04 Mother Of Winter d-4

by Barbara Hambly

  The badge they bore upon their crimson armor was the white circled earth-cross of the Church.

  In the end Gil thought that it was only bureaucracy that spared her. That, and the bureaucratic mind that could not compass decision. Their orders concerned the wizard Ingold Inglorion, and they had no instructions regarding anyone else.

  When Gil stood above his body and said, "Take me to the Lady Govannin," they looked at one another uneasily, not knowing what to say. She refused to give up her weapons when asked; refused, also, to let them ill-treat Ingold, putting her hand on her sword hilt when the bloated, squint-eyed captain made to kick him in the ribs. "He's all but dead, anyway," the lieutenant of the troop pointed out, stepping quickly between the captain and Gil when the man likewise made to draw his sword. "You can see we'll have to get him a horse, if he can sit one. There's no way he can be made to walk."

  The captain's mouth puckered up at that. There was something wrong with the shape of his face, Gil thought-the position of his eyes. With a shudder of recognition she remembered the dream of the mirror, thought, He's been eating slunch, like the animals. He's starting to change. And there were a dozen men of the guard who bore the same signs. "What happened to him?" the lieutenant asked, a small, lithe elderly man with a Churchman's clean-shaved head.

  Gil said, "It's something I must speak of to the bishop." The captain was still looking down at Ingold as if he were trying to figure out how to kill him without interference from his troop. Gil wondered what voices he heard speaking in his head. They chained him, finally; the metal of the various loops and manacles, and the rune plaques that clattered dully from every spancel and cord, was all black with charring. Red spell-ribbon glared among the chains, red as new blood. Gil realized it was in those chains that the witch Hegda had been burned the previous afternoon. Lieutenant Pra-Sia ordered his men to make a litter for Ingold out of lances and spare harness, for there was nothing growing in the canyon, and the men were looking around uneasily at the unclean things moving in the slunch.

  Above the tomb's low door, worn away by weather and nearly eradicated by lichens, Gil saw a battered bas-relief of three forms bent over a cauldron, out of which grew something that looked like a tree. For some reason the carving frightened and repelled her, and made her want to hide.

  Lieutenant Pra-Sia also cut the shaft and feathers of the arrow and pulled it through the wound and out of Ingold's chest, afterward binding on a soldier's dressing. The wound bled heavily, but the wizard made no sign of feeling anything. Gil walked beside the litter as the men carried it down the wadi, cold fog flowing around their feet, her hand resting on her sword hilt. The middle-aged lieutenant dismounted and walked beside her.

  Perhaps Khengrath, the captain of the troop, despite the influence of the ice-mages, understood that she would kill whoever tried to separate them, and die herself uncaring in the attempt: he didn't want to have to explain an extra skirmish to the Prince-Bishop. Perhaps he had other reasons.

  In the dungeon corridor of the bishop's palace, which stood just within the watergates of Lake Nychee, the lieutenant said to her, "You must give up your weapon now," and when she stiffened, Ingold whispered, "Do it, Gil." They removed an iron grill from the floor and lowered him into the brick-lined pit beneath, but the captain let a ladder down for her.

  She thought, climbing down into darkness tessellated with squares of orange from the torches in the corridor, the man might still harbor hopes that she'd murder Ingold while he slept.

  They left water and a little food, and brandy to clean Ingold's wounds. The cell was small but dry, every brick of its walls, floor, and groined ceiling marked with spells that were the death of magic, the silencing of power. By the light of the corridor torches falling through the grill twenty feet above their

  heads, Gil stripped Ingold and washed him as well as she could around the half-dozen manacles, the chains of all thicknesses that looped from arm to arm, throat and wrists and ankles. He no longer shivered, but his flesh felt deathly cold to her touch. With the leftover water she washed the blood from her own face and hands and tried without much success to rinse it from her long hair. It remained, drying and sticky, in her clothing-the stink of it mingled with that of sewage in the cell. She sat on the edge of the low brick bench where they had laid him, and the weight of everything that had passed since leaving Renweth Vale seemed to descend on her shoulders, the icy smoke of dreams breathing through her mind again. Get out of my skull. Damn you, get out of my skull. Haven't you done enough? But it was all she could think about, and the thoughts consumed her. "Gil-Shalos?"

  She thought he was only seeking reassurance and put her hand down to touch his shoulder. His fingers closed on hers. "I'm sorry about your sword," he whispered. "It's just as well. The captain wasn't real pleased. I think he hoped I'd ax you myself." "Ah." He managed to smile, but did not open his eyes. "That's my Gillifer." She tried to keep her voice steady. "He's been eating slunch, I think-changing. I suppose he told Govannin about you the minute the ice-mages realized you were at the door. Unless Hegda really did rat on you?"

  He moved his head a little, no. Squares of lamplight lay over him, delineated by the grill overhead; they caught pale triangles where the skin stretched over his cheekbones, left his eyes in pits of shadow. "That was just... an excuse. Something to tell you. Forgive me, Gil. I couldn't-"

  "No, you were right. They'd have seen you coming through me, and neither of us would have made it. Ingold, forgive me. I didn't aim that arrow on purpose. I swear I didn't. I hope you know that."

  "I know it." A smile twitched one corner of his mouth, and he moved his hand as if he would touch her face; she took it in hers. "We might have saved ourselves trouble," he went on softly, weighing out his breath carefully, nursing the remnants of his energy even to speak.

  "There is nothing more that we can do against the mages in the ice, or against that which they guard. It will all come to pass now. There is nothing we can do to stop it; to stop them; to stop Her. It was good of you to come to me, good of you to guard me. Good beyond any words I can say. But I release you now, Gil. What we came here to do is done, or at least proven to be impossible. If they allow it-and Govannin might well, for old times' sake-return to the Keep."

  "The hell I will," Gil said, still level, but her voice shook a little. "I'm not going without you. There's got to be-"

  "Child, there is nothing to be done." His hand tightened on hers. "If they kill me-and I think they probably will-I can't prevent it. The battle with the ice-mages took everything from me, everything and more." He hesitated for a long time, as if he would ask her something, then at length he shook his head, letting the thought go. "Thank you," he said simply. "Thank you for remaining with me." "Thank you, " Gil repeated, her voice shaking. "Ingold, I love you. I love you to the ends of the earth, to the end of my life. Without you there is nothing, not in this world, not in any other world."

  Panic filled her at the tone of his voice, detached, as if already putting aside her and all things of his life, slipping away into sleep. She clung to his hands, as if she could force him to stay.

  "To hell with what the mages in the ice are doing to the world, Ingold-I hate them for what they've done to me. For using me as a weapon against you. For twisting me-

  taking me-but it won't last. I swear to you it won't. And it has nothing, nothing, to do with my love for you. I swear it."

  His eyes opened and looked up into hers from sunken rings of black. There was a terrible sadness in them, and she thought, I've lost him. Desolation swept her; she could not imagine what she would do now. "Don't send me away." "And the father of the child?" he asked.

  Time seemed to stop, like a plane stalling midair, held only by the grace of the wind. Later she wondered why she didn't jump to the conclusion that he was talking about Rudy and Minalde's child. But she knew this was not what he meant. "What child?"

  For the first time there was a flicker, a change, a life returning to the blue eyes; do
ubt, the rearrangement of something he had believed and acted upon. His white brows drew together a little.

  "Your child," he said. "The child you carry. I thought that was what you spoke of when you said it was better that you remain at the Keep." Her voice sounded like someone else's to her ears. "I'm not pregnant." But even as she said it she knew she was. Everything she had attributed to the poison of the creature that had scratched and bit her came back to her now with changed significance: dizziness, nausea, the constant need for sleep... Even the conviction that her body was changing, twisted as it had been by the ice-mages' songs...

  Boots clashed in the corridor overhead. Ferruginous lamplight jarred over them as the grill was thrust back. A ladder was lowered. "Inglorion?" It was the bloated captain.

  Gil caught Ingold's hand again and asked softly, "Why did you think it wasn't yours?" He looked absolutely nonplussed at that, and Gil understood that it wasn't because wizards customarily laid barren-spells on their consorts-spells that had ceased to work the moment the ice-mages' poison was in her veins. He'd told himself this was the reason, she knew, but she knew, too, that this was not all. It was because he was old. And because, deep in his heart, it had never really occurred to him that any woman would want to conceive and bear his child. "Inglorion!" The guards came down into the chamber in a dry ringing of armor, and Gil stood, smashing the end off the fired pottery brandy bottle and holding the jagged neck like a knife.

  The spilled alcohol made the cell smell like a taproom. Ingold reached to touch her wrist, but his hand fell short, dangling from the bench with the weight of the chains. "I'm coming with you." She didn't even look around at him as she spoke. "That rather depends on where I'm going." She heard the jingle and slide of metal links, leaden rune plaques as he tried to sit, and the tearing gasp of his breath with the effort.

  Her eyes were still on the captain, the lieutenant behind him, and the others, counting who bore the signs of the eaters of slunch and who looked clean. Working out who to go for first, once she killed the captain and got his sword. Through her teeth she said, "No, it doesn't."

  The captain said, "The bishop has sent for you, old man. Give us trouble and the girl dies."

  "My dear captain." Rather carefully, but with a perfectly steady hand, Ingold was pulling straight the rags of his blood-crusted robes, as well as he could under the drag of the chains. "Although I assure you of my complete cooperation, I don't believe I could make any trouble for you if I tried."

  Chapter Twenty

  "Ingold, where are you? Pick up the phone, man!"

  Cold mountain shadow fell across him, the sky above the Hammerking insanguinated with garish light. Downslope, near the track left by the mammoth that morning, the Icefalcon and Melantrys stood guard again. All they needed, Rudy thought, was black suits and sunglasses.

  "You gotta answer me," he whispered, hopeless. "You gotta hear this. I know the shape of the ice-mages' magic. I know the spells they use to raise power." It can't be too late.

  The shape he had seen in the vision was still clear in his mind, the floating cones of what looked like glowing water, preserved as the Bald Lady had reproduced it from her own long-ago dream with a trained wizard's eidetic memory. The precise arrangement of large and small shapes, and the way they seemed to move nearer and farther away. The pattern of their dance. Ingold had to be able to do something with that. It had to tell him something. If he still lived. "My lord wizard."

  Rudy looked up. The Bishop Maia, Lank Yar, and Lord Ankres stood just beyond the edge of the power-circle, a couple of Ankres' white-clothed troopers and three or four of Yar's hunters in the background. They looked grim, and rather white around the mouths.

  Maia said, "I think we have them all."

  The Guards were holding them on the training floor, one of the largest open spaces within the Keep to which access could be limited.

  Even those who had made the biggest fuss about searching the Keep for gaboogoo-Lady Sketh and Enas Barrelstave-were silent in the presence of the eyeless, mewing things that had been Clanith White and Old Man Wicket.

  Koram Biggar, who had not begun to change, was blustering, "When all's said, they don't look so bad." He waved at Noop Fattier, whose wife had cut holes in his jerkin to accommodate the pseudolimbs growing from his chest and back. "You can't say that's really bad, my lady. What's the way you look, anyway, compared to being full-fed?"

  He glared defiantly around him. The Guards and Lord Ankres' soldiers, who'd helped them in the sweep, looked a little queasy, but kept their weapons at the ready. At the sight of Rudy, Varkis Hogshearer pushed to the fore of the prisoners. "You have no right to name me as one of these!" he yelled. "You wait, Master Know-All Wizard! You wait till my girl's powers come in strong!"

  Beside him, Scala was silent, tears running down her red, swollen cheeks. "It's we who're full-fed, you know," Biggar went on, as the Guards began pushing and chivvying the shambling mob toward the stairway that led down to the makeshift prison in the first level of the crypts.

  "You lot are fools for not taking Saint Bounty's gifts! Look at her!" His finger stabbed out toward Minalde, still as marble with her dark hair disheveled, holding Tir's hand. Linnet stood beside her, throat mottled with bruises. Tir's eyes were somber, unsurprised, like water miles deep.

  "Look at her, with her bones staring out of her flesh, ne'er mind the wizard's child she carries! It's we who'll live!"

  "Aye," Janus of Weg said softly as the fifty or so mutants and those unchanged others whose names Tir had given Rudy-were led away. "Aye, you'll live. But in what form?"

  "It isn't all of them," Rudy said as the watchers emptied slowly out of the training floor, murmuring uneasily to themselves. Minalde moved her head a little, no.

  The small group closed up around them: Ankres, Maia, Janus-the core of Alde's power. The lines of her face seemed deeper in the brittle light, more drawn. "It's a dangerous precedent to set," the bishop said gently. "We can't simply say that those who have been against us must be under the control of these ice-mages." "Should be easy to tell," Rudy said. "Thanks to a man named John W. Campbell and a little story called 'Who Goes There?' "

  Alde's morning-glory eyes widened in alarm. "You mean people in your world have to deal with this kind of problem?" Rudy grinned, and just barely remembered not to kiss her, out of respect for Maia's position and Ankres' scruples. She'd regained a little of her color and looked not much the worse for their chase through the vaults, but he wished she'd pack up for the day and go to bed. She was just too damn pregnant for him to relax. "All the time, babe," he said. "All the time."

  The Old Testament Hebrews had used the pronunciation of the word "shibboleth." The fictitious fighters against Antarctic alien intruders had used a hot wire and samples of everybody's blood. Rudy used illusion, which gaboogoos walked straight through without seeing.

  Lord Ankres jumped and flinched when Rudy summoned the illusion of a large and highly colored insect walking up his leg. That particular image did it for most people. For stoics like the Icefalcon, who wouldn't have reacted to a giant squid doing Groucho Marx imitations, Rudy simply drew a line of Ward across the empty cell he was using as a testing chamber and casually said, "Come over here, would you?" The young Guard stopped, baffled that he couldn't come more than halfway into the room. He tested all the Guards, all Lord Ankres' men, and all of Yar's hunters first. He tested everybody who lived on fifth north.

  Rather to his regret, Lord and Lady Sketh both passed with flying colors. But as Maia said, you couldn't arrest those who simply disagreed with you.

  "You know why they interfered with the searches?" Alde said tiredly. It was deep in the night, and Rudy had been testing people for hours. Melantrys and her work party had just locked up the Doors after hauling out the last loads of slunch, room after room of it, tucked away in the mazes behind the Sketh and Ankres enclaves. "My guess is Biggar and his boys hid their chickens with Sketh." Alde nodded. "And stolen food. They simply swore fealt
y to Ankres, in the old style, and for Ankres that was enough to extend his protection to them." She perched awkwardly on the stool that Rudy had relinquished the moment she and Tir entered the training floor-Gnift the Swordmaster sometimes used it for demonstrations. The iron cages in which the glowstones hung overhead threw faded lattices of shadow over her face and across the worn wood of the raised training floor. "They knew he was never going to let any of my troops go poking around in even the deserted areas behind his storerooms. He was livid when he learned Biggar had also sworn fealty to Sketh."

  Rudy rubbed his eyes. In the squirming, glowing masses that he'd seen dragged through the Aisle to the doors he saw things like squamous fruit: half-formed gaboogoos taking shape. Dozens of the things of various sizes had been flushed out of the corners of the fifth-level mazes, out of the deserted storerooms and corridors that were officially the enclaves of the Keep nobility, though nobody ever went there. Just the thought of trying to destroy those foul heaps now piled in front of the Keep made

  Rudy tired.

  "We'll have to kill them," Tir said very quietly, pressing his cheek to the back of Alde's hand. "Won't we?"

  He looked as tired as they, his eyes years older than they had been that morning. Once upon a time there was a boy, Rudy thought, looking down at the hollowed face, the sad, steady blue-violet gaze. Oh, Ace, I'm sorry.

  Alde brushed her thin hand over her son's hair. "We don't have to make that decision tonight, darling."

  Tir looked up at her, saying nothing. Rudy wondered if the boy was thinking what he himself thought, what he knew Alde thought: If Ingold's dead, and the ice-mages aren't gonna be killed, how long do we go on feeding people who're gonna have to be gotten rid of anyway?