Mother of Winter

by Barbara Hambly

Rudy gulped, shocked, and Ingold raised his head quickly, looking again into her face, almost as if he had expected her to say something different. She didn’t see, for her own attention seemed to be fixed suddenly on her hands where they laced over the hilt of her killing-sword.

  She only went on, her fingers probing at her wrist bones again, “I swear it won’t happen. If it gets too bad, I’ll let you know, so you can tie my hands at night. I’m all right in the daytime. But I’ve looked at it six ways from Tuesday and I think I need to be with you.”

  Still she didn’t meet his eyes, and her voice was quick and a little breathless, as if this were something she’d memorized beforehand. “I’d stay here if I could. It’s going to be hard, and sometimes I wonder if I’m this sure you’ll need me because They want me to be. Because They want me to be the one standing behind you with a sword in my hand. But I swear to you I’ll die before I’ll let you come to harm.”

  Ingold was silent for a long time, studying her—two or three times Rudy saw him draw in breath to speak, but in the end he did not. At length he put a hand under her chin and turned her eyes to meet his. “No, my dear,” he said softly. “I will always need you.” He started to say something else; again Rudy had the sense of words stopped on his lips, and when he went on again, it was very different from the original. “Do you feel able to make the journey?”

  Gil drew a deep breath, squaring her shoulders. Rudy saw suddenly by the tight lines around her lips that she was far from well. “I don’t think either of us has a choice about that.”

  “No,” he said. “No, I don’t think we do. Rudy …”

  He turned to clasp Rudy’s hands, the warm, rough strength of his grip reassuring. “I wish I could help you,” he said quietly. “Even if I’m not insane—and I have no assurance that the visions I’ve seen and those that plague Gil’s dreams have the slightest connection with the truth—I’m aware that I’m doing you perhaps the greatest disservice of my life, but … as Gil says, I don’t think any of us has any choice.”

  Rudy sighed. “And I wish I didn’t agree with you, pal, but I do. And anyway, you know the spook’s right more times than either of us.”

  Gil gave him the finger; Ingold smiled. The pain in his eyes did not lessen, and Rudy wondered suddenly what other vision might have come to the old man in the Nest of the Dark, what other truth he had learned that had fallen into place—Rudy could swear had fallen into place—when he touched Gil’s hand.

  “Two things are vital,” Ingold said. “First, that you find these seeds, these earth-apples, that Tir spoke of.”

  “Hell, yes.” Gil swiped at her eye with quick fingers bruised from sword practice, all her scholastic coldness upon her like armor again. “Potatoes completely revolutionized food production in the seventeenth century when they hit Ireland and Germany from the New World. If we can get hold of them—we’ll be home free.”

  “More important even than that,” Ingold went on, “is that you learn, as soon as possible, how the gaboogoos have gotten—or are getting—into the Keep. Even if I’m not mad, I’m not sure that I’m leaving you the easier task. Whatever waits for me in the ice beneath the Mother of Winter holds the key to what’s happening here at the Keep. Of that I’m certain. But whether you’ll be able to survive, whether you’ll be able to protect the Keep and its people …”

  “We’ll get along,” Rudy promised with an optimism he did not feel, and in Ingold’s returning smile he saw that the old man wasn’t fooled one bit. “Maybe things’ll be tough here, but we’ll kluge something together somehow. If you and I swapped places, I’d be sushi.”

  Ingold stepped close and embraced him as the son he had almost become, and Rudy had to fight not to think about what the hell would happen if the old man bought it down south.

  “You watch your butt, man,” he said again as they stepped apart. “With any luck, by the time you get back the whole Keep’ll be ass-deep in french fries.”

  If Tir ever speaks to me again, he thought bitterly, remembering how Alde’s maid Linnet had clung to Tir’s hand, had glared her hatred at Rudy for not being there to somehow save her child.

  He watched the sturdy old vagabond, the thin ramshackle woman, hoist their packs to their backs and move like wraiths into the twilight flutter of aspen-shadow that surrounded the rocks of the Tall Gates, and followed them with a spell of inconspicuousness. There was a faint oath as the watcher on the gates dropped his spear and bent down to pick it up while they crossed open ground; then Rudy turned back toward the black-walled fortress shining in the midst of the brown meadows, the only place he had ever really felt was his home.

  What if Alde goes into labor before he gets back? he wondered desperately. What if there’s another ice storm? Or some other cockamamie thing I don’t have the experience to watch out for? What if the gaboogoos turn out to be way weirder than even Ingold thinks? What do I do then?

  It was true Thoth had said that Brother Wend and Ilae—who must be nineteen or twenty by now, and Rudy shook his head at the thought: the girl he remembered was a child of fourteen—were on their way, but what if something went wrong?

  All I got to say is, there better be some kid in the Keep I can start teaching, because if anything happens, we’re toast.

  He turned and looked back toward the crowding, gray-yellow shoulders of rock that guarded the pass, the crumbling stone watchtowers and remnants of wall visible among the trees. There was no sign of the old wizard or of the woman who would follow him, Rudy knew, to the end of creation.

  He was almost at the Keep when a spate of people poured out of its great doors, as if the Keep Council had collected all its family members and minor supporters for a rally: Barrelstave and the Skeths, Koram Biggar and his squad of grubby fifth-level chicken farmers, Maia and Hogshearer and a lot of Hornbeams and Ankres’ men-at-arms, all shouting, all waving their fists, all furious about something …

  Screw this, Rudy thought and stopped in his tracks, deepening the cloak of illusion that had drifted around him and Gil all the way across the valley. I don’t need this now. Have your agent call my agent.

  But instead of parting to swarm past on either side, the mob stopped, too, and a shrill voice from within it screamed, “There he is!” Varkis Hogshearer’s daughter Scala lumbered up to him, heavy chin jutting and malice in her squinty dark eyes. She yelled over her shoulder to her father, “I saw him meet old Ingold! I saw Ingold and Gil-Shalos run away down the pass together with a lot of food, like a couple of thieves …”

  She should talk, Rudy thought—anybody that stout these days had to be a food-thief herself.

  And then, as Minalde strode out of the group with genuine fury in her eyes, he thought, Oh, crikey. Shocked, he met the big teenager’s red-faced gaze and realized what it meant, that she’d seen him through illusion and stealth. That she’d seen Ingold.

  This is who we’ve been watching for, these past five years.

  This is the next mageborn in the Keep.

  Book Two

  THE BLIND KING’S TOMB

  CHAPTER NINE

  Rudy saw the Bald Lady again, the night after Ingold left the Keep.

  Her face was clearer to him in this dream, perhaps because he’d gazed into the crystal heart of the scrying table with his hand on one of the two record stones that held her images. Like all those forgotten mages—the Guy with the Cats; the Dwarf whose stubby fingers sparkled with a festival of jewels as she worked her incomprehensible cantrips with water and flowers; Black Bart, solemn and wise with a twinkle in his golden eyes—Rudy had come to know her well, and he wasn’t surprised to find himself dreaming about her again.

  In the earlier of the several crystal images, she was young, and in the others, only middle aged. It was strange to see her now so old. It was like viewing all the films of Katharine Hepburn, assuming that there were no changes in hairstyle to contend with, and that somewhere between The Philadelphia Story and The Lion in Winter Ms. Hepburn had visited Hell.

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bsp; The Bald Lady was still unshakably beautiful, descending the long obsidian stair through clouds of glowstone light; still wrapped in her night-colored cloak, her bald head held at a proud angle; still weeping, soundless, giving nothing away as she walked. They were deeper in the Keep this time. Stone tanks lined the walls of the crypt where Rudy stood, water casting a crystalline moiré on the ceilings and across the strangely angled metal faces of machines wrought of wire and glass and what looked like hanging threads of tiny jeweled beads. Unusual, for the stark rectilineal design of the Keep, there were niches let into the wall of this chamber, four or five feet deep and the height of the tall ceiling; in a corner Rudy saw the black stone drum of a scrying table. Probably to read the tech manuals, he thought. She touched the machines, one by one, as she passed them, as if drinking in their soft-glowing power through her long fingers, crossed to trail her hand over the scrying table’s surface before turning toward the crypt’s inner door. There was pain and defeat in her shoulders, grief unbearable in the line of her back.

  Who are you? Rudy cried, and dreamlike found himself unable to make a sound. In any case, the Bald Lady did not turn her head. Where are you going? Where did you hide the answers?

  He reached out to catch her arm but could not touch her. The white glowstone light flickered in a tear as it slid down her face, and she pressed out of sight again into darkness.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The first village of the Alketch lands that Gil and Ingold entered burned to the ground within hours of their arrival. Gil gathered that such a thing wasn’t uncommon these days in the territory that lay between the Penambra hinterland and the Kingdom of D’haalac-Ar, northernmost of the Alketch realms. But it wasn’t an auspicious start

  “It’s the end of the world,” said the steward of the largest landholder in town, leaning in the doorway of the kitchen yard with an armload of shirts gathered to her bosom—she doubled as seamstress and brew-mistress of the house as well. “First it was the Dark, sent by the Lord of the Demons to divide the godly from those ungodly in their hearts. Since that time, it seems that demons have been loose in the land, what with the Golden Sickness, and famine, and the old Emperor and his son both dying and his daughter turning rebel and disobedient.”

  She shook her head wearily. “That has to be the work of demons, too.” Gil guessed her age at forty or so, though it was difficult to tell because her hair was hidden by the caps and veils customarily worn by women in the south. She looked sixty, with the slackness of flesh of one who had been fat five years before.

  “Now it’s all armies on the march, Lord na-Chandros and General Esbosheth with his young king, as if him saying so could make the prince’s concubine’s little brother heir … pfui! And the bishop stripping the land of every standing man for troops, as if poor Father Crimael didn’t have worries enough.”

  Father Crimael, Gil had deduced, was the head of the household, not only priest of the Straight God but the wealthiest man in the village.

  After five years of seeing no one but the population of the Keep and its settlements—with occasional visits from peripatetic bands of murderers—Gil found it strange to encounter whole communities of people she’d never met. She hadn’t realized she had become so insular. From the bench where she sat scouring rust from the harness buckles of every piece of tack in the stables, she found herself marveling at the freestanding house of soft local brick and pink-washed plaster, even as she had found herself subconsciously offended at the fact that the humans of the household shared living space with pigs and cows as well as the usual Keep fauna of cats, dogs, chickens, and rodents. Odd to smell pepper and cinnamon in the steam that floated from the brick cookhouse on the other side of the court. Odder still to realize that not only was every female over the age of nine veiled, but to see their stares, to hear the catcalls and comments they had shouted at her because she was not.

  The Dark had been here, that Gil could see. There were houses in the village that bore signs of extensive repair, and from conversation Gil understood that no one went out-of-doors after twilight for any reason whatsoever. But the scourge here and in all the Alketch lands was the political anarchy that had erupted in the wake of the Dark’s rising. The Golden Sickness had followed that—she and Ingold had passed the rock cairns of the mass graves on the outskirts of the village that morning—fueled by years of famine as warm-weather crops like rice and millet failed. The steward’s dress and zgapchin—the sacklike mob cap of country women—were faded to wan echoes of their original green and yellow, and the stables Ingold was currently cleaning would have accommodated a score of horses and cattle but bore signs of occupancy by only a few of each.

  When Gil had suggested to Ingold that they earn food and shelter for the night by healing, as they’d done in the only other inhabited settlement they’d found, five days’ walk north in the swamps of the delta, he’d shaken his head. “We’re in the Alketch now, my child,” he said softly. “Even herbalists are looked upon askance, be they not priests of the Church.” The only spells he had used since coming out of the forested highlands of the border had been those of concealment from the armed bands, sometimes hundreds strong, that had passed them, harness jingling in the dry heatless afternoons, and the Spell of Tongues that enabled her to understand the gummy, circumlocutory borderland patois. In the negotiations for lunch, the priest-landlord’s steward evidently hadn’t even been aware that Gil wasn’t using the ha’al tongue.

  They were a brown race, here in D’haalac-Ar, with the blue eyes of the Wathe or sometimes the silvery irises of the true Alketch, and in the town square Gil had seen children with the white Alketch hair. According to Ingold, the color bar was stringently observed in the more civilized lands around Khirsrit, both by blacks and by whites. From behind the parched yellow rocks yesterday she had seen a marching force of them, gray eyes startling in the coal-dark faces, long plumes of white hair—or raven-black, there didn’t seem to be anything in between—gathered up through the tops of red leather helmets, like panaches moving in the wind.

  All were mounted—Gil hadn’t seen that many horses together in years.

  And all were men.

  Gil tried to tell herself that that was why people stared at her—though goodness knew, living on the border they must have seen breeched and armed female bandits. She told herself that what was happening to her couldn’t possibly be so far along as to show. Not yet.

  But her hands strayed from the harness to touch her chin, her brow, her wrists, and the long bones of her hands. The changes couldn’t be showing yet. Ingold had said nothing.

  The conviction that she was mutating as the animals had mutated could even be illusion, like the pseudomemories that haunted her dreams and plagued even her waking hours now. Memories of rape at Ingold’s hands; memories of his beating her, shouting names at her that it sickened her to recall—if it was recollection. Sometimes she could remember that it wasn’t. Sometimes she couldn’t tell, just as she couldn’t tell whether or not her arms were growing longer, her fingers turning into spike-tipped horrors like the hands of the thing that had bitten her. She’d look in anything—she stared now into the polished silver pectoral of a martingale—trying to determine the truth.

  But the truth eluded her. Sometimes it was impossible to focus her mind on her own image. Sometimes she thought she looked normal. Other times she found she could not remember what normal had been.

  “Gil?” He stood in the stable doorway, soiled hay flecking his patched deerskin breeches and boots, his eyes filled with concern. “Are you all right?”

  Was he staring oddly at her face? Her hands? You can see it, she had asked, and he had replied, Yes. What else, if not that?

  She made herself sniff, and said, “I was just thinking that any kind of work is okay for a woman to do here, as long as it doesn’t involve defending herself.”

  Ingold grinned and slipped his shoulders from beneath the yoke that held him to a sledgeload of equine by-products.

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p; “My dear Gil, a woman’s defense lies in not catching a man’s eye and in trusting the saints.” The wizard stretched his cramped shoulders and crossed to the bench where she sat, to drink of the water gourd at her side. “Just ask any man hereabouts.”

  He picked up his staff from the well head and sketched a word in the courtyard dust.

  “That’s attes: man. See this diacritical mark? It’s an honorific, but it’s always part of the spelling of the word. All men are Honored Men. Tattesh: woman. Literally, not-a-man or, more precisely, not-of-us, and as you notice, no honorific diacritical in sight.”

  “So we’re here in an entire empire that thinks with its honorific diacriticals?” She cocked a wry grin up at him, and all was for a moment as it had been.

  “More or less. See here: pia’an. Wizard. And pjan: demon.” Every house bore hex signs against demons, as well as the customary bright-painted images of God’s saints.

  “Those two dots there mean nonhuman. You’ll see them on the names of all animals except horses, falcons, and cats. The Emperor’s horse, falcon, and cat all get honorifics, by the way, something none of his wives do. So one can mortally insult a pretender like our one-handed friend Vair na-Chandros simply by referring to his horse as katüsh rather than kattush—mortally for oneself, I mean.”

  “Get along to your work, old fool!” the steward called out, returning to the back door. “When Father Crimael gets back, he’ll—”

  She stopped. From over the courtyard wall came the sound of running feet, women’s voices crying out. Then the fast thud of hooves, and men cursing, and a high, shrill child’s shriek, “Soldiers! Soldiers!”

  Gil dropped the harnesswork and grabbed her sword from the bench by her side; Ingold’s was already in his hand. The wooden gate of the court blasted open under the weight of a horse, black and fully armored and ridden shoulder-first into the barrier, the man on its back gigantic in armor of bronze-lacquered bamboo. Ingold caught Gil’s arm and fled through the still-room door—Gil could hear men shouting in both directions, the crash of furniture breaking, and the steward’s shriek of helpless terror and pain.