Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

All were mounted-Gil hadn't seen that many horses together in years.

And all were men.

Gil tried to tell herself that that was why people stared at her-though goodness knew, living on the border they must have seen breeched and armed female bandits. She told herself that what was happening to her couldn't possibly be so far along as to show.

Not yet.

But her hands strayed from the harness to touch her chin, her brow, her wrists, and the long bones of her hands. The changes couldn't be showing yet. Ingold had said nothing.

The conviction that she was mutating as the animals had mutated could even be illusion, like the pseudomemories that haunted her dreams and plagued even her waking hours now. Memories of rape at Ingold's hands; memories of his beating her, shouting names at her that it sickened her to recall-if it was recollection.

Sometimes she could remember that it wasn't. Sometimes she couldn't tell, just as she couldn't tell whether or not her arms were growing longer, her fingers turning into spike- tipped horrors like the hands of the thing that had bitten her. She'd look in anything- she stared now into the polished silver pectoral of a martingale-trying to determine the truth.

But the truth eluded her. Sometimes it was impossible to focus her mind on her own image. Sometimes she thought she looked normal. Other times she found she could not remember what normal had been.

"Gil?" He stood in the stable doorway, soiled hay flecking his patched deerskin breeches and boots, his eyes filled with concern. "Are you all right?"

Was he staring oddly at her face? Her hands? You can see it, she had asked, and he had replied, Yes. What else, if not that? She made herself sniff, and said, "I was just thinking that any kind of work is okay for a woman to do here, as long as it doesn't involve defending herself."

Ingold grinned and slipped his shoulders from beneath the yoke that held him to a sledgeload of equine by-products. "My dear Gil, a woman's defense lies in not catching a man's eye and in trusting the saints." The wizard stretched his cramped shoulders and crossed to the bench where she sat, to drink of the water gourd at her side. "Just ask any man hereabouts."

He picked up his staff from the well head and sketched a word in the courtyard dust.

"That's attes: man. See this diacritical mark? It's an honorific, but it's always part of the spelling of the word. All men are Honored Men. Tattesh: woman. Literally, not-a-man or, more precisely, not-of-us, and as you notice, no honorific diacritical in sight." "So we're here in an entire empire that thinks with its honorific diacriticals?" She cocked a wry grin up at him, and all was for a moment as it had been. "More or less. See here: pia'an. Wizard. And pjan: demon." Every house bore hex signs against demons, as well as the customary bright-painted images of God's saints. "Those two dots there mean nonhuman. You'll see them on the names of all animals except horses, falcons, and cats. The Emperor's horse, falcon, and cat all get honorifics, by the way, something none of his wives do. So one can mortally insult a pretender like our one-handed friend Vair na-Chandros simply by referring to his horse as katush rather than kattush, mortally for oneself, I mean." "Get along to your work, old fool!" the steward called out, returning to the back door. "When Father Crimael gets back, he'll...'' She stopped. From over the courtyard wall came the sound of running feet, women's voices crying out. Then the fast thud of hooves, and men cursing, and a high, shrill child's shriek, "Soldiers! Soldiers!" Gil dropped the harnesswork and grabbed her sword from the bench by her side; Ingold's was already in his hand. The wooden gate of the court blasted open under the weight of a horse, black and fully armored and ridden shoulder-first into the barrier, the man on its back gigantic in armor of bronze-lacquered bamboo. Ingold caught Gil's arm and fled through the still-room door-Gil could hear men shouting in both directions, the crash of furniture breaking, and the steward's shriek of helpless terror and pain.

They emerged into a shoving chaos in the town square, women holding their veils over their faces or their babies in their arms as they fled screaming, children underfoot like terrified piglets. Only a handful of men, most of them elderly, had been working the fields, and they were dying in pitched battle near the town fountain against three times their number of leather-armored soldiers. On the steps of the church, its curlicued facade a clutter of brilliant-hued statues and gilded sunbursts, a man in a red robe who had to be Father Crimael was shouting, beckoning the women and children who streamed past him into the blue-tiled sanctuary.

Ingold tried to dodge down an alley and cut back as three horsemen rode at them, knocking into and almost falling over an elderly man fleeing a house with a bag of money in his arms. Gil cursed the miser as she and the wizard sprang up the church steps and into its shadows, the horsemen crashing after them, monsters of bronze and black.

Among the carnival house of tiny pavilion chapels, of sunken pits and spiral stairs and hanging lofts on a dozen different levels, women crowded, weeping, holding their children to them or shrieking their names.

Down six steps and through a circular pit where a fountain bubbled softly, Ingold sprang, with Gil at his heels wondering how he knew where the back door was-and of course there was a back door that way, but though it stood open, it was jammed with frightened old men and women, pressing back as men in buglike black armor mounted the steps, weapons flashing. Ingold threw his shoulder against the door, and Gil, behind him, thought with sudden viciousness, Shove him out... They'll cut him to pieces...

She stepped back fast. People pressed her on all sides as she leaned her back to a twisted double pillar, fighting to breathe for a moment, her vision narrowed to a slim girl beside her, with Alde's morning-glory eyes staring at her over the stained gray cotton of a veil. By the time Gil's vision cleared, the girl was gone. Hooves crashed behind her, booming within the church's fretted ceiling groins.

Sunlight from the high windows fleered across armor, beaded plumes, the black captain's silvery eyes. Father Crimael, very young, came from among the refugees and stood before him, crimson robes faded but his cleanshaved head smooth as an egg, his face placid with the serenity of one whose reservation has already been phoned in to Heaven.

"Are you a heretic, then, to break the law of sanctuary, Captain Tsman-el?"

"We break no law." The bandit captain spoke the harsh c'uatal of the south. "We're here to collect tribute for His Lordship Esbosheth, regent for the true king. If a man can't pay it out of his goods, he owes what he can give, a woman or a couple of brats. We'll take those, saint-kisser."

"Then let Lord Esbosheth come here himself and make an accounting," the priest said steadily. "But any man who takes any living human from sanctuary is liable before God- not Lord Esbosheth, not the young king, but the man who himself performs the deed. You are liable before the Judges of the Straight Way, and the saints of God, and all the fires of Hell."

The captain grinned evilly. "Well, I can't have that, now can I? Can't let the Judges of the Straight Way and the saints of God be snickerin' bad things about me behind my back." He reined his horse around, its iron shoes ringing on the soft, pitted brick floor, so that he faced those who'd crowded through the door after him: dark faces, brown, and white, peering like demons from among a forest of ax blades and swords. "You boys heard the saint-kisser. Guess we'll just have to wait for volunteers to come out of their own free will."

The men laughed, and some of them called out obscenities to the women closest to them, or to the priest. Even before the captain had ridden his horse from the sanctuary and away down the front steps, Gil heard them dragging logs and brushwood to pile around the outside walls.