Mother of Winter

by Barbara Hambly

  “But we are, as you say, screwed as it is,” Lord Ankres reminded him, from his position at the foot of the Council table, a slim small man, seventyish and dark-browed, with a bandage from the fighting on his brow. “Are we not?”

  “Not if Ingold can kill those things in the South,” Rudy said quietly. “And I think that’s what’s going on now. I think that’s why they’re attacking.”

  “And if he can’t?” Maia asked.

  Rudy sighed. “Then we’re in real trouble.”

  All over the Keep, throughout that day, fights broke out: over food, over shoes, over fancied slights; fights between men who were rivals for the same woman or whose opinions had long differed about how food and power and space should be allotted; fights that had nothing to do with the squirming, yammering things that waited outside the doors, and everything to do with them.

  After the Council meeting Rudy returned to the old storeroom at the very heart of the Keep, mounting paranoid watch over the great Sphere of Power he had wrought there the night before. Its long traceries spread over walls, ceiling, and floors once again, the influences of its power filling the air and sunk deep into the stone underfoot, calling on the stars, the phase of the moon, the position of the sun, readjusted for certain changes in the atmosphere as Brycothis had shown him. Drawing all power into the clay vessel of water at its heart.

  “The gaboogoos don’t care about the food, do they?” Tir asked, sitting cross-legged on the floor outside the Sphere’s perimeter, a tuft of magefire floating over his head.

  Rudy shook his head. “They just want to get rid of magic, Pugsley.”

  He looked down into the clay vessel at the earth-apples, grown now to three times their original size. They were still dark, but from every eye a thread of white had sprouted. The tinier beads, filling out slowly to their intended size, appeared to be rose hips.

  Ingold would be pleased. Maybe more pleased, Rudy thought wryly, than he’d be about the potatoes. He could almost hear the old boy saying, One can always get food.

  A lot you know, pal.

  But he did hope they were the tiny white ones Gisa of Renweth had worn, which even in dream had smelled so sweet.

  In a day or two, depending on what happened outside with the gaboogoos—depending on what was happening, what he was positive was happening, somewhere in the South—he’d ask Brycothis how to alter the hydroponics tanks to produce the quantities of food needed to carry the Keep through autumn and winter.

  Always supposing somebody or something didn’t kill him first. The screaming of the mutants in their crypts, audible even in this chamber like a faint, terrible whisper of wind, got on his nerves. He didn’t think they’d be able to break the door of their prison. Still

  “And they only want to get rid of magic because we’re using it to keep them from putting back the world the way it was when they were alive.”

  “Are they not alive?”

  “Not really.” Rudy sighed and rubbed his face, decorated with two or three days’ worth of beard and the scabs and welts left by the gaboogoos who’d gotten through the gate. Looking back on it, he was astonished he hadn’t managed to kill himself, or Janus, with the lightning. “It’s just that we can’t live in the world they need, and they can’t live in ours. It’s like we’re taking turns on the planet, and it’s our turn, and they want their turn back again. That’s all.”

  “Oh.” Tir studied the portions of the Sphere visible to him, the traced lines of silver and blood on the floor, the incense vessels filling the air with dreamy, pungent smoke. “Will Ingold kill them?”

  “We’re in deep trouble if he don’t, Ace.”

  Toward evening Minalde came down the curving stairs that Brycothis had walked long before her, exhausted and pale and moving as if in pain, but clad in what Rudy privately called her “Royal drag,” her hair dressed to make her appear both taller and older. Not that she needed the latter, he thought uneasily, studying the thin face within the loops of pearled chains. She carried a covered clay dish and a vessel of water—Tir leaped up at once to help her, and Rudy quickly “unsealed” the opening to the Sphere and hurried out to the small unmarked portion of the chamber to fetch her a chair.

  “Do you think you could come to tomorrow morning’s Council meeting and do that trick of yours with the lightning again?” she asked, sinking gratefully down and handing Rudy the dish with hands trembling with fatigue. “When Barrelstave rounded the turn of his first hour of speaking, I found myself thinking of it … longingly.”

  Rudy laughed and hefted the dish. “Yummers—carrion and peas. My favorite.” He realized he was starving. Probably literally, he thought after a moment, pulling his horn spoon from a pocket of his vest. But let’s not go into that … “What do they want?”

  “They don’t know.” Alde sighed. Her thin fingers fumbled with the elaborate braids, the gold pins that held them, shaking her head to loosen the heavy midnight cascade. “They want to be told everything’s going to be all right, though that isn’t what they’re saying.”

  She shivered, and in the silence the mad howling of the mutants in the crypt could be heard again. After a time she whispered, “Is there nothing we can do? I’ve just come from there. You hear them pounding on the doors—they’re using enough force to smash their own bodies, break their own bones. They haven’t had food since yesterday evening, and now nobody can take them any, or water.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do.” Rudy came over to her chair and took her hands. “How are the rest of the people taking it?”

  “They’re scared.”

  “Hell.” He knelt beside her and pressed his face to the velvet of her worn red dress. “I’m scared.”

  She put her arms around his shoulders, and there was somehow infinite comfort in that slight grip, the warmth of the unloosed swags of her hair, and the smell of sandalwood that permeated clothing and flesh.

  “You can’t be scared.” Tir spoke up from her other side, where she held him, also, in the circle of her arms. “You’re a wizard.”

  “Don’t you believe it, Ace,” Rudy mumbled. “That scares me worse than all the rest of it put together. If you—” He straightened up, his head snapping around to listen. “What’s that?”

  Alde shook her head. “I don’t—”

  He lifted his hand for quiet, got to his feet, and opened the door. The Icefalcon had stepped a few feet from the wall, face expressionless, the dirty yellow torchlight that barely illuminated the outer vault a wavery line along the edge of his drawn sword.

  Like the eerie wail of wind—like the shrieking of the ice storm—the noise was audible through the farther door.

  Screaming.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Gil woke up cold, with something crawling across her leg. She reached to brush it away and drew her hand back fast—a gaboogoo the size of a large cat staggered from her touch on crablike legs. Something warmer grasped her fingers. Ingold’s hand.

  Nausea swamped her.

  “Isn’t this where I came in?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  She realized her speech was slurred, nearly unintelligible, but didn’t bother to repeat her comment. She didn’t recall what she meant.

  Impenetrable white mist curtained the chamber, still as death. The blue glow around them had waned, and only the single dim magelight burning above Ingold’s head reflected on the fog. Gaboogoos continued to crawl in and out of the hazy ring of light, claws skidding and clicking on the ice, which had become slick around them from the heat of Bektis’ sphere of protection.

  By the way the mists didn’t come near them, Gil guessed the spell of protection included a self-contained atmosphere. Given the amount of carbon dioxide now in the chamber, they’d have been quite dead without it.

  Both wizards looked like a couple of teaspoons of warmed-over death. For once Bektis didn’t look indignant, or irritated, or anything but bone-tired. He reached out to help Ingold to his feet, and
Ingold helped Gil.

  “Come,” Ingold said softly. “You have a right to see this.”

  Hurt arm hanging at his side, leaning heavily on his staff for support, he led her to the edge of the pit, where the pool had been.

  The liquescent, half-frozen oxygen was gone. Only shreds of smoke remained, curling from the black throat of the volcanic vent. The Mother of Winter lay on a ledge some fifty feet down; the chasm plunged beyond her to endless night in the bowels of the earth.

  There was no contortion in the great, glistening shape of gelatinous flesh, no sign of struggle, of anger, of resistance. The treelike head lay turned away from them, the long mane of blue fern trailing wetly over the edge, mist-wreathed and phosphorescent in the witchlight, the whiplike, spiraling tail losing itself in the fathomless black. Where the flesh hung like a wet tent from the chitin that shaped her back, Gil could see what might have been the shape of eggs within her, millions on millions of them, a hard black roe beneath translucent skin.

  “She’s beautiful.” She didn’t know why she said that, except that in its own weird way it was true. Mother-Wizard. Heart of the vanished world.

  Ingold had been right. She had quite clearly died in her sleep, a very long time ago.

  “That?” Bektis was recovering. His voice was an angry squeak. “Well, to each their own. Good riddance, I say.”

  “Yes,” Ingold murmured, leading Gil away from the edge. “Yes, I suppose you would.” He paused and, holding carefully onto her arm for support, bent to retrieve his sword, which lay half under the decomposing black things whose whole duty for eons had been to keep the Mother of Winter alive at any cost, to await the day when the world would return to what it had been. The world would never, Gil thought, return to what it had been. Not for anyone.

  Sergeant Cush, Lieutenant Pra-Sia, and the Eggplant met them in the tomb’s outer chamber, coughing and cursing, their torches burning sickly in the barely breathable gas emerging from the passageway. “Don’t come any farther,” Ingold called out, and limped more quickly to meet them in the knee-deep slunch of the chamber around the Blind King and his patient, wise-eyed dog. He brushed the slimy strings of his white hair out of his eyes. “I take it the gaboogoos are gone?”

  “Gone?” Cush made a noise in the back of his throat that could have been a gag or a bitter chuckle. “Like sayin’ a chap with the yellows is poorly, friend. They’re as gone as it gets in this world.”

  He led them out. During the battle with the ice-mages, more—and larger—gaboogoos had attacked the tomb, and either lay in pieces or wandered aimlessly about below the steps. Only a few of the mutant dooic were still alive, the ones who had been least changed, and they were clearly in extremis, lying in the corrosive goo underfoot with blood slowly leaking from their mouths as the slunch-permeated organs of their bodies dissolved. Ingold shivered in the lurid gold of the slanted evening light, grief and pity in his eyes.

  Gil turned her own hands over. They were perfectly normal. She put her fingers to her face. The scars were only scars, healing, and rather small.

  Her veins no longer itched. The constant backtaste of metallic sweetness was gone from her sinuses. With the enchanted diamond, the poison had been drawn from her, cast back to its originator. Her flesh was free. The silence within her mind was like winter morning, with all the world wakening to peace.

  “The gaboogoos themselves just wandered off,” the Eggplant reported, scratching his bead-braided head. “Like they just got word nobody was payin’ ’em. You all right, Gilly?”

  “Fine,” she said, meaning it, and the big lunk’s eyes warmed as he pulled her to him in a hug.

  “And speakin’ of pay …” Cush took Ingold’s arm in one huge hand, Gil’s in the other, and led them down the foulness of the tomb’s steps, picking their way through the filthy zone of burned slunch and vitriol, to the great rocks that half hid the tomb from travelers in the canyon below. Among the blue shadows of the more open ground behind them, the Empress’ guards were fetching the horses back from their place of safety, their voices low and distant, the only sound in all that dreadful, wasted place.

  Cush lowered his voice to exclude the others. “It true what you said? Now it’ll get warm again, and the rains’ll be back, and famine and plague’ll go away?” His sharp, pale gold eyes flickered back toward the guards where they gingerly inspected the decayed and blackening gaboogoos, the dead mutants, with gestures and cries and demon-signs drawn in the air, and he chewed quicker on his gum. “I don’t hold with magic, of course, but … can you tell me who’s going to take power then? Which way it would pay a man to jump?”

  Ingold sighed and shook his head. “That I cannot,” he said softly. “I only said that if we accomplished what we set out to accomplish, the weather would grow no worse, or in any case not much. Slowly, things may improve, or they may not. There’s no way of knowing.”

  “Hm.” The director of training surveyed the ruin behind them, the smoke drifting from the chemical-blackened doorway of the tomb, the strained and blood-streaked faces of the old man and the girl. “You did all that for ‘no way of knowing’? You need a good manager, you do, my friend.”

  The wizard smiled slowly and scratched a corner of his beard. “Well, I’ve been told that before.”

  Cush shrugged. “Hardly worth your trouble, seems to me. Still … that saint-kisser Pra-Sia he tells me we’re to bring you back to Her Highness when you’re done here. Somethin’ tells me …” He lowered his voice. “Somethin’ tells me she ain’t one to take ‘no way of knowing’ for an answer.”

  “No,” Ingold sighed. “No, and since she didn’t send enchanted spancels along, I suspect she may be counting on me to do exactly what I’m going to do.”

  “And that is?”

  “Not come back to her for a reward.” Ingold closed his eyes for a moment, visibly gathering his depleted strength, then made a small sign with his fingers. Almost in the same movement he stepped forward, uninjured arm held out, and caught Sergeant Cush as he fell, easing him unconscious to the ground. Past them, Gil saw every guard and gladiator simultaneously collapse, leaving Bektis, who had been haranguing Pra-Sia, standing by the horses with an expression of offended shock on his narrow face. “Well, really, Inglorion!”

  “Don’t.” Ingold raised his bandaged hand to stop the bishop’s mage as Bektis prepared to gesture the men awake again. “Think about it, Bektis.” He strode down the sloping ground from the rocks where he’d left Cush, hands tucked in his sword belt, as if the deed to the entire mountain and half the plain of Hathyobar were sticking out of his pocket.

  “I have no idea what Her Highness intended for us once she got us back into her power—neither us, nor you. She’s a calculating woman, and a ruthless one; Govannin’s pupil, and like Govannin, not averse to using forbidden magic for her own ends. Nor averse to lying to her preceptress. She may consider having a tame wizard at her beck an advantage when she raises an army against her husband.”

  He stepped over Lieutenant Pra-Sia and came to a halt, surveying the field of battle as Gil neatly hitched the reins of all the horses to the pack-mare’s lead.

  “Now, I can assure you she won’t have me.” He hesitated for a moment, then asked gently, “Will you come with us, Bektis? I understand why you remain …”

  Bektis’ handsome face worked at his words, and he backed away, trembling. “You understand nothing!” he hissed. “Nothing!”

  Ingold only looked at him, sadness in his face. “It isn’t worth it, you know. You have your chance now to leave her, maybe the best you will ever have.”

  Bektis turned white with rage. “You, Ingold Inglorion, are an unscrupulous scoundrel!”

  Ingold’s eyes changed—resigned, Gil thought. Whatever hold Govannin Narmenlion had on the wizard was beyond Ingold’s power to break.

  “But in need of a manager,” Ingold sighed, shaking his head and casting a regretful glance back at the peacefully sleeping Sergeant Cush. “I suppose he’s righ
t. Is there any vitriol left in those tanks, my dear?”

  “Not a drop.” Gil unhitched the last one from the pack-mare and dropped it to the ground. “But we’re in luck. Every one of the guards’ horses is a mare. I knew Cushie rode a stallion, and the Gray Cat, but …”

  “Why do you think I asked the Gray Cat to be part of our party?” Ingold caught the rein of Cush’s stallion and swung lightly into the saddle. “As for the mares, luck had nothing to do with that. I told Her Highness that it was part of the spell. And Govannin’s seedling roses, of course, which are in my saddlebags. Give the Eggplant’s gelding to Bektis—we’ll trade the other two for cattle on the way north.” He held out a folded and sealed scrap of papyrus. “Would you be so good as to tuck that into the good sergeant’s tunic, my dear?”

  “What is it?”

  “Instructions for removing the Wards around the Penambra treasure. We’ll stop by and load up on the rest of the books and enough silver to replenish our supplies, and to remove the really magical parts of the Wards, but I think our friends deserve some remuneration for what is, I fear, a rather scurvy trick. Bektis …”

  He turned back to his sputtering colleague and raised his hand in blessing. “If you will not come, I can only say, may the shades conceal you from your foes and the stars lead you home.”

  “And may you break your leg the moment you step off that horse!”

  Gil came running back from her errand, her whole body light, as though she could run for days untiring. Every muscle in her ached as if she’d been beaten with chains, but the pain within was gone. “You can’t leave the geldings for Cush and the boys?” She cast a guilty eye on the sleeping gladiators. The Eggplant had been a good man to work with and had had, she suspected, a little bit of a crush on her. The Gray Cat had taught her how to use a net and trident.