Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

She held out her hand, to steady Niniak down off the parapet. As she did so she was marginally aware of the sudden throbbing of wings in the seven-foot forest of reeds along the lakeshore: ducks, swans, egrets leaping skyward. Gil thought,They're attacking after all...

The next second the stones of the wall beneath her feet lurched hard, a grating jar that would probably have pitched boy down if he hadn't been held. The sentry grabbed for the parapet, swearing, and Gil pulled Niniak down quickly, knowing there'd be an S-wave in a second or two.

The S- wave was gentle. The whole thing couldn't have been more than a 4.8 here, but Gil felt cold in her heart. In the streets below the wall she heard yelling, cursing, a woman's scream-it didn't take much these days to set people off. Church bells jangled in every tower in the town. A moment later smoke stung her nose, rolling in billowing white sheets from n tenement; Gil swore. A stove or a lamp-the tenements were all so flimsily built, they'd sway like hula dancers in a quake. Down the street she could see that a half-collapsed church, the residence of hundreds of squatters, had come down completely. A woman was digging at the rubble, screaming.

Niniak yelled, "Damn bitch-festering witches!" his silvery eyes wide with terror. "What?" Gil said.

He looked up at her as if she were stupid, fear fading almost at once before the male impulse to pedagogy. "Witches. They been making earthquakes all winter. They get demons to do it. Earthquakes and famines and-"

"Look," Gil said, "why the hell would witches want to make earthquakes? Or famine, either?" She decided not to get into the issue of why wizards would be setting off volcanoes all over the world in order to cause the cold that caused the famine that caused the plague... Presumably they were talking about human wizards, anyway. "I mean, sooner or later if there's a famine, the witches'll starve, too." "No, they won't." Niniak regarded her with puzzled anger. "'They're witches. They just make demons bring them food. And they do this stuff 'cause they're evil, is why. Like that bitch witch Hegda that lives on Coppersmith Market. She's the reason there's all those rats in the city. She makes deals with demons. They're behind all this, 'cause they hate everybody, they were the ones who raised up the Dark. C'mon," he added, rattling down the narrow steps that led to the square within the gates. "Me, I think that's all we're gonna get for now, but if my glass bottle's broken back home, I'm gonna go burn that bitch witch Hegda's house myself." In the wake of the earthquake a dozen fires swept the city. Beggars and the all-powerful street gangs took advantage of the confusion as the precinct firefighters-who doubled as police-tried to quell the blazes themselves or recruit help, and Gil and Niniak made their way back to the tenement behind St. Marcopius through running men, blowing smoke, dust, and shouting. The boy dutifully escorted Gil to the base of the stair and then bade her a bright good-bye- "There got to be pickings someplace"-and Gil climbed the rickety, endless flights to the sixth-floor gallery, which miraculously hadn't pulled loose from the wall.

Ingold sat cross-legged in the doorway of their room, tilting his scrying crystal to and fro against the light. He pocketed the stone and stood as Gil picked her way cautiously along the narrow planking, staying as close to the adobe wall as she could. "You did well to return quickly, my dear," he said.

He didn't seem terribly worried, and Gil realized that the first thing he must have done when the shaking stopped was to scry for her and make sure she was all right. "Vrango's bullies from the Beehive and the Children of the Revealed Word"-street gangs in Khirsrit often split along the lines of minor heresies- "have already started fighting. It's a good day to stay where we are, I think." An aftershock touched the building, giving Gil the sickened sensation of being in a

tall tree in a high wind. She caught the jamb of the door and clung hard, hoping this one wouldn't bring the already stressed walls down. She saw Ingold staring out through the doorway, not even bothering to hang on; saw the unseeing anger in his blue eyes and the swift harshness of his breathing.

"It's them," she said quietly, "isn't it?" A little shyly, she reached to touch his hand. "The mages in the ice?"

She felt him tense and withdrew her fingers; she understood his caution of her and had kept her distance. In her most matter-of-fact voice she added, "Is it close? The volcano?"

He, nodded, and a slight shiver went through him. "In the south," he said. "Deep under the ice. The dust cover is thick already over the poles. We were right to come here, Gil." His tone was that of a man seeking to convince himself, and he did not look at her as he spoke.

Turning away, he set about righting his flower pots; they held slips and cuttings of roses, a dozen varieties, from yellow to nearly black. Under the rolled-back sleeves of his woolen shirt, his wrists and forearms were welted from training cuts, the old shackle galls white among the fresh blue-black of bruises. "They are there:" His fingers paused on the extravagant velvet petals of a blossom he'd found in the abandoned court of a plague-sealed palace. "I know they're there," she said, "In the Blind King's Tomb."

He turned his head sharply, and at that moment, in the street below where it led off the Coppersmith Market, there was a tramping of feet and voices shouting. Forgetting all question of the structural integrity of the building, Gil and Ingold both stepped to the gallery's splintered and sun-damaged rail. In the lane below a small squad of na-Chandros' black-armored soldiers hurried, surrounded by a flying storm of broken cobblestones, dirt clods, and filth hurled from windows and alleys along their route. They weren't dodging or turning to fight the gaggle of men who trailed them like pi-dogs in the wake of a butcher's cart. After a moment Gil made out what the voices were shouting: "Witch-bitch! Demon whore!"

"Hegda." Ingold stood with folded arms at her side, the extravagant green-and-purple chain of saint-beads he wore when not in the Arena glistening in the afternoon sun. He made no move to check his theory with the scrying stone, for the vicious-tongued old countrywoman who sold spells in the Coppersmith Market had sufficient mageborn power to prevent being scried by another mage. Ingold had spoken to her on a number of occasions-she'd spit on him yesterday for disagreeing with her-and Gil considered her no loss. "They've only been waiting their chance."

"The local Church authorities?" The height of the building and the narrowness of the street made it almost impossible to see down, but as the armored squad turned into St. Marcopius Square at the end of the lane, she recognized the bent, drunkenly staggering figure among them, arms and neck banded with mingled layers of chains of all weights and lengths, steel and copper, silver and lead.

Runes of Silence, Runes of Binding, Runes of Ward, were hung on them, lead plaques that made a curious muffled clashing, spell-ribbons fluttering like dirty pennons, further numbing her power.

"Why would they care? It isn't like she's working for one of the warlords." "Yet." Ingold led her back, gently, to the door of their room, the boards of the gallery swaying queasily under their feet. For a moment his hand, resting in the small of her back, had the old warm familiarity, the ease that had always been between them; then he seemed to remember that she could not be trusted, for he carefully took his hand away.

Looking quickly at his face, Gil saw the expression in his eyes that she had seen there so often these four days in Khirsrit: not wary so much as questioning, uncertain. His eyes met hers for a moment and turned quickly away, and anger went through her, a sickening weary rage at the mages in the ice.