There were cosmetics on the dressing table and, best of all, several wigs in varying shades and lengths. She selected a red one and arranged it with a sequined scarf in a kind of turban over her cropped head so that they more or less covered the scar on her cheek. With a certain amount of trepidation-since, though she'd seen women do this, she'd never tried it on herself-she painted her eyes and lips and covered with makeup as much of the scar as still showed. The result wasn't reassuring. The woman staring at her from the warped brass mirror certainly didn't look like herself, but neither did she look capable of earning so much as a copper by getting men to sleep with her.
On the other hand, she reflected, neither Filthy Girt nor the Glutton seemed to have the least trouble finding customers. Reassured, she slipped three daggers and her knuckle-spikes into her belt and boots, found a silk scarf that would double excellently as a garrote, slid a little bodkin dagger down her bosom, added all the jewelry she could find, and put a purple cloak of oiled taffeta garishly lined with yellow-dyed fur over the whole business.
She eyed her tawdry reflection once more and thought, The things one does for love.
Rancid gray daylight filled the sky now that the fog was burning off. She wondered whether this was because Purcell no longer needed it-once they got to fighting in among the houses in Wrynde, fog would work for the defenders rather than the attackers-or because there was a limit to how long even a skilled mage could hold weather not suitable to the place and season. Through a crack in the window shutter she could see that the camp was returning very quickly to normal. It looked better, in fact, than she'd seen it since their return, with more guards on the walls and more men and women moving about between the buildings. So instead of gliding by stealth, she moved with purposeful unobtrusiveness across the blood-patched wallow of the west end of the square to the kitchen, where white smoke signaled the first meal of the day being doled out to all comers, warrior, camp follower, and slave alike.
Two of Zane's guards stood by the door, but neither glanced at her when she went inside. The eating hall, a long, low, rather smoky room, was half-filled with people sitting at the rough benches, mostly camp slaves under the eye of another man she didn't recognize-who must therefore be one of Louth's-and a tawdry gaggle of camp followers sitting chattering together at one table. More warriors were up around the swill pots where Hog and Gully were handing out beans and bread and thinned-out gin. Hog was expressionless, the set of his shoulders almost shouting, "I don't give a rat's mess who runs the damn troop, but stay out of my kitchen." Gully's nose was swollen and his sad eyes both blacked. His fingers, wrapped in bandages, had all been broken. The Hawk gritted her teeth. As often as she'd wished while he was singing that someone would do something of the kind, it had never been more than a facetious remark. Of Bron there was no sign, and she wondered if he'd tried to defend Opium against Zane.
One thing at a time, she told herself. If you try to help everyone, you're going to end up caught yourself. Feeling hopelessly conspicuous, she walked up to the front of the room, keeping her eyes down, and got a bowl. If Hog recognized her, he gave no sign of it, and Gully murmured casually, "Hi, Angelcakes," as he handed her a mug of wretched tea with clumsy, splinted hands. She took her food into a deserted corner of the big, damp room, and rapidly deduced that whatever else was going on, the curse still reigned in Hog's kitchen.
There she waited, watching people come and go, until another group of slaves entered to be fed, among whom she recognized Moggin.
He was thinly clad against the cold, coughing heavily in a way she deeply misliked. He must have slipped himself into one of the camp slave gangs, as he had, he'd told her, in the confusion of the sack of Vorsal. His bare arms, like those of the others of his group, were plastered with mud and sawdust, from which Starhawk guessed they'd been put to work repairing the burned section of the barracks for the benefit of the newly come conquerore. She waited until he'd gotten his food and walked to another deserted table to eat it, moving slowly, as if in pain. Then she got up, fetched a second dollop of swill from Gully, and went to sit beside him. He gave her a polite glance and turned his face away, closed in his own thoughts.
"Don't be so choosy about your company, pook; you're worm food yourself, once Purcell recognizes you." His head snapped around at that. Their eyes met, his still uncomprehending, frightened. "We have to stop meeting this way," she said softly, and mimed a kiss at him. "Sun Wolf is getting suspicious."
He gulped, stammered, then quickly returned his concentration to his bowl. "I saw him with them," he said softly.
"He's under a spell of some kind, a geas, Purcell called it."
Moggin nodded. "Yes, that would stand to reason if they needed him to fight or work magic." He coughed again; she saw the muscles of his sides and back brace in a vain attempt to stifle it. In the gray shadows of the mess hall, he looked awful.
She sipped her tea. It was dreadful. "There a way of breaking it?"
"A bypass morphological rune tree is supposed to work," the philosopher said thoughtfully, "but it would take another wizard to set one up." He paused, cradling the dirty wooden bowl of porridge between grimy, blistered hands, contemplating middle distance with scholarly absorption from behind a graying curtain of filth-streaked hair, and Starhawk marveled at the wonders of the pedagogical mind. "Now, the Sishak Ritual is supposed to offer protection, but again, we'd need a wizard to draw the Signs and construct an aetheric shelter before Sun Wolf could utilize them. We seem to be alternating between having one mage too many or one too few ... "
"Never mind that now," the Hawk said. "Where are you working? On the barracks?"
Moggin nodded, returning to scooping the tacky globs of porridge from bowl to mouth with fingers that shook. He paused, coughing again. He'd be little help, the Hawk reflected methodically, in terms of slugging guards, stealing books, or pilfering horses or weapons; she'd be lucky if she didn't have to lug him physically out of the camp. But at least he could be counted on to do what he was told.
"Listen. Get away from the work party as soon as you can, into any of the rooms near the burned section of the barracks. All of them vent into the old hypocaust. It's flooded and pretty nasty, but you can crawl along it as far as the ruined furnace at the far end near the stables. Wait for me there. With this geas thing, how much of his own volition does the Wolf have? Is Purcell in his mind, seeing what he sees, or does he just control it like a puppet?"
"A bit of both," Moggin said softly, with a wary glance at a nearby guard, who was busy flirting with Big Nin. "As I understand it, theoretically the geas is an aether-fiber extension of Purcell's own being, wrapped around Sun Wolf's consciousness and nervous system. It's partially astral-submaterialized but at least partly physical; it depends on conscious commands, not subconscious volition. Drosis' books contained instructions for the geas master linking with the slave's perceptions in a mediumistic trance, so it doesn't sound as if a sensory link is automatic."
"On your feet!" yelled an overseer. "Come on, Wimpy, that puke you're eating ain't good enough to linger over!"
Moggin rose at once, putting aside his unfinished bowl. Talking instead of eating had cost him a good half of what was probably the only food he'd receive that day. The overseer cuffed him, sending him stumbling after the other slaves through the door. Starhawk sat with her head bowed, not daring to look after him for fear of drawing the guard's attention to herself. She'd had years of watching how men treat women in the elation of victory, and the fear she felt now was a new thing to her. In her current guise, she couldn't very well kill a would-be suitor or even-dressed as she was, as any man's property-imply that she would. She had killed literally hundreds of men, usually for business reasons, but had never learned to deal with them in a one-sided amatory situation. Her heart beat faster when she heard a man's footsteps behind her. Trying to pretend she was unaware of them, she rose quickly to go.
"Not so fast, Angelcakes," Gully's voice said behind her. She froze at
the touch of his bandaged hand on the cloak she held so close around her. "You forgot your laundry."
"Hunh?" She turned to face him and met those sad, bruise-ringed eyes. He held out his hand. The broken fingers had just enough mobility to support a small cloth bundle that did, indeed, look like laundry, but as she took it she could feel by the texture that there was bread, at least, and probably cheese and raisins wrapped inside.
"Uh-thank you," she said, floored by this evidence of the little soak's wits. And then, conscious of the idly watching guards, she stepped close and gave him a wholly unpracticed-looking kiss. "I owe you a drink, Gully."
He shook his head. "You bought me plenty on the road."
The guard by the mess hall door called an obscenity to her as she passed. She felt a twinge of an unfamiliar panic, wondering what she'd do if he came after her; totally aside from her disguise of implied willingness, she was badly outnumbered, if it came to a fight. Though no trooper was fool enough to rape a woman trooper-if she didn't get him herself, the next time they went over a city wall her women friends or Butcher undoubtedly would-but the female soldiers generally looked upon the whores as a different matter.
But the man only laughed at his own wit and remained where he was. The fog outside was burning off, the day growing colder. Her sodden skirts slapped wetly at her boots as she crossed the square and climbed the rough brick steps to the door of Sun Wolf's little house.
As she'd feared, the books were gone. Ari's place, she thought, collecting the coil of rope the Chief habitually hid under the bed, and a heavily quilted coat for Moggin. Of course Purcell, as a wizard, would have taken them.
Tying the food bundle to the back of her belt beneath the cloak, she crossed the strip of waste ground that backed both Sun Wolf's house and Ari's. Sun Wolf had formed his rock garden in part of it, but behind Ari's was only an empty plot of heather, rubble, and weeds in which the ruins of broken furniture and garbage had been left to decay. From it, she identified Ari's bedroom window and, after listening and hearing nothing, scrambled up a half-ruined buttress to look in.
She stopped, frozen with her knee upon the sill.
The djerkas crouched in the middle of the room.
If she hadn't known from Sun Wolf's description what it was, she'd probably have gone straight in, for she had no sense of the thing's being alive at all. It looked like nothing more than a big piece of steel machinery, a loom or an experiment with pulleys, dully gleaming in the cool daylight, its razor claws tucked neatly out of sight behind the maze of cables and counterweights. Beyond it, on the low table that stood near the opulent, gilded fantasy of Ari's curtained bed, she could see Sun Wolf's books.
She swore, with considerable vividness, and swung herself back down the broken granite into the stony garden again. There she continued to swear for some moments.
"All right, you want to play the game that way, we'll play it that way."
Keeping to the garden, the waste ground, and the walls as much as possible, she made her way to the old furnace where Moggin was to meet her later and stowed the rope and the coat. The food bundle she kept tied to her belt, with an instinctive regard for priorities in the event of unexpected flight. From the midden behind the kitchen, she abstracted rags and wet straw; from Sun Wolf's house a flask of gin and a horn fire carrier, in which she placed a few glowing coals from the hearth and enough dried moss from the tinderbox to ensure they'd keep going for some hours. She tried to locate a projectile weapon of some kind-bow, crossbow or throwing ax-but everything along those lines had been confiscated, not much to her surprise. It remained only to slip back into the waste ground near the corner of Ari's house, settle herself behind a broken wall, and wait.
It wasn't even noon when she heard the din of the returning company. All day the cold had been increasing, the blowing gray cloud ceiling rising to a sullen roof high overhead, and in the sharp air it was possible to detect them at a great distance. By the sound she knew at once that their conquest had been successful. Not, she reflected dourly, that it was likely that the folk of Wrynde could have put up much of a fight, even after they realized that Sun Wolf had betrayed them.
She took a pull on the gin and held her half-frozen fingers around the heated horn, trying not to think of all the excellent reasons Purcell would have for disposing of the Wolf immediately after the taking of the town, always supposing the Chief had survived the fighting. From the brief glance she'd had of him during the battle in the camp, it didn't seem that the geas had impaired his fighting skills. Listening, she couldn't hear the deep, gravelly bellow of his voice rising above the general clamor-but then it had changed drastically since last she'd heard him returning with his troops from battle.
Still, the leaden fear inside her did not ease until she leaned cautiously around the comer of the broken colonnade and saw him, standing behind Purcell, a little apart from the boisterous mob that surged in through the gate.
The men were laughing, bussing the prostitutes who'd gathered to meet them, waving the sacks of food, bottles of liquor and beer, and cloaks of fur and wool they'd looted from the town. Some of them had women with them, too, beaten and exhausted, their clothes torn and their skirts bloodied. Louth pulled a girl of eighteen or so whom Starhawk knew slightly out of the crowd and thrust her at Zane, who laughed nastily and shook his head. Then Purcell and Zane started across the square for Ari's house. At a snap of Purcell's fingers, Sun Wolf followed, trailed by four of Zane's guards.
As they approached, Starhawk could hear Purcell saying, " ... of course not. I had picked you out as a possible partner all the way along, Zane. It was obvious that I needed a trusted confederate within the band and equally obvious that you were the only one strong enough to hold them together and dispose of Ari."
Yeah? Starhawk thought cynically. Next you're going to tell us you didn't mean for anyone to be hurt. As they drew nearer, she could see that Sun Wolf had been wounded in one arm, though he didn't seem to notice it himself. He moved more slowly than he had after the battle in the camp, and stumbled once on the slippery goo of the square's mud. His clothing was covered with blood and filth, and his head swayed unsteadily.
Was Moggin wrong? she wondered, suddenly panicked, not liking the way he moved. Did the geas eat out his mind after all? Did it just take time ... ?
"You could have contacted me earlier, you know," Zane said, a hint of sulkiness in his voice. "I mean, I could have got killed anytime during the siege, or the journey up to the Gore, or ... "
"Zane." There was a father's tolerant patience in Purcell's voice, gentle amusement in his smile. They had come around the corner of the colonnade, not more than a dozen yards from Starhawk's hiding place. But Zane's guards, loitering at a little distance in the colonnade's shadows, were armed with crossbows-it was clear Zane still worried about sleepers among the turncoats of the troop. Moving carefully, Starhawk slipped back around the rear of the house and into the shelter of the ruined buttress. Purcell's voice drifted to her ears as she kindled a few dried twigs from the horn at her belt, dripped gin onto the ball of rags and straw ... "Do you think I wasn't watching out for you? Why do you think you didn't come to harm?"
"Really?" There was boyish gratification and wonder in Zane's voice; Starhawk wanted to slap him for such gullibility. Only Zane was conceited enough to believe he'd have been excepted from the general disaster because of who he was. She lit a corner of the rag ball, which proceeded to smoke and burn fitfully, and scrambled up the ragged stone projection to lob it through the window. It rolled easily across the tile floor, past the djerkas, who had clearly been set to guard against human intruders and nothing else, and came to rest against the gilt-embroidered, jewel-stitched curtains of that ridiculous bed Ari had looted from the Duke of Warshing's palace five years ago. "I never guessed that," Zane was saying, even as she did so. "You picked me all along, hunh?"
"Please forgive me the deception," Purcell was saying, obsequious with years of practice on the King-Council, as the
Hawk slipped down into the weeds again and made her cautious way back toward them. At a guess, she thought, Purcell had approached Zane as soon as the band had split, before Zane could carry out the suicide of an attack on the Gore Thane's Fort-as soon, in fact, as it had become clear-to Purcell that he'd need military assistance to get rid of the band that currently controlled the immediate vicinity of the alumstone diggings, instead of simply waiting for the curse to do its work. "Men are stubborn, Zane, especially about men who've been their teachers. You're wise enough to know that. They'd never have followed you until they were absolutely fed up, absolutely convinced of the uselessness of Ari's weak leadership ... for his sake." And he nodded toward Sun Wolf, standing, swaying slightly on his feet, staring sightlessly into the twisted laurel trees that half hid the rocks of the stone garden he had made in earlier winters.
"You want to get him fixed up," Zane said, with a jerk of his thumb. "I guess crocking him up with dream-sugar before the battle wasn't such a good idea after all, hunh?"
"On the contrary, it was quite necessary," the wizard replied, with a hint of sharpness that the man who stood like a golden cock pheasant beside him would dare criticize his judgment of the situation. A far cry, the Hawk thought interestedly, from Renaeka Strata's rabbity yes-man, for all the fawning voice. In spite of his businesslike patience, how he must hate the Lady Prince-how he must look forward to crushing her power.
Purcell lowered his voice to exclude the guards in the colonnade. "As his powers recuperate, now that they're not being expended on healing and weather-witching, he would become unruly if he weren't drugged. I wasn't about to enter into a battle of wills with him when we had the town to take."
"You mean he might break out of this-this geas you've got on him?" Zane threw a sudden, worried glance at his former teacher.
Hambly, Barbara - Sun Wolf 3 - Dark hand of magic.txt Page 26
