Mother of Winter

Informationen zum 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. 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.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 c...

Product details

• Authors: Barbara Hambly
• Publisher: Del Rey
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 29.06.1997
• EAN: 9780345397232
• ISBN: 978-0-345-39723-2
• No. of pages: 380
• Dimensions: 106 mm x 173 mm x 25 mm
• Series: Darwath; Darwath; Random House Worlds
• Subject: Fiction > Science fiction, fantasy