Barbara Hambly - Darwath 4 - Mother Of Winter

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Darwath

Book 4

Mother Of Winter

BARBARA HAMBLY

PROLOGUE

In the moonstone dawn, the lone rider dismounted at the top of the steps, passed

through the black square open eye where the doors would one day be, and halted on

the edge of shadowed abyss. The woman who lay on the obsidian plinth in the

chasm's midst knew by the shape of his shoulders and back, by the way he carried his

head, who he was; there was in any case only one person he could be. The wind that

brought the smell of the glaciers down to her funneled past him through the

passageway and carried on it the stench of blood.

When he stepped clear of the gate's collected gloom, she saw he was covered with it,

as if he had lain down in a butcher's shambles. Some of it she knew was his, all mixed

with the nigrous grease of torch smoke; there was also mud on his bare left forearm

where he had fallen or been thrown from his horse, and on his bare knees above his

boot tops, as if he had knelt in gore-soaked earth-to raise someone in his arms,

perhaps.

The great clean-hewed pit of the foundation lay between them, deep as the cliffs that

surrounded the Vale, and filled with the night's last shade. The plinth that rose

through it, nearly to the level of the ground, was circled by half-made levels and

support pillars like the greatest trees in some primordial iron forest, dwarfed to

fragility by the chasm's sheer size. The machines that fused the black stone walls,

insectile monsters of crystal and meteor iron, stood quiescent on platforms in the

scaffolding; smaller slave-crystals and drones floated in the air between like

exhausted stars, and here and there great sheets of wyr-web flashed softly in the

nacreous light. Where the stairways and catwalks joined and crossed between the

greater platforms, sleeping figures could be seen, lying where they had collapsed

within the rings and spheres of silver dust, dried blood, smoke and light that trailed

off the fragile plank flooring to float like sea-wrack on the air.

He looked down to meet the woman's eyes.

Depleted by last night's Great Spell, she propped herself up with her hands and

coughed, feeling twice her sixty years. As the man picked his way across the

spiderweb lines of bamboo and planking, descended ladders and stepped over gaps

that fell away into a thousand feet of gloom, she saw that he, too, moved carefully,

holding to the ropes and stopping now and then to stand half bowed over, gathering

strength.

"It's all right," she said, when he looked down from a ladder at the intricate patterns

woven on the plinth's circular top. "The spells are accomplished, such as they are.

Stay between those two lines and all will be well."

He was a respecter of such things. Not everyone was these days. He looked around

him again, and she wondered if, from the plinth, he could see what she saw: the whole

of the future edifice called forth in those ghostly traceries, as if the fortress already

existed, wrought of starlight and future time.

Every Rune, every circle, every sigil and smoke-trace had been placed individually,

by her hand or the hands of those who slept all around her huddled in the lee of the

Foci, broken by what they had done.

And to no avail, she thought. To no avail. She asked him, "Are they dead?"

He nodded.

"All of them?"

"All."

It was not the worst thing she had ever borne, but in some ways more painful than the

knowledge that the world's end was coming sooner than anyone had reckoned. She

had loved many of those who died last night.

"You should have asked our help."

He was unshaven under the filth; even the ends of his long hair, by which he was

nicknamed at Court, were tipped with grue. "It was the only chance you had, of

raising the power to do this." He had a voice like gravel and clinkers in an iron pan.

"The locking point of sun, moon, and stars, you said. The time of greatest power." He

swallowed, fighting pain. "It was worth what it cost."

She folded her arms across her breasts, bare beneath the midnight wool of her cloak.

The morning was very cold. Below her the murmur of water was loud where springs

had been broached in the rock. The smell of wet earth breathed up around them. Far

down the Vale where the trees grew thick at the head of the pass, birds were waking.

"No," she said. "For we failed. We put forth all our strength, and all our strength was

not enough. And all this-" The movement of her hand took in the half-raised walls,

the silent machines, the chasm of foundation, the whisper of water and of that half-

seen skeleton of light. "-all this will pass away, and leave us with nothing."

Her head bowed. She hadn't wept for years, not since one night when she'd seen a

truth too appalling to be contemplated in the color of the stars. But her grief was a

leaden darkness, seeming to pull them both down into the beginning of an endless

fall. "I'm sorry."

Book One

Fimbultide

Chapter One

"Do you see it?" Gil Patterson's voice was no louder than the scratch of withered

vines on the stained sandstone wall. Melding with the shadows was second nature to

her by now. The courtyard before them was empty and still, marble pavement

obscured by lichen and mud, and a small forest of sycamore suckers half concealed

the fire-black ruins of the hall, but she could have sworn that something had moved.

"Feel it?"

She edged forward a fraction of an inch, the better to see, taking care to remain still

within the ruined peristyle's gloom. "What is it?"

The possibility of ghosts crossed her mind.

The five years that had passed since eight thousand people died in this place in a

single night had been hard ones, but some of their spirits might linger.

"I haven't the smallest idea, my dear."

She hadn't heard him return to her from his investigation of the building's outer court:

he was a silent-moving man. Pitched for her hearing alone, his voice was of a curious

velvety roughness, like dark bronze broken by time. In the shadows of the crumbling

wall, and the deeper concealment of his hood, his blue eyes seemed very bright.

"But there is something."

"Oh, yes." Ingold Inglorion, Archmage of the wizards of the West, had a way of

listening that seemed to touch everything in the charred and sodden waste of the city

around them, living mid dead. "I suspect," he added, in a murmur that seemed more

within her mind than outside of it, "that it has stalked us since we passed the city

walls."

He made a sign with his hand, small, but five years travel with him in quest of books

and objects of magic among the ruins of cities populated only by bones and ghouls

had taught her to see those signs. Gil was as oblivious to magic as she was to ghosts-

or fairies, or UFOs, for that matter she would have added-but she could read the

summons of a cloaking spell, and she knew that Ingold's cloaking spells were more

substantial than most people's houses.

Thus what happened took her completely by surprise.

The court was a large one. Thousands had taken refuge in the house to which it

belonged, in the fond hope that stout walls and plenty of torchlight would prevent the

incursion of those things called only Dark Ones. Their skulls peered lugubriously

from beneath dangling curtains of colorless vines, white blurs in shadow.

It was close to noon, and the silver vapors from the city's slime-filled canals were

beginning to burn off, color struggling back to the red of fallen porphyry pillars, the

brave blues and gilts of tile. More than half the court lay under a leprous blanket of

the fat white juiceless fungus that surviving humans called slunch, and it was the

slunch that drew Gil's attention now.

Ingold was still motionless, listening intently in the zebra shadows of the blown-out

colonnade as Gil crossed to the edge of the stuff.

"It isn't just me, is it?" Her soft voice fell harsh as a blacksmith's hammer in the

unnatural hush.

"It's getting worse as we get farther south." As Gil knelt to study the tracks that

quilted the clay soil all along the edges of the slunch, Ingold's instruction-and that of

her friend the Icefalcon, rang half-conscious warning bells in her mind. What the hell

had that wolverine been trying to do? Run sideways? Eat its own tail? And that

rabbit-if those were rabbit tracks ... ? That had to be the mark of something caught in

its fur, but ...

"It couldn't have anything to do with what we're looking for, could it?" A stray breath

lifted the long tendrils of her hair, escaping like dark smoke from the braid jammed

under her close-fitting fur cap. "You said Maia didn't know what it was or what it did.

Was there anything weird about the animals around Penambra before the Dark

came?"

"Not that I ever heard." Ingold was turning his head as he spoke, listening as much as

watching. He'd put back the hood of his heavy brown mantle, and his white hair, long

and tatty from weeks of journeying, flickered in the gray air. He'd trimmed his beard

with his knife a couple of nights ago, and resembled St. Anthony after ten rounds with

demons in the wilderness.

Not, thought Gil, that anyone in this universe but herself and Ingold, because she'd

told him-knew who St. Anthony was. Maia of Thran, Bishop of Renweth, erstwhile

Bishop of Penambra and owner of the palace they sought, had told her tales of

analogous holy hermits who'd had similar problems.

Unprepossessing, she thought, to anyone who hadn't seen him in action. Almost

invisible, unless he wished to be seen. "And in any case we might as easily be dealing

with a factor of time rather than distance." Ingold held up his six-foot walking staff in

his blue-mittened left hand, but his right never strayed far from the hilt of the sword at

his side. "It's been ... Behind you!"

He was turning as he yelled, and his cry was the only reason the thing didn't take Gil

full in the back like a bobcat fastening onto a deer. She was drawing her own sword,

still on her knees but cutting as she whirled, and aware at the same moment of Ingold

drawing, stepping in, slashing. Ripping weight collided with Gil's upper arm and she

had a terrible impression of a short-snouted animal face, of teeth thrusting out of a

lifted mass of wrinkles, of something very wrong with the eyes ...

Pain and cold sliced her right cheek low on the jawbone. She'd already dropped the

sword, pulled her dagger; she slit and ripped and felt blood and intestines gush hotly

over her hand. The thing didn't flinch. Long arms like an ape's wrapped around her

shoulders, claws cutting through her sheepskin coat. It bit again at her face, going for

her eyes, its own back and spine wide open. Gil cut hard and straight across them

with seven-inch steel that could shave the hair off a man's arm. The teeth spasmed and

snapped, the smell of blood clogging her nostrils. Buzzing dizziness filled her. She

thought she'd been submerged miles deep in dry, living gray sand.

"Gil!" The voice was familiar but far-off, a fly on a ceiling miles above her head.

She'd heard it in dreams, maybe...

Her face hurt. The lips of the wound in her cheek were freezing now against the heat

of her blood. For some reason she had the impression she was waking up in her own

bed in the fortress Keep of Dare, far away in the Vale of Renweth. "What time is it?"

she asked. The pain redoubled and she remembered. Her head ached.

"Lie still." He bent over her, lined face pallid with shock. There was blood on the

sleeves of his mantle, on the blackish bison fur of the surcoat he wore over that. She

felt his fingers probe gently at her cheek and jaw. He'd taken off his mittens, and his

flesh was startlingly warm. The smell of the blood almost made her faint again. "Are

you all right?"

"Yeah." Her lips felt puffy, the side of her face a balloon of air. She put up her hand

and remembered, tore off her sodden glove, brushed her lips, then the corner of her

right eye with her fingertips. The wounds were along her cheekbone and jaw, sticky

with blood and slobber. "What was that thing?"

"Lie still a little more." Ingold unslung the pack from his shoulders and dug in it with

swift hands. "Then you can have a look."

All the while he was daubing a dressing of herb and willow bark on the wounds,

stitching them and applying linen and plaster-braiding in the spells of healing, of

resistance to infection and shock-Gil was conscious of him listening, watching,

casting again the unseen net of his awareness over the landscape that lay beyond the

courtyard wall.

Once he stood up, quickly, catching up the sword that lay drawn on the muddy marble

at his side, but whatever it was that had stirred the slunch was still then and made no

further move.

He knelt again. "Do you think you can sit up?"

"Depends on what kind of reward you offer me."

His grin was quick and shy as he put a hand under her arm. Dizziness came and went

in a long hot gray wave. She didn't want him to think her weak, so she didn't cling to

him as she wanted to, seeking the familiar comfort of his warmth.

She breathed a couple of times, hard, then said, "I'm fine. What the hell is it?"

"I was hoping you might be able to tell me."

"You're joking!"

The wizard glanced at the carcass-the short bulldog muzzle, the projecting chisel

teeth, the body a lumpy ball of fat from which four thick-scaled, ropy legs projected-

and made a small shrug. "You've identified many creatures in our world-the

mammoths, the bison, the horrible-birds, and even the dooic-as analogous to those

things that lived in your own universe long ago. I hoped you would have some lore

concerning this."

Gil looked down at it again. Something in the shape of the flat ears, of the fat, naked

cone of the tail-something about the smell of it-repelled her, not with alienness, but

with a vile sense of the half familiar. She touched the spidery hands at the ends of the

stalky brown limbs. It had claws like razors.

What the hell did it remind her of?

Ingold pried open the bloody jaws. "There," he said softly. "Look." On the outsides of

the gums, upper and lower, were dark, purplish, collapsed sacs of skin; Gil shook her

head, uncomprehending.

"How do you feel?"

"Okay. A little light-headed."

He felt her hands again and her wrists, shifting his fingers a little to read the different

depths of pulse. For all his unobvious strength, he had the gentlest touch of anyone

she had ever known.

Then he looked back down at the creature. "It's a thing of the cold," he said at last.

"Down from the north, perhaps? Look at the fur and the way the body fat is

distributed. I've never encountered an arctic animal with poison sacs-never a mammal

with them at all, in fact."

He shook his head, turning the hook-taloned fingers this way and that, touching the

flat, fleshy ears. "I've put a general spell against poisons on you, which should

neutralize the effects, but let me know at once if you feel in the least bit dizzy or short

of breath."

Gil nodded, feeling both slightly dizzy and short of breath, but nothing she hadn't felt

after bad training sessions with the Guards of Gae, especially toward the end of

winter when rations were slim. That was something else, in the five years since the

fall of Darwath, that she'd gotten used to.

Leaving her on the marble bench, with its carvings of pheasants and peafowl and

flowers that had not blossomed here in ten summers, Ingold bundled the horrible kill

into one of the hempen sacks he habitually carried, and hung the thing from the

branch of a sycamore dying at the edge of the slunch, wreathed in such spells as

would keep rats and carrion feeders at bay until they could collect it on their outward

journey.

Coming back to her, he sat on the bench at her side and folded her in his arms. She

rested her head on his shoulder for a time, breathing in the rough pungence of his

robes and the scent of the flesh beneath, wanting only to stay there in his arms,

unhurried, forever.

It seemed to her sometimes, despite the forty years difference in their ages, that this

was all she had ever wanted.

"Can you go on?" he asked at length. Carefully, he kissed the unswollen side of her

mouth. "We can wait a little."

"Let's go." She sat up, putting aside the comfort of his strength with regret. There

was time for that later. She wanted nothing more now than to find what they had

come to Penambra to find and get the hell out of town.

"Maia only saw the Cylinder once." Ingold scrambled nimbly ahead of her through

the gotch-eyed doorway of the colonnade and up over a vast rubble heap of charred

beams, shattered roof tiles, pulped woodwork, and broken stone welded together by a

hardened soak of ruined plaster. Mustard colored lichen crusted it, and a black tangle

of all-devouring vines in which patches of slunch grew like dirty mattresses dropped

from the sky. The broken statue of a female saint regarded them sadly from the mess:

Gil automatically identified her by the boat, the rose, and the empty cradle as St.

Thyella of Ilfers.

"Maia was always a scholar, and he knew that people were using fire as a weapon

against the Dark Ones. Whole neighborhoods gathered wherever they felt the walls

would hold-though they were usually wrong about that-and burn whatever they could

find, hoping a bulwark of light would serve should bulwarks of stone fail. They were

frequently wrong about that as well."

Gil said nothing. She remembered her first sight of the Dark. Remembered the

fleeing, uncomprehending mobs, naked and jolted from sleep, men and women falling

and dying as the blackness rolled over them. Remembered the thin, directionless

wind, the acid-blood smell of the predators, and the way fluid and matter would rain

over her when she slashed the amorphous, floating things in half with her sword.

They picked their way off the corpse of the building into a smaller court, its wooden

structures only a black frieze of ruin buried in weeds. On a fallen keystone the circled

cross of the Straight Faith was incised.

"Asimov wrote a story like that," Gil said.

" 'Nightfall.' " Ingold paused to smile back at her. "Yes." In addition to her historical

studies in the archives of the Keep of Dare, Gil had gained quite a reputation among

the Guards as a spinner of tales, passing along to them recycled Kipling and Dickens,

Austen and Heinlein, Doyle and Heyer and Coles, to ease the long Erebus of winter

nights.

And it's true," the old man went on. "People burned whatever they could find and

spent the hours of day hunting for more.'' His voice was grim and sad-those had been,

Gil understood, people he knew. Unlike many wizards, who tended to be recluses at

heart, Ingold was genuinely gregarious.

He'd had dozens of friends in Gae, the northern capital , and the Realm of Darwath,

and here in Penambra: families, scholars, a world of drinking buddies whom Gil had

never met. By the time she came to this universe, most were dead.

Three years ago she had gone with Ingold to Gae, searching for old books and objects

of magic in the ruins. Among the shambling, pitiful ghouls who still haunted the

broken cities, he recognized a man he had known.

Ingold had tried to tell him that the Dark Ones whose destruction had broken his mind

were gone and would come no more, and had narrowly missed being carved up with

rusty knives and clamshells for his pains. "I can't say I blame them for that."

"No," he murmured. "One can't." He stopped on the edge of a great bed of slunch that,

starting within the ruins of the episcopal palace, had spread out through its windows

and across most of the terrace that fronted the sunken, scummy chain of puddles that

had been Penambra's Grand Canal. "But the fact remains that a great deal was lost."

Motion in the slunch made him poke at it with the end of his staff, and a hard-shelled

thing like a great yellow cockroach lumbered from between the pasty folds and

scurried toward the palace doors.

Ingold had a pottery jar out of his bag in seconds and dove for the insect, swift and

neat. The roach turned, hissing and flaring misshapen wings; Ingold caught it midair

in the jar and slapped the vessel mouth down upon the pavement with the thing

clattering and scraping inside. It had flown straight at his eyes.

"Most curious." He slipped a square of card-and then the jar's broad wax stepper-

underneath, and wrapped a cloth over the top to seal it. "Are you well, my dear?"

For Gil had knelt beside the slunch, overwhelmed with sudden weariness and

stabbed by a hunger such as she had not known for months. She broke off a piece of

the slunch, like the cold detached cartilage of a severed ear, and turned it over in her

fingers, wondering if there were any way it could be cooked and eaten.

Then she shook her head, for there was a strange, metallic smell behind the stuff's

vague sweetness-not to mention the roach. She threw the bit back into the main mass.

"Fine," she said.

As he helped her to stand, there was a sound, a quick, furtive scuffling in the slate-

hued night of the empty palace. The dizziness returned nauseatingly as Gil slewed to

listen. She gritted her teeth, fighting the darkness from her eyes.

"Rats, you think?" They were everywhere in the city, and huge.

Ingold's blue eyes narrowed, the small scars on the eyelids and on the soft flesh

beneath pulling in a wrinkle of knife-fine lines. "It smells like them, yes. But just

before you were attacked, there were five separate disturbances of that kind in all

directions around me, drawing my attention from you. The vaults are this way, if I

remember aright."

Since her coming to this world in the wake of the rising of the Dark, Gil had guarded

Ingold's back. The stable crypt opening into the vaults had been half torn apart by the

Dark Ones, and Gil's hair prickled with the memory of those bodiless haunters as she

picked her way after him through a vestibule whose mud floor was broken by a sea-

wrack of looted chests, candlesticks, and vermin-scattered bones. An inner door gave

onto a stairway. There was a smell of water below, a cold exhalation like a grave.

"When the vigilantes started hunting the city for books-for archives, records, anything

that would burn-Maia let them have what he could spare as a sop and hid the rest."

Ingold's voice echoed wetly under the downward-sloping ceiling, and something

below, fleeing the blue-white light that burned from the end of his staff, plopped in

water.

"He bricked up some of the archives in old cells of the episcopal dungeon and

sounded walls in the vaults to find other rooms that had been sealed long ago, where

he might cache the oldest volumes, of which no other known copy existed. It was one

of these vaults that he found the Cylinder."

Water lay five or six inches deep in the maze of cells and tunnels that constituted the

palace vaults. The light from Ingold's raised staff glittered sharply on it as Gil and the

old mage waded between decaying walls plastered thick with slunch, mold, and dim-

glowing niter. The masonry was of a heavy pattern far older than the more finished

stones of Gae. Penambra predated the northern capital at Gae; predated the first rising

of the Dark thousands of years ago- long predated any memory of humankind's. Maia

himself came to Gil's mind, a hollow-cheeked skeleton with arthritis crippled hands,

laughing with Ingold over his own former self, a foppish dilettante whose aristocratic

protector had bought the bishopric for him long before he was of sufficient years to

have earned it.

Perhaps he hadn't really earned it until the night he hid the books-the night he led his

people out of the haunted ruins of their city to the only safe place they knew. Renweth

Vale, and the black-walled Keep of Dare.

Before a bricked-up doorway, Ingold halted. Gil remained a few paces behind him,

calf-deep in freezing water, analyzing every sound, every rustle, every drip and dull

moan of the wind, fighting not to shiver and not to think of the poison that might be in

her veins. Still, she thought, if the thing's bite was poisoned, it didn't seem to be too

serious. God knew she'd gone through sufficient exertion for it to have killed her

twice if it was going to.

Ingold passed his hand across the dripping masonry and murmured a word. Gil saw

no change in the mortar, but Ingold set his staff against the wall-the light still glowing

steadily from its tip, as from a lantern-and pulled a knife from his belt, with which he

dug the mortar as if it were putty desiccated by time. As he tugged loose the bricks,

she made no move to help him, nor did he expect her to. She only watched and

listened for the first signs of danger. That was what it was to wear the black uniform,

the white quatrefoil emblem, of the Guards of Gae.

Ingold left the staff leaning in the corridor, to light the young woman's watch. As a

mage, he saw clearly in the dark.

Light of a sort burned through the ragged hole left in the bricks, a sickly owl-glow

shed by slunch that grew all over the walls of the tiny chamber beyond, illuminating

nothing. The stuff stretched a little as Ingold pulled it from the trestle tables it had

almost covered; it snapped with powdery little sighs, like rotted rubber, to reveal

leather wrappings protecting the books. "Archives," the wizard murmured. "Maia did

well."

The Cylinder was in a wooden box in a niche on the back wall. As long as Gil's hand

from wrist bones to farthest fingertip, and just too thick to be circled by her fingers, it

appeared to be made of glass clear as water. Those who had lived in the Times

Before-before the first rising of the Dark Ones, seemed to have favored plain

geometrical shapes. Ingold brushed the thing with his lips, then set it on a corner of

the table and studied it, peering inside for reflections, Gil thought. By the way he

handled it, it was heavier than glass would have been.

In the end he slipped it into his rucksack. "Obviously one of Maia's predecessors

considered it either dangerous or sacrilegious." He stepped carefully back through the

hole in the bricks, took up his staff again. "Goodness knows there were centuries-and

not too distant ones-during which magic was anathema and people thought nothing of

bricking up wizards along with their toys. That room was spelled with the Rune of the

Chain, which inhibits the use of magic ... Heaven only knows what they destroyed

over the course of the years. But this . . ." He touched the rucksack.

"Someone thought this worth the guarding, the preserving, down through the

centuries. And that alone makes it worth whatever it may have cost us."

He touched the dressings on the side of her swollen face. At the contact, she felt

stronger, warmer inside. "It is not unappeciated, my dear."

She looked away. She had never known what to say in the presence of love, even after

she'd stopped consciously thinking When he finds out what kind of person I am, he'll

leave.

Ingold, to her ever-renewed surprise, evidently really did love her, exactly as she was.

She still didn't know why. ''It's my job," she said.

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