Mother of Winter (43 page)

He angled the central facet to the light.

“Rudy,” he said mildly. “It’s good to see you well.”

It was late when Rudy finished talking to Ingold, late when the old man pronounced himself satisfied in seeing the shape of the ice-mages’ power. Rudy had been horrified at his friend’s appearance, and by the fact that toward the end of the conversation Ingold was quite clearly keeping himself on his feet only by hooking his arms through the stone crossbars of his prison—but damn, he thought, it was good to know the old dude was alive.

He’s got to live
, he thought.
He’s got to make it through this one
.

God knew whether he’d be able to use what Rudy had told him, but at least he, Rudy, could tell Maia that no,
nobody
was born exempt from seeing wizards’ illusions, so there.

The Mother of Winter
. He shivered.
The Mother of Winter
. The mother of her world, holding all life and all that had been within her. And all that would be, if her three servants had their way. Tapping the roots of the earth’s magic, deep within her unfreezing pool.

Like Alde, holding new life within her … And Gil, for that matter, how the hell about that? He grinned for a moment, then his smile faded. Not the greatest time in the history of the world to find yourself growing new life. Gil, he recalled, had always been wary around babies, sentimental as hell but never really comfortable.

No wonder Ingold had had that beaten, wary look when they’d left, knowing he’d placed on her all the customary spells to keep her from conceiving by him.

Holding life
, Rudy thought. Like the Keep.

He remembered the Bald Lady again, the wizards sleeping all around her in the stupor of exhaustion. We will fail, she had said.

And yet they hadn’t failed.

For the first time, he began to understand why: began to understand what she had learned, in her far-off dream of alien power.

In his mind he saw her, curled on the plinth amid the vast web of light whose perimeters defined the half-constructed Keep. Closing his eyes, leaning his elbows on the workroom table, he called to mind the whole scene again, visualizing the half-built walls, the shadowed pit of the foundations, the scaffolding with its glittering machines, the lines of starlight and fire that stitched between them, holding the energies of the Keep together. Defining what the Keep would be, in a future beyond what any of them would ever know.

In his mind, in that future, he located the niche where Amu Bel hid the food; the chamber where Gil and Alde found the scrying table and where he later saw the vision of the Bald Lady; the knoll of execution with its enigmatic pillars; the room where he and Alde had hidden, six levels down but, he now realized, exactly beneath the plinth where the Bald Lady sat …

“It’s a grid,” he said aloud. “The Keep is a power grid.” He got to his feet, made sure the Cylinder was in its accustomed pocket, slung his coat around him and hurried out into the corridors, his footfalls a whisper in the Keep’s dark heart.

“I’m coming with you.” Gil closed the shutter on the thick gold moonlight that flooded the garden. Ingold had spoken to her, on their way south, of the lavish insect life of those warm lands, but even at midsummer the crickets cried slowly and the booming whir of cicadas was only rarely heard. Most of the lamps in the wall-niches had been put out, the remaining few strewing wavery arcs of amber flecks through their pierced brass bellies along the patterned plaster walls.

“No.”

“Bektis will betray you.”

“Whether Bektis betrays me or the sky falls makes no difference.” He had returned to the wall-bench, where it deepened into a decorated sleeping niche, and was invisible save for the blur of his hair and beard and the glim of eyes. His deep voice sounded endlessly tired. “Whether we ride forth tomorrow or next month makes no difference, though I’m inclined to believe it will be the former, since God knows what our hostess told the bishop about Bektis’ whereabouts. Even that …”

He gestured, and despite the spells laid on the room, for a moment the ghostly, flickering simulacrum of an illusion shimmered in the darkness, the precise arrangement of advancing and retreating cones that Rudy had shown him through the crystal. “Even that, illuminating—and astonishing—as it is, will make little difference in the end.”

The moving shapes, like vast plasmic jellyfish, dissolved. Maybe they had only been in her mind. Gil heard Ingold sigh.

“It is more than power, Gil. More than understanding their substance. Their substance is alien, under the sway of alien magic. I understand a great deal now about how their power is raised, but I am not of them. I cannot command their central essence, what they truly are, which I do not understand. And without that command, my magic cannot combat theirs.”

He drew her down into the niche beside him, and she rested against his shoulder, comfortable in the circle of his arm, in trust. Almost, she felt that it would make no difference now whether they lived or died, succeeded or went down in defeat. Only that they had this.

Quietly, she said, “You never were afraid of me because I might kill you, were you? Or because I’m … changing …”

“Changing?” He sat back a little from her, regarded her with surprise.

“Mutating.” She could barely bring the words out, under the agony of shame. “Because of the poison. Sometimes I think it’s illusion. Other times …” She held up her hands, not certain anymore if the fingers were longer than they had been, the joints more extended.

Ingold swiftly took the hand in his and kissed it. “It is
illusion,” he said, appalled, shaken. “Gilly, if I had known …” She turned her face away, but she could feel his eyes searching her. “No,” he said, and she knew to her marrow that he spoke the truth. That his sight saw clear and his assurance could be trusted. “My darling, my child, that you had to go through that, along with everything else—”

“It’s nothing,” she said, brusque and awkward. “It was the least of it.” There was a long silence, the warmth of his hands on hers strong and steady, real against the fading of the dream images of pain.

He was so shocked, so remorseful, that she made her voice light, to reassure him. “It’s just that I couldn’t tell. Like all those other illusions. But in the midst of it, I knew in my heart that even if it was true, it didn’t make a difference to you. But you were so wary—and of course you had to be. So the only thing that really bothered you was you thought I’d lain with another man.”

“In a sense,” Ingold said slowly. “Although had I known … I didn’t know how deep the influence of the ice-mages went in you, you see, or how deeply they could influence your mind. That you would try to kill me, yes; that you felt a great anger at me in the times when their influence was strong over you, yes—and you would have been more vulnerable at the beginning, before you learned to cope. What most troubled me was the possibility that you had lain with another man under their influence and had found in the experience things that I cannot give you.”

Gil said softly, “Oh.”

“I would rather have left you at the Keep, not only for the sake of your health and the child’s, but to give you time to make up your mind.” He spoke hesitantly, choosing each word with desperate care. “I would rather have dealt with the matter after the ice-mages themselves were destroyed—if they could be destroyed—so that your mind would be clear. But as I said in my note—and remind me to transform that brat Niniak into a ferret to repay him for his misguided chivalry—the ice-mages would have made you follow in any case, by illusion or
compulsion or whatever means they could. Though you would be their eyes and their ears while with me, I would rather have had that than have you stalking me, alone, through the wilderness and the cold. They have no care for the physical well-being of their servants,” he added bitterly. “And … for better or worse, my dear, I wanted you with me.”

She tightened her arm around his rib cage—carefully, for his left arm was still strapped, to let the arrow wound heal. “Well, Ingold,” she said gravely, “despite the frenzied passion I developed for Enas Barrelstave, whose child I carry—”

Ingold pulled her hair.

Her voice sobered. “—I swear to you I’m not going to be the ice-mages’ agent on this trip. You know that.”

“I know that.” His hand stroked her hair in the dark. “But I cannot let you lose your life in this cause. Not your life, nor the life of the child within you.”

“
They
are within me.” Gil sat up and held out her arms, pulling back the sleeves of her loose red tunic as if the veins beneath the flesh would have turned color with the venom of the thing inside her. “
They’re
as much a part of me right now as your child, Ingold. More, because the child is quiet, and these bastards talk to me, whisper to me, make me doubt every word I say and every motion I make when I’m anywhere within five feet of you.”

As they whispered now, she added within herself.
He trusts you again. Now is your time. Her
sword lay at the edge of the cushioned bench, within the reach of her hand—a Guard reflex that she suspected would be with her to the end of her days. Her knife was in her belt. That was the young Empress’ doing.

“I’ve gotten more used to it now,” she went on, carefully steadying her voice. “It bothers me less than it did. I can say, ‘Oh, that’s that darn such-and-such illusion again.’ Like commercials on TV.” She found she still could not name to him the visions she had. And in truth, she thought, there was no need.

“I feel like I’ve named the voices in my head, the burning in my veins; all those stupid lies and scenarios that play past me when I shut my eyes.”

Ingold gathered her back into his arms, held her tight against him for a long time. Beneath her cheek she felt the tension of his pectorals and in his silence heard the swift flow of his thought. Then he sighed again, accepting something, releasing something.

There was infinite regret in his voice as he asked her, “And what have you named them, my dear?”

Gil sat up sharply, their hands still touching, their eyes locked; Gil understanding, knowing what it was she saw in the wizard’s gaze. She thought,
Of course. There has to be a built-in compatibility in the poison if there’s communication. Just as there has to be compatibility in the slunch, if it mutates human flesh and human thought
.

At the same time all the voices in her mind rose shrieking, crying to her that it wouldn’t work, it would kill her, kill her child, kill Ingold. Half-seen visions of hideous terrors fleeted through her mind, the awareness of how easy it would be to pull her dagger from her belt and drive it into his heart, and beyond all other things, the clear awareness of pieces of a puzzle falling into place.

“You can use the venom in my blood as a magical interface,” she said. “Can’t you?”

At Gil’s request, the Lady Yori-Ezrikos sent to the St. Marcopius Barracks for warriors to thicken her bodyguard—the Gray Cat, the Little Cat, the Bear, the Eggplant, Sergeant Cush, and others whom Gil knew could be trusted. Ingold selected men from among the young Empress’ regular bodyguard, using Rudy’s criterion of susceptibility to illusion, and spoke to the Empress herself about preparations such as time and place, barges and equipment; presumably, Gil thought, to get at least some jump on the ice-mages. She was still deeply conscious that whatever she learned, they would know, and retired to the other room of the suite when Ingold dealt with such matters.

There was a mirror there. Sometimes she saw the deformed face in it, the hammer-jut of chin and the alien forehead, the horror that had become her eyes. Other times she saw only her
own face. She could not tell which was more familiar, or which was the lie.

She couldn’t tell either whether her overwhelming desire to eavesdrop was the ice-mages’ or her own native nosiness. She rehearsed Dante in her head until the impulse went away.

She was aware that on the day before the first night of the full moon, Yori-Ezrikos manufactured a summons that would take Govannin to the town of Yeshmi All-Saints, a day’s barge-ride downriver, the young Empress promising to hold Ingold for execution upon Govannin’s return. Gil would have given a great deal to know what she told Govannin about Bektis’ absence. A sudden attack of measles?

If, as Gil suspected, Govannin had used Bektis as a pawn in her climb to power in the South, she’d be hesitant to go head-to-head with her pupil over what might simply be a don’t-ask-don’t-tell request for services.

There were preparations that could not be hidden from the ice-mages, and those were difficult for her. As she and the two bodyguards assigned her brought the bishop’s wizard to the small ball-court of the Empress’ wing of the palace, which Ingold had begun ritually cleansing and stitching with Ward-lines against Bektis the moment Govannin was safely on her barge, Gil wondered whether the panic that rose in her, the ghastly sense that she would not survive the ritual Ingold was devising, was in fact her own common sense or her three pals under the ice.

Cold horror swamped her as they entered the ball-court, a long, marble-sided pit open to the sky, and she saw the lines of power Ingold had drawn in the sand, the Weirds that circled the walls. For a moment Ingold, in his red-and-black novice’s robes, seemed a stranger as he ritually sealed the Wards behind them, then signed her to remove the spell-cords and chains from Bektis’ wrists.

“This entire project is ridiculous,” the bishop’s mage muttered through his teeth as Gil set the chains aside and Ingold returned to the measurement of an enormous circle in the court’s smooth-combed sand. “Of what conceivable use can it be to attempt what will only destroy two of a precious and
dwindling corps of trained wizards? Much better to study these … these whatever they are, if they even exist … from a distance, to ascertain whether they are in fact priests or monsters or whatever. They aren’t even human.”

“And while you’re studying,” Gil said softly, her eyes on the old man in the center of the court, “they’re gaining strength. And men and animals are driven to eating slunch out of sheer starvation as the world grows ever colder. And those who eat the slunch eventually begin to hear voices in their minds saying, ‘Kill that guy over there with the magic wand in his hand.’ ”