Mother of Winter

by Barbara Hambly

  The anachronistic image seemed to float, detached, in a lake of white ground fog that surged utterly soundless around Gil’s knees.

  Gil knew full well that this world filled with ice and silence had never been trodden by foot of man.

  Ingold’s voice came to her, very far away now, asking something, she did not know what. In any case, she could not have answered him. Even the memories of who she had once been seemed to have slipped beyond immediate recollection; whom she was seeking here, why she had come. Cold smoke flowed from a crack in the rock at the top of a flight of stone-cut stairs, and a smell of wet sweetness, sugary and attenuated. Gil followed, drawn by music she thought she had heard once before: music and the murmur of half-heard words.

  They were speaking her name. How did they know her name?

  At the top of the stair she looked down at her hands. She drew her dagger and slid the blade along her palms—the pain shocking even in the dream, but she could not help herself.

  The voices grew clearer in her mind and she thought, My blood knows my name, and they are a part of the poison that’s in my blood.

  They were telling her Ingold had caused her that pain, but even in her dream she knew that wasn’t true. As she walked deeper down the crack in the ice, the tension in her chest grew, the terrible anxiety tightening.

  Looking down, she saw the dark bones of the rock, and through them, like horribly shining ropes, lines of tension and power in the ground, coursing into the earth.

  Her blood dripped down onto the ice, hot against her cold fingers. Looking back over her shoulder, she thought she could see Ingold standing in the crevice that led to the surface of the ground, unable to cross its threshold. It was Ingold as he actually was—sometimes a glowing core of magic light, sometimes the arrogant, red-haired princeling who had caused the last of the great Gettlesand wars. Her lover. Her friend. The other half of her life. He held out his hand to her, but he could come no farther, and she could no longer hear his voice.

  The singing filled her ears, and she followed.

  The singers knelt in a world of lightless color, their magic shining into the ice of which the chamber was composed and reflecting back, allowing her to see. Glowing smoke surrounded them, rising from the fumarole in the chamber’s heart; not the smoke of volcanic heat, but the smoke of cold, for the chasm was filled with something that wasn’t lava, wasn’t water—something gelid, thick, clear as diamonds, something that moved in slow glutinous waves with the stirrings of that which dwelt within.

  The singers were wrought of jewels. They were making magic, performing a rite over and over again in the flat space before the chamber’s door; a rite they had performed for eons, until the hard black stone of the floor had been worn into a pit, filled thick now with slunch. Every now and then something crawled out of the slunch: wriggling pale arthropods with masses of tentacles where their heads should have been or those flat, raylike, pincered flying things that she had seen chasing the hawk.

  She couldn’t see the singers clearly, but she knew they were calling her name. The blood that ran down off her fingers dripped into the slunch and began to crawl in thin red snakes in their direction, glittering with jeweled diamond flecks. The jewel things raised their heads, blue-fire gazes surrounding her. There was a profound cold stirring in the slow-throbbing pool.

  “Gil, come back.”

  It would rise out of the lake, she thought. The ice-mages knew her name already. They would give her name to the thing in the pool, the thing that knew all names, and it would know her.

  “Gil, come back now.”

  She had a dreamy sense of wanting to scream, watching her blood wriggle toward the ice-priests, who extended long hands down to gather it in; watching little whitish spiderlike blobs wriggle up out of the slunch, watching the slow emergence of the thing in the pool.

  “Gil!” She felt his hands on her arms, very strong and warm. “You have to come back now. Can you follow my voice? You have to come back.”

  I have to go back. I have to go back and kill him.

  She drew her knife again, her blood sticky all over its leather-wrapped hilt. She wondered if she killed herself in this dream whether she’d really be dead. Then they couldn’t make her hurt him.

  Or maybe, she thought, they could.

  “Can you follow my voice?” She heard it then, the buried urgency under the calm tones. He was scared.

  Her mouth felt as though it had been shot up with lidocaine. She managed to say, “Yes.”

  He led her out of the cavern by the hand. She felt his hand in hers but couldn’t see him—something that sometimes happened in dreams—and once they were out of the cavern, past the stone room with the statue of the Blind King and the dog, on the lichen-grown basalt beside the great, cold lake, she felt him spring upward, flying, drawing her by the hand to fly after him.

  In her dreams she could fly, if he was holding her hand.

  They drifted upward a long way, through black waters again, heading for the light. Looking down, she could see the deep blue crater of the vast lake, like an open eye: the monster volcano beside it, dead and full of ice. It seemed to her she could still smell that sugary odor, still hear the singing of the ice-mages behind her, and the poison in her blood whispered the echo of that song.

  Then there was only dark.

  “What is it?”

  He was kneeling in front of her. She sat on a broken chunk of stone in an old stable in the valley of the Great Brown River, cold to her marrow. “What did I do to my hand?” She withdrew it from his grip to look. Though the heel of her left hand ached as if it had been cut—and cut deep—there was no wound on the flesh.

  “Are you all right?”

  Why was he scared? His hands were warm on her frozen ones and there was both concern and fear in the sea-blue brightness of his eyes.

  She made herself nod, though she didn’t feel all right. She felt nauseated and exhausted, as if she had run for miles; her palm hurt like the dickens, and the unhealed bite on the side of her face throbbed as if the flesh had reopened and bled.

  “I couldn’t reach you.” He pushed her hair away from the side of her face, quickly traced spell-marks over her cheek, her shoulder, her arm, warming the tracks of nerves and blood. “You slipped from me. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to bring you back in time.”

  “In time?” She was still groping in her mind, wondering what the hell she’d say to him if he asked her where she had been all that time, what she’d seen. She couldn’t remember a thing, except that she’d been cold.

  “We have to go. Now, at once, if we’re to reach safety. I don’t know—even now I can’t be sure—but I think there’s an ice storm on its way.”

  “Here? This side of the mountains?” She added an expression she’d picked up from the Guards, almost as an afterthought, for in that first moment she was too shocked to feel fear. She should, she thought reasonably, have been panicking. “I take it there isn’t a cellar on the premises?”

  “Not one deep enough. But we’re only eleven miles from the old gaenguo at Hyve.”

  Only a few years ago Ingold couldn’t have predicted an ice storm more than ten minutes in advance. But sketchy as it was, Gil’s knowledge of air-pressure systems had aligned with one of the demonstrations in the record crystals, allowing Ingold to formulate—theoretically, at least—more advanced symptoms of warning.

  Ice storms being a phenomenon of the far north and the high plains, his theory about the changes in the temperature, pressure, and smell of the air that heralded one remained untried, but lack of hard evidence about a subject had never stopped him from making eerily accurate long-shot guesses. In any case, Gil would have been willing to run eleven miles and hide in the deepest hole she could find on the old man’s bare word, even were an ice storm—a pocket Götterdämmerung and Fimbul Winter rolled into one—not involved.

  “Is that deep enough?” Gil had been to the place a few years earlier. The old chamber of sacrifice had b
een used at various times as either a dungeon or a wine vault, depending on the political circumstances of the surrounding countryside.

  “I think we’re going to find that out,” the wizard replied mildly, and pulled on his mittens. “Are you able to start loading the mule? I have to reach Rudy at the Keep, warn him to get everyone—and the livestock—inside. I’ll help you in a moment …”

  “Ingold, I got my face cut up, not my arms broken.” She breathed hard, fighting a wave of dizziness as she stood, and wondered at the flash of some half-recalled vision of her own blood creeping in two trails through the slunch … Creeping where? She looked at her palm, surprised anew to find it whole. Why surprised?

  “What about the Settlements? Can they flash a message that complicated down from the watchtowers?” She pulled the Cylinder from its hiding place in Ingold’s blankets, stowed it in her own jacket, pulled tight her sash and twisted her dark, crazy hair back from her face with a thong. “It’s not a standard message. I mean, they won’t have a code for it. There’s never been an ice storm this side of the mountains, has there?”

  “One last year, north of Gae but still this side of the mountains.” He angled his scrying stone toward the fading embers of the fire.

  Yoshabel, sensing that somebody was going to make work for her, bared her yellow teeth and snapped at Gil, who hammer-handed her hard in the side of the face.

  “I don’t want any lip from you, cupcake. You’ll thank me for this.”

  “You underestimate our girl, my dear.” Ingold tilted the crystal, the reflection darting over the scars around his eyes, the straggle of his knife-trimmed beard. “Even if she did know we were saving her life, she wouldn’t thank us in the least. The word-code is longer, but they should have time to reach the caves on the mountainside.”

  This shouldn’t be happening. Gil slung a blanket and a saddle buck over Yoshabel’s back. An ice storm—that’s like getting hurricane warnings in Kansas City!

  Only hurricanes didn’t kill everything aboveground.

  Ingold was silent, bowed over his crystal, listening, Gil thought, to the turning of the air over the far-off mountains, to the pressure shifts, the unseen colors of the livid night. She worked quickly, thankful they always hobbled the mule when they made camp for the night. Balked of breaking Gil’s shin with her foot, Yoshabel settled for lashing her across the face with her tail and puffing her belly as big as she could with air.

  “Don’t give me that.” Gil drove her knee hard into the animal’s gut. Even with Yoshabel’s usual complete noncooperation, years of practice had made Gil very quick at saddling up, and the terror of the coming catastrophe added to her speed. She expected Ingold to come help her, at least with the loading of the books; dizziness returned twice as she worked, swift waves of it that swiftly passed, leaving her holding on to the wall and gasping. The second time it happened, she looked past her shoulder and saw the old man still bent over the fire, the crystal an arrowhead of flame in his hand.

  “Rudy, are you there?” His voice was hoarse with strain. “Are you there?”

  Oh, cripes. The vision of the Dead Cell deep within the Keep flashed across her mind, where the wizards had been imprisoned by Bishop Govannin when she decided to make the Keep conform to her version of the Straight Faith. It was ridiculous to think anything of the sort could happen with Minalde ruling the Keep, but Gil knew the stresses pregnancy put on a woman’s health; knew, too, that in the event of a power struggle among the nobles or even the wealthier merchants, anything might happen.

  Getting rid of the wizards at this point would be an utterly lunatic thing to do. As a historian, Gil had read accounts of greater lunacy than that, and she knew exactly how quickly power could shift.

  She finished roping down the sacks, then crossed to the fire at a run. Loading had taken ten minutes. Even at a fast walk it would be more than two hours before they reached the eroded artificial hill where the Big House at Hyve had stood. God knew what they might meet on the way. “Ingold, we have to go.”

  He didn’t stir. His eyes were wide, staring into the crystal, willing Rudy to appear.

  “Ingold, we have to get out of here. If you haven’t reached him by now you’re not going to.”

  Flèches of refracted brightness chased across cheekbones and eye sockets as he raised his head. “They’ll die.” He spoke as if waked from a dream, half disoriented with shock. “I think the winds are going to strike somewhere between here and Sarda Pass. Even if they aren’t torn apart by the blast, the cold—”

  “What’s preventing you from making contact?”

  He shook his head, anguish in his face, the horror of a man whose power has made him responsible for everyone and everything around him. She saw all the dead whose deaths he had been unable to prevent: his parents, the people he had grown up with in the long-vanished principality of Gyrfire. His student Lohiro, and a woman he had once loved. All the blood-dabbled, shrunken corpses in the streets and courts and alleyways of Gae when the Dark arose.

  Tir’s father, who had been Ingold’s student, patron, and friend.

  “What about shape-shifting?” Gil forced her voice to a rationality she was far from feeling. “Can you do that? Into something like a peregrine? Something that’s fast and big enough to take the regular night cold for a couple hours? I think I can get to Hyve by myself.”

  The haunted look in the blue eyes turned to alarm—at the thought of leaving her to make her own way through the hostile dark of the countryside, Gil was certain, rather than at the hideous risk involved in changing shape and flying under the descending hammer of the coming storm. He hesitated, knowing already he’d have to leave her to her own devices, have to do as she suggested …

  “I’ll be all right.” She added, “It’s not like you have a choice.” Thirty percent of the mages who tried shape-shifting didn’t survive the first attempt, but she knew herself to be speaking the literal truth. In the absence of communication by scrying crystal, there was no other way for the warning to be given, for the lives of the herdkids, every man, woman, and child of the Settlements—the stock—to be saved.

  She could see the calculation fleeting behind his eyes, gauging not the hideous stresses to body, mind, and the ability to use magic, but only how those stresses might best be circumvented. “No,” he said at length. “No.”

  He rose in a single lithe move and made his way half at a run down the brick walk between the marble-faced stalls, shedding as he walked the heavy bearskin surcoat, the rough brown mantle, his face set like stone. Gil, at his heels, felt a sudden blowback of heat, as if she had stepped from the icy night into a summer afternoon: spells gathered around him for protection from the outer cold. Brown leaves in the corners of the broken carriage chamber whirled with the wind of warm air meeting cold, and as Ingold pulled off his boots, laid down his sword belt with a soft ringing of metalwork on brick, fog billowed around him, frailly lit from within by the blue galaxy of magelight above his head.

  He slammed open the crazy stable doors, stepped through into the night, naked and shrouded with swirling cloud. Gil stepped into that core of heat and smoky brilliance, clasped him hard to her: “Watch out,” she whispered.

  “I always do, my dear.” His long white hair lifted in the stirring of the magical warmth, his white beard surprisingly soft against her face, while the muscles of his bare arms were like rock. “Guard the Cylinder,” he said. In the chaos of dark and mist, he seemed little more than a voice, strong arms, eyes that could have been summer stars. An old scar like a time-dimmed furrow marked the point of his shoulder; there was a bump where his collarbone had been broken long ago.

  “If I don’t return, send for Thoth or Kta or one of the powerful mages, for at all costs we must find out what it is and what it does. My child—”

  Their lips met, the passion seldom spoken between them like unexpected flame: the fierce, cold, scholarly woman and the man who feared loving as he feared neither death nor foe.

  She
stepped back from him, like stepping through a door into the cold again. Ghostly streams of vapor whirlpooled around him as he lifted his arms and spoke in his great deep broken voice the True Names of the stars. Though she had heard the mages speak of it, Gil had never seen shape-changing; because of its terrible dangers, it was not anything she had ever thought she would see.

  But now she watched, her fear of the ice storm all but submerged in wonder. The mists blew thicker, the light within them stronger, fiercer, lancing out in hard beams to outline the leaves of the blowing oak trees. The core of heat that surrounded Ingold thinned, condensed with the inward turning of his concentration as he drew power from his bones, his flesh, from the molecules of his blood. Lines of strain gashed his face as he called on his deepest reserves of power to change his own essence, the inner armature of his self, into something other than human.

  Lightning flowed, cold and blue around him, dimming as the heat dimmed, until the power was only a fugitive sensation, like the attenuated whisper of spider-silk in sunlight. The vapors braided themselves into an upward-moving helix in which Ingold was no more than a half-guessed shape, arms upraised, head thrown back, foxlight luminous in his long hair. Gil seemed to hear the beating of wings, as when she had stood in the plaza in front of Royce Hall at UCLA and flocks of pigeons had taken to the air around her; she could almost smell feathers, the thin, coppery tang of blood.

  Back inside, Yoshabel brayed, furious and scared, sensing the magic that charged the darkness. Great, Gil thought. You have a hissy about Ingold and you can’t sense the ice storm that’s going to turn you and me into Swanson’s frozen entrées. So much for animal instinct.