Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

More cries went up from other houses in the town, weeping for those who had not made it to the church, or perhaps only for the fact that there was now no more seed and, like those in the Keep, they faced starvation.

Ingold said, "Thank you. It is kind of you, and that kindness should weigh something with God. Come, Gil."

The priest shook his head as they stepped past him, and he followed them down the pink sandstone of the steps. "If you are an agent of Evil," he said, "even an unknowing one, you know nothing of the Judges of the Way, or the saints, or the rule of the Straight God."

"Of all the bloody goddamn nerve!" Gil looked back at the village for the dozenth time. From the high hill it was small now in the discolored light. "You saved those people from being raped and tortured and sold into slavery, and he's going to 'let you go' out of the motherless goodness of his heart? I'm so overwhelmed at his generosity I think I'm going to faint! What would they have done? Burned you at the stake?"

The wizard smiled a little, as at an inner joke. "Well, since that would have been done with the same tinder I quenched around the church to save their lives, I think most of them would have girned at that. But did anyone in the town possess some kind of rune plaque or spell-ribbon or poison-yellow jessamine or passion-flower are what they use hereabouts-I'd probably have been in for a flogging at least."

He spoke lightly, but Gil had seen the marks on his back from long-ago manhandling by the then High King; she had witnessed, also, the imprisonment and sentencing to death of all the wizards of the Keep by the Bishop Govannin of unpleasant memory. There were dozens of saints in the calendar like St. Prathhes, of whom nothing further was known except that he had been called "Killer of Wizards."

She was silent, treading the dusty way beside him, the dry glitter of the silvery olive leaves all around them, the world silent but for the scrape of insects and the dry rattle of geckos in the tangle of thorn and brushwood.

"The ability to use magic doesn't make a person good, Gil. It's a tool, like a knife, which can be used for good or ill. The Church has traditionally been the check upon wizards who use that tool for selfish ends or who sell it to further the greed of others. Given the nature of southern politics, it's no surprise that attitude has been popular hereabouts for centuries."

"Even if you saved their lives." She knew he spoke the truth. Brother Wend, Thoth's student, had undergone agonies of guilt before accepting that he was what he was. "You know we've found evidence that the wizards who built the Keep, or their immediate successors, were destroyed or driven out," Ingold said. "It could have been politics, but politicians as a rule hang on to a few wizards even though they might throw out the ones that side with their enemies. Only fanaticism makes so clean a sweep."

"And indeed," he went on sadly, pausing at the crest of the hill, "I have no guarantee that poor Father Crimael-and Brother Wend, and all the others-aren't absolutely right. If there is an Evil One, a Lord of Illusion, he-or she-might deceive me so thoroughly that I think I am doing good by saving those people, when in fact I am putting them all in debt to the forces of Illusion, the powers of denial and lies. I wouldn't know the difference."

He shook his head, old doubt, old guilt, old horror a shadow on his face. "The same way I do not know whether the vision I saw in the Nest of the Dark Ones was correct; whether my quest is madness that will leave the Keep undefended to its doom." Gil was silent. The subject of madness was a tender one with her, and she shied from it. The voices in her mind were quiet, only the thread of music remained, far back, and that odd, sweetish smell.

She felt her wrist bones again, wondering if Ingold's silence about the changes she felt sure were taking place stemmed only from his punctilious politeness. She felt strange and light-headed, and glad of the chance to stop and rest.

Ingold's face was averted from her. She knew there was something between them that ought to be said, but all that could be said had been said... And it would change nothing. The visions remained lodged like broken glass in her brain, scenes of ugliness and violence that she knew had never taken place.

She was a threat to him, and to the success of this mad journey. It was reasonable, she thought, that he treat her as such and keep her at arm's length.

From here the village looked like someone had dropped a box of toy blocks, white and pink and mostly brown around the edges, ringed in a wide straggle of fences, corrals, sheds, and barns, the stream bright on one side, demon shrines making spots of red or blue in the corners of the fields, and the church a fantasia of color and gilt.

Smoke blossomed from the roof of the church.

"Ingold..."

She pointed. As she did so, more smoke puffed, like exploding dandelions, from the roofs of two houses, then some sheds. She could see people moving around in the square, leading forth a few animals, but calmly, as if buildings were not taking fire all around them. Nobody seemed to be going far water. Nobody seemed to be warning anyone else. There were no horsemen, no soldiers, no flash of weaponry in the tiger-lily sunset.

The people themselves were firing the village. "Atonement," Ingold said. He'd retrieved his dust-colored robe and brown mantle from Father Crimael's house; the sleeve was marked with spatters of the steward's blood. "And cIeansing. Hoping that this will pay off their debt to the Lord of Demons, for saving their lives." Gil could only stare. "They're idiots! Summer or not, it's damn cold around here at night! Most of them have kids. Even if they got run out of most of their food, to destroy their shelter, everything they own..."

"Most people are idiots about something, Gil." The old man sounded beaten and sad. "Only some of them behave like fools about liquor, or whatever drug they've chosen, or about scholarship, or training in war, or learning odd facts about the magical world, or their own personal power... or love." His voice hesitated over that last, and Gil turned her head quickly, trying to catch the look in his eyes.

His gaze, however, remained enigmatic, looking out over the valleys, and he kept his arms wrapped around himself, not offering her his hand. She thought, He can't. He no longer trusts me.

Hatred for the ice-mages razored her, small and cold and perfect, beyond the murmur of their voices in her mind.

On the other side of the ridge they found a dead man in the crimson tunic of some military company pinned with an arrow to the trunk of a burned olive tree. Someone had already taken his weapons, boots, rations, and cut off a finger which presumably had sported a ring. There were bloody gouges in his earlobes where earrings had been. By the amount of blood around him, all of this had been done while his heart still beat.

Gil stood for a time looking down at him, smoke and bloodsmell thick in her nostrils, listening to the cawing of the kites overhead. Ingold put his hand gently on her shoulder. "Welcome to the Alketch, my dear."

Needless to say, Scala Hogshearer's reaction to the realities of learning the craft of wizardry was precisely what Rudy's had been when he realized that she, of all the folk in the Keep, was to be his first pupil. "Yuck! That's stupid! I won't do it!"

"Fine." Rudy took back the book she'd slammed shut, the Black Book of Lists for which Ingold had nearly lost his life in the giddily balanced ruin of the Library Tower of Quo. "Don't. See you." He turned away.

"You can't!" She grabbed his arm, twisting his sleeve. He was reminded of a girl he'd been to junior high with, the daughter of the owner of the biggest used-car dealership in San Bernardino. She'd always had the newest clothes, which never fit her, and the reddest lipstick on her pouting mouth.