Mother of Winter. Barbara Hambly
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 get 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