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 Altiokis 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.
Chapter 15
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 be
en 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.
No wonder the Wolf had always steered clear of love. She wondered how she could ever find the courage to tell him that she loved him and what he would say when or if she did.
And with love, she found herself involved in magic as well.
“Why did you never go on to become a wizard?” she asked one evening, watching Anyog as he brought fire spurting to the little heap of sticks and kindling with a gesture of his bony fingers. “Was it fear of Altiokis alone?”
The bright, black eyes twinkled up at her, catching the glittering reflection of the sparks. “Funk—pure and simple.” He held out his hands to the blaze. The light seemed to shine through them, so thin they were. The white ruffles at his wrists, like those at his throat, were draggled and gray.
Starhawk eyed him for a moment, where he hunched like a cricket over the little blaze, then half glanced over her shoulder at the dark that always seemed to hang over the uplands to the north.
He read her gesture and grinned wryly. “Not solely of our deathless friend,” he explained. “Though I will admit that that consideration loomed largest in my mind when I deserted the master who taught me and took the road for sunnier climes in the south.
“My master was an old man, a hermit who lived in the hills. Even as a little boy, I knew I had the Power—I could find things that were lost or start fires by looking at bits of dried grass. I could see things that other people could not see. This old man was a mystic—crazy, some said—but he taught me...” Anyog paused, staring into the shivering color of the blaze. “Perhaps he taught me more than he knew.
“I tasted it then, you see.” He glanced up at her, standing above him, across the leaping light; the fire touched in his face every wrinkle and line of gaiety and dissipation. “Tasted glory—tasted magic—and tasted what that glory would cost. He was a shy old man, terrified of strangers. I had to hunt for him for two weeks before he would even see me. He distrusted everything, everyone—all from fear of Altiokis.”
Starhawk was silent, remembering that whitewashed cell in the distant Convent and the mirror set in an angle of its walls. Somewhere in the woods an owl hooted, hunting on soundless wings. The horses stamped at their tethers, pawing at the crusted snow.
The dark eyes were studying her face, wondering if she understood. “It meant giving up all things for only one thing,” Anyog said. “Even then I knew I wanted to travel, to learn. I loved the small, bright beauties of the mind. What is life without poetry, without wit, without music? Without the well-turned phrase and the sharpening of your own philosophy upon the philosophies of others? My master lived hidden—he would go for years without seeing another soul. If I became a wizard like him, it would mean the same kind of life for me.”
The old man sighed and turned to pick up the iron spits and begin setting them in their place over the fire. “So I chose all those small beauties over the great, single, lonely one. I became a scholar, teacher, dancer, poet—my Song of the Moon Dog and the Ocean Child will be sung throughout the Middle Kingdoms long after I am gone—and I pretended I did not regret. Until that night at the inn, when you asked me if my safety had bought me happiness. And I could not say that it had.”
He looked away from her and occupied himself in spitting pieces of the rabbit she had shot that afternoon on the long iron cooking spike. Starhawk said nothing, but hunted through the mule’s packs for barley bannocks and a pan to melt snow for drinking water. She was remembering the warm safety of Pel Farstep’s house and how she had not even thought twice about leaving it to pursue her quest.
“And then,” Anyog continued, “I feared the Great Trial. Without passing through that, I could never have come to the fullness of my power in any case.”
“What is it?” Starhawk asked, sitting down opposite him. “Could you take it now, before we reached Grimscarp?”
The old man shook his head; she thought the withered muscles of his jaw tightened in apprehension in the flickering firelight. “No,” he said. “I never learned enough magic to withstand it, and what I learned...It has been long since I used that. The Trial kills the weak, as it kills those who are not mage-born.”
She frowned. “But if you passed through it—would it make you deathless, like Altiokis?”
“Altiokis?” The winged brows plunged down suddenly over his nose. For an instant she saw him, not as a half-sick and regretful little old man, but as a wizard, an echo of the Power he had passed by. “Pah. Altiokis never passed the Great Trial. According to my master, he never even knew what it was. My master knew him, you see. Vain, lazy, trifling...the worst of them all.”
He might have been a classical poet speaking of the latest popular serenade writer. She half smiled. “But you’ve got to admit he’s up there and you’re down here, hiding from him. He’s got to have acquired that power from somewhere.”
Anyog’s voice sank, as if he feared that, this close to the Citadel of the Wizard King, the very winds would hear. “He has,” he told her quietly.
Her glance sharpened, and she remembered the smoky darkness of the inn at Foonspay and the old man’s raving quietly before the sinking fire, with Fawn standing quiet, hidden in the shadows of the corridor. “You spoke of that before,” she said.
“Did I? I didn’t mean to.” He poked the fire, more for something to do than because it needed stirring. The wind brought the voices of wolves from the hills above, sweet and distant upon the hunting trail. “My master knew it—but very few others did. If Altiokis ever found out that it was known, he would guess that my master had taught others. He would find me.”
“Where does Altiokis get his power?”
Anyog was silent for a time, staring into the fire, and Starhawk wondered if he would answer her at all. She had just decided that he would not when he said softly, “From the Hole. Holes in the world, they are called—but I think Holes between worlds would be more accurate. For it is said that something lives in them—something other than the gaums that eat men’s brains.”
“Gaums...” she began.
“Oh, yes. My nephews call them after dragonflies, but they’re things—whatever they are—that come out of the Holes. They are mindless, and they eat the minds of their victims, so that their victims become mindless, too—nuuwa, in fact. The Holes appear—oh, at intervals of hundreds of years, sometimes. My master said they were ruled by the courses of the stars. Sunlight destroys them—they appear at night and vanish with the coming of dawn.”
Something moved, dark against the mottled background of broken snow and old pine needles; Anyog looked up with a gasp, as if at an enemy footfall, and Starhawk, following his gaze, saw the brief green flash of a weasel’s eyes. The old man subsided, shivering and rubbing his hands.
At length he continued. “The Holes vanish with sunlight—as do the gaums, if they don’t find a victim first. But this Hole Altiokis sheltered. He is said to have built a stone hut over it in a single night, and from that time his powers have grown. It animates his flesh, giving him life—but he has changed since then. I don’t know.” He shook his head wearily, a harried, sick old man once more. “He had only to wait for the great mages of his own generation to die and to kill off those who followed before they came to greatness. As he will kill me.”
His voice was shaky with exhaustion and despair; looking at him across the topaz glow of the fire, Starhawk saw how white he looked, how darkly the crazy eyebrows stood out against the pinched flesh. As if he’d been a boy trooper, funked before his first battle, she said hearteningly, “He won’t kill you.”
They left t
he magical silence of the foothills, to climb the Stren Water Valley.
Fed by the drowning rains on the uplands above, the Stren Water roared in full spate, spreading its channels throughout the narrow, marshy country that lay between the higher cliffs, cutting off hilltops to islands, and driving those farmers who eked their living from its soil to their winter villages on the slopes above. Starhawk and Anyog made their way along the rocky foothills that bordered the flooded lands, always wet, always cold. Anyog told tales and sang songs; of wizardry and Altiokis, they did not speak.
They made a dozen river crossings a day—sometimes of boggy little channels of the main flood, sometimes of boiling white streams that had permanent channels. At one of these, they lost the packs and almost lost the mule as well. Starhawk suspected that the struggle with the raging waters had broken something within Anyog; after that, he had a white look about the mouth that never left him and he could not travel more than a few miles without a rest.
She had always been a blisteringly efficient commander, using her own supple strength to drive and bully her men to follow. But she found that her fears for Sun Wolf, though unabated, left room for a care for the old man, who she was sure now would never be able to help her, and she broke the journey to give him a day’s rest while she hunted mountain sheep in the high rock country to the northwest.
She was coming back from this when she found the tracks of the mercenaries.
It had been a small band—probably not more than fifteen, she guessed, studying the sloppy trail in the fading afternoon light. Their mere presence in the valley told her they were out of work and had been so for at least three months, since the rains had begun, holed up somewhere, living off the land by hunting or pillage—too small a group to be hired for anything but tribal war between the Thanes; and most of the Thanes in these parts hadn’t the money to hire, anyway, and wouldn’t go to war in the winter if they could.
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