Mother of Winter (40 page)

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 for 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 lo. 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 Prince-Bishop’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 na-Chandros 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 Prince-Bishop 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 called 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.

“My lady, what I came here to do, I could not do. I had not the strength, and now I do not know what can be done. I can only ask your mercy, and your leave to go out of these lands, to return to the North, and help my own people there as best I can, until darkness falls.”

Govannin tilted her head a little, and there was something ophidian in her movement, as if she were gauging distance for a killing strike. “So learned,” she said softly. “But ignorant, like a precocious child. I acquit you of malice, Inglorion. I know that you are beyond that. Had you a true soul, instead of only the self-blind shadow left you by Evil, I would say that your intent was good. You are indeed the greatest of the mages—”

Behind her Bektis stiffened indignantly and opened his mouth to protest.

“—and your fall, therefore, is the farthest, entrapped by the subtlest of the Evil One’s snares: the will to save those marked by God for testing to the uttermost. Take him away.”

Her eyes moved to Gil. “You stay with him still, child?”

Gil thrust her hands through the knot of her sword belt. “I don’t think God has a problem with either loyalty or love.”

“Don’t you?” Govannin said conversationally, like the Devil at tea. “That is your error, child, and your sin. Take them both away.”

She folded her hands upon her desk, the parchment on the floor stirring as the door was opened and the guards led Ingold through, Gil soundless in his wake. As soon as it closed behind them, he reached out for her, quick and desperate; the guards pulled her back once more. Ingold groped for a moment, leaning against the tiled wall, like a man struck blind. Then he put his hand to his side and slowly slipped unconscious to the floor.

“They’re gonna attack the Keep.” Rudy shaded his eyes against the dim glare of the morning sun, squinted up at the black face of the wall that rose above the Doors, dwarfing them to a small square of blackened bronze. “Sooner or later, they’re gonna attack the Keep.”

He ached in his bones from testing men, women, children—
Come over here, will you?
—and if he saw one more illusory mouse or bug, he was going to go after it himself with a stick. His head throbbed from experiment after experiment with the Sphere of Life in the crypts, trying this source of power and that: the sun, the moon, the strange source that had saved his life on the fifth level. He was ready to smash the unresponsive, unaltered black ur-potato to pieces with a hammer—
There! Instant mashed potatoes! How about that?

The woods around the Keep whispered and crawled with gaboogoos. He could feel them whenever he stepped through the Doors.

“They can’t get in, can they?” Alde glanced over her shoulder, across the stream and the fields toward the diseased and dying trees.