Darwath Book 4

Chapter Six

"Look, guys, it's not that I don't appreciate the hospitality, but you gotta admit it's getting a little thick in here."

Rudy Solis started to rise, and George-the old dooic whom Rudy had decided bore a more than superficial resemblance to a comedian in his own world of that name-darted four-legged to the hole that led to the long and twisting passageway to the outer world, sat down in front of it, and bared his yellowing tusks. It was a ritual gesture-at this point Rudy didn't really think George was going to bite him, though the discolored fangs were darn good for a guy that age-but he understood what it meant and backed to the wall again. "Okay. I'm cool. So what the hell do you want?"

None of the dooic in the cave had laid a hand on Rudy, or come near him. There were perhaps a dozen of them, a small band as dooic went, mostly the wiry, dark-furred variety, though one or two of those with graying muzzles were large enough and scarred on the wrists and back in such a way that Rudy guessed they had been domestic slaves before the rising of the Dark.

They huddled at the far side of the low-roofed, sandy-floored chamber around a fire that George had kindled by merely looking at the wood, in the age-old manner of wizards.

Rudy was still amazed. I'll be buggered. Dooic have magic. He could not have been more surprised if he'd learned the same thing about tree frogs. He settled down to watch the movements of the band. With one worried dark eye still on Rudy, George moved away from the entrance again, to admit three or four more of the tribe, who hauled after them dead branches and chunks of half-rotted logs. These they stacked in a corner of the cave. The cave itself, though wide and deep, was only about five feet high at its tallest, tapering at the back to little more than a horizontal crack that vanished into darkness, and the whole place reeked of carrion, smoke, and dooic.

Not, Rudy thought, the place where he'd planned to spend the night, but it beat hell out of a slunch bed between the timberline and the glacier, with rubbery eyeless mushroom-critters dropping by for tiffin. For company he supposed it had a few points over Graw's great hall.

On the other hand, it was the opportunity of a lifetime to study a dooic band close up. He'd tried on other occasions, in the Vale of Renweth, but dooic were elusive as foxes in the woods-and if some of them could use magic, it was no wonder he'd never been able to sneak up on them.

Despite the fact that dooic would occasionally slaughter and devour lone travelers, he felt no threat. Unless George was a hell of a lot stronger wizard than he appeared to be, his own magic should protect him from concerted attack-and anyway, they'd shown no disposition to gang up on him.

George had lured him here with a trail of magic, of signs traced in light in the dark air, and Rudy had followed out of a combination of intense curiosity and the knowledge that Ingold would smack him with his staff if he passed up the chance. They wanted him here.

Had they asked him to dinner to thank him for saving the life of the hinny with the two babies? Did they think that action had made him responsible for her and them? Was she going to end up his wife, in the best tradition of pulp adventure tales? Er-none for me, thanks. He could see her among the others in the corner, pups in tow, eyes gleaming in the

almost impenetrable smoky darkness of the cave, but she had made no move to approach him; he'd christened her Rosie after a girl he'd gone to high school with. The other mares he labeled Mom, Margaret Dumont, Alice the Goon, Gina, Cheryl, and Linda, and two days from now I won't recognize a single one of them... George, who'd gone over to the wood-bearers-all of whom moved easily on all fours, under the low pitch of the roof-now turned, as if he'd heard a noise from the passageway. He glanced back at Rudy and grunted something, accompanied by a swift, complicated gesture with his hairy, short-fingered hands. Rudy must have looked blank, because George caught the attention of another male with a piglike squeal, made another gesture, then ran, apelike on his knuckles, to the passageway and vanished into the dark.

The other males made a flurry of gestures among themselves, incomprehensible to Rudy but speaking clearly of consternation and fear-why fear? Then four of them ran to sit in a row across the entrance, watching Rudy intently with those surprisingly human eyes.

"I get it," Rudy said. "Sit tight, right?" As he spoke he showed his hands, palms out, empty, then thought, Oh, good. They communicate by gestures, and I've just told them all their mothers wear army boots.

He noted how the males were sitting, arms not wrapped around their knees, but crooked at the sides, hands palms down upon the drawn-up knees. He hunkered himself carefully into the same position.

They'd have shut the gates at the settlement hours ago. Whatever was going on up here, it would be an interesting night, provided they didn't expect him to share the dead rabbits and voles a couple of them had pulled out from behind rocks. He was starving, but even from here he could tell supper had passed its sell-by date quite some time ago.

Everyone in the cave seemed to be listening, tense and on edge; the males across the doorway jumped at sounds, gestured, and signed to one another. At one point one of them went into the passageway, clearly to check and see if George was on his way back.

The gaboogoos? Rudy wondered. Had the old dooic gone to chase them off again? And if so, how?

More logs were heaped on the fire. The cave grew uncomfortably warm and phenomenally odiferous. Huge shadows humped and jittered over the low walls as the dooic moved about in the ruddy light; now and then a couple would sit down and begin to groom each other, but it never lasted long. Whatever was happening, it was bothering the whole group.

In time the old one returned, carrying something in his enormous hands, and Rudy thought, Did Mom send him to the local SuperGrocery for something fresh for dinner?

The bird the old dooic was carrying was not only fresh, but alive. It stirred, trying to shift bloody feathers and bating feebly with its head. As George brought it near, Rudy saw the hard gold eye, the hooked beak of a peregrine falcon, and thought, Nice rock-throwing if you could bring one of those down, pal!

Or had something else wounded it, leaving it bleeding on the rocks below the caves? In that case, how had the old dooic located it in the dark? George held it carefully, hands wrapped gently around the bloody wings, rocking a little and muttering. The bird was either still stunned by whatever had brought it down or calmed by the dooic's spells. It did not fight, but glared around with feral topaz eyes in the near-dark. What was a peregrine doing flying after nightfall, anyway? Silence deepened in the cave.

Then George handed the peregrine to Mom and hunkered close to the fire. A moment later Rudy felt the magic of a Summoning of some kind-heat?

It radiated from the close-curled, gray-furred body as if old George had turned himself into a stove. Coupled with the warmth of the fire, it was nearly unbearable, but the entire band crowded close around. Rosie the hinny scurried over to Rudy and caught his hand, trying to draw him toward the group. He followed, though the smell of the steaming group was Olympian.

This better be good.

Rudy turned, halfway to the group, at the sudden shriek of wind in the passageway. Rosie dragged on his hand, fear in her eyes-the wind flung back Rudy's long hair, the cold striking hard and sudden and sharp enough to stab his sinuses like a knife. The wind's voice rose, screaming in the turnings of the rock, as if a cyclone, a hurricane, the end of the world were taking place outside.

The real cold came. And Rudy knew.

Oh Christ, it's an ice storm.

He stood numb as Rosie plunged back into the safe warmth of her family. For a moment Rudy felt only astonishment at the coming of such a phenomenon, out of place and season.

And then: The Settlements!

It was too late. Knowledge of what an ice storm's winds would do to even such stout constructions as the old stone villas, the tree-trunk walls, ripped his heart like a bayonet. Walls ruptured, roofs jerked away, humans and animals flung like rag dolls in a lawn-mower-he'd seen the ruins on the plains of Gettlesand...

Old George grabbed him, dragged him with horrifying animal strength back into the close- mobbed dooic, as if he genuinely feared Rudy would go dashing out into the storm.

But Rudy only thought, Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus! over and over, knowing there was nothing he could do. They were dead already-frozen, pulped, and dead.

Cold rolled into the cave like the waters of doom. The dooic crowded tighter around the fire, around the old male whose spells had saved them from other peril before. The Keep! Those black walls had resisted the anger of the Dark and would, he thought, resist the fall of the mountains themselves. But the crops would be killed, the crops they'd broken themselves all spring to plant, the crops that were their only salvation. Every head of livestock in the byres outside the Keep would perish of the outer- space cold even if they weren't dashed to pieces by the howling funnel of the wind.

And the herdkids with them.

Rudy screamed, "No!!!" barely aware that he had made a noise, then curled against the rock of the wall and buried his head in his arms.

Like tornadoes, ice storms struck and passed quickly. Rudy lay listening to the mad howl of the wind, every contraction of his heart telling him that the children he'd seen questing for firewood under Lirta Graw's command, the hunter whose nose he had broken, were dead now, their bodies sieved through the smashed palisade and the meat flash-frozen where it lay. So much for human plans, human aspiration, human love... So much for anyone we love or hate or who just has their own annoying agenda.

He shut his teeth hard against tears.

In time he stirred, turning his concentration to his own spells of Summoning heat. The repetition of the words, the drawing of the power, took his mind temporarily from the pain. These dooic, huddled around their meager fire, had saved his life, maybe because he'd saved Rosie's and maybe because old George knew he was a wizard and could help them out-he didn't know.

But he owed them. So he snuggled closer into the fetid congregation, noting in surprise that Mom and some of the younger hinnies were wrapped in badly cured, flayed deerhides, under which they held the cubs close to their bodies, the first evidence he'd seen of dooic using implements more complicated than a rock. Though of course, he thought, the domesticated ones had worn clothing in servitude and may have thought that was a good idea to bring back to the tribe. In time the wind died. The cold grew deeper, the freezing air flowing in... Damn, it must have come down just about on top of us. And on the Settlements. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

Still in old George's hands, the injured peregrine stared around the circle with mad yellow eyes.

Only when his mageborn perceptions told him a crippled dawn was creeping up to warm the mountainside did Rudy wrap a deerhide over his shoulders for extra warmth and scramble, on hands and knees, up the low-roofed passageway to the surface of the ground again.

The tunnel was slippery with ice, and absolutely black-at the top he found twenty or thirty feet of snow blocking the entrance. He gouged at it with the steel crescent of his staff, Summoning heat around the metal, so that meltwater ran down to soak his torn and filthy trousers.

The world was a ruin in the violet gloom of snow-light and morning: pines snapped, branches stripped, birds spattered dead against the rocks. He saw what might have been gulls, though so badly damaged it was hard to tell-God knew how they got there. From a livid bank of cloud overhead a few funnels still dipped earthward, then retreated again, miles away. Five feet in front of the cave mouth a boar had been skewered on the blasted shards of an oak tree, frozen to USDA Choice. George and Mom emerged behind him, the graying female holding another deerskin around her, both peering uneasily, trading hand-signs, quick and small and silent. Rudy was barely aware of them.

His mind felt erased. He was aware that he was looking at the end of the world, the beginning of Fimbul Winter indeed-the Ultimate Notification from the Great Darwinian Bureau in the Sky that said, "We regret to inform you that you have been selected against." He couldn't take it in.

There'd be no crops, either at the Settlements or the Keep. Last night would have iced them where they stood. No animals left at all. Everyone in the Settlements-some nine hundred people, was dead. Everyone at the Keep would starve.

George yowled a warning and flung up his hand. Underfoot the mountain moved, a hard, sharp twitch, then a few seconds of stillness, followed by a long slow roller-coaster sensation, as if they all stood on the belly of some monstrous anaconda as it swallowed a couple of deer.

"Chill out." Rudy caught his balance against the sprawled, uplifted roots of a broken tree as the old dooic and his mate clung to one another, looking for someplace to run. "It's a five-two, tops. I wouldn't even get out of bed for it back home." Like many Southern Californians, Rudy was adept at playing Guess the Richter with local earthquakes. By the time lag between the kicker and the roller, he judged that the epicenter was far off.

He picked his way through the smashed and uprooted trees, mortared together with snow frozen hard as concrete. Where the wind had scoured the snow away, weeds stood stiff, held upright by the water in their cells that had turned to ice, waiting for

the touch of the sun that would let them lapse from pseudolife into brown and crumpled death.

There was a little patch of slunch on the rocks. Though snow lodged in its folds, it seemed perfectly healthy. Rudy muttered, "Son of a..."

He stepped around the rock and stopped again. Toeless footprints marked the thin snow beyond. A little blown snow had dusted into them, enough for Rudy to calculate the timing: after the winds had ceased, but during the worst of the cold. He didn't even want to think about what the temperature had been.

Behind him he heard old George grunt, and Mom yammer in fear. Seizing his staff, Rudy ducked around the rocks, skidding on the hard snow-crust as he ran back to the mouth of the cave.

Ingold stood there, shivering and blinking, wrapped only in the flayed hide of one of the dooic's deer.

"I don't know what happened." The old man's voice was hoarse and hesitant, and he flinched as Rudy turned his mangled arm to the light at the mouth of the tunnel entrance, where they had taken shelter against the cold.

Rudy had gone back to the deeper chamber to fetch firewood and kindled a small blaze in the tunnel, the heat reflecting back from the rocks. Outside, the virulent clouds were breaking, the sun beginning to melt the snow.

Ingold was unable to summon fire; unable, Rudy guessed, to summon heat or light or any of the small magics that were wizardry's second nature. He lay against the rock shivering with exhaustion, barely responding as Rudy examined the wounds on his arms and back, and on the back of his head.

He looked as if he'd been attacked by maniacs wielding chisels and cleavers. The wounds reminded him of something that might have been inflicted by pincers, like an enormous lobster or a Roger Corman-sized crab. Not claws, he thought. Not teeth either, really.

And all the while he was marveling, Ingold really did it. I'll be buggered. He actually turned himself into a goddamn bird.

It was something he couldn't imagine himself or anyone else even trying to accomplish. He was conscious of awe and an overwhelming wish that he'd been there to watch-to see it and to see how it was done.

But he only said, "Man, if that storm had hit while you were still on your way, you'd be dead meat!"

Ingold raised his head a little, brought up one hand to wipe at a gash over his brow. "I had to risk it. I couldn't reach you by scrying stone-"

"Couldn't reach me? I was tryin' all morning to get in touch with you, man! And Thoth, and the Gettlesand gang! Then I lost my crystal... I'll have to go back and look for it. But whenever I tried, I just got this... this..."

"Weight," Ingold said, his voice almost dreamy, as if he were slipping again into sleep. He tried clumsily to pull the deerskin back over the bare, freckled gooseflesh of his shoulders, hands almost unworkable with cold.

"Anger. Magic deep in the bones of the earth. Which is gone now, incidentally," he added, rousing a little. "I expect that after the earthquake we should have no trouble reaching Thoth."

Rudy looked at him a little blankly, trying to work that one out. Mom emerged from the throat of the passageway to proffer an appalling double handful of what was almost certainly chewed leaves, and Rudy said, "Uh-thanks." He sniffed it-borage and willow, and he'd handled worse in five years-and passed a quick hand over it, feeling the magic already in it and adding his own spells of

disinfection and healing. Ingold's mouth did not so much as twitch as Rudy spread the mess over the gaping, clotted wounds. "So what the Sam Hill is going on?"

Ingold shook his head, pressed the side of his face to the rock of the wall, the long white bloodstained hair hanging down to half conceal his face. Rudy said, "You gonna be okay for a couple minutes more? I gotta stitch this one." The old man nodded and signed for him to go ahead. Rudy threaded up a needle with the toughest line of sinew in his belt kit and turned Ingold's shoulder so that his back took the direct patch of the in-falling morning light. Under blood and muck, the skin was crossed with the scars of old whip cuts, scores of them, white gouges that when fresh must have gone nearly to the bone.

"We can find your crystal and contact Thoth and the others in Gettlesand, later in the day." Ingold's voice was barely a whisper, though Rudy had laid on him every spell he could to dull pain.

Anyone else-anyone who had no magic of his own to combat it-would probably have been in shock, and by the old man's coloring, he was pretty near it, anyway. He was shivering convulsively, fighting to steady his breath. "But our first duty lies in the Settlements. To burn them in death, since we could not save them in life." Rudy gave Ingold his long woolen shirt and would have given him his trousers, too, if they'd have fit the wizard's stockier frame.

The shirt came down to his thighs, and Ingold wrapped strips of deerskin around his legs and feet. Rudy cut him a staff from an oak sapling, and the two descended, like a couple of shivering beggars, through the ghastly silence of ruined woods covered with snow to the dead land below.

As they walked, Rudy told Ingold about the gaboogoos that had attacked him in the woods and how they had followed him despite every spell he had laid to throw them off the track; how he had found their spoor in the lee of rock still dusted with the snow that had fallen during the worst of the night.

He spoke to take his mind off what he knew was waiting for them, to turn it aside from all those questions about what they were going to do now. About what they could do.

Long before they reached the Settlements, they found sheep, or parts of sheep, impaled on the broken trees, their wool brown clots of blood. The warming air melted the snow in patches, and the two men had to struggle to keep from slipping in the mud-Rudy kept a wary eye on Ingold and a hand ready to steady him should he fall, but though the older wizard's pain and exhaustion slowed him, he seemed to recover as the day went on.

Rudy looked at the birds-eagles or bull owls, crushed against the trees like bugs on a windshield, and wondered again what it was that had caused those pincerlike wounds; what had struck Ingold down before he'd gotten to the Settlements. Just before noon they passed the place where the storm funnel had touched down. The trees had been swept up by their roots and lay in a smashed heap against the mountain's first rising slopes, mixed with rocks, laurel shrubs, the carcasses of animals, and ice and snow. It was melting at the edges, and there was a great dirty pool of water and blood below the tangle, like a colossal beaver dam of matchsticked spruces and bones.

Barely a mile south of that unbelievable scour lay what was left of Fargin Graw's fortress. At one end of the imploded wreck the two wizards uncovered the bodies of Graw, his wife and sons, and most of the other members of his household, mashed by the fallen roof beams and lying in a lake of snowmelt and gore. The child Lirta, a few of the servants, and the hunter whose bow had broken his nose

had been carried by the wind nearly a dozen yards and smashed against the wreckage of the stables, where their bodies mixed with the slow-thawing rummage of cattle and sheep. They found the boy Reppitep later in the afternoon, when the sun strengthened enough to melt some of the larger drifts.

"It will have happened very quickly," Ingold said as he and Rudy dragged the far-flung bodies to lie in what would be their pyre among the thatch. Tears running down his face, Rudy yelled at him, "And that's supposed to make me feel better?"

Ingold replied wearily, "In time."

The old man insisted, to Rudy's rage and horror, on thoroughly looting the buildings, making a stack of kitchen utensils, clothing, plows, rake heads, needles, and harness buckles near the well. "Can't you show a little respect, for Chrissake?" "No," the old man said, slowly pulling on a pair of somebody's boots. "Not in the circumstances."

He transformed himself into a bird, Rudy thought, watching him trying to wash some of the grime off with snow before dressing clumsily in a dark leather jerkin, baggy trousers, and a sheepskin vest Rudy remembered seeing on one of the hunters the night before last.

Done one of the most crazily dangerous acts of magic possible in the outside hope of warning these people.

It was only by sheerest chance and the wisdom of the dooic mage that he wasn't a bloody blot on the snow someplace now. And everyone here would be just as dead. Rudy had to remind himself of that again when he saw the old man laboriously going through the corpses, removing knives from the men's belts and needles from the sewing still in the women's hands.

When they passed the place where Rudy first met the gaboogoo, they had picked up his fallen scrying stone, half buried under snow, and now Rudy got up his courage to look into it and saw Minalde weeping as she struggled to drag wood to the pyre in front of the Keep on which they'd lined the bodies of fifteen little herdkids. Rudy watched until he saw Tir, stumbling at her heels with an armful of kindling. For a horrible time, Rudy had feared that last night had been one of the many occasions on which Tir had sneaked out to spend the night with the other kids. He let the image die. Once he'd ascertained Tir and Minalde lived, he didn't want to see anything else.

Mountain shadows stretched across them, blue and chill. Hating himself, Rudy went to the heap of garments Ingold was making where the gatehouse had been and found among them his own ramskin coat, its sleeves gay with painted flowers. The sky would remain soaked in summer light for hours.

Looking up, he saw the air above the mountains streaked in peach and apricot, a phenomenal, overblown sunset such as Rudy had previously associated with the tackier variety of cowboy painters or photographs in inspirational magazines. He whispered, "Wow," and Ingold, to whom he hadn't spoken since his bitter railings about respect, limped to his side. "Come now, Rudy, don't tell me you're surprised." "You're predicting sunsets now?"

"There was an earthquake this morning," Ingold said. His hand was pressed to his side, his gored face gray. "I thought it might have been triggered by the eruption of another volcano in Gettlesand."

"You're right," Rudy said. "That makes-what? Three this winter? What you got there, pal?" he added, nodding at the gory wad of sacking in the old man's hands. The limb of an animal-a rabbit? But no rabbit had claws like that-protruding from it at an

awkward angle.

"I haven't any idea." Ingold stooped agonizingly and unwrapped the thing on the remains of the foundation by which they stood.

Rudy said, "Yike!" and took a step back, then came close again, staring. "What the hell is it?" In his own voice he heard the echo of a theme he'd been singing for days now, and looked across at Ingold, baffled and a little scared. "Where'd you find this thing?"

He gestured with his eyes. "Against the palisade." Only one wall of the palisade remained, the south one, into which the north wall and huge chunks of the old villa and outbuildings had been driven, a dune of wreckage.

Stiffly, Ingold wrapped the carcass up again. His hands were swollen with the work he'd done, shifting timbers and grubbing for bodies under pools of half-frozen water, and the flesh around the cuts on the left side of his face was bruised nearly black. "I've noticed that-''

At the sound of some noise, he turned, and there was nothing stiff or crippled about the smoothness with which he suddenly had one of the dead farmers' shortswords in his hand. Rudy turned to follow his gaze. There were figures in the road, dozens of them, faces glimmering pale in the gathering dusk. Someone called, "Who's there? Is anyone alive?"

Rudy recognized the voice. "That you, Yar?" He left the darkness by the gatehouse and strode down in the direction of the straggling line of newcomers. "It's Rudy and Ingold." He almost didn't need a mage's sight to recognize Lank Yar, the Keep's chief hunter, a drooping leather strap of a man who seemed, body and soul, to have been braided back together out of his own scar tissue following the rising of the Dark.

Behind the hunter he identified others: Nedra Hornbeam, the matriarch of third level south, with her son and son-in-law; Lord Sketh, pushing fussily to the front with two or three of his purplebadged men-at-arms; several of the Dunk clan from second north with Bannerlord Pnak; Bok the Carpenter and half a dozen Guards under the command of the Icefalcon.

"They're dead here," Rudy said quietly. "They're all dead."

"Good God, man, we thought you were gone as well!" Bok strode forward and caught Rudy's arms in huge hands, then enveloped him in a hug that was like being hugged by an iron tree. "And Lord Ingold...!"

"Lord Ingold," Yar the Hunter said quietly, "who ought never have left the Keep to begin with this spring. Had he stayed where he belonged, these folk would have been alive, and the children of the herds, too."

He turned and walked away. Lord Sketh came over quickly, caught Rudy's hand in one of his own round moist ones, said quickly, "Ridiculous! Are you well, man?" There was scared relief in his eyes, desperate relief that the Keep would not, in the face of such catastrophe, be left wizardless as well. "What happened? Was it an ice storm, as the Icefalcon's been saying? We heard nothing, only opened the Doors this morn to a wall of snow."

"It was an ice storm," Ingold said softly. "And Yar is right. I should not have left the Keep."

They worked through the fevered sunset and long into full dark, under a moon that came up gibbous and crimson, like a dirty blood-orange, as if the grue that lay soaking into the ground had stained its golden light.

Under Lord Sketh's orders, the hunters and volunteers and Guards dragged every horse, every head of stock, every deer, every boar, even the rats and rabbits and voles found crushed in the woods or mashed into the palisade, and made great thawing piles of them between the ruined house and the heap of matchwood that had been the gates.

Rudy and Ingold laid spells of preservation on those dripping heaps, to arrest and postpone decay once they should begin to thaw, and men and women set to hacking the meat into chunks, to be carried up to the Keep.

Through a haze of blind exhaustion, of pain in his frozen hands and toes, Rudy understood that this meat was all the Keep would have to live on, summer, winter, and into the following spring.

And he could already see that it wasn't going to be enough. While the meat thawed, Lord Sketh ordered a pyre built of broken timbers and the drying thatch; they kindled it an hour before dawn.

The smell of the smoke was a vast, oily cloud over the charnel house of wet bones, ice- beaded meat, and glittering heaps of salvaged harness buckles and shoes. Lank Yar, more practical-minded, set parties to building sledges to carry the meat, and racks on which to smoke it, and the first group of bearers set off for the Keep with Fargin Graw's food reserves and the news that the two wizards were alive just as dawn was staining red the waters of the Great Brown River to the east.

When Rudy woke from exhausted sleep, Gil was there, her black hair braided to keep it out of the blood, her face half masked in field dressing and more bruised even than Ingold's.

She looked exhausted, sick, and deeply worried, and no wonder, Rudy thought. Some distance away he could see Ingold at work cutting up a sheep neatly as a butcher, and like a butcher soaked and spattered with blood from head to foot; he would answer if someone spoke to him, but he seemed, as Rudy knew he would, to have taken Lank Yar's words completely to heart.

At least it was too early for ants or flies to have commuted in. Thank God for small favors.

"I was worried about you, punk." Gil sat down next to him and handed him a bowl of gruel and a dried apple. They'd almost certainly come from the settlement store. Rudy thought about the people who should have been eating them for breakfast and felt nearly sick.

"I wish I could say the same about you, spook." He was too hungry and exhausted not to eat, and once he began, he felt better. He had eaten almost nothing yesterday and had worked cutting wood and hauling bodies to the pyre until he was ready to drop. "But until that thing hit, I was clueless, and when it did--" He paused and shook his head. "- I didn't really think about any one person, I guess. Just, like, 'Oh, Jesus, no.' I guess I figured if you were with the old man, you'd be okay. Did you-did you see him turn himself into a bird?"

She smiled crookedly-with the wound on her face, she could hardly help it-and nodded. But she only said, "I thought Lord Sketh was going to propose marriage when I showed up with the mule. The orneriest, nastiest old bizzom in the Keep, and now she's the only domesticated beast of burden in the Vale. That'll learn Enas Banelstave to argue against us borrowing the best instead of the worst critter when we go out scavenging. Sterile, too, of course."

"Oh, Christ," Rudy said. He hadn't thought of that-Gil was generally about two jumps ahead of him. "What're we gonna...? I mean, what about plowing next spring?"

"Don't worry about it, punk." Gil got to her feet and swept the ruined settlement with a gaze as chill and silvery as the heatless sky. "We're gonna starve by Christmas."

"Most of it's still frozen," the Icefalcon was saying as Rudy and Gil came up to the shambles where Ingold was jointing deer and pigs with an ax. "We'll probably be able to get it up to the Vale before it begins to go off, but on foot it will be a slow trek. Warmer weather's coming," he added, glancing to the north. "There'll be flies."

"I'll do what I can about that," Ingold said. He looked like ten miles of bad road, and moved as if he'd been beaten with a stick. Rudy guessed he hadn't slept at all.

"I expect there'll be parties coming down to clear out Manse and Carpont today," the young Guard continued, one bloodgummed hand tucked into his sash. "We may need spells to prevent decay then. When we go up to the Keep tomorrow morning, one of you should remain."

"One of 'em should stay just to tell us if there's another one of those what'd you call, ice storms, on the way," Yobet Troop threw in, stopping nervously beside them with dangling bundles of frozen chickens yoked to his shoulders. He glanced at Ingold with frightened eyes, and then at the sky. "You'll do that, won't you, m'lord wizard? That's your job."

"Yes," Ingold said gently. "That's my job."

He added to Gil, when Troop and the Icefalcon had gone their ways, "Things aren't as bad as you might suppose. The storm affected an area perhaps fifty miles across, and beyond that there will be game, and fruits in abandoned orchards if we can get parties out there quickly enough, and nuts in the woods. The Icefalcon spoke to me earlier about leading a raiding party against the bandits around Penambra, who will have horses if nothing else."

"I bet they'll be real efficient raiders on foot," Gil said. Ingold regarded her in mild surprise and mimed a dig through his pockets. "If you're willing to put money against the Icefalcon on foot in a contest with the average group of mounted bandits..." "The hell I am," Gil said, with the first grin Rudy had seen out of her all day.

"And I'm sure Lady Minalde will send to Tomec Tirkenson in Gettlesand for livestock as well, provided we can haul hay up from the river meadows below Willowchild to feed them." Moving as slowly as an old man, Ingold limped to the stack of carcasses and began to drag free a deer.

His hands fumbled their grip and Gil and Rudy hastened to help him; Rudy handed him the ax he'd been using, but after lifting it, Ingold set it down again, as if too wearied, for the moment, to go on.

"They're taking the mule, you know," Gil said, turning to the stump nearby, where several axes were stuck. It was the first time in years that Rudy had seen more implements than there were people. Gil judged her striking point on the carcass and buried the ax head just below the foreleg, bracing her foot and shoving to wrench free the ice- stiff limb.

"As well they must." Ingold looked across at Rudy. "Rudy, I'm counting on you to spell the books Gil and I brought from Penambra. I concealed them last night in the root cellar here. Between my peregrinations of the night before last and laying every fragment of magic I could summon on the meat last night and today, even should I get some rest between now and nightfall, I'm barely going to have the strength to do what I'll need to do."

Rudy didn't like the sound of that. Still less did he like the way the muscles of Ingold's jaw tightened when he hobbled slowly to the other side of the carcass, to help Gil reduce it to limbs and trunk.

"Every ward and guard you can summon," the old man went on without giving him time to reply. "Decay, water, fire, theft, insects, even notice by another wizard.

Goodness knows how long it will be before someone can be sent to fetch them. Those books are some of the oldest that exist outside the City of Wizards, and some of them are copies of texts even older than that city itself. They may contain the answer to questions necessary for our very survival."

Warily, Rudy said, "You sound like you ain't gonna be around."

Ingold scratched the side of his nose, leaving a streak of slightly fresher blood in the grime. "Well, I do feel badly about that." Don't do this to me, man. Don't leave me to deal with this alone. "I should not go," Ingold went on, very slowly. "For Yar was right, you know. I was culpable for leaving as I did. For assuming that such a disaster would not befall." "Who knew?" Rudy flung out his hands. "And who's gonna be dumb enough to say that it was our fault this happened? You can feel those things coming ten minutes ahead of time, tops; I can't feel 'em at all. Even before I feebed my crystal, I wasn't able to reach you. I still haven't figured out why..."

"You haven't?" Ingold appeared mildly surprised. "Be that as it may, it was my fault, and I am responsible. And I suspect that once we return to the Keep, there will be pressure brought to bear on both of us not to leave it again." He glanced over at Gil, then away.

"It isn't only for the sake of the art of wizardry itself that I've been searching for a mageborn child, Rudy. We desperately need more wizards at the Keep. We should never have gone from month to month, year to year, putting off sending for a few of the Gettlesand wizards... I've spoken to Thoth, by the way. "You did?" Contact with the Gettlesand wizards-and the entire subject of the gaboogoos-had completely slipped his mind. "Did he say what happened? Why we couldn't get in touch?"

"He told me a number of extremely disquieting things, but no, he had no idea why communication by scrying stone was impossible. But I suspect that the night before last was not the first time that such a thing has happened. I haven't time to go into that now-maybe later, or more likely you can speak to him yourself. The important thing is that something very strange is going on-strange and appalling and, as far as I know, completely unprecedented."

"Well," Rudy said sarcastically, heaving up one severed hindquarter of the deer and manhandling it onto the nearby sledge for transport, "I'd kinda guessed that." "You always did have a good, solid grasp of the obvious," the mage replied approvingly. "But I'm not sure you are aware how rare the completely unprecedented actually is: never-heard-of; beyond human experience. Gil's a historian. She knows the truth that was said by the Lord of the Sigils: There is no new thing beneath the sun. It's not just a wise platitude, it's the basis of all lore, all scholarship, all the method of magic.

"But these gaboogoos seem to be precisely that. And as such, they bear fairly close investigation."

Ingold straightened up and wiped the sticky gum of half-frozen blood from his hands. "That's why magic won't work on them, huh?" Rudy said slowly. "Because we don't really know what the hell they are. They don't bleed, I'll tell you that. And if they sweat or smell or excrete or eat or spit, they do it damn inconspicuously. They sure walked through my spells of concealment like they were a cheesy plastic bead curtain."

"Precisely." Under the bloody grime of his overgrown mustache, Ingold's mouth was hard. "And the trouble is, it isn't just the gaboogoos. The creature that attacked Gil-almost certainly in concert with other beings that I did not see-was utterly unfamiliar to my lore or the lore of anyone I have ever read or spoken to. Last night the Icefalcon and his scavengers brought to me three other totally unknown animals, at least insofar as I could tell from the parts that remained. And there is no record-none-in the most ancient books or the tales of the most wide-ranging travelers, of what slunch is." "Slunch?" Rudy blinked at the sudden reversion to the mundane... if it was mundane. His first reaction-slunch is slunch-was automatic and, he found on reflection a second

later, rather unsettling. He'd gotten used to it. Everyone had. "I don't get it." "Nor do I." The blue eyes glittered, very pale and very bright, against the gruesome dark of bruises, old blood, and filth. "And considering that I have spent the longer if not the better part of my sixty-eight years learning to get it in every conceivable and inconceivable situation, I find that fact, in itself, extremely unsettling. And therefore," he went on, turning back to the vast heap of frozen beasts for another to hew, "I am leaving you tonight, to seek an answer outside of and beyond the bounds of human experience. I am going to visit the Nest of the Dark."