Mother of Winter (33 page)

An aftershock touched the building, giving Gil the sickened sensation of being in a tall tree in a high wind. She caught the jamb of the door and clung hard, hoping this one wouldn’t bring the already stressed walls down. She saw Ingold staring out through the doorway, not even bothering to hang on; saw the unseeing anger in his blue eyes and the swift harshness of his breathing.

“It’s them,” she said quietly, “isn’t it?” A little shyly, she reached to touch his hand. “The mages in the ice?”

She felt him tense and withdrew her fingers; she understood his caution of her and had kept her distance. In her most matter-of-fact voice she added, “Is it close? The volcano?”

He nodded, and a slight shiver went through him. “In the south,” he said. “Deep under the ice. The dust cover is thick already over the poles. We were right to come here, Gil.” His tone was that of a man seeking to convince himself, and he did not look at her as he spoke. Turning away, he set about righting his flower pots; they held slips and cuttings of roses, a dozen varieties, from yellow to nearly black. Under the rolled-back sleeves of his woolen shirt, his wrists and forearms were welted from training cuts, the old shackle galls white among the fresh blue-black of bruises.

“They are there.” His fingers paused on the extravagant velvet petals of a blossom he’d found in the abandoned court of a plague-sealed palace. “I know they’re there.”

She said, “In the Blind King’s Tomb.”

He turned his head sharply, and at that moment, in the street below where it led off the Coppersmith Market, there was a tramping of feet and voices shouting. Forgetting all question of the structural integrity of the building, Gil and Ingold both stepped to the gallery’s splintered and sun-damaged rail. In the
lane below a small squad of na-Chandros’ black-armored soldiers hurried, surrounded by a flying storm of broken cobblestones, dirt clods, and filth hurled from windows and alleys along their route.

They weren’t dodging or turning to fight the gaggle of men who trailed them like pi-dogs in the wake of a butcher’s cart. After a moment Gil made out what the voices were shouting: “Witch-bitch! Demon whore!”

“Hegda.” Ingold stood with folded arms at her side, the extravagant green-and-purple chain of saint-beads he wore when not in the Arena glistening in the afternoon sun. He made no move to check his theory with the scrying stone, for the vicious-tongued old countrywoman who sold spells in the Coppersmith Market had sufficient mageborn power to prevent being scried by another mage. Ingold had spoken to her on a number of occasions—she’d spit on him yesterday for disagreeing with her—and Gil considered her no loss. “They’ve only been waiting their chance.”

“The local Church authorities?” The height of the building and the narrowness of the street made it almost impossible to see down, but as the armored squad turned into St. Marcopius Square at the end of the lane, she recognized the bent, drunkenly staggering figure among them, arms and neck banded with mingled layers of chains of all weights and lengths, steel and copper, silver and lead. Runes of Silence, Runes of Binding, Runes of Ward, were hung on them, lead plaques that made a curious muffled clashing, spell-ribbons fluttering like dirty pennons, further numbing her power.

“Why would they care? It isn’t like she’s working for one of the warlords.”

“Yet.” Ingold led her back, gently, to the door of their room, the boards of the gallery swaying queasily under their feet. For a moment his hand, resting in the small of her back, had the old warm familiarity, the ease that had always been between them; then he seemed to remember that she could not be trusted, for he carefully took his hand away. Looking quickly at his face, Gil saw the expression in his eyes that she had seen there so often these four days in Khirsrit: not wary so much as questioning,
uncertain. His eyes met hers for a moment and turned quickly away, and anger went through her, a sickening weary rage at the mages in the ice.

Ingold was already within their bare little room, gathering up her spare shirt and his from the table where they had been drying. “It isn’t only the other warlords they worry about, you know,” he went on. “The Church has never liked the idea of people going to wizards to solve their problems—or what they perceive to be their problems—instead of using the more difficult methods of faith, self-examination, and trust in God … accompanied, in many cases, by the advice of the Church. In good times the Church can afford to rely on their contention that magic erodes the soul and all illusion is the work of the Evil One or Ones. But in days of famine, when everyone is afraid, people think less of saving their souls than they do of feeding their children. And bishops are only human,” he added softly, folding the worn garments and laying them on the small stack of rucksacks and spare clothing in the corner. “In these days, they’re afraid as well. I warned her to leave town.”

Gil remembered the children in Niniak’s little band, country children with haunted eyes and ribs like barrel hoops, risking their lives to steal bread. “Maybe she didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

At sunset Niniak appeared in the open shutters of their doorway with the news that the woman Hegda would be burned in the Arena at noon the next day. “She was the one who started the earthquake, you know?” The boy had his brothers and sisters around him, like filthy little feral puppies; Ingold always kept a few scraps from supper to give them. The Eggplant and the Gray Cat, who lived on the lower floors of the building, did the same.

“Oh, come on!” Gil said impatiently, very conscious of Ingold, who was dozing on their blankets. “Why the hell would anyone want to do that?”

“Because she’s evil,” Niniak retorted, baffled by the question. He shifted his gum to the other side of his mouth. “Or maybe some rich guy, he paid her to. But she started it, all right. She confessed.”

“How very astonishing,” Ingold murmured without opening his eyes. “A woman who has the power to raise earthquakes, living in a hovel all these months and begging her bread in the marketplace.”

The thief looked doubtful, then regarded him with narrow suspicion in his silver eyes. “She confessed. And she’s a witch. Witches do weird stuff.”

Ingold sighed and folded his hands on his breast. “You have me there,” he admitted.

He went with Gil to the auto-da-fé, in a crowd of men from the gladiatorial school. The Arena was packed to its topmost tiers, and a line of Church soldiers, shaven-headed in their loose crimson uniforms, demarcated the end of the long, narrow combat pit where the stake was set, the rest of the sand being taken up by an impenetrable jam of spectators. The show was free, even to the nobility, the bankers, the corn-brokers, and landlords. Ingold winced when two red-robed Church functionaries threw a couple of seedy scrolls and a codex or two on the head-high pile of brushwood and logs: Hegda’s books, such as they were. Other Church soldiers led the woman out, weaving unsteadily and still laden with chains, her long white mare’s tails of hair snagging in the bloody weals that crossed her naked back.

“Yellow jessamine,” Ingold said quietly to Gil. His voice had a distant quality, and he was withdrawn into himself, with pain or shame—though a woman like Hegda had owed no allegiance to the Council of Wizards, its Archmage, Ingold, still felt he should be able to protect her. “The Council of Wizards usually uses bluegall root, which numbs the ability to use magic but leaves the prisoner otherwise unharmed. The Church favors jessamine. In a way it’s merciful, under the circumstances. She won’t be more than half conscious.”

Gil shivered. She had seen death—had killed men and women herself, coldly and without thought, though later the reaction had sometimes been devastating. But it had always been in combat, and always quick. As a medievalist, she’d read about burnings, but had never seen one. She didn’t know if she could deal with the reality.

The soldiers assisted the reeling figure up the ladder and lashed it to the stake. A crimson ecclesiastic stepped forth from among the guards, slim, straight, terrible as a bloodstained stiletto, and with uplifted white hands cried ritual words. At the sound of that harsh alto voice, Gil gasped and tried to peer past the massive forms surrounding her. “Want a better look, Gilly?” the Eggplant asked, and huge hands clasped her waist, lifting her effortlessly to a shoulder like a park bench. They were down in the reserved gladiators’ section, close to ringside but near the center of the field. Someone yelled, “Down in front!” and Sergeant Cush turned around and yelled something about the protester’s mother.

“Set me down,” Gil said to the coiled, beaded braids next to her elbow, and the Eggplant glanced up at her.

“Stuff ’em, Gilly, they’re just rubes.” The Eggplant cracked his gum. He was very fond of her and had recently broken four of the King’s ribs after His Majesty had made a rather rough pass at Gil in the Arena’s pillared porch. Cush had given him five lashes for putting the King out of action on the last day of the games, and the King had gone around ever since saying that Gil was a girl-lover anyway, and ugly. Gil knew she shouldn’t care, but that hurt.

“No, it’s okay.” She’d seen what she needed to see. In a way, she had known from the moment she heard the voice of the Prince-Bishop of Alketch, speaking the words of eternal cursing upon the condemned. As the Eggplant swung her down from her perch, she cast a quick final glance at the Prince-Bishop, ivory pale among the ebony faces of guards and lesser clerics. She could almost feel the bonfire heat of those hooded dark eyes.

The Prince-Bishop of Alketch, officiating prelate at the witch Hegda’s execution, was none other than Ingold’s old nemesis Govannin Narmenlion, quondam Bishop of Gae. “Ingold,” she said breathlessly, “Ingold, it’s—” She looked around for him among the gladiators.

He was nowhere to be found.

*  *  *

There was a literary tradition in the world where Gil had been brought up—and in fact in the less respectable fiction of the Wathe, to which Minalde was addicted, as well—that any heroine worthy of her corsetry, upon finding herself in a situation of peril, should promptly run away seeking her hero, endangering both herself and everyone else in the process. Having searched for people in the woods, and knowing Ingold fairly well, Gil remained with the gladiators, which was where she guessed he’d look for her when he decided to reappear. In any case it was useless to search for the old man if he did not wish to be found. He had his scrying crystal, and would rejoin her when he had either ascertained what he’d departed to ascertain or when whatever danger he perceived approaching had passed.

In the end Gil did not see the actual burning, owing to the thickness of the crowd. Pressed on all sides by a mob of sweating bodies, she heard the old woman’s slurred cursing turn to screams and barely smelled the wood smoke and charring flesh above the stench of sweat, pomade, and dust. A boy came by and tried to pick her pocket; another tried to sell her a stick of fried bread. She managed not to throw up, but the Icefalcon would be ashamed, she felt, of her squeamishness.

The Eggplant walked her back to St. Marcopius, his face a study in inarticulate worry when a rush of faintness swept over her in the marketplace. He insisted she sit on the corner of a fountain until she felt better, and pushing his way off through the crowds, returned a short time later with a brightly colored coat of the kind fashionable among the gladiators’ molls just then, adorned with bits of mirror and patches of leather and steel. He waved off her startled thanks. “You’re cold,” he said, helping her to her feet—and indeed, though very bright, the day was turning chill. “Your hands are freezing.”

She put her hands out of sight in the wrapped front of the coat as quickly as possible, suddenly overcome with humiliation. She had dreamed last night about a ruined villa they’d passed through, in the near-empty city of Zenuuak—dreamed of the mirror she’d found in an inner room, and the transformed horror reflected in it. All day she’d been surreptitiously
checking her hands. The gladiator seemed not to notice, however; he escorted her up all six flights to her door. After she thanked him, she bolted the shutters, knowing Ingold to be perfectly capable of working the bolts from the other side. She lay down on the mattress and fell into sleep as if drugged.

She woke to blue darkness and the sound of knocking. “It’s me, Gilly,” came Niniak’s voice.

“I knocked earlier,” the boy added when she opened the shutters. The sky over the red-and-yellow city’s parapets was dimming, all the bells of its churches speaking their incomprehensible rounds. The smell of charred timber hung heavy in the air. Farther along the gallery some of the men who lived up there, a tailor and a shoemaker and a man who sold fish off a barrow in the street, played pitnak while their wives talked and sewed.

Gil scratched at her heavy mane of unbraided hair. “It’s okay.” She still felt queasy, and wondered a little at her own exhaustion. “What can I do for you?”

The boy’s pixie face twisted in an odd expression, and he held out a broken curve of potsherd, such as shopkeepers toted up their addition on, or sent notes to one another, provided they could write. “Ingold, he asked me to give you this.”

It said:

Gil—

Forgive me. It was necessary for me to flee, at once. How they knew I was here I do not know for certain, though Hegda may have seen more in me than she said and passed it on to them to spare herself more pain. Stay off the streets as much as you can, and guard yourself. I am safe. Only wait
.

“He’s left you.” Niniak’s voice was neutral, dead, but she could tell the boy was furiously angry.

She shook her head. “He’s just had to go into hiding. It sounds like he saw someone in the crowd …”

“Or he saw you had your back turned.” The pale silver eyes glittered with old memory, old rage. “Like just ’cause you’re ugly and got a scar and all you aren’t a hundred times better than all them stupid girls that flounce around the street after men. What an idiot!”

Gil realized, with some surprise, that the boy had a crush on her. She hid a smile at this piece of consciousness-raising and said, “No. Ingold has enemies …”