The Ladies of Mandrigyn

by Barbara Hambly

  Sheera’s eyes met hers, and she nodded, understanding. But a taller woman, harsh-faced and ugly, who had stood in the shadows, spoke up. “He said there would be a woman coming to seek him.” The voice was as low and soft as a rosewood flute, the green eyes like sea-light in the dimness. “You are she?”

  There was no need to ask who “he” was. Starhawk said, “I am.”

  “And your name?”

  “Starhawk.”

  There was a pause. “He has spoken of you,” the beautiful voice said. “You are welcome. I am Yirth.” She came forward and held out long slender hands. “He told me to tell you what became of him.”

  “I know what became of him,” Starhawk replied grimly. On all sides of them, the women watched silently, amazed both at her presence and at the fact that this dark, lanky woman seemed to have expected her. To them, the exchange between Yirth and Starhawk must be cryptic, half intelligible; but none asked for an explanation. The tension in the room was too electric; they feared to break it.

  Starhawk said, “I know that he died. What I want to know is how and why.”

  “No,” Yirth said quietly. “He did not die. He is a wizard now.”

  Shock left Starhawk speechless. She could only stare at Yirth in blank astonishment, scarcely aware that her surprise was shared by all but a very few of the other women in the room.

  Yirth added, “And he is Altiokis’ prisoner.”

  “And I don’t think there is any question,” Sheera put in, her voice suddenly hard and cutting as a sword blade, “that Altiokis’ mercenaries knew where to look for him.”

  She swung around, her eyes going from face to face—browned faces, darkened from exposure, some of them with the bruises of training hidden under carefully applied cosmetics. There were pretty faces, faces plain or homely, but none of them weak, none of them afraid. “Starhawk is right,” she said quietly. “We must strike and strike now.”

  Drypettis caught her petaled sleeve. “Don’t be a fool!” she cried. “Do you know how many men there are in Grimscarp now?”

  “Fifteen hundred less,” purred a red-haired woman in a prostitute’s thin, gaudy silks, “than there were a week ago.”

  “And Altiokis!” the little woman squeaked.

  “And Altiokis,” Sheera echoed. She turned back to Yirth, who still stood at Starhawk’s side. “Can you do it, Yirth? Can you fight him?”

  Yirth shook her head. “I can lead you through illusion,” she said, “and to some degree protect you from the traps of magic that are set to guard the ways to the Citadel from the mines. But my wizardry is knowledge without the Great Power, even as the captain’s is Power without the knowledge of how to use it. We are equally helpless before Altiokis’ might, though he is stronger than I. But as I see it, neither I nor any of us has a choice. It is now or never, prepared or unprepared.”

  “Don’t be fools!” Drypettis cried hysterically. “And you are fools, if you let yourselves be stampeded this way! Altiokis doesn’t care about information. All he wants is Sun Wolf’s death! I know—I overheard Stirk and the mercenary captain speak of it! If we rush in now, before Yirth has a chance to gain the power she needs, before we can coordinate with Tarrin, we will cast away everything!”

  “And if we wait,” Gilden lashed, “Sun Wolf is going to die.”

  “He would have let the lot of us die!” Drypettis retorted, her face suddenly mottled with red blotches of rage. “Even those of you he made his sluts!”

  Gilden’s hand came up to strike her; but with a curiously practiced neatness, an equally tiny lady standing behind Gilden caught her wrist before she could deliver the blow. Drypettis stood before her trembling, her face white now but for the spots of color that stood out like rouge on her delicate cheekbones.

  In a cold voice, Sheera said, “He was brought here against his will, Dru. And as for the rest, that is hardly your affair.”

  The little woman whirled on her in a hurricane of jangling metal and tangled veils. “It is my affair!” she cried, her brown eyes blazing with shame and rage. “It is exactly my affair! How is the good and the decent in this city to triumph, if it debases itself to the level of its enemies to defeat them? How are we to face the men whom we wish to free, if we make trollops of ourselves to free them? That is precisely what this captain of ours has done. He has debased us all. Debased us? Seduced us into debasing ourselves, rather, with this lure of success at any cost! We should have suffered the evils that befell us and learned to work around them, before we turned ourselves into coarse and dirty soldiers like this—this—” Her jerking hand waved violently toward the startled and silent Starhawk. “—this camp follower of his!”

  Her tone changed, became wheedling. “You are worthy of the Prince, Sheera, worthy to wed the King of Mandrigyn and to be its Queen. And I would have supported you in this, given everything to you for it—my wealth and the honor of the most ancient House in the city! I would have given you my life, gladly. But to have given these, only to see you turn them and the cause itself over to such a man as that—to transform an ideal of decency and self-sacrifice into a base, athletic exercise in brute muscle and sneakiness—”

  Sheera strode forward, caught the hysterical woman’s shoulders in powerful hands, and shook her with terrible violence. All the ridiculous jewelry jangled and rattled, catching in the sudden tumble of unraveled brown hair. She shook her until they were both breathless, her eyes burning with fury; then she said, “You told them.”

  “I did it for your sake!” Drypettis screeched. “I have seen what one man’s influence can do—how far one man’s influence can defile everything that he touches! You are worthy—”

  “Be quiet,” Sheera said softly. “And sit down.”

  Drypettis obeyed, staring up at her in silence, tears of fury pouring down her round, red-stained cheeks. Watching their faces, Starhawk was conscious of that curiously concentrated quality to Drypettis’ gaze, as if Sheera and Sheera alone had any reality for her, as if she were literally unaware that she had enacted a lovers’ quarrel in the presence of some fifty other people. For her, they did not exist. Only Sheera existed—perhaps only Sheera ever had.

  Very slowly and quietly, Sheera said, “Drypettis, I don’t know whether or not you ever wanted yourself to be queen of Mandrigyn, rather than me, as the ancient lineage of your House might qualify you to be. I never questioned your loyalty to me, or your loyalty to my cause.”

  “I was never disloyal to you,” Drypettis whispered in a thin voice, like the sound of a crack running through glass. “It was all for you—to purge the cause of the evil in it that could destroy it and you. To make it pure again, as it was before that barbarian came.”

  “Or to get rid of a man of whom you were jealous?” Sheera’s hands tightened over the slender shoulders. “A man who took it away from being your cause, operated by your money and your influence, and threw it open to all who were willing to fight for it, no matter how rough their origins, how crass their motives, or how inelegant and dirty their methods might be? A man who changed the whole game from something that was bought to something that was done? A man who put commoners on the same level with yourself? Who treated you like a potential soldier instead of a lady? Is that why?” she asked, her voice low and harsh. “Or do you even know?”

  Drypettis’ face seemed to soften and melt like wax with grief, the exquisite brown eyes growing huge in the puckering flesh. Then she crumpled forward, her face buried in her hands, sobbing bitterly. The faint, silvery light from the high windows danced like expensive glitter over the incongruous riot of ornaments strewn through her hair. “He has done this to you,” she keened. “He has made you like him, thinking only of victory, no matter how dishonorable you become in the process.”

  Sheera straightened up, her mouth and nostrils white, as if with sickness. “Defeat will only make us dead,” she said, “not honorable. I will never say anything to anyone about what has happened here, and no one else in this room ever will, either;
not even to one another. That’s not an order,” she added, looking about her at the stunned, silent circle of women. “That’s a request, from a friend, that I hope you will honor.” She turned back to the bowed form of Drypettis, now rocking back and forth in the straight-backed chair where she herself had sat, during that first meeting in the orangery, the night Sun Wolf had come to Mandrigyn. “I will never speak of this,” she repeated, “but I do not ever want to see you again.”

  Her face still hidden in her hands, Drypettis got slowly to her feet. The women made way for her as she stumbled from the room; through the orangery door, they could see the colors of her clothes, a gaudy fluttering of whalebone and panniers, veils and jewels, against the liver-colored earth of the garden, until she vanished into the shadows of the house.

  Sheera watched, her face white and tears glittering like beads of glass upon her wind-burned cheeks; the grief in her eyes was like that on the face of Drypettis, the grief of one who had lost a close friend. At her sides, her sword-bruised hands were clenched, the knuckles white under the brown of the skin.

  Not what she needed, Starhawk thought dryly, with her first battle before her; and if for nothing else, she cursed the woman for that selfishness.

  That was first; and then the anger came—anger at the petty jealousy of Drypettis, at her own slow realization that the man whose capabilities to resist torture they had been speaking of was, in fact, the Wolf himself, still alive—but in horrible danger. She had missed him by hours. He had passed within a dozen feet of her as she lay hiding in the roadside ditch, the stones of his horse’s hooves showering her with pebbles...

  He was alive! Whatever else had happened to him, would happen to him, he was alive now, and that knowledge went through her like a living heat, kindling both blood and spirit.

  But, with her customary calm, she turned to the woman beside her, the woman who still gazed, with her jaw set, out into the now-empty garden, grief and the bitterness of betrayal marked onto her face like a careless thumbprint on cooling bronze. A sister in the fellowship of arms.

  The women around them were silent, not knowing what to say or how to speak of that betrayal.

  It was Starhawk who broke the silence, her natural habit of command laying the course for all the others to follow. Sheera’s grief was her own; Starhawk understood, and was the first of them not to speak of it. She laid a hand on the woman’s shoulder and asked in her most businesslike voice, “How soon can your ladies be ready to march?”

  Chapter 20

  IF WHAT LADY WRINSHARDIN had said was true—and Sun Wolf could think of no reason for her to have lied—the fortress of the Thanes of Grimscarp had once stood at the base of that rocky and forbidding knee of stone which thrust out of the mountain above the Iron Pass. The siegecraft that had been bred into his bones picked out the place, even as the Dark Eagle and his men took him past it—a weed-grown rubble of stones, just past where the road divided. There was no signpost at the fork, but Amber Eyes and her girls had told him that the right-hand way went up to the southward entrances of the mines below the Citadel, then wound around the base of the mountain to the main, western entrances above Altiokis’ administrative center at Racken Scrag; the left-hand way twisted up the rock face, toward the Citadel itself.

  Weary from two days with little sleep and from half a day’s hard ride up the rocky Iron Pass, his wrists chafed and raw from the weight of some thirty pounds of iron chain, Sun Wolf looked up through the murk of low-lying cloud at the Citadel, where the Wizard King awaited him, and wondered why anyone in his right mind would have made the place the center of his realm.

  There was the legend Lady Wrinshardin had quoted about the stone hut that Altiokis had raised in a single night—the stone hut that was supposed to be still standing, the buried nucleus of the Citadel’s inner core. But why Altiokis had chosen to do so made no sense to the Wolf, unless, as he had begun to suspect, the Wizard King were mad. Perhaps he had built the Citadel in such an impossible, inaccessible place simply to show that he could. Perhaps he had put it here so that no city could grow up around his walls; Racken Scrag perforce lay on the other side of the mountain.

  The Gods knew, the place was defensible enough. The impossible road was overlooked at every turning by overhanging cliffs; if Yirth were right about Altiokis’ powers of far-seeing, he would be able to detect any force coming up that road, long before it got within sight of the Citadel, and bury it under avalanches of stone or landslides of burning wood. But when they reached the narrow, rocky valley before the Citadel’s main gate, Sun Wolf understood why it was cheaper and simpler to haul the food for the legions up through the mines, for here Altiokis’ fears had excelled themselves.

  Most of the works in the valley were new, Sun Wolf judged; with the expansion of his empire, the Wizard King had evidently grown more and more uneasy. The Citadel of Grimscarp had originally been built between the cliff edge that looked northward over the wastes of the Tchard Mountains and a great spur or rock that cut it off from the rest of the Scarp on which it stood; its main entrance had tunneled straight through this unscalable knee of rock. Now the floor of the valley below the gate had been cut with giant pits, like a series of dry moats; slave gangs were still at work carving out the nearer ones as the Dark Eagle and his party emerged from between the dark watchtowers that overhung the little pass into the vale. While they paused to breathe the horses after the climb, Sun Wolf could see that the rock and earth within these long moats were charred. If an enemy managed to bridge them—if any enemy could get bridges up that winding road—the ditches could be floored with some flammable substance and ignited at a distance by the magic of the Wizard King.

  They were bridged now by drawbridges of wood and stone, things that could easily be torn down or destroyed. The bridges did not lie in a direct line with the gate, which was cut directly into the cliff face at the other side, without turrets or outworks. The Wolf knew instinctively that it was the kind of gate that could be concealed with illusion; if Altiokis willed it, travelers to that Citadel would see nothing but the stark and treeless gray rock of the Scarp as they reached the head of the road.

  He was coming to understand how a man such as the Wizard King had built his empire, between unlimited wealth and animal cunning, between hired strength and the dark webs of his power.

  The men who held the reins of Sun Wolf’s horse led him on, down the slope toward the bridges and the iron-toothed, forbidding gate. The hooves of the horses echoed weirdly in the smooth stone of the tunnel walls. Guards in black armor held up smoky torches to look at them. The Dark Eagle repeated passwords with a faint air of impatience and led them onward. The tunnel itself reeked with evil; its stone walls seemed to drip horror. The air there was fraught with latent magic that could be turned into illusions of unspeakable fear. Great gates led into wide, downward-sloping ways, the lines of torches along the walls fading into blackness at the end. The warm breath that rose from these tunnels stank of muddy rock, of illusion, and of the glittering, nameless magic of utter dread. It was as if Altiokis’ power had been spread throughout his Citadel, as if his mind permeated the tunnels, the darkness, and the stone.

  Sun Wolf whispered, almost unaware that he spoke aloud, “How can he spread himself so thin?”

  The Dark Eagle’s head snapped around. “What?”

  There were no words to express it to someone not mageborn; it was a concept impossible to describe. The closest the Wolf could come to it was to say, “His spirit is everywhere here.”

  White teeth flashed in the gloom. “Ah. You’ve felt that, have you?”

  The Wolf could see that the mercenary captain thought that he spoke in admiration, or in awe. He shook his head impatiently. “It’s everywhere, but it isn’t in himself. He’s put part of his power in the rocks, in the air, in the illusions at the bottom of the mine shafts—but he has to keep it all up. He has to hold it together somehow, and—how can there be anything left back at the center of him, the key of his bein
g, to hold it with?”

  The Dark Eagle’s smile faded; that round, swarthy countenance grew thoughtful; in the darkness, the blue eyes seemed very bright. “Gilgath, Altiokis’ Commander of the Citadel, has said that my lord has been slipping—he’s been with Altiokis far longer than I.” His voice was low, excluding even the men who rode about them. “I never believed it until about two years ago—and what you say makes sense.” He shrugged, and that wary look left his face. “But even so, my barbarian,” he continued, as slaves came to take their horses, and they passed through the courtyards of the heavily defended Outer Citadel, “he has power enough to crush his enemies to dust—and money enough to pay his friends.”

  Other guards surrounded them, men and a few women in the bright panoplies of the mercenary troops. They were escorted through the courts and gateways of the Outer Citadel, up to the massive gatehouse that loomed against the sky, guarding the way into the Inner Citadel. The Dark Eagle strode now at Sun Wolf’s side, the chain mail of his shirt jingling, the gilded spike that protruded through the dark, fluttering veils of his helmet crests flashing in the wan daylight.

  “Wait until you come into the Inner Citadel, if you think his power has thinned.”

  They entered the darkness of the gatehouse, two men holding the chain that joined Sun Wolf’s wrists, the rest of the troop walking with drawn swords behind him. All the while the Wolf was concentrating, his mind calm and alert as in battle, waiting for his chance to escape and reviewing the way down the mountain.

  Daylight blazed ahead. Like a huge mouth, a gate opened around them. As they stepped from the dense shadows, Sun Wolf saw that it led onto a kind of causeway that spanned the long, stone-walled ditch separating the Outer Citadel from the Inner. At the center, the causeway was broken by a railless drawbridge. The pit itself crawled with nuuwa.