Mother of Winter

by Barbara Hambly

  “You want an appetizer first, or the salad?” Gil handed him the satchel.

  “Appetizer, please.” Ingold limped painfully between the rocks, leading them to a hollow under the shoulder of a granite dome. He was soaked to the thighs from wading through the lake of meltwater; streaks of mud and niter mottled his robe. The hollow was about the size of a restaurant booth and only three or four feet high, and from its entrance the whole of the Vale could probably be seen by day. As it was, only the faintly glowing beds of slunch stood out in the darkness, islands in an iron sea.

  The feeble witchlight on the tip of Ingold’s staff brightened somewhat, to illuminate the little chamber. The wizard sank to the ground and opened the bundle Gil had brought. “I do hope there’s an entire ox in here, with peppercorns and just the slightest suspicion of garlic,” he said in a hopeful voice.

  “Darn!” Gil smacked her forehead with the heel of her hand, as if she’d only just noticed, “you turned into a person again! I brought stuff for a falcon!”

  “Gillifer, my dear,” Ingold sighed with feigned patience, and held up the few scraps of what looked like road-kill, “you really need to write these things down.”

  “What kind of wine you want with that, man?” Rudy ducked low under the slope of the ceiling, dropped cross-legged at the old man’s side and uncorked the small bottle of what was called Blue Ruin around the Keep.

  “All of it in the entire world.”

  There was a time of silence.

  At length Rudy asked, “The Dark tell you anything?”

  The wizard’s eyes glinted under scarred lids. “I didn’t telephone them, you know.” He leaned his shoulders carefully against the cold, dimpled rock of the wall, wiped the last bits of grease from his fingers, and examined the picked bones regretfully. Gil had managed to cadge an apple, one of the last from the previous winter. The wizard had devoured it core and all.

  He sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose, as if to massage away the ache of the old wounds. “It was more like … oh, sorting through diaries or looking through the record crystals, trying to piece together information for which there is no context. Like dreaming someone else’s dreams.”

  Rudy said nothing. He had gone down into a deserted Nest once before the Dark Ones had departed from this world, and two or three times afterward, and the images he had carried back with him were those of endless caverns of limestone sheathed in the withered remains of brown moss, strewn with the bones of the Dark Ones’ pitiful herds. Ceilings, walls, stalactites and stalagmites had all been polished silken by the crawling feet of untold numbers of the Dark, the rock discolored into a thousand hues of yellow and green and blue by the action of their body acids. He didn’t like to think of the old man’s mind leaving his body to walk into the places where the shapeless ones had left their memories.

  Didn’t like the thought of what form those dreams might take.

  Almost as if speaking to himself, Ingold went on, “Part of the problem is that those we seek could not exist in the same world as the Dark. Like the Dark—or like the Dark in the end became—they were travelers, Void-walkers. As the Dark Ones eventually moved on to another world, so these came here, long before either the Dark Ones or humankind arose. The world was cold then, bitter, iron cold, nearly waterless and locked under sheets of ice miles thick. Strange things moved over the surface of its ground, or swam weightless in its air. Things that crystallized out of its few pools and streams or grew like sponges from the rock. A cruel world, but it suited Them.”

  He frowned, gazing out at the glimmering precipice of the ice and the dim speckle of reflected witchlight on the thread of the stream.

  “How long ago?” Rudy’s voice was almost a whisper, and Ingold shook his head.

  “The Dark didn’t know. The Travelers came and had their eons of dominion, and sank first into sleep and then into death when the Dark Ones’ furthest ancestors were no more than grubs clinging to the hot volcanic vents on the ocean floors. The stars were different then, the sun weak behind a universe of dust.”

  His voice, rough-textured and deep, seemed far away, speaking of those dreams that were not his dreams, as if he were barely aware of the two friends who sat at his side. Perhaps, Rudy thought, he was not.

  “This I … saw in dreams, lying on the rocks in the darkness. I don’t even know whether what I saw was true or only what the Dark believed to have taken place. The awareness of the Dark is not like the awareness of humankind.

  “The Dark were aware that the final remnant of all those things still existed, deep within caverns wrought of ice, beneath the bones of an eternal mountain. The Dark hated cold and kept their distance, but they heard the songs of Those Who Wait.”

  He shook his head, unfocused, gazing still into the alien dream.

  “They sang of waiting, to the music of a chiten flute. Eternal sureness, treading a black eternal road, waiting for the world to become what it had been once again.”

  Rudy shifted uncomfortably on his hunker-bones. Wind made cat-feet on the milky glacier lake and brought the smell of ice and high places. “And that’s happening?”

  “The current cold cycle has been enough to wake them up, anyway.” Gil’s voice chipped into the dense texture of the Dark Ones’ dreams, her long, thin fingers twisting dark curls away from the unhealed mess of her cheek. Ingold’s eyes opened, bright and present once again. “For whatever reason, Those Who Wait have decided to quit waiting.”

  “Gil’s sort of figured out what’s happening,” Rudy said, and quickly outlined her theory of terraforming. “We think the gaboogoos have to be growing out of the slunch,” he said at the end. “They disregard magic, the same way magic doesn’t touch the slunch. Gil thinks that after animals eat it, slunch starts to metabolize them from the inside. But why the critters are mutating into the forms they are is beyond me.”

  “Is it?” Ingold blinked at him, appearing not in the slightest surprised. “I suppose it would be.” He fell silent then, hands folded before his mouth, witch-blue shadows deepening in the lines of his face as he gazed back into the night, as if in the blackness he could see again the Dark Ones’ dreams.

  “You knew about that?” Rudy demanded, miffed.

  “Of course I knew it. I saw it,” Ingold said. “In the vision. In the Nest. I saw it, but it seemed … without explanation. Insane. I can’t tell you how pleased I am to discover that I’m not mad. Trust you, Rudy, and you, my Gil.”

  He put out his hand and touched her wrist, and Rudy, who was looking in that direction, saw their eyes meet—saw the old man freeze. Ingold didn’t flinch, but his eyes flared wide as he looked with shock and hurt and astonishment into Gil’s face.

  Rudy didn’t know what Ingold saw there, as Gil returned the wizard’s gaze. In the shadows her eyes were uncertain, maybe doubting what Ingold detected as well, but he saw her mouth alter, and she turned her face quickly aside. In Ingold’s gaze there was, for a moment, only shock, as if he had stumbled upon some new and dreadful knowledge. For a moment, before the wizard also looked away, Rudy thought he could see that shock followed by a grief past bearing, and bitterest pain.

  Gil said nothing. Her stillness was like a bent bow whose arrow aimed at a human heart. Maybe, Rudy thought—he did not know why—maybe her own.

  Ingold drew breath to speak, but let the words leak away unvoiced. Whatever they were, they hung on the air, they and whatever he saw or thought he saw in Gil’s face. It was a terrible silence, and Rudy, rather hastily, blithered into the breach.

  “Uh—so where are these guys waiting? The Dark tell you that?”

  There was a sleight-of-hand, a shift of expression, as if Ingold whisked away whatever he was feeling behind exasperation: “The Dark didn’t tell me anything. They’re not down there, you know.” Rudy thought there was relief in his voice. “But yes. I know.”

  The white brows pulled down over his nose, and pain returned to the deep-scored lines of his face. “There’s a mountain called Sa
ycotl Xyam, the Mother of Winter; the last great peak of the Spine of the Serpent, the cordillera of the continent, that sinks into hills for a time and rearises as these mountains and the Bones of God in Gettlesand. Saycotl Xyam guards the plain of Hathyobar, the heartland of the Empire of Alketch, where the Emperor’s city of Khirsrit rises on the shores of the lake of Nychee. They say the glaciers on its shoulders have never melted in all of human knowledge, in all of time. The mountain itself is said to have a core of ice, though none have been there to see.”

  “They’re there,” Gil whispered, and Ingold’s eyes returned to hers. It seemed to Rudy that they both stared at the same thing, both looked into the same blue depths of jewel, understanding one another—what Ingold had seen in the Dark Ones’ dreams and she in her own poison-tainted blood. Understanding to the cores of their souls.

  “Yes.” His lips moved; there was no sound.

  “Three mages making images with the music of the flute.”

  “Yes.”

  “Their magic …” She started to say something else, then shuddered and averted her eyes, as if from something she could not bear to see. When she spoke again, it was only to say, “And you’re gonna have to go down there, aren’t you?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “The Alketch?” Enas Barrelstave puffed out his heavy cheeks and scowled solemnly, the high ruff of his shirt giving him the appearance of a very pink pudding balanced on an elaborately folded napkin. As the finer fabrics of the age before the Dark deteriorated with time, Gil had pointed out to Rudy how the hereditary nobles—the lords and bannerlords—had become more conscious of keeping the well-off commoners in the Keep from dressing like them; Barrelstave’s shirt ruffles were drawing an angry glare from Lady Sketh, who had intruded herself into the Council as her husband’s permanent “guest.”

  “I’m afraid that’s out of the question.”

  “Out of the question?” Rudy’s voice scaled up in disbelief. “We’re talking about a … a force of magic that’s going to destroy the world as we know it, and you’re saying out of the question?”

  “I still don’t see how—even if such beings as you say Lord Ingold described to you do exist, for which I’d like to see a little more proof—” Lord Sketh began, and his wife dove in to finish his sentence for him.

  “I still don’t see how a volcano erupting in Gettlesand is any threat to us here.”

  “We have to have some priorities,” Lapith Hornbeam added reasonably. All around the long pine conference table, flanked by black-drummed columns that ran the length of the big chamber, the various representatives of the Keep nodded agreement. “Yes, if there is such a problem, I agree that it has to be taken care of, but you must concede right now that it’s more important to acquire stock. Parties can be sent downriver beyond Willowchild to gather hay, but my mother has come up with a plan—”

  “I don’t have to concede anything of the goddamn kind!”

  “How does he know about these things in the Alketch, anyway?”

  “It isn’t that we don’t believe him,” added Philonis Weaver, of the second level north, a kindly woman who didn’t look like she was going to survive the next frost, much less the next Ice Age. “It’s just that there are critical things that we need now, things that only a wizard can provide. We need to have someone who can tell us if another of those terrible storms is on the way—”

  “Oh, surely not!” Lady Sketh interrupted. “There’s only been one of them, and now that it’s over, and summer is approaching, it’s unlikely there’ll be another.”

  “I can goddamn guarantee you,” Rudy said in exasperation, “that there’s gonna be more ice storms, and no harvest, and nothing to eat, unless Ingold takes care of what’s causing this!” He glared around the Council chamber, uneasily aware of the way Barrelstave’s glance crossed that of Lord Sketh, and the speculative way in which both of them watched Tir.

  “Well, perhaps you could inform Lord Ingold, when he returns,” Lord Ankres said in his slow, dry voice, “that … when does he return?”

  “I personally move,” Bannerlord Pnak added angrily, “that when he does, he be reprimanded for deserting us in the first place. He has his responsibilities, after all—”

  “Which he should have taken into account—”

  “Second to that motion—”

  “Now, my mother’s plan—”

  “Yikes and double yikes.” Rudy closed the door to the Council chamber softly behind him and fell into step with Gil. The illusion he’d left in his place should keep most of them thinking he was still present for at least forty minutes if nobody spoke to it, and on their record it was unlikely anyone would.

  “I take it they didn’t think much of letting Ingold go south.” Gil kept close to his side, sheltered by the umbrella of his illusions. They crossed through the white splotches of glowstone light and through inky shadow where those with business in the Keep jostled shoulders with them, unseeing.

  “They’re idiots!” Rudy remembered to keep his voice to a whisper, but his gesture nearly took the hat off Treemut Farrier, passing along the corridor with a basket of eggs. The Council had spent all day yesterday arguing about whether to expropriate and socialize all the illegal chickens that had survived the storm—eggs were being traded for everything from better-situated cells to sexual favors—and in the meantime the Wickets and Gatsons and Biggars had hidden their hens all over fifth level north. “If Ingold doesn’t stop Los Tres Geezers down south from screwing with the weather, they’ll lose everything to the next ice storm and we’re gonna be under six feet of slunch by this time next year!”

  “If Lord Sketh, or Barrelstave, can manage to turn the Guards or any sizable percentage of the Keep against Minalde while Ingold is away,” Gil remarked, “you’re going to be in trouble a lot sooner than that.” She shifted the bundle under her cloak, heavier this time than last night—Rudy didn’t want to know about how she’d gotten hold of that much food. “You’ve heard what they’re whispering to the Guards—that Ingold could have stopped the storm if he’d wanted to. Or could have saved those kids. God knows what idiots like Biggar are putting around on fifth north.”

  The haunted look that had been in her eyes was more pronounced now, and she’d acquired a trick of looking at her hands, of feeling her wrist and elbow joints nervously, as if seeking something she didn’t want to find. “It’s easy now, because people are scared. Hell, I’m scared.”

  And she sounded scared, he thought. But not of the Fimbul Winter or the mages under the ice.

  On the steps of the Keep they stepped aside in time to avoid being knocked over by Scala Hogshearer, storming away from an altercation with a couple of the other girls of the Keep. One of them was holding her wrist and shouting furiously, “She bit me! She bit me!” and the other collecting broken beads scattered on the steps; Rudy could only guess what that was all about. The day was a bright one, thin warmth returning to the shards of the spring. Nearly everyone was clearing the ruined wheat from the fields, preparing for a second sowing—late, but still just feasible in these upland fields.

  That had been the topic for another heated discussion in Council—whether to sow the seed or hold it to feed the population through autumn and winter to come.

  “And they’ve got no guarantee Ingold is right.”

  “Whaddaya mean?” Rudy demanded, furious: “Ingold saw that stuff!”

  “Ingold says he saw it,” Gil pointed out. “If you weren’t a wizard yourself, would you believe him?”

  “Hell yes!”

  He said it because he had to, even though he knew he was wrong and dumb as the words came out of his mouth. She cocked a brow at him and said nothing. The bitten side of her face was toward him; he couldn’t see whether the other side smiled.

  Ingold was waiting in a copse of hemlocks just out of sight of the watchtowers at the Tall Gates. He looked better than he had last night, as if he’d gotten some sleep and the food had helped. “You were right,” Rudy
said as the old man sorted through the packs they’d brought: blankets, as much food as they could collect, a minimum of spare clothing, a few medical supplies. “Those yammerheads were talking about locking you up when you got back, trying to figure out goddamn ‘securities’ to make sure you didn’t run off again.”

  “Precisely what I am doing.” He straightened up and turned his head to survey the glassy black monolith of the Keep, visible through the trees. Men and women toiled in the fields, the lack of draft animals painfully evident. Apportionment of Yoshabel the Only Mule in the Vale was another matter much discussed in Council. Blue haze still hung heavy around the walls, from the smoking fires—even half-spoiled meat was still being brought up from Wormswell and Manse by the exhausted scavenging crews.

  “Deserting them … for what could very well be a madman’s fancy. Just because I’m able to work magic doesn’t mean I’m not subject to hallucinations, you know,” he added, seeing the look of uncertainty on Rudy’s face. “Or deception by the Dark.”

  “Uh …”

  “Somebody concerted those attacks on me,” Gil said quietly. “And on you. Somebody is … talking to me. Whispering in my head.”

  Rudy saw between them that understanding again, blue gaze meeting blue, seeing the same thing. Silence hung on the air, deepening with unsaid words.

  At last Ingold broke it, softly. “My child, were there a way I could … do without you on this journey … I would. As it is …”

  “You can tell,” she said, inaudible, her face like marble. “Can’t you?” If it hadn’t been Gil, Rudy would have sworn that tears silvered her eyes. “You can see it.”

  He looked away and nodded. “Yes. I—”

  She went on, reaching out to touch his hand, her voice very low. “If I knew how to fight it, I would, Ingold. I swear I would. But the dream comes back to me, telling me to kill you.”