Mother of Winter

by Barbara Hambly

  He was so shocked, so remorseful, that she made her voice light, to reassure him. “It’s just that I couldn’t tell. Like all those other illusions. But in the midst of it, I knew in my heart that even if it was true, it didn’t make a difference to you. But you were so wary—and of course you had to be. So the only thing that really bothered you was you thought I’d lain with another man.”

  “In a sense,” Ingold said slowly. “Although had I known … I didn’t know how deep the influence of the ice-mages went in you, you see, or how deeply they could influence your mind. That you would try to kill me, yes; that you felt a great anger at me in the times when their influence was strong over you, yes—and you would have been more vulnerable at the beginning, before you learned to cope. What most troubled me was the possibility that you had lain with another man under their influence and had found in the experience things that I cannot give you.”

  Gil said softly, “Oh.”

  “I would rather have left you at the Keep, not only for the sake of your health and the child’s, but to give you time to make up your mind.” He spoke hesitantly, choosing each word with desperate care. “I would rather have dealt with the matter after the ice-mages themselves were destroyed—if they could be destroyed—so that your mind would be clear. But as I said in my note—and remind me to transform that brat Niniak into a ferret to repay him for his misguided chivalry—the ice-mages would have made you follow in any case, by illusion or compulsion or whatever means they could. Though you would be their eyes and their ears while with me, I would rather have had that than have you stalking me, alone, through the wilderness and the cold. They have no care for the physical well-being of their servants,” he added bitterly. “And … for better or worse, my dear, I wanted you with me.”

  She tightened her arm around his rib cage—carefully, for his left arm was still strapped, to let the arrow wound heal. “Well, Ingold,” she said gravely, “despite the frenzied passion I developed for Enas Barrelstave, whose child I carry—”

  Ingold pulled her hair.

  Her voice sobered. “—I swear to you I’m not going to be the ice-mages’ agent on this trip. You know that.”

  “I know that.” His hand stroked her hair in the dark. “But I cannot let you lose your life in this cause. Not your life, nor the life of the child within you.”

  “They are within me.” Gil sat up and held out her arms, pulling back the sleeves of her loose red tunic as if the veins beneath the flesh would have turned color with the venom of the thing inside her. “They’re as much a part of me right now as your child, Ingold. More, because the child is quiet, and these bastards talk to me, whisper to me, make me doubt every word I say and every motion I make when I’m anywhere within five feet of you.”

  As they whispered now, she added within herself. He trusts you again. Now is your time. Her sword lay at the edge of the cushioned bench, within the reach of her hand—a Guard reflex that she suspected would be with her to the end of her days. Her knife was in her belt. That was the young Empress’ doing.

  “I’ve gotten more used to it now,” she went on, carefully steadying her voice. “It bothers me less than it did. I can say, ‘Oh, that’s that darn such-and-such illusion again.’ Like commercials on TV.” She found she still could not name to him the visions she had. And in truth, she thought, there was no need.

  “I feel like I’ve named the voices in my head, the burning in my veins; all those stupid lies and scenarios that play past me when I shut my eyes.”

  Ingold gathered her back into his arms, held her tight against him for a long time. Beneath her cheek she felt the tension of his pectorals and in his silence heard the swift flow of his thought. Then he sighed again, accepting something, releasing something.

  There was infinite regret in his voice as he asked her, “And what have you named them, my dear?”

  Gil sat up sharply, their hands still touching, their eyes locked; Gil understanding, knowing what it was she saw in the wizard’s gaze. She thought, Of course. There has to be a built-in compatibility in the poison if there’s communication. Just as there has to be compatibility in the slunch, if it mutates human flesh and human thought.

  At the same time all the voices in her mind rose shrieking, crying to her that it wouldn’t work, it would kill her, kill her child, kill Ingold. Half-seen visions of hideous terrors fleeted through her mind, the awareness of how easy it would be to pull her dagger from her belt and drive it into his heart, and beyond all other things, the clear awareness of pieces of a puzzle falling into place.

  “You can use the venom in my blood as a magical interface,” she said. “Can’t you?”

  At Gil’s request, the Lady Yori-Ezrikos sent to the St. Marcopius Barracks for warriors to thicken her bodyguard—the Gray Cat, the Little Cat, the Bear, the Eggplant, Sergeant Cush, and others whom Gil knew could be trusted. Ingold selected men from among the young Empress’ regular bodyguard, using Rudy’s criterion of susceptibility to illusion, and spoke to the Empress herself about preparations such as time and place, barges and equipment; presumably, Gil thought, to get at least some jump on the ice-mages. She was still deeply conscious that whatever she learned, they would know, and retired to the other room of the suite when Ingold dealt with such matters.

  There was a mirror there. Sometimes she saw the deformed face in it, the hammer-jut of chin and the alien forehead, the horror that had become her eyes. Other times she saw only her own face. She could not tell which was more familiar, or which was the lie.

  She couldn’t tell either whether her overwhelming desire to eavesdrop was the ice-mages’ or her own native nosiness. She rehearsed Dante in her head until the impulse went away.

  She was aware that on the day before the first night of the full moon, Yori-Ezrikos manufactured a summons that would take Govannin to the town of Yeshmi All-Saints, a day’s barge-ride downriver, the young Empress promising to hold Ingold for execution upon Govannin’s return. Gil would have given a great deal to know what she told Govannin about Bektis’ absence. A sudden attack of measles?

  If, as Gil suspected, Govannin had used Bektis as a pawn in her climb to power in the South, she’d be hesitant to go head-to-head with her pupil over what might simply be a don’t-ask-don’t-tell request for services.

  There were preparations that could not be hidden from the ice-mages, and those were difficult for her. As she and the two bodyguards assigned her brought the bishop’s wizard to the small ball-court of the Empress’ wing of the palace, which Ingold had begun ritually cleansing and stitching with Ward-lines against Bektis the moment Govannin was safely on her barge, Gil wondered whether the panic that rose in her, the ghastly sense that she would not survive the ritual Ingold was devising, was in fact her own common sense or her three pals under the ice.

  Cold horror swamped her as they entered the ball-court, a long, marble-sided pit open to the sky, and she saw the lines of power Ingold had drawn in the sand, the Weirds that circled the walls. For a moment Ingold, in his red-and-black novice’s robes, seemed a stranger as he ritually sealed the Wards behind them, then signed her to remove the spell-cords and chains from Bektis’ wrists.

  “This entire project is ridiculous,” the bishop’s mage muttered through his teeth as Gil set the chains aside and Ingold returned to the measurement of an enormous circle in the court’s smooth-combed sand. “Of what conceivable use can it be to attempt what will only destroy two of a precious and dwindling corps of trained wizards? Much better to study these … these whatever they are, if they even exist … from a distance, to ascertain whether they are in fact priests or monsters or whatever. They aren’t even human.”

  “And while you’re studying,” Gil said softly, her eyes on the old man in the center of the court, “they’re gaining strength. And men and animals are driven to eating slunch out of sheer starvation as the world grows ever colder. And those who eat the slunch eventually begin to hear voices in their minds saying, ‘Kill that guy over there w
ith the magic wand in his hand.’ ”

  “There is no proof whatsoever of that!” Bektis practically spit the words at her. “And what proof has Ingold that the cold is the result of these … these things he says live in the heart of the mountain? In all my years of dwelling in the Alketch, I’ve never heard of such a thing!”

  “Bektis,” Ingold called mildly. “I need your help.”

  “Hmf.” The tall wizard stalked stiffly away toward the center of the court, fingering little waves into his new-washed beard. “First time Lord High-and-Mighty Inglorion has ever admitted he needs anyone’s help …”

  Gil remained where she was, in the smaller circle Ingold had traced around her, joined to the larger, central design by a narrow Road traced in ochre, silver, and hawk’s blood in the sand. Unlike Rudy, who claimed to see the lines of magic written as light in the air or, in some cases, reaching down into the earth like roots, she could only see the two wizards themselves, sketching patterns with their fingers or the ends of their staffs above the growing maze of Runes, sigils, and power-tracks that grew about them on the dust. But either they could see something there, she thought, or they were the best mimes she’d ever encountered. All the invisible lines met at the same points, over and over; Bektis ducked one as a tall man would have ducked a stretched clothesline.

  From the small ebony chest Yori-Ezrikos had sent to him that morning, Ingold removed silver dishes to hold the water necessary for the rite, silver braziers to burn the incense specific to the raising of power from noon sun on the day of the full moon. At the Keep, Gil knew, Ingold and Rudy frequently had to postpone spells and Summonings because they lacked materials that were, for thaumaturgical reasons, time-specific.

  Fortunately, Govannin was the trustee of a quite astounding amount of treasure, handed over to the Church in the course of centuries by nobles and Emperors anxious to curry the favor of the saints. She’d seen the same thing in the ruined treasure vaults of Penambra, only Govannin’s hoard made the Penambra trove look like a five-and-dime. Govannin would hemorrhage if she knew the use to which the Church’s wealth was being put now.

  Gil smiled.

  At the lift of Ingold’s hand, nine flames sprang to life in the braziers, nine cones of the finest incense flickered with brief coals, then sent up thin columns of smoke into the still air of the sunken court. The wan afternoon light flashed on the nine shallow vessels of water. Ingold and Bektis began to speak, words of power and light, and from the bronze-strapped chest beside him, Ingold lifted the pride of Govannin’s gem collection: a cabochon diamond more than half the size of Gil’s fist.

  The Crown of Khirsrit, it was called.

  Six hundred seventy-five karats of pure carbon.

  “Can you do that?” she’d asked Ingold the night before last, as they sat talking and planning in the dark. “Alter the atomic valences of pure carbon so it will bond with the liquid oxygen in the pool the ice-mages guard?”

  “You’re sure the pool is oxygen?” For a number of years now, Ingold had been questioning Gil on as much elementary chemistry as she could remember, and laboriously devising his own experiments, for no other purpose than to satisfy his utter fascination with how the universe was put together. He had, to his own great surprise, made sense of two or three very ancient textual fragments by dealing with magic on chemical terms—something that told Gil a little more about the mages of the Times Before.

  “Not a hundred percent.” It had been pretty late then, the lamps, like elderly relatives at a party, one by one calling it quits. She and Ingold had pulled the blankets up over their knees, for though stuffy, the chamber was cold. Everything they said was being relayed immediately, she knew, to the ice-mages, but that couldn’t be helped. All the gaboogoos in the world were going to be out there anyway.

  “I’m guessing it’s oxygen because oxygen’s more stable than nitrogen,” she said slowly. “Those would be the easiest to pull out of the air, the way you and Rudy can pull water vapor. Oxygen would require less magic over the years to hold in stasis. If it was something with a higher liquification temperature, like fluorine or bromine, you would have suffocated when you went in there to fight them. But if you charge a solid lump of pure crystallized carbon to be automatically open, to bond with the oxygen in the pool …”

  “It will disrupt the thaumaturgic equilibrium,” Ingold finished softly. “It will set off a chain reaction.”

  “And the thing in the pool will be destroyed.”

  “The thing in the pool,” Ingold said. “The Mother of Winter.” He touched the tangled night of her hair, traced with his thumb the print of the scars on her cheek. There was an endless sadness in his voice, a world of deep regret, as he spoke of their unseen enemy. “The guardian of the essence of all that vanished world.”

  “Do we have a choice?” Gil’s voice came out taut and stifled, fighting against the waves of screaming rage that pummeled her mind, the nausea and splitting headache. Hands trembling, she curled her right thumb into the side of her index finger, where Ingold couldn’t see it, and drove the nail into the flesh as hard as she could.

  Ingold must have sensed the sudden strain, for he drew her closer to him, his strength a reassurance, like a lifeline in a storm. “If we have a choice, my dear,” he said sadly, “it is one I cannot see.”

  “Gil-Shalos.” Ingold beckoned from the greater circle, above which the shapes he showed her two nights ago had begun to take form. In the sunlight they were different, transparent, as if wrought of clear water, less like jellyfish and more like some kind of eerily glowing elemental plasm. Gil assumed the pattern of their movement to be part of their power—Ingold had observed it in the crystal for slightly over an hour, the night Rudy showed it to him, before Gil half carried him back to bed. In the open air the forms were huge, changing size and shape and position. They seemed to breathe, though Gil wondered what elements of the air they sought.

  Bektis, eyes closed, hands outstretched, appeared to be in charge of maintaining those plasmoid shapes. He stood statue-like, garnet robes hanging in shining folds about his slender body, breathing deeply within his own small traced circle in the dust, the very picture of a great mage deep in the concentration of his sacred art.

  Altogether less impressive, Ingold met her at the main circle’s heart. In his hands, the Crown of Khirsrit glittered with secret fire, the reflections from within it cast up onto his face.

  “Gil-Shalos.” He addressed her again by the name she had been given among the Guards. “Do you truly wish this? I have not the faintest idea what the spell will do to you, either in the charging of the crystal or when it breaks the greater spell of the pool. But the crystal will be linked to you. It will become—it has to become—in a Platonic sense a part of your body and your blood. To the best of my knowledge and calculation, you will be unharmed by this, but we are dealing with an unknown magic, and with a spell that I myself have invented. There are things about this that I do not know. I cannot tell what may happen, to you or to your child.”

  Gil had seen Minalde make a certain gesture many times, that of laying her hand on her belly, as if to protect the life asleep within. She made it almost without thinking, then self-consciously hooked her hand instead behind the knot of her sword belt.

  “He’s your child, too, Ingold,” she said. “But one thing I do know: if the ice-mages are around seven months from now, he’ll be under their control, if he’s alive at all. If anyone’s alive.”

  He stepped close and kissed her, and set the diamond in her hands. Using his right hand, he drew his left from its sling and put it on her shoulder, his right hand then on the other.

  “Do I need to do anything?” Gil asked. “Meditate or say Om or something?” Her voice was light, half kidding, covering genuine fear and a thousand screaming illusions in her mind.

  He smiled into her eyes. “It would make no difference if you stood on one foot and recited The Shooting of Dan McGrew,’ ” he said. “Do their voices still trouble you?�
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  “I’m used to them.” Which wasn’t entirely the truth. “Will this hurt?” It occurred to her she hadn’t even thought to ask before. Not, she reflected, that it made the slightest difference.

  He only shook his head. “That’s another thing I haven’t figured out, my dear. I’m sorry.”

  She closed her eyes, conscious of the weight of the Crown of Khirsrit in her hands. Conscious, too, of the sun’s thin heat on her face, of the stillness in the ball-court and the smell of incense and of the dust underfoot; of the sudden fierce rending pain in the scar on her face and the screams knifing through her mind, telling her to step over the power-lines, to hurl the diamond away, to whip out her sword and …

  She remained still. She knew how spells were done. Pain rose through her like an illness, but she knew it was only the illusion of pain, sent by the ice-mages. She formulated it into a TV commercial in her mind—Oh, that crummy thing again …

  Ingold was speaking, a long way off, the voice she would recognize and know in her dreams when she was an old woman—the voice it seemed she had known all of her life. The pain redoubled, and she wove words in her mind to cling to:

  I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I

  Did till we loved; were we not weaned till then …?

  Fire passed through her, a colorless torrent of heat. There was no pain. She felt odd and light-headed, and short of breath, and there seemed to be an enormous silence in her mind. The Ward-lines could not exclude the voices, because they were a part of her, a part of her blood, her essence—but that link would be, she knew, their undoing, for they could be reached by her name.

  Far off she saw her dream vision again, of diamond dust and quicksilver flashing in the thick red surge of her bloodstream, and through it saw mists, and blue pulsing light, and three shapes half glimpsed that were not human, performing again and again rites that had worn stone away.