Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

"Can't you see it's hopeless?"

"Of course it's hopeless," Ingold replied around a dried fig. "My strength should return in a day or two-never mind what that charlatan said-but even at my strongest I was not a match for them, and I doubt that your assistance will improve the situation much. It would make no difference had I the entire Council of Wizards at my back burning incense and chanting. Without a... a thaumaturgical paradigm for the essence of the ice-mages, without an understanding of the central essence of the Mother of Winter, without a word of command over that essence, I cannot use my magic to combat theirs. It becomes, as it did before, a contest of strength between me and the gaboogoos. Even with the Empress' guards protecting us, we shall be hopelessly outnumbered before we even reach the tomb."

"Then why go?" Bektis demanded. He strode to the wallbench, crouched beside it so that his handsome, pale face was level with the other man's. "Listen, I've never known a guard who wouldn't take messages out, at least." He pulled from his finger one of his many rings, a cabochon diamond caught in the grip of an emerald-eyed golden lion.

"Govannin would never let me go if she knew of this outrageous plan of Her Highness'. She'd never let me be put in a position of danger. I'm too... too valuable to her. And I know too much. She could never spare me. And there are any number of warlords who would welcome your services enough to intercept us on the way to this lunatic mission at the tomb.

"Oh, you don't have to actually serve him!" he added, seeing Ingold's face. "Once they take the Rune of the Chain off you, you can take Gil-Shalos here and flee! Govannin would be delighted to see the back of you. There would be no pursuit. You could-" "You display a startling optimism about what people in this land would or would not do," Ingold remarked. "Could you get me a little of that aubergine paste on some bread, my dear? As for there being no pursuit, I should say that as long as-" He stopped, as if suddenly listening, trying to catch some far-off sound, then turned to Bektis with sharp anger in his eyes and held out his hand. "Give it here." "What?" The tall wizard made to rise in haste. But with surprising speed for a man whose doctor had just told him to take two months of absolute rest, Ingold's hand darted out and fastened to Bektis' wrist. Bektis made a move to wrench free, and discovered, as others had before him, that Ingold had a grip like a crocodile's jaws. "My scrying crystal," Ingold said mildly. "Really," Bektis blustered, "how would I have come by-"

"Gil." Ingold nodded at the other mage, an unspoken Frisk him in his eyes.

"I was keeping it safe for you." Bektis fished with his free hand in the velvet purse that hung at his hip, produced the thumb-sized fragment of smoky yellow quartz, and put it into Ingold's palm.

"That was exceedingly kind of you." Ingold used his leverage on Bektis' wrist to haul himself to his feet and walked, shakily, to the long wooden shutters that covered the lattice wall. Gil strode ahead of him and pushed them farther open; they were enormously heavy and she didn't like the way the old man's eyebrows stood out suddenly dark against his bloodless face.

A thin splash of sunlight fell over Ingold as he pressed his body to the lattice and thrust his arm through so that his hand, with the scrying stone in it, was outside the ensorcelled boundaries of the room.

He angled the central facet to the light.

"Rudy," he said mildly. "It's good to see you well."

It was late when Rudy finished talking to Ingold, late when the old man pronounced himself satisfied in seeing the shape of the ice-mages' power. Rudy had been horrified at his friend's appearance, and by the fact that toward the end of the conversation Ingold was quite clearly keeping himself on his feet only by hooking his arms through the stone crossbars of his prison-but damn, he thought, it was good to know the old dude was alive.

He's got to live, he thought. He's got to make it through this one.

God knew whether he'd be able to use what Rudy had told him, but at least he, Rudy, could tell Maia that no, nobody was born exempt from seeing wizards' illusions, so there.

The Mother of Winter. He shivered. The Mother of Winter. The mother of her world, holding all life and all that had been within her. And all that would be, if her three servants had their way. Tapping the roots of the earth's magic, deep within her unfreezing pool.

Like Alde, holding new life within her... And Gil, for that matter, how the hell about that? He grinned for a moment, then his smile faded. Not the greatest time in the history of the world to find yourself growing new life. Gil, he recalled, had always been wary around babies, sentimental as hell but never really comfortable.

No wonder Ingold had had that beaten, wary look when they'd left, knowing he'd placed on her all the customary spells to keep her from conceiving by him.

Holding life, Rudy thought. Like the Keep.

He remembered the Bald Lady again, the wizards sleeping, all around her in the

stupor of exhaustion. We will fail, she had said.

And yet they hadn't failed.

For the first time, he began to understand why: began to understand what she had learned, in her far-off dream of alien power.

In his mind he saw her, curled on the plinth amid the vast web of light whose perimeters defined the half-constructed Keep.

Closing his eyes, leaning his elbows on the workroom table, he called to mind the whole scene again, visualizing the half-built walls, the shadowed pit of the foundations, the scaffolding with its glittering machines, the lines of starlight and fire that stitched between them, holding the energies of the Keep together. Defining what the Keep would be, in a future beyond what any of them would ever know.

In his mind, in that future, he located the niche where Amu Bel hid the food; the chamber where Gil and Alde found the scrying table and where he later saw the vision of the Bald Lady; the knoll of execution with its enigmatic pillars; the room where he and Alde had hidden, six levels down but, he now realized, exactly beneath the plinth where the Bald Lady, sat.

"It's a grid," he said aloud. "The Keep is a power grid." He got to his feet, made sure the Cylinder was in its accustomed pocket, slung his coat around him and hurried out into the corridors, his footfalls a whisper in the Keep's dark heart.

"I'm coming with you." Gil closed the shutter on the thick gold moonlight that flooded the garden. Ingold had spoken to her, on their way south, of the lavish insect life of those warm lands, but even at midsummer the crickets cried slowly and the booming whir of cicadas was only rarely heard.

Most of the lamps in the wall-niches had been put out, the remaining few strewing wavery arcs of amber flecks through their pierced brass bellies along the patterned plaster walls.

"No."

"Bektis will betray you."

"Whether Bektis betrays me or the sky falls makes no difference." He had returned to the wall- bench, where it deepened into a decorated sleeping niche, and was invisible save for the blur of his hair and beard and the glim of eyes. His deep voice sounded endlessly tired.

"Whether we ride forth tomorrow or next month makes no difference, though I'm inclined to believe it will be the former, since God knows what our hostess told the bishop about Bektis' whereabouts. Even that..."

He gestured, and despite the spells laid on the room, for a moment the ghostly, flickering simulacrum of an illusion shimmered in the darkness, the precise arrangement of advancing and retreating cones that Rudy had shown him through the crystal. "Even that, illuminating-and astonishing-as it is, will make little difference in the end."