Mother Of Winter

Chapter Fourteen

Crowds always made Gil nervous. In five years of living in the Keep, of traveling in the depopulated lands the Dark Ones left, she'd forgotten how much she hated them. "They can feel it," Ingold chided softly. "Your anger. And your fear of them." He put a hand on her waist, protective and comforting, and she felt some of her anxiety ease.

The Southgate quarter of Khirsrit just within the massive complex of pale yellow blockhouses guarding the land road into Hathyobar-seemed to consist almost entirely of ruins: shattered churches, broken-backed mansions studded with demon-scares and some of the crudest statues of the saints Gil had ever seen, clapped-out warehouses lined streets whose paving-stones had long ago been mined for repairs.

Gil had thought the stink was bad in the back corridors of the Keep. Here, night soil and garbage were out in the open, untrammeled by anything resembling Minalde's efforts at regulation. No wonder they got hit with the plague!

The surprise was that anyone was left alive at all. The moment she and Ingold were through the gate, children descended on them, goose-bumped and shivering in rags, whining for money, for food-not only children, but women in tattered zgapchins and stained and dirty veils, holding up babies like skinny grubs, displaying their scabs and their ribs. Men glowered from every stoop and wall and windowsill, thin men with hostile eyes.

"They feel your contempt of them," Ingold went on, in the wind-whisper murmur of scouts in an enemy land. "Open up to them instead of shutting down. They're only hungry and scared."

"Well, that makes seven hundred and two of us, then." Gil forced herself to relax and held out her own hand to a whining child, and said, "We're broke, too, friend-you know anybody we could kill around here for half a loaf of bread?"

The girl laughed at that, surprised, and said, "You c'n kill Uncle Fatso the

Moneylender!" Everybody hanging from the makeshift balconies, sitting against the rose- pink walls or under the dead and dying snarls of vines hooted approval. Another child yelled, "You c'n, kill Hegda the Witch!"

"I'd give you a whole fresh cud of gum for this ol' man here!" shouted a young woman with no veil and no front teeth, either, jerking a thumb good-naturedly at the sleek man beside her, who laughed too whitely and pinched her breast.

Ingold nodded wisely and stroked his beard in an exaggerated mime of a wise old man. "I shall begin a list. I see there's much work of this kind here in town."

What they actually ended up doing for a little bread, wine, and cheese was hauling water nearly half a mile from a public fountain, then swabbing down the floors of a tavern in preparation for the dinnertime rush.

The tavern was in the Arena district, slightly better off than the Southgate but still full of empty buildings and boarded-up houses marked with flaking yellow plague flowers.

There seemed to be a little more money and a little more more food hereabouts, but there was an edginess to everyone, an air of watching for advantage that scratched Gil's nerves.

''I suspect we're going to have to remain here until the fighting in the valley calms down," Ingold said, bringing over the gourd of sour wine to the table near the rear door that the tavern keeper had grudgingly awarded them.

The city of Khirsrit sprawled in the gap between the arms of the mountains like a pearl in a pincer, built on the shores of the lake that filled the original crater, its waters a holy, unearthly blue. Beyond the patched carmine and yellow walls, crystaletched even in distance, towered the snow-marbled black cone of the mountain Gil felt she recognized from unremembered dreams. She did not need to be told its name.

Saycotl Xyam. The Mother of Winter.

She had felt it in her sleep all the long way south, through the muddy and deserted coastal towns that made up the chief part of the wealth of the Alketch before tidal waves and plague destroyed them, across the savannah and over the overgrazed maquis of Alketch proper.

Everywhere they had found villages in ruins, burned to their foundations by foraging armies, broken by the Dark Ones or by plague.

They had encountered no more armies, though, until they reached the Plain of Hathyobar. There, the vineyards of Kesheth were in flames, and only illusion brought them safely through the warring forces of Esbosheth, Vair na-Chandros, and a dozen minor warlords and gangster chiefs.

Now, all over the city, bells began to sound for evening prayers, ring speaking to ring in the complex mathematical permutations that differed from saint to saint. They'd washed in a stream in the hills last night but still looked like a pair of panhandlers, and Gil was getting thoroughly irked at the way both men and women stared at her unveiled face.

She wondered if she would have felt the same had she not been scarred, wondered if they could see the mutations that she was positive were taking place.

She'd checked a dozen times in the tavernkeeper's mirror, as she'd checked, obsessively, in every reflective surface she'd encountered on the way. There was no sign of change yet, the voices whispered. She found herself wondering if the mirror could be wrong.

"It should not be long," Ingold added comfortingly.

"It better not be." Gil sopped her cheese-smeared bread into the wine. "We're out of money, and I don't think we can live on what we make hauling water and washing floors."

Ingold widened his eyes at her in mock surprise. "I thought you and I were going to go into the business of killing people for bread." He sipped his wine, then gazed at his cup doubtfully. "Some scheme will doubtless present itself. In fact, I only need... Ah."

Customers were coming in from the quick-falling, chilly dusk. Most seemed to be small- time street vendors and what looked like professional linkboys, but a group entered amid a great flaring of torches and noise: two men surrounded by unveiled women in thin, tight, bright-dyed dresses and facepaint -and incongruously elaborate necklaces of saintbeads and male sycophants who aped the garments of the two principals.

These consisted of high-cut trunks of gilded boiled leather-their fantastically jeweled codpieces entered the tavern well in advance of their wearers; high, gilded boots; short fur jackets and a good slather of body oil that probably didn't do much to cut the cold of the evening.

"Oh, be still my heart," Gil murmured.

"Gladiators," Ingold said, sounding pleased. "The two with the muscles, that is. The others will be-''

"Roadies and groupies," Gil said, with an odd sensation of delight at the predictability of human behavior. "In my world they followed rock 'n' roll bands. You mean with the whole empire coming apart at the seams, with civil war and golden plague and what- all else, people are still spending money on big-scale entertainment?"

"Oh, more than ever, I should imagine." Ingold's eyes narrowed with a professional's calculation. "Look at their jackets. Red, like our friend Esbosheth's men out in the vineyards, look, they've got the same emblems on the backs and sleeves. I should be surprised if the other teams haven't taken up patrons among the princes fighting for control of the empire. When I was here forty years ago, there were riots between supporters of the teams, killing hundreds sometimes, over the outcome of a bout. I'm extraordinarily pleased to see them." "You know those guys?" With Ingold there was no telling. "Not yet." The wizard finished his wine and stood. "But it's a comfort to know that some things haven't changed."

Instead of going over to the gladiators-who were behaving toward their groupies and the tavern staff about as Gil expected them to-he picked up his pack and moseyed out of the tavern, Gil soundless at his heels.

Two streets from the tavern a public square fronted a low, broad, long building whose walls were vivid yellow and surrounded by porches of gaudily painted columns of plastered brick, garish with torchlight and the final lurid glare of the sunset.

Crowds milled in the arcade and in the square itself, trampling up a cloud of dust that hung like smoke in the lamplight and grated in Gil's throat; pickpockets, prostitutes, drug dealers, and peanut vendors all seemed to ply their trades at the top of their lungs. Among the pillars topaz light flashed on bright silks, on gems real and phony, on embroidered veils, demon-scares that would choke a horse, silly hats, platform shoes with curly toes, on pomaded curls and bad wigs.

Ingold led the way through the forest of columns, Gil brushing shoulders with the bodyguards of the rich and the skinny gum-chewing beggar children. Around her, voices rose in chatter.

Gil saw one young lady in yellow silk display to her friends the blood spattered on the side of her veil: "You think your seats were good? Our box was so close to the fighting that when the Gray Cat slit that Durgan's throat..."

They passed out of earshot, Gil's momentary anger at the girl folding itself away like a black kerchief into her heart. She'd slit throats herself and hadn't liked it. She clung to the back of Ingold's tattered robe and followed through an inconspicuous door that he found with the ease with which he always located doors. A big ugly guy with a broken nose and a club guarded it, but Ingold only moved a finger and the man sneezed so hard he stepped back out of the doorway and didn't see the old man and the girl with the scarred face slip past him into the blue dark of the corridor beyond.

Smoke from burning cheap oil and pine knots hung everywhere like a fog, and the place was rank with sweat and blood. Through an open arch Gil saw a young man in a butchery tunic bandaging a musclebound gladiator's cut thigh; through another, a couple of laborers in leather aprons and nothing else loaded bodies onto a sledge to the drone of an orchestra of flies.

Some of the bodies were women's, clad in skimpy bright-hued costumes, horribly battered and bruised. Some were children. Gil didn't even want to ask. Ingold went straight to the office of the training director, a cubicle between the locker room and the staging area where gladiators waited to go into the ring. Despite the night's chill the big doors into the sanded arena were open, showing men and boys raking smooth the sand. Beyond the locker-room door Gil glimpsed rows of cramped chests and benches.

Cheap terra cotta and plaster saints ranged the locker tops, along with a couple of quite startling pornographic figurines. There were stone tubs at one end and a latrine trench along the wall. A lone gladiator, dolling himself before a polished brass mirror, yelled irritably, "What's that dame doin' here? Get her out!"

Gil ignored him.

Ingold looked through the narrow archway into the cubicle and said, "Sergeant?" and the man at the table there looked up, balding and heavy with a deceptive combination of fat and muscle. "I was told to come see you about a job as a swordmaster." The man cracked the wad of gum he was chewing and took in the ragged, short-hacked white beard, the half-healed cut on the brow, the tattered and bloodstained wool robe kilted high under the sword belt, and the way the old man stood with his hand on the belt only a gesture away from the killing-sword's hilt. "Little old to be doin' this for a livin', ain't you, Pop?" Ingold nodded humbly. "I'd be younger if I could."

The sergeant cracked his gum again. "Wouldn't we all." He got up, picked up the split wood training-sword that lay across his desk with an unthinking gesture: challenged, Gil guessed, he wouldn't even be aware he'd done it. His eye lighted on Gil and he seemed about to say something, then glanced at Ingold and changed his mind. Instead he raised his voice. "Boar? Your Majesty? Get a coupla lamps or somethin' out to the ring."

Ingold passed his audition, not to any surprise of Gil's. She'd sparred with him, both with the heavy training-swords used for his initial bout with Sergeant Cush, and with live blades, such as Cush told him to use against first the Boar, then the King, and then both together while he and Gil held the torches...

She knew he was good. She'd fought beside him against White Raiders and bandits and knew that the mild exterior was completely misleading: when he shucked off his holed brown mantle and rolled up the sleeves of his robe, she could see the awareness of this fact in Sergeant Cush's eyes, though it took the Boar and His Majesty longer to figure out what they were up against. The King, a White Alketch who kept his jewelry on and left his pomaded red-gold locks free during his bouts, was tall and outweighed Ingold by a good eighty pounds, and, Gil judged by the way he fought, was a bully in the bargain, seeking to wound in the face of the sergeant's order for control. Maybe seeking to kill.

Ingold got a scratched hand. His Majesty went to the infirmary. Gil made a mental note to stay out of that one's way. In all, they spent four days at the St. Marcopius Gladiatorial Barracks, though it seemed longer at the time; it was better than hauling water.

Despite the milling and shifting of warlord armies along the ring of lava cliffs that enclosed the Vale of Hathyobar, despite the burning of the farms there, the constant raiding parties, the smaller bands of town bullies scavenging for food in the countryside, Gil sensed that Ingold could have made his way to the Mother of Winter under cloak of illusion, had he chosen to.

He was waiting for something. So she made notes on the histories and customs of the southern lands, and helped him find pots in which to plant the roses that grew feral in the waste-grounds of the city, and slept at night alone with the whispering horrors of her dreams.

I'm doing this wrong, Rudy thought. The Cylinder weighed heavy in his hands, and he was dimly conscious of the way the witchlight shining through it fragmented into a starburst on the black stone rim of the scrying table on which his elbows rested. This sure as hell is not what I wanted to see.

He continued to look, fascinated nonetheless.

Tiny and very clear, the Keep of Black Rock was reflected in the heart of the

Cylinder, like a toy seen through the wrong end of a telescope. At first glance Rudy

had nearly stopped breathing with horror: Tomec Tirkenson's fortress was shattered, the black walls gouged and broken, the roof gaping to the cold blue desert sky. Only at second look did Rudy realize that, though the shape of the Sawtooth Mountains in the distance remained the same, the land itself was different. The scrubby sagebrush and cactus had been replaced by taller, thinner thorntrees and eucalyptus. Grass grew more or less evenly on the barren soil, and brush and shrubs of all kinds clustered thick around the Keep's mined walls. There was no slunch. The past? Rudy wondered. The Cylinder sure as hell seemed connected in some fashion with memory, or what seemed to be memory. Or the future? The scene changed to darkness, and through the darkness he saw her walking again, arms folded, blue-filigreed hands hugging her shoulders outside the midnight-blue cloak, white gauze floating loose around her slippered feet. She was deep in the crypts of the Keep now, passing through rooms he did not recognize: columns stretched from floor to ceiling like forests of wrought crystal that glimmered pale violet and green with her witch-fire; farther on, mazes of something that looked like twenty-foot spiderwebs, winking with lights-the work of an unimaginable magic, for purposes he could only guess. A crypt of water whose dark surface reflected, instead of the black ceiling overhead, a starry sky. The woman passed her hands over the surface of the water and moved on. We failed, she had said to the blood-covered man who had ridden up from his world's doom. Our strength was not enough.

He thought of them together, in his vision of the unfinished Keep; the Bald Lady looking up with despair in her eyes, the bloodied, middle-aged warrior with his long hair hanging over his shoulders, who had just, Rudy knew somehow, lost everything he had.

All this will pass away, she had said, and leave us with nothing. I'm sorry. "Rudy?"

The tiny voice behind him almost didn't register. The words In a minute, Ace formed on his lips and froze there as he realized that what had once been a completely commonplace communication was now fraught with meaning. He drew his breath and let the images within the Cylinder fold away on themselves. Let his thoughts settle and return home. Another breath, for good measure. Then he turned in his chair. Small and clean in his shabby jersey and patched jerkin, Tir came into the workroom. His azure eyes were uncertain as they considered Rudy, and by the lines at the corners of his small mouth, he wasn't finding this easy. He was angry still and struggling to put it aside.

He carried a bundle in his hands. "What can I do for you, Prince Altir?"

Instinct told Rudy not to assume anything about Tir's visit, and Tir relaxed the smallest fraction at the formality of Rudy's attitude.

I understand you don't want to be my friend anymore and I respect your choice, Rudy said, looking into the eyes of the child who had been like a son to him. Tir's voice was stiff. "Rudy, I found this today in one of the rat traps. I thought you had to see it."

He set the bundle on the scrying table in front of Rudy and climbed onto the other stool to unwrap it. Rudy could see by the way the small hands worked at the dirty washrags that Tir didn't want to touch the thing inside. "Yikes!" Rudy drew back hastily from what was revealed. "What the...?"

Tir was watching him with grave eyes. A king's eyes, Rudy thought. A king who guessed his people were in danger and was checking the problem out with the local mage in spite of the fact that that mage had been responsible for the deaths of all his friends.

The rat was the size of a small terrier, and of a shape no rat had any business to be-a shape Rudy had never seen in a lifetime that had encompassed Wilmington wrecking yards and cities choked with the bodies of slain men.

His mind clicked to Gil's thin hands, scraping and picking at the collection of sticky and deformed bones. To the Icefalcon, showing him the slunch beds in the woods and the tracks around them. To the rubbery wastes of sickly herbiage that plowed in the twilight and the revolting sense of things bouncing and scuttling around their verges.

He whispered, "Friggin' hell."

Tir looked up at him, the distance he had set between them momentarily put aside in their shared responsibility for the Inhabitants of this small, beleaguered domain. Rudy saw in his frightened face that he'd guessed already what was going on; that he was hoping he was wrong. But he wasn't.

Knowing it to be true, Rudy said, "There's slunch growing in the Keep."