Mother Of Winter Page 0,1

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