Mother of Winter (Darwath, Band 4) - Softcover

Buch 4 von 5: Darwath

Hambly, Barbara

 
9780345397232: Mother of Winter (Darwath, Band 4)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0345397231 ISBN 13: 9780345397232
Verlag: Random House Worlds, 1997

Inhaltsangabe

Five years after defeating the Dark Ones, the embattled inhabitants of the once-great Keep of Dare face a yet more deadly foe. An icy-cold force was spreading across the northlands, spawning strange creatures that killed everything in their grisly path . . .

Archmage Ingold Inglorion believed the source of this monstrous evil lay in the decadent lands to the south. With him traveled Gil Patterson, the scholar-warrior from Earth who had forsaken her own universe for love of the mage.  Determined to aid him in his quest, she was cursed to become the instrument of his death.

Ingold's apprentice Rudy Solis was left behind, the sole wizard standing between the Keep of Dare and the nightmare creatures besieging it. Rudy struggled tirelessly with wavering magic to ward off the virulent attacks of the ice mage's minions. But when someone attacked the widowed queen--the woman he loved--Rudy was forced to plumb the ultimate secret locked in the black crystal heart of the Keep of Dare . . . and so decide the fate of the world.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Barbara Hambly is the author of Patriot Hearts and The Emancipator’s Wife, a finalist for the Michael Shaara Award for Excellence in Civil War Fiction. She is also the author of Fever Season, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and the acclaimed historical Benjamin January series, including the novels A Free Man of Color and Sold Down the River. She lives in California.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Five years after vanquishing the Dark Ones who had so nearly destroyed the civilization of Renweth, the remnant of that once-great kingdom huddled in the Keep, on the brink of starvation. Their survival depended on magic - and magic as they knew it was powerless against the strange, cold force abroad in the world. Ghastly, unnatural growths were spreading across the land, invulnerable to hex and to axe. Whatever those repugnant and ever-spreading things might be, they killed the local flora and fauna, even as they seemed to spawn bizarre, unheard-of creatures to further their grisly work. Ingold Inglorion - Archmage and, perhaps, madman - believed that the source of the life- and soul-destroying power lay to the south, in the war-torn theocracy of Alketch, and the haunted chasm of the Blind King's Tomb outside its gaudy, decadent capital city. And so Ingold turned his back upon his charges, the people of Dare, and vanished southward, to beard the enemy in its den and so decide the fate of the world. With him went Gil Patterson, the scholar-warrior who had forsaken her own universe to be with him - and who was now bespelled to be the instrument of his death. Meanwhile Rudy Solis, Ingold's pupil and the sole wizard remaining in the Vale of Renweth after the Archmage's desertion, struggled ceaselessly to ward off the ever-more virulent attacks of the ice mage's minions. Increasingly hindered by factional fighting that threatened to tear apart the fragile community he feared that his own hard-won ability to work magic would fail him. Then someone inside the Keep attacked Minalde, the widowed queen. To protect the woman he loved, Rudy realized that he would have to risk his life and all heheld precious, to plumb the ultimate secret locked in the black crystal heart of the Keep of Dare.

Aus dem Klappentext

Five years after defeating the Dark Ones, the embattled inhabitants of the once-great Keep of Dare face a yet more deadly foe. An icy-cold force was spreading across the northlands, spawning strange creatures that killed everything in their grisly path . . .
Archmage Ingold Inglorion believed the source of this monstrous evil lay in the decadent lands to the south. With him traveled Gil Patterson, the scholar-warrior from Earth who had forsaken her own universe for love of the mage. Determined to aid him in his quest, she was cursed to become the instrument of his death.
Ingold's apprentice Rudy Solis was left behind, the sole wizard standing between the Keep of Dare and the nightmare creatures besieging it. Rudy struggled tirelessly with wavering magic to ward off the virulent attacks of the ice mage's minions. But when someone attacked the widowed queen--the woman he loved--Rudy was forced to plumb the ultimate secret locked in the black crystal heart of the Keep of Dare . . . and so decide the fate of the world.

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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 and 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 bum 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 was or what it did. Was there anything weird about the animals around Penambra before the Dark came?”
 
“Not that I ever heard.” Ingold was turning his head as he spoke, listening as much as watching. He’d put back the hood of his heavy brown mantle, and his white hair, long and tatty from weeks of journeying, flickered in the gray air. He’d trimmed his beard with his knife a couple of nights ago, and resembled St. Anthony after ten rounds with demons in the wilderness.
 
Not, thought Gil, that anyone in this universe but herself—and Ingold, because she’d told him—knew who St. Anthony was. Maia of Thran, Bishop of Renweth, erstwhile Bishop of Penambra and owner of the palace they sought, had told her tales of analogous holy hermits who’d had similar problems.
 
Unprepossessing, she thought, to anyone who hadn’t seen him in action. Almost invisible, unless he wished to be seen.
 
“And in any case we might as easily be dealing with a factor of time rather than distance.” Ingold held up his six-foot walking staff in his blue-mittened left hand, but his right never strayed far from the hilt of the sword at his side. “It’s been … Behind you!”
 
He was turning as he yelled, and his cry was the only reason the thing didn’t take Gil full in the back like a bobcat fastening on a deer. She was drawing her own sword, still on her knees but cutting as she whirled, and aware at the same moment of Ingold drawing, stepping in, slashing. Ripping weight collided with Gil’s upper arm and she had a terrible impression of a short-snouted animal face, of teeth thrusting out of a lifted mass of wrinkles, of something very wrong with the eyes …
 
Pain and cold sliced her right cheek low on the jawbone. She’d already dropped the sword, pulled her dagger; she slit and ripped and felt blood and intestines gush hotly over her hand. The thing didn’t flinch. Long arms like an ape’s wrapped around her shoulders, claws cutting through her sheepskin coat. It bit again at her face, going for her eyes, its own back and spine wide open. Gil cut hard and straight across them with seven-inch steel that could shave the hair off a man’s arm. The teeth spasmed and snapped, the smell of blood clogging her nostrils. Buzzing dizziness filled her. She thought she’d been submerged miles deep in dry, living gray sand.
 
“Gil!” The voice was familiar but far-off, a fly on a ceiling miles above her head. She’d heard it in dreams, maybe …
 
Her face hurt. The lips of the wound in her cheek were freezing now against the heat of her blood. For some reason she had the impression she was waking up in her own bed in the fortress Keep of Dare, far away in the Vale of Renweth.
 
“What time is it?” she asked. The pain redoubled and she remembered. Her head ached.
 
“Lie still.” He bent over her, lined face pallid with shock. There was blood on the sleeves of his mantle, on the blackish bison fur of the surcoat he wore over that. She felt his fingers probe gently at her cheek and jaw. He’d taken off his mittens, and his flesh was startlingly warm. The smell of the blood almost made her faint again. “Are you all right?”
 
“Yeah.” Her lips felt puffy, the side of her face a balloon of air. She put up her hand and remembered, tore off her sodden glove, brushed her lips, then the corner of her right eye with her fingertips. The wounds were along her cheekbone and jaw, sticky with blood and slobber. “What was that thing?”
 
“Lie still a little...

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Verlag
Random House Worlds
Erscheinungsdatum
1997
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345397231
ISBN 13 
9780345397232
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
380
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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