Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

They left Khirsrit before the dawn in barges with muffled oarlocks, and the marsh-birds lifted in startled ribbons from the head-high forests of sedge and mist along the lakeside walls. Wrapped in the gaudy coat the Eggplant bought her, Gil watched them; behind her in the barge, a mare that bore food or weaponry or armor or whatever it was, wrapped under oiled sheets, blew softly and shook her head, the clinking of bridle-rings like the distant tap of a hammer in the morning still. Her head ached. The ice-mages had whispered to her through the night, to slip the dagger from beneath her pillow and cut the throat of the man who sat awake at her side. The effort of silencing them, of telling them to go to hell, made her feel as if she'd spent the night at hard labor.

Whenever she awakened, Ingold's hand had touched her hair, her shoulder, her cheek. The brown velvet voice had whispered to her, words she no longer recalled. And she had slept again, the diamond safe in its silken bag beneath her hands. Only now, looking across to where he sat huddled in his red-and-black robes of novitiate in the prow beside her, did it occur to her that he had not slept at all. He politely hid a smile as a small contingent of Sergeant Cush's gladiators brought Bektis down the yellow sandstone steps of the bishop's private watergate-extended by newer wooden ones, for like all water, the lake stood lower this year than it had in centuries-his wrists heavy with spell-chains and amulets of Silence, and his back rigid with the indignity of it all.

Ingold got to his feet and went to welcome him, nimble in the floating craft, so that it barely moved on the water's surface. The water made Gil profoundly uneasy. The opal brightness near the city walls changed within a dozen feet of embarkation to deeper and deeper tourmaline, then the otherworldly blue of the darkest morning glory.

The barges were passing over the heart of the old volcanic funnel. Gil was not much of a swimmer. If they capsized, she thought, they would never reach bottom, only sink forever into the heart of that azure world.

She fought the desire to seize Ingold around the throat and fling herself overboard. What the hell, she thought. He probably can walk on water. She had to loop the throng of her knife hilt tight around her fingers and twist it hard to keep the thought at bay.

Before them, the Mother of Winter shimmered, nacre-crowned coal. No smoke darkened the rising colors of the sky. Niniak the Thief had done his work well, spreading rumor among the city's various gangs-all of whom had connections to the warlords-that a shipment of food was due from the distant coast, though it was never specified which pass this fictive train would use or who had sent for it; some credit, Gil thought, should be left to the imagination of the generals involved. Her hand strayed to the silken bag again, and she thought, If l dropped it overside now, there would be no retrieving it.

For a moment the thought of the ensorcelled diamond flashing in the water amused her, fascinated her; how the water around it would be first brilliant, then darker and darker, colder and colder, as it sank away toward the world's heart. But her mind recoiled from the thought of losing that second heart, that blood of her blood. A warm hand fell on her shoulder, and she looked up into Ingold's face; standing behind her, feet spread to take the roll of the boat, haggard in the growing light. She took her hand away from the silk latches of her coat and put it over his. I will bear his child. It was as if she were thinking of someone else. If I live. They reached the Blind King's Tomb shortly after noon. The gaboogoos were waiting for them.

"St. Bes' drawers!" Sergeant Cush dragged at the spiked bit in his stallion's mouth as the terrified beast wheeled to flee. "What in the name of the Seven Hells?"

"Oh, very good." Ingold smiled with genuine pleasure in his eyes at the things that crawled, spiderlike, squidlike, squatty and scuttling and barbed and toothed like scorpions, down the rocks in a pulpy white gush.

"Good?" The gladiators were backing their horses fast; Bektis was screaming invective that could have been heard in Penambra. "What the bloody demon-festering hell is goddamn good about it?"

None of the things was bigger than a cat. A bodyguard of five hundred couldn't have dealt with them all.

"It's always gratifying when one's communications are received and acted upon."

The wizard dropped lightly from the saddle of his own mare and tossed the reins to Gil. She was one of the few holding her horse rock-steady, knowing it was no part of Ingold's plan to flee. She didn't even wonder how she would cope when the scuttering things reached them.

"I must beg your forgiveness, my dear," he went on, and ripped the oiled cover from the pack- mare's burden. "But when one's enemies are so obliging as to give one a line direct to them, they have no business being surprised when one uses it to relay information about plans-even if that information is misleading."

The mare was carrying four tall terra-cotta vessels about the size of butter churns; each equipped with a pump

and a leathern hose pipe. Gil laughed, the first sound that had passed her lips since last night. "You bastard!" He smiled up at her, like a sleepy and mischievous elf. "Well-I try."

Gil- who'd been given charge of the pack-mare's lead upon disembarkation that morning- wheeled both her own horse and the mare, holding them in position as the squid- things, spider-things, scorpion-things wavered, hesitant, their advance already broken by the knowledge flooding from her consciousness into that of their masters. The Eggplant had dismounted already and stood at Ingold's side as the wizard unhitched the metal nozzle of the hose.

"Pump it "

Anything big enough to be proof against vitriol was big enough to be cut to pieces with a sword-and therefore dealt with by a bodyguard. But the reverse was also true. "Where'd you get the sulfur?" she asked as the first stinking wave of it sprayed over those small, foul, and wholly undefended bodies.

"My dear, you ask that in a country that lives by the mining of copper?"

"Do we take it in with us?"

The smell was astonishing as the gaboogoos blackened, curled, fizzled on the stone steps like slugs under a drench of salt. Gil realized why Ingold had insisted everyone wear thicksoled boots.

"When you've fought as many renegade wizards as I have, my dear," Ingold said, wrapping his scarf over nose and mouth, "you learn one thing: never take as a weapon anything more complicated than a sword. And never take anything that can be blown up, or splashed back, or whipped around in your hand. Bektis, are you coming?"

"Have I a choice?" Sergeant Cush and Lieutenant Pra-Sia had already pulled the bishop's mage from his saddle, were stripping the chains of Silence from his wrists. A gaboogoo that had only been spattered with the acid staggered drunkenly out of the blackening mess on the tomb steps and snapped with its pincers at the hem of the old man's robe; Cush smashed it under his boot heel.

It made a horrible noise as it flattened. Bektis looked as if he would willingly have scrambled up on the training director's shoulders had no one been watching. "No." Ingold's blue eyes were suddenly icy under the scarred lids. "You haven't. I'm only going to say this once, because I'm sure the ice-mages have reserves of creatures large enough to be proof against vitriol."

He stepped close to the taller wizard, his sword in his hand now and power radiating from his dusty, sweat-streaked face. "If you flee, or betray us, or so much as flinch back, Bektis, I lay upon you a death-curse of pain, of humiliation, of cold, of filth, of regret. I lay upon you a body devoured before your mind departs it; a mouth filled with worms; flesh given over to ants and roaches. Do you understand?" Bektis swallowed hard. Gil thought, Ingold is the Archmage. It was something she seldom had cause to remember. Ruler of the wizards of the West. His words are the words of command.