Mother of Winter (28 page)

“The Keep was attacked last night by the creatures you call gaboogoos,” the mage said. “Not the Keep, precisely, but the cells of the mages, which as you know are built against its outer wall.”

Rudy had seen the Black Rock Keep last year, about half the size of the Renweth Keep and badly decayed, its hard black stone shattered in many places and filled in with blocks—or occasionally rough-cemented boulders—of the local granite and sandstone. After their experience with the ill-remembered Govannin Narmenlion, the wizards of Gettlesand preferred not to sleep within the Keep itself, and Rudy could hardly blame them.

“Our hermitages are stout enough to resist all but the most terrible storm,” Thoth went on, “but these creatures tore at the doors and windows as if no Wards, no spells of protection, had been laid on them at all. We were trapped within our cells until one of the herd-riders who also has an out-cell managed to slither through a ventilator into the Keep to warn them within.”

“What is it?” Silua Hornbeam-Weff, bow in hand, came over to where Rudy sat staring into his crystal. Rudy waved her sharply away.

“They weren’t alone,” Thoth said quietly. “I’ve tried to warn Ingold, and cannot pierce this gray anger that fills the crystals. You must make the attempt, and take warning yourself. If he’s in Alketch now, he’ll—”

The crystal clouded over. Rudy yelled, “Son of a—” and shook it, then focused his own concentration, as if he were sending Thoth a message, trying to pierce the inner alignments of the stone, the dull, buzzing grayness that suddenly seemed to fill his perception.

“—changing,” said Thoth’s voice, dimly, in his mind, “but always there is that one fact.” The image wavered back for a moment, the sharp, exhausted features, the chill amber eyes, the panic-filled torchlit darkness of the painted Keep’s maze. “They only attack the mageborn, but they will kill whatever comes between the mageborn and themselves. In the distance, at the far side of the Great Slunch, our scouts have—”

The image faded again, and again Rudy sensed through the half trance of his listening the gray denseness, the heavy, angry heat. He waited. Once he thought he heard Thoth’s voice say, “—slunch—” The image did not reappear.

Changing
, Rudy thought. Who or what was changing? Those animals that had eaten the slunch? Or something else?

“Master Wizard?” Lapith Hornbeam called out from the side of the interrupted power-circle, drawn in powdered chalk mixed with bone-dust and Ingold’s Penambra silver in the trampled mix of new green and dead yellow grass. “The day is drawing on, and you did say it would take time to complete the circle. Is all well?”

“Yeah,” Rudy said. “Gimme another minute.” It was a good bet he wouldn’t be able to contact Ingold without a power-circle of some kind to raise the juice for it; whatever kind of interference the ice-mages were able to throw, it came and went, but right now it seemed to be pretty strong. Still, he made the attempt, and got nothing.

Later, after the circle was drawn—and at Lord Brig’s suggestion he included deer and wild pigs in the Summoning-spell—he retreated a little distance from it and built a second circle, though the effort of that seemed to scrape the marrow from his bones, and sent out his mind across the distance between him and the Alketch, calling Ingold’s name.

In the heart of his crystal he had a queer, quick flash of the old man’s face, floured with dust and scabbed as if from minor battle, peering into the crystal, his lips forming what was clearly the word
Rudy?
without a sound. He seemed to be in a sort of hollow among towering, black, volcanic rocks
shaded by withered tamarisks. Gil was just visible past his shoulder, slumped on a slanted stone, her head between her knees.

Then the image was gone.

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 girl 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 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, crystal-etched 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 tavern-keeper’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 face-paint—and incongruously elaborate necklaces of saint-beads—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.