Darwath Book 4

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."

Some of Ingold's lore concerned gaboogoos, and they almost certainly didn't exist, though legends of them persisted, mostly in the southeast. But in any case, according to most of those legends, gaboogoos were humanoid: blue, glowing, and "clothed as richly as princes," a description that made Rudy wonder where they and similar fairy folk purchased size minus-triple-zero petite doublets and gowns. Same place superheroes order those nonwrinkle tights from, I guess. On the other hand, of course, he hadn't believed in dragons, either, until he'd been attacked by one.

"Whatever it is, it sure as hell isn't supposed to be here." Rudy looked around him uneasily, then down at the boy again. As the first shock and alarm wore off, the implications were coming home to him.

Something was living in the upper reaches of the Keep. Something he'd never seen, had never heard of-which probably meant Ingold had never heard of it, either. The old man had sure never mentioned weird little eyeless gremlins to him. And that meant... Rudy wasn't entirely sure what it did mean, except that it meant big trouble somewhere. "I think it's time we got you home, Ace." He took Tir's hand. "But you said it was smaller than me," Tir protested. "And it didn't have a mouth or teeth or anything. And I want to see it. Maybe it's got a treasure." "Maybe it's got claws," Rudy said firmly, leading the way back toward the cell where the steps descended. Oddly, he couldn't remember whether it had or not. "Maybe it's got great big long skinny fingers to strangle you with." Maybe it's got a big brother. Or lots of big brothers.

"But what about the... the earth-apples, the potatoes?" Tir pronounced the word carefully, and with a good imitation of Rudy's clipped California accent. "If you've got to go to the River Settlements with Master Graw tomorrow, we won't be able to look for them for days."

"If they've kept for a couple thousand years, they'll keep for another three, four days." Rudy glanced behind him at the corridor as they entered the cell where the stair led down. His concentration had not been up to maintaining the full white magelight for more than a few minutes, and it had faded and shrunk around them until it was once more two smoky stars on the points of the metal crescent that topped his staff. "Besides, I'll be damned if I'm leaving this place till I figure out what's going on, Master Graw or no Master Firetrucking Graw." He held the staff down through the hole that led back to the fourth level, to make sure the cell below was empty and safe, and watched Tir carefully as the boy climbed down. In the few seconds that took, he also managed to glance over his shoulder at the cell doorway behind him seven or eight or maybe ten times.

He hadn't realized how much, in the past five years, he had taken for granted the safety within the walls of the Keep.

"You're sure it wasn't an illusion?" Ingold asked a short time later.

Rudy considered the matter, propping his shoulders against the dyed sheepskins, bison pelts, and pillows of knit-craft and leather that made homey the pine-pole bench in the big workroom on first south that he and Ingold shared.

"I dunno," he said at length. He tilted the scrying crystal in his hand so that the older wizard's image, tiny but clear, shone more brightly in the jewel's depths. By the look of it, the old man was in a ruined villa at Willowchild, four or five days' journey from Renweth Vale.

The sight filled-him with relief. He didn't feel capable of dealing with what he'd seen earlier that evening-or what he thought he'd seen. "I'm usually pretty good at spotting an illusion," he went on slowly. "And this didn't feel like one."

At the other end of the bench, Alde curled up like a child, her feet tucked under her green wool gown and her long black hair loosened for sleep, as it had been when he and Tir had come in to tell her what he had seen. Despite the lateness of the hour-the Keep was settling into somnolence around them-the boy was wide-awake, watching Rudy's end of the conversation with vivid interest.

"It didn't have a sound or a smell to it. Pugsley and I were looking for stuff the old guys hid... And hey, you know what? The Guy with the Cats, from the record crystals? He was the one Tir remembered seeing in the Keep all those years ago! He described him perfectly. So we know when he lived! But Tir didn't see squat, did you, kid?"

"Not squat," the boy affirmed. Though he had demonstrated an almost preternatural ability to separate the formal intonations of proper speech from the combination of peasant dialect and barrio slang that Rudy and most of the herdkids spoke, Alde rolled her eyes.

"Hmm," Ingold said and scratched a corner of his beard. Rudy had been half hoping the older wizard would say, Oh, THOSE eyeless, rubbery, mysterious critters, but at least he hadn't blanched, clutched his heart, and cried, Dear God, stay together and barricade the doors! either.

"Well, we can't rule out that it was an illusion," Ingold finally said. "And considering the stringency with which the Guards protect the Doors, and the spells of Ward written over the steps, the doorposts, and the inner and outer doors themselves, it's difficult to see how something could have gotten in, though of course that doesn't mean it didn't. The Ward captains at the back end of the fifth aren't going to like it much. Koram Biggar and Old Man Wicket and the Gatsons have been raising chickens illegally up there, and never mind what it does to the rat population of their neighbors' cells-but I think you need to have the Guards make a thorough sweep."

He considered the matter a moment, his sharp blue eyes distant with thought, then added, "Tell them to take dogs."

The Guards swept that night. And the Guards found nothing. It was after midnight when they began their search, and it was not a popular one. They swept the fourth level and the fifth, back away from the inhabited regions around the Aisle, where the corridors lay straight and cold and uncompromising far from the water sources and curled tight and thick where they had been, or still were, perhaps.

They questioned those who lived there about things seen or smelled or found, and heard no word of strange droppings, or food missing, or odd or unwarranted smells. Not that one could tell in some places, Rudy reflected dourly, and there was trouble, as Ingold had predicted, with the Biggar clan, and the Browns, and the Gatsons, and the Wickets, and others who resented being taken to task for their disregard of Keep health regulations.

"Hell, it ain't botherin' no one!" protested Old Man Gatson, a sour-faced patriarch whose family occupied the least desirable tangle of cells on fifth north-least desirable because there was no waste disposal for many hundred feet. "What about the people who live directly underneath?" Janus of Weg demanded, disgusted and exasperated at the sight of the stinking, swarming boxes and jars heaped up in an abandoned cell. "Who gets your cockroaches?" "Pah," the old man snarled. "It's Varkis Hogshearer that lives underneath and he can have my cockroaches-and what they live off, too! Twenty-five percent he charged me for the loan of seed wheat-twenty-five percent! He's lucky I don't-'' "That'll be enough of that," the commander snapped, while Rudy and the Icefalcon drifted silently down the corridor toward the empty darkness beyond the Gatsons' warren, listening: Up here, away from the thick-settled regions of the Keep, Rudy sensed the ghosts of old magic in the smooth black stone of the walls. Magic that had defeated the Dark Ones; magic that turned the eyes of ordinary folk aside. Magic that did things Rudy could not identify. But he could feel it as he might feel cold or heat, a kind of magnetism, a tingling in his fingertips or a sense that someone stood quite close beside him whispering words in a language he could not understand.

Wizards had raised the Keep. Their laboratory still existed, deep in the crypts near the hydroponics chambers. Of the great machines that had been made and stored there, nothing remained but scratches and stains on the floor-what had become of them, Rudy hated to think.

Smaller, largely incomprehensible equipment of gold and glass and shining tubes of silver had been found, hidden when the old mages themselves had vanished. Echoes of their spells lingered in places: in addition to selected cells in the Church sector, where no magic whatsoever would work, there was a cell on second north where Rudy's powers, and Ingold's, were sometimes magnified, sometimes disturbingly randomized, so that spells had different effects from those intended, and a Summoning would frequently result in the appearance of something appallingly other than that which had been called.

Ingold had found a three-foot-long section of corridor on fifth south where he could speak in a whisper and Rudy, if he stood at a particular spot in the third level of the crypts, could hear every word.

There was a room in the crypts that would kill any animal, except a cat, that walked into it-including the one human being who had tried it and a corner of what had been a chamber on third south where from time to time letters would appear on the wall, smudgily written in light as if traced with someone's fingertip, spelling out words not even Ingold understood. The corner had been bricked off from the main cell in a subsequent renovation-the main cell itself was currently used as a store-room.

So why couldn't the Guy with the Cats have guarded his bewitched potatoes with visions of little eyeless gremlins? Rudy didn't think so, however. Arms folded, he probed at the sunless silence, listened deeply into the chambers all around him and down that empty hall, tracking the footfalls of the Guards as they carried their torches and glowstones from doorway to doorway. Grimy streaks of yellowish light marked flea-ridden curtains or shutters with broken slats. Skinny men and women, feral children with hungry eyes, came to the doors of cells, resentful at being waked and asked, "Any food missing? Anything disturbed, prints... Cats afraid? Any places the children have spoken of as wrong, or odd?" "No, sir... No, sir. Why, my Jeddy, she been all over this level like it was her own warren. She'd have let me know soon enough if there was suthin' amiss in the corners in the dark. You tell the man, Jeddy."

The statue of an enormously plump saint in a chalky, yellowy-white robe smiled beneficently from a niche between two tallow candles, and Rudy felt uneasy, filled with a sense of looking at clues he did not understand.

Ingold sat for a long time after Rudy ceased speaking-after Gil presumed that Rudy had ceased speaking, for she could hear nothing of what Ingold heard when he used the scrying crystal-turning the two-inch shard of yellowish quartz over and over in scarred, thick-muscled fingers, firelight honeying the white hairs that dusted their backs.

Outside the villa's crumbling walls Gil could hear the far-off ululations of wolftalk, and nearby, Yoshabel the mule stamped and laid back her ears, her eyes green-gold mirrors of brainless malice.

Waking to the sound of Ingold's voice, Gil had for a time been so overwhelmed with rage at him, so filled with the conviction that the throbbing agony in her face and all the sorrows in her life were his doing, that she had had to close her hands around a broken projection of marble in the packed earth near her blankets and stare at the dim pattern of firelight among her knuckle bones until the anger went away. For no particular reason, she thought of Sherry Reinhold, the beautiful blond, tanned, aerobics-perfect classmate who'd been one of the few to be friendly with her in high school.

Sherry had become an airline stewardess and had married a dentist and acquired a house the size of one of the smaller campus buildings. Meanwhile, Gil herself was still struggling with the poverty and frustration of the UCLA graduate program in medieval history.

She remembered Sherry sitting across from her at the Bicycle Shop Cafe in Westwood, saying, "I don't know why I do it. I don't even like the taste of alcohol. I know getting drunk isn't going to solve anything, or help anything, or do anything but screw me up worse. And then I'm sitting there with eleven empty glasses in front of me telling some man I've never seen before my telephone number and the directions to my house."

That had been after the divorce. "It's like the words `Oh, have another one' come out of the empty air, not connected to anything-not the past or the future or anything real-and it's the rightest and sanest and most sensible thing in the universe. I have to do it." Kill him. Kill Ingold.

The rightest and most sensible thing in the universe.

She closed her eyes. Wondered what she had dreamed about, her mother and sister?-that had made her at once angry and convinced that nothing she would ever do would bring her happiness again.

Though she had spoken to him of the dreams, of the terrible urgings that swamped her mind, he had refused to bind her hands. "You may need your weapons, my dear, at

any moment," he had said. "And I trust you."

"You shouldn't." They were standing under the dying sycamore tree in the courtyard where she had first been attacked, looking down at the ripped sack that lay on the ground. It contained what little was left of the thing that had attacked her, torn down and chewed by vermin as if no spells had been placed upon it, as if no Wards had ringed the tree.

"Then I trust myself," he had said, picking up the maggoty hindquarter and stowing it-and the remains of the original bag-in another sack pulled from Yoshabel's numerous packs.

"Whatever it is that is driving you to assault me, if it can quicken your timing and get you out of the lamentable habit of telegraphing your side lunges, I'd like to meet it." He'd smiled at her-with Ingold as one of her swordmasters, she could take on almost any of the other Guards and win-and Gil responded to his teasing with a grin and a flick at him with the pack rope. Even that small and playful assault he'd sidestepped as effortlessly, she knew, as he would have avoided a lethal blow. "Thoth?" she heard Ingold say softly now. "Thoth, can you hear me? Are you there?" She turned her head and looked. A slice of amber light lay across one scarred eyelid and down his cheekbone, refracted from the crystal in his hand. His brows, down-drawn in a bristle of fire-flecked shadow, masked the sockets of his eyes. "Has that ever happened before?" she asked. "Before last week, I mean?" He raised his head, startled. "I'm sorry, my dear, did I wake you? No," he answered her question, when she signed that it didn't matter. "And the troubling thing is, I've frequently had the sensation that Thoth-or one of the other Gettlesand wizards-is trying to signal me, but for some reason cannot get through." He got up from his place by the fire, crossed the room to her, a matter of two or three steps only. The former library was one of the few remaining chambers with four walls and a roof, though the wooden latticework of the three wide windows had been broken out.

Flickering ember-light revived the velvety crimson memory of the frescoes on the wall, lent renewed color to the faces of those attenuated ghosts acting out scenes from a once-popular romance.

She curved her body a little to make room, and Ingold sat beside her, still turning the crystal in his hand. "I had hoped," he went on quietly, "that if Rudy could get through to me I would be able to get through to Thoth, but that doesn't seem to be the case. There's only a deep sense of... of pressure, of heat, like a river far beneath the earth. Like a rope pulled taut and about to snap." He put the crystal away and sat silent for a time, gazing at the broken window bars and toying one-fingered with a corner of his beard.

"What did Rudy have to say?"

Ingold told her. At his description of the thing Rudy called a gaboogoo, she was seized with the flashing sensation of familiarity, a tip-of-the-tongue impression that she had seen such a thing, or dreamed about it, but the next instant it was gone. Her dreams had been strange, and even deeper than the urge to hurt Ingold, to destroy him, was the reluctance to speak to him of the things she saw in them... And indeed, when she tried to frame those bleak, fungoid landscapes of pillowlike vegetation, the amorphous, shining shapes that writhed through it or flopped heavily a few feet above its surface, the very memory of those visions dissolved and she couldn't recall what it was that she had seen.

And so it happened here. When Ingold paused, raising his eyebrows at her intaken breath, her words jammed in her throat, like a stutter, or like tears that refused to be wept, and she could not remember whether she had dreamed about such a thing or not. She shook her head, embarrassed, and was deeply thankful when Ingold only nodded and said, "Interesting."

And she thought, almost as if she heard a voice saying it in the back of her mind, It will appear at the window. She didn't know what it was, but she automatically checked her hand's distance from the sword that lay next to her blankets and mentally triangulated on where Ingold's back would be when he turned his head.

Her mind was starting to protest,... like Sherry Reinhold... when Yoshabel threw up her head and squealed in terror.

Ingold swung around; Gil came out of her blankets like a coiled spring, catching up the scabbarded blade and drawing in a single fluid, killing move. She had a dim awareness of something large and pale clinging to the lattice with limbs more like pincers than claws, of a round fanged mouth where no mouth should be and of a wet flopping sound, all subsumed by the vicious calculation of target and stroke. She wrenched the blade around and drove it into the dirt with a chop that nearly dislocated her wrists, hardly aware that she cried out as she did so, only knowing afterward, as she stood shaking like a spent runner with her hair hanging in her eyes, that her throat hurt and the painted walls were echoing with an animal scream.

Ingold was already moving back toward her; she rasped "No!" and fell to her knees, sweating, the wound in her face radiating a heat that consumed her being.

There was an interim when she wasn't able to see anything beyond her own whiteknuckled hands gripping the sword hilt, was conscious of nothing but a wave of nausea, but he must have used the moment to stride to the window. In any case, he returned instants later. The thing outside had vanished.

"Are you all right?"

His voice came from a great distance away, a dull roaring like the sound within a shell. Though her eyes were open, she saw for a moment a vision of red laced with tumbling diamond fire. Then he was holding her, and she was clinging to the coarse brown wool of his robe, her face crushed to his shoulder, gripping the barrel chest and the hard rib cage to her as if they both floated in a riptide and she feared to be washed away.

"Gilly..." He whispered her nicknames. "Gillifer, beloved, it's all right... it's all right."

The desire to pull out her knife and shove it up between his ribs drowned her in a red wave, nauseating her again. She locked her hands behind his back, fighting the voices in her mind. Then the rage ebbed, leaving in its wake only the wet shingle of failure and utter despair.

As Rudy suspected, Graw's urgent demand that something be done about slunch meant that patches of it had developed in his fields and pastures-which happened to lie on the best and most fertile ground in that section of the Arrow River bottomlands. Though the sun had long since vanished behind the Hammerking's tall head when the little party reached its goal-what had once been a medium-sized villa, patched and expanded with log-and-mud additions and surrounded by what Rudy still thought of as a Wild West-style wooden palisade, Graw insisted that Rudy make a preliminary investigation of the problem.

The villa and fort were Graw's homestead, and everyone in them a member of the red-haired man's family, an outright servant, or a smallholder who had pledged fealty in exchange for protection.

Three of the nobles who had made the journey to the Keep from Gae had established such settlements as well, populated both by retainers and men-at-arms who had served them before the rising of the Dark, and by those farmers who sought their protection or owed them money.

Even had Gil not filled Rudy in on their own world's Dark Ages, he'd have been able to see where that practice was leading. It was one reason he'd acceded to Minalde's pleading, in spite of his own unwillingness to leave the Keep with the gaboogoo question unanswered.

That, and the white look around her mouth when she'd said, "It's only a day's journey." The livestock at the Keep would need hay from the riverbottoms to survive the winter. Not all the broken remnants of the great Houses were particularly mindful of their vows to Alde as the Lady of the Keep.

She didn't need more problems than the ones she already had.

"Now, when you folk up there started putting all kinds of rules on us instead of letting us go our own way," Graw groused in his grating, self-pitying caw, "I had my doubts, but I was willing to give Lady Alde consideration. I mean, she'd been queen all her life and was used to it, and I thought maybe she did know more about this than me."

He shoved big rufous hands into the leather of his belt as he strode along the edge of the fields, Rudy trailing at his heels. The split rails of the fences had been reinforced with stout earth banks and a chevauxde-frise of sharpened stakes, heavier even than the ones around the Keep wheat fields that discouraged moose and the great northern elk. This looked designed to keep out mammoths.

"I did ask why we were supposed to send back part of our harvest, and everybody said, 'Oh, shut up, Graw, it's because the Keep is the repository of all True Laws and wonderful knowledge and everything that makes civilization-' "

"I thought the vote went that way because you were taking Keep seed, Keep axes and plows, and Keep stock," Rudy said, cutting off the heavy-handed sarcasm, vaulting over the fence in his host's wake.

Graw's face reddened still further in the orange sunset light. "Any organism that doesn't have the courage to grow will die!" he bellowed. "The same applies to human societies. Those who try to hang on to all the old ways, to haggle as if the votes of ten yapping cowards are somehow more significant than a true man of the land who's willing to go out and do something-"

"When did this stuff start to grow here?" Rudy had had about enough of the Man of the Land. He halted among the rustling, leathery cornstalks, just where the plants began to droop lifeless. They lay limp and brown in a band a yard or so wide, and beyond that he could see the fat white fingers of the slunch.

"Just after the first stalks started to come up." Graw glared at him as if he'd sneaked down from the Vale in the middle of the night and planted the slunch himself. "You don't think we'd have wasted the seed in a field where the stuff was already growing, do you?"

Rudy shook his head, though he privately considered Graw the sort of man who'd do precisely that rather than waste what he wanted to consider good acreage, particularly if that acreage was his. Silly git probably told himself the situation wouldn't get any worse.

"So it's gone from nothing to-what? About twelve feet by eighteen?-in four weeks? Have the other patches been growing this fast?"

"How the hell should I know?" Graw yelled. "We've got better things to do than run around with measuring tapes! What I want to know is what you plan to do about it!"

"Well, you know," Rudy said conversationally, turning back toward the fence, "even though I've known the secret of getting rid of this stuff for the past three years, I've kept it to myself and just let it grow all over the fields around the Keep. But I tell you what: I'll tell you."

"Don't you get impertinent with me, boy!"

"Then don't assume I'm not doing my job to the best of my ability," Rudy snapped. "I'll come out here in the morning to take a good look at this stuff, but-" Voices halooed in the woods beyond the field, and there was a great crashing in the thickets of maple and hackberry along the dense green verge of the trees. Someone yelled, "Whoa, there she goes!" and another cried, "Oh, mine, mine!" There was laughter, like the clanging of iron pots.

Rudy ran to the fence, swung himself up on the rails between two of the stakes in time to see a dark figure break from the thickets, running along the waste-ground near the fence for the shelter of the rocks by the stream.

Two of Graw's hunters pelted out of the woods, young ruffians in deer leather dyed brown and green, arrows nocked, and Graw called out, exasperated but tolerant, "Oh, for heaven's sake, it's only a damn dooic!"

It was a female-mares, some people called them, or hinnies-with one baby clutched up against the fur of her belly and another, larger infant clinging hard around her neck, its toes clutching at the longer fur of her back. She ran with arms swinging, bandy legs pumping hard, dugs flapping as she zigzagged toward the tangle of boulders and willow, but Rudy could see she wasn't going to make it. One hunter let fly with an arrow, which the hinny dodged, stumbling. The smaller pup jarred loose as she scrambled up, and the other hunter, a snaggle-haired girl, laughed and called out, "Hey, you dropped one, Princess!" The bowman fired again as the hinny wheeled, diving for the silent pup in the short, weedy grass.

The hinny jerked back from the arrow that seemed to appear by magic in the earth inches from her face. For an instant she stared, transfixed, at the red-feathered shaft, at the man who had fired and the wriggling black shape of the pup: huge brown eyes under the heavy pinkish shelf of brow, lips pressed forward like pale velvet from the longer fur around them in an expression of panic, trying to think. Graw muttered, "Oh, for heaven's sake," and whipped an arrow from the quiver at his belt. He carried his bow strung, on his back, as most of the men in the Settlements did; nocking and firing was a single move.

Rudy reached with his thought and swatted Graw's arrow as if it had been a stinging fly. At the same moment he spoke a word in the silence of his mind, and the bowstring of the male hunter snapped, the weapon leaping out of his hands and the nocked arrow, drawn back for another shot, jerking wild.

The man cursed-seventy-five pounds of tension breaking does damage-and the hinny, gauging her chance, slipped forward, grabbed the pup by one foot, and flung herself in a long rolling dive for the rocks.

"You watch what you're goddamn doing!" Graw bellowed, snatching Rudy by the shoulder and throwing him backward from the fence.

As he hit the ground, Rudy could hear the girl hunter screaming and the retreating, furious rustle of the streamside laurels as the hinny made good her escape. Breath knocked out of him, he rolled, in case Graw were moved to kick him, and got back to his feet, panting, his long reddish-black hair hanging in his eyes. Graw was standing foursquare in front of him, braced as for a fight: "Go on, use your magic against me!" he yelled, slapping his chest. "I'm unarmed! I'm helpless! I'm just trying to protect our fields from those stinking vermin!"

Rudy felt his whole body heat with a blister of shame. Ingold had taught him what he had to do next, and his soul cringed from it as his hand would have cringed from open flame. The man was hurt, and Rudy was a healer.

Turning his back on Graw, he slipped through the stakes in the fence and strode up the broken slope toward the hunter who lay among the weeds. The buckskin-clad girl

knelt over him, her wadded kerchief held to his broken nose. Both raised their heads as Rudy approached through the tangle of hackberry and fern, hatred and terror in their eyes; before he got within ten yards of them the girl had pulled the hunter to his feet, and snatching up their bows, both of them fled into the green shadows of the pines.

The shame was like being rolled in hot coals. He had used magic against a man who had none and who was not expecting an attack. He had, he realized, damaged the position of wizards and wizardry more by that single impulsive act than he could have by a year of scheming for actual power.

Ingold would have something to say to him. He didn't even want to think about what that would be.

He stood still, feeling suffocated, hearing behind him Graw's bellowing voice without distinguishing words beyond, "I shoulda known a goddamn wizard would..." Rudy didn't stay to hear what Graw knew about goddamn wizards. Silently he turned and made his way down the rough, sloping ground to the fence, and along it toward the fort as the half-grown children of the settlement were driving in the cattle and sheep from the fields.

The long spring evening was finally darkening toward actual night, the tiger-lily brilliance of reds and golds above the mountains rusting to cinnabar as indigo swallowed the east. Crickets skreeked in the weeds along the fence row, and by the stream Rudy could hear the peeping of frogs, an orchestral counterpoint to Graw's bellowed commentary. Well, he thought tiredly, so much for supper.

He was not refused food when the extended household set planks on trestles in the main hall to eat. What he was offered was some of the best in the household. But it was offered in silence, and there was a wariness in the eyes of everyone who looked at him and then looked away.

The bowman whose nose he'd broken sat at the other end of the table from him, bruises darkening horribly; he was, Rudy gathered, an extremely popular man. Rudy recalled what Ingold had told him about wizards being poisoned, or slipped drugs like yellow jessamine or passion-flower elixirs that would dull their magic so they could be dealt with, and found himself without much appetite for dinner. The huntress' eyes were on him from the start of the meal to its finish, cold and hostile, and he heard her whispering behind his back whenever he wasn't looking. After the meal was over, no one, not even those who were clearly sick, came to speak to him.

Great, Rudy thought, settling himself under a smoky pine torch at the far end of the hall and pulling his mantle and bison-hide vest more closely around him. The women grouped by the fire to spin and sew had started to gather up their things to leave when he approached, so he left them to work in the warmth, and contented himself with the cold of the far end of the hall.

I guess this is why Ingold makes himself so damn invisible all the time. It didn't take a genius to realize that from fear like this it was only a short step to bitter resentment. Especially with little Miss Buckskin helping things along with her mouth.

Ingold- and Minalde-would have to put in weeks of P.R. and cleanup over this one. From a pocket of the vest he took his scrying stone, an amethyst crystal twice the width of his thumb and nearly as long as his palm, and tilted its facets toward the light.

And there she was. Alde, cutting out a new tunic for herself by the light of three glowstones, working carefully around the unaccustomed bulk of her belly-smiling a

little and reaching up to adjust the gold pins in her hair, final jeweled relics of the wealth of the High King's realm.

Tir and Geppy Nool and a little girl named Thya, made cat's cradles of the wool from the knitting basket, and Thya's mother, Linnet-a slim brown woman of thirty or so who was Alde's maid and good friend-knitted and talked. The black walls of the chamber were bright with familiar hangings; Alde's cat Archbishop stalked a trailing end of yarn, dignified lunacy in his golden eyes.

Uneasy, Rudy tilted the crystal, calling to being in it the corridors of the fourth level, and the fifth; picturing in his mind the chalky little gremlin he had seen. But there was nothing. No sign of the creature anywhere in the Keep. That didn't mean it wasn't there. The Dead Cells in the Church territory and some of the royal prisons were proof against Rudy's scrying-there were other cells as well from which he could not summon an image.

But it was hard to believe that the eyeless critter, whatever it was, knew where those were.

Whatever it was...

On impulse he cleared his mind and summoned to his thoughts the image of Thoth Serpentmage, Recorder of Quo: shaven-headed, yellow-eyed, hawk-nosed, brooding over broken fragments of pottery and scrolls in the patched, eroded Black Rock Keep in Gettlesand, the scribe of the wizards of the West.

But no image came. Nothing showed in the crystal, where a moment ago he'd seen the distant reflection of Minalde and Tir and the room he knew so well. No wizard could be seen without that wizard's consent, of course, but a wizard would know, would feel, the scrying crystal calling to him. And Rudy felt only a kind of blankness, like a darkness; and below that a curious deep sense of something... some power, like the great heavy pull of a tidal force. He shook his head to clear it. "What the hell...?"

After a moment's consideration he called in his mind the image of the mage Kara of Black Rock, wife to its lord, Tomec Tirkenson. But only that same deep darkness met his quest, the same sense of... of what? he wondered. Foreboding. Power, spells... a breathlessness fraught with a sensation of crushing, a sensation of movement, a sensation of anger. Anger? Like a river under the earth, the thought came to him... And yet there was something about it that was familiar to him, that he almost knew. Why did he think of California?

One by one he summoned them to mind: red-haired, beautiful Ilae; shy Brother Wend; Dakis the Minstrel, who could herd the clouds with the sound of his lute; and even Kara's horrible old mother, Nan-all the wizards who had taken refuge in the Keep of Gettlesand, when five years ago they had been exiled from Renweth by one of the stupider orders of the fanatic Bishop Govannin, now mercifully departed. It was the same. It was always the same.

With an automatic reflex Rudy shook the crystal, as if to jar loose molecules back to their proper place. Delighted shrieking from the center of the big room drew his attention. The settlement children were playing some kind of jump-out-and-scream game.

Rudy looked up as they scattered, in time to see a child hidden beneath a bench brandishing a homemade doll above the level of the seat. "It's Mr. Creepy-in-the-Woods! Mr. Creepy-in-the-Woods is gonna get you!" The children all screamed as if enveloped by goblins.

With its long stalky arms, its minute legs-with its tasseled, beaded bud of an eyeless head swinging wildly on a spindle neck, Mr. Creepy-in-the-Woods was the tiny twin of the thing Rudy had seen in the Keep.