04 Mother Of Winter d-4 Read online

  He was kneeling in front of her. She sat on a broken chunk of stone in an old stable in the valley of the Great Brown River, cold to her marrow.

  "What did I do to my hand?" She withdrew it from his grip to look. Though the heel of her left hand ached as if it had been cut-and cut deep-there was no wound on the flesh.

  "Are you all right?"

  Why was he scared? His hands were warm on her frozen ones and there was both concern and fear in the sea-blue brightness of his eyes. She made herself nod, though she didn't feel all right. She felt nauseated and exhausted, as if she had run for miles; her palm hurt like the dickens, and the unhealed bite on the side of her face throbbed as if the flesh had reopened and bled. "I couldn't reach you." He pushed her hair away from the side of her face, quickly traced spell-marks over her cheek, her shoulder, her arm, warming the tracks of nerves and blood. "You slipped from me. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to bring you back in time."

  "In time?" She was still groping in her mind, wondering what the hell she'd say to him if he asked her where she had been all that time, what she'd seen. She couldn't remember a thing, except that she'd been cold.

  "We have to go. Now, at once, if we're to reach safety. I don't know-even now I can't be sure-but I think there's an ice storm on its way."

  "Here? This side of the mountains?" She added an expression she'd picked up from the Guards, almost as an afterthought, for in that first moment she was too shocked to feel fear. She should, she thought reasonably, have been panicking. "I take it there isn't a cellar on the premises?"

  "Not one deep enough. But we're only eleven miles from the old gaenguo at Hyve."

  Only a few years ago Ingold couldn't have predicted an ice storm more than ten minutes in advance. But sketchy as it was, Gil's knowledge of air-pressure systems had aligned with one of the demonstrations in the record crystals, allowing Ingold to formulate-theoretically, at least-more advanced symptoms of warning.

  Ice storms being a phenomenon of the far north and the high plains, his theory about the changes in the temperature, pressure, and smell of the air that heralded one remained untried, but lack of hard evidence about a subject had never stopped him from making eerily accurate long-shot guesses.

  In any case, Gil would have been willing to run eleven miles and hide in the deepest hole she could find on the old man's bare word, even were an ice storm-a pocket Gotterdammerung and Fimbul Winter rolled into one-not involved.

  "Is that deep enough?" Gil had been to the place a few years earlier. The old chamber of sacrifice had been used at various times as either a dungeon or a wine vault, depending on the political circumstances of the surrounding countryside.

  "I think we're going to find that out," the wizard replied mildly, and pulled on his mittens. "Are you able to start loading the mule? I have to reach Rudy at the Keep, warn him to get everyone-and the livestock-inside. I'll help you in a moment..."

  "Ingold, I got my face cut up, not my arms broken." She breathed hard, fighting a wave of dizziness as she stood, and wondered at the flash of some half-recalled vision of her own blood creeping in two trails through the slunch... Creeping where? She looked at her palm, surprised anew to find it whole. Why surprised?

  "What about the Settlements? Can they flash a message that complicated down from the watchtowers?" She pulled the Cylinder from its hiding place in Ingold's blankets, stowed it in her own jacket, pulled tight her sash and twisted her dark, crazy hair back from her face with a thong.

  "It's not a standard message. I mean, they won't have a code for it. There's never been an ice storm this side of the mountains, has there?"

  "One last year, north of Gae but still this side of the mountains." He angled his scrying stone toward the fading embers of the fire.

  Yoshabel, sensing that somebody was going to make work for her, bared her yellow teeth and snapped at Gil, who hammer-handed her hard in the side of the face.

  "I don't want any lip from you, cupcake. You'll thank me for this."

  "You underestimate our girl, my dear." Ingold tilted the crystal, the reflection darting over the scars around his eyes, the straggle of his knife-trimmed beard.

  "Even if she did know we were saving her life, she wouldn't thank us in the least. The word- code is longer, but they should have time to reach the caves on the mountainside."

  This shouldn't be happening.

  Gil slung a blanket and a saddle bag over Yoshabel's back.

  An ice storm-that's like getting hurricane warnings in Kansas City!

  Only hurricanes didn't kill everything above ground. Ingold was silent, bowed over his crystal, listening, Gil thought, to the turning of the air over the far-off mountains, to the pressure shifts, the unseen colors of the livid night. She worked quickly, thankful they always hobbled the mule when they made camp for the night. Balked of breaking Gil's shin with her foot, Yoshabel settled for lashing her across the face with her tail and puffing her belly as big as she could with air.

  "Don't give me that." Gil drove her knee hard into the animal's gut. Even with Yoshabel's usual complete noncooperation, years of practice had made Gil very quick at saddling up, and the terror of the coming catastrophe added to her speed.

  She expected Ingold to come help her, at least with the loading of the books; dizziness returned twice as she worked, swift waves of it that swiftly passed, leaving her holding on to the wall and gasping. The second time it happened, she looked past her shoulder and saw the old man still bent over the fire, the crystal an arrowhead of flame in his hand.

  "Rudy, are you there?" His voice was hoarse with strain. "Are you there?"

  Oh, cripes. The vision of the Dead Cell deep within the Keep flashed across her mind, where the wizards had been imprisoned by Bishop Govannin when she decided to make the Keep conform to her version of the Straight Faith. It was ridiculous to think anything of the sort could happen with Minalde ruling the Keep, but Gil knew the stresses pregnancy put on a woman's health; knew, too, that in the event of a power struggle among the nobles or even the wealthier merchants, anything might happen. Getting rid of the wizards at this point would be an utterly lunatic thing to do. As a historian, Gil had read accounts of greater lunacy than that, and she knew exactly how quickly power could shift.

  She finished roping down the sacks, then crossed to the fire at a run. Loading had taken ten minutes. Even at a fast walk it would be more than two hours before they reached the eroded artificial hill where the Big House at Hyve had stood. God knew what they might meet on the way. "Ingold, we have to go."

  He didn't stir. His eyes were wide, staring into the crystal, willing Rudy to appear.

  "Ingold, we have to get out of here. If you haven't reached him by now you're not going to."

  Fleches of refracted brightness chased across cheekbones and eye sockets as he raised his head. "They'll die." He spoke as if waked from a dream, half disoriented with shock. "I think the winds are going to strike somewhere between here and Sarda Pass. Even if they aren't torn apart by the blast, the cold-"

  "What's preventing you from making contact?"

  He shook his head, anguish in his face, the horror of a man whose power has made him responsible for everyone and everything around him. She saw all the dead whose deaths he had been unable to prevent: his parents, the people he had grown up with in the long- vanished principality of Gyrfire. His student Lohiro, and a woman he had once loved. All the blood-dabbled, shrunken corpses in the streets and courts and alleyways of Gae when the Dark arose.

  Tir's father, who had been Ingold's student, patron, and friend.

  "What about shape-shifting?" Gil forced her voice to a rationality she was far from feeling. "Can you do that? Into something like a peregrine? Something that's fast and big enough to take the regular night cold for a couple hours? I think I can get to Hyve by myself."

  The haunted look in the blue eyes turned to alarm-at the thought of leaving her to make her own way through the hostile dark of the countryside, Gil was certai
n, rather than at the hideous risk involved in changing shape and flying under the descending hammer of the coming storm. He hesitated, knowing already he'd have to leave her to her own devices, have to do as she suggested...

  "I'll be all right." She added, "It's not like you have a choice." Thirty percent of the mages who tried shapeshifting didn't survive the first attempt, but she knew herself to be speaking the literal truth. In the absence of communication by scrying crystal, there was no other way for the warning to be given, for the lives of the herdkids, every man, woman, and child of the Settlements-the stock-to be saved.

  She could see the calculation fleeting behind his eyes, gauging not the hideous stresses to body, mind, and the ability to use magic, but only how those stresses might best be circumvented. "No," he said at length. "No."

  He rose in a single lithe move and made his way half at a run down the brick walk between the marble-faced stalls, shedding as he walked the heavy bearskin surcoat, the rough brown mantle, his face set like stone. Gil, at his heels, felt a sudden blowback of heat, as if she had stepped from the icy night into a summer afternoon: spells gathered around him for protection from the outer cold. Brown leaves in the corners of the broken carriage chamber whirled with the wind of warm air meeting cold, and as Ingold pulled off his boots, laid down his sword belt with a soft ringing of metalwork on brick, fog billowed around him, frailly lit from within by the blue galaxy of magelight above his head.

  He slammed open the crazy stable doors, stepped through into the night, naked and shrouded with swirling cloud. Gil stepped into that core of heat and smoky brilliance, clasped him hard to her: "Watch out," she whispered.

  "I always do, my dear." His long white hair lifted in the stirring of the magical warmth, his white beard surprisingly soft against her face, while the muscles of his bare arms were like rock.

  "Guard the Cylinder," he said. In the chaos of dark and mist, he seemed little more than a voice, strong arms, eyes that could have been summer stars. An old scar like a time-dimmed furrow marked the point of his shoulder; there was a bump where his collarbone had been broken long ago. "If I don't return, send for Thoth or Kta or one of the powerful mages, for at all costs we must find out what it is and what it does. My child-"

  Their lips met, the passion seldom spoken between them like unexpected flame: the fierce, cold, scholarly woman and the man who feared loving as he feared neither death nor foe.

  She stepped back from him, like stepping through a door into the cold again. Ghostly streams of vapor whirlpooled around him as he lifted his arms and spoke in his great deep broken voice the True Names of the stars. Though she had heard the mages speak of it, Gil had never seen shapechanging; because of its terrible dangers, it was not anything she had ever thought she would see.

  But now she watched, her fear of the ice storm all but submerged in wonder. The mists blew thicker, the light within them stronger, fiercer, lancing out in hard beams to outline the leaves of the blowing oak trees.

  The core of heat that surrounded Ingold thinned, condensed with the inward turning of his concentration as he drew power from his bones, his. flesh, from the molecules of his blood. Lines of strain gashed his face as he called on his deepest reserves of power to change his own essence, the inner armature of his self, into something other than human.

  Lightning flowed, cold and blue around him, dimming as the heat dimmed, until the power was only a fugitive sensation, like the attenuated whisper of spider-silk in sunlight. The vapors braided themselves into an upward-moving helix in which Ingold was no more than a half-guessed shape, arms upraised, head thrown back, foxlight luminous in his long hair. Gil seemed to hear the beating of wings, as when she had stood in the plaza in front of Royce Hall at UCLA and flocks of pigeons had taken to the air around her; she could almost smell feathers, the thin, coppery tang of blood.

  Back inside, Yoshabel brayed, furious and scared, sensing the magic that charged the darkness. Great, Gil thought. You have a hissy about Ingold and you can't sense the ice storm that's going to turn you and me into Swanson's frozen entrees. So much for animal instinct.

  The fog whispered with an inner pulse of light, and all around her stone and wood and the madly whipping leaves of the trees seemed to answer with a shimmer of that which was not light.

  Gil raised her hand a little, knowing he was beyond seeing her, and thought, Don't die

  ... Within the numinous coil she saw him move. The air changed, a wave of heat utterly unlike the spells of warmth, the dreadful heat of atomic matter altering shape and nature.

  The column of mist itself stretched skyward, a dozen feet, two dozen, lightless levinfire incandescent around it. Then Ingold cried out in pain or triumph. The cloud seemed to collapse from within: the vapor poured earthward and streamed away in all directions, swirling over her feet.

  The trees gave one final shudder and were still. Ingold was gone.

  Gil walked to the place where he had been and knelt to feel the earth. It was warm under her hand. A peregrine feather lay on the imprint of the mage's naked feet. The night was suddenly very cold.

  In her travels with Ingold, and her explorations of the countryside with the Icefalcon of the Guards, Gil had encountered gaenguo before. Millennia ago, victims had been bled to death in those deep pits and caves beneath the earth.

  But memory is long, even when not unpleasantly refreshed by the reappearance of allegedly extinct horrors. Gil did not think she'd find bandits, White Raiders, or wandering gangs of Alketch mercenaries taking refuge anywhere beneath the ground.

  Most people in the Keep couldn't even be brought to go willingly into its crypts.

  As she hastened through the black trees as swiftly as she dared, her fear increased with the very stillness of the windless night, for there was no way of telling how long it would be before the butcher winds hit. None of the other wizards-with the possible exception of Kta, who wasn't precisely a mage anyway-considered Ingold's theories about predicting ice storms more than a few minutes ahead at all practicable. (Gil did not doubt the accuracy of his prediction for a moment.)

  She felt as if she walked with an unseen arrow aimed at her back. Worse. She had survived arrow wounds.

  The sacrificial mound at Hyve was protected by old cellar doors, which Gil herself had closed and barred two or three seasons back when she first explored the place. It stank of foxes, causing Yoshabel to balk and back and refuse to enter, and Gil dragged brutally on the bit, in no mood for another tantrum. Two hours and more had gone by since Ingold vanished into the light-laced fog.

  Any time, she thought. Any time. Her hair prickled on her nape.

  A rock ramp led from the slab-roofed upper chamber beneath the hill to the corbeled one far below. Gil kindled a horn lantern from the little firebox of smoldering moss on Yoshabel's saddle bow.

  It threw about as much light as a dying flashlight bulb on rough-cobbled stone walls, on the dark earth before her, puddled with damp, and on the lip of the pit. Gil knew that the pit was smooth at the bottom-that no stairway led farther down to the deeper realms that had been the Dark's.

  There were only broken skulls, scattered bones. This had been the final refuge for those in the house on the hill above, the house that stood no longer. The Dark had come here, too.

  Returning to the wall near the door, she hoped the place was deep enough to be safe from the coming nightmare cold, that the curves of the stone ramp would be sufficient to keep out the worst of the wind if the place took a direct hit.

  From the packs she pulled Ingold's robe and mantle, and threw his surcoat across Yoshabel's back, for which favor the mule tried to bite her again. Her back to the wall, Gil settled into as tight a ball as she could, drawing in on herself, pressing her face to the coarse-woven brown wool that smelled of old campfires, of herbs, of the subtle freshness of his flesh. Don't die.

  Two days' walk to the Settlements. Two hours' flight for a falcon. If the night's cold didn't kill it. If it wasn't brought down by som
e larger, fiercer creature, an eagle owl or a wolf. If it didn't forget that it had once been a wizard; if it remembered that there was a killing storm on the way; if it remembered how to transform itself back into a wizard again once its goal was reached. It wasn't that mages died of trying the spell, Thoth told her once. Some did, of course, for the strain of transformation was appalling. But many more simply continued their lives as animals, the memory of human magic, human faces, human families sliding from their small, intent animal brains. The most adept at transformation were the most in danger, it was said. There'd been at least four such dwelling in Quo when the City of Wizards was destroyed.

  Gil had come from California -had turned down the chance to go back-to be in this world with him. She had accepted then that if he died-when he died-she would continue in this world without him. It was her world, now and forever. Her face hurt her again, and she looked down at her hand, trying to recall why it pained her so sharply and what made her remember the blood running down her palm to drip into the slunch. There were dim images of a mountain with a core of ice, of a deep lake, blue as a jewel... of things like animate gems that looked at her and knew her name. Troubled by the recollections, she took from her jacket the leather wrappings that held the Cylinder.

  It weighed heavy in her hand. Without crack, without bubble, without shadow or flaw; its surface wasn't even pitted, and it had to be old, three thousand years, four thousand, maybe more. There was no way to tell. It gleamed in the smudgy lantern light as if oiled. Beyond the shadow of a doubt it was the product of magic, the product of the wizards who lived in the Times Before.

  Everything she had seen of this world before the Dark's last rising had a decorated quality: the walls half timbered or ornamentally bricked, turreted and frilled with statuary and screens.

  The furniture was carved with flowers and beasts, the clothing-at least that of the rich-elaborate with trapunto and knotwork and embroidery. Of the Times Before, only the Keep itself remained, slick and enigmatic and black, a featureless rectangle immensely huge; the Keep, and the crystals of light and images, likewise smooth and unblemished by eons of time. And this?