Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

Then moving lightly, he circled past it, and the thing turned to watch him as he stepped to the very brink of the oxygen pool. White fog frothed around his feet as he stood, staring into the depths with the shapes of the alien magic moving like living sails almost invisibly over his head, strange reflections of blue and green and rose passing over his face and hair.

Slowly, the shapes dwindled, faded, and died. An old man with a stick and a sword, in borrowed clothing, he stood among his enemies unprotected, his left arm held stiff where he'd taken it out of the sling. His face was sad as he raised it at last to the dark, shining thing that hovered above him.

"I'm sorry." He spoke soft, but in the utter silence his flawed, beautiful voice carried to the farthest ends of the cave. "I didn't realize. She's dead."

The great mage-priest crouched lower, tentacles shortening, thickening, shifting. The other priests seemed to shrink in on themselves, readying like cats to spring, and Gil felt malice and fury, a heavy pain pounding in her belly and head.

The voices in her mind fell still. Their anger had no time for her now, no time for anything, drawing in on itself, denser and denser, an imploding universe of time and power and rage.

Ingold went on, very gently, "I didn't know it when last I came here, because I could not see the shape of your magic. Things were hidden from me. Maybe from you as well. But I think she's been dead for many centuries now."

His hand shifted a little on the worn wood of his staff, his sword lowered, tip touching the ice at the very brink of the pool. "She lasted a long time," he murmured, almost to himself. "But all seeds perish, if they lie unquickened in the womb of time."

(not dead)

Gil felt/heard like a hot grip on her vitals the leaden rage of their denial. The dark volcanic heat they had called in the earth was nothing more than a clanging echo to this refusal and fury and grief.

(not dead back alive if back alive if) (world will be the same) (back alive if world will

be the same) (make it all the same put it back put it back)

(not dead)

Ingold had to have heard them, had to have felt the swelling of that poison-storm of rage, and Gil could not understand why he didn't flee. Could not imagine standing there in front of them, under the growing horror of that rage, unflinching, only sad. But he said, "She is dead," and his voice was the voice of a relative breaking the news to a grieving child. "You did your duty well. She could have asked for no better children than you, no better gift than your love. There was nothing you could have done to prevent it, nothing you could have done to bring that world back in time. It was only time that out lasted her. I'm sorry."

And the dark condensed, spread and thickened through the blue thin unworldly dimness of the ice-shimmer. Anger. Denial and anger. Hammerblows of rage.

(not so)

(not dead)

(not failed not failed not failed)

Ingold turned away from them, and they fell upon him like nuclear storm.

Gil screamed warning, throat burning, and he turned with staff outflung in a searing explosion of nova-scale light. They struck him in bursting sub-purple glare, like the colors in the back of the brain when the eyes are closed, saw him fall to one knee, raising his sword. She saw no more, though she heard him cry out. But she was moving already, running, the carbon stone bursting fire in her hand.

Mist filled the chamber, surging up from the shapes of dark and X-ray glare, lightning and weighted rage. Mist whirled around her as Bektis shouted, touched her with thrown spells of warmth that could not seem to shake free of the searing cold slicing her mind.

The pool was before her somewhere, covered in cloud-she saw Ingold brace himself, stabbing and thrusting with his staff, saw darkness encompass him at the same moment her foot caught on something under the drowning swirls of mist. She fell, panting, the diamond bruising her palm. The clouds heaved up around her, and the next moment the heat-spells shifted, caught the cold air in an eddy of wind that swept aside the mist.

For one instant she saw before her bare rock, black ice, and purple depths going down to infinite darkness, the slow cold liquid of her dreams heaving and churning with the rage of the mages whose spells had so long held it intact.

And in the dark of the pool she saw it, that floating, drifting wonder in its ferny universe of mane, like a shadow, suspended in what had once been its dream. In her dream it-She-had spoken Gil's name, called forth the life from her body. Now Gil raised the diamond heart, the blood of her blood, the life of her life, while her own blood dripped to the rock and ice underfoot.

The weight of the icemages' fury slammed down on her mind, crushing her consciousness toward darkness, but for some reason the pain in her hand, the sight of her blood trickling like thin red snakes, kept her mind focused. She heard Ingold cry out again and turned, arm upraised, to see him throw himself between her and the three shadows as they reached out for her.

The flash and crack of lightning seemed to split the world, and Gil threw the diamond with all her strength.

Bektis, I hope that spell of protection's a doozy.

The world exploded in a holocaust of smoke and light.

Too much had altered in the Keep over the course of the years to have left the crypts unchanged. What had been, Rudy guessed, the small chamber at the heart of the grid, had long ago been incorporated into one of the less efficient hydroponics vaults, which had then itself been let go to dust.

Thank God we didn't decide to lock the devotees of Saint Bounty in here, he thought, coming through the rough doorway-which Gil had dated at late in the Keep's original period of habitation, whatever that meant. Most of the tanks had been taken out, and those that remained had been converted to storage of grain and dried fruits. Studying the floor, he could see where three chambers had been joined into one. And the central of those three chambers had been round, small... and had contained, he saw now, brightening the light and kneeling to more closely examine the dirty black stone underfoot, a scrying table.

Only the fact that the room was so little frequented let him see anything at all, because no one cleaned here. But in spite of the thin coating of dust and grime, there was no mistaking the round patch of roughness where it had been taken up and moved.

Moved where? Carried away from the Keep entirely, when the place had finally been abandoned? Maybe to Gae, to the palaces of the Kings of Dare's line? Maybe broken up, during some upsurge of antiwizard sentiment? From the pocket of his vest he took the Cylinder and set it in the center of the rough stone circle on the floor. "Brycothis?" he said. "You here?"

He shut his eyes. He was inside the Cylinder, inside the dark small circular chamber in the heart of the Keep. "I'm here," the Bald Lady said. He wasn't sure what he expected. Not this.

At times it seemed to him that he was standing beside the ocean on a January morning, the world an opal of pewter and cold; or that he was in a garden on a summer night, just outside a white marble belvedere through whose blinds light streamed golden, looking at the shadow of a woman bending over an armillary sphere.

Sometimes he had the impression of looking at her sleeping-on a couch? In a cylinder of glass?-though oddly, he could not tell whether she was young or old. Sometimes he didn't know exactly what he perceived. The smell of vanilla and cinnamon.

That bone-deep sense of trust, of caring, of friendly peace. He wasn't sure how to address her, or which way to look.

"I, uh- I'm Rudy Solis. I'm the Keep wizard this summer. But you probably already know that."