Mother of Winter

by Barbara Hambly

  They emerged into a shoving chaos in the town square, women holding their veils over their faces or their babies in their arms as they fled screaming, children underfoot like terrified piglets. Only a handful of men, most of them elderly, had been working the fields, and they were dying in pitched battle near the town fountain against three times their number of leather-armored soldiers. On the steps of the church, its curlicued facade a clutter of brilliant-hued statues and gilded sunbursts, a man in a red robe who had to be Father Crimael was shouting, beckoning the women and children who streamed past him into the blue-tiled sanctuary, Ingold tried to dodge down an alley and cut back as three horsemen rode at them, knocking into and almost falling over an elderly man fleeing a house with a bag of money in his arms. Gil cursed the miser as she and the wizard sprang up the church steps and into its shadows, the horsemen crashing after them, monsters of bronze and black.

  Among the carnival house of tiny pavilion chapels, of sunken pits and spiral stairs and hanging lofts on a dozen different levels, women crowded, weeping, holding their children to them or shrieking their names. Down six steps and through a circular pit where a fountain bubbled softly, Ingold sprang, with Gil at his heels wondering how he knew where the back door was—and of course there was a back door that way, but though it stood open, it was jammed with frightened old men and women, pressing back as men in buglike black armor mounted the steps, weapons flashing. Ingold threw his shoulder against the door, and Gil, behind him, thought with sudden viciousness, Shove him out … They’ll cut him to pieces …

  She stepped back fast. People pressed her on all sides as she leaned her back to a twisted double pillar, fighting to breathe—for a moment her vision narrowed to a slim girl beside her, with Alde’s morning-glory eyes staring at her over the stained gray cotton of a veil. By the time Gil’s vision cleared, the girl was gone.

  Hooves crashed behind her, booming within the church’s fretted ceiling groins. Sunlight from the high windows fleered across armor, beaded plumes, the black captain’s silvery eyes. Father Crimael, very young, came from among the refugees and stood before him, crimson robes faded but his clean-shaved head smooth as an egg, his face placid with the serenity of one whose reservation has already been phoned in to Heaven.

  “Are you a heretic, then, to break the law of sanctuary, Captain Tsman-el?”

  “We break no law.” The bandit captain spoke the harsh c’uatal of the south. “We’re here to collect tribute for His Lordship Esbosheth, regent for the true king. If a man can’t pay it out of his goods, he owes what he can give, a woman or a couple of brats. We’ll take those, saint-kisser.”

  “Then let Lord Esbosheth come here himself and make an accounting,” the priest said steadily. “But any man who takes any living human from sanctuary is liable before God—not Lord Esbosheth, not the young king, but the man who himself performs the deed. You are liable before the Judges of the Straight Way, and the saints of God, and all the fires of Hell.”

  The captain grinned evilly. “Well, I can’t have that, now can I? Can’t let the Judges of the Straight Way and the saints of God be snickerin’ bad things about me behind my back.” He reined his horse around, its iron shoes ringing on the soft, pitted brick floor, so that he faced those who’d crowded through the door after him: dark faces, brown, and white, peering like demons from among a forest of ax blades and swords. “You boys heard the saint-kisser. Guess we’ll just have to wait for volunteers to come out of their own free will.”

  The men laughed, and some of them called out obscenities to the women closest to them, or to the priest. Even before the captain had ridden his horse from the sanctuary and away down the front steps, Gil heard them dragging logs and brushwood to pile around the outside walls. She looked around quickly for Ingold, but there was an anger flaring in her, cold and deliberate—she knew the old man could get the two of them past the soldiers just by causing a couple of the horses to spook, but that wasn’t what she wanted. Above her in a thick-carved shrine projecting from the wall she heard a girl sobbing, “I won’t do it! I won’t do it!” over and over; the babble of voices, soprano mostly and terrified, was growing louder as the heat-dance from the fires began to waver against the high windows and smoke poured in to roil in the ceiling’s pendants and hammerbeams.

  She wanted to kill them, those men in the square. Like the heat-dance the lying visions shuddered in her mind, hands holding her down—Ingold’s hands. Angerless cold rose in her like a wave.

  “Are you a bandit?” a voice beside her asked. “A robber?” The tone was that of one who seeks information only.

  She looked around. It was the priest, Father Crimael.

  “No. Just a woman who wants to travel without getting raped.” She saw herself reflected in those light gray eyes, a thin, tall woman with a scar down one side of her unveiled face and hair like braided storm-wrack, a killing-sword in her belt and terrible knowledge in her eyes. If there was anything more, she could not tell it.

  The priest didn’t look more than twenty. He wore bright glass saint-charms around his neck and a strand of demon-scaring beads. “You’re a northerner,” he said, as if that explained it. “Will you help? We need every weapon. Your father, too, carries a sword—can he use it?”

  “Just watch him.” She looked around. They stood at the foot of a short flight of steps, leading up to a latticed window and the statue of St. Prathhes, recognizable by his attributes of crimson spell-rope, scourge, and poisoned cup. Like one of the wizards whom that most archaic of saints was said to have flogged, Ingold stood at the statue’s feet, looking out the window, while below him in the round depression of a holy pit, men and boys took up candles and lampstands, handling them uncertainly, not sure how to use them as weapons.

  “Ingold!” Gil called, but the old man made no response. He stood with head bowed, arms folded over his chest. The flames flickering outside emblazoned his scarred face and bloodied the white of his beard and the pale wool of his shirt. Smoke poured in through the window bars around him. She sprang up the stairs, Father Crimael at her heels, and called out again, “Ingold …!”

  She reached the window just in time to see the fires die out of the blazing wood that surrounded the church. The Spell of Tongues gave her an accurate idea of what the captain and his officers said on the subject. Interesting imagery, to say the least. Tsman-el kicked the wood, thrust at it with his sword. Shouts from around the other side of the church indicated that the bonfires built there had gone out, too.

  Ingold shifted his stance a little, drew a deep breath, but his scarred eyelids remained shut, only shifting a little with the movement of the eyes beneath.

  Gil had to suppress the urge to laugh with angry delight. The bandits tried twice more to get the fires going again. They might just as well have been putting tinder and flint to bricks. On the second effort a man yelled, “Damn it, Captain, my firebox has gone out!” Other troopers rushed to their saddles, where many carried fire-boxes of horn in which, with assiduous feeding on bits of moss and tinder, a couple of smoldering coals might be nursed along all day. The ensuing commentary was unedifyingly awesome.

  “Who’s the heretic now, eh, saint-kisser?” the captain yelled, swinging astride his black horse again and looking up at the young priest framed in the traceries of the window. Men were coming out of all the houses around the square, with sacks of seed millet, chickens, and the bleeding carcasses of pigs and pot-dogs slung over their shoulders. “Heretic and hypocrite as well, demons bugger you for a thousand years! Who gets to deal with the Judges now, and the saints, and the fires of Hell?”

  “My, aren’t the grapes sour today?” Gil remarked, watching the bandits ride past the church in a great choke of dust that glittered goldenrod in the slanting afternoon light. “Doesn’t want to risk—”

  The priest had gone. Ingold leaned his back against the striped pillars that flanked St. Prathhes’ shrine, his eyes still closed, his breathing deep now and even. With his arms folded before
his breast, he was closed in on himself, walled within his own private thoughts. The twisted images of her own mind gone, it occurred to Gil that he’d probably just saved almost as many people as had perished in the Settlements, if not from the quick murder of the ice storm, then from something slower, more wretched, more agonizing.

  People were emerging from the church door. From her post at the window she could see them around the corner of the building, peer furtively about them to check if any soldiers remained, then scatter at a run to their houses. From between two houses that fronted the square, a young girl emerged, barely able to walk, her veil held in front of her face with both hands and her skirt torn and streaked with blood. A woman ran from the door of the church and caught the girl in her arms as she fell.

  The priest’s voice came soft to Gil’s ears, asking, “Is it true?”

  Ingold opened his eyes and looked at Father Crimael, who had come once more to the top of the little flight of steps. The sun fractured like blue topaz in his eyes. “Yes,” he said at length. “Yes, it’s true.”

  The priest’s soft mouth tightened and he turned his face away. “They were right,” he whispered, “who said that the Lord of Demons is subtle, and crueler than death. The holy place protected us from the horrors of war, but it could not guard us against Evil.”

  “What the hell …?” Gil stared at that tormented young face, uncomprehending.

  “I assure you,” Ingold’s voice cut in gently over hers, “none of the people protected within these walls by my magic owes the Evil One a thing. I quenched the fires, not they, and I did it solely because I would not see them harmed.” A woman walked below the platform where they stood, going late out of the church; she carried a boy of two and led another, ten years old and pretty as a girl, by the hand. Ingold watched them, a kind of bitterness in his eye, as if he knew from terrible experience what happened to pretty boys as well as pretty girls, and not-so-pretty girls, and fairly ugly grandmothers, when soldiers sacked a town. “They have their lives and their freedom, to choose and find the good. Where lies the evil in that?”

  There was sorrow in the young priest’s face, as if he heard sentence of his own death. “All things that arise from Illusion partake of Evil,” he said. “The Hand of Illusion lies upon it, and upon you, and now upon them by extension, and on this whole town.”

  He laid fingers like black velvet, workless and fine, upon Ingold’s arm, and his eyes were pleading—Gil wondered for whose forgiveness. “I believe you meant only good, my friend. But the Lord of Lies has lied even to you, masking from your own eyes why you did what you did. Masking from you the stench of evil that touches all illusion, all magic, all things of his, no matter how they are meant.”

  In one of the houses close by the square an old man’s quavery voice lifted, crying out in horror at what he found when he returned to his home. The priest’s head moved, following the sound, and his face contracted with grief. “I must go to them.” He raised his saint-beads to his lips. “Go now. I won’t speak of this to them until sunset, by which time you can be far away. If this lies upon my soul for letting you escape after what you have done, so be it. I believe in my heart that you meant no ill. That you were deceived.”

  Gil was speechless, assembling the implications of what was said. It was almost easier to believe the whispered lies in her mind than that these people would believe that salvation from the wrong source would damn them all.

  More cries went up from other houses in the town, weeping for those who had not made it to the church, or perhaps only for the fact that there was now no more seed and, like those in the Keep, they faced starvation.

  Ingold said, “Thank you. It is kind of you, and that kindness should weigh something with God. Come, Gil.”

  The priest shook his head as they stepped past him, and he followed them down the pink sandstone of the steps. “If you are an agent of Evil,” he said, “even an unknowing one, you know nothing of the Judges of the Way, or the saints, or the rule of the Straight God.”

  “Of all the bloody goddamn nerve!” Gil looked back at the village for the dozenth time. From the high hill it was small now in the discolored light. “You saved those people from being raped and tortured and sold into slavery, and he’s going to ‘let you go’ out of the motherless goodness of his heart? I’m so overwhelmed at his generosity I think I’m going to faint! What would they have done? Burned you at the stake?”

  The wizard smiled a little, as at an inner joke. “Well, since that would have been done with the same tinder I quenched around the church to save their lives, I think most of them would have girned at that. But did anyone in the town possess some kind of rune plaque or spell-ribbon or poison—yellow jessamine or passion-flower are what they use hereabouts—I’d probably have been in for a flogging at least.”

  He spoke lightly, but Gil had seen the marks on his back from long-ago manhandling by the then-High King; she had witnessed, also, the imprisonment and sentencing to death of all the wizards of the Keep by the Bishop Govannin of unpleasant memory. There were dozens of saints in the calendar like St. Prathhes, of whom nothing further was known except that he had been called “Killer of Wizards.”

  She was silent, treading the dusty way beside him, the dry glitter of the silvery olive leaves all around them, the world silent but for the scrape of insects and the dry rattle of geckos in the tangle of thorn and brushwood.

  “The ability to use magic doesn’t make a person good, Gil. It’s a tool, like a knife, which can be used for good or ill. The Church has traditionally been the check upon wizards who use that tool for selfish ends or who sell it to further the greed of others. Given the nature of southern politics, it’s no surprise that attitude has been popular hereabouts for centuries.”

  “Even if you saved their lives.” She knew he spoke the truth. Brother Wend, Thoth’s student, had undergone agonies of guilt before accepting that he was what he was.

  “You know we’ve found evidence that the wizards who built the Keep, or their immediate successors, were destroyed or driven out,” Ingold said. “It could have been politics, but politicians as a rule hang on to a few wizards even though they might throw out the ones that side with their enemies. Only fanaticism makes so clean a sweep.

  “And indeed,” he went on sadly, pausing at the crest of the hill, “I have no guarantee that poor Father Crimael—and Brother Wend, and all the others—aren’t absolutely right. If there is an Evil One, a Lord of Illusion, he—or she—might deceive me so thoroughly that I think I am doing good by saving those people, when in fact I am putting them all in debt to the forces of Illusion, the powers of denial and lies. I wouldn’t know the difference.”

  He shook his head, old doubt, old guilt, old horror a shadow on his face. “The same way I do not know whether the vision I saw in the Nest of the Dark Ones was correct; whether my quest is madness that will leave the Keep undefended to its doom.”

  Gil was silent. The subject of madness was a tender one with her, and she shied from it. The voices in her mind were quiet—only the thread of music remained, far back, and that odd, sweetish smell. She felt her wrist bones again, wondering if Ingold’s silence about the changes she felt sure were taking place stemmed only from his punctilious politeness.

  She felt strange and light-headed, and glad of the chance to stop and rest.

  Ingold’s face was averted from her. She knew there was something between them that ought to be said, but all that could be said had been said … And it would change nothing. The visions remained lodged like broken glass in her brain, scenes of ugliness and violence that she knew had never taken place. She was a threat to him, and to the success of this mad journey. It was reasonable, she thought, that he treat her as such and keep her at arm’s length.

  From here the village looked like someone had dropped a box of toy blocks, white and pink and mostly brown around the edges, ringed in a wide straggle of fences, corrals, sheds, and barns, the stream bright on one side, demon shrin
es making spots of red or blue in the corners of the fields, and the church a fantasia of color and gilt. Smoke blossomed from the roof of the church.

  “Ingold …”

  She pointed. As she did so, more smoke puffed, like exploding dandelions, from the roofs of two houses, then some sheds. She could see people moving around in the square, leading forth a few animals, but calmly, as if buildings were not taking fire all around them. Nobody seemed to be going for water. Nobody seemed to be warning anyone else. There were no horsemen, no soldiers, no flash of weaponry in the tiger-lily sunset.

  The people themselves were firing the village.

  “Atonement,” Ingold said. He’d retrieved his dust-colored robe and brown mantle from Father Crimael’s house; the sleeve was marked with spatters of the steward’s blood. “And cleansing. Hoping that this will pay off their debt to the Lord of Demons, for saving their lives.”

  Gil could only stare. “They’re idiots! Summer or not, it’s damn cold around here at night! Most of them have kids. Even if they got run out of most of their food, to destroy their shelter, everything they own …”

  “Most people are idiots about something, Gil.” The old man sounded beaten and sad. “Only some of them behave like fools about liquor, or whatever drug they’ve chosen, or about scholarship, or training in war, or learning odd facts about the magical world, or their own personal power … or love.” His voice hesitated over that last, and Gil turned her head quickly, trying to catch the look in his eyes.

  His gaze, however, remained enigmatic, looking out over the valleys, and he kept his arms wrapped around himself, not offering her his hand. She thought, He can’t. He no longer trusts me. Hatred for the ice-mages razored her, small and cold and perfect, beyond the murmur of their voices in her mind.