Mother Of Winter

Chapter Sixteen

Swordsmen, Guardsmen, and other professional warriors are always on the lookout for new teachers and new techniques, and Ingold was a welcome addition to the staff of the St. Marcopius Gladiatorial Barracks. Once the men got used to Gil's presence-and the Alketch men were for the most part astonishingly shy of being less than completely dressed around women-she worked as a sparring partner, too, and learned a good deal about different methods of combat.

She learned, among other things, how to deal with men who resented the presence of an armed woman and felt called upon to teach her a lesson, but at least two-the Boar and a bouncy, perpetually cheerful Delta Islander called the Little Cat-welcomed the chance to learn about Guards' technique and would push her hard in a bout without malice.

Gil and Ingold had arrived at the tail end of the Hummingbird Games, dedicated to one of the thirty thousand obscure local Alketch saints and financed by Generalissimo Vair na Chandros to the tune of several hundred thousand silver crowns. There was a certain amount of talk about this in the noisy and garlic-smelling tenement behind the Arena, where they got a room through the good offices of the Boar, a big, inarticulate man with a mustache the size of a sheep. His ring-name in the c'uatal language, Bizjek-the monster red pigs of the deep southern jungles-was pronounced almost the same as the ha'al word for eggplant-bezji'ik-and within a day Gil and Ingold were calling him Eggplant, as everyone else had for years. Niniak, an eleven-year-old thief who shared the room next to theirs with several of his younger sisters and brothers, explained to Gil as they toted water from the nearest fountain one night, that Vair na-Chandros was trying to buy popularity after forcing marriage with the old Emperor's daughter Yori-Ezrikos. "She sent out letters to every other general and nobleman in the, realm offering marriage when her da and her brother croaked but na-Chandros, he just camped out with his army and told 'em he'd kill all comers." The boy shifted his chewing gum to the other side of his mouth. Everyone, Gil had found, chewed gum, except for the very high nobility, who smoked opium in quantities that would have embarrassed nineteenth century Chinese mandarins.

"Esbosheth, he came up with some second cousin or something of the old Emp who happened to be his nephew, and why didn't Yori-Ezrikos marry this brat and everybody would live happily ever after, and they been fighting ever since." He shrugged. He had been six at the rising of the Dark, Gil thought. He'd lived through four major wars, plague, and a fire that wiped out a good quarter of the city; he would not remember much of the world before that time. She felt ancient, and-with her nervousness about crowds, her increasing desire to remain out of sight, and her longing for the silence of the empty lands-extremely provincial.

"Hell, me, I don't see what the problem is," the boy went on cockily. "It don't really matter who she marries-the generals gonna run the country anyway. I'll marry her and live in the palace and eat meat every day and do whatever they say." Gil, who had met Vair na-Chandros when he was in charge of the Alketch effort to assist and conquer the remainder of the Realm of Darwath, had her own reflections on how long anyone would last who shared even the illusion of power with that treacherous gentleman, but she kept them to herself.

Niniak would have bristled at the merest suggestion that he couldn't take care of himself in any situation, and when Ingold wasn't around, had adopted a protective

attitude about her as well.

He'd given her a tin demon-catcher-a sort of filigree ball with a bit of colored glass inside-and a couple of strings of saint-beads, but when they reached the stairway that ran up the side of the tenement, he bounced up ahead of her as a matter of course. He was the male. He might have no shoes on his feet, but he had an honorific diacritical on his name. Of course he'd go first.

Gil smiled and ascended the stair in his wake. At least Niniak hadn't noticed-or hadn't mentioned-anything strange in her appearance. But in a world where all women went veiled, she reflected, that was no guarantee he'd notice even a major mutation. She guessed, too, that Ingold had other reasons for lingering in Khirsrit. The journey south had been an exhausting one. Scarce as food was in that cruel summer, with starvation walking openly in the lower quarters of the town, those connected with the half-dozen gladiatorial schools ate well.

In spite of teaching and sparring eight and ten hours a day-hard physical training against men a third his age-Ingold looked better than he had when they were living off the famished countryside.

The wounds on his back and arms were healing, the new scars fresh-red and shocking among the older marks and weals when he stood, half stripped, booted feet apart, in the sand of the ring. Most of the time he didn't even draw his sword until halfway through the bout, contenting himself with effortless dodging and sidestepping and a spate of mild commentary.

In a way, Gil knew, he was enjoying himself. This was his vacation. He was resting, gathering himself for the meeting with the mages under the ice. There was never a time when Gil was not conscious of them. She feared sleep, for her dreams were foul, and the visions spilled over into waking memory. But such was her exhaustion-or the effect of the poison still working in her blood-that she was tired all the time, sleeping in spite of the heat in their chamber on the uppermost floor, and in spite of the noise of the families who had rooms all along the gallery, who fought and fornicated and shouted deep into the brief nights.

She slept in the daytime as well, with the rickety wooden shutters bolted that led onto the gallery-the room was sufficating, but her instincts as a Guard would not permit anything else. In her dreams she sometimes saw the pool of heaving mists shimmering in the blue nonlight of the glacier's howl, heard the singing of the ice-mages as they wrought their spells.

Sometimes she would know what they were singing and would wake with hammering heart to see Ingold, sitting in the opened huff of the shutters, gazing out into the starry night.

The day after the end of the Hummingbird Games there was a rumor that Esbosheth's army was going to make a try on the Hathyobar walls. Gil and Niniak walked down to the Southgate quarter and sat on the parapet overlooking the jewel-blue darkness of Lake Nychee and the half-burned counterpane of gold and green and black that were the fields visible beyond.

No army showed up. Vair na-Chandros' men waited in gold and black, phoenix-headed barges drawn up around the water ways, painted holy banners stirring in the sullen breeze, and the generalissimo himself put in a brief appearance in his renowned cloak of peacock tails, but by that time people were getting bored and leaving. On the rose-red walls themselves, Gil felt queerly exposed, visible to the looming shape of gray and black and green and killing white that was the Mother of Winter, a crouching monster reared against the sky. During the journey south, Ingold had spoken of the tombs cut into the complex of canyons at the mountain's feet, spoken with an edge of distant anger in his voice and the memory of some old pain in his eyes. "Most of the wadis of the necropolis parallel the ridges, just beyond the olive groves, but one of them leads straight back into the mountain itself."

There had been fighting in the necropolis when she and Ingold had first approached the valley, turning them aside into the city.

There were mountain apes up there, too, Ingold had said, and almost certainly gaboogoos. She wondered now about how Ingold planned to reach the place at all, much less find where the entrance to the ice-mages' cave lay. If there were gaboogoos, or mountain apes mutated by eating slunch, no spell of concealment would cloak him long.

From the wall she could see the dark smudges of the trees that marked the mouths of the mortuary canyons, the ruined aisles of obelisks, statues, funerary steles.

She asked, "Was one of the Old Emperors blind, Niniak?"

The boy shrugged. "Me, I ain't no egghead. I dunno." He perched on a crenellation with his feet dangling over twentyfive yards of straight drop to the rocky strip of the shore. "How come you want to know that?"

"I heard a story about how one of the tombs up there-" She nodded toward the mountain. "-has a statue in it of a king with no eyes. I wondered who that might be."

"Oh," Niniak said. "Him." He'd bagged a handful of dates from a vendor, had considerately given Gil one and was unselfconsciously consuming the rest. A man needs his strength, after all.

"You know him?" Gil regarded the boy in surprise.

"Sure. At least Old Haystraw, he knows him. Haystraw's the old cripple who begs on the St. Tekmas pillar-that's on the landside south corner of the Arena porch." Landside was west; lakeside was east. Nobody in Khirsrit ever said west or east. Every pillar of the Arena porch was named for a different saint, and everyone in town knew which was which.

Niniak spit a date pit over the precipice of the wall and craned his neck to watch it hit the pebbles. "Haystraw, he used to be a tomb-robber, till the bishop's guards caught him. But he talked all the time about this king and that king, like they was his family or somethin'. But anyhow everybody, they knows about the Blind King's Tomb. It's way up that third canyon there-see? The canyon splits in two and you push through the trees and go up the left way, and between these two big ol' pillars there's a door and that's the Blind King's Tomb. Haystraw, he says there's this statue inside of the Blind King sitting on his throne with no eyes and his dog laying by his feet. But the canyon's bad luck, and anyway, everything up there's been picked over already."

He shrugged and spit another date pit. "Your old man, he ask me about it yesterday. He crazy?" he inquired conversationally, simply for information.

Gil gave it some thought. "I don't think so," she said. "I'm in a small minority, though." Two, she thought. Three, if Alde's feeling charitable.

Niniuk laughed. "You talk funny. What's a minority?"

"A small group. If five thousand people think Ingold's crazyas a coot, and me and one other guy think he's sane, we're a mlnority. Let's go," she added, seeing one of the sentries on the Wall idling over in their direction. Why any man would assume that a skinny, mannishly dressed woman with a scarred face who made no effort to proposition them was a prostitute just because she was unveiled was a mystery to her, but they all did. About half of them started negotiations with Niniak rather than with herself.

She held out her hand, to steady Niniak down off the parapet. As she did so she was marginally aware of the sudden throbbing of wings in the seven-foot forest of reeds along the lakeshore: ducks, swans, egrets leaping skyward. Gil thought,They're attacking after all...

The next second the stones of the wall beneath her feet lurched hard, a grating jar that would probably have pitched boy down if he hadn't been held. The sentry grabbed for the parapet, swearing, and Gil pulled Niniak down quickly, knowing there'd be an S-wave in a second or two.

The S- wave was gentle. The whole thing couldn't have been more than a 4.8 here, but Gil felt cold in her heart. In the streets below the wall she heard yelling, cursing, a woman's scream-it didn't take much these days to set people off. Church bells jangled in every tower in the town. A moment later smoke stung her nose, rolling in billowing white sheets from n tenement; Gil swore. A stove or a lamp-the tenements were all so flimsily built, they'd sway like hula dancers in a quake. Down the street she could see that a half-collapsed church, the residence of hundreds of squatters, had come down completely. A woman was digging at the rubble, screaming.

Niniak yelled, "Damn bitch-festering witches!" his silvery eyes wide with terror. "What?" Gil said.

He looked up at her as if she were stupid, fear fading almost at once before the male impulse to pedagogy. "Witches. They been making earthquakes all winter. They get demons to do it. Earthquakes and famines and-"

"Look," Gil said, "why the hell would witches want to make earthquakes? Or famine, either?" She decided not to get into the issue of why wizards would be setting off volcanoes all over the world in order to cause the cold that caused the famine that caused the plague... Presumably they were talking about human wizards, anyway. "I mean, sooner or later if there's a famine, the witches'll starve, too." "No, they won't." Niniak regarded her with puzzled anger. "'They're witches. They just make demons bring them food. And they do this stuff 'cause they're evil, is why. Like that bitch witch Hegda that lives on Coppersmith Market. She's the reason there's all those rats in the city. She makes deals with demons. They're behind all this, 'cause they hate everybody, they were the ones who raised up the Dark. C'mon," he added, rattling down the narrow steps that led to the square within the gates. "Me, I think that's all we're gonna get for now, but if my glass bottle's broken back home, I'm gonna go burn that bitch witch Hegda's house myself." In the wake of the earthquake a dozen fires swept the city. Beggars and the all-powerful street gangs took advantage of the confusion as the precinct firefighters-who doubled as police-tried to quell the blazes themselves or recruit help, and Gil and Niniak made their way back to the tenement behind St. Marcopius through running men, blowing smoke, dust, and shouting. The boy dutifully escorted Gil to the base of the stair and then bade her a bright good-bye- "There got to be pickings someplace"-and Gil climbed the rickety, endless flights to the sixth-floor gallery, which miraculously hadn't pulled loose from the wall.

Ingold sat cross-legged in the doorway of their room, tilting his scrying crystal to and fro against the light. He pocketed the stone and stood as Gil picked her way cautiously along the narrow planking, staying as close to the adobe wall as she could. "You did well to return quickly, my dear," he said.

He didn't seem terribly worried, and Gil realized that the first thing he must have done when the shaking stopped was to scry for her and make sure she was all right. "Vrango's bullies from the Beehive and the Children of the Revealed Word"-street gangs in Khirsrit often split along the lines of minor heresies- "have already started fighting. It's a good day to stay where we are, I think." 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-fe, 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 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 redrobed 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 hold 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 l 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 couId 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 turn. 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..." Niniak held out a second potsherd. "He said give you this three days from now, if he wasn't back." Gil went cold to her heart.

Forgive me. It is all that I can ask. Please, please understand. They hear with your ears. They see with your eyes. This I guessed, leaving the Keep-

but I also guessed that you would follow, against your own will, did I not bring you. It has been death in my heart daily, hourly, to do this to you. Without you at my side I stand some chance of reaching the cavern of the ice-mages before they realize I am on the mountain and rally the gaboogoos, the dooic, the mountain apes who because of the slunch are theirs to command-maybe even the armies of the warlords, for I cannot know now how far their power has reached. They knew of me through the minds of the Dark, in their dreaming, even as the Dark knew of them. As the Dark took my mind... Gil turned the sherd over; the writing was worse on the back... so the ice-mages saw. They know I am a danger, insofar as any can be. This may be my only chance.

As if she heard their voices in the distance, she felt the outcry of them, realizing they had been circumvented, tricked-realizing he was on his way. She felt them call out, drawing everything they could to them-gaboogoos, cave-apes, mutants. Readying themselves to crush him.

No, she thought, her heart screaming as she felt that frantic, furious call. NO! I love you, Gil. If I have not returned by this time, I will not return. I bless you, I free you. I only regret-and I regret with all my heart-that I cannot see you safe again to the Keep. But I cannot be two men. I fear that with you, I have not even been one. Please understand, as a warrior understands. Please do not despise me for what I had to do.

If I have not returned, it is because I met my death at the hands of the ice-mages; and I met it with your name on my lips. With all that is in me -Inglorion