Barbara Hambly - Mother of Winter

Since her coming to this world in the wake of the rising of the Dark, Gil had guarded Ingold’s back. The stable crypt opening into the vaults had been half torn apart by the Dark Ones, and Gil’s hair prickled with the memory of those bodiless haunters as she picked her way after him through a vestibule whose mud floor was broken by a sea-wrack of looted chests, candlesticks, and vermin-scattered bones. An inner door gave onto a stairway. There was a smell of water below, a cold exhalation like a grave.

“When the vigilantes started hunting the city for books—for archives, records, anything that would burn—Maia let them have what he could spare as a sop and hid the rest.” Ingold’s voice echoed wetly under the downward-sloping ceiling, and something below, fleeing the blue-white light that burned from the end of his staff, plopped in water.

“He bricked up some of the archives in old cells of the episcopal dungeon and sounded walls in the vaults to find other rooms that had been sealed long ago, where he might cache the oldest volumes, of which no other known copy existed. It was in one of these vaults that he found the Cylinder.”

Water lay five or six inches deep in the maze of cells and tunnels that constituted the palace vaults. The light from Ingold’s raised staff guttered sharply on it as Gil and the old mage waded between decaying walls plastered thick with slunch, mold, and dim-glowing niter. The masonry was ancient, of a heavy pattern far older than the more finished stones of Gae. Penambra predated the northern capital at Gae; predated the first rising of the Dark thousands of years ago—long predated any memory of humankind’s. Maia himself came to Gil’s mind, a hollow-cheeked skeleton with arthritis-crippled hands, laughing with Ingold over his own former self, a foppish dilettante whose aristocratic protector had bought the bishopric for him long before he was of sufficient years to have earned it.

Perhaps he hadn’t really earned it until the night he hid the books—the night he led his people out of the haunted ruins of their city to the only safe place they knew: Renweth Vale and the black-walled Keep of Dare.

Before a bricked-up doorway, Ingold halted. Gil remained a few paces behind him, calf-deep in freezing water, analyzing every sound, every rustle, every drip and dull moan of the wind, fighting not to shiver and not to think of the poison that might be in her veins. Still, she thought, if the thing’s bite was poisoned, it didn’t seem to be too serious. God knew she’d gone through sufficient exertion for it to have killed her twice if it was going to.

Ingold passed his hand across the dripping masonry and murmured a word. Gil saw no change in the mortar, but Ingold set his staff against the wall—the light still glowing steadily from its tip, as from a lantern—and pulled a knife from his belt, with which he dug the mortar as if it were putty desiccated by time. As he tugged loose the bricks, she made no move to help him, nor did he expect her to. She only watched and listened for the first signs of danger. That was what it was to wear the black uniform, the white quatrefoil emblem, of the Guards of Gae.

Ingold left the staff leaning in the corridor, to light the young woman’s watch. As a mage, he saw clearly in the dark.

Light of a sort burned through the ragged hole left in the bricks, a sickly owl-glow shed by slunch that grew all over the walls of the tiny chamber beyond, illuminating nothing. The stuff stretched a little as Ingold pulled it from the trestle tables it had almost covered; it snapped with powdery little sighs, like rotted rubber, to reveal leather wrappings protecting the books. “Archives,” the wizard murmured. “Maia did well.”

The Cylinder was in a wooden box in a niche on the back wall. As long as Gil’s hand from wrist bones to farthest fingertip, and just too thick to be circled by her fingers, it appeared to be made of glass clear as water. Those who had lived in the Times Before—before the first rising of the Dark Ones—seemed to have favored plain geometrical shapes. Ingold brushed the thing with his lips, then set it on a corner of the table and studied it, peering inside for reflections, Gil thought. By the way he handled it, it was heavier than glass would have been.

In the end he slipped it into his rucksack. “Obviously one of Maia’s predecessors considered it either dangerous or sacrilegious.” He stepped carefully back through the hole in the bricks, took up his staff again. “Goodness knows there were centuries—and not too distant ones—during which magic was anathema and people thought nothing of bricking up wizards along with their toys. That room was spelled with the Rune of the Chain, which inhibits the use of magic … Heaven only knows what they destroyed over the course of the years. But this …” He touched the rucksack.

“Someone thought this worth the guarding, the preserving, down through the centuries. And that alone makes it worth whatever it may have cost us.”

He touched the dressings on the side of her swollen face. At the contact, she felt stronger, warmer inside. “It is not unappreciated, my dear.”

Gil looked away. She had never known what to say in the presence of love, even after she’d stopped consciously thinking, When he finds out what kind of person I am, he’ll leave. Ingold, to her ever-renewed surprise, evidently really did love her, exactly as she was. She still didn’t know why. “It’s my job,” she said.

Scarred and warm, his palm touched her unhurt cheek, turning her face back to his, and he gathered her again into his arms. For a time they stood pressed together, the old man and the warrior, taking comfort among the desolation of world’s end.

They spent two days moving books. Chill days, though it was May and in times past the city of Penambra had been the center of semitropical bottomlands lush with cotton and sugarcane; wet days of waxing their boots every night while the spares dried by the fire; nerve-racking days of shifting the heavy volumes up the crypt stairs to where Yoshabel the mule waited in the courtyard, wreathed in spells of “there-isn’t-a-mule-here” and “this-creature-is-both-dangerous-and-inedible.” The second spell wasn’t far wrong, in Gil’s opinion. On the journey down to Penambra she had grown to thoroughly hate Yoshabel, but knew they could not afford to lose her to vermin or ghouls.

Sometimes, against the code of the Guards, Gil worked. Mostly Ingold would send her to the foot of the stairs from the stable crypt, where she listened for sounds in the court as well as watching the corridor outside the cell where the books were. He left his staff with her, the light of it glistening on the vile water underfoot and on the wrinkled, cranial masses of the slunch. What they couldn’t load onto Yoshabel, Ingold rehid, higher and drier and surrounded by more spells, to keep fate and rats and insects at bay until someone could be sent again on the long, exhausting journey from Renweth Vale to retrieve them.

In addition to books—of healing, of literature, of histories and law—they found treasure, room after room of Church vessels of gold and pearl and carven gems, chairs crusted with garnets, ceremonial candleholders taller than a man and hung with chains of diamond fruit; images of saints with jeweled eyes, holding out the gem-encrusted instruments of their martyrdom; sacks of gold and silver coin. These they left, though Ingold took as much silver as he could carry and a few of the jewels flawless enough to hold spells in their crystalline hearts. The rest he surrounded with Ward-signs and spells. One never knew when such things would come in handy.

They took turns at watch that night. Even in lovemaking, which they did by the glow of the courtyard fire, neither fully relaxed—it would have been more sensible not to do it, but the strange edge of danger drew at them both. Now and then a shift in the wind brought them the smells of wood smoke and raw human waste, and they knew there were ghouls—or perhaps bandits—dwelling somewhere in the weedy desolation along the canals. Gil, her face discolored and aching in spite of all Ingold’s spells of healing, fell asleep almost at once and slept heavily; wrapped in his fur surcoat, Ingold sat awake by the bead of their fire, listening to the dark.