Mother of Winter

by Barbara Hambly

  All for nothing …

  After a moment she unwound the scarf from around her hands and dragged it again over the armillary, until the crystalline brightness of its gems was veiled, as if in a cloud of dust. Then she got to her feet and crossed to the window. She was still so young, standing there like a queen, but the youth was gone from her face, and Rudy knew that it never came back. The dark, strangely colored eyes were terrible to behold.

  He had seen that look in Ingold’s eyes. She had knowledge that she would give anything to unknow, had seen what she could never unsee. Closing her eyes, she folded her fist into a white-and-blue hammer and beat it slowly, angrily, on the flawless white wall. As if that could change what she knew would come, could break the wall of what must be.

  In time she returned to the table, and laying her head down beside the veiled stars of the armillary sphere, she wept.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Swordsmen, Guardsmen, and other professional warriors are always on the lookout for new teachers and new techniques, and Ingold was a welcome addition to the staff of the St. Marcopius Gladiatorial Barracks. Once the men got used to Gil’s presence—and the Alketch men were for the most part astonishingly shy of being less than completely dressed around women—she worked as a sparring partner, too, and learned a good deal about different methods of combat. She learned, among other things, how to deal with men who resented the presence of an armed woman and felt called upon to teach her a lesson, but at least two—the Boar and a bouncy, perpetually cheerful Delta Islander called the Little Cat—welcomed the chance to learn about Guards’ technique and would push her hard in a bout without malice.

  Gil and Ingold had arrived at the tail end of the Hummingbird Games, dedicated to one of the thirty thousand obscure local Alketch saints and financed by Generalissimo Vair na-Chandros to the tune of several hundred thousand silver crowns. There was a certain amount of talk about this in the noisy and garlic-smelling tenement behind the Arena, where they got a room through the good offices of the Boar, a big, inarticulate man with a mustache the size of a sheep. His ring-name in the c’uatal language, Bizjek—the monster red pigs of the deep southern jungles—was pronounced almost the same as the ha’al word for eggplant—bezji’ik—and within a day Gil and Ingold were calling him Eggplant, as everyone else had for years.

  Niniak, an eleven-year-old thief who shared the room next to theirs with several of his younger sisters and brothers, explained to Gil as they toted water from the nearest fountain one night that Vair na-Chandros was trying to buy popularity after forcing marriage with the old Emperor’s daughter Yori-Ezrikos.

  “She sent out letters to every other general and nobleman in the realm offering marriage when her da and her brother croaked, but na-Chandros, he just camped out with his army and told ’em he’d kill all comers.” The boy shifted his chewing gum to the other side of his mouth. Everyone, Gil had found, chewed gum, except for the very high nobility, who smoked opium in quantities that would have embarrassed nineteenth-century Chinese mandarins.

  “Esbosheth, he came up with some second cousin or something of the old Emp who happened to be his nephew, and why didn’t Yori-Ezrikos marry this brat and everybody would live happily ever after, and they been fighting ever since.”

  He shrugged. He had been six at the rising of the Dark, Gil thought. He’d lived through four major wars, plague, and a fire that wiped out a good quarter of the city; he would not remember much of the world before that time.

  She felt ancient, and—with her nervousness about crowds, her increasing desire to remain out of sight, and her longing for the silence of the empty lands—extremely provincial.

  “Hell, me, I don’t see what the problem is,” the boy went on cockily. “It don’t really matter who she marries—the generals gonna run the country anyway. I’ll marry her and live in the palace and eat meat every day and do whatever they say.”

  Gil, who had met Vair na-Chandros when he was in charge of the Alketch effort to assist and conquer the remainder of the Realm of Darwath, had her own reflections on how long anyone would last who shared even the illusion of power with that treacherous gentleman, but she kept them to herself. Niniak would have bristled at the merest suggestion that he couldn’t take care of himself in any situation, and when Ingold wasn’t around, had adopted a protective attitude about her as well. He’d given her a tin demon-catcher—a sort of filigree ball with a bit of colored glass inside—and a couple of strings of saint-beads, but when they reached the stairway that ran up the side of the tenement, he bounced up ahead of her as a matter of course. He was the male. He might have no shoes on his feet, but he had an honorific diacritical on his name.

  Of course he’d go first.

  Gil smiled and ascended the stair in his wake. At least Niniak hadn’t noticed—or hadn’t mentioned—anything strange in her appearance. But in a world where all women went veiled, she reflected, that was no guarantee he’d notice even a major mutation.

  She guessed, too, that Ingold had other reasons for lingering in Khirsrit. The journey south had been an exhausting one. Scarce as food was in that cruel summer, with starvation walking openly in the lower quarters of the town, those connected with the half-dozen gladiatorial schools ate well. In spite of teaching and sparring eight and ten hours a day—hard physical training against men a third his age—Ingold looked better than he had when they were living off the famished countryside. The wounds on his back and arms were healing, the new scars fresh-red and shocking among the older marks and weals when he stood, half stripped, booted feet apart, in the sand of the ring. Most of the time he didn’t even draw his sword until halfway through the bout, contenting himself with effortless dodging and sidestepping and a spate of mild commentary.

  In a way, Gil knew, he was enjoying himself. This was his vacation. He was resting, gathering himself for the meeting with the mages under the ice.

  There was never a time when Gil was not conscious of them. She feared sleep, for her dreams were foul, and the visions spilled over into waking memory. But such was her exhaustion—or the effect of the poison still working in her blood—that she was tired all the time, sleeping in spite of the heat in their chamber on the uppermost floor, and in spite of the noise of the families who had rooms all along the gallery, who fought and fornicated and shouted deep into the brief nights. She slept in the daytime as well, with the rickety wooden shutters bolted that led onto the gallery—the room was suffocating, but her instincts as a Guard would not permit anything else. In her dreams she sometimes saw the pool of heaving mists shimmering in the blue nonlight of the glacier’s heart, heard the singing of the ice-mages as they wrought their spells.

  Sometimes she would know what they were singing and would wake with hammering heart to see Ingold, sitting in the opened half of the shutters, gazing out into the starry night.

  The day after the end of the Hummingbird Games there was a rumor that Esbosheth’s army was going to make a try on the Hathyobar walls. Gil and Niniak walked down to the Southgate quarter and sat on the parapet overlooking the jewel-blue darkness of Lake Nychee and the half-burned counterpane of gold and green and black that were the fields visible beyond. No army showed up. Vair na-Chandros’ men waited in gold-and-black, phoenix-headed barges drawn up around the watergates, painted holy banners stirring in the sullen breeze, and the generalissimo himself put in a brief appearance in his renowned cloak of peacock tails, but by that time people were getting bored and leaving.

  On the rose-red walls themselves, Gil felt queerly exposed, visible to the looming shape of gray and black and green and killing white that was the Mother of Winter, a crouching monster reared against the sky. During the journey south, Ingold had spoken of the tombs cut into the complex of canyons at the mountain’s feet, spoken with an edge of distant anger in his voice and the memory of some old pain in his eyes. “Most of the wadis of the necropolis parallel the ridges, just beyond the olive groves, but one of them leads straight back into the mountain it
self.”

  There had been fighting in the necropolis when she and Ingold had first approached the valley, turning them aside into the city. There were mountain apes up there, too, Ingold had said, and almost certainly gaboogoos. She wondered now about how Ingold planned to reach the place at all, much less find where the entrance to the ice-mages’ cave lay. If there were gaboogoos, or mountain apes mutated by eating slunch, no spell of concealment would cloak him long.

  From the wall she could see the dark smudges of the trees that marked the mouths of the mortuary canyons, the ruined aisles of obelisks, statues, funerary steles.

  She asked, “Was one of the Old Emperors blind, Niniak?”

  The boy shrugged. “Me, I ain’t no egghead. I dunno.” He perched on a crenellation with his feet dangling over twenty-five yards of straight drop to the rocky strip of the shore. “How come you want to know that?”

  “I heard a story about how one of the tombs up there—” She nodded toward the mountain. “—has a statue in it of a king with no eyes. I wondered who that might be.”

  “Oh,” Niniak said. “Him.” He’d bagged a handful of dates from a vendor, had considerately given Gil one and was unselfconsciously consuming the rest. A man needs his strength, after all.

  “You know him?” Gil regarded the boy in surprise.

  “Sure. At least Old Haystraw, he knows him. Haystraw’s the old cripple who begs on the St. Tekmas pillar—that’s on the landside south corner of the Arena porch.” Landside was west; lakeside was east. Nobody in Khirsrit ever said west or east. Every pillar of the Arena porch was named for a different saint, and everyone in town knew which was which.

  Niniak spit a date pit over the precipice of the wall and craned his neck to watch it hit the pebbles. “Haystraw, he used to be a tomb-robber, till the bishop’s guards caught him. But he talked all the time about this king and that king, like they was his family or somethin’. But anyhow everybody, they knows about the Blind King’s Tomb. It’s way up that third canyon there—see? The canyon splits in two and you push through the trees and go up the left way, and between these two big ol’ pillars there’s a door and that’s the Blind King’s Tomb. Haystraw, he says there’s this statue inside of the Blind King sitting on his throne with no eyes and his dog laying by his feet. But the canyon’s bad luck, and anyway, everything up there’s been picked over already.”

  He shrugged and spit another date pit. “Your old man, he ask me about it yesterday. He crazy?” he inquired conversationally, simply for information.

  Gil gave it some thought. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I’m in a small minority, though.” Two, she thought. Three, if Alde’s feeling charitable.

  Niniak laughed. “You talk funny. What’s a minority?”

  “A small group. If five thousand people think Ingold’s crazy as a coot, and me and one other guy think he’s sane, we’re a minority. Let’s go,” she added, seeing one of the sentries on the wall idling over in their direction. Why any man would assume that a skinny, mannishly dressed woman with a scarred face who made no effort to proposition them was a prostitute just because she was unveiled was a mystery to her, but they all did. About half of them started negotiations with Niniak rather than with herself.

  She held out her hand, to steady Niniak down off the parapet. As she did so she was marginally aware of the sudden throbbing of wings in the seven-foot forest of reeds along the lakeshore: ducks, swans, egrets leaping skyward. Gil thought, They’re attacking after all …

  The next second the stones of the wall beneath her feet lurched hard, a grating jar that would probably have pitched the boy down if he hadn’t been held. The sentry grabbed for the parapet, swearing, and Gil pulled Niniak down quickly, knowing there’d be an S-wave in a second or two.

  The S-wave was gentle. The whole thing couldn’t have been more than a 4.8 here, but Gil felt cold in her heart. In the streets below the wall she heard yelling, cursing, a woman’s scream—it didn’t take much these days to set people off. Church bells jangled in every tower in the town. A moment later smoke stung her nose, rolling in billowing white sheets from a tenement; Gil swore. A stove or a lamp—the tenements were all so flimsily built, they’d sway like hula dancers in a quake. Down the street she could see that a half-collapsed church, the residence of hundreds of squatters, had come down completely. A woman was digging at the rubble, screaming.

  Niniak yelled, “Damn bitch-festering witches!” his silvery eyes wide with terror.

  “What?” Gil said.

  He looked up at her as if she were stupid, fear fading almost at once before the male impulse to pedagogy. “Witches. They been making earthquakes all winter. They get demons to do it. Earthquakes and famines and—”

  “Look,” Gil said, “why the hell would witches want to make earthquakes? Or famine, either?” She decided not to get into the issue of why wizards would be setting off volcanoes all over the world in order to cause the cold that caused the famine that caused the plague … Presumably they were talking about human wizards, anyway. “I mean, sooner or later if there’s a famine, the witches’ll starve, too.”

  “No, they won’t.” Niniak regarded her with puzzled anger. “They’re witches. They just make demons bring them food. And they do this stuff ’cause they’re evil, is why. Like that bitch witch Hegda that lives on Coppersmith Market. She’s the reason there’s all those rats in the city. She makes deals with demons. They’re behind all this, ’cause they hate everybody—they were the ones who raised up the Dark. C’mon,” he added, rattling down the narrow steps that led to the square within the gates. “Me, I think that’s all we’re gonna get for now, but if my glass bottle’s broken back home, I’m gonna go burn that bitch witch Hegda’s house myself.”

  In the wake of the earthquake a dozen fires swept the city. Beggars and the all-powerful street gangs took advantage of the confusion as the precinct firefighters—who doubled as police—tried to quell the blazes themselves or recruit help, and Gil and Niniak made their way back to the tenement behind St. Marcopius through running men, blowing smoke, dust, and shouting. The boy dutifully escorted Gil to the base of the stair and then bade her a bright good-bye—“There got to be pickings someplace”—and Gil climbed the rickety, endless flights to the sixth-floor gallery, which miraculously hadn’t pulled loose from the wall.

  Ingold sat cross-legged in the doorway of their room, tilting his scrying crystal to and fro against the light. He pocketed the stone and stood as Gil picked her way cautiously along the narrow planking, staying as close to the adobe wall as she could. “You did well to return quickly, my dear,” he said. He didn’t seem terribly worried, and Gil realized that the first thing he must have done when the shaking stopped was to scry for her and make sure she was all right. “Vrango’s bullies from the Beehive and the Children of the Revealed Word”—street gangs in Khirsrit often split along the lines of minor heresies—“have already started fighting. It’s a good day to stay where we are, I think.”

  An aftershock touched the building, giving Gil the sickened sensation of being in a tall tree in a high wind. She caught the jamb of the door and clung hard, hoping this one wouldn’t bring the already stressed walls down. She saw Ingold staring out through the doorway, not even bothering to hang on; saw the unseeing anger in his blue eyes and the swift harshness of his breathing.

  “It’s them,” she said quietly, “isn’t it?” A little shyly, she reached to touch his hand. “The mages in the ice?”

  She felt him tense and withdrew her fingers; she understood his caution of her and had kept her distance. In her most matter-of-fact voice she added, “Is it close? The volcano?”

  He nodded, and a slight shiver went through him. “In the south,” he said. “Deep under the ice. The dust cover is thick already over the poles. We were right to come here, Gil.” His tone was that of a man seeking to convince himself, and he did not look at her as he spoke. Turning away, he set about righting his flower pots; they held slips and cuttings
of roses, a dozen varieties, from yellow to nearly black. Under the rolled-back sleeves of his woolen shirt, his wrists and forearms were welted from training cuts, the old shackle galls white among the fresh blue-black of bruises.

  “They are there.” His fingers paused on the extravagant velvet petals of a blossom he’d found in the abandoned court of a plague-sealed palace. “I know they’re there.”

  She said, “In the Blind King’s Tomb.”

  He turned his head sharply, and at that moment, in the street below where it led off the Coppersmith Market, there was a tramping of feet and voices shouting. Forgetting all question of the structural integrity of the building, Gil and Ingold both stepped to the gallery’s splintered and sun-damaged rail. In the lane below a small squad of na-Chandros’ black-armored soldiers hurried, surrounded by a flying storm of broken cobblestones, dirt clods, and filth hurled from windows and alleys along their route.

  They weren’t dodging or turning to fight the gaggle of men who trailed them like pi-dogs in the wake of a butcher’s cart. After a moment Gil made out what the voices were shouting: “Witch-bitch! Demon whore!”

  “Hegda.” Ingold stood with folded arms at her side, the extravagant green-and-purple chain of saint-beads he wore when not in the Arena glistening in the afternoon sun. He made no move to check his theory with the scrying stone, for the vicious-tongued old countrywoman who sold spells in the Coppersmith Market had sufficient mageborn power to prevent being scried by another mage. Ingold had spoken to her on a number of occasions—she’d spit on him yesterday for disagreeing with her—and Gil considered her no loss. “They’ve only been waiting their chance.”

  “The local Church authorities?” The height of the building and the narrowness of the street made it almost impossible to see down, but as the armored squad turned into St. Marcopius Square at the end of the lane, she recognized the bent, drunkenly staggering figure among them, arms and neck banded with mingled layers of chains of all weights and lengths, steel and copper, silver and lead. Runes of Silence, Runes of Binding, Runes of Ward, were hung on them, lead plaques that made a curious muffled clashing, spell-ribbons fluttering like dirty pennons, further numbing her power.