Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

She was one of the few people Gil had seen in the south who didn't wear a demon-catcher. Presumably no stray imp would dare invade the Prince-Bishop's sacrosanct halls. She wore saint-beads, however-carved butter-amber, and very costly. Govannin, she noticed, wore neither. Nor was the PrinceBishop veiled, the only woman she had seen so other than prostitutes. Were women in the Church here, then, legally considered as men?

She wondered how Govannin had managed to seize and hold power enough to dispense with the weight of custom, not that she didn't think she could. To the girl, Ingold went on, "The cold of advancing winter-the winter of the world-has gripped this land as it has gripped others. Such crops as survive cannot feed your own people, my lady, much less thousands of interlopers from the north. I'm not sure that you could even feed them as slaves, though I'm sure some of the warlords might promise to do so."

Still she made no reply, and there was no warming of the bleak eyes. Gil remembered her name, Yori-Ezrikos"Daughter of Ezrikos," who had been the Lord of Alketch and the Prince of the Seven Isles, and no honorific diacritical for you, cupcake. Boys in the deep south received names at the age of six, though the poorer families just numbered them-Niniak meant "third-born." Girls were never named. Vair na Chandros, she recalled, had married the Emperor's daughter against her will: wicked and rebellious, the steward in D'haalac-Ar had called her.

It was Govannin who replied. "We are all tested." Knives of evening light, spearing through openings in the velvet draperies, crossed the ivory hands, the parchment on the floor, then faded from brass to copper to dirty bronze as Gil watched. "It is like you, Inglorion-like all wizards in their arrogance and their ignorance-to

attempt to cheat Fate, to circumvent with will and illusion and this most subtle of snares called Magic, the fires intended to anneal the soul."

She settled back a little in her chair, and her eyes were a shark's eyes. "But a woman who brings drugs to her husband rather than let him suffer the pain of cleansing still sins. And for all your delusion of playing savior to the world, you are still the Hand of Evil and deliver all those whom you save over into Hell." "And you know better?" He spoke without irony, ashen gray and swaying slightly. "I know the law." The calm self-satisfaction in her voice made Gil's heart sink. "The law says that all things proceeding from magic proceed from Evil, no matter how good their seeming or how beneficial their ends."

It was the voice of one who will not be moved, who knows herself to be utterly right, killing others or dying herself without the smallest flicker of doubt as to her duty. From his low chair of ivory and rosewood the mage Bektis watched her, and Gil was struck by the whole souled absorption in his face, and his utter loathing and hate. "Evil is Illusion," Govannin went on. "Evil is Will. What else is magic but illusion and the action of a wizard's will upon the laws created for the physical world?" "As is art," Ingold replied softly. "As is medicine. The first woman who struck fire from steel and flint circumvented the laws of the gods of winter, lady; the first man who shaped a branch into a spear to hurl into the saber-tooth's mouth defied the shape of naked flat-faced clawlessness which he had been given. But I will not argue." He shook back the long white hair that had straggled down from his topknot, his eyes seeming very blue in the hollows of fatigue.

"Those same gods of winter have defeated me. I came south and sought the Blind King's Tomb, in hopes of working a great magic, a magic that would arrest the killing frost that spreads across the world. It would keep matters from growing worse, even if they could not be bettered immediately. In this I failed."

He put a hand out quickly, trying to catch his balance; the guards pulled Gil back when she tried to go to him. Where the chains crossed his back she could see a slow-spreading spot of red on the bandages.

"My lady, what I came here to do, I could not do. I had not the strength, and now I do not know what can be done. I can only ask your mercy, and your leave to go out of these lands, to return to the North, and help my own people there as best I can, until darkness falls."

Govannin tilted her head a little, and there was something ophidian in her movement, as if she were gauging distance for a killing strike.

"So learned," she said softly. "But ignorant, like a precocious child. I acquit you of malice, Inglorion. I know that you are beyond that. Had you a true soul, instead of only the self-blind shadow left you by Evil, I would say that your intent was good. You are indeed the greatest of the mages-"

Behind her Bektis stiffened indignantly and opened his mouth to protest. "-and your fall, therefore, is the farthest, entrapped by the subtlest of the Evil One's snares: the will to save those marked by God for testing to the uttermost. Take him away."

Her eyes moved to Gil. "You stay with him still, child?" Gil thrust her hands through the knot of her sword belt. "I don't think God has a problem with either loyalty or love."

"Don't you?" Govannin said conversationally, like the Devil at tea. "That is your error, child, and your sin. Take them both away."

She folded her hands upon her desk, the parchment on the floor stirring as the door was opened and the guards led Ingold through, Gil soundless in his wake. As soon as it closed behind them, he reached out for her, quick and desperate; the

guards pulled her back once more. Ingold groped for a moment, leaning against the tiled wall, like a man struck blind. Then he put his hand to his side and slowly slipped unconscious to the floor.

''They're gonna attack the Keep." Rudy shaded his eyes against the dim glare of the morning sun, squinted up at the black face of the wall that rose above the Doors, dwarfing them to a small square of blackened bronze. "Sooner or later, they're gonna attack the Keep."

He ached in his bones from testing men, women, childrenCome over here, will you?-and if he saw one more illusory mouse or bug, he was going to go after it himself with a stick.

His head throbbed from experiment after experiment with the Sphere of Life in the crypts, trying this source of power and that: the sun, the moon, the strange source that had saved his life on the fifth level. He was ready to smash the unresponsive, unaltered black ur-potato to pieces with a hammer-There! Instant mashed potatoes! How about that?

The woods around the Keep whispered and crawled with gaboogoos. He could feel them whenever he stepped through the Doors.

"They can't get in, can they?" Alde glanced over her shoulder, across the stream and the fields toward the diseased and dying trees.

"I don't think so... Your Majesty," he added, in deference to the fact that Enas Barrelstave and Lord Ankres were with them, and a mixed gaggle of both black and white clothed soldiery.

"So I don't think there's any need for us to put brushwood around the walls, like they seem to be doing in Gettlesand. Gaboogoos aren't real flammable, anyway." He squinted up at the walls again. Utterly smooth, unpierced by any kind of defensive ports-no arrow slits, no pipes to pour out hot lead, no posterns for little surprise sorties-they were designed for protection against an inhuman enemy of variable dimensions.

He added, "But it'll mean we can't get out."

Barrelstave's eyes seemed to bug slightly from their sockets. He looked down across the fields, where work crews were weeding the new green corn and wheat, which to everybody's surprise had come up and seemed to be doing well. Rudy had studied everything in Ingold's library about weather prediction and wondered if any of it would help him should another ice storm come along.