Mother of Winter

by Barbara Hambly

  They were shouting something at her, but their voices made no sound. The diamond fire in her bloodstream seemed to flicker and flow into a new limb of her, a new part—diamond also, and surprising: flesh of her flesh, blood of her diamond-laced blood.

  It seemed to take a long time. All of Donne’s poem, and another of Shakespeare: Like to a lark at break of day arising …

  At length Ingold said, “Gil?”

  She opened her eyes. The light in the court had changed. It had the dense, glittery quality of the turn of the afternoon into evening.

  The great, cone-shaped lights were gone. The nine fires in their silver dishes were smoking ash. The air smelled of the waters of the lake and of cooking from the city beyond the palace walls. A lake-bird squawked. She wondered what Sergeant Cush was teaching in the Arena tonight. Her hands, clasped around the diamond, were numb.

  “Are you all right?”

  She nodded. Sweat was dried in Ingold’s hair and on his strain-lined face, gray with exhaustion. Bektis, visible past him, was combing his beard with a scented sandalwood comb and looking put-upon.

  “Can you speak?”

  She thought about it for a time, then shook her head. She wasn’t sure why she couldn’t, but it was as if the nerves that communicated from brain to tongue were paralyzed. I’m all right, though, she said with eyes and brows. Ingold nodded and went to a sort of vacuole drawn in the rim of the great circle, where a silken bag lay. Gil clutched at the diamond when she thought he might take it from her hands; he slipped the long strap of the bag over her head, his touch a reassurance that the bag was her property, part of her. She slipped the stone into the silk herself, feeling strangely unwilling to have anyone save Ingold even see it. She felt odd, as if she’d just waked from strange dreams.

  “It’s a common side effect of certain spells,” he said comfortingly.

  Gil nodded, accepting, almost indifferent to it. Considering what they were riding into tomorrow, it seemed like such small potatoes as to be microscopic. She flexed her fingers, winced at the pins and needles. Then she knelt quickly and traced in the dust of the ball-court, It didn’t hurt. I love you. As quickly, she brushed it over, lest anyone see.

  He knelt beside her, drew her against him, held her with a tightness that said everything he hadn’t dared speak aloud: I could have lost you; you’re brave; I admire you; I love you beyond what words can say.

  Bektis said sniffily, “I would deeply appreciate it if you confined that type of demonstration indoors. If we’re quite finished here, I certainly need rest, particularly if you are set upon this insane course of action for the morrow.”

  “Certainly, Bektis.” Ingold got at once to his feet and crossed to the taller wizard, exerting all his warm charm to make him understand that his contribution to the rite had been invaluable and enormously appreciated, even if the whole ball-court had been carefully Warded to prevent him from running away while he made it. Guards, summoned by Gil knew not what method, were waiting in the entryway, chains in hand, and Bektis, who had shown every sign of unbending at Ingold’s lavish thanks, pokered up at once and turned haughtily away from his colleague as he was manacled once more.

  Ingold and Gil, hand in hand and innocent of chains, followed him back along the corridors to their ensorcelled suite, Ingold with an air of deep humility and apology that Gil knew to be completely spurious, and Gil, to her own surprise considering what waited for them all tomorrow, deeply amused.

  Through the silk of the sack around her neck she could feel the diamond, a second heart against her chest.

  The voices in her mind were silent. But she knew they did not sleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  They left Khirsrit before the dawn in barges with muffled oarlocks, and the marsh-birds lifted in startled ribbons from the head-high forests of sedge and mist along the lakeside walls. Wrapped in the gaudy coat the Eggplant bought her, Gil watched them; behind her in the barge, a mare that bore food or weaponry or armor or whatever it was, wrapped under oiled sheets, blew softly and shook her head, the clinking of bridle-rings like the distant tap of a hammer in the morning still.

  Her head ached. The ice-mages had whispered to her through the night, to slip the dagger from beneath her pillow and cut the throat of the man who sat awake at her side. The effort of silencing them, of telling them to go to hell, made her feel as if she’d spent the night at hard labor.

  Whenever she awakened, Ingold’s hand had touched her hair, her shoulder, her cheek. The brown velvet voice had whispered to her, words she no longer recalled. And she had slept again, the diamond safe in its silken bag beneath her hands.

  Only now, looking across to where he sat huddled in his red-and-black robes of novitiate in the prow beside her, did it occur to her that he had not slept at all.

  He politely hid a smile as a small contingent of Sergeant Gush’s gladiators brought Bektis down the yellow sandstone steps of the bishop’s private Watergate—extended by newer wooden ones, for like all water, the lake stood lower this year than it had in centuries—his wrists heavy with spell-chains and amulets of Silence, and his back rigid with the indignity of it all. Ingold got to his feet and went to welcome him, nimble in the floating craft, so that it barely moved on the water’s surface. The water made Gil profoundly uneasy. The opal brightness near the city walls changed within a dozen feet of embarkation to deeper and deeper tourmaline, then the otherworldly blue of the darkest morning glory. The barges were passing over the heart of the old volcanic funnel. Gil was not much of a swimmer. If they capsized, she thought, they would never reach bottom, only sink forever into the heart of that azure world.

  She fought the desire to seize Ingold around the throat and fling herself overboard.

  What the hell, she thought. He probably can walk on water.

  She had to loop the throng of her knife hilt tight around her fingers and twist it hard to keep the thought at bay.

  Before them, the Mother of Winter shimmered, nacre-crowned coal.

  No smoke darkened the rising colors of the sky. Niniak the Thief had done his work well, spreading rumor among the city’s various gangs—all of whom had connections to the warlords—that a shipment of food was due from the distant coast, though it was never specified which pass this fictive train would use or who had sent for it; some credit, Gil thought, should be left to the imagination of the generals involved.

  Her hand strayed to the silken bag again, and she thought, If I dropped it overside now, there would be no retrieving it. For a moment the thought of the ensorcelled diamond flashing in the water amused her, fascinated her; how the water around it would be first brilliant, then darker and darker, colder and colder, as it sank away toward the world’s heart.

  But her mind recoiled from the thought of losing that second heart, that blood of her blood. A warm hand fell on her shoulder, and she looked up into Ingold’s face; standing behind her, feet spread to take the roll of the boat, haggard in the growing light.

  She took her hand away from the silk latches of her coat and put it over his.

  I will bear his child. It was as if she were thinking of someone else. If I live.

  They reached the Blind King’s Tomb shortly after noon. The gaboogoos were waiting for them.

  “St. Bes’ drawers!” Sergeant Cush dragged at the spiked bit in his stallion’s mouth as the terrified beast wheeled to flee. “What in the name of the Seven Hells?”

  “Oh, very good.” Ingold smiled with genuine pleasure in his eyes at the things that crawled, spiderlike, squidlike, squatty and scuttling and barbed and toothed like scorpions, down the rocks in a pulpy white gush.

  “Good?” The gladiators were backing their horses fast; Bektis was screaming invective that could have been heard in Penambra. “What the bloody demon-festering hell is goddamn good about it?”

  None of the things was bigger than a cat. A bodyguard of five hundred couldn’t have dealt with them all.

  “It’s always gratifying when on
e’s communications are received and acted upon.” The wizard dropped lightly from the saddle of his own mare and tossed the reins to Gil. She was one of the few holding her horse rock-steady, knowing it was no part of Ingold’s plan to flee. She didn’t even wonder how she would cope when the scuttering things reached them.

  “I must beg your forgiveness, my dear,” he went on, and ripped the oiled cover from the pack-mare’s burden. “But when one’s enemies are so obliging as to give one a line direct to them, they have no business being surprised when one uses it to relay information about plans—even if that information is misleading.”

  The mare was carrying four tall terra-cotta vessels about the size of butter churns, each equipped with a pump and a leathern hose pipe.

  Gil laughed, the first sound that had passed her lips since last night. “You bastard!”

  He smiled up at her, like a sleepy and mischievous elf. “Well—I try.”

  Gil—who’d been given charge of the pack-mare’s lead upon disembarkation that morning—wheeled both her own horse and the mare, holding them in position as the squid-things, spider-things, scorpion-things wavered, hesitant, their advance already broken by the knowledge flooding from her consciousness into that of their masters. The Eggplant had dismounted already and stood at Ingold’s side as the wizard unhitched the metal nozzle of the hose. “Pump it.”

  Anything big enough to be proof against vitriol was big enough to be cut to pieces with a sword—and therefore dealt with by a bodyguard. But the reverse was also true.

  “Where’d you get the sulfur?” she asked as the first stinking wave of it sprayed over those small, foul, and wholly undefended bodies.

  “My dear, you ask that in a country that lives by the mining of copper?”

  “Do we take it in with us?”

  The smell was astonishing as the gaboogoos blackened, curled, fizzled on the stone steps like slugs under a drench of salt. Gil realized why Ingold had insisted everyone wear thick-soled boots.

  “When you’ve fought as many renegade wizards as I have, my dear,” Ingold said, wrapping his scarf over nose and mouth, “you learn one thing: never take as a weapon anything more complicated than a sword. And never take anything that can be blown up, or splashed back, or whipped around in your hand. Bektis, are you coming?”

  “Have I a choice?” Sergeant Cush and Lieutenant Pra-Sia had already pulled the bishop’s mage from his saddle, were stripping the chains of Silence from his wrists. A gaboogoo that had only been spattered with the acid staggered drunkenly out of the blackening mess on the tomb steps and snapped with its pincers at the hem of the old man’s robe; Cush smashed it under his boot heel. It made a horrible noise as it flattened. Bektis looked as if he would willingly have scrambled up on the training director’s shoulders had no one been watching.

  “No.” Ingold’s blue eyes were suddenly icy under the scarred lids. “You haven’t. I’m only going to say this once, because I’m sure the ice-mages have reserves of creatures large enough to be proof against vitriol.”

  He stepped close to the taller wizard, his sword in his hand now and power radiating from his dusty, sweat-streaked face. “If you flee, or betray us, or so much as flinch back, Bektis, I lay upon you a death-curse of pain, of humiliation, of cold, of filth, of regret. I lay upon you a body devoured before your mind departs it; a mouth filled with worms; flesh given over to ants and roaches. Do you understand?”

  Bektis swallowed hard. Gil thought, Ingold is the Archmage. It was something she seldom had cause to remember. Ruler of the wizards of the West. His words are the words of command.

  As through a mouth filled with dust, Bektis managed to say, “I understand.”

  “Gil’s life is to be protected above my own. At all costs.”

  The bishop’s mage nodded again. He stared as if hypnotized into what lay beyond the mist-filled gate of the Blind King’s Tomb. Things reached and snapped at them from within, drawing back from the puddles of stinking acid smoking on the steps. Within the vaporous, glowing dimness, the very walls pulsed with the movement of the slunch.

  Bektis looked about to throw up.

  “If you flee,” Ingold continued in a voice as soft as the darkness of summer night, “I think you’re going to find that curse awaiting you about two strides away from the steps. Now come. It is time.”

  The voices filled Gil’s mind, like the roaring of the sea, the flute crying birdlike above them.

  They waded forward through the mist, into the dark.

  In her dream last night she had seen the Mother of Winter. Unhuman and beautiful, flashing greens and blues and violets, she had risen from the heaving pool of stasis and cloud, and Gil had thought, If she looks at me, I will die. If she looks at me …

  Mother-Wizard and guardian of the world long past, she had floated in her enchanted pool that stretched down, down the volcanic vent into the world’s heart. Beautiful and alien as a snowflake, she had held out her arms, her three acolytes bowing at her feet. The life-forms of all that vanished world had waited in her shining body, peered from the forest of her blue mane, from the contents of her prodigal, scintillant memory.

  She was back from her long sleep, with all her children singing in her train. Joyful to be living again.

  And in Gil’s dream the beautiful eyeless gaze had fallen upon her, from those spreading wilds of ferny cloud, a flashing of jewels in mist. The Mother of Winter had spoken her name. And she had died.

  They shrilled in her mind. You will die. If you do not kill him, do not stop him, you will die, and your child, your single egg, will die with you.

  Gil closed her mind. There was a reason she followed Ingold, through the ground-fog streaming around their boots, through the writhing slunch that sizzled under the spattering blasts of ball-lightning that hissed from the ends of his staff and Bektis’. She could not remember what it was, but she made that not matter.

  Creatures unimaginable flopped and whistled, struck at them from the air or flashed snakelike from crevices in the rock. Simulacra wrought from the slunch, she thought, striking at them with her sword, decapitating, slicing off legs and tentacles and pincers. She was a Guard, and Ingold her teacher. Only that existed, like a steel sphere within the red shrieking maelstrom of illusion and visions in her head.

  She thought the Blind King turned his head and watched them, eyeless, as they passed.

  She thought her own hands were white as the slunch, and that she bore two swords—maybe more—in several sets of hands: one to fight the gaboogoos, but another to decapitate Bektis, who walked close before her, clinging almost to Ingold’s red-and-black garments in horror and revulsion. To decapitate Bektis, and then Ingold himself.

  And then she could rest.

  The slunch was knee-deep in the inner chamber where Ingold had fought, shoulder-deep where it ran into the walls; heaving, moving, quivering with pseudopods and stalks. Ingold plowed ahead, cutting a way to the entry to the ice tunnel itself, and the bloated, mutated insects that had fattened themselves on the decomposing cave-apes and dooic Ingold had slain came roaring at their heads. Bektis spattered at them with lightning and fire: Bektis against whom she had rather foolishly pictured herself protecting Ingold. The tall mage looked grim and scared and furious, but showed no disposition to turn tail.

  He understood, as Gil understood, that Ingold was the only thing protecting them from death.

  Cold smoke poured at them from the tunnel that led to the glacier’s heart, smoke and pallid light. White snakes of lightning ran from Ingold’s fingers, skating along the slunch and running before them into the blue eternity of the ice, and Gil heard—maybe in reality, maybe only in her head—the flute that she knew from dreams. The ground stirred beneath them, and Gil caught at the rock of the wall, willing herself not to feel terror—willing herself to feel nothing. Bektis hesitated, and Ingold said, “They’re bluffing. They know perfectly well a cave-in will make it impossible for the Mother of Winter to seed.”

  Movement
in the mist. Ingold leveled his staff, fire pouring from its tip, and something like a plasmoid flounder struggled out of the burning slunch underfoot and threw itself at him. He cut it down automatically with his sword, slicing it in half and crushing it underfoot as he led the way down the inferno of charred matter and dim, brain-hurting glow.

  Yori-Ezrikos had taken refuge here, Gil thought, with the small corner of her mind still capable of thought at all. It hadn’t been as bad then, granted; but it was a gauge of her terror and loathing of Vair na-Chandros that she had come this far at all.

  Or had she only fallen in sleep on the feet of the Blind King and dreamed of the music of the ice-mages and the beautiful, eternal thing sleeping in the pool?

  The blue light deepened, dense as the bottom of the sea on the glassy curve of the walls. The white swirl of mists around them dimly defined the heat-spell in which they all now walked. Phosphorus shimmered, and all around her the glacier ice picked up eerie ghosts of their movements; she felt cold, cold unto death. Streaked with smoke and grime and blood where two or three gaboogoos had made it past the lightning, Ingold’s face was serene, calm with concentration, witchlight seeming to flicker in his beard and hair and along the blade of his sword.

  They had left the slunch behind. They were within the glacier, walking to its center as if into the heart of a geode, and the dense blue light grew colder, thinner where it hid within the ice.

  The ice-mages were not anything like they had appeared to Gil in her dreams, not even at the end.

  Maybe they weren’t anything like she saw them now: Gil was no longer certain how much of what she saw was real. The floor underfoot—ice, not stone—was worn away with their magic, and a little slunch grew in the pit, but it might not have been real slunch, just something conjured out of the wanting of their minds. Things crawled up out of it now and then; one of them attacked Bektis’ foot, and he crushed it, horrified loathing on his face.

  The mages were waiting, crouched together. Aware. Shapes of light like vast jellyfish drifted and danced over the smoking waters of the pool that filled most of that enormous cavern, and in all that chamber there was no single sound but the thick slurp and heave of the liquid in the pool, and the breathing of the three who stood within the cavern’s entrance, their breath smoking hard in the heat-spell’s despite.