Mother of Winter (44 page)

“There is no proof whatsoever of that!” Bektis practically spit the words at her. “And what proof has Ingold that the cold is the result of these … these things he says live in the heart of the mountain? In all my years of dwelling in the Alketch, I’ve never heard of such a thing!”

“Bektis,” Ingold called mildly. “I need your help.”

“Hmf.” The tall wizard stalked stiffly away toward the center of the court, fingering little waves into his new-washed beard. “First time Lord High-and-Mighty Inglorion has ever admitted he needs anyone’s help …”

Gil remained where she was, in the smaller circle Ingold had traced around her, joined to the larger, central design by a narrow Road traced in ochre, silver, and hawk’s blood in the sand. Unlike Rudy, who claimed to see the lines of magic written as light in the air or, in some cases, reaching down into the earth like roots, she could only see the two wizards themselves, sketching patterns with their fingers or the ends of their staffs above the growing maze of Runes, sigils, and power-tracks that grew about them on the dust. But either they could see something there, she thought, or they were the best mimes she’d ever encountered. All the invisible lines met at the same points, over and over; Bektis ducked one as a tall man would have ducked a stretched clothesline.

From the small ebony chest Yori-Ezrikos had sent to him that morning, Ingold removed silver dishes to hold the water necessary for the rite, silver braziers to burn the incense specific
to the raising of power from noon sun on the day of the full moon. At the Keep, Gil knew, Ingold and Rudy frequently had to postpone spells and Summonings because they lacked materials that were, for thaumaturgical reasons, time-specific.

Fortunately, Govannin was the trustee of a quite astounding amount of treasure, handed over to the Church in the course of centuries by nobles and Emperors anxious to curry the favor of the saints. She’d seen the same thing in the ruined treasure vaults of Penambra, only Govannin’s hoard made the Penambra trove look like a five-and-dime. Govannin would hemorrhage if she knew the use to which the Church’s wealth was being put now.

Gil smiled.

At the lift of Ingold’s hand, nine flames sprang to life in the braziers, nine cones of the finest incense flickered with brief coals, then sent up thin columns of smoke into the still air of the sunken court. The wan afternoon light flashed on the nine shallow vessels of water. Ingold and Bektis began to speak, words of power and light, and from the bronze-strapped chest beside him, Ingold lifted the pride of Govannin’s gem collection: a cabochon diamond more than half the size of Gil’s fist.

The Crown of Khirsrit, it was called.

Six hundred seventy-five karats of pure carbon.

“Can you do that?” she’d asked Ingold the night before last, as they sat talking and planning in the dark. “Alter the atomic valences of pure carbon so it will bond with the liquid oxygen in the pool the ice-mages guard?”

“You’re sure the pool is oxygen?” For a number of years now, Ingold had been questioning Gil on as much elementary chemistry as she could remember, and laboriously devising his own experiments, for no other purpose than to satisfy his utter fascination with how the universe was put together. He had, to his own great surprise, made sense of two or three very ancient textual fragments by dealing with magic on chemical terms—something that told Gil a little more about the mages of the Times Before.

“Not a hundred percent.” It had been pretty late then, the lamps, like elderly relatives at a party, one by one calling it quits. She and Ingold had pulled the blankets up over their knees, for though stuffy, the chamber was cold. Everything they said was being relayed immediately, she knew, to the ice-mages, but that couldn’t be helped. All the gaboogoos in the world were going to be out there anyway.

“I’m guessing it’s oxygen because oxygen’s more stable than nitrogen,” she said slowly. “Those would be the easiest to pull out of the air, the way you and Rudy can pull water vapor. Oxygen would require less magic over the years to hold in stasis. If it was something with a higher liquification temperature, like fluorine or bromine, you would have suffocated when you went in there to fight them. But if you charge a solid lump of pure crystallized carbon to be automatically open, to bond with the oxygen in the pool …”

“It will disrupt the thaumaturgic equilibrium,” Ingold finished softly. “It will set off a chain reaction.”

“And the thing in the pool will be destroyed.”

“The thing in the pool,” Ingold said. “The Mother of Winter.” He touched the tangled night of her hair, traced with his thumb the print of the scars on her cheek. There was an endless sadness in his voice, a world of deep regret, as he spoke of their unseen enemy. “The guardian of the essence of all that vanished world.”

“Do we have a choice?” Gil’s voice came out taut and stifled, fighting against the waves of screaming rage that pummeled her mind, the nausea and splitting headache. Hands trembling, she curled her right thumb into the side of her index finger, where Ingold couldn’t see it, and drove the nail into the flesh as hard as she could.

Ingold must have sensed the sudden strain, for he drew her closer to him, his strength a reassurance, like a lifeline in a storm. “If we have a choice, my dear,” he said sadly, “it is one I cannot see.”

“Gil-Shalos.” Ingold beckoned from the greater circle, above which the shapes he showed her two nights ago had
begun to take form. In the sunlight they were different, transparent, as if wrought of clear water, less like jellyfish and more like some kind of eerily glowing elemental plasm. Gil assumed the pattern of their movement to be part of their power—Ingold had observed it in the crystal for slightly over an hour, the night Rudy showed it to him, before Gil half carried him back to bed. In the open air the forms were huge, changing size and shape and position. They seemed to breathe, though Gil wondered what elements of the air they sought.

Bektis, eyes closed, hands outstretched, appeared to be in charge of maintaining those plasmoid shapes. He stood statue-like, garnet robes hanging in shining folds about his slender body, breathing deeply within his own small traced circle in the dust, the very picture of a great mage deep in the concentration of his sacred art.

Altogether less impressive, Ingold met her at the main circle’s heart. In his hands, the Crown of Khirsrit glittered with secret fire, the reflections from within it cast up onto his face.

“Gil-Shalos.” He addressed her again by the name she had been given among the Guards. “Do you truly wish this? I have not the faintest idea what the spell will do to you, either in the charging of the crystal or when it breaks the greater spell of the pool. But the crystal will be linked to you. It will become—it has to become—in a Platonic sense a part of your body and your blood. To the best of my knowledge and calculation, you will be unharmed by this, but we are dealing with an unknown magic, and with a spell that I myself have invented. There are things about this that I do not know. I cannot tell what may happen, to you or to your child.”

Gil had seen Minalde make a certain gesture many times, that of laying her hand on her belly, as if to protect the life asleep within. She made it almost without thinking, then self-consciously hooked her hand instead behind the knot of her sword belt.

“He’s your child, too, Ingold,” she said. “But one thing I do know: if the ice-mages are around seven months from now,
he’ll be under their control, if he’s alive at all. If anyone’s alive.”

He stepped close and kissed her, and set the diamond in her hands. Using his right hand, he drew his left from its sling and put it on her shoulder, his right hand then on the other.

“Do I need to do anything?” Gil asked. “Meditate or say Om or something?” Her voice was light, half kidding, covering genuine fear and a thousand screaming illusions in her mind.

He smiled into her eyes. “It would make no difference if you stood on one foot and recited The Shooting of Dan McGrew,’ ” he said. “Do their voices still trouble you?”

“I’m used to them.” Which wasn’t entirely the truth. “Will this hurt?” It occurred to her she hadn’t even thought to ask before. Not, she reflected, that it made the slightest difference.

He only shook his head. “That’s another thing I haven’t figured out, my dear. I’m sorry.”

She closed her eyes, conscious of the weight of the Crown of Khirsrit in her hands. Conscious, too, of the sun’s thin heat on her face, of the stillness in the ball-court and the smell of incense and of the dust underfoot; of the sudden fierce rending pain in the scar on her face and the screams knifing through her mind, telling her to step over the power-lines, to hurl the diamond away, to whip out her sword and …

She remained still. She knew how spells were done. Pain rose through her like an illness, but she knew it was only the illusion of pain, sent by the ice-mages. She formulated it into a TV commercial in her mind—
Oh, that crummy thing again …

Ingold was speaking, a long way off, the voice she would recognize and know in her dreams when she was an old woman—the voice it seemed she had known all of her life. The pain redoubled, and she wove words in her mind to cling to:

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I

Did till we loved; were we not weaned till then …?

Fire passed through her, a colorless torrent of heat. There was no pain. She felt odd and light-headed, and short of breath, and there seemed to be an enormous silence in her mind. The Ward-lines could not exclude the voices, because they were a
part of her, a part of her blood, her essence—but that link would be, she knew, their undoing, for they could be reached by her name.

Far off she saw her dream vision again, of diamond dust and quicksilver flashing in the thick red surge of her bloodstream, and through it saw mists, and blue pulsing light, and three shapes half glimpsed that were not human, performing again and again rites that had worn stone away.

They were shouting something at her, but their voices made no sound. The diamond fire in her bloodstream seemed to flicker and flow into a new limb of her, a new part—diamond also, and surprising: flesh of her flesh, blood of her diamond-laced blood.

It seemed to take a long time. All of Donne’s poem, and another of Shakespeare:
Like to a lark at break of day arising …

At length Ingold said, “Gil?”

She opened her eyes. The light in the court had changed. It had the dense, glittery quality of the turn of the afternoon into evening.

The great, cone-shaped lights were gone. The nine fires in their silver dishes were smoking ash. The air smelled of the waters of the lake and of cooking from the city beyond the palace walls. A lake-bird squawked. She wondered what Sergeant Cush was teaching in the Arena tonight. Her hands, clasped around the diamond, were numb.

“Are you all right?”

She nodded. Sweat was dried in Ingold’s hair and on his strain-lined face, gray with exhaustion. Bektis, visible past him, was combing his beard with a scented sandalwood comb and looking put-upon.

“Can you speak?”

She thought about it for a time, then shook her head. She wasn’t sure why she couldn’t, but it was as if the nerves that communicated from brain to tongue were paralyzed.
I’m all right, though
, she said with eyes and brows. Ingold nodded and went to a sort of vacuole drawn in the rim of the great circle, where a silken bag lay. Gil clutched at the diamond when she
thought he might take it from her hands; he slipped the long strap of the bag over her head, his touch a reassurance that the bag was her property, part of her. She slipped the stone into the silk herself, feeling strangely unwilling to have anyone save Ingold even see it. She felt odd, as if she’d just waked from strange dreams.

“It’s a common side effect of certain spells,” he said comfortingly.

Gil nodded, accepting, almost indifferent to it. Considering what they were riding into tomorrow, it seemed like such small potatoes as to be microscopic. She flexed her fingers, winced at the pins and needles. Then she knelt quickly and traced in the dust of the ball-court,
It didn’t hurt. I love you
. As quickly, she brushed it over, lest anyone see.

He knelt beside her, drew her against him, held her with a tightness that said everything he hadn’t dared speak aloud: I
could have lost you; you’re brave; I admire you; I love you beyond what words can say
.

Bektis said sniffily, “I would deeply appreciate it if you confined that type of demonstration indoors. If we’re quite finished here, I certainly need rest, particularly if you are set upon this insane course of action for the morrow.”

“Certainly, Bektis.” Ingold got at once to his feet and crossed to the taller wizard, exerting all his warm charm to make him understand that his contribution to the rite had been invaluable and enormously appreciated, even if the whole ball-court had been carefully Warded to prevent him from running away while he made it. Guards, summoned by Gil knew not what method, were waiting in the entryway, chains in hand, and Bektis, who had shown every sign of unbending at Ingold’s lavish thanks, pokered up at once and turned haughtily away from his colleague as he was manacled once more.

Ingold and Gil, hand in hand and innocent of chains, followed him back along the corridors to their ensorcelled suite, Ingold with an air of deep humility and apology that Gil knew to be completely spurious, and Gil, to her own surprise
considering what waited for them all tomorrow, deeply amused.

Through the silk of the sack around her neck she could feel the diamond, a second heart against her chest.

The voices in her mind were silent. But she knew they did not sleep.

They left Khirsrit before the dawn in barges with muffled oarlocks, and the marsh-birds lifted in startled ribbons from the head-high forests of sedge and mist along the lakeside walls. Wrapped in the gaudy coat the Eggplant bought her, Gil watched them; behind her in the barge, a mare that bore food or weaponry or armor or whatever it was, wrapped under oiled sheets, blew softly and shook her head, the clinking of bridle-rings like the distant tap of a hammer in the morning still.