Mother of Winter (37 page)

Alien shapes. Alien and frightening.

For a moment she let the shapes float in the air between them, glowing cones that pulsed and shifted and moved in a dance that was the paradigm of their power, changing size in a curious fashion, as if they were coming closer or moving farther away through a dimension that lay at ninety degrees to all perceived reality.

And yet, Rudy thought, in a way he understood that they were exactly the same as the circles of power that he drew, the sphere of light and shadow that the Bald Lady had formed. They existed for the same purpose and delineated the same things.

She let the images fade.

Amu Bel shook his head. “This is something of which I have never heard. I cannot even imagine how to call forth power from such … such configurations. This is what you dreamed?”

She nodded. “I hoped it might mean something to you. That it might help us to find a way to—to connect the Keep directly into the power of the Earth, the power of the stars. To call it into a life that would hold it in magic forever.”

“There is no such thing as forever, Brycothis,” Amu Bel whispered.

“Then until the world changes and we can come forth again. Surely,” she said softly, “that is not too much to ask?”

“For the wounded and the sick, the breath of life between their lips is all they dare ask,” the old man replied. “We can only do what we can and trust that we will be guided when the peril is worst.”

She lowered her head to her hand again and did not turn around when he departed, he and his cat. In time she sighed, a deep and bitter breath, and looked up again, and Rudy could see the tears on her face.

She murmured, “You sent that dream to me, didn’t you? You who dream of your three guardians; you who are the living guardian …”

She shook her head. “I can’t,” she whispered, her voice almost below hearing, and she closed her fists tight and
pressed them to her lips, as if fearing lest any see how they trembled. “I can’t.”

But in her voice Rudy heard that whatever it was she said she could not do—whatever it was that she would descend all those levels of stairways to the heart of the crypts to do—she knew that she could, and she must.

Kneeling again beside the pottery bowl, she reached inside and picked out the little black bead that she had put into the water. She shook the drops from it and laid it on the floor beside the bowl. Then she stood and gathered up her midnight-blue wool cloak, wrapping it around her, the tears starting again from her eyes.

She whispered, “Dare, my friend, forgive me. And farewell.”

Turning, she walked from the room—to descend to the crypts, Rudy thought. To pass through all those rooms, touching the hydroponics tanks, the wyr-webs, the walls—bidding them farewell, before she passed into darkness.

On the floor beside the pottery bowl he saw the black bead, still wet from the water that had been called through the Sphere of Life. He saw that it had swelled to twice or thrice its original size, and put forth a threadlike white root and a green leaf.

It was full morning when Gil reached the Blind King’s Tomb.

As she climbed the narrowing canyon in the flank of the Saycotl Xyam, it seemed to her that she wandered deeper and deeper into a dream, into an alien world; the terrible thing was that this world did not seem strange to her anymore. White slunch patched the canyon walls, then covered them, thin over the rocks, thick in the pockets of soil, enveloping trees, fallen logs, screes, in a rubbery shroud. Things stirred in the gutlike convolutions, creeping forth now and then, creatures she guessed were simulacra of life-forms unspeakably ancient: shelled things with translucent legs and feelers, slubbery mats of moving protoplasm; things that glided along a foot or so above the wrinkled surface and thrust jointed proboscises down into it to feed on what crawled within. Hatlike things that spit at her from hard round mouths. As a dream within a dream Gil remembered Thoth walking in just such a slunch bed on the plains of Gettlesand, a stranger in an alien world beneath a livid yellow sky.

A river of mist flowed down the canyon, knee-deep, obscuring the wet mat underfoot; she knew its source was the cold of the ice-mages’ cavern and followed it, the music very clear now in her mind. Songs of guarding. Of waiting. Of holding all things in trust, until they could make the world right again.

She kept seeing Ingold’s blood in her mind, red and hot over the lifeless lard of the slunch.

She kept seeing the statue of the king who had no eyes.

He was familiar to her when she saw him. A black basalt image, floating in a lake of mist in the cut-rock cave of the tomb’s antechamber. Slunch grew all around it, up the walls, over the ceiling, a dirty oatmeal river spilling over the steps to the outside. It had put out immense stalks that groped weightlessly in the still air or crawled about on the ground, fat tubulate hoses that opened and shut, looking for something to touch. Gil waded through the mist, the unseen, sloshing, crawling slunch, into dimness lit only by the queasy glow of the alien stuff itself.

The inner door was visible only as a smoldering bluish square, as it had been in her dreams, and the Blind King, robed in lichen and slunch, gazed at her with a sad serenity; a glowing thing of a shape Gil had never imagined in her most fevered nightmares perched silent upon his head.

Gil saw Ingold’s footprints, leading through that blue doorway, and the footprints of other things following after. Blood streaked and gouted the slunch, and it was torn here and there where he had turned to fight. She wasn’t aware of how long she’d been hurting but knew she hurt badly, and all the voices in her mind sang songs about rest.

After she took care of one final thing.

She’d walked all night. She had avoided Esbosheth’s patrols, and those of Vair na-Chandros, and the armies of bandits in the burned farms and wasted fields of the most fertile valley of the south, without much trouble. Though she’d taken considerable weaponry from the decaying corpses—including a recurve bow and a quiverful of barbed arrows—she found no horses and had been forced to go the whole way afoot.

A dark hump grew clearer in the mist as she approached it—a pair of dooic, dead, mutated almost unrecognizably: heads swollen huge, arms impossibly long—there were vestigial arms, and other things, growing out of their backs. The cuts were clean and few, Ingold’s work, neat as ever. He would have been reconnoitering, she thought, until her awareness of his plan triggered an attack by every gaboogoo and mutant on the mountainside. Whether he’d retreated or been driven to this place made little difference now.

She felt uneasily at her own face and arms, telling herself for the thousandth time that her own mutations were only an illusion, then strung the bow and nocked an arrow. Ahead of her came frenzied rustling, movement without outcry, without so much as grunts of pain. The short Alketch bow was unfamiliar, lighter than the six-foot northern longbow. She guessed she wouldn’t get many shots.

The passageway curved to the right. Directly before her a crack gaped in the stone wall, opened by an earthquake, perhaps. Ghastly slunch-light flowed through it, seeming bright in the mist-filled darkness, and a dead thing that had probably once been a mountain ape lay in the gap. It was burned all over its body and one arm was a stump; the blood smoked in the cold. Gil stepped over it, her breath a thick cloud now, light-headed with pain and with the singing in her mind.

The pain is his doing. His doing. He ran out on you, left you to be raped and killed by the gladiators … You
were
raped by them …

For a shocking moment the pseudomemory engulfed her mind: the Boar, the King, the Leopard …

She thrust it aside. Thrust aside, too, the false image that not only had it happened, but Ingold had been there.

The cavern she entered was perhaps fifty feet in length, that and more in height, narrow, like the nave of a Gothic church. Webs of attenuated slunch dangled from the ceiling, and long kelpy fronds writhed and twitched on the walls. Smoke as well as mist filled the cave, the fetor of burned slunch underlain by the harsher stink of charred flesh. In a dozen places balls of what appeared to be lichen burned fitfully, and dooic, mountain apes, and bloated things were trying to climb the slunch along the far wall to get at a shallow niche about halfway up, where a statue might once have stood, reached by a slender flight of stone steps.

The steps had been blasted away. Fragments of rock lay everywhere, fresh and bright, and pieces of gaboogoo, patiently crawling toward the wall below the niche.

Ingold stood in the niche. In places, the rock beneath and the slunch all around were scorched and charred with fire. Streams
of blood glistened blackly in the slunch, on the stone, all around on the walls, where some had succeeded in climbing up. A lot of them lay dead at the foot of the wall, or were trying still to climb, hemorrhaging their lives out.

The wizard’s arms were black with blood, as if he’d dipped them in a vat of it—the light of the dying fireballs caught red gleams of it when he raised his sword arm like a man exhausted, to strike at some flapping, toothed monstrosity that struck at him from the air. His movements had the blind deliberation of a warrior at the end of his strength; and blood ran from the cuts on his face and scalp to gum beard and hair to his skull. Gil saw him put his hand to the side of the niche to steady himself as the creature, whatever it was or had been, fell in two pieces with a spongy plop to the heap of dead things below the niche, twenty feet below his boots—a swamp of gore and cave-roaches and slunch.

Gil shot two dooic in the back before she was thrust aside by a gaboogoo nearly her own height that came out of the tunnel behind her. It ignored her as if she weren’t there. She set down her bow and stepped lightly forward, hacked its reaching fore-limbs off—it had no head—and then cut it off at the knees. It kept crawling through the slunch toward the yammering scrim under Ingold’s niche, but probably couldn’t do much damage. Ingold didn’t seem to notice; a thing that had once been a saber-tooth was clawing its way up the slunch toward him, and in the gritty light Ingold’s face was like a dying man’s.

Gil picked up her bow, nocked an arrow, and fired at the thing on the wall.

Later she told herself it could have been the light. There wasn’t much in the cavern, and what there was, from the burning fireballs he’d earlier flung, was fitful, flaring and dying …

So it really could have been the light.

Or it could have been that, at the last moment, her arm moved.

The barbed arrow buried itself in Ingold’s chest, high under the collarbone. The impact slammed him back against the rear wall of the niche, shadow hiding him as his head leaned back
for an instant to rest against the rear wall. Then slowly his body buckled forward, left hand groping to catch himself on the edge of the niche—he still kept a desperate grip on his sword. Gil’s mind stalled in horror on what she had done, but her body and her heart kept working. Without, it seemed, any conscious volition whatsoever, she nocked another arrow, and that one she did put through the throat of the huge thing that clung beside the niche, snatching at Ingold: she thought,
He’s going to fall in a minute and it’ll drop on top of him
.

The creature fell first, dead or dying. Gil was halfway to the howling pack of dooic and apes and mutant things, sword flashing in her hand, when Ingold’s knees gave and he crumpled forward out of the niche.

What followed was a vile business, a massacre. Gil cut stone-cold at the backs and necks of the dooic, the apes, of everything in sight as they fell upon the wizard’s body. She severed arms, heads, hands as if she were chopping at vines, fighting the berserker fury that kept trying to rise in her, fighting the wild urge to start cutting madly at everything and anything regardless, hacking until there was nothing alive, then to turn the blade upon herself.

Cold
, she thought.
Stay cold
.

None of them defended themselves against her.

When she was done, she slid the sword into its sheath, lest she use it on him.

Before she turned him over, she saw the barbed arrow point sticking out of his back. She moved him carefully, hands foul with blood, trembling.

His eyes were shut, but he whispered, “Gil?”

It will be with your name on my lips
.

No
.

“You’re all right,” she said.

His voice was a thread. There was no blood coming from his mouth—the arrow hadn’t pierced a lung. He said, “Oh, come now.”

Cold as death, his hand moved on her wrist. “The priests in the ice …” he said. “Did you see them?”

He moved his head, yes, and coughed. She felt the freeze of his muscles as he tried to suppress it, to lessen the pain.

“Did you fight them?” Once they’d known of his coming, he’d have had no choice. What she had seen, she realized, in this nightmare cavern, was only the tail end of the battle that had taken place while she was hiding and scrounging weapons through the trampled fields, the burned vineyards of the Valley of Hathyobar.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I’m sorry you had to leave me behind. I wouldn’t have knowingly betrayed you.”

In spite of the fact that I just put an arrow through you
.

He shook his head and tightened his fingers on hers. “No,” he said. “No.”

Cut his throat
.

No
.

Open his veins. NO
.

He’s used you, raped you, mocked you, sold you …

She could hear something moving, turned her head. There was a farther tunnel, leading inward still—a mouth of dim indigo hell that vomited forth mists. A shadow, a sense of cold more bitter than anything she had felt. A smell of acrid sweetness.

Something there.

An amorphous shape, and the sound of flutes that turned the diamond flecks of poison in her blood to lengthening knives.

Ingold flinched, as if he, too, could hear the sound.

“They crushed me like an insect.” His lips barely stirred over the unvoiced words. “I could not touch them, nor would I have had the strength to overcome them if I had. They will do … as they will do. There is nothing further for us. The Mother of Winter …”