Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

"Oh, more than ever, I should imagine." Ingold's eyes narrowed with a professional's calculation. "Look at their jackets. Red, like our friend Esbosheth's men out in the vineyards, look, they've got the same emblems on the backs and sleeves. I should be surprised if the other teams haven't taken up patrons among the princes fighting for control of the empire. When I was here forty years ago, there were riots between supporters of the teams, killing hundreds sometimes, over the outcome of a bout. I'm extraordinarily pleased to see them." "You know those guys?" With Ingold there was no telling. "Not yet." The wizard finished his wine and stood. "But it's a comfort to know that some things haven't changed."

Instead of going over to the gladiators-who were behaving toward their groupies and the tavern staff about as Gil expected them to-he picked up his pack and moseyed out of the tavern, Gil soundless at his heels.

Two streets from the tavern a public square fronted a low, broad, long building whose walls were vivid yellow and surrounded by porches of gaudily painted columns of plastered brick, garish with torchlight and the final lurid glare of the sunset.

Crowds milled in the arcade and in the square itself, trampling up a cloud of dust that hung like smoke in the lamplight and grated in Gil's throat; pickpockets, prostitutes, drug dealers, and peanut vendors all seemed to ply their trades at the top of their lungs. Among the pillars topaz light flashed on bright silks, on gems real and phony, on embroidered veils, demon-scares that would choke a horse, silly hats, platform shoes with curly toes, on pomaded curls and bad wigs.

Ingold led the way through the forest of columns, Gil brushing shoulders with the bodyguards of the rich and the skinny gum-chewing beggar children. Around her, voices rose in chatter.

Gil saw one young lady in yellow silk display to her friends the blood spattered on the side of her veil: "You think your seats were good? Our box was so close to the fighting that when the Gray Cat slit that Durgan's throat..."

They passed out of earshot, Gil's momentary anger at the girl folding itself away like a black kerchief into her heart. She'd slit throats herself and hadn't liked it. She clung to the back of Ingold's tattered robe and followed through an inconspicuous door that he found with the ease with which he always located doors. A big ugly guy with a broken nose and a club guarded it, but Ingold only moved a finger and the man sneezed so hard he stepped back out of the doorway and didn't see the old man and the girl with the scarred face slip past him into the blue dark of the corridor beyond.

Smoke from burning cheap oil and pine knots hung everywhere like a fog, and the place was rank with sweat and blood. Through an open arch Gil saw a young man in a butchery tunic bandaging a musclebound gladiator's cut thigh; through another, a couple of laborers in leather aprons and nothing else loaded bodies onto a sledge to the drone of an orchestra of flies.

Some of the bodies were women's, clad in skimpy bright-hued costumes, horribly battered and bruised. Some were children. Gil didn't even want to ask. Ingold went straight to the office of the training director, a cubicle between the locker room and the staging area where gladiators waited to go into the ring. Despite the night's chill the big doors into the sanded arena were open, showing men and boys raking smooth the sand. Beyond the locker-room door Gil glimpsed rows of cramped chests and benches.

Cheap terra cotta and plaster saints ranged the locker tops, along with a couple of quite startling pornographic figurines. There were stone tubs at one end and a latrine trench along the wall. A lone gladiator, dolling himself before a polished brass mirror, yelled irritably, "What's that dame doin' here? Get her out!"

Gil ignored him.

Ingold looked through the narrow archway into the cubicle and said, "Sergeant?" and the man at the table there looked up, balding and heavy with a deceptive combination of fat and muscle. "I was told to come see you about a job as a swordmaster." The man cracked the wad of gum he was chewing and took in the ragged, short-hacked white beard, the half-healed cut on the brow, the tattered and bloodstained wool robe kilted high under the sword belt, and the way the old man stood with his hand on the belt only a gesture away from the killing-sword's hilt. "Little old to be doin' this for a livin', ain't you, Pop?" Ingold nodded humbly. "I'd be younger if I could."

The sergeant cracked his gum again. "Wouldn't we all." He got up, picked up the split wood training-sword that lay across his desk with an unthinking gesture: challenged, Gil guessed, he wouldn't even be aware he'd done it. His eye lighted on Gil and he seemed about to say something, then glanced at Ingold and changed his mind. Instead he raised his voice. "Boar? Your Majesty? Get a coupla lamps or somethin' out to the ring."

Ingold passed his audition, not to any surprise of Gil's. She'd sparred with him, both with the heavy training-swords used for his initial bout with Sergeant Cush, and with live blades, such as Cush told him to use against first the Boar, then the King, and then both together while he and Gil held the torches...

She knew he was good. She'd fought beside him against White Raiders and bandits and knew that the mild exterior was completely misleading: when he shucked off his holed brown mantle and rolled up the sleeves of his robe, she could see the awareness of this fact in Sergeant Cush's eyes, though it took the Boar and His Majesty longer to figure out what they were up against. The King, a White Alketch who kept his jewelry on and left his pomaded red-gold locks free during his bouts, was tall and outweighed Ingold by a good eighty pounds, and, Gil judged by the way he fought, was a bully in the bargain, seeking to wound in the face of the sergeant's order for control. Maybe seeking to kill.

Ingold got a scratched hand. His Majesty went to the infirmary. Gil made a mental note to stay out of that one's way. In all, they spent four days at the St. Marcopius Gladiatorial Barracks, though it seemed longer at the time; it was better than hauling water.

Despite the milling and shifting of warlord armies along the ring of lava cliffs that enclosed the Vale of Hathyobar, despite the burning of the farms there, the constant raiding parties, the smaller bands of town bullies scavenging for food in the countryside, Gil sensed that Ingold could have made his way to the Mother of Winter under cloak of illusion, had he chosen to.

He was waiting for something. So she made notes on the histories and customs of the southern lands, and helped him find pots in which to plant the roses that grew feral in the waste-grounds of the city, and slept at night alone with the whispering horrors of her dreams.

I'm doing this wrong, Rudy thought. The Cylinder weighed heavy in his hands, and he was dimly conscious of the way the witchlight shining through it fragmented into a starburst on the black stone rim of the scrying table on which his elbows rested. This sure as hell is not what I wanted to see.

He continued to look, fascinated nonetheless.

Tiny and very clear, the Keep of Black Rock was reflected in the heart of the

Cylinder, like a toy seen through the wrong end of a telescope. At first glance Rudy

had nearly stopped breathing with horror: Tomec Tirkenson's fortress was shattered, the black walls gouged and broken, the roof gaping to the cold blue desert sky. Only at second look did Rudy realize that, though the shape of the Sawtooth Mountains in the distance remained the same, the land itself was different. The scrubby sagebrush and cactus had been replaced by taller, thinner thorntrees and eucalyptus. Grass grew more or less evenly on the barren soil, and brush and shrubs of all kinds clustered thick around the Keep's mined walls. There was no slunch. The past? Rudy wondered. The Cylinder sure as hell seemed connected in some fashion with memory, or what seemed to be memory. Or the future? The scene changed to darkness, and through the darkness he saw her walking again, arms folded, blue-filigreed hands hugging her shoulders outside the midnight-blue cloak, white gauze floating loose around her slippered feet. She was deep in the crypts of the Keep now, passing through rooms he did not recognize: columns stretched from floor to ceiling like forests of wrought crystal that glimmered pale violet and green with her witch-fire; farther on, mazes of something that looked like twenty-foot spiderwebs, winking with lights-the work of an unimaginable magic, for purposes he could only guess. A crypt of water whose dark surface reflected, instead of the black ceiling overhead, a starry sky. The woman passed her hands over the surface of the water and moved on. We failed, she had said to the blood-covered man who had ridden up from his world's doom. Our strength was not enough.