Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

She looked around quickly for Ingold, but there was an anger flaring in her, cold and deliberate-she knew the old man could get the two of them past the soldiers just by causing a couple of the horses to spook, but that wasn't what she wanted.

Above her in a thick carved shrine projecting from the wall she heard a girl sobbing, "I won't do it! I won't do it!" over and over; the babble of voices, soprano mostly and terrified, was growing louder as the heat-dance from the fires began to waver against the high windows and smoke poured in to roil in the ceiling's pendants and hammerbeams.

She wanted to kill them, those men in the square. Like the heat-dance the lying visions shuddered in her mind, hands holding her down-Ingold's hands. Angerless cold rose in her like a wave.

"Are you a bandit?" a voice beside her asked. "A robber?" The tone was that of one who seeks information only.

She looked around. It was the priest, Father Crimael.

"No. Just a woman who wants to travel without getting raped." She saw herself reflected in those light gray eyes, a thin, tall woman with a scar down one side of her unveiled face and hair like braided storm-wrack, a killing-sword in her belt and terrible knowledge in her eyes. If there was anything more, she could not tell it.

The priest didn't look more than twenty. He wore bright glass saint-charms around his neck and a strand of demon-scaring beads. "You're a northerner," he said, as if that explained it. "Will you help? We need every weapon. Your father, too, carries a sword- can he use it?"

"Just watch him." She looked around. They stood at the foot of a short flight of steps, leading up to a latticed window and the statue of St. Prathhes, recognizable by his attributes of crimson spell-rope, scourge, and poisoned cup. Like one of the wizards whom that most archaic of saints was said to have flogged, Ingold stood at the statue's feet, looking out the window, while below him in the round depression of a holy pit, men and boys took up candles and lampstands, handling them uncertainly, not sure how to use them as weapons.

"Ingold!" Gil called, but the old man made no response. He stood with head bowed, arms folded over his chest. The flames flickering outside emblazoned his scarred face and bloodied the white of his beard and the pale wool of his shirt. Smoke poured in through the window bars around him. She sprang up the stairs, Father Crimael at her heels, and called out again, "Ingold...!"

She reached the window just in time to see the fires die out of the blazing wood that surrounded the church. The Spell of Tongues gave her an accurate idea of what the captain and his officers said on the subject. Interesting imagery, to say the least Tsman-el kicked the wood, thrust at it with his sword. Shouts from around the other side of the church indicated that the bonfires built there had gone out, too. Ingold shifted his stance a little, drew a deep breath, but his scarred eyelids remained shut, only shifting a little with the movement of the eyes beneath. Gil had to suppress the urge to laugh with angry delight. The bandits tried twice more to get the fires going again. They might just as well have been putting tinder and flint to bricks. On the second effort a man yelled, "Damn it, Captain, my fire-box has gone out!" Other troopers rushed to their saddles, where many carried fire-boxes of horn in which, with assiduous feeding on bits of moss and tinder, a couple of smoldering coals might be nursed along all day. The ensuing commentary was unedifyingly awesome.

"Who's the heretic now, eh, saint-kisser?" the captain yelled, swinging astride his black horse again and looking up at the young priest framed in the traceries of the window.

Men were coming out of all the houses around the square, with sacks of seed millet, chickens, and the bleeding carcasses of pigs and pot-dogs slung over their shoulders. "Heretic and hypocrite as well, demons bugger you for a thousand years! Who gets to deal with the Judges now, and the saints, and the fires of Hell?" "My, aren't the grapes sour today?" Gil remarked, watching the bandits ride past the church in a great choke of dust that glittered goldenrod in the slanting afternoon light. "Doesn't want to risk-"

The priest had gone. Ingold leaned his back against the striped pillars that flanked St. Prathhes' shrine, his eyes still closed, his breathing deep now and even. With his arms folded before his breast, he was closed in on himself, walled within his own private thoughts.

The twisted images of her own mind gone, it occurred to Gil that he'd probably just saved almost as many people as had perished in the Settlements, if not from the quick murder of the ice storm, then from something slower, more wretched, more agonizing.

People were emerging from the church door. From her post:n the window she could see them around the corner of the building, peer furtively about them to check if any soldiers remained, then scatter at a run to their houses.

From between two houses that fronted the square, a young girl emerged, barely able to walk, her veil held in front of her face with both hands and her skirt torn and streaked with blood. A woman ran from the door of the church and caught the girl in her arms as she fell.

The priest's voice came soft to Gil's ears, asking, "Is it true?"

Ingold opened his eyes and looked at Father Crimael, who had come once more to the top of the little flight of steps. The sun fractured like blue topaz in his eyes. "Yes," he said at length. "Yes, it's true."

The priest's soft mouth tightened and he turned his face away. "They were right," he whispered, "who said that the Lord of Demons is subtle, and crueler than death. The holy place protected us from the horrors of war, but it could not guard us against Evil."

"What the hell...?" Gil stared at that tormented young face, uncomprehending.

"I assure you," Ingold's voice cut in gently over hers, "none of the people protected within these walls by my magic owes the Evil One a thing. I quenched the fires, not they, and I did it solely because I would not see them harmed." A woman walked below the platform where they stood, going late out of the church; she carried a boy of two and led another, ten years old and pretty as a girl, by the hand.

Ingold watched them, a kind of bitterness in his eye, as if he knew from terrible experience what happened to pretty boys as well as pretty girls, and not-so-pretty girls, and fairly ugly grandmothers, when soldiers sacked a town. "They have their lives and their freedom, to choose and find the good. Where lies the evil in that?" There was sorrow in the young priest's face, as if he heard sentence of his own death.

"All things that arise from Illusion partake of Evil," he said. "The Hand of Illusion lies upon it, and upon you, and now upon them by extension, and on this whole town."

He laid fingers like black velvet, workless and fine, upon Ingold's arm, and his eyes were pleading-Gil wondered for whose forgiveness. "I believe you meant only good, my friend. But the Lord of Lies has lied even to you, masking from your own eyes why you did what you did. Masking from you the stench of evil that touches all illusion, all magic, all things of his, no matter how they are meant."

In one of the houses close by the square an old man's quavery voice lifted, crying out in horror at what he found when he returned to his home. The priest's head moved, following the sound, and his face contracted with grief.

"I must go to them." He raised his saint-beads to his lips. "Go now. I won't speak of this to them until sunset, by which time you can be far away. If this lies upon my soul for letting you escape after what you have done, so be it. I believe in my heart that you meant no ill. That you were deceived."

Gil was speechless, assembling the implications of what was said. It was almost easier to believe the whispered lies in her mind than that these people would believe that salvation from the wrong source would damn them all.