Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

It was full morning when Gil reached the Blind King's Tomb. As she climbed the narrowing canyon in the flank of the Saycotl Xyam, it seemed to her that she wandered deeper and deeper into a dream, into an alien world; the terrible thing was that this world did not seem strange to her anymore. White slunch patched the canyon walls, then covered them, thin over the rocks, thick in the pockets of soil, enveloping trees, fallen logs, screes, in a rubbery shroud. Things stirred in the gutlike convolutions, creeping forth now and then, creatures she guessed were simulacra of life-forms unspeakably ancient: shelled things with translucent legs and feelers, slubbery mats of moving protoplasm; things that glided along a foot or so above the wrinkled surface and thrust jointed proboscises down into it to feed on what crawled within.

Hatlike things that spit at her from hard round mouths. As a dream within a dream Gil remembered Thoth walking in just such a slunch bed on the plains of Gettlesand, a stranger in an alien world beneath a livid yellow sky.

A river of mist flowed down the canyon, knee-deep, obscuring the wet mat underfoot; she knew its source was the cold of the ice-mages' cavern and followed it, the music very clear now in her mind. Songs of guarding. Of waiting. Of holding all things in trust, until they could make the world right again.

She kept seeing Ingold's blood in her mind, red and hot over the lifeless lard of the slunch.

She kept seeing the statue of the king who had no eyes.

He was familiar to her when she saw him. A black basalt image, floating in a lake of mist in the cut-rock cave of the tomb's antechamber. Slunch grew all around it, up the walls, over the ceiling, a dirty oatmeal river spilling over the steps to the outside. It had put out immense stalks that groped weightlessly in the still air or crawled about on the ground, fat tubulate hoses that opened and shut, looking for something to touch. Gil waded through the mist, the unseen, sloshing, crawling slunch, into dimness lit only by the queasy glow of the alien stuff itself. The inner door was visible only as a smoldering bluish square, as it had been in her dreams, and the Blind King, robed in lichen and slunch, gazed at her with a sad serenity; a glowing thing of a shape Gil had never imagined in her most fevered nightmares perched silent upon his head.

Gil saw Ingold's footprints, leading through that blue doorway, and the footprints of other things following after. Blood streaked and gouted the slunch, and it was torn here and there where he had turned to fight. She wasn't aware of how long she'd been hurting but knew she hurt badly, and all the voices in her mind sang songs about rest. After she took care of one final thing.

She'd walked all night. She had avoided Esbosheth's patrols, and those of Vair na-Chandros, and the armies of bandits in the burned farms and wasted fields of the most fertile valley of the south, without much trouble.

Though she'd taken considerable weaponry from the decaying corpses-including a recurve bow and a quiverful of barbed arrows-she found no horses and had been forced to go the whole way afoot.

A dark hump grew clearer in the mist as she approached it, a pair of dooic, dead, mutated almost unrecognizably: heads swollen huge, arms impossibly long-there were vestigial arms, and other things, growing out of their backs. The cuts were clean and few, Ingold's work, neat as ever. He would have been reconnoitering, she thought, until her awareness of his plan triggered an attack by

every gaboogoo and mutant on the mountainside. Whether he'd retreated or been driven to this place made little difference now.

She felt uneasily at her own face and arms, telling herself for the thousandth time that her own mutations were only an illusion, then strung the bow and nocked an arrow. Ahead of her came frenzied rustling, movement without outcry, without so much as grunts of pain. The short Alketch bow was unfamiliar, lighter than the six-foot northern longbow. She guessed she wouldn't get many shots. The passageway curved to the right. Directly before her a crack gaped in the stone wall, opened by an earthquake, perhaps. Ghastly slunch-light flowed through it, seeming bright in the mist-filled darkness, and a dead thing that had probably once been a mountain ape lay in the gap. It was burned all over its body and one arm was a stump; the blood smoked in the cold. Gil stepped over it, her breath a thick cloud now, lightheaded with pain and with the singing in her mind. The pain is his doing. His doing. He ran out on you, left you to be raped and killed by the gladiators... You were raped by them...

For a shocking moment the pseudomemory engulfed her mind: the Boar, the King, the Leopard...

She thrust it aside. Thrust aside, too, the false image that not only had it happened, but Ingold had been there.

The cavern she entered was perhaps fifty feet in length, that and more in height, narrow, like the nave of a Gothic church. Webs of attenuated slunch dangled from the ceiling, and long kelpy fronds writhed and twitched on the walls. Smoke as well as mist filled the cave, the fetor of burned slunch underlain by the harsher stink of charred flesh. In a dozen places balls of what appeared to be lichen burned fitfully, and dooic, mountain apes, and bloated things were trying to climb the slunch along the far wall to get at a shallow niche about halfway up, where a statue might once have stood, reached by a slender flight of stone steps. The steps had been blasted away. Fragments of rock lay everywhere, fresh and bright, and pieces of gaboogoo, patiently crawling toward the wall below the niche. Ingold stood in the niche. In places, the rock beneath and the slunch all around were scorched and charred with fire. Streams of blood glistened blackly in the slunch, on the stone, all around on the walls, where some had succeeded in climbing up. A lot of them lay dead at the foot of the wall, or were trying still to climb, hemorrhaging their lives out.

The wizard's arms were black with blood, as if he'd dipped them in a vat of it the light of the dying fireballs caught red gleams of it when he raised his sword arm like a man exhausted, to strike at some flapping, toothed monstrosity that struck at him from the air.

His movements had the blind deliberation of a warrior at the end of his strength; and blood ran from the cuts on his face and scalp to gum beard and hair to his skull. Gil saw him put his hand to the side of the niche to steady himself as the creature, whatever it was or had been, fell in two pieces with a spongy plop to the heap of dead things below the niche, twenty feet below his boots-a swamp of gore and cave-roaches and slunch.

Gil shot two dooic in the back before she was thrust aside by a gaboogoo nearly her own height that came out of the tunnel behind her. It ignored her as if she weren't there. She set down her bow and stepped lightly forward, hacked its reaching forelimbs off-it had no head-and then cut it off at the knees.

It kept crawling through the slunch toward the yammering scrim under Ingold's niche, but probably couldn't do much damage. Ingold didn't seem to notice; a thing that had once been a saber-tooth was clawing its way up the slunch toward him, and in the gritty light Ingold's face was like a dying man's.

Gil picked up her bow, nocked an arrow, and fired at the thing on the wall.

Later she told herself it could have been the light. There wasn't much in the cavern, and what there was, from the burning fireballs he'd earlier flung, was fitful, flaring and dying...

So it really could have been the light.

Or it could have been that, at the last moment, her arm moved. The barbed arrow buried itself in Ingold's chest, high under the collarbone. The impact slammed him back against the rear wall of the niche, shadow hiding him as his head leaned back for an instant to rest against the rear wall.