The Ladies of Mandrigyn

19

Starhawk heard the hoofbeats of the cavalcade long before they emerged from the gray mists. She was in the open country of stubble fields, not far from the walls of Mandrigyn; there was but little cover beyond the fog itself. Still, they sounded to be in a hurry.

She scrambled down the dead and matted vines of the roadside ditch and curled herself half under a tangle of gray and web-spun ivy just above the brim of the ice-cold water. Yesterday the water in the ditches had been scummed with ice and every leaf rimmed with a white powder of frost, but the weather seemed to have turned. In a few more weeks it would be spring.

Pebbles thrown from the hooves of the horses clattered around her. She heard the brisk jingling of mail and the rattle of weapons and trappings. She estimated the force to be a largish squadron, between fifteen and twenty riders. Yesterday at the crossroads, where the wide trade road from the Bight Coast joined the Mandrigyn Road up to the Iron Pass, she’d found the unmistakable spoor of a huge force going from the Citadel to the city and the marks, not many hours old, of a smaller force returning. Yet this road was also marked with cart traffic, farmers taking vegetables to town, so at least the place wasn’t under siege.

Starhawk lay with her head down under the wiry thicket of the vines, listening to the riders pass, and wondered what she would do when she reached Mandrigyn.

Seek out Sun Wolf? He had said he was dying.

Seek out Sheera Galernas?

May his ancestors help the poor bastard. Sun Wolf had said, who falls afoul of her.

The memory of the vision came back, the aching confusion of misery and despair and a weird, deep-seated peace. She had been right in her love for him, right to seek him, as, at the end, dying, he had sought her. But she had been too late—after months of journeying, she had missed him by less than a week.

And now he was dead.

She remembered his face, pain-ravaged and exhausted, and how warm the blood on his hands had been in contrast with the coldness of his flesh. What had happened to him in Mandrigyn?

Had Altiokis done that to him?

He said that he loved me.

She had tried to hate Fawnie for delaying her, but it had not been Fawn’s fault. All she had done was what the Hawk herself had done—sought for the man she loved. That she had been injured doing so was only due to the difference in their training; that she had found another sort of happiness altogether was something that the Hawk could not pretend couldn’t just as easily have happened to herself.

None of it changed the fact that she had been too late.

Anyog had lived for three days after the night of her vision, sinking gradually into deeper and deeper delirium. At first he had raved about the Hole, about Altiokis, about the spirit that dwelt in that sunless gap between worlds. Between tending him and hunting in the woods, she had had little time for other thought, or to wonder why she wanted to make this final conclusion to her quest.

When Anyog had died, she had buried him in the birch grove at the bottom of the valley, with tools she had found in the cell of the chapel’s former guardian. Whether because of the old man’s love for her, or because Sun Wolf’s death had broken some last wall of resistance within her soul—or simply because, she thought without bitterness, she had, after all, grown soft—she had wept over Anyog’s grave and had been unashamed of her tears. Tears might be a waste of time, she had thought, but she now had time; and the tears had been a medicine to her chilled soul.

The hoof beats faded into the distance. Starhawk got to her feet, brushing the damp ivy from her buckskin breeches and from the quilted sleeves of her much-stained black coat. It only remained for her to make her way to Mandrigyn and seek out Sheera Galernas, to ask her why and particularly how she had been able to carry off a full-grown and presumably protesting captain of mercenaries—and what had become of him.

The woman in the marketplace from whom she asked directions looked askance at Starhawk’s sword belt and brass-buckled doublet, but directed her without comment to the house of Sheera Galernas. It stood upon its own island, like so many of the great townhouses of that checkerboard city; from the mouth of the narrow street that debouched into the canal just opposite it, Starhawk studied its inlaid marble facade. Carved lattices of interlocking stone quatrefoils shaded the canal front arcades; red and purple silk banners, their bullion embroidery gleaming wanly with the lifting of the morning’s white mist, made stripes of brilliant color against the black and white starkness of the stone. Two gondolas were already moored at the foot of the black marble steps—a curious thing, the Hawk thought, at so early an hour.

She followed the narrow wooden catwalk that formed a footpath for a few dozen yards above the waters at the edge of the canal, crossing eventually by a miniature camelback bridge that led into the maze of alleys on the next islet. It was difficult to maintain any kind of sense of direction here, for the high walls of that crowded district cut her off from any glimpse of the roofline of Sheera’s house; but by dint of much backtracking over tiny bridges and through the twisting streets, she was eventually able to circle the grounds. From the catwalk along the wall of the nearby church-owned public laundry, she could look down into the grounds themselves and guessed” that, with so much waste space, Sheera Galernas must be rich indeed. Behind the house stretched elaborately laid-out gardens, fallow and waiting for the rains to end, a big, boarded-up orangery and a string of new, glass-roofed succession houses, and a stable court and what looked like a pleasure pavilion or a bathhouse, brave with pillars of colored porphyry.

It occurred to Starhawk that there were an unnatural number of entrances to those grounds.

She glimpsed movement in an alleyway on an adjacent island and pressed herself back against the uneven brick of the laundry’s high wall. A stealthy figure descended the few steps that led from the alley’s mouth to the opaque green waters of the canal and glanced quickly to the right and left. From where she stood on the catwalk above, Starhawk could see the woman—for it was a woman, wrapped in a dark cloak—go to the cellar door of the last house on the alley and from it produce a plank, which she laid across the canal to a disused-looking postern door in Sheera’s back wall. In spite of the postern’s dilapidated appearance, it did not seem to be locked, nor, the Hawk noticed, did the hinges creak. The woman crossed, pulled the plank after her, and shut the door.

Curious, Starhawk swung down the rickety flight of steps and wound her way through the alleys to where the woman had been. The cellar door wasn’t locked; in the muddy-floored room lay quite a few planks.

Intrigued, Starhawk returned to the mouth of the alley. It led straight down into the dirty canal water, about two feet below. The stones of the alley were uneven, slimy and offensive with moss; she guessed this was the neighborhood dumping ground for chamber pots. Leaning around the corner of the tall house beside her, she could see the backs of all the houses along the curve of the canal; women were laying out bedding over the rails of makeshift balconies to air, and someone was dumping a pan of dishwater from a kitchen doorstep directly into the murk a few feet below. A couple of the houses had little turrets, with long green smears of moss on the walls below them to announce their function.

A quiet place, altogether, she thought, glancing back at the deep-set little door in the wall. It wasn’t the regular kitchen entrance—that was visible down at the far end of the wall, a double door and a kind of little step for deliverymen unloading from gondolas.

The Hawk had another careful look around, then fetched a plank from the cellar, as she had seen the furtive woman do. It just reached from the pavement to the doorsill; Starhawk realized that all these planks had been cut to the same length. She drew her sword, look a final look around, and slipped across.

The postern was unlocked. It opened directly onto a thicket of laurel bushes, which masked it from the main house. There was no one in sight.

Starhawk pulled in her plank and added it to the three that already lay concealed under the laurels. The ground here was trampled and grassless. As Ari would say, somebody had more up the sleeve than the arm.

Well, of course Sheera was involved in a cause—meaning a conspiracy. But whether she’d been able to involve Sun Wolf in it...

The Hawk moved soundlessly around the edge of the laurel thicket and stopped, startled by what she saw.

The gardens were empty, the brown, formal hedges marching in elaborate patterns away toward the distant terrace of the main house. But here someone had quite recently half built, half excavated, a pocket-sized wilderness in one comer of those formal beds, the rocks settled like the bones of the sleeping earth, waiting for their attendant vegetation.

Sun Wolf had laid out those rocks.

She knew it, recognized his style in the shaping of them, the lie of the colored fissure in the granite, and the latent tension between large shapes and small. How she knew it she was not sure—the aesthetics of rock gardening was a subject she knew only through him—but she was as certain of it as those who could look upon a painting or hear a tune and say “This was created by that person.”

The warrior in her remarked, He was here, then, while some other part of her throbbed with a deep and unexpected ache, as if she had found his glove or his dagger.

And then, an instant later, an absurd thought crossed her mind: I knew good gardeners were hard to find, but this...!

She knew from working with him on the one at Wrynde that rock gardens like this were the work of days, sometimes weeks.

Steam billowed from the laundry quarters at the back of the house, drifting across the brown beds of the gardens. Voices came to her, like distant bird song.

A high, twittering voice insisted, “I’ve told you, he’s learned all he wants to know! There’s no danger! He’s looking for men, and looking in the Thanelands ...”

Among the bare white stems of the ornamental birch, Starhawk saw two people descending the terrace steps—a black-haired woman in purple and sables, with amethysts snagged in the dark curls that lay scattered across her shoulders, and a small, curiously childish shape pattering at her side, rattling with incongruous masses of heavy, jingling jewels, a king’s ransom in bad taste.

The dark-haired woman she recognized at once as Sheera Galernas.

“We don’t know that,” Sheera said.

The smaller woman said, “We do! I do. I heard them talk of it. Altiokis has no interest in questioning him. And Tarrin says—”

“Tarrin doesn’t know the situation here.”

The little woman looked shocked. “But he does! You’ve kept him informed...”

“For God’s sake, Dru, that isn’t the same as being here!”

The women passed through the door of the orangery. As it shut behind them, Starhawk glimpsed other forms moving about inside.

Who, she wondered, had Altiokis taken for questioning or not for questioning, as the case might be? The hoof beats of the passing cavalcade returned to her with new meaning. Greatly interested, she slipped cautiously across the open space that separated her from the orangery and glided along its wall until she found an open window that let into a sort of potting shed built out of one wail. It was empty. She found it a simple matter to force the catch with her dagger and climb in unheard. The women in the main, boarded-up section of the building were talking far too intently to hear the small sounds of her feet.

Sun Wolf had been here. Looking about her in the gloom, she was virtually certain of it. He had been here and had worked here. She knew the way he habitually laid out things at his workshop back in Wrynde too well to think that another could have his same order of putting up those mysterious little medicines to succor ailing plants.

But—it made absolutely no sense. Holy Mother, had Sheera really kidnapped him to do her gardening? And why—and how, for that matter?—had he appeared to Starhawk in a dream, and how and why had he died? Her hand tightened over the worn hilt of her dagger. That, at least, Sheera Galernas will tell me. And if it was her doing...

Starhawk stopped. She had far too much experience with the motivations of sudden death to make an unequivocal threat, even in the privacy of her mind. It was perfectly possible that Sun Wolf had asked for the fate he got—and in fact, knowing the Wolf as she did, more than likely.

She pressed her ear to the door.

A confusion of voices came to her, the high, strident twitter of the little woman called Dru, insisting over and over again that they were safe. Starhawk found a knothole in the door just as a tiny, golden-haired lady snapped impatiently, “Oh, button it, Dru!”

Dru swung around, blazing with self-righteous wrath. “You dare speak that way to me—” she began furiously. Then she caught Sheera’s disapproving eye and relapsed into red-faced and stifled silence.

Sheera said to another woman, “What about it. Amber Eyes?”

Starhawk had noticed her before, a slender girl of about Fawn’s age, standing almost shyly in the circle of her big, dark-eyed friend’s arm. But the moment she spoke, the Hawk realized that the helpless shyness was only an illusion—she was clearly the stronger of the partners.

She said, “It’s true we don’t know where Tarrin and the other leaders are working today. But Cobra and Crazyred have both been all over the mines, as I have, and we’ve all made maps. We can get you to the armories, to the passages up to the Outer Citadel, and to the storerooms where they keep the blasting powder. There’s enough blasting powder to destroy half the Citadel, if it could be placed. It doesn’t need magic to be ignited, just a slow match.”

“What if he’s talked already?” her friend demanded worriedly. “Altiokis might question him up at the Citadel—from what Dru told us, it’s in the wizard’s power to put him to what no man could stand. They could be lying in wait for us when we get there.”

“I tell you—” Dru began in her high, hissing voice.

Then from the dark doorway of the potting room, Starhawk spoke. “If that’s the case, you’d better chance it and strike now.”

All eyes swiveled to her. The women were shocked into silence as she stepped forth from the shadows. To do them credit, they weren’t frozen with astonishment—three of them were already moving to flank her as she emerged. Sheera Galernas was frowning at her, trying to place her, knowing they had met before.

Starhawk went on. “Waiting won’t buy you anything if your friend breaks.”

“We could get out of the city—” someone began.

A thin little woman in the dark robes of a nun asked, “Do you really believe Altiokis would not hound us over the face of the earth, once he knew who we were?”

Starhawk rested her hands on the buckle of her sword belt and surveyed the group quietly. “It isn’t any of my affair, of course,” she said, surprised at how easily she fell back into her habit of command, then accepting the way they listened to her, somehow knowing her for a commander. “I’m only here to speak to Sheera Galernas.” From the tail of her eye, she saw Sheera startle as the memory returned. “But if your friend was the one who passed me under escort this morning, I’d say strike, if you think he has any kind of strength to hold out against questioning.”

The little blonde murmured, “He has the strength.”

“They won’t reach the Citadel until after noon,” the Hawk continued. “Thai gives you maybe an hour or two hours to gamble on whatever you plan to do. It all depends on how tough you think your friend is.”

She saw their eyes, exchanging glances, questioning. As a rule, she had found that women vastly overestimated a man’s stamina against torture, as men underestimated women’s. That seemed to be the case here—none of them appeared to be in much doubt, except Sheera herself. To her, Starhawk said, “I won’t trouble you now, if you’re going into battle. But there’s something you owe me to speak of when you’re done.”

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 tike 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?”