Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

As through a mouth filled with dust, Bektis managed to say, "I understand." "Gil's life is to be protected above my own. At all costs." The bishop's mage nodded again. He stared as if hypnotized into what lay beyond the mist-filled gate of the Blind King's Tomb.

Things reached and snapped at them from within, drawing back from the puddles of stinking acid smoking on the steps. Within the vaporous, glowing dimness, the very walls pulsed with the movement of the slunch. Bektis looked about to throw up. "If you flee," Ingold continued in a voice as soft as the darkness of summer night, "I think you're going to find that curse awaiting you about two strides away from the steps. Now come. It is time."

The voices filled Gil's mind, like the roaring of the sea, the flute crying birdlike above them.

They waded forward through the mist, into the dark.

In her dream last night she had seen the Mother of Winter. Unhuman and beautiful, flashing greens and blues and violets, she had risen from the heaving pool of stasis and cloud, and Gil had thought, If she looks at me, I will die. If she looks at me... Mother-Wizard and guardian of the world long past, she had floated in her enchanted pool that stretched down, down the volcanic vent into the world's heart. Beautiful and alien as a snowflake, she had held out her arms, her three acolytes bowing at her feet. The life-forms of all that vanished world had waited in her shining body, peered from the forest of her blue mane, from the contents of her prodigal, scintillant memory. She was back from her long sleep, with all her children singing in her train. Joyful to be living again.

And in Gil's dream the beautiful eyeless gaze had fallen upon her, from those spreading wilds of ferny cloud, a flashing of jewels in mist. The Mother of Winter had spoken her name. And she had died.

They shrilled in her mind. You will die. If you do not kill him, do not stop him, you will die, and your child, your single egg, will die with you.

Gil closed her mind. There was a reason she followed Ingold, through the ground-fog streaming around their boots, through the writhing slunch that sizzled under the spattering blasts of ball-lightning that hissed from the ends of his staff and Bektis'. She could not remember what it was, but she made that not matter. Creatures unimaginable flopped and whistled, struck at them from the air or flashed snakelike from crevices in the rock. Simulacra wrought from the slunch, she thought, striking at them with her sword, decapitating, slicing off legs and tentacles and pincers. She was a Guard, and Ingold her teacher. Only that existed, like a steel sphere within

the red shrieking maelstrom of illusion and visions in her head. She thought the Blind King turned his head and watched them, eyeless, as they passed.

She thought her own hands were white as the slunch, and that she bore two swords-maybe more-in several sets of hands: one to fight the gaboogoos, but another to decapitate Bektis, who walked close before her, clinging almost to Ingold's red-and-black garments in horror and revulsion. To decapitate Bektis, and then Ingold himself. And then she could rest.

The slunch was knee-deep in the inner chamber where Ingold had fought, shoulder-deep where it ran into the walls; heaving, moving, quivering with pseudopods and stalks.

Ingold plowed ahead, cutting a way to the entry to the ice tunnel itself, and the bloated, mutated insects that had fattened themselves on the decomposing cave-apes and dooic Ingold had slain came roaring at their heads.

Bektis spattered at them with lightning and fire: Bektis against whom she had rather foolishly pictured herself protecting Ingold. The tall mage looked grim and scared and furious, but showed no disposition to turn tail.

He understood, as Gil understood, that Ingold was the only thing protecting them from death.

Cold smoke poured at them from the tunnel that led to the glacier's heart, smoke and pallid light. White snakes of lightning ran from Ingold's fingers, skating along the slunch and running before them into the blue eternity of the ice, and Gil heard-maybe in reality, maybe only in her head-the flute that she knew from dreams. The ground stirred beneath them, and Gil caught at the rock of the wall, willing herself not to feel terror-willing herself to feel nothing. Bektis hesitated, and Ingold said, "They're bluffing. They know perfectly well a cave-in will make it impossible for the Mother of Winter to seed."

Movement in the mist. Ingold leveled his staff, fire pouring from its tip, and something like a plasmoid flounder struggled out of the burning slunch underfoot and threw itself at him. He cut it down automatically with his sword, slicing it in half and crushing it underfoot as he led the way down the inferno of charred matter and dim, brainhurting glow.

Yori- Ezrikos had taken refuge here, Gil thought, with the small corner of her mind still capable of thought at all. It hadn't been as bad then, granted; but it was a gauge of her terror and loathing of Vair na-Chandros that she had come this far at all. Or had she only fallen in sleep on the feet of the Blind King and dreamed of the music of the ice-mages and the beautiful, eternal thing sleeping in the pool? The blue light deepened, dense as the bottom of the sea on the glassy curve of the walls. The white swirl of mists around them dimly defined the heat-spell in which they all now walked. Phosphorus shimmered, and all around her the glacier ice picked up eerie ghosts of their movements; she felt cold, cold unto death. Streaked with smoke and grime and blood where two or three gaboogoos had made it past the lightning, Ingold's face was serene, calm with concentration, witchlight seeming to flicker in his beard and hair and along the blade of his sword. They had left the slunch behind. They were within the glacier, walking to its center as if into the heart of a geode, and the dense blue light grew colder, thinner where it hid within the ice.

The ice- mages were not anything like they had appeared to Gil in her dreams, not even at the end.

Maybe they weren't anything like she saw them now: Gil was no longer certain how much of what she saw was real. The floor underfoot-ice, not stone-was worn away with their magic, and a little slunch grew in the pit, but it might not have been real slunch, just something conjured out of the wanting of their minds.

Things crawled up out of it now and then; one of them attacked Bektis' foot, and he crushed it, horrified loathing on his face.

The mages were waiting, crouched together. Aware. Shapes of light like vast jellyfish drifted and danced over the smoking waters of the pool that filled most of that enormous cavern, and in all that chamber there was no single sound but the thick slurp and heave of the liquid in the pool, and the breathing of the three who stood within the cavern's entrance, their breath smoking hard in the heat-spell's despite. Ingold said, "Protect her." Gil could just see the protective shapes he called into being as he walked forward, boots squeaking; cones and spheres and curious, moving rods of power that glimmered and vanished in the air all around him, tenuous beside the shining power-shapes of the priests.

Gil heard them screaming something at her, but shut it out of her mind.

Nothing existed. Nothing. Nothing.

Only that she was a Guard, and when something happened to let her, she would react. From her tunic she slipped the silken bag and felt within the jewel that was her flesh and blood and heart.

The smaller two ice-mages circled sideways to surround the small red-and-black figure walking toward them. The central mage, the great enchanter, reared like a rising black cloud above the pit.

Gil couldn't even find an analogy to describe the domed shielding-if that's what it was- of the head-if that's what that was: the covered orifices; the long muddle of tubes and striking heads or hands or whatever they were, probing in and out like eels from rocks; and cold nonlight pouring from every crack and crevice of it, ultraviolet, pallid, searing. It spread itself out, bubbling, and Ingold stood before it with the quicksilver light glistening along his sword blade, gazing into its heart. Waiting.