Mother of Winter by Barbara Hambly Page A

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 stay-put 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 dottedwith 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 hairof 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