Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

Then slowly his body buckled forward, left hand groping to catch himself on the edge of the niche-he still kept a desperate grip on his sword. Gil's mind stalled in horror on what she had done, but her body and her heart kept working.

Without, it seemed, any conscious volition whatsoever, she nocked another arrow, and that one she did put through the throat of the huge thing that clung beside the niche, snatching at Ingold: she thought, He's going to fall in a minute and it'll drop on top of him.

The creature fell first, dead or dying. Gil was halfway to the howling pack of dooic and apes and mutant things, sword flashing in her hand, when Ingold's knees gave and he crumpled forward out of the niche.

What followed was a vile business, a massacre. Gil cut stone-cold at the backs and necks of the dooic, the apes, of everything in sight as they fell upon the wizard's body. She severed arms, heads, hands as if she were chopping at vines, fighting the berserker fury that kept trying to rise in her, fighting the wild urge to start cutting madly at everything and anything regardless, hacking until there was nothing alive, then to turn the blade upon herself.

Cold, she thought. Stay cold

None of them defended themselves against her.

When she was done, she slid the sword into its sheath, lest she use it on him.

Before she turned him over, she saw the barbed arrow point sticking out of his back.

She moved him carefully, hands foul with blood, trembling.

His eyes were shut, but he whispered, "Gil?"

It will be with your name on my lips.

No.

"You're all right," she said.

His voice was a thread. There was no blood coming from his mouth-the arrow hadn't pierced a lung. He said, "Oh, come now."

Cold as death, his hand moved on her wrist. "The priests in the ice..." he said.

"Did you see them?"

He moved his head, yes, and coughed. She felt the freeze of his muscles as he tried to suppress it, to lessen the pain.

"Did you fight them?" Once they'd known of his coming, he'd have had no choice.

What she had seen, she realized, in this nightmare cavern, was only the tail end of the battle that had taken place while she was hiding and scrounging weapons through the trampled fields, the burned vineyards of the Valley of Hathyobar.

"I'm sorry," she said softly. "I'm sorry you had to leave me behind. I wouldn't have knowingly betrayed you."

In spite of the fact that I just put an arrow through you.

He shook his head and tightened his fingers on hers. "No," he said. "No."

Cut his throat. No.

Open his veins. NO.

He's used you, raped you, mocked you, sold you...

She could hear something moving, turned her head. There was a farther tunnel, leading inward still-a mouth of dim indigo hell that vomited forth mists. A shadow, a sense of cold more bitter than anything she had felt. A smell of acrid sweetness. Something there.

An amorphous shape, and the sound of flutes that turned the diamond flecks of poison in her blood to lengthening knives. Ingold flinched, as if he, too, could hear the sound.

"They crushed me like an insect." His lips barely stirred over the unvoiced words. "I could not touch them, nor would I have had the strength to overcome them if I had. They will do... as they will do. There is nothing further for us. The Mother of Winter..."

His eyelids creased in pain, and he turned his face aside. "Come on," Gil said softly. "Let's get out of here."

He made a move that might have been denial, but he didn't resist-she wasn't sure that he could- when she put her arm under his shoulders, dragged and pulled him half to his feet.

His whole weight, nearly half again her own, was on her, but he did what he could to walk. He did not try to speak as they dragged themselves slowly up the long corridor. She suspected he had not even the strength for that.

Behind her, she heard them. Deep in the mountain, where the rock ended and only ice remained- where light that wasn't light smoked sapphire in the glacier's heart, flashed on the slow-churning liquid in the pool they had guarded years past counting-their shadows flickered like pearlized dreams in her mind.

Only once Ingold said, "You don't have to do this, child."

"Screw you. I may go back without hope, but I'm not going back without you."

A square of light in the dark ahead. Stale smoke still burned her eyes, and she thought the copper stench of blood would never leave her nostrils, her hair, her clothing. Her body ached as if she'd been hammered with clubs, and an exhaustion she had never known before seemed to be drowning her. And in that drowning, in the edges of that dreaming, those silvery voices whispered to leave him where he lay, for the insects that crawled in the slunch to eat. It would only serve him right.

Screw you, too. You've defeated him. Isn't that enough?

Evidently it wasn't. He collapsed a few yards short of the glaring sunlight of the entrance, slipping down without a sound, and she dragged him, cursing, toward the light, a filthy and exhausted Orpheus hauling Eurydice out of Hell, with a trail of muttered profanity in their wake. From the dark behind her she felt their watching eyes.

Unlike Orpheus, she knew better than to look back.

Light surrounded them--chill and bleak, but light. Gil blinked in it, shading her eyes as she laid Ingold down on the stone, then straightened her back to look around. A semicircle of men stood on the one shallow step that remained below the door. Others held the bits of horses, gathered in the canyon immediately behind. Armored and armed, most were black Alketch, though there were a few brown or bronze borderers and Delta Islanders among them. Their swords were drawn, a flashing hedge in the pallid light.

The badge they bore upon their crimson armor was the white circled earth-cross of the Church.

In the end Gil thought that it was only bureaucracy that spared her. That, and the bureaucratic mind that could not compass decision. Their orders concerned the wizard Ingold Inglorion, and they had no instructions regarding anyone else.

When Gil stood above his body and said, "Take me to the Lady Govannin," they looked at one another uneasily, not knowing what to say. She refused to give up her weapons when asked; refused, also, to let them ill-treat Ingold, putting her hand on her sword hilt when the bloated, squint-eyed captain made to kick him in the ribs. "He's all but dead, anyway," the lieutenant of the troop pointed out, stepping quickly between the captain and Gil when the man likewise made to draw his sword. "You can see we'll have to get him a horse, if he can sit one. There's no way he can be made to walk."

The captain's mouth puckered up at that. There was something wrong with the shape of his face, Gil thought-the position of his eyes. With a shudder of recognition she remembered the dream of the mirror, thought, He's been eating slunch, like the animals. He's starting to change. And there were a dozen men of the guard who bore the same signs. "What happened to him?" the lieutenant asked, a small, lithe elderly man with a Churchman's clean-shaved head.

Gil said, "It's something I must speak of to the bishop." The captain was still looking down at Ingold as if he were trying to figure out how to kill him without interference from his troop. Gil wondered what voices he heard speaking in his head. They chained him, finally; the metal of the various loops and manacles, and the rune plaques that clattered dully from every spancel and cord, was all black with charring. Red spell-ribbon glared among the chains, red as new blood. Gil realized it was in those chains that the witch Hegda had been burned the previous afternoon. Lieutenant Pra-Sia ordered his men to make a litter for Ingold out of lances and spare harness, for there was nothing growing in the canyon, and the men were looking around uneasily at the unclean things moving in the slunch.