Mother Of Winter

Chapter Twenty-One

''They're gonna attack the Keep." Rudy shaded his eyes against the dim glare of the morning sun, squinted up at the black face of the wall that rose above the Doors, dwarfing them to a small square of blackened bronze. "Sooner or later, they're gonna attack the Keep."

He ached in his bones from testing men, women, childrenCome over here, will you?-and if he saw one more illusory mouse or bug, he was going to go after it himself with a stick.

His head throbbed from experiment after experiment with the Sphere of Life in the crypts, trying this source of power and that: the sun, the moon, the strange source that had saved his life on the fifth level. He was ready to smash the unresponsive, unaltered black ur-potato to pieces with a hammer-There! Instant mashed potatoes! How about that?

The woods around the Keep whispered and crawled with gaboogoos. He could feel them whenever he stepped through the Doors.

"They can't get in, can they?" Alde glanced over her shoulder, across the stream and the fields toward the diseased and dying trees.

"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 ladderstep 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 world. In her body 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."

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 counter arguments, 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 PrinceBishop'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 handbreadth 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, she'll 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 wallbench, 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.

He angled the central facet to the light.

"Rudy," he said mildly. "It's good to see you well."