Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

His magic was like the warmth of the fire, reassuring her with his measureless calm. "What do you see, Gilly?" he asked. "What do you see?"

The wide lake upon whose stone verge she stood steamed like a cauldron in the air's cruel chill. In contrast to most of her dreams, Gil felt the cold and smelled the sulfurous tang of the waters: the jewel-indigo of enormous depths, an almost perfect circle miles across, ringed by a toothed wall of high lava escarpments. Steam drifted across a verge of reddish-black basalt, smeared near the shores with garish lichens-purples, golds, virulent reds. A volcanic cone, she thought. And above her a second volcano reared, infinitely tall, crowned with ice. All things, she knew-she didn't know how she knew-were ice-covered beyond the rim of those encircling cliffs.

Something crawled across her foot. It was another of the blubbery hat-shaped things Thoth had found. Like odd slugs with their calcined rosettes, they were creeping everywhere on the few yards of basalt beach that separated the sharp rise of the crater rims from the night-blue waters to her left.

Things like small scorpions, armed but legless, tails upcurled, floated above the steaming waters. The only sound was the groaning of the wind in the rocks. "What do you see, Gil?" She could not say.

An entrance squinted at her in the rock wall of the secondary cone, black, deadly; a tunnel into the mountain's ice-locked heart. She could feel the cold on her face as she stepped into the rift, and knew that the volcano, huge and ancient, had a core of ice. In the rock chamber where the tunnel to the ice began there was a statue: cut of black basalt, a man sitting in a chair and gripping with one hand the collar of a dog. The bearded face was stylized, but even so it held an expression of profound sadness, and the sculptor had forgotten or chosen not to cut pupils in the staring eyes.

The anachronistic image seemed to float, detached, in a lake of white ground fog that surged utterly soundless around Gil's knees.

Gil knew full well that this world filled with ice and silence had never been trodden by foot of man.

Ingold's voice came to her, very far away now, asking something, she did not know what. In any case, she could not have answered him. Even the memories of who she had once been seemed to have slipped beyond immediate recollection; whom she was seeking here, why she had come.

Cold smoke flowed from a crack in the rock at the top of a flight of stonecut stairs, and a smell of wet sweetness, sugary and attenuated. Gil followed, drawn by music she thought she had heard once before: music and the murmur of half-heard words.

They were speaking her name. How did they know her name?

At the top of the stair she looked down at her hands. She drew her dagger and slid the blade along her palms-the pain shocking even in the dream, but she could not help herself.

The voices grew clearer in her mind and she thought, My blood knows my name, and they are a part of the poison that's in my blood.

They were telling her Ingold had caused her that pain, but even in her dream she knew that wasn't true. As she walked deeper down the crack in the ice, the tension in her chest grew, the terrible anxiety tightening.

Looking down, she saw the dark bones of the rock, and through them, like horribly shining ropes, lines of tension and power in the ground, coursing into the earth.

Her blood dripped down onto the ice, hot against her cold fingers. Looking back over her shoulder, she thought she could see Ingold standing in the crevice that led to the surface of the ground, unable to cross its threshold.

It was Ingold as he actually was-sometimes a glowing core of magic light, sometimes the arrogant, red-haired princeling who had caused the last of the great Gettlesand wars. Her lover. Her friend. The other half of her life. He held out his hand to her, but he could come no farther, and she could no longer hear his voice.

The singing filled her ears, and she followed.

The singers knelt in a world of lightless color, their magic shining into the ice of which the chamber was composed and reflecting back, allowing her to see.

Glowing smoke surrounded them, rising from the fumarole in the chamber's heart; not the smoke of volcanic heat, but the smoke of cold, for the chasm was filled with something that wasn't lava, wasn't water-something gelid, thick, clear as diamonds, something that moved in slow glutinous waves with the stirrings of that which dwelt within.

The singers were wrought of jewels. They were making magic, performing a rite over and over again in the flat space before the chamber's door; a rite they had performed for eons, until the hard black stone of the floor had been worn into a pit, filled thick now with slunch.

Every now and then something crawled out of the slunch: wriggling pale arthropods with masses of tentacles where their heads should have been or those flat, raylike, pincered flying things that she had seen chasing the hawk.

She couldn't see the singers clearly, but she knew they were calling her name. The blood that ran down off her fingers dripped into the slunch and began to crawl in thin red snakes in their direction, glittering with jeweled diamond flecks. The jewel things raised their heads, blue-fire gazes surrounding her. There was a profound cold stirring in the slow-throbbing pool. "Gil, come back."

It would rise out of the lake, she thought. The ice-mages knew her name already. They would give her name to the thing in the pool, the thing that knew all names, and it would know her. "Gil, come back now."

She had a dreamy sense of wanting to scream, watching her blood wriggle toward the ice-priests, who extended long hands down to gather it in; watching little whitish spiderlike blobs wriggle up out of the slunch, watching the slow emergence of the thing in the pool.

"Gil!" She felt his hands on her arms, very strong and warm. "You have to come back now. Can you follow my voice? You have to come back." I have to go back. I have to go back and kill him.

She drew her knife again, her blood sticky all over its leather-wrapped hilt. She wondered if she killed herself in this dream whether she'd really be dead. Then they couldn't make her hurt him. Or maybe, she thought, they could.

"Can you follow my voice?" She heard it then, the buried urgency under the calm tones. He was scared.

Her mouth felt as though it had been shot up with lidocaine. She managed to say, "Yes."

He led her out of the cavern by the hand. She felt his hand in hers but couldn't see him-something that sometimes happened in dreams-and once they were out of the cavern, past the stone room with the statue of the Blind King and the dog, on the lichen-grown basalt beside the great, cold lake, she felt him spring upward, flying, drawing her by the hand to fly after him.

In her dreams she could fly, if he was holding her hand. They drifted upward a long way, through black waters again, heading for the light. Looking down, she could see the deep blue crater of the vast lake, like an open eye: the monster volcano beside it, dead and full of ice.

It seemed to her she could still smell that sugary odor, still hear the singing of the ice-mages behind her, and the poison in her blood whispered the echo of that song. Then there was only dark. "What is it?"

He was kneeling in front of her. She sat on a broken chunk of stone in an old stable in the valley of the Great Brown River, cold to her marrow.

"What did I do to my hand?" She withdrew it from his grip to look. Though the heel of her left hand ached as if it had been cut-and cut deep-there was no wound on the flesh.

"Are you all right?"

Why was he scared? His hands were warm on her frozen ones and there was both concern and fear in the sea-blue brightness of his eyes. She made herself nod, though she didn't feel all right. She felt nauseated and exhausted, as if she had run for miles; her palm hurt like the dickens, and the unhealed bite on the side of her face throbbed as if the flesh had reopened and bled. "I couldn't reach you." He pushed her hair away from the side of her face, quickly traced spell-marks over her cheek, her shoulder, her arm, warming the tracks of nerves and blood. "You slipped from me. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to bring you back in time."