04 Mother Of Winter d-4

by Barbara Hambly

  The Bald Lady had drawn a sphere to Summon not only water, but life. Reproducing it would be an all-day job, and the thought of Summoning the power to do so made his bones ache. But the memory of that single leaf, that single root, made him shiver. Tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow.

  Tomorrow he'd have to go back to testing. There'd been thirty-five mutants, maybe half a dozen who'd been with them-like Biggar and Hogshearer and Scala-and another ten or so who hadn't changed physically but upon whom the slunch had worked to the extent that they hadn't been aware of illusion. And the vast bulk of the Keep's population remained untested.

  And there were still the other problems, the hydroponics tanks that didn't work to capacity, the power-circles by the Tall Gates from which-according to Lady Sketh-he should still be sending out his Summons to all and any sorts of edible livestock. Probably some band of White Raiders is sitting at the bottom of the pass getting fat on the cattle and horses and sheep that come ambling up the trail. "By golly, Slaughters-Everything-in-Sight, this's the best hunting spot we've had in years!" Under the cool, brittle white lights Alde looked worn to the breaking point, and he remembered Biggar's stabbing finger. Look at her, with her bones staring through her skin...

  And Ingold maybe not coming back.

  Christ, I wish I could just go out with a goddamn sword and kill a goddamn monster and have goddamn done with it! As methods of saving the world go, this one really stinks.

  No wonder old Ingold has white hair, being responsible for everyone and everything around him.

  And then he thought, If Ingold really is dead, I'm gonna have to try to kill the ice-mages myself. Oh, Christ.

  Alde slept that night in Rudy's small chamber, unwilling to return to the room in the Royal Sector that the gaboogoos had torn apart. Surrounded by Guards, she said she felt safe, but woke two or three times in the night sobbing and trembling. Given the fact that no one knew how many others in the Keep the ice-mages might be whispering to, not even Lord Ankres had anything to say. Tir slept in the barracks.

  At dawn, when Alde seemed to be resting more deeply, Rudy slipped from beneath the blankets, bathed in the long, deserted chamber off the Guards' watchroom, with its worn black tubs and the aged copper boilers old King Eldor had had sent there when he'd ordered the Keep regarrisoned, and padded down through the silence of the Keep to the crypts. Turning a corner, he glimpsed Seya and the older of Lord Ankres' sons standing guard

  outside the room where the mutants were kept. Dimly, he caught Varkis Hogshearer's voice, ranting, "... all a trick, a cabal, an effort to turn this Keep into a Warlockracy..."

  Another corner muffled the sound, unless he cared to reach out his senses to listen. The long workroom where Ingold did his tinkering with machines, the low-ceilinged crypt whose floor was scratched and stained from apparatus that had vanished three millennia ago, was silent, dark, curiously comforting in its familiarity. Leftover bits of the ancient flamethrowers lay on the black stone wall-benches, the pine table that he and the wizard had hauled down. Wheels and pulleys and intricately jointed chains dangled from the ceiling. Water murmured softly in a black stone basin let into a niche in the wall.

  From his belt Rudy took a packet of powdered silver mixed with herbs, another packet of incense, and a couple of burningstones. He was exhausted from yesterday, and knew today would be nearly as bad.

  The sigils he marked, the circle of power he wove, he linked into the rhythm of the Earth and the phase of the moon, drawing power from those to lessen the drag on his own resources.

  He laid out stringers, as Ingold had once shown him, to tap the veins of silver and copper he knew lay deep in the ground, and a curve that followed the watercourses through the floor that fed the still-deeper crypts below. Anything to help him get in touch with Ingold. Anything.

  For a time he was afraid that if he relaxed to meditate, crosslegged in the circle's heart, he'd fall asleep. But when he breathed deep, his mind drifting down into the Now of magic, the weariness eased and the magic strength of the Keep seeped like a balm into his flesh and his soul.

  I live, and that is enough, he thought as he drifted like an errant feather into the chasm where magic dwells. I breathe. I'm here.

  Power flowed into him, dark rising up out of the earth and brightness soaking into his lungs from the air. In that sweet calm he collected strength and funneled it through the scrying stone, casting out his thought like a rope of light, calling Ingold's name. Nothing came to him. Nor could he summon any image of Gil.

  What he saw of the Black Rock Keep-dim, faded, horrible-was only smoke and slunch and ash-hued monstrosities, glimpsed far off.

  Dimly, he was aware of the sun rising above the Keep, of the great Doors opening for the workers in the fields, of other Guards in the bath-chamber. Of all life stirring and waking.

  When he looked up, he saw Tir in the doorway of the crypt. The boy had been around magic all his life and knew not to interrupt, or to step on the Weirds. He'd brought a pine-knot torch with him, probably swiped from the Guards' watchroom. Even that dim, grubby light seemed bright beside the pinlights of the incense fires, the bluish chains of light shining softly along the lines of the power-circle.

  "S'okay, Ace. I'm done here." He started to rise, and Tir held up his hand, staying him. "Do you need to go find him?" the boy asked.

  "Ingold?" He'd never journeyed south, but Gil and the Icefalcon had told him of the road along the river valleys, the jungles of the border coasts, the brown hills around Khirsrit.

  "If you turn yourself into a bird, like Ingold did," Tir said, a small figure forlorn against the darkness of the corridor outside, "you could get down there and kill the bad guys yourself. You said you know their secret now. You told Mama you saw it in

  your dream."

  Tir carefully propped his torch into an empty jar, thin in his bright blue jerkin. Rudy saw that under the jerkin he was wearing a scarf of dulled reds and browns, which had belonged to Geppy Nool.

  "What about you, Ace?" Rudy asked gently. "You and your mom? C'mere..." He held out his arms. "I'm not gonna be using this thing again tonight." Tir ran across the lines of power to him, and Rudy felt them swirl away into the protecting shadows of the crypt. Tir put his arms around him, and Rudy hugged the compact little body close.

  "He let them all die, to save the world," Tir said, face pressed to Rudy's shoulder, voice barely audible. Rudy felt a trickle of hot wetness in the bison fur of his collar, and against his cheek the sudden tightening of the boy's jaw.

  "I saw him. I was him. They were all coming here, to get away from the Dark, and the King was mad at him-at the man-at Dare. All the wizards were making a spell to make the Keep, so people would have someplace to hide, and Dare didn't tell them, didn't ask them to come with him when he went down to stop the King from hurting his family."

  His voice broke, a thin treble breathless with remembered pain. "The King's men caught Dare's family down by the river where the Settlements are, and there was a battle. Everybody was killed except Dare and a couple of his men. Dare's wife, and his oldest son, and all them. But if the wizards had gone with him, the Keep wouldn't have been safe for people afterward."

  Tir looked up at him, face streaked with tears, eyes desperate with the darkness of the memory he had seen. The woman with the white flowers in her red wig and decades of loving in her eyes. The blood-covered man riding to the Keep at the gates of dawn. "He couldn't save everybody," Tir whispered, and hiccuped. "If the ice-mages live, we'll all die, won't we?" Behind the child's voice was the King, asking an opinion of the colony's only mage, and the mage had to give it. "I think that's right, Ace."

  Tir's breath fetched hard, then let out; he stepped back and wiped his eyes with his sleeve, and sniffled.

  "Can you turn yourself into a bird?" he asked. "Could you get down there and find Ingold and help him?"

  Rudy shivered, remembering yesterday's desire for some definite action, something besides the slow grind of responsibilities fo
r which he wasn't strong enough. "Does your mom know you came here to tell me this?" He remembered her anger at Ingold's departure, the ferocity with which she had fought Barrelstave and Bannerlord Pnak when the question arose of abandoning the Keep.

  Tir shook his head. His voice was level now, but very quiet. "She wants to save the people here, to keep everyone here safe," he said softly.

  "But it's more than just people here. I'll help you get past the Guards, out of the Keep at night. And after you leave I'll tell her I said it was okay. She'll be mad, but I'll tell her I told you to go."

  Rudy sighed, and put his arm around the boy again. "You won't have to do that, Pugsley," he said. "If I turned myself into a bird-if I could manage to turn myself into anything better than a turkey-" Tir giggled at that, the King disappearing into the child. "-I'd probably forget how to turn myself back once I got to Alketch, and get myself eaten for dinner. Birds are pretty stupid. I can't do it, kid. I don't have Ingold's power. You're brave for telling me I should go-braver than me. But you and your mom need me here. You understand?" The boy regarded him for a moment, the elusive quality of ancient memory flickering

  in his too-thin face. His father's memories. Dare's memories. The memories of the pestilent brat who'd shot the egret, whoever he had grown up to be. Remembering half-comprehended choices, decisions made on grounds he did not yet understand. Finally he whispered, "Okay. Thank you." He put his arms tightly around Rudy's neck.

  Ten years ago, Gil guessed, the audience chamber in the palace of the Prince-Bishop of Alketch would have been an oasis of cool in Khirsrit's semitropical heat. Like most of the rooms Gil had seen in the south, it was nearly bare of furniture, the walls of ornate tile and plasterwork flowing upward into a hanging fantasia of pale-tinted stalactites-free of spiderwebs, a tribute to the palace servants and the fear that kept them at their jobs.

  Two walls consisted mostly of windows, latticed with sandalwood and opalescent stone that was just visible past a heavy shroud of oxblood velvet, to hold what heat could be held. The room was icy now.

  Govannin Narmenlion folded narrow white hands and regarded the old man who stood before her-ragged, barefoot, in chains, and gray with exhaustion-with speculation in her serpent gaze. "My lady." Ingold inclined his head.

  "So." She touched a corner of the square of brown parchment on the granite desk before her, and the dark jewel of her ring glinted like a demon's thoughtful eye. "You have come south, Inglorion. I wondered how long it would be." "Before what, lady?"

  Her eyelids lowered, creased with age and chronic insomnia. In the north, after the fall of Gae, Gil had guessed her to be in her fifties, though shaven-headed as she was, after the custom of the Church, it was difficult to tell. She looked older now, more than five years could account for, and there was an edge to her harsh voice. "I'll give the Lady Minalde credit for more intelligence than this. When she sent you here, she can't have known about this idiot Pnak who presented himself at na-Chandros' court the eve of St. Kanne's Day, he and his little band of fools, with their offers to negotiate for lands. Negotiate forsooth. Do they really think na-Chandros would deal in good faith for such lands that will still grow wheat?" She held up the parchment and read, "The Vale of Renweth is useless now. Even the fields along the river will grow no crops to support us, and we must cast ourselves upon the mercy of the Emperor." She opened her fingers. The parchment dropped like a great sere leaf, skated across the polished prairie of the desk, and turned over once in the air before it slid to the floor. "He would be well served if that hook-handed hellspawn bade them all come, with their children and their wives. But it is clear to me now, the direction of my Lady Minalde's pretty blue eyes. And to. Here you stand."

  Ingold shook his head. He was struggling to breathe, his face like wax from the effort of simply remaining on his feet; Gil had guessed by this time that the battle with the mages under the ice had badly strained his heart. He stood with arms folded, fingers toying gently with one of the several manacles around his wrists. "This is not why I came south, lady. I knew nothing of this."

  "Then the Lady of the Keep is a fool." Her voice was soft and sharp as the scrape of a blade tip on stone. "Why did you come?"

  Gil wondered, in Ingold's silence, if he would say, To save humankind, and what Govannin's reply would be then. There were two chairs at the rear of the chamber, behind the PrinceBishop's desk.

  In one sat a girl of fifteen or sixteen, with the curious top-heavy look of a fragile-boned girl whose breasts fill out large and early. Her forehead was wide and low-the milky dip of a widow's peak visible even beneath the pearl fringe of her veil-and her eyebrows a single line of white, unpretty against the ebony luster of her skin. In the other chair sat a white man who was probably only a few years older than Ingold, bald with age, who had once been tall but sat hunched, shrunken, as if drained of life and will save for the spite in his dark eyes.

  Though his robe was red, like those of the servants of the Church, unlike them he wore a beard, a river of perfumed milk lying on his knees.

  It was he who spoke. "They say that the Blind King's Tomb is a place of great magic, my lady." His voice was beautiful, a trained light tenor with an almost theatrical modulation, and as he spoke he straightened somewhat, gesturing with an actor's grace.

  "It is a place abrim with strange power, where dreams are dreamed and visions seen. Were I attempting great acts of magic, either to rally local warlords to rebellion against their rightful rulers or to cripple and damage the forces of the Empire by means of spells, it is the place that I would choose to work." "I'm sure you would, Bektis," Ingold said kindly. "Every little bit helps those whose power needs that sort of amplification. I take it you haven't been there yourself? Of course not." He turned back to Govannin, leaving Bektis fuming. "My lady, I came south for reasons which have nothing to do with the fighting among your lords. I came despite Lady Minalde's command, and believe me, I regard Bannerlord Pnak as a fool for even thinking he can negotiate with naChandros or Esbosheth's puppet Yor-Cleos-or with Her Highness here." He bowed his head in the direction of the young girl in the chair beside Bektis, but she only regarded him with silvery eyes, one shade darker than frost and expressionless as a snake's.

  She was one of the few people Gil had seen in the south who didn't wear a demon-catcher. Presumably no stray imp would dare invade the Prince-Bishop's sacrosanct halls. She wore saint-beads, however-carved butter-amber, and very costly. Govannin, she noticed, wore neither. Nor was the PrinceBishop veiled, the only woman she had seen so other than prostitutes. Were women in the Church here, then, legally considered as men?

  She wondered how Govannin had managed to seize and hold power enough to dispense with the weight of custom, not that she didn't think she could. To the girl, Ingold went on, "The cold of advancing winter-the winter of the world-has gripped this land as it has gripped others. Such crops as survive cannot feed your own people, my lady, much less thousands of interlopers from the north. I'm not sure that you could even feed them as slaves, though I'm sure some of the warlords might promise to do so."

  Still she made no reply, and there was no warming of the bleak eyes. Gil remembered her name, Yori-Ezrikos"Daughter of Ezrikos," who had been the Lord of Alketch and the Prince of the Seven Isles, and no honorific diacritical for you, cupcake. Boys in the deep south received names at the age of six, though the poorer families just numbered them-Niniak meant "third-born." Girls were never named. Vair na Chandros, she recalled, had married the Emperor's daughter against her will: wicked and rebellious, the steward in D'haalac-Ar had called her.

  It was Govannin who replied. "We are all tested." Knives of evening light, spearing through openings in the velvet draperies, crossed the ivory hands, the parchment on the floor, then faded from brass to copper to dirty bronze as Gil watched. "It is like you, Inglorion-like all wizards in their arrogance and their ignorance-to

  attempt to cheat Fate, to circumvent with will and illusion and this most subtle of snares calle
d Magic, the fires intended to anneal the soul."

  She settled back a little in her chair, and her eyes were a shark's eyes. "But a woman who brings drugs to her husband rather than let him suffer the pain of cleansing still sins. And for all your delusion of playing savior to the world, you are still the Hand of Evil and deliver all those whom you save over into Hell." "And you know better?" He spoke without irony, ashen gray and swaying slightly. "I know the law." The calm self-satisfaction in her voice made Gil's heart sink. "The law says that all things proceeding from magic proceed from Evil, no matter how good their seeming or how beneficial their ends."

  It was the voice of one who will not be moved, who knows herself to be utterly right, killing others or dying herself without the smallest flicker of doubt as to her duty. From his low chair of ivory and rosewood the mage Bektis watched her, and Gil was struck by the whole souled absorption in his face, and his utter loathing and hate. "Evil is Illusion," Govannin went on. "Evil is Will. What else is magic but illusion and the action of a wizard's will upon the laws created for the physical world?" "As is art," Ingold replied softly. "As is medicine. The first woman who struck fire from steel and flint circumvented the laws of the gods of winter, lady; the first man who shaped a branch into a spear to hurl into the saber-tooth's mouth defied the shape of naked flat-faced clawlessness which he had been given. But I will not argue." He shook back the long white hair that had straggled down from his topknot, his eyes seeming very blue in the hollows of fatigue.

  "Those same gods of winter have defeated me. I came south and sought the Blind King's Tomb, in hopes of working a great magic, a magic that would arrest the killing frost that spreads across the world. It would keep matters from growing worse, even if they could not be bettered immediately. In this I failed."

  He put a hand out quickly, trying to catch his balance; the guards pulled Gil back when she tried to go to him. Where the chains crossed his back she could see a slow-spreading spot of red on the bandages.