Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

Gil woke up cold, with something crawling across her leg. She reached to brush it away and drew her hand back fast, a gaboogoo the size of a large cat staggered from her touch on crablike legs. Something warmer grasped her fingers. Ingold's hand. Nausea swamped her. "Isn't this where I came in?" "I beg your pardon?"

She realized her speech was slurred, nearly unintelligible, but didn't bother to repeat her comment. She didn't recall what she meant.

Impenetrable white mist curtained the chamber, still as death. The blue glow around them had waned, and only the single dim magelight burning above Ingold's head reflected on the fog. Gaboogoos continued to crawl in and out of the hazy ring of light, claws skidding and clicking on the ice, which had become slick around them from the heat of Bektis' sphere of protection.

By the way the mists didn't come near them, Gil guessed the spell of protection included a self-contained atmosphere. Given the amount of carbon dioxide now in the chamber, they'd have been quite dead without it.

Both wizards looked like a couple of teaspoons of warmed-over death. For once Bektis didn't look indignant, or irritated, or anything but bone-tired. He reached out to help Ingold to his feet, and Ingold helped Gil.

"Come," Ingold said softly. "You have a right to see this." Hurt arm hanging at his side, leaning heavily on his staff for support, he led her to the edge of the pit, where the pool had been.

The liquescent, half-frozen oxygen was gone. Only shreds of smoke remained, curling from the black throat of the volcanic vent. The Mother of Winter lay on a ledge some fifty feet down; the chasm plunged beyond her to endless night in the bowels of the earth.

There was no contortion in the great, glistening shape of gelatinous flesh, no sign of struggle, of anger, of resistance. The treelike head lay turned away from them, the long mane of blue fern trailing wetly over the edge, mist-wreathed and phosphorescent in the witchlight, the whiplike, spiraling tail losing itself in the fathomless black.

Where the flesh hung like a wet tent from the chitin that shaped her back, Gil could see what might have been the shape of eggs within her, millions on millions of them, a hard black roe beneath translucent skin.

"She's beautiful." She didn't know why she said that, except that in its own weird way it was true. Mother-Wizard. Heart of the vanished world.

Ingold had been right. She had quite clearly died in her sleep, a very long time ago. "That?" Bektis was recovering. His voice was an angry squeak. "Well, to each their own. Good riddance, I say."

"Yes," Ingold murmured, leading Gil away from the edge. "Yes, I suppose you would." He paused and, holding carefully onto her arm for support, bent to retrieve his sword, which lay half under the decomposing black things whose whole duty for eons had been to keep the Mother of Winter alive at any cost, to await the day when the world would return to what it had been. The world would never, Gil thought, return to what it had been. Not for anyone.

Sergeant Cush, Lieutenant Pra-Sia, and the Eggplant met them in the tomb's outer chamber, coughing and cursing, their torches burning sickly in the barely breathable gas emerging from the passageway. "Don't come any farther," Ingold called out, and

limped more quickly to meet them in the knee-deep slunch of the chamber around the Blind King and his patient, wise-eyed dog. He brushed the slimy strings of his white hair out of his eyes. "I take it the gaboogoos are gone?"

"Gone?" Cush made a noise in the back of his throat that could have been a gag or a bitter chuckle. "Like sayin' a chap with the yellows is poorly, friend. They're as gone as it gets in this world."

He led them out. During the battle with the ice-mages, more-and larger-gaboogoos had attacked the tomb, and either lay in pieces or wandered aimlessly about below the steps.

Only a few of the mutant dooic were still alive, the ones who had been least changed, and they were clearly in extremis, lying in the corrosive goo underfoot with blood slowly leaking from their mouths as the slunch-permeated organs of their bodies dissolved. Ingold shivered in the lurid gold of the slanted evening light, grief and pity in his eyes.

Gil turned her own hands over. They were perfectly normal. She put her fingers to her face. The scars were only scars, healing, and rather small. Her veins no longer itched. The constant backtaste of metallic sweetness was gone from her sinuses.

With the enchanted diamond, the poison had been drawn from her, cast back to its originator. Her flesh was free. The silence within her mind was like winter morning, with all the world wakening to peace.

"The gaboogoos themselves just wandered off," the Eggplant reported, scratching his bead-braided head. "Like they just got word nobody was payin' 'em. You all right, Gilly?"

"Fine," she said, meaning it, and the big lunk's eyes warmed as he pulled her to him in a hug.

"And speakin' of pay..." Cush took Ingold's arm in one huge hand, Gil's in the other, and led them down the foulness of the tomb's steps, picking their way through the filthy zone of burned slunch and vitriol, to the great rocks that half hid the tomb from travelers in the canyon below.

Among the blue shadows of the more open ground behind them, the Empress' guards were fetching the horses back from their place of safety, their voices low and distant, the only sound in all that dreadful, wasted place.

Cush lowered his voice to exclude the others. "It true what you said? Now it'll get warm again, and the rains'll be back, and famine and plague'll go away?" His sharp, pale gold eyes flickered back toward the guards where they gingerly inspected the decayed and blackening gaboogoos, the dead mutants, with gestures and cries and demon-signs drawn in the air, and he chewed quicker on his gum. "I don't hold with magic, of course, but... can you tell me who's going to take power then? Which way it would pay a man to jump?"

Ingold sighed and shook his head. "That I cannot," he said softly. "I only said that if we accomplished what we set out to accomplish, the weather would grow no worse, or in any case not much. Slowly, things may improve, or they may not. There's no way of knowing."

"Hm." The director of training surveyed the ruin behind them, the smoke drifting from the chemical-blackened doorway of the tomb, the strained and blood-streaked faces of the old man and the girl. "You did all that for 'no way of knowing'? You need a good manager, you do, my friend."

The wizard smiled slowly and scratched a corner of his beard. "Well, I've been told that before." Cush shrugged. "Hardly worth your trouble, seems to me. Still... that saint-kisser PraSia, he tells me we're to bring you back to Her Highness when you're done here. Somethin' tells me..." He lowered his voice. "Somethin' tells me she ain't one to take 'no way of knowing' for an answer."

"No," Ingold sighed. "No, and since she didn't send enchanted spancels along, I suspect she may be counting on me to do exactly what I'm going to do." "And that is?"

"Not come back to her for a reward." Ingold closed his eyes for a moment, visibly gathering his depleted strength, then made a small sign with his fingers.

Almost in the same movement he stepped forward, uninjured arm held out, and caught Sergeant Cush as he fell, easing him unconscious to the ground. Past them, Gil saw every guard and gladiator simultaneously collapse, leaving Bektis, who had been haranguing Pra-Sia, standing by the horses with an expression of offended shock on his narrow face.

"Well, really, Inglorion!"

"Don't." Ingold raised his bandaged hand to stop the bishop's mage as Bektis prepared to gesture the men awake again. ''Think about it, Bektis." He strode down the sloping ground from the rocks where he'd left Cush, hands tucked in his sword belt, as if the deed to the entire mountain and half the plain of Hathyobar were sticking out of his pocket.