Mother Of Winter

Chapter Twenty-Four

Gil woke up cold, with something crawling across her leg. She reached to brush it away and drew her hand back fast, a gaboogoo the size of a large cat staggered from her touch on crablike legs. Something warmer grasped her fingers. Ingold's hand. Nausea swamped her. "Isn't this where I came in?" "I beg your pardon?"

She realized her speech was slurred, nearly unintelligible, but didn't bother to repeat her comment. She didn't recall what she meant.

Impenetrable white mist curtained the chamber, still as death. The blue glow around them had waned, and only the single dim magelight burning above Ingold's head reflected on the fog. Gaboogoos continued to crawl in and out of the hazy ring of light, claws skidding and clicking on the ice, which had become slick around them from the heat of Bektis' sphere of protection.

By the way the mists didn't come near them, Gil guessed the spell of protection included a self-contained atmosphere. Given the amount of carbon dioxide now in the chamber, they'd have been quite dead without it.

Both wizards looked like a couple of teaspoons of warmed-over death. For once Bektis didn't look indignant, or irritated, or anything but bone-tired. He reached out to help Ingold to his feet, and Ingold helped Gil.

"Come," Ingold said softly. "You have a right to see this." Hurt arm hanging at his side, leaning heavily on his staff for support, he led her to the edge of the pit, where the pool had been.

The liquescent, half-frozen oxygen was gone. Only shreds of smoke remained, curling from the black throat of the volcanic vent. The Mother of Winter lay on a ledge some fifty feet down; the chasm plunged beyond her to endless night in the bowels of the earth.

There was no contortion in the great, glistening shape of gelatinous flesh, no sign of struggle, of anger, of resistance. The treelike head lay turned away from them, the long mane of blue fern trailing wetly over the edge, mist-wreathed and phosphorescent in the witchlight, the whiplike, spiraling tail losing itself in the fathomless black.

Where the flesh hung like a wet tent from the chitin that shaped her back, Gil could see what might have been the shape of eggs within her, millions on millions of them, a hard black roe beneath translucent skin.

"She's beautiful." She didn't know why she said that, except that in its own weird way it was true. Mother-Wizard. Heart of the vanished world.

Ingold had been right. She had quite clearly died in her sleep, a very long time ago. "That?" Bektis was recovering. His voice was an angry squeak. "Well, to each their own. Good riddance, I say."

"Yes," Ingold murmured, leading Gil away from the edge. "Yes, I suppose you would." He paused and, holding carefully onto her arm for support, bent to retrieve his sword, which lay half under the decomposing black things whose whole duty for eons had been to keep the Mother of Winter alive at any cost, to await the day when the world would return to what it had been. The world would never, Gil thought, return to what it had been. Not for anyone.

Sergeant Cush, Lieutenant Pra-Sia, and the Eggplant met them in the tomb's outer chamber, coughing and cursing, their torches burning sickly in the barely breathable gas emerging from the passageway. "Don't come any farther," Ingold called out, and

limped more quickly to meet them in the knee-deep slunch of the chamber around the Blind King and his patient, wise-eyed dog. He brushed the slimy strings of his white hair out of his eyes. "I take it the gaboogoos are gone?"

"Gone?" Cush made a noise in the back of his throat that could have been a gag or a bitter chuckle. "Like sayin' a chap with the yellows is poorly, friend. They're as gone as it gets in this world."

He led them out. During the battle with the ice-mages, more-and larger-gaboogoos had attacked the tomb, and either lay in pieces or wandered aimlessly about below the steps.

Only a few of the mutant dooic were still alive, the ones who had been least changed, and they were clearly in extremis, lying in the corrosive goo underfoot with blood slowly leaking from their mouths as the slunch-permeated organs of their bodies dissolved. Ingold shivered in the lurid gold of the slanted evening light, grief and pity in his eyes.

Gil turned her own hands over. They were perfectly normal. She put her fingers to her face. The scars were only scars, healing, and rather small. Her veins no longer itched. The constant backtaste of metallic sweetness was gone from her sinuses.

With the enchanted diamond, the poison had been drawn from her, cast back to its originator. Her flesh was free. The silence within her mind was like winter morning, with all the world wakening to peace.

"The gaboogoos themselves just wandered off," the Eggplant reported, scratching his bead-braided head. "Like they just got word nobody was payin' 'em. You all right, Gilly?"

"Fine," she said, meaning it, and the big lunk's eyes warmed as he pulled her to him in a hug.

"And speakin' of pay..." Cush took Ingold's arm in one huge hand, Gil's in the other, and led them down the foulness of the tomb's steps, picking their way through the filthy zone of burned slunch and vitriol, to the great rocks that half hid the tomb from travelers in the canyon below.

Among the blue shadows of the more open ground behind them, the Empress' guards were fetching the horses back from their place of safety, their voices low and distant, the only sound in all that dreadful, wasted place.

Cush lowered his voice to exclude the others. "It true what you said? Now it'll get warm again, and the rains'll be back, and famine and plague'll go away?" His sharp, pale gold eyes flickered back toward the guards where they gingerly inspected the decayed and blackening gaboogoos, the dead mutants, with gestures and cries and demon-signs drawn in the air, and he chewed quicker on his gum. "I don't hold with magic, of course, but... can you tell me who's going to take power then? Which way it would pay a man to jump?"

Ingold sighed and shook his head. "That I cannot," he said softly. "I only said that if we accomplished what we set out to accomplish, the weather would grow no worse, or in any case not much. Slowly, things may improve, or they may not. There's no way of knowing."

"Hm." The director of training surveyed the ruin behind them, the smoke drifting from the chemical-blackened doorway of the tomb, the strained and blood-streaked faces of the old man and the girl. "You did all that for 'no way of knowing'? You need a good manager, you do, my friend."

The wizard smiled slowly and scratched a corner of his beard. "Well, I've been told that before." Cush shrugged. "Hardly worth your trouble, seems to me. Still... that saint-kisser PraSia, he tells me we're to bring you back to Her Highness when you're done here. Somethin' tells me..." He lowered his voice. "Somethin' tells me she ain't one to take 'no way of knowing' for an answer."

"No," Ingold sighed. "No, and since she didn't send enchanted spancels along, I suspect she may be counting on me to do exactly what I'm going to do." "And that is?"

"Not come back to her for a reward." Ingold closed his eyes for a moment, visibly gathering his depleted strength, then made a small sign with his fingers.

Almost in the same movement he stepped forward, uninjured arm held out, and caught Sergeant Cush as he fell, easing him unconscious to the ground. Past them, Gil saw every guard and gladiator simultaneously collapse, leaving Bektis, who had been haranguing Pra-Sia, standing by the horses with an expression of offended shock on his narrow face.

"Well, really, Inglorion!"

"Don't." Ingold raised his bandaged hand to stop the bishop's mage as Bektis prepared to gesture the men awake again. ''Think about it, Bektis." He strode down the sloping ground from the rocks where he'd left Cush, hands tucked in his sword belt, as if the deed to the entire mountain and half the plain of Hathyobar were sticking out of his pocket.

"I have no idea what Her Highness intended for us once she got us back into her power- neither us, nor you. She's a calculating woman, and a ruthless one; Govannin's pupil, and like Govannin, not averse to using forbidden magic for her own ends. Nor averse to lying to her preceptress. She may consider having a tame wizard at her beck an advantage when she raises an army against her husband."

He stepped over Lieutenant Pra-Sia and came to a halt, surveying the field of battle as Gil neatly hitched the reins of all the horses to the pack-mare's lead.

"Now, I can assure you she won't have me." He hesitated for a moment, then asked gently, "Will you come with us, Bektis? I understand why you remain..."

Bektis' handsome face worked at his words, and he backed away, trembling. "You understand nothing!" he hissed. "Nothing!"

Ingold only looked at him, sadness in his face. "It isn't worth it, you know. You have your chance now to leave her, maybe the best you will ever have."

Bektis turned white with rage. "You, Ingold Inglorion, are an unscrupulous scoundrel!"

Ingold's eyes changed-resigned, Gil thought. Whatever hold Govannin Narmenlion had on the wizard was beyond Ingold's power to break.

"But in need of a manager," Ingold sighed, shaking his head and casting a regretful glance back at the peacefully sleeping Sergeant Cush. "I suppose he's right. Is there any vitriol left in those tanks, my dear?"

"Not a drop." Gil unhitched the last one from the pack-mare and dropped it to the ground. "But we're in luck. Every one of the guards' horses is a mare. I knew Cushie rode a stallion, and the Gray Cat, but..."

"Why do you think I asked the Gray Cat to be part of our party?"

Ingold caught the rein of Cush's stallion and swung lightly into the saddle. "As for the mares, luck had nothing to do with that. I told Her Highness that it was part of the spell. And Govannin's seedling roses, of course, which are in my saddlebags. Give the Eggplant's gelding to Bektis-we'll trade the other two for cattle on the way north." He held out a folded and sealed scrap of papyrus. "Would you be so good as to tuck that into the good sergeant's tunic, my dear?"

"What is it?"

"Instructions for removing the Wards around the Penambra treasure. We'll stop by and load up on the rest of the books and enough silver to replenish our supplies, and to remove the really magical parts of the Wards, but I think our friends deserve some remuneration for what is, I fear, a rather scurvy trick. Bektis..."

He turned back to his sputtering colleague and raised his hand in blessing. "If you will not come, I can only say, may the shades conceal you from your foes and the stars lead you home."

"And may you break your leg the moment you step off that horse!"

Gil came running back from her errand, her whole body light, as though she could run for days untiring. Every muscle in her ached as if she'd been beaten with chains, but the pain within was gone.

"You can't leave the geldings for Cush and the boys?" She cast a guilty eye on the sleeping gladiators. The Eggplant had been a good man to work with and had had, she suspected, a little bit of a crush on her. The Gray Cat had taught her how to use a net and trident.

"Pra- Sia's guards would only take them and leave our friends to walk in any case. A poor reward for Cush's warning, but we've given them all the best possible excuse. I think he'll understand."

He wheeled Cush's big bay stallion as if he'd ridden in the cavalry for years. "If we ride fast, my dear, we should make the other side of the hills by morning."

They camped toward the end of the short summer night in a burnt-out hill-fort in the southern spur of the old volcanic wall. Through the tail end of the predawn light, Ingold labored to obscure their tracks and hide the horses, and Gil realized only then that the old man had spent the last of his magic putting the sleep-spell on the Empress' guards. It would be hours, perhaps days, before he could protect them with illusion against bandits, warlords, and the vengeance of the Church.

Until then they would have to ride carefully, by night.

She hoped to hell Niniak's rumor had drawn the warlords away from their route.

She thought about the little thief as she assembled a meal from the contents of the saddlebags, while the dove-blue air of the east stained pink, then apricot, swelling to white with the growing overture of the sun.

A little throwaway, she thought, as likely as not to die in the next plague or be killed in the next food riot... wicked and bright and angry for her sake that Ingold had deserted her because she had a scar on her face.

Pain tightened hard in her chest. She'd known him four days and would never see him again.

Or the Eggplant, big and inarticulate, with little jeweled chains decorating his ankles.

Or Sergeant Cush.

Or even the formidable and terrible Yori-Ezrikos.

She leaned her back against the broken stone wall behind her and let the sorrow rise through her, telling their names over to herself, as if they died the minute she'd ridden away out of their lives.

She missed them. She would always miss them.

"Gil?" Ingold was standing in the doorway, a sackful of wild corn and beans and a few tomatoes slung over his shoulder, white hair bright in the rising of the sun. "Are you all right?"

She nodded. It had been a long time since she'd thought about her mother, or her sister, or the few friends she'd had in the history department of UCLA. She wondered if any of them were still trying to find her.

The incredible disappearing woman, she thought. Step through the wall of fire-the wall of magic-the wall of Somewhere Else to Go-and you're gone.

He knelt beside her, and she reached out blindly and took his hand.

After a time he asked her softly, "What do you want to do about the child?"

She didn't know why she understood so immediately what he was asking, but she did.

She raised her head, looking into his face; it was carefully blanked, but there was deep concern and a haunted doubt in his eyes.

She realized she'd only known she was pregnant for three or four days. And hadn't had two spare minutes together, with her mind clear, to truly consider the thought, I'm going to have a child.

I'm going to have a child. I'm going to be pregnant for nine months-well, more like seven, now-and at the end of it I'll have this... this little peep in my arms, like Tir when I first saw him. Like my sister's kid.

She didn't know what she felt, a hot strange tightness in her chest, an overwhelming desire to cry.

But she didn't want to confuse the issue with tears. Didn't want to hurt him with them. Carefully, she asked, "Is there a law about it? I know they frown on wizards marrying, but Church law is pretty iffy at the Keep these days. What do you want to do?"

"The Church frowns on wizards marrying," Ingold said slowly. "This is partly for the sake of its own power, but partly out of consideration for the woman and the child. Wizards... don't make particularly good parents."

Gil folded her hands over her knees and smiled. "You mean they head off to parts unknown to save the world because of weird visions they have in caves?"

"Er... precisely." He scratched at a corner of his beard. "I would not... harm you for the world, Gil." The words came carefully, picked and chosen from all possible words, and it came to Gil for the first time that for all his glibness, Ingold was terrified of speaking about the things that meant the most to him.

Like her, she thought, he feared that he would say something wrong, something that would lose him the single thing he most needed in the world. And it would be all his fault.

"I would not... ask you to do anything you would regret, or... or be angry with me for, later. With me, or with my memory. For I could have been killed today, Gil. I could have gotten us both killed, without compunction and without regret, doing what needed to be done or what I perceived needed to be done. Today, or any day in the past five years."

"You could," Gil agreed softly. She touched her belly again, wonderingly, understanding why Alde made that gesture. There was somebody in there, she thought. Somebody who wasn't her.

"My judgment isn't that good."

She smiled a little. "Whose is?"

"It's your life, Gil." He drew a deep breath. "And you have chosen how you want to live it: as a warrior, as a scholar, as a woman free of any bonds that she cannot lay aside. A child is not what you wanted. I know that."

"No." She shook her head and pulled the leather thongs free that bound her hair, shaking it down to lie loose over her shoulders. She saw for the first time there was gray in it, though she was not thirty. So she hadn't gone completely unchanged after all, she thought, without rancor or annoyance.

But then, who ever did?

She thought about Niniak again, and the Eggplant-and her sister, her professors, her friends.

She went on, "No, it wasn't. But you know... we change. I've never wanted to find myself in bonds that I couldn't lay aside, no, in a situation I couldn't just walk away from. I never wanted to be trapped the way I was trapped by what my family expected of me, the way I was trapped whenever I argued with my father or when my mother started quoting how much things would cost. I was with you because I wanted to be, because I chose to be. If I let the Icefalcon or Melantrys or Janus or the Eggplant beat the hell out of me with a training-sword, it was to get where I was going-like lost sleep or ink stains or a headache from looking in a record crystal too long." She fell silent a moment, turning her hands on the muchworn leather bindings of the sword hilt.

"But what we want changes, too. That's something I never understood before: the kind of love that can come to you when you stick around through really thick and really thin; the kind of love when you put yourself on the line, when you give it time and stay long enough to learn to care. When you make someone-and I don't just mean you, I mean the Keep, and Rudy, and Alde, and even doofs like Enas Barrelstave-when you care enough about people to make them a permanent part of your life. It's different from what I knew before."

"That's what I'm saying," Ingold said. "That I cannot guarantee that I will be a permanent part of your life."

"I can't guarantee that your son will be, either," Gil said softly. "But I'd like to have all the time with him that I can. And this may be the only chance I get."

Minalde's child was born a month later, two weeks before the equinox of fall. Rudy sat on the steps of the Keep watching the coagulating twilight blacken to night, dyeing the glaciers, staining the slunch beds below them, black-veined by dying fruit trees. The glaciers, he supposed, would continue to grow-though from Brycothis he was beginning to learn the spells by which they could be turned aside from Renweth Vale and convinced to flow down the other side of the ridge. With any luck, the slunch would stay pretty much where it was, until a warm year killed it, who knew how far down the road. Gaboogoos still grew out of it, but they didn't attack anybody, just wandered around the woods in their fanciful shapes, weird souvenirs of a forgotten world.

They didn't eat anything or harm anyone, and eventually died of starvation or heat prostration, or gaboogoo distemper, for all he knew. Some animals still ate slunch, but they puffed up and died pretty fast, and most of them avoided it now. After seeing what had happened to the devotees of Saint Bounty, nobody in the Keep could even be brought to touch the carcasses of either gaboogoos or mutants that died in the woods.

Rudy sighed. The surviving members of the Brown, Wicket, and Biggar clans had carved a stone stele to place on the mass grave in which were buried the ashes of Koram Biggar and Varkis Hogshearer and all those others who died screaming when Gil broke the final complex of spells that kept the Mother of Winter in stasis. Maia had spoken a blessing over them, asking God to accept the clean parts of them and to forgive them for what they could not help.

Scala Hogshearer was buried up with the herdkids, in the orchard behind the Keep. Without mentioning it to anyone, Rudy kept an eye on both graves. So far, no slunch had grown on either one.

He leaned his back against the Keep's black wall, let his head tip back to rest on the ensorcelled stone. Alde was all right. The baby was fine. He'd delivered the child himself.

He'd done it himself because neither of the Keep's two new wizards-red-haired, silent Ilae and quiet little Brother Wend-had ever delivered a baby. In the Black Rock Keep, Tomec Tirkenson's hagwife mother-in-law Nan was in charge of that-and virtually everything else. And in any case the newcomers arrived only days ago, escorted by Old George the dooic and his band, stumbling and filthy, exhausted after weeks of flight and hiding from the gaboogoos. Wend was still laid up with fever and fatigue, but Rudy was reasonably sure he'd make it.

It was good, he thought, not to be the only wizard around anymore.

Good to know that Tirkenson, Thoth, and the others at the Black Rock Keep had likewise survived.

He had a daughter.

Blue- eyed, black-haired, and beautiful as a perfectly ripe peach...

He closed his eyes again. He had a child.

Down the valley he heard them singing, in the direction of the pass.

"Yippee- ti-yi-yo, git along, little dogie,

It's your misfortune and none of my own... "

He thought absently, Gil must be in a good mood.

It was as if she'd only been gone a few days. As if Ingold had only been gone a few days.

It would be good, he thought, to have them back.

"Yippee- ti-yi-yo, git along, little dogie,

You know Wyoming will be your new home. "

What they were singing didn't sink in for a minute; only that Gil couldn't carry a tune worth sour apples, and Ingold had a very nice baritone.

Then he opened his eyes.

They were riding across the meadow-riding-he on a bay horse, she on a long-tailed black, driving before them a small, mixed herd of mares, sheep, and a dozen or more scrawny cows.

Four of the mares bore packs on their backs, and from somewhere Ingold had gotten two scraggy yellow dogs, who trotted gamely along through the short, hesitant grass, nipping at the heels of stragglers.

Ingold had told him via crystal that they were coming back. He had neglected to mention this.

"Cool." Rudy got stiffly to his feet and came down the steps of the Keep to greet them, hands in the pockets of his vest. "French fries and burgers."

Gil tossed the reins down, sprang from the saddle; skinnier than ever but somehow better than she'd looked in a long time.

Peaceful, he thought: Something had changed in her eyes. She wore a gaudy-hued silk coat and still had her hair up in a gladiator's topknot.

"Sorry it took us this long, punk," she said, and hugged him, for the first time ever.

"We did hurry. Is Alde okay?"

" Alde's fine," Rudy said, returning the embrace with a slow, tired grin. "You didn't need to rush. Everything, uh-came out okay."

Ingold dropped from the saddle like he'd ridden trail herds all his life; all he needed was a ten-gallon hat to go with his red-and-black Church wizard robes and the bearskin coat that looked like he'd looted it off somebody who'd been dead for a long time.

"Rudy, I congratulate you... I congratulate you deeply."

People were running down the Keep steps around them; the two herd dogs barked furiously, but stilled at a gesture from Ingold, sitting in the grass and watching suspiciously while Bok the Carpenter and Lank Yar and others exclaimed and argued and put ropes around the animals' noses and horns.

"My apologies for not mentioning the herd. Frankly, with the Raiders as thick as they are in the valley, I'm astonished we weren't bushwhacked a dozen times on the way up here. We purchased the cattle along the way-two of those calves are male, by the way, so we really will have a herd again-but the sheep were an entirely fortuitous find."

"They were on the road up here," Gil said. "Look at 'em, they look like they've been wandering around in the wilderness for years. What they were doing up here..." Rudy laughed. "Well, I'll be buggered. Nedra Hornbeam's idea worked after all. I've been trudging out to that frigging circle at the Tall Gates every day and Summoning All Useful Animals. I never thought it'd pay off."

"I thought they seemed in an unlikely hurry to get up here." Ingold scratched the corner of his mustache, which looked as usual as if he trimmed it with a sword and no mirror.

"It will be good to sleep in a bed again, not to mention speaking to one of the wizards from the Times Before. And I'm delighted you were able to make the roses viable-there've been no singlepetal white roses in the world for centuries. Really, Rudy, you-"

He was stopped on the steps by Enas Barrelstave, who bustled out and caught his arm in an eager grip. "Inglorion!" He shook his finger in remonstrance, stepping out of the way of cattle, sheep, and horses being led up the steps around them and into makeshift byres in the Aisle.

"Now, it's all very well of you to disappear on a cattle-buying trip, but you really should have consulted the Council about it before you left. It's not that we don't respect and value your services, but you can't simply..."

"You okay, spook?" Rudy slung his arm around Gil's shoulders as they mounted the steps in the wake of the chattering mob.

She glanced sidelong at him and smiled again. "Yeah," she said. "I'm okay." The scar seemed a part of her features, as if she'd always had it, like the dark smoke-rings around the pupils of her eyes.

"I guess you won't be training with the Guards for a while."

"The hell I won't," Gil said. "There's no reason a woman can't train up until the month before she delivers-though I'm not going to get into any death-fights unless I have to. You think I can't deal with it, punk?" She gave him her old cold stare, and Rudy dropped his arm and backed hastily away.

"No- I just meant... I know you can deal with it."

Between Ingold and Gil, he thought, that was gonna be one tough kid. Cold wind blew across them from the glaciers above; in the doors of the Keep the Guards beckoned, wanting to lock up for the night, black forms silhouetted against the gold lamplight inside.

"There gonna be much of a harvest?" Gil asked.

"Some. We'll send out an expedition to the marshes down by Willowchild for hay. But we've got the hydroponics tanks up and running the way they were originally designed, so even if we get thwacked by another ice storm, we should be fine. I don't think we'll have any problem talking Barrelstave and Company into okaying some kind of underground stables. It might be that until the weather evens out we have to give up outside farming completely, except for things like the orchard. Even at that, we got more apples than we thought we would, growing in late..: "

They paused on the steps, looking back at the bleak landscape. Somewhere down the valley a mammoth hooted; a small herd of squid-like gaboogoos flapped slowly from the slunch beds, palely glowing like otherworldly birds. Rudy shook his head at the alienness of the scene.

Until the weather evens out. However many centuries that might take.

But they had food. And they had books. And they had roses, for when the weather warmed up again.

"So what'd you name her?" Gil asked. "Your daughter?"

My daughter.

"Gisa," Rudy said softly. "That was the name of Dare of Renweth's wife, who died on the way up to the Keep... died because Dare wouldn't pull the wizards off raising the walls. Gisa of the Flowering Hands. She's been a long time on her way here."

"Gisa," Gil said softly, turning over the word in the tongue of the Wathe, and Rudy nodded.

"The old word for spring."