04 Mother Of Winter d-4 Read online

  The quality of the wind changed above the timberline. It howled over the split domes of rock and tore at Rudy's long dark hair, cutting through the sleeves of his woolen shirt as if he wore nothing, pouring through the gaping hole in his trouser leg like a carnivore ready to strip the meat off his bones.

  The small plants of the subalpine snatched at the invisible torrents of air like the wasted hands of the starving. Dozens of streams ribboned the lichenous rock up here, and behind a cracked spur of blue-black granite Rudy saw the terrible lavender wall of the glacier itself, a bled-out sapphire the size of the world.

  Rudy thought, almost calmly, I'm going to freeze to death. Below him, something white was working its way among the dwarf-willow and hemlock.

  Shivering uncontrollably now, he headed northwest along the face of the slope, wondering if he could get past his pursuers and head down the Arrow Gorge.

  Something inside him whispered he was kidding himself, but he kept moving anyway.

  He didn't want to think about what would happen if he stopped.

  He couldn't put from his mind the recollection of that white, spider-fingered hand inching over the rocks in his direction. He wondered if it was still trying to catch him.

  I'm invisible, dammit!

  Or unnoticeable, which was as close as wizards could get. But unnoticeable by what? He seemed to hear Ingold's voice in his mind. To elk you look like a deer, to sabertooths you look like one of themselves. To bandits he'd look like a tree, and to White Raiders-who could probably pick any individual tree out of a nursery lineup and give the coordinates of where it stood on the mountain-he'd look like a weasel or an owl or something that had business up there.

  But to a gaboogoo?

  What is a gaboogoo?

  Having no idea what shape their perceptions took, Rudy had no key to their minds-if they had minds-no paradigm with which to tailor illusion. He had no idea what they were. Except ugly, mean guys who were after him.

  Rudy kept moving.

  He counted four of them as the afternoon light darkened, the rutilant glare of the sunset illuminating the white beds of slunch that lay, hundreds of feet long sometimes, over the rocks.

  The gaboogoo whose head he'd half severed had managed to lose it entirely but didn't appear to notice. Like its hand, way back down the mountain, it kept on. The two others Rudy glimpsed among the columned pines below him weren't as big, but seemed subtly different in configurationone of them appeared to be moving on all fours. Or all sevens, or whatever. Rudy didn't see whether it had a head or not. He was genuinely scared. Years of living rough had given him a great deal of stamina, but as the gory sunset faded, Rudy was racked by profound shivering. In theory he could Summon heat, as he could Summon light, but he wasn't good at that particular Summoning and didn't think he could keep up his concentration while on the move.

  The vest of painted bison hide that kept him warm in the windless hollows by day wasn't going to be enough as temperatures plunged. He knew that. And the gaboogoos were working him like wolves, keeping their distance, tiring him out. Under the open crater in his trouser leg Rudy's thigh was black with bruises, a horrible tribute to the strength of that bloodless grip.

  Well, Ingold old buddy, I think we can safely deduce that no, these buggers aren't illusions.

  And Jesus Christ, they're in the Keep!

  He had to get out of this. Had to get word back to Minalde, somehow, to sweep the Keep and sweep it now!

  But even if there had been another mage at the Keep he could communicate with, he'd dropped his scrying stone during the gaboogoo's first attack. He spared a quick stayput spell for it-problematical at this distance, but scrying crystals were good about that kind of thing.

  Ingold's words about the Dark knowing that magic was humankind's only defense came back. Maybe these guys knew it, too. Who were they? And what the hell did they want?

  Dead wizards. Rudy looked down at the bruise on his leg again. That part of the agenda was pretty unambiguous. And as the wind numbed his fingers, his ears, and his feet, he had the increasing feeling they were going to get what they were after. Dark wrapped itself over the slopes. Rudy crouched, trembling, against a boulder, tucking his hands into his armpits to warm them. To his left a U-shaped canyon curved between rocky walls, scattered with boulders and dotted with sheets of water, runoff of the glacier that blocked the way at the farther end. To his right, downslope, he could see all four of his pursuers now, shining dimly as the slunch that blanketed the lower slopes seemed to shine. Out across the falling black carpet of trees he could make out the Great Brown River where the Arrow flowed into it, dull snakes of orange-gold under the flammeous moon. Five little spots of jonquil light showed him where the Settlements lay among the trees. Black clouds were moving in overhead, and his breath, paining his lungs, poured from his lips in streams.

  He'd been on the move since slightly after noon, with nothing to eat or drink. A fire-spell, he thought-not to warm himself, but to fight. Fire or lightning.

  He wondered if others would come, conjured a strange vision of them emerging like cheap plastic toys from a mammoth Cracker Jack box concealed somewhere in the trees.

  "A big surprise in every pack. " But he couldn't go farther. He knew that.

  When he looked again, there were only three gaboogoo. Rudy glanced automatically over his shoulder, half dreading the sight of the thing coming at him from up the glacier canyon. But there was nothing visible to his mageborn sight, and when he looked back, there was only one. While he watched, it, too, faded away into the night. Oh, come on, you expect me to believe that one? Rudy shifted his weight uncomfortably. Why don't you just point down and say, "Oh, look, your shoe is untied?"

  His hands were so cold now he could barely grip his staff. His legs were numb and aching, his chest burned, and he had to fight the growing urge to say screw it and to crawl under the rocks to sleep.

  Eyes flashed in the darkness. Rudy sprang to his feet, staggering with cramp. He'd been nearly dozing. Eyes?

  It was a dooic.

  Even at this distance, and in the piercing cold, he could smell it, if he reached out only a little with his senses-the rank pong of an omnivore. It was an old male, the brown hair of its arms, back, and chest graying to frost, its fanged muzzle nearly white.

  It was small, probably born wild, though there were dooic in the river bands who'd been born in captivity and trained to simple tasks like cutting sugarcane and digging

  in the mines, who'd escaped with the coming of the Dark.

  This one was standing on its short, bandy hind legs, and through the darkness Rudy could swear that in spite of his spells of concealment-which he had never relinquished throughout the day-it was looking at him.

  Can't be, he thought, puzzled and scared. Unless those things have somehow... What? Robbed me of power? That couldn't happen... Could it? He didn't know.

  But the dooic definitely saw him. It lumbered a few strides back toward the dark wall of the trees, then turned again, raising its face toward him. Retreated again and turned...

  Retreated and turned. Rudy could see the glint of its tusks in the dimness, smell the stink of it, and he wondered if the creature associated him in its mind with those jerks in the settlement who had tried to shoot that poor hinny yesterday, or if it was merely hungry.

  He listened and scanned the edge of the woods, but could neither see nor smell any other dooic near. They hunted in bands and would bring down and slaughter a human being if they could, but Rudy knew that even without magic he could probably deal with a single attack.

  Man, I don't need this, he thought tiredly, shifting his grip along the haft of his staff. See me tomorrow, pal, I've had a lousy day.

  With a grunt, the dooic dropped to all fours. A moment later it settled to its knees and did something with its hand above a small pool of meltwater caught in the hollow of the rock.

  And Rudy felt, strangely, the swift glimmer of something that almost seemed to be magic, like a d
rift of anomalous scent in the air. MAGIC???

  The old dooic moved away again, using its long forearms for speed, the whitish flesh beneath its fur a mottled blur as it reached the edge of the trees. It turned, staring upslope at him again, waiting.

  Cautiously, ready for anything, Rudy came forward. Where the dooic had knelt by the meltwater, Rudy bent down-one eye still on the trees-and looked into the water. In it he could see the pallid, fungoid shapes of the gaboogoo, as if in a scrying stone, moving away through the thick darkness of the woods.

  "Jesus H. Christ on a bicycle." Clouds overhead covered the moon, but as a wizard Rudy could see clearly, and the tiny pool had definitely been ensorceled to show the gaboogoo departing.

  Rudy half recognized the woods through which they passed, downslope and to the north in the hardwoods of the lower forest, toward the Arrow River gorge. By the way they moved, he could tell they were following something, tracking something other than himself.

  Movement at the edge of the woods made him swing around, ready for a fight, and he saw that a second dooic had joined the first, a female by the flat pale dugs protruding through the body hair, with an infant clinging to her belly and another on her back. Male and hinny turned at once, ran a few steps back into the trees, then turned again, waiting for him. This time Rudy could almost see the flickering of magic-not human magic, but magic of some sort-that trailed from the old male's fingers as it beckoned him impatiently to follow.

  Chapter Five

  Cast from my fist, shining in the sky, Brown wings lift and carry you from me. With earthbound hooves I trace the road you fly...

  "Gil?" Gentle and uninsistent, the word seemed to come, not from Ingold, but from some darkness in her mind, the thought taking shape in the abyss of a bottomless well. Holding to the poem as to a lifeline in terrifying darkness, Gil managed to nod, to let him know that she heard, but she could not speak.

  In a sense, she was still aware of the broken stone walls of an old stable around them-the house to which it had been attached consisted these days of a couple of charred walls overgrown with birch saplings-the rusted black scrollwork of the manger near her head. The smoke of the fire Ingold had built in a corner stung her eyes; she heard the far-off howl of wolves and the soft, restless blowing of Yoshabel's breath. But it was as if all those images, that awareness, came to her down a cable from the bright surface of water through which she was slowly sinking, swimming deeper and deeper toward a lightless and terrible depth.

  As Ingold's spells drew her farther into the dark, her mind gyred back to images of the UCLA campus in Westwood, to the words of poems. Donne, Villon, Minalde's favorites Kaalis and Seredne, whom she, too, had come to love. Anything to avoid the fear that she sensed lay at the foundation of her dreams.

  His magic was like the warmth of the fire, reassuring her with his measureless calm. "What do you see, Gilly?" he asked. "What do you see?"

  The wide lake upon whose stone verge she stood steamed like a cauldron in the air's cruel chill. In contrast to most of her dreams, Gil felt the cold and smelled the sulfurous tang of the waters: the jewel-indigo of enormous depths, an almost perfect circle miles across, ringed by a toothed wall of high lava escarpments. Steam drifted across a verge of reddish-black basalt, smeared near the shores with garish lichens-purples, golds, virulent reds. A volcanic cone, she thought. And above her a second volcano reared, infinitely tall, crowned with ice. All things, she knew-she didn't know how she knew-were ice-covered beyond the rim of those encircling cliffs.

  Something crawled across her foot. It was another of the blubbery hat-shaped things Thoth had found. Like odd slugs with their calcined rosettes, they were creeping everywhere on the few yards of basalt beach that separated the sharp rise of the crater rims from the night-blue waters to her left.

  Things like small scorpions, armed but legless, tails upcurled, floated above the steaming waters. The only sound was the groaning of the wind in the rocks. "What do you see, Gil?" She could not say.

  An entrance squinted at her in the rock wall of the secondary cone, black, deadly; a tunnel into the mountain's ice-locked heart. She could feel the cold on her face as she stepped into the rift, and knew that the volcano, huge and ancient, had a core of ice. In the rock chamber where the tunnel to the ice began there was a statue: cut of black basalt, a man sitting in a chair and gripping with one hand the collar of a dog. The bearded face was stylized, but even so it held an expression of profound sadness, and the sculptor had forgotten or chosen not to cut pupils in the staring eyes.

  The anachronistic image seemed to float, detached, in a lake of white ground fog that surged utterly soundless around Gil's knees.

  Gil knew full well that this world filled with ice and silence had never been trodden by foot of man.

  Ingold's voice came to her, very far away now, asking something, she did not know what. In any case, she could not have answered him. Even the memories of who she had once been seemed to have slipped beyond immediate recollection; whom she was seeking here, why she had come.

  Cold smoke flowed from a crack in the rock at the top of a flight of stonecut stairs, and a smell of wet sweetness, sugary and attenuated. Gil followed, drawn by music she thought she had heard once before: music and the murmur of half-heard words.

  They were speaking her name. How did they know her name?

  At the top of the stair she looked down at her hands. She drew her dagger and slid the blade along her palms-the pain shocking even in the dream, but she could not help herself.

  The voices grew clearer in her mind and she thought, My blood knows my name, and they are a part of the poison that's in my blood.

  They were telling her Ingold had caused her that pain, but even in her dream she knew that wasn't true. As she walked deeper down the crack in the ice, the tension in her chest grew, the terrible anxiety tightening.

  Looking down, she saw the dark bones of the rock, and through them, like horribly shining ropes, lines of tension and power in the ground, coursing into the earth.

  Her blood dripped down onto the ice, hot against her cold fingers. Looking back over her shoulder, she thought she could see Ingold standing in the crevice that led to the surface of the ground, unable to cross its threshold.

  It was Ingold as he actually was-sometimes a glowing core of magic light, sometimes the arrogant, red-haired princeling who had caused the last of the great Gettlesand wars. Her lover. Her friend. The other half of her life. He held out his hand to her, but he could come no farther, and she could no longer hear his voice.

  The singing filled her ears, and she followed.

  The singers knelt in a world of lightless color, their magic shining into the ice of which the chamber was composed and reflecting back, allowing her to see.

  Glowing smoke surrounded them, rising from the fumarole in the chamber's heart; not the smoke of volcanic heat, but the smoke of cold, for the chasm was filled with something that wasn't lava, wasn't water-something gelid, thick, clear as diamonds, something that moved in slow glutinous waves with the stirrings of that which dwelt within.

  The singers were wrought of jewels. They were making magic, performing a rite over and over again in the flat space before the chamber's door; a rite they had performed for eons, until the hard black stone of the floor had been worn into a pit, filled thick now with slunch.

  Every now and then something crawled out of the slunch: wriggling pale arthropods with masses of tentacles where their heads should have been or those flat, raylike, pincered flying things that she had seen chasing the hawk.

  She couldn't see the singers clearly, but she knew they were calling her name. The blood that ran down off her fingers dripped into the slunch and began to crawl in thin red snakes in their direction, glittering with jeweled diamond flecks. The jewel things raised their heads, blue-fire gazes surrounding her. There was a profound cold stirring in the slow-throbbing pool. "Gil, come back."

  It would rise out of the lake, she thought. The ice-mag
es knew her name already. They would give her name to the thing in the pool, the thing that knew all names, and it would know her. "Gil, come back now."

  She had a dreamy sense of wanting to scream, watching her blood wriggle toward the ice-priests, who extended long hands down to gather it in; watching little whitish spiderlike blobs wriggle up out of the slunch, watching the slow emergence of the thing in the pool.

  "Gil!" She felt his hands on her arms, very strong and warm. "You have to come back now. Can you follow my voice? You have to come back." I have to go back. I have to go back and kill him.

  She drew her knife again, her blood sticky all over its leather-wrapped hilt. She wondered if she killed herself in this dream whether she'd really be dead. Then they couldn't make her hurt him. Or maybe, she thought, they could.

  "Can you follow my voice?" She heard it then, the buried urgency under the calm tones. He was scared.

  Her mouth felt as though it had been shot up with lidocaine. She managed to say, "Yes."

  He led her out of the cavern by the hand. She felt his hand in hers but couldn't see him-something that sometimes happened in dreams-and once they were out of the cavern, past the stone room with the statue of the Blind King and the dog, on the lichen-grown basalt beside the great, cold lake, she felt him spring upward, flying, drawing her by the hand to fly after him.

  In her dreams she could fly, if he was holding her hand. They drifted upward a long way, through black waters again, heading for the light. Looking down, she could see the deep blue crater of the vast lake, like an open eye: the monster volcano beside it, dead and full of ice.

  It seemed to her she could still smell that sugary odor, still hear the singing of the ice-mages behind her, and the poison in her blood whispered the echo of that song. Then there was only dark. "What is it?"