He drew himself up a little against the wall, his blue gaze now crystal hard. “By that time, I assure you, Bektis, you and I and everyone in this city—every human being; in the world-will be dead. But that point is moot.”
He turned back to Yori-Ezrikos. “The answer to the question that everyone is so politely refraining from asking me is no. I am not mad. I thought I was for a long while—the time it took to journey here, the days Gil and I spent at St. Marcopius Gladiatorial Barracks. I had no way of knowing whether my visions were anything but lunacy at best or some complicated trick or trap. And I can’t pretend that having my sanity confirmed yesterday by what I saw in the Blind King’s Tomb comforted me much. I would infinitely prefer madness to the knowledge that my suspicions were true.”
He was silent a moment, the orange light that fell upon him from the torches in the corridor lying in strange patterns along the differing links of the chains, like the encrypted message in some unimaginable genetic code.
“But they are true. And because the mages in the ice—the children of the Mother—and the Mother of Winter herself—are of a substance and an essence unknown to me, my magic cannot touch them. When I was driven into the tomb, I put forth all my strength, all my power, against them, and it was as if I fought shadows.
“My lady.” He stretched out his hand to the young Empress, the bandages stiff with blood, and Gil saw the tightening of his jaw muscles under the weight of the chains. “I beg you, let me go. Even if you will not believe me—and there is no reason that you should—please, let me return to my home. My people need protection against what is coming. I swear to you I will not meddle, nor spy, nor interfere in the affairs of your people or your lands, unless you come against us. And if things go on as they are,” he added quietly, “in a year, or two years, you will be in no position to do that.”
“What of Bektis?”
Ingold looked momentarily nonplussed, his hand dropping to the bench again; he turned to regard his brother wizard with mild inquiry. “Oh, I doubt he’ll be in a position to come against us, either.”
“Do not jest with me,” the dark girl said soberly. “I meant, did I release you—did I ask you to go again to the crypt of the Blind King to meet these children, these priests, of the Mother—would it aid you to have Bektis fighting at your side? For all that my Lady Bishop has done to him, he is still—”
Bektis hastily framed counterarguments, but Yori-Ezrikos spoke over his mellifluous objections. “—he is still a man of power.”
“Your Most Gracious Majesty, surely you cannot believe the ravings of a man who is clearly deranged! My position in the household of the Prince-Bishop is indispensable! Though I regret most exceedingly that I am unable to accompany my Lord Ingold—”
“You will accompany him.”
Bektis shut up as if she’d turned a faucet or tightened a garrote. Gil didn’t blame him. Yori-Ezrikos was not anyone she’d want to mess around with.
“I know everything about your position in the Prince-Bishop’s household,” Yori-Ezrikos said, “and what you have done in her service.”
“Your Highness is kind.” Ingold inclined his head; his hair and beard were damp with the sweat of the sheer exertion of the conversation. “But I fear—”
“My Highness is nothing of the sort.” Her small hands had returned to her knees, the hieratic position reminiscent of the Blind King himself within his tomb. The silken veil moved eerily with the movement of her lips as she spoke, the gold flowers embroidered on its hem glinting in the torchlight from above. “But I believe you. I owe the Prince-Bishop a great deal, including my life, I daresay. Perhaps I do wrong in the sight of God by freeing you, by using your power to defeat this evil. I know not what this will do to my soul in God’s eyes. But I am not stupid. I know that the cold causes the famine and the famine causes the wars. And if there is anything I can do to turn this tide, or to stop its flow, that I will do, though it cost me my hope of heaven.”
She rose, a tiny woman not yet seventeen, with an eerie frost in her eyes. “Under this condition will I let you free, Ingold Inglorion. That you go with Bektis, and you try again with your combined powers to defeat the wizards under the ice. I shall give you whatever you need, whatever you ask for—protection, a time of rest and food to regain your strength, the best physician in the city. But you must swear to me that you will make the attempt. If not, you, and Bektis, and your wife here, will all die.”
“Your Beneficent and Beautiful Majesty,” Bektis said, “I beg you not to be hasty—”
“I said be quiet.” She didn’t even look over her shoulder at him. “Will you swear? I know wizards have no God. Swear to me—” She hesitated, searching her mind, and a curious expression glimmered in the silver-gray eyes. “—swear to me on the head of your firstborn child.”
Ingold shivered. His eyes went to Gil for a moment, then down to his hands, lying chained and broken across his middle. If he thought about telling Yori-Ezrikos that it was useless—that no matter what aid she gave him he could not touch the mages in the ice—the sight of even that hand-breadth of her face between the veils, Gil thought, would have changed his mind. It passed through Gil’s mind that in another year or two, the man who raped her when she was twelve—the man whose child she had killed as it emerged from her body—Ingold’s old enemy Vair na-Chandros the One-Handed—was going to be very, very sorry he had done what he did.
“I swear to you,” Ingold said in a voice so soft as to be nearly inaudible, “on the head of my firstborn child, that I will attempt once more to destroy the Mother of Winter, though I die in the attempt.”
“Ingold, this is ridiculous!” Bektis paced furiously back and forth across the gold and lapis tiles of the chamber Yori-Ezrikos had installed them in, his white beard and crimson velvet robe giving him the air of an agitated Father Christmas. “My Lady Govannin will never stand for it! We must make plans!”
The chamber, though comfortable in the spare southern fashion, was, Gil gathered, also proof against the use of magic therein, as were the other two rooms of the tiny suite at the rear of the Empress’ wing of the episcopal palace. Gil thought she recognized the Runes of Silence ornately calligraphed into the goldwork of the tiles, worked into the plaster, probably graven on the stones beneath the tiled floor, as they had been graven on the bricks of the cell. A marble lattice looked into a garden, but heavy wooden shutters were folded over it on the inside, and there was no way through.
“Oh, I’m making plans.” Ingold propped himself a little on one of the pillows that lined the wall-bench, seemingly the only type of furniture, except for the occasional pedestals or desks, that southern buildings boasted. In number of pieces, the room differed not the slightest from Gil and Ingold’s chamber in the tenement behind the St. Marcopius Arena: only the mattresses and sheets on the wall-bench were of indigo linen, and the desk ebony and pearl. Where a leaf of the shutters was folded back, a few pigeons-blood roses grew through the marble fretwork, touching the air with their scent.
“And I suspect that since your powers and your position in Her Holiness’ household are kept very quiet, shell wait for some time before making inquiries after you.”
The physician sent by Yori-Ezrikos—and escorted by two of her personal guards—had just departed, after telling Ingold that his heart had been badly strained and he must have at least two months of absolute rest. Gil suspected this was not what either Ingold or Yori-Ezrikos had in mind.
“I’m planning just exactly how I’m going to make sure of your assistance when we return to the Blind King’s Tomb. Though I suspect I won’t need to do much,” the mage went on, refastening the breast of his borrowed ecclesiastical robes. “I’m sure our escort will have instructions to carry us thither in chains, and considering the population of gaboogoos and mutant dooic on the lower slopes of the mountain, I think you’ll find it safer to accompany me than to make a run for it under a cloaking spell. I doubt you’d get far.”
“Really!” Be
ktis sputtered, trying to look indignant at the implication instead of merely scared out of his wits.
The servant who accompanied the physician had brought a hammered copper platter containing lamb, doves, some kind of spiced aubergine mush, and a pie of honey, almonds, and rice, famine not having reached such proportions as to affect the Prince-Bishop’s table, evidently. Or maybe it had, Gil thought, pouring herself a cup of mint tea. Maybe these were poverty rations, as Yori-Ezrikos and Govannin understood them. “Can’t you see it’s hopeless?”
“Of course it’s hopeless,” Ingold replied around a dried fig. “My strength should return in a day or two—never mind what that charlatan said—but even at my strongest I was not a match for them, and I doubt that your assistance will improve the situation much. It would make no difference had I the entire Council of Wizards at my back burning incense and chanting. Without a … a thaumaturgical paradigm for the essence of the ice-mages, without an understanding of the central essence of the Mother of Winter, without a word of command over that essence, I cannot use my magic to combat theirs. It becomes, as it did before, a contest of strength between me and the gaboogoos. Even with the Empress’ guards protecting us, we shall be hopelessly outnumbered before we even reach the tomb.”
“Then why go?” Bektis demanded. He strode to the wall-bench, crouched beside it so that his handsome, pale face was level with the other man’s. “Listen, I’ve never known a guard who wouldn’t take messages out, at least.” He pulled from his finger one of his many rings, a cabochon diamond caught in the grip of an emerald-eyed golden lion. “Govannin would never let me go if she knew of this outrageous plan of Her Highness’. She’d never let me be put in a position of danger. I’m too … too valuable to her. And I know too much. She could never spare me. And there are any number of warlords who would welcome your services enough to intercept us on the way to this lunatic mission at the tomb.
“Oh, you don’t have to actually serve him!” he added, seeing Ingold’s face. “Once they take the Rune of the Chain off you, you can take Gil-Shalos here and flee! Govannin would be delighted to see the back of you. There would be no pursuit. You could—”
“You display a startling optimism about what people in this land would or would not do,” Ingold remarked. “Could you get me a little of that aubergine paste on some bread, my dear? As for there being no pursuit, I should say that as long as—”
He stopped, as if suddenly listening, trying to catch some far-off sound, then turned to Bektis with sharp anger in his eyes and held out his hand. “Give it here.”
“What?” The tall wizard made to rise in haste. But with surprising speed for a man whose doctor had just told him to take two months of absolute rest, Ingold’s hand darted out and fastened to Bektis’ wrist. Bektis made a move to wrench free, and discovered, as others had before him, that Ingold had a grip like a crocodile’s jaws.
“My scrying crystal,” Ingold said mildly.
“Really,” Bektis blustered, “how would I have come by—”
“Gil.” Ingold nodded at the other mage, an unspoken Frisk him in his eyes.
“I was keeping it safe for you.” Bektis fished with his free hand in the velvet purse that hung at his hip, produced the thumb-sized fragment of smoky yellow quartz, and put it into Ingold’s palm.
“That was exceedingly kind of you.” Ingold used his leverage on Bektis’ wrist to haul himself to his feet and walked, shakily, to the long wooden shutters that covered the lattice wall. Gil strode ahead of him and pushed them farther open; they were enormously heavy and she didn’t like the way the old man’s eyebrows stood out suddenly dark against his bloodless face.
A thin splash of sunlight fell over Ingold as he pressed his body to the lattice and thrust his arm through so that his hand, with the scrying stone in it, was outside the ensorcelled boundaries of the room.
He angled the central facet to the light.
“Rudy,” he said mildly. “It’s good to see you well.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
It was late when Rudy finished talking to Ingold, late when the old man pronounced himself satisfied in seeing the shape of the ice-mages’ power. Rudy had been horrified at his friend’s appearance, and by the fact that toward the end of the conversation Ingold was quite clearly keeping himself on his feet only by hooking his arms through the stone crossbars of his prison—but damn, he thought, it was good to know the old dude was alive.
He’s got to live, he thought. He’s got to make it through this one.
God knew whether he’d be able to use what Rudy had told him, but at least he, Rudy, could tell Maia that no, nobody was born exempt from seeing wizards’ illusions, so there.
The Mother of Winter. He shivered. The Mother of Winter. The mother of her world, holding all life and all that had been within her. And all that would be, if her three servants had their way. Tapping the roots of the earth’s magic, deep within her unfreezing pool.
Like Alde, holding new life within her … And Gil, for that matter, how the hell about that? He grinned for a moment, then his smile faded. Not the greatest time in the history of the world to find yourself growing new life. Gil, he recalled, had always been wary around babies, sentimental as hell but never really comfortable.
No wonder Ingold had had that beaten, wary look when they’d left, knowing he’d placed on her all the customary spells to keep her from conceiving by him.
Holding life, Rudy thought. Like the Keep.
He remembered the Bald Lady again, the wizards sleeping all around her in the stupor of exhaustion. We will fail, she had said.
And yet they hadn’t failed.
For the first time, he began to understand why: began to understand what she had learned, in her far-off dream of alien power.
In his mind he saw her, curled on the plinth amid the vast web of light whose perimeters defined the half-constructed Keep. Closing his eyes, leaning his elbows on the workroom table, he called to mind the whole scene again, visualizing the half-built walls, the shadowed pit of the foundations, the scaffolding with its glittering machines, the lines of starlight and fire that stitched between them, holding the energies of the Keep together. Defining what the Keep would be, in a future beyond what any of them would ever know.
In his mind, in that future, he located the niche where Amu Bel hid the food; the chamber where Gil and Alde found the scrying table and where he later saw the vision of the Bald Lady; the knoll of execution with its enigmatic pillars; the room where he and Alde had hidden, six levels down but, he now realized, exactly beneath the plinth where the Bald Lady sat …
“It’s a grid,” he said aloud. “The Keep is a power grid.” He got to his feet, made sure the Cylinder was in its accustomed pocket, slung his coat around him and hurried out into the corridors, his footfalls a whisper in the Keep’s dark heart.
“I’m coming with you.” Gil closed the shutter on the thick gold moonlight that flooded the garden. Ingold had spoken to her, on their way south, of the lavish insect life of those warm lands, but even at midsummer the crickets cried slowly and the booming whir of cicadas was only rarely heard. Most of the lamps in the wall-niches had been put out, the remaining few strewing wavery arcs of amber flecks through their pierced brass bellies along the patterned plaster walls.
“No.”
“Bektis will betray you.”
“Whether Bektis betrays me or the sky falls makes no difference.” He had returned to the wall-bench, where it deepened into a decorated sleeping niche, and was invisible save for the blur of his hair and beard and the glim of eyes. His deep voice sounded endlessly tired. “Whether we ride forth tomorrow or next month makes no difference, though I’m inclined to believe it will be the former, since God knows what our hostess told the bishop about Bektis’ whereabouts. Even that …”
He gestured, and despite the spells laid on the room, for a moment the ghostly, flickering simulacrum of an illusion shimmered in the darkness, the precise arrangement of advancin
g and retreating cones that Rudy had shown him through the crystal. “Even that, illuminating—and astonishing—as it is, will make little difference in the end.”
The moving shapes, like vast plasmic jellyfish, dissolved. Maybe they had only been in her mind. Gil heard Ingold sigh.
“It is more than power, Gil. More than understanding their substance. Their substance is alien, under the sway of alien magic. I understand a great deal now about how their power is raised, but I am not of them. I cannot command their central essence, what they truly are, which I do not understand. And without that command, my magic cannot combat theirs.”
He drew her down into the niche beside him, and she rested against his shoulder, comfortable in the circle of his arm, in trust. Almost, she felt that it would make no difference now whether they lived or died, succeeded or went down in defeat. Only that they had this.
Quietly, she said, “You never were afraid of me because I might kill you, were you? Or because I’m … changing …”
“Changing?” He sat back a little from her, regarded her with surprise.
“Mutating.” She could barely bring the words out, under the agony of shame. “Because of the poison. Sometimes I think it’s illusion. Other times …” She held up her hands, not certain anymore if the fingers were longer than they had been, the joints more extended.
Ingold swiftly took the hand in his and kissed it. “It is illusion,” he said, appalled, shaken. “Gilly, if I had known …” She turned her face away, but she could feel his eyes searching her. “No,” he said, and she knew to her marrow that he spoke the truth. That his sight saw clear and his assurance could be trusted. “My darling, my child, that you had to go through that, along with everything else—”
“It’s nothing,” she said, brusque and awkward. “It was the least of it.” There was a long silence, the warmth of his hands on hers strong and steady, real against the fading of the dream images of pain.
Mother of Winter Page 33