04 Mother Of Winter d-4 Page 7

  "He's probably lying," Lirta said, and tossed her red head. "Anyway, his mother's a whore. I wouldn't be scared of no stupid gaboogoo. And Daddy says there's no such thing."

  "Your daddy probably said that about the Dark Ones," Rudy said. Lirta's mother herded all the children away, glancing back furtively at him over her shoulder. His sleep that night, in a corner of the hall on a straw pallet, like most of the men of the household, was filled with imageless dreams of breathless, weighted anger, a pressure that seemed to clog the very ether.

  Sometimes he thought he saw the plains and deserts of Gettlesand, felt the arid sunlight and smelled dust and stone and buffalo grass on the slopes of its jutting,

  scrub- covered black mountains.

  At other times he dreamed of California, as he hadn't for years. Dreamed of lying in his bed in his mother's crummy apartment in Roubidoux, feeling the whole building shake as the big trucks went by on the broken pavement of Arlington Avenue outside. Something was going on, something that troubled him deeply. He didn't know what. At dawn he went out to have another look at Fargin Graw's slunch. Graw went with him, grousing that members of the River Settlements Council-which he had resigned in annoyance when they wouldn't accept his leadership-were antiquated holdovers of a system designed to keep down "true men" like himself, as though the elderly Lord Gremmedge, who had pioneered Carpont Settlement five miles farther downriver, were an impostor of some kind.

  Rudy had heard the same at the Keep, with variations. Technically, everyone at the Keep held their lands through Minalde, just as, technically, they were her guests in a building that belonged to Tir. But men of wealth like Varkis Hogshearer and Enas Barrelstave spoke of cutting back the power of the queen and the little king, and giving the Keep and its lands outright to those who held them-one of whom was, coincidentally enough, Enas Barrelstave himself.

  There was also a good deal of feeling against the nobles, like Lord Ankres and Lord Sketh, and the lesser bannerlords, some of whom had arrived with more food than the poor of Gae and had parlayed that into positions of considerable power, though Rudy had noticed there was less of such talk when bandits or Raiders threatened the Keep. Most of the great Houses had never lost their ancient traditions of combat, and even ancients like Lord Gremmedge proved to be an asset on those few occasions when it came down to a question of defending the Vale.

  For the most part, the lords looked down on men like Graw, on Enas Barrelstave-who had built up a considerable landholding of his own, although he was still the head of the Tubmaker's Guild-and on Varkis Hogshearer-and no wonder, in the latter case, thought Rudy dourly.

  In addition to being the Keep moneylender, earlier that spring Hogshearer had somehow gotten word that the only trader from the South to come north in six months was a few days off from the Vale.

  He'd ridden down to meet the merchant and had purchased his entire stock of needles, buttons, glass, seed, plowshares, and cloth, which he was currently selling for four and five times what the southern merchants generally asked. No other trader had appeared since, though Rudy scried the roads for them daily. As Rudy expected, the slunch in Graw's fields was pretty much like the slunch everywhere else. It was almost unheard of for slunch to spread that fast, and he suspected that the patch had been there-small but certainly not unnoticeable-when Graw planted the seed.

  Nonetheless, he checked the place thoroughly, on the chance that a slight variation would show him something he and Ingold had missed. It didn't, however.

  Slunch was slunch. It seemed to be vegetable, but had no seed pods or leaves or stems, and Rudy wasn't sure about the function of the hairlike structures that held its blubbery underground portions to the soil. There was no visible reason for the vegetation all around the slunch to die, but it did.

  Worms lived in it: huge, sluggish, and, Rudy discovered, weirdly aggressive, lunging at him and snapping with round, reddish, maggotlike mouths. "Yuckers," he muttered, stepping back from not-very-efficient attack and flicking the thing several yards away with his staff. "I'll have to trap one of these buggers, before I start for home." A regular earthworm, swollen and made aggressive by eating the slunch? Or some species he'd never heard of or that had never heretofore made it this far south?

  Ingold would know. Ingold's scholarship, concerning both old magical lore and natural history, was awesome-there were times when Rudy despaired of ever living up to his teacher.

  But when he tried to contact Ingold, after Graw finally left him alone around noon, he could see nothing in his crystal.

  He shifted the angle to the pale sunlight that fell through the blossoms of the apple tree under which he sat, a thin little slip of a thing in an orchard surrounded by a palisade that would have discouraged a panzer tank division; let his mind dip into a half- meditative trance, drifting and reaching out. They'd be on the road, he thought, but there was a good chance they'd have stopped for a nooning. Ingold...

  But there was nothing. Only the same deep, angry pulling sensation, the feeling of weight, and heat, and pressure. And underneath that, the profound dread, as if he stood in the presence of some kind of magic that he could not understand.

  "C'mon, man," Rudy whispered. "Don't do this to me." He cleared his mind, reordering his thoughts. Thoth of Gettlesand: he might have an answer, might indeed know what was going wrong with communications. Might know what that nameless feeling was, that haunting fear.

  When no image came, he called again on the names of every single one of the Gettlesand mages, as he had last night. Failing them, he summoned the image of Minalde, whom he saw immediately, a small bright shape in the crystal, standing by the wheat fields in her coat of colored silks, arguing patiently with Enas Barrelstave about the placement of boundary hurdles.

  Worried now, he tried again to reach Ingold.

  "Dammit." He slipped the crystal back into its leather pouch and returned it to the pocket of his vest. The day was mild, warmer than those preceding it and certainly warmer here in the bottomlands than in the high Vale of Renweth. Maybe summer was finally getting its act together and coming in.

  About goddamn time. He didn't think the Keep could stand another winter like the last one.

  Clear as a little steel bell on the still air, he heard Lirta Graw's voice, bossing someone about. Yep, there she was by the open gate of the log stockade, with a pack of the settlement kids.

  In a couple of years she'd be as obnoxious as Varkis Hogshearer's daughter, Scala, an overbearing, sneaky adolescent who spied and, Rudy suspected, stole.

  He wondered if there were some kind of karmic law of averages that required the presence of one of those in every group of thirty or more kids. There'd certainly been one in his high school.

  He watched them from where he sat in his miniature fortress of sharpened stakes and apple trees, listened to their voices, as he watched and listened to the herdkids at the Keep and the children who tagged at their mothers' skirts by the stream when they did laundry.

  Partly this was simply because he liked kids, but partly-and increasingly so in the last year or two, because, like Ingold, he was watching for someone.

  Waiting for someone to show up.

  "The Dark Ones knew that magic was humankind's only defense against them," Ingold had said to him one evening when he and Rudy had gone out to locate Tir during the first flush of the boy's livestock supervision phase.

  The Keep herdkids, under the command of a skinny, towheaded boy named Tad, had been bringing in the cattle from the upper pastures: Rudy had known Tir should be safe enough with the older children, but the boy was then only four, after all.

  "They attacked the City of Wizards, destroying nearly all its inhabitants; they knew me well enough to come after me." The old man frowned, leaning on his staff-a mild, unassuming, and slightly shabby old maverick, reminding Rudy of any number of overage truckers or bar-fighters he'd known in his Southern California days. "And in the past five years the fear has been growing on me that the Dark Ones-among all the
hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children that they killed sought out also the children born with the talent for wizardry. The next generation of wizards."

  Rudy said, "Oh, Christ.'' It made sense.

  Talent or propensity for Magic usually manifested in very small children, Ingold had told him-five and younger-and then seemed to go underground until puberty. In the past five years, Ingold had kept a close eye on the children coming of age. Not one had shown the slightest bent toward magic. Tad, eldest of the herdkids-had elected himself a kind of lab assistant to Ingold in the wizard's chemical and mechanical endeavors, but had no apparent thaumaturgical gift. He just loved gadgets, spending all his free time in helping them adjust the mirrors that amplified the witchlight in the hydroponics crypts. So far, there had been no one. Rudy wondered how long it would be.

  The children straggled off toward the thin coppices of the bottomlands, carrying kindling sacks. They'd have to collect more wood in the Settlements, he thought. Even though the nights here were less chill than in the Vale, the sprawling stone villa didn't hold heat the way the Keep did. His eye followed them, Lirta Graw-sackless, as befitted the Boss's Daughter striding ahead, and the little fair-haired child Reppitep in the rear, struggling to keep up.

  As they disappeared into the cloudy green of hemlock and maples along the Arrow, Rudy turned his eyes back toward the slopes behind him; the rising glacis strewn with boulders and threaded with silvery streams, and above that the dense viridian gloom of the high forest.

  Where the trees grew thick, the children had said. That was where several of them reported they'd seen Mr. Creepy-in-the-Woods.

  It was an hour's steady climb to the edge of the trees. As he picked his way through fern and fox-grape up the rust- stained rocks of the streambed, Rudy wrapped himself in progressively thicker veils of illusion.

  He'd learned the art of remaining unseen from Ingold, whom he nicknamed-not without reason-the Invisible Man. Three years ago the first bands of White Raiders had made their appearance in the valley of the Great Brown River, tracking the spoor of elk and mammoth driven by cold from the high northern plain, and one still sometimes found their Holy Circles on deserted uplands. The thought of being the messenger elected to carry a letter written in pain to the obscure Ancestors of the tribes made Rudy queasy.

  Moose and glacier elk raised their heads from grazing to regard him mildly as he passed, under the magically engineered impression that he was some harmless cousin of the deer tribe. Farther up the slopes, where the erratics left by the last glaciation poked through a tangled chaparral of brush, fern, and vines, a saber-tooth sunning itself on a slab of rock rolled over and looked at him, and Rudy hastily morphed the spell into

  I'm a saber-tooth, too-but smaller and milder and definitely beta to your alpha, sir. The huge, sinewy beast blinked and returned to its nap, surprisingly difficult to see against the splotchy gray-gold stone.

  Wind breathed from the high peaks, carrying on it the glacier's cold. Rudy shivered. As carefully as any hunter, he worked the line of trees above the waste and pasture.

  Among the short grasses and weeds, he found mostly the tracks that he expected to find: half a dozen different sorts of deer, rabbits and coons, porcupines and weasels, voles and wolves.

  On the bark of a red fir he saw the scratchings of a cave-bear, higher than his head. Hidden carefully under the ferns of the denser woods were the droppings of a band of dooic, and Rudy wondered momentarily whether that poor hinny had made it safely back to her pals.

  Once or twice he came upon tracks that made him pause, puzzled. Rabbit spoor that hinted of movement no rabbit would have made-no rabbit in its right senses, anyway. Wolverine pugs from the biggest, weirdest damn wolverine he'd never hope to run across.

  But nothing that would qualify as Mr. Creepy-in-the-Woods. The sun curved toward the harsh white head of the Hammerking, barely visible above the Rampart Range 's broken-topped wall. A redstart called, Rudy identifying the almost conversational warble; farther down the long slope of rock a lark answered from the olive velvet of the pasture.

  Deep silence filled the earth, save for the eternal roaring of the wind in the pines. The sound seemed to wash away Fargin Graw's grating voice and the petty small-town politicking of the Keep.

  Rudy felt himself relaxing slowly, as he did when he went on his solitary rambles in the Renweth Vale in quest of herbs or minerals or just information about what the edges of the woods looked like on any particular day. He was alive. He was a wizard. Minalde loved him. What else mattered? He came clear of the trees and settled himself with his back to a boulder at the top of a long slope of blackish rock peeled and scrubbed by the passage of long-ago ice. Due back any day, he thought, without any real sense of that event's imminence. Below him, at the distant foot of the slope, the squalid congeries of villa and stockade, outbuildings and byres, lay surrounded by moving figures in the dull browns and greens of homespun, going about their daily tasks.

  Still farther down the silver-riffled sepia line of the Arrow, other stockades could be made out among the trees: square log towers and tall, spindly looking watch-spires like masts. The squat stone donjon of Wormswell.

  From up here he could see the wheat fields and the stockaded orchard of Carpont, the next settlement over; a small group of half-naked men and women were clearing a drainage ditch.

  Not bad. For people whose civilization had collapsed out from under them in the wholesale slaughter of most of the world's population by an incomprehensible force of monstrosities not terribly long ago, they'd recovered pretty quickly. Not that they had a choice, he reflected, closing his eyes, the sun comforting on his lids. Who does have a choice? You recover and get a place to keep the rain off you, you plant some food, you get over the pain, or you die.

  Many of those people had come from the ruins of Penambra to unfamiliar northern lands. Many were city folk, clerks, or Guildsmen unused to the scythe or the plow. Probably not a whole lot of them were comfortable being outside at night, even after five years. But they were managing.

  He sighed, closing more tightly around himself the veils of illusion as he took out his scrying crystal once more. He let his mind dip toward the half-trance state from which most magic was worked.

  But all that he felt in the depths of the crystal was the grinding of that anger, the pressure of some deep, otherworldly rage. Ingold, dammit, where'd you go? Pick up the phone, man!

  Had something happened to them? Now, there was a scary thought. Ingold was a tough old dude, and Gil was nobody Rudy would want to fool with, but there were White Raiders wandering in the valley, and bandits scavenging what they could from the ruins.

  A year and a half ago the merchant who'd brought Ingold the sulfur had told them that some Alketch princeling, banished by the upheavals in the plagueriddled South, had marched up the Great Brown River with a midsize army, intent on conquest of the empty plantations and devastated acres of what had been the southernmost of the High King's realms. Ingold had kept an eye on them by scrying crystal for about a month. Then one morning he'd tuned in to see only a campful of corpses.

  True, Rudy reflected, turning the facets of his stone toward the fading sunlight, they didn't have a wizard's ability to make themselves look like scenery, but still...

  Rudy looked up to see a gaboogoo standing three feet in front of him.

  It was as tall as he was, reaching for him with hands like animate rope.

  Rudy screamed, grabbed his staff from the rock beside him and slashed with the razor- edged crescent at the slick, whitish knotwork of the thing's wrist. The hand fell onto his knee and clenched on like a machine of iron and cable, even as Rudy leapt to his feet and backward, cutting and slashing at the bloodless and undeterred thing that came at him with other hands outstretched.

  It was fast. Rudy scrambled back, hacking at it and feeling the horrible grip of the severed hand shift its clutch on his leg, working its way up his thigh. He whipped the dagger from his belt with his
free hand and slashed the leather of his trousers, pulling a great chunk of the buckskin loose, crawling hand and all.

  He hurled the thing as far as he could and spun to meet the gaboogoo again, slashing this time at the bobbing cluster of nodules on its head. They scattered like asparagus in a mower, and the thing kept coming on.

  Well, they might have been sensory organs, dammit!-and Rudy cut a third time, half severing the skinny, bobbing head from the stalk of the neck.

  Movement on the ground caught his eye. The hand was creeping determinedly toward him over the rock.

  Feet, don't fail me now.

  Rudy bolted.

  He plunged upslope and into the trees, wondering if the gaboogoo would be hindered at all by the forest. He dodged and plunged over fallen pines gross with ear-shaped orange fungus, and leaped the fern-clogged tangle of a stream.

  Here in the higher woods, little undergrowth hampered his flight, only the yellow pine- straw that slithered beneath his boots. He ducked back along the slope with the intention of circling toward the settlement again but saw something palely gleam ahead of him in the gray-green twilight beneath the trees.

  He flattened to a spruce trunk and had another look. It was a second gaboogoo. A little smaller than the first but still sizable. Rudy counted at least four arms-with this one's bobbing nodules not confined to its head, it was somewhat hard to tell what was what. There seemed to be other growths on it as well.

  Cloaking spells notwithstanding, it was coming in his direction.

  The tag line of an old movie floated through Rudy's head-"Who are those guys?"-but it did nothing to diminish the terror that had him by the throat. He headed upslope again.

  The going was tougher, the ground now very steep. Above the trees the sun had slipped behind the high glaciers of the Rampart Range, and the light between the hoary spruces and lodgepole pines was like translucent slatecolored silk. His boots skidded on rocks and pine-straw as he climbed, the gloom all around him striped now with white birch and gray aspen. The birds had gone silent.