The Ladies of Mandrigyn

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 Starhawk. “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 Anas 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.”

He heard her small, faint sniff, which he rightly interpreted as laughter. “And to think I once despised you for being a soldier,” she said. “I will teach you what I can while you are hidden here, until we can get you out of the city. But you must find a true wizard—one who has had the fullness of his power for many years and who understands in truth what I know only in theory.”

“I would do that in any case,” Sun Wolf said quietly. “I know dial my days as a warrior are done.”

Clear and sharp, the vision returned to him of his own hands seared to the bone from grasping the molten fire of his dreams. It hurt to let the old life go, to release what he had striven for and taken pride in since he was a boy old enough to wield a child’s sword. It left him with a stricken feeling of emptiness, as if with the sword he had given up an arm as well. Ari would take the troop and the school at Wrynde. Starhawk...

He looked up. “There’ll be a woman coming here,” he said, knowing that with the Hawk’s stubbornness, even his vision manifesting itself to her in a dream and telling her to give up the search would not be sufficient to turn her aside. Stubborn female! he added to himself. “She’s looking for me. Tell her...”

Tell her what? That he’d gone on, searching for a wizard in a world long bereft of such things? That she should follow him once again?

“Tell her to meet me in Wrynde, before the summer’s end.

Tell her I swear that I will come to her there.” He paused, picturing her with sharp and painful clarity in the quiet of the stone garden below the school. He had not walked its paths in summer for nearly twenty years. “Tell her what became of me,” he added quietly.

The deformed mouth quirked suddenly into a wry smile, showing teeth white as snow in the gloom. “A long way to travel,” she remarked. “Shall I teach you how to find this woman yourself?”

He saw what must have been his own expression reflected in the one of deepening amusement in her eyes and grinned ruefully. “If I’m going to go back to being a schoolboy at my age,” he said, “I’m certainly developing the reactions of one.”

“That, Captain, is only because you have never before this particularly cared where anyone else was, or if that person lived or died,” Yirth replied calmly. “The relationships of the body are the business of women like Amber Eyes—the relationships of the heart are mine. I have made as many love philters as I have made poisons and abortifacients. They all tell me why. They are driven to tell; I do not ask. There is nothing that I have not heard.

“And do you know, Captain, that I have heard men sneer at—what do they call? A respectable man of full age—suddenly discovering what it is to love another person. Doubtless you yourself know what they say.”

Sun Wolf had the grace to blush.

“But if a man who has been crippled from childhood is healed at the age of forty, will he not jump and dance and turn cartwheels like a young boy, scorning the dignity of his years? The mockers are those who themselves are still crippled. Think nothing of it.” She shook back the thick mane of hair from her shoulders, her face framed in it like the white blur of an asymmetrical skull in the gloom. “Will you sleep?”

He hesitated. “If you’re tired, yes,” he said. “If you’re willing, I’d rather spend the night learning whatever you have to teach me about my new trade.”

And Yirth laughed, a faint, dry, little sound that Sun Wolf reflected he was probably the first member of the male sex to have heard. “What I have to teach is meager enough,” she said. “I have the learning, but my powers are very small.”

“Will they increase when you yourself pass through the Trial?”

She hesitated, the indecision in her green eyes, the fear robbing her of her years of experience, making her look again like a thin, bitter, ugly young girl-like the duckling in that rather comforting fable, who knew that she would never grow into a swan. “They should,” she said at length. “And I will read and learn all that I can about it before I take the anzid myself, so that I may meet Altiokis as a proven wizard when Sheera and Tarrin agree that it is time to attack. And that must be soon. Altiokis has long suspected there is another person born with the powers of wizardry here in Mandrigyn; after the Trial, it will be harder to hide.”

In the darkness, he heard her move, stepping to the narrow window that overlooked the slimy alley outside, the reflected light from the other houses that crowded the Little Island touching the hooked aquiline profile and the spider threads of silver in the dark masses of her hair as she turned back to face him once more. “As for the Trial itself, I think that my strength is sufficient to carry me through it alive,” she went on. “For thirty years, since I came to my powers as a child, I have felt them in me, chafing and twisting at the walls that flesh and mind set against their exercise. I know they are strong—there have been times when I have felt like a woman in travail with a dragon’s child, unable to give it birth.”

She was silent again, only the ragged draw of her breath audible in the cool, herb-smelling darkness of the bare attic room. Seeing her clearly in the darkness, the Wolf could see also the girl that she had been, like a young tree girdled with steel as a sapling, warping a little more each day as it strove despairingly toward a destiny not permitted it—And ugly, he thought, to boot. He knew now that the limitations that beauty set upon a woman were far pleasanter, at least at the time, than the ones ugliness placed—and he knew from bitter personal memory how cruel the world could be to women who were not pleasing to men’s eyes.

But he only said, “At least you knew why you were in pain. I never did.”

“Knowing why only made it worse,” she whispered.

“Maybe,” the Wolf said, sitting up a little in the narrow bed and bracing his shoulders against the dry, smooth wood of the wall. “I’m not sure whether it would have been better to know I’d been robbed or to grow up trying to hide from everyone—particularly my father—the fact that I suspected that I was mad.”

Against the reflected window fights, he saw her head turn sharply and felt the touch of her green eyes on him. He wondered suddenly how long it had been between the time she had realized her own powers and the time she had found someone who understood what they were.

When she spoke again, her voice was quieter, and the edge of bitter mockery was gone from it, leaving it sweet in the darkness, like the sweetness of the smell of drying rosemary. “I should look to the Trial as a gate to freedom—freedom from all that I have been—even if it is only freedom to challenge Altiokis and die. But—I saw you when we brought you up out of the pit, Captain.”

Then she turned away, covering her fear of pain with brusqueness, as the Wolf had seen warriors curse rather than weep when their bones were set. “Come. If you intend to learn tonight, we had best start.”

Twenty-five years of hard soldiering had not given Sun Wolf much background in wizardry or love, but they had taught him discipline and the concentration to set aside physical weariness and apply himself to what must be done. As he worked under Yirth’s guidance through the dark hours, he was constantly aware that it might be months or years before he found another teacher. I will sleep, he told himself, when I get on the road.

One of the first things that she taught him were the spells to hold back the need for sleep and rest and the drugs to reinforce them. He’d been familiar already with the drugs—most mercenaries were.

But this was only a beginning.

As with the body, there were exercises of the mind and spirit, without which large portions of wizardry would be impossible to comprehend, even for those born with its seeds within them. Those exercises she also taught him, in the shadowy dimness of that long workroom with its arcane charts, its age-worn books, and its phials of poisons and philters—things that in a year, or two years, or five years would come to fruition, if he meditated daily and practiced and learned the complexities of mathematics and music which were as much a part of wizardry as drugs and illusion. At one point, she stopped in her teaching and regarded him across the cluttered table, her long hands resting tranquilly among the diagrams that strewed its waxed surface.

“You are certainly the most cooperative student I have ever heard of,” she commented. “At this point, I was in tears, arguing with my master. I hated the mathematics part.”

He grinned ruefully and pushed the lank, sweat-damp strands of his hair back from his stubbled face. “Mathematics has always been a closed book to me,” he admitted. “I know enough about trajectories to get a rock over a wall with a catapult, but this...” He gestured in amazement at the abstruse figures that covered the yellowed parchments. “I’m going to have to take a couple of hours and memorize it by rote, in the hopes that one day it will make sense to me. By the spirits of all my drunken ancestors, it sure doesn’t now!”

She sat back, a wry expression on her craggy face. “For a warrior, you’re certainly peaceable about accepting things on faith.”

“I accept that you know more about it than I do,” he told her. “In fact, that’s exactly what made teaching those wildcats of Sheera’s so easy. To teach men, I have to prove to them that I’m capable of whipping the daylights out of them—and I have to go on proving it. Women don’t care.” He shrugged. “That was the most surprising thing about it. Women are a pleasure to teach the arts of war.”

Her white teeth glimmered again in a smile. “For the sake of your self-esteem I shall not pass that along to Sheera. But I tell you this also—it is a pleasure to teach this...” The spare movement of her hand took in not only the charts but the whole of the long room, the gold gleam of the book bindings in the brown shadows, the jungles of hanging plants, and the skeletal shapes of the instruments that read the stars. “.. .to a mind that has already grasped the concept of discipline. That is what I myself found hardest to learn.”

It was the discipline of a warrior that carried him through that night. Toward morning, he snatched an hour or so of sleep, above stairs, in the little whitewashed attic where Yirth had cared for so many exhausted mothers, but rest eluded him. When the witch descended the stairs to her workroom at dawn, she found him already up and dressed in the shabby, brown smock of Sheera’s gardener, as still as stone over the mathematical exercises, memorizing their incomprehensible patterns.

Sheera came after sundown that evening. He could tell by the way she spoke to him that she had heard what had happened to him; when she thought he was not looking, he caught the glimpse of something in her eyes that was almost fear.

“Altiokis left for the Citadel this morning,” she reported, settling wearily onto the carved X of a folding chair in Yirth’s long study. She rubbed her eyes in a way that told the Wolf that she had had hardly more sleep than he. He himself had dozed a little in the afternoon, but always the pressure was nagging at his mind—that he must learn, must absorb all that he could, before he left this stem and clear-hearted teacher. Yirth had spoken to him of what her own master Chilisirdin had told her many years ago, and he knew that it might take years of searching before he could find another wizard with even Yirth’s limited education to continue his training. And in those years, Altiokis would be searching for him.

“According to Drypettis, the Dark Eagle has orders to remain with the troops here in Mandrigyn and hunt for you. The gates of the city are double-guarded. There are far too many for a couple of girls and a phial of laudanum to account for.”

“I’ll get out,” Sun Wolf said.

Yirth raised one of her straight brows. “Illusion is a thing that comes only with long study,” she said. “This nonvisibility I cannot do—I must look like someone, not no one. You can elude the guards, if you move quietly and keep from drawing attention to yourself. Once men see you, you cannot vanish. But get through locked gates you cannot, without calling down their eyes upon you.”

“I’ll leave at dawn, when they unlock the land gates.”

“There’ll be a horse waiting for you in the first woods,” Sheera said. “There will be gold in the saddlebags...”

“Ten thousand pieces?” Sun Wolf inquired, with mild curiosity, and saw Sheera flush. “I’ll let you owe me,” he temporized with a smile.

She hesitated, then rose from her chair and went around the end of the table to lay her hands on his broad shoulders. “Captain, I want to say thank you—and, I’m sorry.”

He grinned up at her. “Sheera, it has been far from pleasurable to know you; but, like dying in the pit, it’s something I think I’m glad I did. Take care of my ladies for me.”

“I will.” Behind the graveness in those brown eyes, he could read the same grim purpose that he had seen four months ago in his tent below the walls of Melplith. But the wildness in them had been tempered by experience and by the knowledge of her own limitations. She bent gravely, to touch her lips to his.

“Makes me sorry I never bothered to seduce you,” he murmured and was pleased to see her bristle with her old rage. “When are you going to hit the mines?”

“Two weeks,” she replied, swallowing her angry words at him with difficulty. “We’ll send word to Lady Wrinshardin to start an insurrection in the Thanelands, and draw Altiokis out of his Citadel that way. By then, Yirth will have had time to go through the Great Trial herself and to recover from it. Tarrin...”

“You know, I’ll always be sorry I never met Tarrin,” Sun Wolf mused.

Sheera was touched. “He would have been honored ...” she began.

“It isn’t that. It’s just that I’ve heard so much about his perfection, I’m curious to see if he really is seven feet tall and glows in the dark.”

“You—” she flared, and he caught her drawn-back fist, laughing, and kissed her once again.

“I wish the poor bastard joy with you.” He grinned. “Be careful, Sheera.”

There was fog the next morning. It had begun to creep in from the sea during the night; the Wolf had seen Yirth sitting alone in the shadows of her study, surrounded by her herbs and her charts of the sky, stirring at the surface of the water in her ancient pottery bowl, watching as the liquid within grew gray and clouded. He had not bidden her goodbye, not wanting to break her concentration and knowing that she would understand.

The Golden Gate loomed before him through the slaty darkness, like the bristling back of a sleeping dragon. Sun Wolf moved quietly from shadow to shadow, hearing and feeling around him the faint noises of the awakening city, wary as an animal going down to drink. Distantly, the lapping of the canals came to his ears and the far-off mewing of the gulls in the harbor.

He wondered if he would ever see any of these people again.

It was not something that had ever troubled him before; in twenty years, he had left so many cities behind! He wondered whether this was an effect of Starhawk’s influence on him or simply that he was forty now instead of twenty; or because he was a solitary fugitive, with no idea of where he would go. Three days ago, from this street, he’d been able to look beyond the walls to the dark crags of the Tchard Mountains; they were hidden now in fog, and the Wizard King was within them. If Sheera’s plan succeeded, he would be able to return to Mandrigyn eventually. If it did not—if she and her Tarrin met defeat and death—he would be hounded by Altiokis to the ends of the earth.

They would need a wizard on their side to emerge victorious.

Yirth’s face returned to him, and the fear in her eyes as she’d said, “I saw you when they brought you up out of the pit.” She had to want her power very badly, if she proved willing to seek it in the racking of her body and the lightless pits of her mind. He did not doubt that she would do it, but he understood her fears.

Would I go through that voluntarily, if I knew?

He didn’t know.

Like a ghost, he drifted into the looming shadows of the turreted gates.

There were soldiers everywhere, and the gold of the torchlight within the passage under the over spanning gatehouse flashed on polished mail and leather. The great gates were still shut, barred, bolted, and studded with iron. A group of the Dark Eagle’s mercenaries loitered around the winch that would raise the portcullis; others were dicing in an archway opposite, their gleaming steel breastplates catching the red firelight, silhouetting them against the impenetrable dark beyond.

Sun Wolf melted himself back into the shadows of another of the numerous arches that supported the gatehouse overhead and waited. It wouldn’t be long. Already he could hear the market carts assembling on the other side of the gates, bringing in produce from the countryside. It would be easy enough to drift out in the confusion.

And yet... The memory returned to him of the fight in the street, when the Dark Eagle had taken him, and of the illusion that had broken his concentration. In the heat of battle it took very little to break a defensive line; and once an army began to flee in panic, there was little hope of its rallying. Was that how Altiokis had defeated them, up at Iron Pass?

Would Sheera be able to handle that, even with Yirth at her side? She had the courage of a lioness, but she was inexperienced—as inexperienced as Yirth would be against Altiokis’ greater magic.

The red-haired slave boy in the prison came back to his thoughts, and the obscene thing that had raped the boy’s mind. What of that?

It was Altiokis’ doing that Sun Wolf would have to search the earth for someone to teach him to handle the powers he had. If the women met defeat in the mines and the Citadel, it was Altiokis who would pursue him.

Beside their bonfire, one of the soldiers cracked a rude joke and got a general laugh. Outside the gates, farmers’ voices could be heard. The gray mists in the wide street behind were paling. He thought of Starhawk, hunting for him somewhere, thought of telling her that he was a warrior and her captain no longer, but that he was a fugitive, neither wizard nor warrior, doomed to wander.

He thought again of Altiokis.

Very softly, he turned and started back toward the streets of the town.

Like the flare of a far-off explosion, amber light sprang into view in the darkness of a pillared arch. Curiously hard-edged, a glint of light fell like a round hand from there onto his shoulder, and the Dark Eagle’s voice said, “Good morning, my barbarian.”

The chief of Altiokis’ mercenaries materialized from the shadows. In one hand he held a sword; in the other, a mirror.

A faint, steely rattle sounded and men stepped from behind pillars, from around the turrets and gargoyles, and from the black pockets of shadow behind the columns of the gatehouse stair. Flattened back into a niche, Sun Wolf found himself facing a battery of arrows, the bows straining at full draw. He let his sword hand fall empty to his side.

“No, no, by all means, draw your weapon,” the Eagle eluded. “You can throw it here at my feet.” When Sun Wolf did not move, he added, “When you’ve lost enough blood to pass out, we can always take it from you, I suppose. My lord Altiokis will not be pleased to receive you in a damaged condition—but believe me, my barbarian, he will receive you alive.”

The blade clattered on the stone pavement. The Dark Eagle snapped his fingers, and a man ran warily out to fetch it.

The mercenary captain flashed the mirror in the torchlight, his eyes glinting pale and bright under the dark metal of his helmet. “We were warned you’d grown trickier. You can fool the eyes of a man, my friend, but not a piece of glass. Hold your arms out to the sides, shoulder-high. If you touch the men who are going to put the bracelets on you, you may find yourself conducting your interview with my lord Altiokis from a stretcher on the floor. So.”

“Who told you I’d be here?” Sun Wolf asked quietly as the irons were locked to his wrists. He shivered at their touch—there were spells forged into the metal of the bracelets and into the five feet of chain that joined them.

The Dark Eagle laughed. “My dear Wolf—your secret is how you’ve acquired your wizard tricks, mine is how we learned where and when you would make your break. Ask your precious ancestors about it. You’ll be seeing them soon, but not, I daresay, soon enough.”