Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

"I know now that it isn't always like that between men and women." She raised her eyes and looked steadily at Ingold, then past him to Gil, and what was in them was more terrible than tears, more terrible than anger. "My ladies tell me that men aren't all what Vair is. If they were, I suppose women would crush the heads of all their male babies as they come from the womb, as I did with mine. Is he good to you?" Her voice had not changed pitch or level once. She might have been speaking of laundry. "As a man, I mean."

Gil reached down to touch Ingold's hand. "Yes," she said. "He's good to me. He taught me to wield a sword, so that I could protect myself." The gray eyes brightened, curious, interested, and young for the first time: "Truly?" She regarded Ingold again, and for that moment Gil felt the vitality of this girl, the energy buried beneath the controlled and vicious calm. "I didn't think-" She stopped herself-she was a woman who had learned early to weigh each and every word that passed her lips-and simply said, "It is good." The cold returned, a steel visor clanging shut, and after a few moments she went on.

"As soon as I could walk again after the wedding, I ran away. I stole a horse and rode out from the Hathyobar Gate. I don't know where I thought I was going. I was only twelve. At that time all my uncles wanted the match, though later they changed their minds. Vair came after me himself with his men.

"I was so frightened of what he would do that I rode up into the hills and let the horse go and hid in the tombs. It was night. That was the year it first grew cold enough to kill the cane and the papyrus. I dreamed about the three priests in the ice." "And how did you know," Ingold asked, in the scratchy velvet voice that seemed itself a part of dreaming, "that they were priests? Your nurse called them devils." "I don't know," the girl said softly. "Yes, I do, though." She closed her eyes, remembering, the eyelids creased with powdered gold. "They worshiped... they worshiped... Her. They were magicians, but their magic was a song of worship, a song of power, for Her, in the pool."

"Yes." The word itself was the breath of white smoke, rising from the seethe of that gelatinous pool; the dark shape visible under the surface, dark and huge and waiting. "They had worshiped in that single spot for so long, drawing up power out of the earth for her, that the rock was all worn away," she went on. "Every now and then their magic made the rock itself ooze creatures, dreadful things, things that crawled a few feet and died. I think I dreamed," she said. "I went through rooms, through corridors-through a crack in the wall. Through ice. I must have fainted but I don't remember. It was cold."

She brought up her hands, crossing them over ripe, upstanding breasts; she looked frail, sitting there on the ladderstep with her gold-slippered feet not quite touching the floor.

"They were keeping her alive with the power they drew from the earth. Singing songs to her, worshiping her; waiting for her to awaken, to speak. I thought that when she waked she would know my name-I was afraid of what would happen when she spoke. I don't know how I knew that."

She looked up at Ingold again, the frozen calm gone from her eyes. "Who is she? Did you see her when you fought the priests beneath the ice?"

"She is the Mother of Winter, my child... my children." He managed to stretch out a finger to touch the side of Gil's hip.

"When the gaboogoos and the servants of the ice-mages drove me inward into the tomb-when I knew that I had to confront them then or die-I heard them singing of her. To her. She is the Life Tree of a world that ceased to exist when first the sun shone warm enough to admit the growth of green plants in the world. In her body the seeds

of all the life that world knew.

"She is Wizard Mother, the sanctuary of the flesh, her magic the repository of the understanding of the final shape, the destinies, the essences, of those creatures, that world. Hers is the magic of the heart and the flesh, not of the mind. The magic of mothers, of seeds, of the future imprisoned in a thought. She has waited a long time." "For what?" Yori-Ezrikos' deep voice sounded loud in the gloom. Ingold did not immediately reply. Gil wondered that she felt no surprise at what the wizard had said. It was as if she had known it all along, as if her blood understood-the poison of quicksilver and diamonds that ran with the human blood in her veins. Maybe, she thought, she had dreamed it. Gil said softly, "She's waiting for the Winter of the Stars." When he still did not speak, she went on, "The world goes through phases-eons-of warmth and cold. You'll find reference to that idea in the books of the Old Gods sometimes, or the fragments of them that remain. I think it has to do with huge clouds of stellar dust passing between the Earth and the sun, blocking off the sun's heat-probably changing the color of the stars. At least the Scroll of the Six Gods speaks of it."

Yori- Ezrikos shook her head. "These things are forbidden in the South." Gil bit back another tart remark and said only, "That book speaks of cycles-some of the most ancient magical texts do, too. From everything I can guess, these clouds can stay in place for thousands of years, sometimes tens of thousands, before they pass on again."

Let's not get into the subject of celestial mechanics-it works just as well this way as saying the sun passes through dust clouds, trailing its planets behind it. "That's why the Dark rose-because the world got colder, their herds died, and they had to hunt on the surface of the Earth. But before the Dark, before the birth of humankind, there were other things on the Earth when it was cold and dim-things that had minds and could work magic, though the magic is not magic as we understand. When the world got too warm for them, they retreated, hid themselves away in the heart of the glacier to wait until the cold returned again."

"Is this true?" Yori-Ezrikos looked up at Bektis, who cleared his throat, stroked his white beard, and looked solemn. "Your Munificent Highness, Ingold Inglorion is the greatest loremaster living, with the possible exception of Lord Thoth Serpentmage. But I, too, was educated in the City of Wizards; I have studied as deeply and as widely as he. And never have I heard or read a word of what he says, much less of the fantasies dreamed up by this deluded young woman. Giant clouds of dust floating between us and the sun? Where does this dust come from? Why aren't we all choking and sneezing on it? I grant you-" He spread his hands with practiced expressiveness. "-Lord Ingold clearly encountered something out of the ordinary in the Blind King's Tomb. But you yourself know there are wild dooic in the hills, mountain apes and creatures fiercer still in these degenerate days. The notion that something magical dwells up there, something evil, something whose destruction will reverse what seems to be a completely natural cycle of colder winters-"

"But it is not natural." Ingold opened his eyes. His voice was faint and infinitely weary, that of a prophet speaking from the dust. "Neither will it abate until all the world is covered in ice, locked under a mantle of slunch upon which feed such creatures as the Mother of Winter holds within her body and can summon from her memory, can create and can control."

He drew himself up a little against the wall, his blue gaze now crystal hard. "By that time, I assure you, Bektis, you and I and everyone in this city-every human being in the world, will be dead. But that point is moot."

He turned back to Yori-Ezrikos. "The answer to the question that everyone is so politely refraining from asking me, is no. I am not mad. I thought I was for a long while-the time it took to journey here, the days Gil and I spent at St. Marcopius Gladiatorial Barracks. I had no way of knowing whether my visions were anything but lunacy at best or some complicated trick or trap. And I can't pretend that having my sanity confirmed yesterday by what I saw in the Blind King's Tomb comforted me much. I would infinitely prefer madness to the knowledge that my suspicions were true."