Mother of Winter (42 page)

Yori-Ezrikos shook her head. “These things are forbidden in the South.”

Gil bit back another tart remark and said only, “That book speaks of cycles—some of the most ancient magical texts do, too. From everything I can guess, these clouds can stay in place for thousands of years, sometimes tens of thousands, before they pass on again.”
Let’s not get into the subject of celestial mechanics—it works just as well this way as saying the sun passes through dust clouds, trailing its planets behind it

“That’s why the Dark rose—because the world got colder, their herds died, and they had to hunt on the surface of the Earth. But before the Dark, before the birth of humankind, there were other things on the Earth when it was cold and dim—things that had minds and could work magic, though
the magic is not magic as we understand. When the world got too warm for them, they retreated, hid themselves away in the heart of the glacier to wait until the cold returned again.”

“Is this true?” Yori-Ezrikos looked up at Bektis, who cleared his throat, stroked his white beard, and looked solemn.

“Your Munificent Highness, Ingold Inglorion is the greatest loremaster living, with the possible exception of Lord Thoth Serpentmage. But I, too, was educated in the City of Wizards; I have studied as deeply and as widely as he. And never have I heard or read a word of what he says, much less of the fantasies dreamed up by this deluded young woman. Giant clouds of dust floating between us and the sun? Where does this dust come from? Why aren’t we all choking and sneezing on it? I grant you—” He spread his hands with practiced expressiveness. “—Lord Ingold clearly encountered something out of the ordinary in the Blind King’s Tomb. But you yourself know there are wild dooic in the hills, mountain apes and creatures fiercer still in these degenerate days. The notion that something magical dwells up there, something evil, something whose destruction will reverse what seems to be a completely natural cycle of colder winters—”

“But it is not natural.” Ingold opened his eyes. His voice was faint and infinitely weary, that of a prophet speaking from the dust. “Neither will it abate until all the world is covered in ice, locked under a mantle of slunch upon which feed such creatures as the Mother of Winter holds within her body and can summon from her memory, can create and can control.”

He drew himself up a little against the wall, his blue gaze now crystal hard. “By that time, I assure you, Bektis, you and I and everyone in this city—every human being; in the world-will be dead. But that point is moot.”

He turned back to Yori-Ezrikos. “The answer to the question that everyone is so politely refraining from asking me is no. I am not mad. I thought I was for a long while—the time it took to journey here, the days Gil and I spent at St. Marcopius Gladiatorial Barracks. I had no way of knowing whether my visions were anything but lunacy at best or some complicated trick or trap. And I can’t pretend that having my
sanity confirmed yesterday by what I saw in the Blind King’s Tomb comforted me much. I would infinitely prefer madness to the knowledge that my suspicions were true.”

He was silent a moment, the orange light that fell upon him from the torches in the corridor lying in strange patterns along the differing links of the chains, like the encrypted message in some unimaginable genetic code.

“But they are true. And because the mages in the ice—the children of the Mother—and the Mother of Winter herself—are of a substance and an essence unknown to me, my magic cannot touch them. When I was driven into the tomb, I put forth all my strength, all my power, against them, and it was as if I fought shadows.

“My lady.” He stretched out his hand to the young Empress, the bandages stiff with blood, and Gil saw the tightening of his jaw muscles under the weight of the chains. “I beg you, let me go. Even if you will not believe me—and there is no reason that you should—please, let me return to my home. My people need protection against what is coming. I swear to you I will not meddle, nor spy, nor interfere in the affairs of your people or your lands, unless you come against us. And if things go on as they are,” he added quietly, “in a year, or two years, you will be in no position to do that.”

“What of Bektis?”

Ingold looked momentarily nonplussed, his hand dropping to the bench again; he turned to regard his brother wizard with mild inquiry. “Oh, I doubt he’ll be in a position to come against us, either.”

“Do not jest with me,” the dark girl said soberly. “I meant, did I release you—did I ask you to go again to the crypt of the Blind King to meet these children, these priests, of the Mother—would it aid you to have Bektis fighting at your side? For all that my Lady Bishop has done to him, he is still—”

Bektis hastily framed counterarguments, but Yori-Ezrikos spoke over his mellifluous objections. “—he is still a man of power.”

“Your Most Gracious Majesty, surely you cannot believe the ravings of a man who is clearly deranged! My position in the household of the Prince-Bishop is indispensable! Though I regret most exceedingly that I am unable to accompany my Lord Ingold—”

“You will accompany him.”

Bektis shut up as if she’d turned a faucet or tightened a garrote. Gil didn’t blame him. Yori-Ezrikos was not anyone she’d want to mess around with.

“I know everything about your position in the Prince-Bishop’s household,” Yori-Ezrikos said, “and what you have done in her service.”

“Your Highness is kind.” Ingold inclined his head; his hair and beard were damp with the sweat of the sheer exertion of the conversation. “But I fear—”

“My Highness is nothing of the sort.” Her small hands had returned to her knees, the hieratic position reminiscent of the Blind King himself within his tomb. The silken veil moved eerily with the movement of her lips as she spoke, the gold flowers embroidered on its hem glinting in the torchlight from above. “But I believe you. I owe the Prince-Bishop a great deal, including my life, I daresay. Perhaps I do wrong in the sight of God by freeing you, by using your power to defeat this evil. I know not what this will do to my soul in God’s eyes. But I am not stupid. I know that the cold causes the famine and the famine causes the wars. And if there is anything I can do to turn this tide, or to stop its flow, that I will do, though it cost me my hope of heaven.”

She rose, a tiny woman not yet seventeen, with an eerie frost in her eyes. “Under this condition will I let you free, Ingold Inglorion. That you go with Bektis, and you try again with your combined powers to defeat the wizards under the ice. I shall give you whatever you need, whatever you ask for—protection, a time of rest and food to regain your strength, the best physician in the city. But you must swear to me that you will make the attempt. If not, you, and Bektis, and your wife here, will all die.”

“Your Beneficent and Beautiful Majesty,” Bektis said, “I beg you not to be hasty—”

“I said be quiet.” She didn’t even look over her shoulder at him. “Will you swear? I know wizards have no God. Swear to me—” She hesitated, searching her mind, and a curious expression glimmered in the silver-gray eyes. “—swear to me on the head of your firstborn child.”

Ingold shivered. His eyes went to Gil for a moment, then down to his hands, lying chained and broken across his middle. If he thought about telling Yori-Ezrikos that it was useless—that no matter what aid she gave him he could not touch the mages in the ice—the sight of even that hand-breadth of her face between the veils, Gil thought, would have changed his mind. It passed through Gil’s mind that in another year or two, the man who raped her when she was twelve—the man whose child she had killed as it emerged from her body—Ingold’s old enemy Vair na-Chandros the One-Handed—was going to be very, very sorry he had done what he did.

“I swear to you,” Ingold said in a voice so soft as to be nearly inaudible, “on the head of my firstborn child, that I will attempt once more to destroy the Mother of Winter, though I die in the attempt.”

“Ingold, this is ridiculous!” Bektis paced furiously back and forth across the gold and lapis tiles of the chamber Yori-Ezrikos had installed them in, his white beard and crimson velvet robe giving him the air of an agitated Father Christmas. “My Lady Govannin will never stand for it! We must make plans!”

The chamber, though comfortable in the spare southern fashion, was, Gil gathered, also proof against the use of magic therein, as were the other two rooms of the tiny suite at the rear of the Empress’ wing of the episcopal palace. Gil thought she recognized the Runes of Silence ornately calligraphed into the goldwork of the tiles, worked into the plaster, probably graven on the stones beneath the tiled floor, as they had been graven on the bricks of the cell. A marble
lattice looked into a garden, but heavy wooden shutters were folded over it on the inside, and there was no way through.

“Oh, I’m making plans.” Ingold propped himself a little on one of the pillows that lined the wall-bench, seemingly the only type of furniture, except for the occasional pedestals or desks, that southern buildings boasted. In number of pieces, the room differed not the slightest from Gil and Ingold’s chamber in the tenement behind the St. Marcopius Arena: only the mattresses and sheets on the wall-bench were of indigo linen, and the desk ebony and pearl. Where a leaf of the shutters was folded back, a few pigeons-blood roses grew through the marble fretwork, touching the air with their scent.

“And I suspect that since your powers and your position in Her Holiness’ household are kept very quiet, shell wait for some time before making inquiries after you.”

The physician sent by Yori-Ezrikos—and escorted by two of her personal guards—had just departed, after telling Ingold that his heart had been badly strained and he must have at least two months of absolute rest. Gil suspected this was not what either Ingold or Yori-Ezrikos had in mind.

“I’m planning just exactly how I’m going to make sure of your assistance when we return to the Blind King’s Tomb. Though I suspect I won’t need to do much,” the mage went on, refastening the breast of his borrowed ecclesiastical robes. “I’m sure our escort will have instructions to carry us thither in chains, and considering the population of gaboogoos and mutant dooic on the lower slopes of the mountain, I think you’ll find it safer to accompany me than to make a run for it under a cloaking spell. I doubt you’d get far.”

“Really!” Bektis sputtered, trying to look indignant at the implication instead of merely scared out of his wits.

The servant who accompanied the physician had brought a hammered copper platter containing lamb, doves, some kind of spiced aubergine mush, and a pie of honey, almonds, and rice, famine not having reached such proportions as to affect the Prince-Bishop’s table, evidently. Or maybe it had, Gil thought, pouring herself a cup of mint tea. Maybe these
were poverty rations, as Yori-Ezrikos and Govannin understood them. “Can’t you see it’s hopeless?”

“Of course it’s hopeless,” Ingold replied around a dried fig. “My strength should return in a day or two—never mind what that charlatan said—but even at my strongest I was not a match for them, and I doubt that your assistance will improve the situation much. It would make no difference had I the entire Council of Wizards at my back burning incense and chanting. Without a … a thaumaturgical paradigm for the essence of the ice-mages, without an understanding of the central essence of the Mother of Winter, without a word of command over that essence, I cannot use my magic to combat theirs. It becomes, as it did before, a contest of strength between me and the gaboogoos. Even with the Empress’ guards protecting us, we shall be hopelessly outnumbered before we even reach the tomb.”

“Then why go?” Bektis demanded. He strode to the wall-bench, crouched beside it so that his handsome, pale face was level with the other man’s. “Listen, I’ve never known a guard who wouldn’t take messages out, at least.” He pulled from his finger one of his many rings, a cabochon diamond caught in the grip of an emerald-eyed golden lion. “Govannin would never let me go if she knew of this outrageous plan of Her Highness’. She’d never let me be put in a position of danger. I’m too … too valuable to her. And I know too much. She could never spare me. And there are any number of warlords who would welcome your services enough to intercept us on the way to this lunatic mission at the tomb.

“Oh, you don’t have to actually
serve
him!” he added, seeing Ingold’s face. “Once they take the Rune of the Chain off you, you can take Gil-Shalos here and flee! Govannin would be delighted to see the back of you. There would be no pursuit. You could—”

“You display a startling optimism about what people in this land would or would not do,” Ingold remarked. “Could you get me a little of that aubergine paste on some bread, my
dear? As for there being no pursuit, I should say that as long as—”

He stopped, as if suddenly listening, trying to catch some far-off sound, then turned to Bektis with sharp anger in his eyes and held out his hand. “Give it here.”

“What?” The tall wizard made to rise in haste. But with surprising speed for a man whose doctor had just told him to take two months of absolute rest, Ingold’s hand darted out and fastened to Bektis’ wrist. Bektis made a move to wrench free, and discovered, as others had before him, that Ingold had a grip like a crocodile’s jaws.

“My scrying crystal,” Ingold said mildly.

“Really,” Bektis blustered, “how would I have come by—”

“Gil.” Ingold nodded at the other mage, an unspoken
Frisk him
in his eyes.

“I was keeping it safe for you.” Bektis fished with his free hand in the velvet purse that hung at his hip, produced the thumb-sized fragment of smoky yellow quartz, and put it into Ingold’s palm.

“That was exceedingly kind of you.” Ingold used his leverage on Bektis’ wrist to haul himself to his feet and walked, shakily, to the long wooden shutters that covered the lattice wall. Gil strode ahead of him and pushed them farther open; they were enormously heavy and she didn’t like the way the old man’s eyebrows stood out suddenly dark against his bloodless face.

A thin splash of sunlight fell over Ingold as he pressed his body to the lattice and thrust his arm through so that his hand, with the scrying stone in it, was outside the ensorcelled boundaries of the room.