Sun Wolf 1 - The Ladies Of Mandrigyn (26 page)

He crossed through the spiderweb windings of twisting streets and over plank bridges that spanned canals he could have jumped, had there been room on those jammed islets for a running start. On catwalks that paralleled the canals or circled the courtyard lagoons along the second or third storey of the houses that fronted them, crones and young girls were already appearing, to shake out bedding in the damp air and call gossip back and forth across the narrow waters. In the black latticework of alleys, ankle-deep in icy water on the lower islands, he saw the lights going up in kitchens and heard the rattle of ironware and the scrape of metal on stone as ashes were raked. Crossing a small square before the black and silent fortress of a three-spired church, he smelled from somewhere the waft and glory of bread baking, like a ghost’s guiding glimpse of the heaven of the saints.

In the silvery light of morning, the city market was a riot of colors: the rain-darkened crimson of the servants of the rich and the wet blue of country smocks; the somber viridians of spinach and kale and the crisp greens of lettuces; the scarlets and golds of fruits; and the prodigal, cloisonne brightness of pyramids of melons, all shining like polished porcelain under their beading of rain. The smells of sharp herbs and fishy mud smote him, mixed with those of clinging soil and the smoky tang of wet wool; he heard girls’ voices as sweet as the hothouse strawberries they cried and old countrymen’s half-unintelligible patois. Raised as he had been in the barbaric North, Sun Wolf had been a grown man before he had ever seen a city marketplace; and even after all these years, the impact of kaleidoscopic delight was the same.

From a countrywoman in a stall where game birds hung like great feathered mops, he asked the direction of the woman Yirth; and though she gave him a suspicious look from dark old eyes, she told him where Yirth could be found.

The house stood on the Little Island, tall, faded, and old. Like most of the houses there, it was of the old-fashioned style, half timbered and lavishly decorated with carving, every pillar, doorpost, and window lattice encrusted with an extravagant lacework of saints, demons, and beasts, wreathed about with all the flowers of the fields. But the paint and gilding had long since worn off them. Standing before the door. Sun Wolf had the impression of being on the edge of a dark and carven wood, watched from beneath the trellised leaves by deformed and malevolent elves. Yet the house itself was severely clean; the shutters that were hinged to every window of its narrow face were darkly varnished, and the worn brick of the step was washed and scraped. He heard his own knock ring hollowly in the fastnesses of the place; a moment later, he heard the light, soft touch of the wizard’s approaching stride.

She stepped aside quickly to let him in. Sun Wolf guessed that few people lingered on that step.

“Did Sheera send you?” she asked.

“No.” He saw the flicker of suspicion cross the sea-colored eyes. “I’ve come on my own.”

The single dark bar of brow deepened in the middle, over the hooked nose. Then she said, “Come upstairs.” On the lower isles, none but the very poorest used the ground floors of their houses for anything except storage.

Yirth’s consulting room was dark, long, and narrow, the tall window at its far end looking out over the greenish light of a canal. Plants curtained it, crowding in pots or hanging like robber gangs all from the same gallows, and the light that penetrated was green and mottled. Around him, the Wolf had a sense of half-hidden things, of clay crocks containing herbs lining the dark shelves, of books whose worn bindings gleamed with wax and gold, and of embryos preserved in brandy and herbs hung in dried and knobby bunches from the low rafters. Unknown musical instruments slept like curious monsters in the corners; maps, charts in forgotten tongues, and arcane diagrams of the stars lined the pale plaster of the walls. The place smelled of soap, herbs, and drugs. He felt the curious, tingling sense of latent magic in the air.

She turned to face him in the tarry shadows. “What did you want?” she asked.

“I want to know what I can give you, or what I can do for you, to have you set me free.” It came to him as he spoke that there was, in fact, nothing that he could give her, for he had quite literally no possessions beyond his sword. A hell of a spot, he thought, for the richest mercenary in the West.

But Yirth only considered him for a moment, her hands folded over the gray web of her shawl. Then she said, “Kill Altiokis.”

His hand slammed down on the long table that divided the room, making the glass bottles there jump, and his voice crackled with anger. “Curse it, woman, that wasn’t your price on the ship!”

The black brow moved; the eyes did not. “It is the price I claim to set you free now,” she responded coolly. “Otherwise, your bargain with Sheera stands. You shall be freed—and paid—when the strike force marches.”

“You know as well as I do that’s insane.”

She said nothing, using her silence against him.

“Damn your eyes, you know that lunatic woman’s going to get every skirt in that troop killed!” he stormed at her. “I’ve worked on those women and I’ve taught them, and some of them will be damned fine warriors in about two years’ time, if they live that long, which they won’t if they go into battle with a green captain. But if she’s stubborn enough to do it, then all I want is to be out of here—to have nothing further to do with it or with her!”

“I fear you have no choice about that,” Yirth replied calmly. She rested her hands on the dark wood of the table; the wan light picked out their knots and sinews, making them hardly human, like the strange, folded shapes of an oak burl. “Men go to war for their own entertainment, or for some other man’s—women, only because they must. Altiokis, now—Altiokis is deathless and, being deathless, he is bored. It amuses him to conquer cities. Have you seen what happens to a city under his rule?”

“Not being suicidal,” the Wolf rumbled irritably, “I’ve avoided cities under his rule.”

“Not being a merchant, or the father of children, or a tradesman needing to make his living, you can do that, I suppose,” Yirth returned. “But Tarrin—Tarrin fought for the men who were, and for the generation of men who would not see their children grow up under Altiokis’ rule. He and Sheera seek to free Mandrigyn. But my goal is different. I seek to see the Wizard King destroyed, rooted out, as he rooted out and destroyed the other wizards. We are not insane, Captain—the insane ones are those who let him live and grow.”

“You don’t even know he can be killed,” Sun Wolf said. “He’s been a wizard since before you were born. We don’t even know if he’s a man or a demon or what he is.”

“He’s a man,” she lashed out, coldly bitter.

“Then why hasn’t he died?” the Wolf demanded. “All the magic in the world won’t prolong a man’s life—not for a hundred and fifty years! Else we’d have an army of superannuated wizards from all the ages in the past crawling down the walls like ants. But demons are deathless . . . ”

“He’s a man,” she insisted. “Swollen and corrupt on his own immortality. His desires are a man’s desires—power, lands, money. His caprices are a man’s caprices, not a demon’s. He has found a way—some way—of prolonging his life, indefinitely for all we know. Unless he is stopped, he will continue to grow, and all that he touches will rot.” She turned and strode to the glimmering window, the light catching the pale streaks in her hair, like wood ash in a half-burned fire. “It is his death I seek, whatever the cost.”

“Pox rot you, you’re not even a wizard yourself!” he yelled at her. “You’ve never even gone through this bloody Great Trial I keep hearing about; you haven’t got the strength to blow out his bedroom candles! You’re as big a fool as Sheera is!”

“Bigger,” she bit out, whirling to face him, and Sun Wolf could feel the tension smoking from her, like mist from a pond on a freezing night. “Bigger—because Sheera fights with hope, and I have none. I know what Altiokis is—I know just how great is the gap between his powers and mine. But if he can be drawn into battle, there is a chance, however slim. I will use the might of a freed Mandrigyn to destroy him, as he destroyed my master—as he destroyed my future. If f can do so, I shall be satisfied, though it costs me my life. As a wizard in a town under his rule, I know that it will only be a matter of time before he learns of my existence, and my life would be forfeit then, no matter what I did.”

“And what about the cost to the others?” he stormed at her. “What about their lives that Altiokis will destroy?”

“I thought you cared only about your own, Captain,” she jeered at him. “We all have our motives, as you yourself have said. Without me, they would still fight. Without you, without Sheera, without Tarrin. Without them, I would have found another weapon to wield against the Wizard King. Depend upon it, Captain, you are a part of us, your flesh and your fate sealed to ours. You can no more desert us now than the string can desert the bow. The others do not fully see this; even Sheera understands it only in terms of her own need, as they all do. But late or soon, the Wizard King must be met. And willing, unwilling, knowing or unknowing, you, Sheera, Tarrin, every man in the mines, and every woman in Mandrigyn will play a part of that meeting.”

Sun Wolf stared at her for a moment, silent before her deadly bitterness. Then he said again, “You’re insane.”

But she only looked at him with those eyes like jade and polar ice. She stood like a black-oak statue, framed in the trailing greenery of the window, wrapped in the misty and terrible cloak of her power. She made no move as his storming footfalls retreated down the sounding well of the stair, nor when the door banged as he let himself out into the narrow street.

In black anger, Sun Wolf made his way through the streets of Mandrigyn. He saw now that, even in the unlikely event that he could talk or coerce that hellcat Sheera into releasing him, Yirth would never let her do it. He had heard women called vacillating and fickle, but he saw now that it was only in such matters as were of little moment to them. Given a single target, a single goal, they could not be shaken. It was a race now, he thought, to finish the training of the strike force before someone in the city learned of what was happening.

He traversed the Spired
Bridge and turned aside through the Cathedral Square to avoid the dissolving throngs in the market. Morning was still fresh in the sky, the air cold and wet against his face and throat, and the sea birds crying among the heaped pillows of clouds, warning of storms to come. On two sides of the square, bright-colored clusters of silks and furs proclaimed the patrons of the bookbinders’ stalls there; on the third side, a small troop of Governor Derroug’s household guards stood watch over his curtained utter beside the Cathedral steps. The usual sycophants were there. The Wolf recognized Stirk, the harbor master, looking like a dressed-up corpse at a Trinitarian funeral, and the fat brute who was Derroug’s captain of the watch. Above them, the Cathedral rose, its gold and turquoise mosaics glimmering in the pale morning, buttress and dome seeming to be made of gilded light.

As he passed the steps, a voice beyond him called out, “Captain!”

He knew the voice, and his heart squeezed in his breast with fear and fury. He kept walking. If anyone was within earshot, he had best not stop.

Thin and clear as a cat’s mew, Drypettis’ voice called out again. “Captain!”

A quick glance showed him no one close enough to hear. He turned in his tracks, hearing the approaching footsteps down the church’s tessellated ascent and the restive jittering of tangled gold.

Fluttering with veils, like a half-furled pennoncel pinned with gems, the little woman came scurrying importantly up to him. “Captain, I want you to tell Sheera—” she began.

Sun Wolf caught her by the narrow shoulders as if he would shake the life from her. “Don’t you ever,” he said in a soundless explosion of wrath, “don’t you ever address me as captain in public again.”

The prim-mouthed face went white with rage, though she must have known that she was in the wrong. Under the thread-drawn saffron of her puffed sleeves, he felt the delicate muscle harden like bone. “How dare you!” she snarled at him. With a wrench she freed herself of his grip. “How dare you speak to me . . . ”

Anger crackled into him—an anger fed by Yirth’s mocking despair, by Sheera’s stubbornness, and by the dangers that he had long sensed closing around him. Impatiently he snapped, “You’re bloody right I’ll speak to you, if you’re ever stupid enough to . . . ”

She shrank from his pointing finger, pale, blazing, spitting like a cornered cat. The rage in her eyes stopped him, startled, even before she cried, “Don’t you touch me, you lecherous blackguard!”

The clipped, mincing accents of Derroug Dru demanded, “And what, pray, is this?”

Altiokis’ governor had just emerged from the great bronze doors of the Cathedral and was standing at the top of the steps, twisted and elegant against his backdrop of clients. From where he stood, he could look down upon Sun Wolf. “Unhand my sister, boy.”

The guards who had been around the litter were already approaching at a run.

The slaves’ cell of the jail under the city records office was damp, filthy, and smelted like a privy; the straw underfoot crawled with black and furtive life. For as many people as there were chained to the walls, the place was oddly quiet. Even those lucky enough to be fettered to the wall by a long chain—long enough to allow them to sit or lie, at any rate—had the sense to keep their mouths shut. Those who, like Sun Wolf, had had their slave collars locked to the six inches or so of short chain could only lean against the dripping bricks in exhausted silence, unable to move, to rest, or to reach the scummy trough of water that ran down the center of the cell.

The Wolf wasn’t certain how long he’d been there. Hours, he thought, shifting his cramped knees. Like most soldiers, he could relax in any position; it would be quite some time before the strain began to tell on him. Others were not so fortunate, or perhaps they had been here longer. There was a good-looking boy of twenty or so, with a soft mop of auburn hair that hung over his eyes, who had fallen three times since the Wolf had been there. Each time he’d been brought up choking as the iron slip-collar tightened around the flesh of his throat. He was standing now, but he looked white and sick, his breathing labored, his eyes glazed and desperate, as if he could feel the last of his strength leaking away with every minute that passed. The Wolf wondered what crime the boy had committed, if any.