Sun Wolf 1 - The Ladies Of Mandrigyn (31 page)

“He’s dead,” he said softly. “It’s all right. We’ve come to get you out, and he’s dead and won’t come after you.”

The girl stammered, “Mother . . . ”

“Your mum’s out burning down the other side of the palace,” the Wolf said, in the same comforting accents. “She’s fine—”

Tisa
raised her head, her cheek all smutched with blacking, green moss stains, and bird droppings. “Are you kidding me?” she asked, laughter and suspicion fighting through her tears.

The Wolf made wide eyes at her. “No,” he said. “Did you think I was?”

She wiped her eyes and swallowed hard. “I’m not crying,” she explained, after a moment.

“No,” he agreed. “I’m sorry I hurt you, Tisa.”

“You didn’t hurt me.” Her voice was shaky; the breath had been very soundly knocked out of her, if nothing else.

“Well, you damned near strangled me,” he returned gruffly. “You think you can swim?”

She nodded. She was wearing, he now saw, a kind of loose white robe, clearly given to her by Derroug. It was slightly too large for her and sewn over with white sequins and elaborate swirls of milky, opalescent beads. Against it, he saw her transformed, no longer a coltish girl, but a half-opened bud of womanhood. Her eyelids were stained dark with fatigue and terror, her hair pale against the silk, almost as light as Starhawk’s in the shimmer of the bedroom lamp. The gown was cut so as to reveal half her young bosom. Before taking her post to attack, she’d prosaically pinned the robe with a ruby stickpin that glowed beneath her collarbone like a huge bead of blood.

She was as light as a flower in his hands as he lifted her to her feet. Her eyes lighted on Sheera and widened at the sight of the blood.

Sun Wolf whispered, “Let’s go. They’ll be looking for him, now that the fire’s started.”

As they slipped back through the anteroom and out the window, Tisa breathed, “What happened to your voice, Captain? And I thought . . . ”

“Not now.”

Obediently, she gathered handfuls of her voluminous skirts and followed Sheera down onto the roof of the walkway. Even to his sharper eyes, the gardens below looked deserted. He could see, vague against the deeper dark of the shadowed wall, the shape of the postern gate.

“Wait here till I signal,” he said softly. “A whistle like a nightjar. Then keep to the shadows along the wall. If it’s locked, we’ll have to go up the steps to the parapet and dive.”

Sheera gauged the height of the wall. “Thank God it’s the Grand Canal. It’s the deepest one in the city.”

Sun Wolf slithered down the side of the walkway and into the gardens below.

The overcast was growing thicker with the night winds that fanned the blaze on the north end of the palace. The din was audible over the moaning of the wind. It should keep them all busy for at least another hour, he calculated and began to move, slowly and cautiously, along the wall toward the inky wells of shadow that lay between him and the gate.

The blackness here was almost absolute; a month ago he would have been able to see nothing. As it was, he was aware of shapes and details with a sense that he was not altogether certain was sight—an effect of the anzid, he guessed, as well as that curious ability to prevent people from looking at him.

That would come in handy, he thought. Come to think of it, he realized he had used it twice before tonight—when he’d evaded Sheera almost unthinkingly in the narrow confines of the potting room, and earlier this evening, when he had first come down the stairs to hear the war council in the orangery. The professional in him toyed with ways of developing that strange talent; but deep within him, a tug of primitive excitement shivered in his bones, as it had done when he had first known that he could see demons and others could not.

The postern was unguarded, but locked. He glanced around the blackness under the gate arch and found the narrow stair to the parapet above. The garden behind him still appeared deserted, but a tension, a premonition of danger, had begun to prickle at the nape of his neck. The brush and hedges seemed to rustle too much, and the wind, laden with smoke and shouting, seemed somehow to carry the scent of evil to his nostrils. He whistled softly, like a nightjar, and saw swift movement near the covered walk, then the flash of Tisa’s almost luminous white gown.

They were halfway across the garden when something else moved, from around the corner of the kitchen building.

The things were armored like men, but weaponless. From where he stood at the bottom of the parapet stair, the Wolf could see that they walked steadily, oblivious to the darkness that made the fugitive women’s steps so halting and slow. They moved so softly that he wasn’t sure Sheera and Tisa were aware of them, but his own sharpened vision showed them clearly to him. There were four, wearing the fouled liveries of Derroug’s guards, their eyeless heads swinging as if they also could see in darkness.

They were nuuwa.

Realization hit him, and horrible enlightenment, as if pieces of some huge and ghastly puzzle had fallen into place. Rage and utter loathing swept over him, such as he had never felt toward anyone or anything before. The nuuwa began to lope. Sheera swung around, hearing the steps on the grass, but her eyes were unable to pierce the utter darkness.

Sun Wolf bellowed, “Run for it! Here!”

His sword whined from its sheath. Unquestioning, the women ran, Tisa stripping out of her billowing white robe as it caught on the dead limbs of a thorn hedge. They ran blindly, stumbling, blundering through soft earth and gray tangles of vine and hedge, and the nuuwa plunged soundlessly after. He yelled again, a half-voiceless croaking that was answered by wild commotion in the windows of the palace behind them. Tisa hit the stairs first, with Sheera a few strides behind. The nuuwa were hard on their heels, running sightlessly with the drool glistening on those gaping, deformed mouths.

Sword naked in his hand, Sun Wolf followed the women up the steps, the foremost of the pursuers not three feet behind. At the top of the wall, Tisa dived, plunging down into the dark murk of the canal; Sheera’s dark-stained, gleaming body outlined momentarily against the reflected lamps in the villas across the way as she followed. When the Wolf reached the parapet, huge hands dug into his flesh from behind, and he writhed away from the fangs that tore like great wedges of rusty iron into his shoulder. He turned, ripping with his sword, knowing he had only seconds until they were all on him, literally eating him alive. As the blade cleaved the filthy flesh of the nuuwa’s body, the misshapen face was inches from his own, the huge mouth still rending at him, flowing with blood, the empty eye sockets scabbed wells of shadow.

Then he was plunging down, and the freezing, salty, unspeakably filthy waters of the canal swallowed him. The nuuwa, nothing daunted, flung themselves over the wall after their prey. Weighted in their armor, too blind and too stupid to swim, they sank like stones.

In her usual silence, Yirth gathered up her medicines and glided from the dim confines of the loft. Sun Wolf lay still for a time, staring up at the slant of the ceiling over his head, as he had stared at it four mornings ago, when he had awakened to know that Sheera had indeed won.

But there was no thought of Sheera now in his mind.

He was thinking now of Lady Wrinshardin, of Derroug Dru, and of Altiokis.

He felt weak from loss of blood, woozy and aching from the pain of Yirth’s remedies. Against his cheek on the pillow, his hair was damp, and his flesh chilled where the lampblack and grease had been sponged off it. Sheera, in her velvet bed, and Tisa, safe at the Thane of Wrinshardin’s castle, would both be striped like tigers with bruises and scratches from that last crashing flight through the gardens.

He himself scarcely felt the pain. Knowledge still burned in him, and the heat of fury that knowledge had brought; deformed, hideous, the face of the nuuwa returned to his thoughts, no matter what he did to push it aside. The grayish light beyond the window grew broader, and he wondered if he had best get up and go about his business for the benefit of whatever servants of the household might be questioned by Derroug’s successors.

Weakness weighted his limbs. He was still lying there when the door of the orangery opened and shut, and he heard the creak of light feet on the steps, the soft, thick slur of satin petticoats, and the stiff rubbing of starched lace.

He turned his head. Sheera stood in the doorway, where she had so seldom come before. Cosmetics covered the scratches on her face; but below the paint, he thought she looked pale and drawn. In that crowded and terrible night, he realized, she had avenged herself on Derroug. But it had been a businesslike, almost unthinking revenge.

“I came to thank you for last night,” she said tiredly. “And—to apologize for things that I said. You did not have to do what you did.”

“I told you before,” Sun Wolf rasped, his new voice still scraping oddly in his ears. “All it would have taken was for our girl to tackle Derroug the way she tackled me for there to have been a lot of questions asked. And as for the other business—you were tired and I was drunk. That should never have happened.”

“No,” Sheera said. “It shouldn’t have.” She rubbed her eyes, the clusters of pearl and sardonyx that decorated her ears and hair flickering in the wan light of morning. “I’ve come to tell you that you’re free to leave Mandrigyn. I’m going to speak to Yirth—to have her give you the antidote to the anzid—to let you go. For what you did . . . ”

He held out his hand. After a moment’s hesitation, she stepped forward, and he drew her to sit on the edge of his bed. Her fingers felt like ice in his.

“Sheera,” he said, “that doesn’t matter now. When you march to the mines—when you free the men—what are you going to do?”

Taken off guard, she stammered, “I—we—Tarrin and I will lead them back here . . . ”

“No,” he said. “Lady Wrinshardin was right, Sheera. Yirth is right. Don’t wait for Altiokis to come to you. Those ways from the mines up to the Citadel itself—could Amber’s girls find them?”

“I suppose,” she said hesitantly. “Crazyred says she’s seen one of them. But they’re guarded by magic, by traps . . . ”

“Yirth will have to deal with that,” he told her quietly. “She’ll have to find some way to get you through them—and she will, or die trying. Sheera, Altiokis has to be destroyed. He’s got an evil up there worse than anything I imagined—and he’s breeding it, creating it, calling it up out of some other world, I don’t know. Lady Wrinshardin guessed it; Yirth knows it. He has to be destroyed, and that evil with him.”

Sheera was silent, looking down at her hands where they rested among the folds of her gown. Once she might have triumphed over his admission that she was right and he wrong—but that had been before the pit, and before the garden last night.

Watching her eyes, he realized that, since she had spoken with Lady Wrinshardin, she had known in her heart that they would have to storm the Citadel.

He went on. “Those were nuuwa that pursued us from Derroug’s gardens last night. Nuuwa under the control of Altiokis, I would guess—as nuuwa under his control are said to march in his armies. When he’s done with them—as he was after the battle of Iron Pass—he turns most of them out, to overrun the conquered lands; or else he gives them over to his governors as watchdogs. I think they deform, they deteriorate, in time—and that’s why Aitiokis and Derroug have to go on creating new ones.”

“Creating?” She raised her head quickly; he could see in her face the hideous comprehension knocking on the doors of her mind, as it had knocked on his last night.

“You remember that room in Derroug’s prison? That—that thing that looked like a flake of fire, or a shining dragonfly?”

She glanced away, nauseated by the memory. After a moment, the thick curls of her hair slipped across her red satin shoulder as she nodded. He felt her cold fingers tighten over his.

“That red-haired boy became the creature who tore up my shoulder last night,” he told her.

From Pergemis, the road wound northeast, first through the rich croplands and forests of the Bight
Coast, then through mist-hung, green foothills, where snow lay light upon the ground, printed with the spoor of fox and beaver. In the summer, it would have been possible to take a ship from the port, around the vast hammer of cliff-girt headlands and through the gray walls of the Islands, to the port city of Mandrigyn below the walls of Grimscarp itself. But the world lay in the iron grip of winter. Starhawk and Anyog made their way into the Wizard King’s domains slowly, overland, as best they could.

In the higher foothills, the rains turned to snow, and the winds drove down upon them from the stony uplands above. When they could, they put up at settlements—either the new villages of traders and hunters or the ancient clan holds of the old Thanes, who had once ruled all these lands and now lived in haughty obsolescence in the depths of the trackless forests.

Starhawk found the going far slower than she had anticipated, for Anyog, despite his uncomplaining gameness, tired easily. In this weather, and in this country, an hour or two of travel would leave the little scholar gray-faced and gasping, and the time span shortened steadily as they pressed on. She would have scorned the weakness in one of her own men and used the lash of her tongue to drive him. But she could not do so. It was her doing that the old man had undertaken the hardships of a winter journey when he should have been still in bed, letting his wounds heal. Besides, she admitted to herself, she’d grown to be extremely fond of the old goat.

Never before had she found that her personal feelings toward someone bred tolerance of his weakness. Have I grown soft, she wondered, those weeks in Pel Farstep’s house? Or is this something love does for you—makes you kinder toward others as well?

Dealing with the irrationalities of love that she found in her own soul frightened her. Her jealousy of poor Fawn had been as senseless as was her stubbornness in pursuing a hopeless quest for a man who was almost certainly already dead and who had never spoken to her of love in the first place. She knew herself to be behaving stupidly, yet the thought of turning around and retracing her steps to Pergemis or Wrynde was intolerable to the point of pain. Meditation cleared and calmed her mind, but gave her no answer—she could find herself within the Invisible Circle, but she could not find another person.