Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

"Yeah," Rudy said. "Gimme another minute." It was a good bet he wouldn't be able to contact Ingold without a power-circle of some kind to raise the juice for it; whatever kind of interference the ice-mages were able to throw, it came and went, but right now it seemed to be pretty strong. Still, he made the attempt, and got nothing. Later, after the circle was drawn-and at Lord Brig's suggestion he included deer and wild pigs in the Summoning spell-he retreated a little distance from it and built a second circle, though the effort of that seemed to scrape the marrow from his bones, and sent out his mind across the distance between him and the Alketch, calling Ingold's name.

In the heart of his crystal he had a queer, quick flash of the old man's face, floured with dust and scabbed as if from minor battle, peering into the crystal, his lips forming what was clearly the word Rudy? without a sound. He seemed to be in a so of hollow among towering, black, volcanic rocks shaded by withered tamarisks. Gil was just visible past his shoulder, slumped on a slanted stone, her head between her knees.

Then the image was gone

Crowds always made Gil nervous. In five years of living in the Keep, of traveling in the depopulated lands the Dark Ones left, she'd forgotten how much she hated them. "They can feel it," Ingold chided softly. "Your anger. And your fear of them." He put a hand on her waist, protective and comforting, and she felt some of her anxiety ease.

The Southgate quarter of Khirsrit just within the massive complex of pale yellow blockhouses guarding the land road into Hathyobar-seemed to consist almost entirely of ruins: shattered churches, broken-backed mansions studded with demon-scares and some of the crudest statues of the saints Gil had ever seen, clapped-out warehouses lined streets whose paving-stones had long ago been mined for repairs.

Gil had thought the stink was bad in the back corridors of the Keep. Here, night soil and garbage were out in the open, untrammeled by anything resembling Minalde's efforts at regulation. No wonder they got hit with the plague!

The surprise was that anyone was left alive at all. The moment she and Ingold were through the gate, children descended on them, goose-bumped and shivering in rags, whining for money, for food-not only children, but women in tattered zgapchins and stained and dirty veils, holding up babies like skinny grubs, displaying their scabs and their ribs. Men glowered from every stoop and wall and windowsill, thin men with hostile eyes.

"They feel your contempt of them," Ingold went on, in the wind-whisper murmur of scouts in an enemy land. "Open up to them instead of shutting down. They're only hungry and scared."

"Well, that makes seven hundred and two of us, then." Gil forced herself to relax and held out her own hand to a whining child, and said, "We're broke, too, friend-you know anybody we could kill around here for half a loaf of bread?"

The girl laughed at that, surprised, and said, "You c'n kill Uncle Fatso the

Moneylender!" Everybody hanging from the makeshift balconies, sitting against the rose- pink walls or under the dead and dying snarls of vines hooted approval. Another child yelled, "You c'n, kill Hegda the Witch!"

"I'd give you a whole fresh cud of gum for this ol' man here!" shouted a young woman with no veil and no front teeth, either, jerking a thumb good-naturedly at the sleek man beside her, who laughed too whitely and pinched her breast.

Ingold nodded wisely and stroked his beard in an exaggerated mime of a wise old man. "I shall begin a list. I see there's much work of this kind here in town."

What they actually ended up doing for a little bread, wine, and cheese was hauling water nearly half a mile from a public fountain, then swabbing down the floors of a tavern in preparation for the dinnertime rush.

The tavern was in the Arena district, slightly better off than the Southgate but still full of empty buildings and boarded-up houses marked with flaking yellow plague flowers.

There seemed to be a little more money and a little more more food hereabouts, but there was an edginess to everyone, an air of watching for advantage that scratched Gil's nerves.

''I suspect we're going to have to remain here until the fighting in the valley calms down," Ingold said, bringing over the gourd of sour wine to the table near the rear door that the tavern keeper had grudgingly awarded them.

The city of Khirsrit sprawled in the gap between the arms of the mountains like a pearl in a pincer, built on the shores of the lake that filled the original crater, its waters a holy, unearthly blue. Beyond the patched carmine and yellow walls, crystaletched even in distance, towered the snow-marbled black cone of the mountain Gil felt she recognized from unremembered dreams. She did not need to be told its name.

Saycotl Xyam. The Mother of Winter.

She had felt it in her sleep all the long way south, through the muddy and deserted coastal towns that made up the chief part of the wealth of the Alketch before tidal waves and plague destroyed them, across the savannah and over the overgrazed maquis of Alketch proper.

Everywhere they had found villages in ruins, burned to their foundations by foraging armies, broken by the Dark Ones or by plague.

They had encountered no more armies, though, until they reached the Plain of Hathyobar. There, the vineyards of Kesheth were in flames, and only illusion brought them safely through the warring forces of Esbosheth, Vair na-Chandros, and a dozen minor warlords and gangster chiefs.

Now, all over the city, bells began to sound for evening prayers, ring speaking to ring in the complex mathematical permutations that differed from saint to saint. They'd washed in a stream in the hills last night but still looked like a pair of panhandlers, and Gil was getting thoroughly irked at the way both men and women stared at her unveiled face.

She wondered if she would have felt the same had she not been scarred, wondered if they could see the mutations that she was positive were taking place.

She'd checked a dozen times in the tavernkeeper's mirror, as she'd checked, obsessively, in every reflective surface she'd encountered on the way. There was no sign of change yet, the voices whispered. She found herself wondering if the mirror could be wrong.

"It should not be long," Ingold added comfortingly.

"It better not be." Gil sopped her cheese-smeared bread into the wine. "We're out of money, and I don't think we can live on what we make hauling water and washing floors."

Ingold widened his eyes at her in mock surprise. "I thought you and I were going to go into the business of killing people for bread." He sipped his wine, then gazed at his cup doubtfully. "Some scheme will doubtless present itself. In fact, I only need... Ah."

Customers were coming in from the quick-falling, chilly dusk. Most seemed to be small- time street vendors and what looked like professional linkboys, but a group entered amid a great flaring of torches and noise: two men surrounded by unveiled women in thin, tight, bright-dyed dresses and facepaint -and incongruously elaborate necklaces of saintbeads and male sycophants who aped the garments of the two principals.

These consisted of high-cut trunks of gilded boiled leather-their fantastically jeweled codpieces entered the tavern well in advance of their wearers; high, gilded boots; short fur jackets and a good slather of body oil that probably didn't do much to cut the cold of the evening.

"Oh, be still my heart," Gil murmured.

"Gladiators," Ingold said, sounding pleased. "The two with the muscles, that is. The others will be-''

"Roadies and groupies," Gil said, with an odd sensation of delight at the predictability of human behavior. "In my world they followed rock 'n' roll bands. You mean with the whole empire coming apart at the seams, with civil war and golden plague and what- all else, people are still spending money on big-scale entertainment?"