The Ladies of Mandrigyn

by Barbara Hambly

  Did others wonder about this, too? the Wolf asked himself, watching them mount the few steps to the hall. How could something that trivial, that spiteful and vicious, have acquired this kind of power?

  Didn’t any of them see?

  “One more thing.”

  Altiokis turned back, the torchlight from the hall outside streaming over his jewels like a spent wave over a barnacle-encrusted hull. He snapped his fingers. Past him, the Wolf saw the guards in the hallway startle, heard Drypettis give a sharp squeak of alarm.

  Two nuuwa entered the cell.

  Sun Wolf felt his heart stop, then pound to life with a surge of terror that momentarily drowned out all things else. He cast one quick glance at the hook that held his chained hands helpless above his head, calculating whether he could get free before they began ripping at his flesh, then stared back at them, knowing he was trapped. Altiokis’ smile broadened with delight.

  “You like my friends, eh?” he asked.

  Both waggling heads turned toward Sun Wolf, as if they could see him or smell the blood in his veins. Drool glistened on the misshapen chins, and they champed their impossibly grown teeth and fidgeted as the wizard laid companionable hands on the sloped backs. Their uniforms—foul, torn, and crawling with lice—were so filthy the Wolf wondered how anyone could bring himself to touch even those, let alone the mindless, unclean flesh beneath.

  “You’ll be quite safe.” Altiokis smiled. “As long as you make no attempt to get away, they shall curb their appetites and be content with—ah—contemplation. But believe me, should you try to get away, I’m sure they could chew off quite large portions of you before your screams brought the guards—if any guards would be willing to try to separate them from their victim.”

  That pleased smile widened still more at the thought, and the most powerful wizard in the world paused thoughtfully to excavate a nostril with his jeweled finger. He wiped it fastidiously on Stirk’s sleeve. Stirk gave a fatuous smile.

  “I hope I shall see you in the morning.”

  The door shut behind him.

  For a long time Sun Wolf stood, his twisted shoulders racked and aching from the drag of his body against the chain, his mind chasing itself blindly from thought to thought.

  The most powerful wizard in the world! His stomach turned at the thought of that power and that waste.

  But the power came from nothing within Altiokis himself. He was a man half rotted from the inside by something else; the power was not of his own finding. That first, fleeting impression was all the Wolf had to go on; afterward, he had seen the wizard only as others saw him—obese, omnipotent, and terrifying. Sun Wolf felt as he had in his childhood, frantically insisting to his father and to the other men of the tribe that he could see the demons whose voices taunted them from the marsh mists and being sharply told to shut up and follow. He had been right then, he knew. And he knew now that there was something in Altiokis that was neither human nor clean nor sane.

  Tomorrow he would be taken up to the Citadel. He’d seen enough torture to harbor no illusions about his own abilities to withstand it for any protracted period of time. Altiokis was right—the threat of being given anzid again, or of being put into a room with whatever it was that could transform a man into a nuuwa, would have him selling off all these women he had come to be so fond of without a moment’s hesitation.

  Except, he thought, that it probably would not save him, anyway. Even upon short acquaintance, he knew Altiokis too well for that.

  His eyes returned to the nuuwa. Altiokis had left a torch, burning in its bracket on the other side of the room. The nuuwa wore the uniforms of Altiokis’ troops, but they were already ragged and fouled, for the creatures were too brainless to change them or even unsnag them if they caught on something. It occurred obliquely to the Wolf, in the one corner of his mind not occupied by horror, that what undoubtedly became of nuuwa, if they weren’t killed, was that they simply rotted away from self-neglect. One of these already had what looked like a badly festered gash on its leg, visible through the torn and soiled breeches.

  Now that he had seen them made from men, the Wolf could tell that one of these was more recent than the other—the one eye seared out and scarred over, the other rotted out from within and already scarring. The second nuuwa was older, the bones of the face changed and deformed, the shoulders more slumped. It was impossible to tell through which eye the flame-creature had bored.

  They stood unmoving, watching him from eyeless holes, their reek filling the cell. Sometimes one of them would shift from foot to foot, but neither stirred itself to brush away the roaches that crawled over its feet in the straw. Once Sun Wolf looked cautiously over his head at the chain and hook again, and they grew restless, snuffling and fidgeting.

  He gave up the attempt.

  His mind returned to that windowed cell in the burned-out wing of the prison. The flake of flame, the young slave screaming as he clutched his bleeding eye...Altogether it had taken nearly a minute, the Wolf calculated, between the time the thing had got the boy and the time it had bored through to the brain. Had he known what would happen to him in those endless, racking seconds? Or had the pain been too great?

  The Wolf shuddered with the memory of it. In his heart, he already knew what was intended for him, whether he revealed any plans or not.

  The anzid had changed his tolerance for pain, which was already higher than most men’s, but it had given him a hearty appreciation of how bad pain could get. And even with the blessing of ignorance, without the knowledge that one’s scooped-out husk would be ruled by Altiokis’ foul will, the sixty seconds or so that it took for the thing—fire, insect, or whatever—to bore its way inward would be like the distilled essence of the deepest Hells.

  He glanced at the nuuwa and then back up at the chains.

  It would be possible, he saw now, to stretch his body and arms enough to lift the manacles up over the top of the hook that held them. The hook was positioned for a slightly shorter man—few of the men of Mandrigyn topped six feet—and he thought that he could manage with a struggle. But it would take a short while; in the meantime, his body would hang exposed and helpless before those mindless things drooling in their corner.

  He wondered how far his own abilities of nonvisibility went.

  He’d experimented with them since the night he’d first called them into use on the roof of the palace kitchens, the night he and the women had rescued Tisa. With a little practice, he had found that he could, within certain limits, avoid the eyes of someone entering a fairly small and well-lighted room, provided he did nothing to call attention to himself. The nuuwa had no eyes—it stood to reason that they saw with their minds. But if that were the case, his nonvisibility should work better on them, since it was, in fact, avoidance of the attention.

  It might be worth a try.

  In any case, he was aware that, objectively, in the long run, he would not be worse off. Being devoured alive by them would be a messy and hideous way to die, but he wondered whether it would be worse than becoming a nuuwa himself.

  It was a choice he had no desire to put to the test.

  Hesitantly, he groped his mind out toward theirs, shifting their attention past him, toward the stones of the wall and the crawling straw at his feet, letting them look through him, around him, turning that intentness toward trivial things, and making them forget that he was there. He found himself sweating with the effort of it, trickles of moisture running down his aching arms and down his face and his body. He made himself relax into the effort, becoming less and less important in their minds against their general awareness of the cell and occupying their attention, their senses, with the crackle of insect feet in the straw, the smell of the torch smoke...

  He braced his body, then began to reach upward, rising on his toes and stretching his stiff back and shoulders toward the iron hook.

  The nuuwa stared stolidly at the walls to either side of him.

  Delicately, he hooked the tips of
his half-numbed fingers under the short links that joined the metal bracelets. He strained to lift them toward the tip of the hook, loosening his back muscles against the shooting fire of cramps that raced down them from their long inactivity. The sweat burned in the raw flesh of his opened cheek, and his arms trembled at the effort of movement. The tip of the hook seemed impossibly high. One of the nuuwa belched, the sound sharp as an explosion in the silent room; half hypnotized by the effort of concentration, the Wolf never took his mind from the illusion of nonvisibility that he held with his whole attention, despite the physical strain that occupied his limbs. He had been trapped once by having his concentration broken. Even if they tore him to pieces, he would not do so again.

  The metal slipped over metal. The slacking of the hook’s support was abrupt, as the links slid over it. The Wolf felt as if all the weight of his body had dropped suddenly upon his exhausted muscles. He could have collapsed in a thankful heap on the fetid straw, but he forced himself to remain upright, lowering his arms slowly to his sides, shaking all over with the effort. The separate agonies of the day were swallowed in an all-encompassing wave of anguishing cramps in arms and back.

  The nuuwa continued to look at the wall.

  As soon as he was satisfied that his legs would support him, Sun Wolf took a cautious step forward.

  There was no reaction.

  His mind held their attention at bay, but the concentration required most of his strength, and he knew he could not keep it up for long. He took another step and another, without either of them appearing to notice...No mean feat, he thought in that clear cynical corner of his mind, to keep a nuuwa from going after ambulatory food.

  The door was bolted with an iron dead bolt, not merely a wooden drop that could be lifted with a card. He glanced over his shoulder at the nuuwa, the nearest of which stood, a stinking lump of flesh, less than six feet from him.

  He decided to risk it.

  “Dark Eagle!” he yelled, lifting his raw voice to as carrying a pitch as he could manage. “Stirk! I’ll tell you what you want to know! Just keep them off me!”

  His concentration pressed against the nuuwa, a sheer physical effort, like that of trying to hold up a falling wall. The nuuwa shifted, scuffling around the cell, arms swinging, lolling heads wagging, as if seeking for what they could not find. Rot your eyes, you poxy corridor guard, he thought, don’t you want to be the first with the news that your prisoner’s broken?

  He yelled again. “I’ll tell you anything! Just get me out of here! I’ll tell you what you want!”

  Running footsteps sounded in the corridor. One man, he guessed from the sound, hesitating outside the door. Open it, you cowardly bastard! the Wolf demanded silently. Don’t call your chief...

  The bolt shot back.

  Sun Wolf came slamming out of the cell, throwing his full weight on the door, heedless of any weapon the man might have had. The guard’s drawn short sword jammed in the wood of the door and stuck; the man had his mouth open, too startled to scream, showing a wide expanse of dirty teeth. Sun Wolf grabbed him by the neck and hurled him bodily into the arms of the advancing nuuwa.

  He sent the door crashing shut and shot the bolt against the man’s screams, pulled the sword free, and ran up the empty corridor as if heading for the half-closed doors of Hell.

  Chapter 18

  “AND YOU TURNED their minds aside?”

  Sun Wolf nodded. Yirth’s drugs could ease pain without dulling the mind, but the release of concentration acted almost like a drug in itself. Lying in the fading light of her tiny whitewashed attic room, he felt as exhausted as he did after battle. The smell of the place, of the drying herbs that festooned the low rafters in strings, filled him with a curious sense of peace, and he watched her moving around, gaunt and powerful, and wondered how he had ever thought of her as ugly. Stern and strong in her power, yes. But the marring birthmark no longer drew his eyes from the rest of her face, and he saw her now as a harsh-faced woman a few years older than he, whose life had been, in its way, as strenuous as his own.

  As if she felt his thoughts, she turned back to him. “How did you do this thing?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he replied wearily. “It was the anzid, I think.” He saw her sudden frown and realized it wasn’t much of an explanation.

  “I think the anzid did something to me—besides half killing me, that is. Since I was brought back, I’ve been able to see in the dark, and I’ve had this—this ability to avoid people’s sight. I’ve always been good at it, but now it’s—it’s uncanny. I used it the first time when we rescued Tisa, and I’ve been practicing since then. I used to—”

  She held up her hand against his words. “No,” she said. “Let me think.”

  She turned from him, pacing to the narrow window that looked out over the wet, red roofs of Mandrigyn. For a long moment she stood, her dark head bent, the gray light gleaming in the pewter streaks that frosted her hair. Outside, the plop and splash of a gondola’s pole could be heard in the canal, and the light tapping of hooves over the bridge nearby. Yirth’s cat, curled at the foot of Sun Wolf’s narrow cot, woke, stretched, and sprang soundlessly to the floor.

  Then Yirth whispered, “Dear Mother.” She looked back at him. “Tell me about the night you spent in the pit,” she said.

  He returned her gaze in silence, unwilling to share the extent of grief and pain and humiliation. Only one person knew the whole and, if she were even still alive, he did not know where she was now. At length he said, “Sheera had her victory over me. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Don’t be a fool,” the witch said coldly. “There was no anzid left in your system when she led us back to you.”

  He stared at her, not comprehending.

  “Did you have visions?”

  He nodded mutely, his body shaken with a fit of shivering at the memory of those dreams of power and despair.

  She put her hands to her temples, the thick, streaky hair springing over and through her fingers, like water through a sieve of bone. “Dear Mother,” she murmured again.

  Her voice sounded hollow, half stunned. “I found it among her things when she was killed,” she said, as if to herself. “Chilisirdin—my master. I didn’t think...In our business there are always poisons. We deal in them—poisons, philters, abortifacients. Sometimes a death is the only answer. I never thought anything else of it.”

  “What are you talking about?” he whispered, though it was coming to him, in a kind of unveiling of horror, what she meant.

  Her face, in the deepening shadows, seemed suddenly very young, its stony self-possession stripped away by fear and hope. “Tell me, Captain—why did you become a warrior and not a shaman among your people?”

  Sun Wolf stared at her for as long as it would take to count to a hundred, stunned at the truth of her question, struck as he had been during the tortured visions in the pit, with the memory of his black and icy childhood and of all those things of beauty and power that he had set aside in the face of his father’s bleak mockery. In a voice very unlike his own, he stammered, “The old shaman died—long before I was born. The one we had was a charlatan, a fake. My father...” He was silent, unable to go on.

  For a time neither spoke.

  Then he said, “No.” He made a movement, as if thrusting from him the thought that he could have what he had known from his earliest childhood was his birthright. “I’m no wizard.”

  “What are you, then?” she demanded harshly. “If you hadn’t been born with the Power, the anzid would have killed you. I was surprised that it didn’t, but I thought it was because you were tough, were strong. It never crossed my mind otherwise, even though my master had told me that the Great Trial would kill any who were not mageborn to begin with.”

  Cold and irrational terror rose in him. His mouth dry, he whispered, “I’m no wizard. I’m a warrior. My business is war. I stay out of that stuff. My life is war. Starhawk...” He paused, uncertain what he had meant to say about Starh
awk. “I can’t change at my age.”

  “You are changed,” Yirth said bitterly. “Like it or not.”

  “But I don’t know any magic!” he protested.

  “Then you had best learn,” she rasped, an edge of impatience stinging into her voice. “For believe me, Altiokis will come to know that there is another proven wizard in the world, another who has passed through the Great Trial. Most of us undergo the training first, and the Trial when we have the strength to endure it. You had the strength—either from your training as a warrior or because the magic you were born with is strong, stronger than any I have heard tell of. But without training in the ways of it, you are helpless to fight the Wizard King.”

  Sun Wolf lay back on the cot. The smart of his arms and shoulders and the raw places on his wrists where the spancel had been removed bitterly reinforced his memory of the Wizard King. “He’ll follow me wherever I go, won’t he?” he asked quietly.

  “Probably,” Yirth answered. “As he hounded my master Chilisirdin to her death.”

  The Wolf turned his eyes toward her in the dark. The daylight had faded from the attic, but among themselves, wizards had no need of light. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was just given for free what you would have sold everything you owned to possess; and here I am complaining because I don’t want it. But I was raised to steer very clear of magic, and I—I’m afraid of the Power.”

  “You should be,” she snapped. In a quieter voice, she went on. “It is unheard of for an untrained mage to pass through the Great Trial. You must leave Altiokis’ domains, and quickly; but if you take my advice, you must seek out another wizard as fast as you can. You do not know the extent of your powers; without the teaching and the discipline of wizardry, you are as dangerous as a mad dog.”

  Sun Wolf chuckled softly in the darkness. “I know. I’ve seen it a thousand times in my own business. When a boy comes to me to be trained in arms, he’s the most dangerous between the fourth month and the twelfth. That’s when he’s learned the physical power, but not the spiritual control—and he hasn’t quite grasped the fact that there’s anyone alive who can beat him. That’s the age when someone—myself or Starhawk or Ari—has to trounce the daylights out of him, to keep him from picking fights with everyone else in the troop. If a boy survives the first year, he has the discipline and the brains to be a soldier.”