Mother of Winter

by Barbara Hambly

  Ingold said, “Protect her.” Gil could just see the protective shapes he called into being as he walked forward, boots squeaking; cones and spheres and curious, moving rods of power that glimmered and vanished in the air all around him, tenuous beside the shining power-shapes of the priests.

  Gil heard them screaming something at her, but shut it out of her mind.

  Nothing existed. Nothing. Nothing.

  Only that she was a Guard, and when something happened to let her, she would react.

  From her tunic she slipped the silken bag and felt within the jewel that was her flesh and blood and heart.

  The smaller two ice-mages circled sideways to surround the small red-and-black figure walking toward them. The central mage, the great enchanter, reared like a rising black cloud above the pit. Gil couldn’t even find an analogy to describe the domed shielding—if that’s what it was—of the head—if that’s what that was: the covered orifices; the long muddle of tubes and striking heads or hands or whatever they were, probing in and out like eels from rocks; and cold nonlight pouring from every crack and crevice of it, ultraviolet, pallid, searing. It spread itself out, bubbling, and Ingold stood before it with the quicksilver light glistening along his sword blade, gazing into its heart. Waiting.

  Then moving lightly, he circled past it, and the thing turned to watch him as he stepped to the very brink of the oxygen pool. White fog frothed around his feet as he stood, staring into the depths with the shapes of the alien magic moving like living sails almost invisibly over his head, strange reflections of blue and green and rose passing over his face and hair.

  Slowly, the shapes dwindled, faded, and died. An old man with a stick and a sword, in borrowed clothing, he stood among his enemies unprotected, his left arm held stiff where he’d taken it out of the sling. His face was sad as he raised it at last to the dark, shining thing that hovered above him.

  “I’m sorry.” He spoke soft, but in the utter silence his flawed, beautiful voice carried to the farthest ends of the cave. “I didn’t realize. She’s dead.”

  The great mage-priest crouched lower, tentacles shortening, thickening, shifting. The other priests seemed to shrink in on themselves, readying like cats to spring, and Gil felt malice and fury, a heavy pain pounding in her belly and head. The voices in her mind fell still. Their anger had no time for her now, no time for anything, drawing in on itself, denser and denser, an imploding universe of time and power and rage.

  Ingold went on, very gently, “I didn’t know it when last I came here, because I could not see the shape of your magic. Things were hidden from me. Maybe from you as well. But I think she’s been dead for many centuries now.”

  His hand shifted a little on the worn wood of his staff, his sword lowered, tip touching the ice at the very brink of the pool. “She lasted a long time,” he murmured, almost to himself. “But all seeds perish, if they lie unquickened in the womb of time.”

  (not dead)

  Gil felt/heard like a hot grip on her vitals the leaden rage of their denial. The dark volcanic heat they had called in the earth was nothing more than a clanging echo to this refusal and fury and grief.

  (not dead back alive if back alive if)

  (world will be the same)

  (back alive if world will be the same)

  (make it all the same put it back put it back)

  (not dead)

  Ingold had to have heard them, had to have felt the swelling of that poison-storm of rage, and Gil could not understand why he didn’t flee. Could not imagine standing there in front of them, under the growing horror of that rage, unflinching, only sad.

  But he said, “She is dead,” and his voice was the voice of a relative breaking the news to a grieving child. “You did your duty well. She could have asked for no better children than you, no better gift than your love. There was nothing you could have done to prevent it, nothing you could have done to bring that world back in time. It was only time that outlasted her. I’m sorry.”

  And the dark condensed, spread and thickened through the blue thin unworldly dimness of the ice-shimmer. Anger. Denial and anger. Hammerblows of rage.

  (not so)

  (not dead)

  (not failed not failed not failed)

  Ingold turned away from them, and they fell upon him like nuclear storm.

  Gil screamed warning, throat burning, and he turned with staff outflung in a searing explosion of nova-scale light. They struck him in bursting sub-purple glare, like the colors in the back of the brain when the eyes are closed, saw him fall to one knee, raising his sword. She saw no more, though she heard him cry out. But she was moving already, running, the carbon stone bursting fire in her hand.

  Mist filled the chamber, surging up from the shapes of dark and X-ray glare, lightning and weighted rage. Mist whirled around her as Bektis shouted, touched her with thrown spells of warmth that could not seem to shake free of the searing cold slicing her mind.

  The pool was before her somewhere, covered in cloud—she saw Ingold brace himself, stabbing and thrusting; with his staff, saw darkness encompass him at the same moment her foot caught on something under the drowning swirls of mist.

  She fell, panting, the diamond bruising her palm. The clouds heaved up around her, and the next moment the heat-spells shifted, caught the cold air in an eddy of wind that swept aside the mist. For one instant she saw before her bare rock, black ice, and purple depths going down to infinite darkness, the slow cold liquid of her dreams heaving and churning with the rage of the mages whose spells had so long held it intact.

  And in the dark of the pool she saw it, that floating, drifting wonder in its ferny universe of mane, like a shadow, suspended in what had once been its dream.

  In her dream it—She—had spoken Gil’s name, called forth the life from her body. Now Gil raised the diamond heart, the blood of her blood, the life of her life, while her own blood dripped to the rock and ice underfoot. The weight of the ice-mages’ fury slammed down on her mind, crushing her consciousness toward darkness, but for some reason the pain in her hand, the sight of her blood trickling like thin red snakes, kept her mind focused. She heard Ingold cry out again and turned, arm upraised, to see him throw himself between her and the three shadows as they reached out for her.

  The flash and crack of lightning seemed to split the world, and Gil threw the diamond with all her strength.

  Bektis, I hope that spell of protection’s a doozy.

  The world exploded in a holocaust of smoke and light.

  Too much had altered in the Keep over the course of the years to have left the crypts unchanged. What had been, Rudy guessed, the small chamber at the heart of the grid, had long ago been incorporated into one of the less efficient hydroponics vaults, which had then itself been let go to dust. Thank God we didn’t decide to lock the devotees of Saint Bounty in here, he thought, coming through the rough doorway—which Gil had dated at late in the Keep’s original period of habitation, whatever that meant. Most of the tanks had been taken out, and those that remained had been converted to storage of grain and dried fruits.

  Studying the floor, he could see where three chambers had been joined into one. And the central of those three chambers had been round, small … and had contained, he saw now, brightening the light and kneeling to more closely examine the dirty black stone underfoot, a scrying table. Only the fact that the room was so little frequented let him see anything at all, because no one cleaned here. But in spite of the thin coating of dust and grime, there was no mistaking the round patch of roughness where it had been taken up and moved.

  Moved where? Carried away from the Keep entirely, when the place had finally been abandoned? Maybe to Gae, to the palaces of the Kings of Dare’s line? Maybe broken up, during some upsurge of antiwizard sentiment?

  From the pocket of his vest he took the Cylinder and set it in the center of the rough stone circle on the floor. “Brycothis?” he said. “You here?”

  He shut his eyes. He was insid
e the Cylinder, inside the dark small circular chamber in the heart of the Keep.

  “I’m here,” the Bald Lady said.

  He wasn’t sure what he expected. Not this.

  At times it seemed to him that he was standing beside the ocean on a January morning, the world an opal of pewter and cold; or that he was in a garden on a summer night, just outside a white marble belvedere through whose blinds light streamed golden, looking at the shadow of a woman bending over an armillary sphere. Sometimes he had the impression of looking at her sleeping—on a couch? In a cylinder of glass?—though oddly, he could not tell whether she was young or old.

  Sometimes he didn’t know exactly what he perceived.

  The smell of vanilla and cinnamon.

  That bone-deep sense of trust, of caring, of friendly peace.

  He wasn’t sure how to address her, or which way to look. “I, uh—I’m Rudy Solis. I’m the Keep wizard this summer. But you probably already know that.”

  He felt her smile and understood that after all this time, the core of her was human still.

  He’d been about to ask about the spells of stasis, but that smile made him ask instead, “Are you okay? Have you—have you been alive all this time? Trapped?”

  But he knew as the words came out of his mouth that she was no more trapped in the walls of the Keep than he could be described as trapped within the armature of his bones.

  She was the heart of the Keep, transformed into it as Ingold had transformed himself into a peregrine, and for the same cause—to save those whom she loved.

  But she thanked him for asking—it was like the warmth of still midsummer.

  Memories stirred and swirled, as if she were trying to bring them into focus: fragments of consciousness drifting in the light, scenes that flickered through Rudy’s mind as if he had been there, as if he remembered someone else’s memories, or dreamed someone else’s dreams.

  A cat that had liked to sleep curled up on her hip, one paw over its black-and-white nose. The way the needles had stung when they tattooed the sigils of power and focus, the Runes and patterns of force, on her hands and arms. Someone’s laughter. The color of her daughter’s hair.

  And then, very clear, he saw the Mother of Winter, sleeping in her pool. Sleeping truly, for she would move in sleep, dreaming of the eggs all safe within her body, dimly illumined by the soft glow of her living heart.

  Only the living will use magic to preserve those they love. He didn’t know if this was his own thought or hers, this woman’s, in whose heart/dream/memory he now stood; he didn’t know whether it was himself, or she, who wondered if it was for that reason that the Mother of Winter had sent the dream to Brycothis, to show her what she must do.

  “Did it hurt?” he asked, desperately wanting that it had not.

  He was reassured by the whisper of her laughter and the touch on his arm, palpable and immediate, of her warm fingers, though he saw nothing. A little sadness, when Amu Bel died, and Dare, and others, mages whom she could no longer protect.

  The heart remembered. He was glad she was all right.

  “Look,” he said diffidently, “we’ve got this problem I wondered if you could help me with. How do you get them spuds to grow?”

  And he felt around him again the summer joy of her smile.

  The following day the gaboogoos attacked the Keep in force.

  Knowing that thick concentrations of slunch—or the creatures that grew out of the slunch—interfered with communications by scrying crystal, Rudy had ensorcelled a ball made of leather stuffed with grass, such as the children played with, laying on it spells to turn first blue, then red, then green, then black, then white. He’d driven three stakes in the ground a few yards before the Keep steps, to form a tripod, and had set the ball on them; every morning, before the doors of the Keep were opened, he looked into his crystal, to see whether the ball could be seen by such means and whether it was the color it was supposed to be.

  This latter guard against the possibility of illusion was in fact doing the ice-mages too much credit. When he checked on the ball that morning, with the first stirrings of light outside, he saw nothing. There was only the dense gray anger of the ice-mages, faded shadows within the facets of the stone.

  “Whoa!” Shoving the crystal in his pocket, he hurried to the Aisle, where the farmers had already begun to gather, chatting with the Guards and waiting for the opening of the gate.

  “Sorry, folks, can’t be done,” he said, striding to the front of the crowd, where Caldern and Gnift stood before the inner doors. “They’re out there, waiting. I don’t know how many.”

  “Are you sure?” someone inevitably demanded.

  “That’s ridiculous!” another declared, equally inevitably. “We need to get to our work! The season’s going to be short enough. If we’re not to starve—”

  “And how do we know what you’re seeing out there is true?”

  Rudy planted himself before the doors, hands on his hips and the witchlight that burned above his head glittering on the locking-rings behind him and in the shadows of his eyes. “You don’t believe me?”

  There was silence.

  “You’re the people who made all the screaming fuss about me not being here to use my magic to protect you back when there was no way I could have protected you. Well, I’m here now. And I’m telling you: don’t open those doors.”

  Without a word five of them flung themselves at him, hoes and knives and billhooks raised. Rudy was so astonished—though he realized later he shouldn’t have been—and the quarters were so close that they were on him, tearing his staff from his hands, slamming him against the doors behind him before he could raise a finger in his own defense. He lashed out automatically, with fists and boots and elbows, hurling also the vicious spells of pain and suffocation that did, of course, absolutely nothing—Caldern wrenched a billhook away from one man and threw the weapon in one direction and the man in the other; Gnift beheaded a second farmer without an instant’s hesitation; and the others in the forefront of the group, Barrelstave and Lapith Hornbeam and a couple of the Dunk clan, fell on the attackers and dragged them back.

  The attackers turned on their erstwhile friends and relatives and fought like demons, screaming and slashing. Yobet Troop had his forehead opened almost to the bone by a hoe before he disarmed the man who’d been trying to bludgeon Rudy to death. At the same time, one of the attackers flung himself at the locking-rings, wrenched them over and plunged down the dark passageway between the two sets of gates. Rudy rolled to his feet and pelted after him, gasping. The farmer was already wrenching and twisting at the rings of the outer gate. Rudy seized him, and was thrown back by a strength almost superhuman; rolled to his feet and grabbed him again …

  The door opened. Gaboogoos poured through the gate in a pallid, filthy tide. Rudy screamed, “Shut the friggin’ gate!” and behind him heard the slam of iron, the snap of the locks, sealing him in the passageway with the mad farmer and the monstrous horde.

  Rudy shouted the Word of Lightning, levin-fire spangling around him in sizzling bursts, cracking back and forth from the black stone of walls and ceiling and floor. Mutant animals were mixed with the gaboogoos, snarling and shrieking as the bolts hit them; the air in the close-cramped tunnel was filled with the stench of charring matter, the stink of smoke, the reek of his own hair and clothing singeing.

  Someone was by the light of the gates, men’s forms struggling. Rudy saw the flash of a sword against the predawn gloom outside. Guards had slipped through the gate behind him. Janus was dragging the outer doors shut even now, while the Icefalcon hacked at the dog-sized gaboogoo spiders that struggled to come through even yet. The farmer lay headless underfoot. Rudy called a flare of witchlight as the outer doors slammed shut, and a moment later the commander strode back to him through a reeking ruin of carcasses, coughing, “You cut that a mite close for comfort.”

  Rudy was slumped back against the wall, panting. The floor was carpeted with dead gaboogoos,
most of them tiny, pincered, too small for a man to kill with a sword. “The crypt!” he gasped.

  “Ankres is on his way.”

  By the time the inner doors were opened again, and Janus had summoned a heavy enough company to hold them, Rudy was halfway across the Aisle, running for the corner stairway that led down to the crypt. Even so, he reached the place almost too late for the battle. After the initial shock of being attacked by fourteen or fifteen men and women armed with makeshift weaponry, Seya and Melantrys, who’d been on guard, had been able to hold their own and hold the doors behind which the mutants were locked. The attacking slunch-eaters, none of whom had been tested yet and none of whom lived on the fifth level north, had fought like mad things, refusing surrender, as if they had no concept of anything but the death of those who kept them from opening the doors. Half were dead by the time Lord Ankres and his men got there, the black stone of the crypt corridor puddled with blood. The other half had died fighting, while the mutants in the crypt itself flung themselves against the door, screaming and pounding and cursing. Rudy arrived, breathless, in time to see the last of them die.

  “Devils take them,” Lord Ankres whispered, turning one of the attackers over with his foot. It was one of Lady Sketh’s sewing-maids, with a scythe from the Sketh storerooms in her hands.

  The day was a nerve-racking one, of meetings, of plans drawn up, of anger and rumor and fear. “What are we going to do about them?” demanded Barrelstave, Ankres, Janus, everyone, in Council. “We can’t just stay behind locked doors. We have to farm.”

  But the answer was always the same. “If we open those doors, we’re screwed,” Rudy said. “Half those gaboogoos are the size of mice, and everybody in this room knows the problems we have with mice in this Keep. Their goal isn’t just to destroy me. It’s to destroy the core of this Keep, which is made of magic, living magic. And if the core goes, everything goes—the ventilation, the water, the magic in the walls.”