Mother Of Winter

Chapter Nineteen

It was full morning when Gil reached the Blind King's Tomb. As she climbed the narrowing canyon in the flank of the Saycotl Xyam, it seemed to her that she wandered deeper and deeper into a dream, into an alien world; the terrible thing was that this world did not seem strange to her anymore. White slunch patched the canyon walls, then covered them, thin over the rocks, thick in the pockets of soil, enveloping trees, fallen logs, screes, in a rubbery shroud. Things stirred in the gutlike convolutions, creeping forth now and then, creatures she guessed were simulacra of life-forms unspeakably ancient: shelled things with translucent legs and feelers, slubbery mats of moving protoplasm; things that glided along a foot or so above the wrinkled surface and thrust jointed proboscises down into it to feed on what crawled within.

Hatlike things that spit at her from hard round mouths. As a dream within a dream Gil remembered Thoth walking in just such a slunch bed on the plains of Gettlesand, a stranger in an alien world beneath a livid yellow sky.

A river of mist flowed down the canyon, knee-deep, obscuring the wet mat underfoot; she knew its source was the cold of the ice-mages' cavern and followed it, the music very clear now in her mind. Songs of guarding. Of waiting. Of holding all things in trust, until they could make the world right again.

She kept seeing Ingold's blood in her mind, red and hot over the lifeless lard of the slunch.

She kept seeing the statue of the king who had no eyes.

He was familiar to her when she saw him. A black basalt image, floating in a lake of mist in the cut-rock cave of the tomb's antechamber. Slunch grew all around it, up the walls, over the ceiling, a dirty oatmeal river spilling over the steps to the outside. It had put out immense stalks that groped weightlessly in the still air or crawled about on the ground, fat tubulate hoses that opened and shut, looking for something to touch. Gil waded through the mist, the unseen, sloshing, crawling slunch, into dimness lit only by the queasy glow of the alien stuff itself. The inner door was visible only as a smoldering bluish square, as it had been in her dreams, and the Blind King, robed in lichen and slunch, gazed at her with a sad serenity; a glowing thing of a shape Gil had never imagined in her most fevered nightmares perched silent upon his head.

Gil saw Ingold's footprints, leading through that blue doorway, and the footprints of other things following after. Blood streaked and gouted the slunch, and it was torn here and there where he had turned to fight. She wasn't aware of how long she'd been hurting but knew she hurt badly, and all the voices in her mind sang songs about rest. After she took care of one final thing.

She'd walked all night. She had avoided Esbosheth's patrols, and those of Vair na-Chandros, and the armies of bandits in the burned farms and wasted fields of the most fertile valley of the south, without much trouble.

Though she'd taken considerable weaponry from the decaying corpses-including a recurve bow and a quiverful of barbed arrows-she found no horses and had been forced to go the whole way afoot.

A dark hump grew clearer in the mist as she approached it, a pair of dooic, dead, mutated almost unrecognizably: heads swollen huge, arms impossibly long-there were vestigial arms, and other things, growing out of their backs. The cuts were clean and few, Ingold's work, neat as ever. He would have been reconnoitering, she thought, until her awareness of his plan triggered an attack by

every gaboogoo and mutant on the mountainside. Whether he'd retreated or been driven to this place made little difference now.

She felt uneasily at her own face and arms, telling herself for the thousandth time that her own mutations were only an illusion, then strung the bow and nocked an arrow. Ahead of her came frenzied rustling, movement without outcry, without so much as grunts of pain. The short Alketch bow was unfamiliar, lighter than the six-foot northern longbow. She guessed she wouldn't get many shots. The passageway curved to the right. Directly before her a crack gaped in the stone wall, opened by an earthquake, perhaps. Ghastly slunch-light flowed through it, seeming bright in the mist-filled darkness, and a dead thing that had probably once been a mountain ape lay in the gap. It was burned all over its body and one arm was a stump; the blood smoked in the cold. Gil stepped over it, her breath a thick cloud now, lightheaded with pain and with the singing in her mind. The pain is his doing. His doing. He ran out on you, left you to be raped and killed by the gladiators... You were raped by them...

For a shocking moment the pseudomemory engulfed her mind: the Boar, the King, the Leopard...

She thrust it aside. Thrust aside, too, the false image that not only had it happened, but Ingold had been there.

The cavern she entered was perhaps fifty feet in length, that and more in height, narrow, like the nave of a Gothic church. Webs of attenuated slunch dangled from the ceiling, and long kelpy fronds writhed and twitched on the walls. Smoke as well as mist filled the cave, the fetor of burned slunch underlain by the harsher stink of charred flesh. In a dozen places balls of what appeared to be lichen burned fitfully, and dooic, mountain apes, and bloated things were trying to climb the slunch along the far wall to get at a shallow niche about halfway up, where a statue might once have stood, reached by a slender flight of stone steps. The steps had been blasted away. Fragments of rock lay everywhere, fresh and bright, and pieces of gaboogoo, patiently crawling toward the wall below the niche. Ingold stood in the niche. In places, the rock beneath and the slunch all around were scorched and charred with fire. Streams of blood glistened blackly in the slunch, on the stone, all around on the walls, where some had succeeded in climbing up. A lot of them lay dead at the foot of the wall, or were trying still to climb, hemorrhaging their lives out.

The wizard's arms were black with blood, as if he'd dipped them in a vat of it the light of the dying fireballs caught red gleams of it when he raised his sword arm like a man exhausted, to strike at some flapping, toothed monstrosity that struck at him from the air.

His movements had the blind deliberation of a warrior at the end of his strength; and blood ran from the cuts on his face and scalp to gum beard and hair to his skull. Gil saw him put his hand to the side of the niche to steady himself as the creature, whatever it was or had been, fell in two pieces with a spongy plop to the heap of dead things below the niche, twenty feet below his boots-a swamp of gore and cave-roaches and slunch.

Gil shot two dooic in the back before she was thrust aside by a gaboogoo nearly her own height that came out of the tunnel behind her. It ignored her as if she weren't there. She set down her bow and stepped lightly forward, hacked its reaching forelimbs off-it had no head-and then cut it off at the knees.

It kept crawling through the slunch toward the yammering scrim under Ingold's niche, but probably couldn't do much damage. Ingold didn't seem to notice; a thing that had once been a saber-tooth was clawing its way up the slunch toward him, and in the gritty light Ingold's face was like a dying man's.

Gil picked up her bow, nocked an arrow, and fired at the thing on the wall.

Later she told herself it could have been the light. There wasn't much in the cavern, and what there was, from the burning fireballs he'd earlier flung, was fitful, flaring and dying...

So it really could have been the light.

Or it could have been that, at the last moment, her arm moved. The barbed arrow buried itself in Ingold's chest, high under the collarbone. The impact slammed him back against the rear wall of the niche, shadow hiding him as his head leaned back for an instant to rest against the rear wall.

Then slowly his body buckled forward, left hand groping to catch himself on the edge of the niche-he still kept a desperate grip on his sword. Gil's mind stalled in horror on what she had done, but her body and her heart kept working.

Without, it seemed, any conscious volition whatsoever, she nocked another arrow, and that one she did put through the throat of the huge thing that clung beside the niche, snatching at Ingold: she thought, He's going to fall in a minute and it'll drop on top of him.

The creature fell first, dead or dying. Gil was halfway to the howling pack of dooic and apes and mutant things, sword flashing in her hand, when Ingold's knees gave and he crumpled forward out of the niche.

What followed was a vile business, a massacre. Gil cut stone-cold at the backs and necks of the dooic, the apes, of everything in sight as they fell upon the wizard's body. She severed arms, heads, hands as if she were chopping at vines, fighting the berserker fury that kept trying to rise in her, fighting the wild urge to start cutting madly at everything and anything regardless, hacking until there was nothing alive, then to turn the blade upon herself.

Cold, she thought. Stay cold

None of them defended themselves against her.

When she was done, she slid the sword into its sheath, lest she use it on him.

Before she turned him over, she saw the barbed arrow point sticking out of his back.

She moved him carefully, hands foul with blood, trembling.

His eyes were shut, but he whispered, "Gil?"

It will be with your name on my lips.

No.

"You're all right," she said.

His voice was a thread. There was no blood coming from his mouth-the arrow hadn't pierced a lung. He said, "Oh, come now."

Cold as death, his hand moved on her wrist. "The priests in the ice..." he said.

"Did you see them?"

He moved his head, yes, and coughed. She felt the freeze of his muscles as he tried to suppress it, to lessen the pain.

"Did you fight them?" Once they'd known of his coming, he'd have had no choice.

What she had seen, she realized, in this nightmare cavern, was only the tail end of the battle that had taken place while she was hiding and scrounging weapons through the trampled fields, the burned vineyards of the Valley of Hathyobar.

"I'm sorry," she said softly. "I'm sorry you had to leave me behind. I wouldn't have knowingly betrayed you."

In spite of the fact that I just put an arrow through you.

He shook his head and tightened his fingers on hers. "No," he said. "No."

Cut his throat. No.

Open his veins. NO.

He's used you, raped you, mocked you, sold you...

She could hear something moving, turned her head. There was a farther tunnel, leading inward still-a mouth of dim indigo hell that vomited forth mists. A shadow, a sense of cold more bitter than anything she had felt. A smell of acrid sweetness. Something there.

An amorphous shape, and the sound of flutes that turned the diamond flecks of poison in her blood to lengthening knives. Ingold flinched, as if he, too, could hear the sound.

"They crushed me like an insect." His lips barely stirred over the unvoiced words. "I could not touch them, nor would I have had the strength to overcome them if I had. They will do... as they will do. There is nothing further for us. The Mother of Winter..."

His eyelids creased in pain, and he turned his face aside. "Come on," Gil said softly. "Let's get out of here."

He made a move that might have been denial, but he didn't resist-she wasn't sure that he could- when she put her arm under his shoulders, dragged and pulled him half to his feet.

His whole weight, nearly half again her own, was on her, but he did what he could to walk. He did not try to speak as they dragged themselves slowly up the long corridor. She suspected he had not even the strength for that.

Behind her, she heard them. Deep in the mountain, where the rock ended and only ice remained- where light that wasn't light smoked sapphire in the glacier's heart, flashed on the slow-churning liquid in the pool they had guarded years past counting-their shadows flickered like pearlized dreams in her mind.

Only once Ingold said, "You don't have to do this, child."

"Screw you. I may go back without hope, but I'm not going back without you."

A square of light in the dark ahead. Stale smoke still burned her eyes, and she thought the copper stench of blood would never leave her nostrils, her hair, her clothing. Her body ached as if she'd been hammered with clubs, and an exhaustion she had never known before seemed to be drowning her. And in that drowning, in the edges of that dreaming, those silvery voices whispered to leave him where he lay, for the insects that crawled in the slunch to eat. It would only serve him right.

Screw you, too. You've defeated him. Isn't that enough?

Evidently it wasn't. He collapsed a few yards short of the glaring sunlight of the entrance, slipping down without a sound, and she dragged him, cursing, toward the light, a filthy and exhausted Orpheus hauling Eurydice out of Hell, with a trail of muttered profanity in their wake. From the dark behind her she felt their watching eyes.

Unlike Orpheus, she knew better than to look back.

Light surrounded them--chill and bleak, but light. Gil blinked in it, shading her eyes as she laid Ingold down on the stone, then straightened her back to look around. A semicircle of men stood on the one shallow step that remained below the door. Others held the bits of horses, gathered in the canyon immediately behind. Armored and armed, most were black Alketch, though there were a few brown or bronze borderers and Delta Islanders among them. Their swords were drawn, a flashing hedge in the pallid light.

The badge they bore upon their crimson armor was the white circled earth-cross of the Church.

In the end Gil thought that it was only bureaucracy that spared her. That, and the bureaucratic mind that could not compass decision. Their orders concerned the wizard Ingold Inglorion, and they had no instructions regarding anyone else.

When Gil stood above his body and said, "Take me to the Lady Govannin," they looked at one another uneasily, not knowing what to say. She refused to give up her weapons when asked; refused, also, to let them ill-treat Ingold, putting her hand on her sword hilt when the bloated, squint-eyed captain made to kick him in the ribs. "He's all but dead, anyway," the lieutenant of the troop pointed out, stepping quickly between the captain and Gil when the man likewise made to draw his sword. "You can see we'll have to get him a horse, if he can sit one. There's no way he can be made to walk."

The captain's mouth puckered up at that. There was something wrong with the shape of his face, Gil thought-the position of his eyes. With a shudder of recognition she remembered the dream of the mirror, thought, He's been eating slunch, like the animals. He's starting to change. And there were a dozen men of the guard who bore the same signs. "What happened to him?" the lieutenant asked, a small, lithe elderly man with a Churchman's clean-shaved head.

Gil said, "It's something I must speak of to the bishop." The captain was still looking down at Ingold as if he were trying to figure out how to kill him without interference from his troop. Gil wondered what voices he heard speaking in his head. They chained him, finally; the metal of the various loops and manacles, and the rune plaques that clattered dully from every spancel and cord, was all black with charring. Red spell-ribbon glared among the chains, red as new blood. Gil realized it was in those chains that the witch Hegda had been burned the previous afternoon. Lieutenant Pra-Sia ordered his men to make a litter for Ingold out of lances and spare harness, for there was nothing growing in the canyon, and the men were looking around uneasily at the unclean things moving in the slunch.

Above the tomb's low door, worn away by weather and nearly eradicated by lichens, Gil saw a battered bas-relief of three forms bent over a cauldron, out of which grew something that looked like a tree. For some reason the carving frightened and repelled her, and made her want to hide.

Lieutenant Pra-Sia also cut the shaft and feathers of the arrow and pulled it through the wound and out of Ingold's chest, afterward binding on a soldier's dressing. The wound bled heavily, but the wizard made no sign of feeling anything. Gil walked beside the litter as the men carried it down the wadi, cold fog flowing around their feet, her hand resting on her sword hilt. The middle-aged lieutenant dismounted and walked beside her.

Perhaps Khengrath, the captain of the troop, despite the influence of the ice-mages, understood that she would kill whoever tried to separate them, and die herself uncaring in the attempt: he didn't want to have to explain an extra skirmish to the Prince-Bishop. Perhaps he had other reasons.

In the dungeon corridor of the bishop's palace, which stood just within the watergates of Lake Nychee, the lieutenant said to her, "You must give up your weapon now," and when she stiffened, Ingold whispered, "Do it, Gil." They removed an iron grill from the floor and lowered him into the brick-lined pit beneath, but the captain let a ladder down for her.

She thought, climbing down into darkness tessellated with squares of orange from the torches in the corridor, the man might still harbor hopes that she'd murder Ingold while he slept.

They left water and a little food, and brandy to clean Ingold's wounds. The cell was small but dry, every brick of its walls, floor, and groined ceiling marked with spells that were the death of magic, the silencing of power. By the light of the corridor torches falling through the grill twenty feet above their

heads, Gil stripped Ingold and washed him as well as she could around the half-dozen manacles, the chains of all thicknesses that looped from arm to arm, throat and wrists and ankles. He no longer shivered, but his flesh felt deathly cold to her touch. With the leftover water she washed the blood from her own face and hands and tried without much success to rinse it from her long hair. It remained, drying and sticky, in her clothing-the stink of it mingled with that of sewage in the cell. She sat on the edge of the low brick bench where they had laid him, and the weight of everything that had passed since leaving Renweth Vale seemed to descend on her shoulders, the icy smoke of dreams breathing through her mind again. Get out of my skull. Damn you, get out of my skull. Haven't you done enough? But it was all she could think about, and the thoughts consumed her. "Gil-Shalos?"

She thought he was only seeking reassurance and put her hand down to touch his shoulder. His fingers closed on hers. "I'm sorry about your sword," he whispered. "It's just as well. The captain wasn't real pleased. I think he hoped I'd ax you myself." "Ah." He managed to smile, but did not open his eyes. "That's my Gillifer." She tried to keep her voice steady. "He's been eating slunch, I think-changing. I suppose he told Govannin about you the minute the ice-mages realized you were at the door. Unless Hegda really did rat on you?"

He moved his head a little, no. Squares of lamplight lay over him, delineated by the grill overhead; they caught pale triangles where the skin stretched over his cheekbones, left his eyes in pits of shadow. "That was just... an excuse. Something to tell you. Forgive me, Gil. I couldn't-"

"No, you were right. They'd have seen you coming through me, and neither of us would have made it. Ingold, forgive me. I didn't aim that arrow on purpose. I swear I didn't. I hope you know that."

"I know it." A smile twitched one corner of his mouth, and he moved his hand as if he would touch her face; she took it in hers. "We might have saved ourselves trouble," he went on softly, weighing out his breath carefully, nursing the remnants of his energy even to speak.

"There is nothing more that we can do against the mages in the ice, or against that which they guard. It will all come to pass now. There is nothing we can do to stop it; to stop them; to stop Her. It was good of you to come to me, good of you to guard me. Good beyond any words I can say. But I release you now, Gil. What we came here to do is done, or at least proven to be impossible. If they allow it-and Govannin might well, for old times' sake-return to the Keep."

"The hell I will," Gil said, still level, but her voice shook a little. "I'm not going without you. There's got to be-"

"Child, there is nothing to be done." His hand tightened on hers. "If they kill me-and I think they probably will-I can't prevent it. The battle with the ice-mages took everything from me, everything and more." He hesitated for a long time, as if he would ask her something, then at length he shook his head, letting the thought go. "Thank you," he said simply. "Thank you for remaining with me." "Thank you, " Gil repeated, her voice shaking. "Ingold, I love you. I love you to the ends of the earth, to the end of my life. Without you there is nothing, not in this world, not in any other world."

Panic filled her at the tone of his voice, detached, as if already putting aside her and all things of his life, slipping away into sleep. She clung to his hands, as if she could force him to stay.

"To hell with what the mages in the ice are doing to the world, Ingold-I hate them for what they've done to me. For using me as a weapon against you. For twisting me-

taking me-but it won't last. I swear to you it won't. And it has nothing, nothing, to do with my love for you. I swear it."

His eyes opened and looked up into hers from sunken rings of black. There was a terrible sadness in them, and she thought, I've lost him. Desolation swept her; she could not imagine what she would do now. "Don't send me away." "And the father of the child?" he asked.

Time seemed to stop, like a plane stalling midair, held only by the grace of the wind. Later she wondered why she didn't jump to the conclusion that he was talking about Rudy and Minalde's child. But she knew this was not what he meant. "What child?"

For the first time there was a flicker, a change, a life returning to the blue eyes; doubt, the rearrangement of something he had believed and acted upon. His white brows drew together a little.

"Your child," he said. "The child you carry. I thought that was what you spoke of when you said it was better that you remain at the Keep." Her voice sounded like someone else's to her ears. "I'm not pregnant." But even as she said it she knew she was. Everything she had attributed to the poison of the creature that had scratched and bit her came back to her now with changed significance: dizziness, nausea, the constant need for sleep... Even the conviction that her body was changing, twisted as it had been by the ice-mages' songs...

Boots clashed in the corridor overhead. Ferruginous lamplight jarred over them as the grill was thrust back. A ladder was lowered. "Inglorion?" It was the bloated captain.

Gil caught Ingold's hand again and asked softly, "Why did you think it wasn't yours?" He looked absolutely nonplussed at that, and Gil understood that it wasn't because wizards customarily laid barren-spells on their consorts-spells that had ceased to work the moment the ice-mages' poison was in her veins. He'd told himself this was the reason, she knew, but she knew, too, that this was not all. It was because he was old. And because, deep in his heart, it had never really occurred to him that any woman would want to conceive and bear his child. "Inglorion!" The guards came down into the chamber in a dry ringing of armor, and Gil stood, smashing the end off the fired pottery brandy bottle and holding the jagged neck like a knife.

The spilled alcohol made the cell smell like a taproom. Ingold reached to touch her wrist, but his hand fell short, dangling from the bench with the weight of the chains. "I'm coming with you." She didn't even look around at him as she spoke. "That rather depends on where I'm going." She heard the jingle and slide of metal links, leaden rune plaques as he tried to sit, and the tearing gasp of his breath with the effort.

Her eyes were still on the captain, the lieutenant behind him, and the others, counting who bore the signs of the eaters of slunch and who looked clean. Working out who to go for first, once she killed the captain and got his sword. Through her teeth she said, "No, it doesn't."

The captain said, "The bishop has sent for you, old man. Give us trouble and the girl dies."

"My dear captain." Rather carefully, but with a perfectly steady hand, Ingold was pulling straight the rags of his blood-crusted robes, as well as he could under the drag of the chains. "Although I assure you of my complete cooperation, I don't believe I could make any trouble for you if I tried."