Mother of Winter

by Barbara Hambly

  “Why would they care? It isn’t like she’s working for one of the warlords.”

  “Yet.” Ingold led her back, gently, to the door of their room, the boards of the gallery swaying queasily under their feet. For a moment his hand, resting in the small of her back, had the old warm familiarity, the ease that had always been between them; then he seemed to remember that she could not be trusted, for he carefully took his hand away. Looking quickly at his face, Gil saw the expression in his eyes that she had seen there so often these four days in Khirsrit: not wary so much as questioning, uncertain. His eyes met hers for a moment and turned quickly away, and anger went through her, a sickening weary rage at the mages in the ice.

  Ingold was already within their bare little room, gathering up her spare shirt and his from the table where they had been drying. “It isn’t only the other warlords they worry about, you know,” he went on. “The Church has never liked the idea of people going to wizards to solve their problems—or what they perceive to be their problems—instead of using the more difficult methods of faith, self-examination, and trust in God … accompanied, in many cases, by the advice of the Church. In good times the Church can afford to rely on their contention that magic erodes the soul and all illusion is the work of the Evil One or Ones. But in days of famine, when everyone is afraid, people think less of saving their souls than they do of feeding their children. And bishops are only human,” he added softly, folding the worn garments and laying them on the small stack of rucksacks and spare clothing in the corner. “In these days, they’re afraid as well. I warned her to leave town.”

  Gil remembered the children in Niniak’s little band, country children with haunted eyes and ribs like barrel hoops, risking their lives to steal bread. “Maybe she didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

  At sunset Niniak appeared in the open shutters of their doorway with the news that the woman Hegda would be burned in the Arena at noon the next day. “She was the one who started the earthquake, you know?” The boy had his brothers and sisters around him, like filthy little feral puppies; Ingold always kept a few scraps from supper to give them. The Eggplant and the Gray Cat, who lived on the lower floors of the building, did the same.

  “Oh, come on!” Gil said impatiently, very conscious of Ingold, who was dozing on their blankets. “Why the hell would anyone want to do that?”

  “Because she’s evil,” Niniak retorted, baffled by the question. He shifted his gum to the other side of his mouth. “Or maybe some rich guy, he paid her to. But she started it, all right. She confessed.”

  “How very astonishing,” Ingold murmured without opening his eyes. “A woman who has the power to raise earthquakes, living in a hovel all these months and begging her bread in the marketplace.”

  The thief looked doubtful, then regarded him with narrow suspicion in his silver eyes. “She confessed. And she’s a witch. Witches do weird stuff.”

  Ingold sighed and folded his hands on his breast. “You have me there,” he admitted.

  He went with Gil to the auto-da-fé, in a crowd of men from the gladiatorial school. The Arena was packed to its topmost tiers, and a line of Church soldiers, shaven-headed in their loose crimson uniforms, demarcated the end of the long, narrow combat pit where the stake was set, the rest of the sand being taken up by an impenetrable jam of spectators. The show was free, even to the nobility, the bankers, the corn-brokers, and landlords. Ingold winced when two red-robed Church functionaries threw a couple of seedy scrolls and a codex or two on the head-high pile of brushwood and logs: Hegda’s books, such as they were. Other Church soldiers led the woman out, weaving unsteadily and still laden with chains, her long white mare’s tails of hair snagging in the bloody weals that crossed her naked back.

  “Yellow jessamine,” Ingold said quietly to Gil. His voice had a distant quality, and he was withdrawn into himself, with pain or shame—though a woman like Hegda had owed no allegiance to the Council of Wizards, its Archmage, Ingold, still felt he should be able to protect her. “The Council of Wizards usually uses bluegall root, which numbs the ability to use magic but leaves the prisoner otherwise unharmed. The Church favors jessamine. In a way it’s merciful, under the circumstances. She won’t be more than half conscious.”

  Gil shivered. She had seen death—had killed men and women herself, coldly and without thought, though later the reaction had sometimes been devastating. But it had always been in combat, and always quick. As a medievalist, she’d read about burnings, but had never seen one. She didn’t know if she could deal with the reality.

  The soldiers assisted the reeling figure up the ladder and lashed it to the stake. A crimson ecclesiastic stepped forth from among the guards, slim, straight, terrible as a bloodstained stiletto, and with uplifted white hands cried ritual words. At the sound of that harsh alto voice, Gil gasped and tried to peer past the massive forms surrounding her. “Want a better look, Gilly?” the Eggplant asked, and huge hands clasped her waist, lifting her effortlessly to a shoulder like a park bench. They were down in the reserved gladiators’ section, close to ringside but near the center of the field. Someone yelled, “Down in front!” and Sergeant Cush turned around and yelled something about the protester’s mother.

  “Set me down,” Gil said to the coiled, beaded braids next to her elbow, and the Eggplant glanced up at her.

  “Stuff ’em, Gilly, they’re just rubes.” The Eggplant cracked his gum. He was very fond of her and had recently broken four of the King’s ribs after His Majesty had made a rather rough pass at Gil in the Arena’s pillared porch. Cush had given him five lashes for putting the King out of action on the last day of the games, and the King had gone around ever since saying that Gil was a girl-lover anyway, and ugly. Gil knew she shouldn’t care, but that hurt.

  “No, it’s okay.” She’d seen what she needed to see. In a way, she had known from the moment she heard the voice of the Prince-Bishop of Alketch, speaking the words of eternal cursing upon the condemned. As the Eggplant swung her down from her perch, she cast a quick final glance at the Prince-Bishop, ivory pale among the ebony faces of guards and lesser clerics. She could almost feel the bonfire heat of those hooded dark eyes.

  The Prince-Bishop of Alketch, officiating prelate at the witch Hegda’s execution, was none other than Ingold’s old nemesis Govannin Narmenlion, quondam Bishop of Gae. “Ingold,” she said breathlessly, “Ingold, it’s—” She looked around for him among the gladiators.

  He was nowhere to be found.

  * * *

  There was a literary tradition in the world where Gil had been brought up—and in fact in the less respectable fiction of the Wathe, to which Minalde was addicted, as well—that any heroine worthy of her corsetry, upon finding herself in a situation of peril, should promptly run away seeking her hero, endangering both herself and everyone else in the process. Having searched for people in the woods, and knowing Ingold fairly well, Gil remained with the gladiators, which was where she guessed he’d look for her when he decided to reappear. In any case it was useless to search for the old man if he did not wish to be found. He had his scrying crystal, and would rejoin her when he had either ascertained what he’d departed to ascertain or when whatever danger he perceived approaching had passed.

  In the end Gil did not see the actual burning, owing to the thickness of the crowd. Pressed on all sides by a mob of sweating bodies, she heard the old woman’s slurred cursing turn to screams and barely smelled the wood smoke and charring flesh above the stench of sweat, pomade, and dust. A boy came by and tried to pick her pocket; another tried to sell her a stick of fried bread. She managed not to throw up, but the Icefalcon would be ashamed, she felt, of her squeamishness.

  The Eggplant walked her back to St. Marcopius, his face a study in inarticulate worry when a rush of faintness swept over her in the marketplace. He insisted she sit on the corner of a fountain until she felt better, and pushing his way off through the crowds, returned a short time later with a brightly colored coat of the
kind fashionable among the gladiators’ molls just then, adorned with bits of mirror and patches of leather and steel. He waved off her startled thanks. “You’re cold,” he said, helping her to her feet—and indeed, though very bright, the day was turning chill. “Your hands are freezing.”

  She put her hands out of sight in the wrapped front of the coat as quickly as possible, suddenly overcome with humiliation. She had dreamed last night about a ruined villa they’d passed through, in the near-empty city of Zenuuak—dreamed of the mirror she’d found in an inner room, and the transformed horror reflected in it. All day she’d been surreptitiously checking her hands. The gladiator seemed not to notice, however; he escorted her up all six flights to her door. After she thanked him, she bolted the shutters, knowing Ingold to be perfectly capable of working the bolts from the other side. She lay down on the mattress and fell into sleep as if drugged.

  She woke to blue darkness and the sound of knocking. “It’s me, Gilly,” came Niniak’s voice.

  “I knocked earlier,” the boy added when she opened the shutters. The sky over the red-and-yellow city’s parapets was dimming, all the bells of its churches speaking their incomprehensible rounds. The smell of charred timber hung heavy in the air. Farther along the gallery some of the men who lived up there, a tailor and a shoemaker and a man who sold fish off a barrow in the street, played pitnak while their wives talked and sewed.

  Gil scratched at her heavy mane of unbraided hair. “It’s okay.” She still felt queasy, and wondered a little at her own exhaustion. “What can I do for you?”

  The boy’s pixie face twisted in an odd expression, and he held out a broken curve of potsherd, such as shopkeepers toted up their addition on, or sent notes to one another, provided they could write. “Ingold, he asked me to give you this.”

  It said:

  Gil—

  Forgive me. It was necessary for me to flee, at once. How they knew I was here I do not know for certain, though Hegda may have seen more in me than she said and passed it on to them to spare herself more pain. Stay off the streets as much as you can, and guard yourself. I am safe. Only wait.

  “He’s left you.” Niniak’s voice was neutral, dead, but she could tell the boy was furiously angry.

  She shook her head. “He’s just had to go into hiding. It sounds like he saw someone in the crowd …”

  “Or he saw you had your back turned.” The pale silver eyes glittered with old memory, old rage. “Like just ’cause you’re ugly and got a scar and all you aren’t a hundred times better than all them stupid girls that flounce around the street after men. What an idiot!”

  Gil realized, with some surprise, that the boy had a crush on her. She hid a smile at this piece of consciousness-raising and said, “No. Ingold has enemies …”

  Niniak held out a second potsherd. “He said give you this three days from now, if he wasn’t back.”

  Gil went cold to her heart.

  Forgive me. It is all that I can ask. Please, please understand.

  They hear with your ears. They see with your eyes. This I guessed, leaving the Keep—but I also guessed that you would follow, against your own will, did I not bring you. It has been death in my heart daily, hourly, to do this to you.

  Without you at my side I stand some chance of reaching the cavern of the ice-mages before they realize I am on the mountain and rally the gaboogoos, the dooic, the mountain apes who because of the slunch are theirs to command—maybe even the armies of the warlords, for I cannot know now how far their power has reached. They knew of me through the minds of the Dark, in their dreaming, even as the Dark knew of them. As the Dark took my mind …

  Gil turned the sherd over; the writing was worse on the back.

  … so the ice-mages saw. They know I am a danger, insofar as any can be. This may be my only chance.

  As if she heard their voices in the distance, she felt the outcry of them, realizing they had been circumvented, tricked—realizing he was on his way.

  She felt them call out, drawing everything they could to them—gaboogoos, cave-apes, mutants. Readying themselves to crush him.

  No, she thought, her heart screaming as she felt that frantic, furious call. NO!

  I love you, Gil. If I have not returned by this time, I will not return. I bless you, I free you. I only regret—and I regret with all my heart—that I cannot see you safe again to the Keep. But I cannot be two men. I fear that with you, I have not even been one.

  Please understand, as a warrior understands. Please do not despise me for what I had to do.

  If I have not returned, it is because I met my death at the hands of the ice-mages; and I met it with your name on my lips.

  With all that is in me

  —Inglorion

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Cold jerked Rudy awake. Cold and pain, an overwhelming wrenching breathlessness. Then a sense of shock that he knew instantly was secondhand but was clear as a scream in his mind. Ingold! he thought, staring into the blackness of his cell, knowing immediately the source. Ingold …!

  The feeling didn’t fade, but grew. Dizziness, the swimming dots of fire that merged into a single, terrible light; the numbing of his left arm; the hammerblow of pain over his heart.

  Ingold!

  Rudy’s mind fumbled, disoriented, with his sense of time. He’d fallen asleep in a tangle of old books ma Gil’s notes after more vain hours of searching for the answers he knew had to be somewhere: to time and stasis, to the power that had come to him at call, the power he had never felt before. He wasn’t as good as Ingold yet at knowing immediately where the stars were at any moment of the day or night, but reaching out with his senses, he heard nothing in the watchroom of the Guards but the desultory click of the single worn set of pitnak tiles, and from their barracks only the soft draw of sleepers’ breath.

  The cold, the pain, the breathlessness, were already pouring away like smoke into a hole in darkness. Rudy fumbled with trembling hands under his pillow for his crystal, body aching from the aftershock. Christ, don’t do this to me, man! The witchlight he summoned flared in the crystal’s heart. Answer me! Tell me it ain’t so …

  Nothing. The thick grayness of the ice-mages’ malice seemed to choke the air.

  God damn it, God damn it, answer me!

  He lowered his hands, the witchlight fading. No. No.

  Don’t make me be the only wizard in this godforsaken world! Don’t make me have to go after the ice-mages myself.

  I’m not any good at this, dammit!

  Pain. Breathlessness. Dizziness. Pain.

  He couldn’t sort them easily in his mind, but he knew it was Ingold’s pain he’d felt. Knew it as surely as if he’d heard the old man’s voice.

  It’s three o’clock in the Christly morning! Rudy wanted to scream. What the hell are you doing fighting monsters at three in the morning?

  If Ingold were no longer alive, thought Rudy, he’d be able to see Gil even if she were with him …

  But even that he could not do.

  He can’t be dead, he thought, whispering it to himself like a mantra, willing it to be true. He can’t be dead. It was an endless time until dawn.

  Accompanied by Janus, Melantrys, and the Icefalcon, he left the Keep as soon as the Doors were opened, climbed to the high ground near the orchards, where the slunch was less, and drew a power-circle, Summoning to himself every scrap and whisper of magic to be had from the earth, from the streams, from the dawn-fading stars.

  But whether Ingold was dead and Gil in some place where the influence of the ice-mages lay too thick to pierce, or whether Ingold lived and Gil were with him, he could get no shadow of either of them in his scrying stone’s heart. Head aching from the exertion, he tried to contact Thoth, but all that appeared in the amethyst’s facets were dim images of flabby, death-colored fungoid parodies of human and animal life crawling out of a wasteland of slunch to attack the patched, rambling pile of the Black Rock Keep.

  Even that view was distant. He tho
ught he could see men with weapons around the walls of black and gray stone, and brushwood stacked before the battered iron doors and along the north wall where the wizards had their little beehive hermitages, but he could not be sure. Cold wind blew down on his back, and behind him he heard a swift scuffle, a slithering and then the heavy chunk, like someone hitting a watermelon with an ax. Blood-smell stung his nostrils as he turned.

  “Better get back.” The Icefalcon struck his ax into the earth to clean it. Whatever had come out of the slunch-decayed woods to attack lay in bleeding pieces at his feet. “There’s more on the way. See anything?”

  Rudy shook his head despairingly. Gaunt and tired, Janus and Melantrys were closing around them. At the foot of the slope the woods were thick with slunch, hanging in dirty mats and clumps from the branches of the dying trees. Something was moving deep in the infected glades, and Rudy shoved the crystal into the pocket of his vest and headed for the Keep. Fast.

  “If Gil’s with the old boy, he can’t be too bad off,” Janus pointed out.

  As they sprang up the shallow black steps of the Keep, Janus turned back to scan the woods, shifting his sword in his bandaged hand; the wound he’d taken three weeks ago from a mutated dire wolf hadn’t even begun to heal. This wasn’t like the rip in Gil’s face, attributable to some gaboogoo venom. Nobody’s wounds were healing these days.

  The dark line of hemlocks that fringed the high woods shuddered suddenly, shook and parted. Rudy gasped, “Mother pus-bucket!” and Janus only said, “Pox rot it, but it; had to happen sooner or later. Get inside. We’ll take care of it.” Melantrys was already yelling for the rest of the Guards.