Mother of Winter (41 page)

“I don’t think so … Your Majesty,” he added, in deference to the fact that Enas Barrelstave and Lord Ankres were with them, and a mixed gaggle of both black- and white-clothed soldiery. “So I don’t think there’s any need for us to put brushwood around the walls, like they seem to be doing in Gettlesand. Gaboogoos aren’t real flammable, anyway.” He squinted up at the walls again. Utterly smooth, unpierced by any kind of defensive ports—no arrow slits, no pipes to pour
out hot lead, no posterns for little surprise sorties—they were designed for protection against an inhuman enemy of variable dimensions.

He added, “But it’ll mean we can’t get out.”

Barrelstave’s eyes seemed to bug slightly from their sockets. He looked down across the fields, where work crews were weeding the new green corn and wheat, which to everybody’s surprise had come up and seemed to be doing well. Rudy had studied everything in Ingold’s library about weather prediction and wondered if any of it would help him should another ice storm come along.

“But it’s just you they want, isn’t it?” the tubmaker demanded worriedly. “I mean, they won’t harm the rest of us.”

“Yeah,” Rudy sighed. “It’s just me they want. But even for the sake of letting you folks get on with your gardening uninterrupted, I kind of hesitate about letting them tear me to pieces. I know it’s selfish of me, but—”

“I’m sorry to correct you, Lord Wizard,” Alde cut in gently, “but I’m afraid I must.
You don’t know
that it’s just you they want.” Her hand stole for a moment to her gravid belly, speaking to him without words:
You, and our child
. Her blue eyes moved to Barrelstave’s, cool and without anger. “None of us knows, truly, what the gaboogoos want. Not they, nor those who have eaten the slunch whom we haven’t yet found—”

“Oh, surely we’ve gotten them all!” Barrelstave protested uncomfortably. He bore on his hand the stain of ensorcelled walnut juice that marked those who’d been tested from the many who hadn’t, to keep Rudy from wasting his time with retests, and had been genuinely horrified when, yesterday, the thoroughly respectable second-level matron Urania Hoop had failed to recognize the spell-line across the testing cell’s floor. “I mean, we’ve tested everyone who dwelt in that area of the fifth level—”

“And are you certain there aren’t simply some people who are proof against the illusion of wizardry?” Maia asked. Some of the people who had been taken to the crypts, raving and swearing they had never in their lives touched the slunch,
troubled him deeply. “The way some people cannot hear the difference between one tune and another?”

“You ever met any?” Rudy shot back.

The bishop was silent for a moment. He wasn’t much more than ten years older than Rudy, but his experiences leading the survivors out of Penambra to the Keep had aged him prematurely, and his long hair was almost completely gray. Like Ingold, he had the air of a man for whom the vagaries of human conduct held few surprises. “No,” he said at length. “But I know Urania Hoop was a good, pious woman. And you must admit it is scarcely fair to have susceptibility to illusion be the sole criteria of losing one’s liberty and being locked in the crypts with monsters?”

Rudy sighed. “I’m sorry about that, pal, I really am,” he said. “But I can’t reach Thoth, and I can’t reach Ingold, if the old boy’s still alive, even. For all I know, I’m the last friggin’ wizard alive in the friggin’ world, and the gaboogoos are out to get me, too. So if you can get in touch with someone for a second opinion—” He pulled his scrying stone from his vest pocket, caught the bishop’s crippled hand and slapped the crystal into the cleft hollow of the palm. “—you be my friggin’ guest, and I’ll thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

“But until you do,” Alde said softly, stepping forward to Rudy’s side and laying a placating hand on Maia’s wrist, “or until someone does, I’d like everyone to remember this. Eliminating Rudy—eliminating wizards—may only be a first step. With Ingold dead, with Thoth dead, with Wend and Ilae and the Gettlesand wizards dead,
we have no idea what else the gaboogoos will want.”

She turned, and with the graceful serenity of a gazelle in unthreatened pasture, walked back up the shallow steps of the Keep, the others following in her wake. Catching up with her, Rudy said softly, “I wish you hadn’t said that, babe. That’s something I’d rather not even think about.”

“Leave us.”

Gil didn’t recognize the voice, deep and surprisingly gritty, but she saw the red-clothed Church warrior who had lowered
the ladder into the cell hesitate, and she knew who it had to be. A moment later the girl Yori-Ezrikos climbed down the rough steps, holding her gown of yellow-and-green painted silks up out of the way of her feet. Very much to Gil’s surprise, she was followed by Govannin’s tame mage Bektis, who peered around uneasily at the heavy brickwork, the dark groinings of the ceiling, and sniffed disapprovingly at the sour stink of spilled brandy. Ingold hadn’t even commented on the fact that the room was spelled against the working of magic—had he not just come through a mangling by the ice-mages, he still wouldn’t have been able to use his powers—but the erstwhile Court mage seemed to be trying not to touch any of the air.

“Stay at the end of the corridor,” the girl said over her shoulder to her guards and looked up inquiringly at Bektis.

The old man listened a moment, then nodded. A wizard, whether or not his spells were under restraint, still possessed the trained senses and perceptions of a mage, and would be able to hear the retreat of even the quietest footfalls out of normal earshot.

Gil had risen to her feet at the younger woman’s entrance and inclined her head awkwardly in respect of her rank. Ingold, lying on the wall-bench, made a move to do likewise, and Yori-Ezrikos signed him with a tiny, gold-nailed hand to remain where he was. This was fortunate, Gil reflected, since she guessed he would pass out again if he tried to stand.

“How is he?”

Gil bit back a spate of furious sarcasm—how the hell did she think he was, after Govannin had dragged him up, reamed him over, and passed sentence of death on them both?—and replied quietly, “Better. The battle with the mages under the ice … hurt him. Crippled him inside. He’ll be better if he can rest.”

“I’ll be better still with a little food,” Ingold said. The chains on his wrist clinked softly on the stone as he moved his hand.

The girl’s cold eyes regarded him for a moment over her jonquil silk veil, then returned to Gil. “Is he your lover?” she asked. Her mode of speaking was very slow and deliberate, as if words caused her effort. Her hands remained resting on the
amber saint-beads where they hung at her belt. Gil nodded. “How did you know about the priests under the ice?”

Ingold’s eyes widened. “I was unaware that any legend in the South touched upon them. Or anywhere, for that matter. I would invite you to sit down, Majesty, except this bench is not particularly salubrious, and of course it would be presumptuous of me to imply that you could not be seated anywhere you wished, at any time. Would you offer our guest some water, Gil?”

The gray eyes did not change, disregarding Ingold’s persiflage as if he had said nothing. She accepted the gourd of water from Gil’s hands, however, and dipped her fingers into it, all that a woman of good breeding was permitted to do in the presence of a man who was not her family. She brought them up behind the concealing veil and touched her lips.

“It wasn’t legend, exactly,” she said, after a long period of consideration. “My nurse came of a mountain village, where faith in the saints is strange. There are three devils instead of one in all her stories, and they’re frozen in ice. They work all their evil by making people do bad things with songs they sing in their minds. One of them plays a flute. Only mountain people tell those tales anymore.”

The milk-white bar of eyebrow pinched in the middle, and for the first time the gray eyes lost their chilly hardness, looking into some depth beyond the dark stone pit of the room, the squares of grimy light.

“I thought that’s why I saw the things I did in the dream I had,” she went on. “That it was only Nana’s tales coming back on me when I was cold and afraid.”

She glanced around her, then sat on a lower rung of the ladder, Bektis standing respectfully at her side. Gil remained standing also, in respect for the presence of a ruler, her hands tucked into her empty sword belt. They’d replaced the pottery vessels of food and drink with gourds and wood, but Gil was already mentally dismantling other objects in the room, in case she needed another weapon in a hurry.

“What did you dream?” Ingold asked gently. “And why were you cold and afraid?”

Yori-Ezrikos did not raise her eyes from her hands, where they lay upon her knees; a storyteller would have put more expression than she did into her deep, rough voice.

“Four years ago my father died,” she said. “He survived the rising of the Dark Ones by having the slaves pile wood all around the summer pavilion on the other side of the lake and keep fires burning through the night. Mostly the Dark Ones haunted the city, where there were more people. But afterward there was a plague, and Father died of that, and my brothers also. I had been betrothed to Stiarth na-Stalligos, my cousin, but he perished in the North. Vair na-Chandros, the general who led the army to help the Realm of Darwath, came back and made me marry him so he could be Emperor like Father.

“I know now that it isn’t always like that between men and women.” She raised her eyes and looked steadily at Ingold, then past him to Gil, and what was in them was more terrible than tears, more terrible than anger. “My ladies tell me that men aren’t all what Vair is. If they were, I suppose women would crush the heads of all their male babies as they come from the womb, as I did with mine. Is he good to you?” Her voice had not changed pitch or level once. She might have been speaking of laundry. “As a man, I mean.”

Gil reached down to touch Ingold’s hand. “Yes,” she said. “He’s good to me. He taught me to wield a sword, so that I could protect myself.”

The gray eyes brightened, curious, interested, and young for the first time: “Truly?” She regarded Ingold again, and for that moment Gil felt the vitality of this girl, the energy buried beneath the controlled and vicious calm. “I didn’t think—” She stopped herself—she was a woman who had learned early to weigh each and every word that passed her lips—and simply said, “It is good.” The cold returned, a steel visor clanging shut, and after a few moments she went on.

“As soon as I could walk again after the wedding, I ran away. I stole a horse and rode out from the Hathyobar Gate. I don’t know where I thought I was going. I was only twelve. At that time all my uncles wanted the match, though later they changed their minds. Vair came after me himself with his men.
I was so frightened of what he would do that I rode up into the hills and let the horse go and hid in the tombs. It was night. That was the year it first grew cold enough to kill the cane and the papyrus. I dreamed about the three priests in the ice.”

“And how did you know,” Ingold asked, in the scratchy velvet voice that seemed itself a part of dreaming, “that they were priests? Your nurse called them devils.”

“I don’t know,” the girl said softly. “Yes, I do, though.” She closed her eyes, remembering, the eyelids creased with powdered gold. “They worshiped … they worshiped … Her. They were magicians, but their magic was a song of worship, a song of power, for Her, in the pool.”

“Yes.” The word itself was the breath of white smoke, rising from the seethe of that gelatinous pool; the dark shape visible under the surface, dark and huge and waiting.

“They had worshiped in that single spot for so long, drawing up power out of the earth for her, that the rock was all worn away,” she went on. “Every now and then their magic made the rock itself ooze creatures, dreadful things, things that crawled a few feet and died. I think I dreamed,” she said. “I went through rooms, through corridors—through a crack in the wall. Through ice. I must have fainted but I don’t remember. It was cold.”

She brought up her hands, crossing them over ripe, upstanding breasts; she looked frail, sitting there on the ladder-step with her gold-slippered feet not quite touching the floor. “They were keeping her alive with the power they drew from the earth. Singing songs to her, worshiping her; waiting for her to awaken, to speak. I thought that when she waked she would know my name—I was afraid of what would happen when she spoke. I don’t know how I knew that.” She looked up at Ingold again, the frozen calm gone from her eyes. “Who is she? Did you see her when you fought the priests beneath the ice?”

“She is the Mother of Winter, my child … my children.” He managed to stretch out a finger to touch the side of Gil’s hip. “When the gaboogoos and the servants of the ice-mages drove me inward into the tomb—when I knew that I had to confront them then or die—I heard them singing of her. To her. She is
the Life Tree of a world that ceased to exist when first the sun shone warm enough to admit the growth of green plants in the seas. In her body lie the seeds of all the life that world knew. She is Wizard Mother, the sanctuary of the flesh, her magic the repository of the understanding of the final shape, the destinies, the essences, of those creatures, that world. Hers is the magic of the heart and the flesh, not of the mind. The magic of mothers, of seeds, of the future imprisoned in a thought. She has waited a long time.”

“For what?” Yori-Ezrikos’ deep voice sounded loud in the gloom.

Ingold did not immediately reply. Gil wondered that she felt no surprise at what the wizard had said. It was as if she had known it all along, as if her blood understood—the poison of quicksilver and diamonds that ran with the human blood in her veins. Maybe, she thought, she had dreamed it.

Gil said softly, “She’s waiting for the Winter of the Stars.” When he still did not speak, she went on, “The world goes through phases—eons—of warmth and cold. You’ll find reference to that idea in the books of the Old Gods sometimes, or the fragments of them that remain. I think it has to do with huge clouds of stellar dust passing between the Earth and the sun, blocking off the sun’s heat—probably changing the color of the stars. At least the Scroll of the Six Gods speaks of it.”