Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

She could see the calculation fleeting behind his eyes, gauging not the hideous stresses to body, mind, and the ability to use magic, but only how those stresses might best be circumvented. "No," he said at length. "No."

He rose in a single lithe move and made his way half at a run down the brick walk between the marble-faced stalls, shedding as he walked the heavy bearskin surcoat, the rough brown mantle, his face set like stone. Gil, at his heels, felt a sudden blowback of heat, as if she had stepped from the icy night into a summer afternoon: spells gathered around him for protection from the outer cold. Brown leaves in the corners of the broken carriage chamber whirled with the wind of warm air meeting cold, and as Ingold pulled off his boots, laid down his sword belt with a soft ringing of metalwork on brick, fog billowed around him, frailly lit from within by the blue galaxy of magelight above his head.

He slammed open the crazy stable doors, stepped through into the night, naked and shrouded with swirling cloud. Gil stepped into that core of heat and smoky brilliance, clasped him hard to her: "Watch out," she whispered.

"I always do, my dear." His long white hair lifted in the stirring of the magical warmth, his white beard surprisingly soft against her face, while the muscles of his bare arms were like rock.

"Guard the Cylinder," he said. In the chaos of dark and mist, he seemed little more than a voice, strong arms, eyes that could have been summer stars. An old scar like a time-dimmed furrow marked the point of his shoulder; there was a bump where his collarbone had been broken long ago. "If I don't return, send for Thoth or Kta or one of the powerful mages, for at all costs we must find out what it is and what it does. My child-"

Their lips met, the passion seldom spoken between them like unexpected flame: the fierce, cold, scholarly woman and the man who feared loving as he feared neither death nor foe.

She stepped back from him, like stepping through a door into the cold again. Ghostly streams of vapor whirlpooled around him as he lifted his arms and spoke in his great deep broken voice the True Names of the stars. Though she had heard the mages speak of it, Gil had never seen shapechanging; because of its terrible dangers, it was not anything she had ever thought she would see.

But now she watched, her fear of the ice storm all but submerged in wonder. The mists blew thicker, the light within them stronger, fiercer, lancing out in hard beams to outline the leaves of the blowing oak trees.

The core of heat that surrounded Ingold thinned, condensed with the inward turning of his concentration as he drew power from his bones, his. flesh, from the molecules of his blood. Lines of strain gashed his face as he called on his deepest reserves of power to change his own essence, the inner armature of his self, into something other than human.

Lightning flowed, cold and blue around him, dimming as the heat dimmed, until the power was only a fugitive sensation, like the attenuated whisper of spider-silk in sunlight. The vapors braided themselves into an upward-moving helix in which Ingold was no more than a half-guessed shape, arms upraised, head thrown back, foxlight luminous in his long hair. Gil seemed to hear the beating of wings, as when she had stood in the plaza in front of Royce Hall at UCLA and flocks of pigeons had taken to the air around her; she could almost smell feathers, the thin, coppery tang of blood.

Back inside, Yoshabel brayed, furious and scared, sensing the magic that charged the darkness. Great, Gil thought. You have a hissy about Ingold and you can't sense the ice storm that's going to turn you and me into Swanson's frozen entrees. So much for animal instinct.

The fog whispered with an inner pulse of light, and all around her stone and wood and the madly whipping leaves of the trees seemed to answer with a shimmer of that which was not light.

Gil raised her hand a little, knowing he was beyond seeing her, and thought, Don't die

... Within the numinous coil she saw him move. The air changed, a wave of heat utterly unlike the spells of warmth, the dreadful heat of atomic matter altering shape and nature.

The column of mist itself stretched skyward, a dozen feet, two dozen, lightless levinfire incandescent around it. Then Ingold cried out in pain or triumph. The cloud seemed to collapse from within: the vapor poured earthward and streamed away in all directions, swirling over her feet.

The trees gave one final shudder and were still. Ingold was gone.

Gil walked to the place where he had been and knelt to feel the earth. It was warm under her hand. A peregrine feather lay on the imprint of the mage's naked feet. The night was suddenly very cold.

In her travels with Ingold, and her explorations of the countryside with the Icefalcon of the Guards, Gil had encountered gaenguo before. Millennia ago, victims had been bled to death in those deep pits and caves beneath the earth.

But memory is long, even when not unpleasantly refreshed by the reappearance of allegedly extinct horrors. Gil did not think she'd find bandits, White Raiders, or wandering gangs of Alketch mercenaries taking refuge anywhere beneath the ground.

Most people in the Keep couldn't even be brought to go willingly into its crypts.

As she hastened through the black trees as swiftly as she dared, her fear increased with the very stillness of the windless night, for there was no way of telling how long it would be before the butcher winds hit. None of the other wizards-with the possible exception of Kta, who wasn't precisely a mage anyway-considered Ingold's theories about predicting ice storms more than a few minutes ahead at all practicable. (Gil did not doubt the accuracy of his prediction for a moment.)

She felt as if she walked with an unseen arrow aimed at her back. Worse. She had survived arrow wounds.

The sacrificial mound at Hyve was protected by old cellar doors, which Gil herself had closed and barred two or three seasons back when she first explored the place. It stank of foxes, causing Yoshabel to balk and back and refuse to enter, and Gil dragged brutally on the bit, in no mood for another tantrum. Two hours and more had gone by since Ingold vanished into the light-laced fog.

Any time, she thought. Any time. Her hair prickled on her nape.

A rock ramp led from the slab-roofed upper chamber beneath the hill to the corbeled one far below. Gil kindled a horn lantern from the little firebox of smoldering moss on Yoshabel's saddle bow.

It threw about as much light as a dying flashlight bulb on rough-cobbled stone walls, on the dark earth before her, puddled with damp, and on the lip of the pit. Gil knew that the pit was smooth at the bottom-that no stairway led farther down to the deeper realms that had been the Dark's.

There were only broken skulls, scattered bones. This had been the final refuge for those in the house on the hill above, the house that stood no longer. The Dark had come here, too.

Returning to the wall near the door, she hoped the place was deep enough to be safe from the coming nightmare cold, that the curves of the stone ramp would be sufficient to keep out the worst of the wind if the place took a direct hit.

From the packs she pulled Ingold's robe and mantle, and threw his surcoat across Yoshabel's back, for which favor the mule tried to bite her again. Her back to the wall, Gil settled into as tight a ball as she could, drawing in on herself, pressing her face to the coarse-woven brown wool that smelled of old campfires, of herbs, of the subtle freshness of his flesh. Don't die.

Two days' walk to the Settlements. Two hours' flight for a falcon. If the night's cold didn't kill it. If it wasn't brought down by some larger, fiercer creature, an eagle owl or a wolf. If it didn't forget that it had once been a wizard; if it remembered that there was a killing storm on the way; if it remembered how to transform itself back into a wizard again once its goal was reached. It wasn't that mages died of trying the spell, Thoth told her once. Some did, of course, for the strain of transformation was appalling. But many more simply continued their lives as animals, the memory of human magic, human faces, human families sliding from their small, intent animal brains. The most adept at transformation were the most in danger, it was said. There'd been at least four such dwelling in Quo when the City of Wizards was destroyed.