Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

"Hell, me, I don't see what the problem is," the boy went on cockily. "It don't really matter who she marries-the generals gonna run the country anyway. I'll marry her and live in the palace and eat meat every day and do whatever they say." Gil, who had met Vair na-Chandros when he was in charge of the Alketch effort to assist and conquer the remainder of the Realm of Darwath, had her own reflections on how long anyone would last who shared even the illusion of power with that treacherous gentleman, but she kept them to herself.

Niniak would have bristled at the merest suggestion that he couldn't take care of himself in any situation, and when Ingold wasn't around, had adopted a protective

attitude about her as well.

He'd given her a tin demon-catcher-a sort of filigree ball with a bit of colored glass inside-and a couple of strings of saint-beads, but when they reached the stairway that ran up the side of the tenement, he bounced up ahead of her as a matter of course. He was the male. He might have no shoes on his feet, but he had an honorific diacritical on his name. Of course he'd go first.

Gil smiled and ascended the stair in his wake. At least Niniak hadn't noticed-or hadn't mentioned-anything strange in her appearance. But in a world where all women went veiled, she reflected, that was no guarantee he'd notice even a major mutation. She guessed, too, that Ingold had other reasons for lingering in Khirsrit. The journey south had been an exhausting one. Scarce as food was in that cruel summer, with starvation walking openly in the lower quarters of the town, those connected with the half-dozen gladiatorial schools ate well.

In spite of teaching and sparring eight and ten hours a day-hard physical training against men a third his age-Ingold looked better than he had when they were living off the famished countryside.

The wounds on his back and arms were healing, the new scars fresh-red and shocking among the older marks and weals when he stood, half stripped, booted feet apart, in the sand of the ring. Most of the time he didn't even draw his sword until halfway through the bout, contenting himself with effortless dodging and sidestepping and a spate of mild commentary.

In a way, Gil knew, he was enjoying himself. This was his vacation. He was resting, gathering himself for the meeting with the mages under the ice. There was never a time when Gil was not conscious of them. She feared sleep, for her dreams were foul, and the visions spilled over into waking memory. But such was her exhaustion-or the effect of the poison still working in her blood-that she was tired all the time, sleeping in spite of the heat in their chamber on the uppermost floor, and in spite of the noise of the families who had rooms all along the gallery, who fought and fornicated and shouted deep into the brief nights.

She slept in the daytime as well, with the rickety wooden shutters bolted that led onto the gallery-the room was sufficating, but her instincts as a Guard would not permit anything else. In her dreams she sometimes saw the pool of heaving mists shimmering in the blue nonlight of the glacier's howl, heard the singing of the ice-mages as they wrought their spells.

Sometimes she would know what they were singing and would wake with hammering heart to see Ingold, sitting in the opened huff of the shutters, gazing out into the starry night.

The day after the end of the Hummingbird Games there was a rumor that Esbosheth's army was going to make a try on the Hathyobar walls. Gil and Niniak walked down to the Southgate quarter and sat on the parapet overlooking the jewel-blue darkness of Lake Nychee and the half-burned counterpane of gold and green and black that were the fields visible beyond.

No army showed up. Vair na-Chandros' men waited in gold and black, phoenix-headed barges drawn up around the water ways, painted holy banners stirring in the sullen breeze, and the generalissimo himself put in a brief appearance in his renowned cloak of peacock tails, but by that time people were getting bored and leaving. On the rose-red walls themselves, Gil felt queerly exposed, visible to the looming shape of gray and black and green and killing white that was the Mother of Winter, a crouching monster reared against the sky. During the journey south, Ingold had spoken of the tombs cut into the complex of canyons at the mountain's feet, spoken with an edge of distant anger in his voice and the memory of some old pain in his eyes. "Most of the wadis of the necropolis parallel the ridges, just beyond the olive groves, but one of them leads straight back into the mountain itself."

There had been fighting in the necropolis when she and Ingold had first approached the valley, turning them aside into the city.

There were mountain apes up there, too, Ingold had said, and almost certainly gaboogoos. She wondered now about how Ingold planned to reach the place at all, much less find where the entrance to the ice-mages' cave lay. If there were gaboogoos, or mountain apes mutated by eating slunch, no spell of concealment would cloak him long.

From the wall she could see the dark smudges of the trees that marked the mouths of the mortuary canyons, the ruined aisles of obelisks, statues, funerary steles.

She asked, "Was one of the Old Emperors blind, Niniak?"

The boy shrugged. "Me, I ain't no egghead. I dunno." He perched on a crenellation with his feet dangling over twentyfive yards of straight drop to the rocky strip of the shore. "How come you want to know that?"

"I heard a story about how one of the tombs up there-" She nodded toward the mountain. "-has a statue in it of a king with no eyes. I wondered who that might be."

"Oh," Niniak said. "Him." He'd bagged a handful of dates from a vendor, had considerately given Gil one and was unselfconsciously consuming the rest. A man needs his strength, after all.

"You know him?" Gil regarded the boy in surprise.

"Sure. At least Old Haystraw, he knows him. Haystraw's the old cripple who begs on the St. Tekmas pillar-that's on the landside south corner of the Arena porch." Landside was west; lakeside was east. Nobody in Khirsrit ever said west or east. Every pillar of the Arena porch was named for a different saint, and everyone in town knew which was which.

Niniak spit a date pit over the precipice of the wall and craned his neck to watch it hit the pebbles. "Haystraw, he used to be a tomb-robber, till the bishop's guards caught him. But he talked all the time about this king and that king, like they was his family or somethin'. But anyhow everybody, they knows about the Blind King's Tomb. It's way up that third canyon there-see? The canyon splits in two and you push through the trees and go up the left way, and between these two big ol' pillars there's a door and that's the Blind King's Tomb. Haystraw, he says there's this statue inside of the Blind King sitting on his throne with no eyes and his dog laying by his feet. But the canyon's bad luck, and anyway, everything up there's been picked over already."

He shrugged and spit another date pit. "Your old man, he ask me about it yesterday. He crazy?" he inquired conversationally, simply for information.

Gil gave it some thought. "I don't think so," she said. "I'm in a small minority, though." Two, she thought. Three, if Alde's feeling charitable.

Niniuk laughed. "You talk funny. What's a minority?"

"A small group. If five thousand people think Ingold's crazyas a coot, and me and one other guy think he's sane, we're a mlnority. Let's go," she added, seeing one of the sentries on the Wall idling over in their direction. Why any man would assume that a skinny, mannishly dressed woman with a scarred face who made no effort to proposition them was a prostitute just because she was unveiled was a mystery to her, but they all did. About half of them started negotiations with Niniak rather than with herself.