the Guy with the Cats had been in the Keep. That meant whoever that old mage was, he'd been of the generation that first saw the Dark Ones come.

  The generation that fought them first. The generation that built the Keep. "The little boy got lost here once," Tir confided in a whisper as they wound their way along a secondary corridor on third south.

  Night was a time of anthill activity in the Keep, as suppers were cooked, business transacted, courtships furthered, and gossip hashed in the maze of interlocking cells, passageways, warrens, and bailiwicks that sometimes more resembled a succession of tight-packed villages than a single community, let alone a single building. Rudy paused to get an update on Lilibet Hornbeam's abscess from a cousin or second cousin of that widespreading family; nodded civil greetings to Lord Ankres, one of the several noblemen who had survived to make it to the Keep-His Lordship gave him the smallest of chilly bows-and stopped by Tabnes Crabfruit's little ill-lit workshop to ask how his wife was doing.

  Tir went on, "He was playing with his sisters-he had five sisters and they were all mean to him except the oldest one. He was pretty scared, here in the dark." What little boy? Rudy wondered. How long ago? Sometimes Tir spoke as if, in his mind, all those little boys were one. Him.

  "They sent a wizard up to find him?" Rudy was frequently asked to search the back corners of the Keep, or the woods, for straying children.

  They ascended a stair near the enclave owned by Lord Sketh and his dependents, a wooden one crudely punched through a hole in the ceiling to join the House of Sketh's cells on the third level with those on the fourth. Warm air breathed up around them,

  rank with the pungence of cooking, working, living, drawn by the mysterious ventilation system of the Keep.

  One more point for the wizards who built the place, Rudy thought. However they'd powered the ventilator pumps and the flow of water, most of them still worked. He and Ingold had never been able to ascertain that one to their satisfaction. They'd found the pumps, all right, and the pipes and vents like capillaries through the black walls, the thick floors, but no clue as to why they still worked.

  A young boy passed with two buckets of water on his shoulders, accompanied by a henchman wearing the three-lobed purple badge of the House of Sketh-Sketh was notorious for thinking it owned the small fountain in the midst of the section where most, but not all, of its servants and laborers lived. Alde suspected they were charging for access, but couldn't prove it.

  "Uh- huh," Tir said. "There were three wizards in the Keep then, an old man and a lady and a little girl. The girl found the little boy."

  "So these were different from the guy who showed the King how to find the potatoes."

  Tir thought about this. "Uh-huh. That was... I think the King was before. Way before." It was the first time he'd identified anything resembling a sequence to his memories. Eldor-Tir's dead father-had had some of Dare of Renweth's memories, toward the end of his pain-racked life; according to Ingold, few others of the line had. Ingold deduced that the wizards who built the Keep had engineered such memories into certain bloodlines to make sure of their preservation, but it was never possible to predict who would remember what, or when.

  The boy frowned, fighting to reach back into that barely comprehended darkness, and they turned a couple of corners and cut through a quarter-cell somebody had chopped into a corridor: Tir still leading, still pursuing old recollections, matching in his mind the way the Keep had been three thousand years ago against the shortcuts of his current experience.

  "There's stairway back there but we can go up here," he said, pointing down another hall.

  Here, toward the back of the fourth, many of the fountains had failed. The cells were inhabited by the Keep's poorer folk, who'd received less productive land in the division of arable allotments, or whose birthrate had outstripped what they were assigned; those whose land had been damaged by slunch or whose livestock had sickened and died; those who sold, traded, or mortgaged first their land, then their time and freedom, to the wealthier inhabitants who had food to spare. Many of the cells lying far from the stairways or bridges that crossed the Aisle, weren't inhabited at all. Around here the air smelled bad. It was all very well to be living in a place whose ventilation pumps were still operative after three thousand years, but over the millennia, as Rudy put it, somebody had lost the manual. When a pump broke, it stayed broken. Rudy hadn't mentioned it to Alde, but he lived in fear that a lot of this stuff would all give out at the same time, as the internal combustion engines of his experience generally had. And then Shit Creek won't even be the phrase for it, he thought uneasily.

  Toward the back of the Keep the corridors lay straighter, too, for no one had lived here long enough to alter the walls. The darkness seemed denser away from the pine-knot torches, the lamps of smoking grease, and the occasional glowstone in its locked bracket of iron.

  The stairway Tir led him to was at the back of the fourth, a deserted area smelling of the rats that seemed to spontaneously generate in spite of all the purging-spells he or Ingold could undertake.

  Without the blue-white glow that burned from the head of Rudy's staff, the long corridor would have been as lightless as the crawl spaces behind Hell. A smoke-stained image of a saint regarded them gloomily from a niche at the stair's foot: St. Prool; Rudy recognized her by the broken ax she held in her hands. He'd never figured out, when Gil told him the story, why God had broken the ax in half after ol' Proolie got the chop.

  The blood line around her neck was neatly drawn in red, like a sixties choker. The stairs themselves were rough plank, almost as steep as a ladder. Tir darted ahead, feet clattering on the wood, and Rudy cast his magic before him so that a ball of witchlight would be burning over the child's head when he got to the top
. He himself followed more slowly, thrusting his glowing staff-head up through the ragged hole in the stone ceiling to illuminate the cell above. The magelight was bright, filling the little room and showing Rudy, quite clearly when he came up level with the floor, the thing that stood in the cell's doorway.

  It was a little taller than his knee, and, he thought-trying to summon the image of it in his mind later-a kind of dirty yellowish or whitish-yellow, like pus except that there was something vaguely inorganic about the hue.

  It had a head but it didn't have eyes, though it turned the flattened, fist-sized nodule on its spindly neck in his direction as he emerged. It had arms and legs-afterward Rudy wasn't sure how many of each.

  He was so startled he almost fell, lurching back against the stone edge of the opening in the floor. He must have looked away, grabbing for his balance on the ladder, because when he looked back it was gone.

  "Tir!" Rudy lunged up the last few rungs, flung himself at the door. "Tir, watch out!" He almost fell through the doorway, the blast of light he summoned flooding the corridor, an actinic echo of his panic and dread.

  He looked left, then right, in time to see Tir emerge, puzzled, from another cell door perhaps fifty feet down the hall. There was no sign of the thing he'd seen.

  Chapter Three

  "Stay there!"

  Tir looked scared-by the panic in Rudy's tone as much as by anything else-and held on to the jamb of the doorway in which he stood, while Rudy summoned all the light he could manage. By that brilliant, shadowless wash Rudy checked every cell for fifty feet down the corridor, quick looks, loath to turn his back on the passage or on the other empty black openings.

  Most cells here were bare, scavenged long ago of everything remotely useful-boxes had been stripped of their metal nails, old barrels of their strapping, even the curtains or the rickety shutters that in other places in the Keep served to cover the openings. Here and there Rudy found a cell crammed, disgustingly, with the waste and garbage some family on five north thought Minalde's quaestors wouldn't notice. Rudy stretched his senses out, listening, trying to scent above the overwhelming garbage stink. But his concentration wasn't what it should have been. Thinking back, he recalled no odor connected with the creature; nor any sound, not even when it fled. "Maybe it's a gaboogoo," Tir surmised, when Rudy returned to the boy at last. "They're sort of fairy things that live in the forest and steal milk from cows," he added, with the tone of one who has to explain things to grown-ups. "Geppy's mama tells neat stories about them."