The Ladies of Mandrigyn

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 siege craft 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 being, 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 staves 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.

In spite of the day’s cold, the carrion stink of them rose in a suffocating wave. Halfway across the drawbridge itself, the Wolf stopped. Turning, he saw that the Dark Eagle had his hand on his sword hilt. “Don’t try it,” the mercenary said quietly. “Believe me, if I went over, I guarantee that you’d go, too.”

“Would it make that much difference?”

The Dark Eagle cocked a sardonic eyebrow. “That depends on what you think your chances of escaping from the Inner Citadel are.”

Below them, the nuuwa had begun to gather, their grunting undulations shattering the air. Sun Wolf glanced at the men holding his chain, then back at the Eagle. He could see that the sheer wall of the Inner Citadel was broken by two gates, one fairly close and one several hundred feet away, with steps leading down into the pit of the nuuwa, plus the heavily guarded gate on their own level that let onto the causeway. There were gates into the pit from the Outer Citadel as well. It was a good bet that those were all heavily barred.

It was a gamble—to die horribly now, or to risk an uglier fate against an almost nonexistent chance of escape.

Compared with this, he thought bitterly as he moved off again toward the looming maw of the Inner Citadel’s gates, the choice Sheera had given him on the ship appeared monumental in its opportunities. But he would not give up when the chance remained to play for time.

The nuuwa’s screams followed them, like derisive jeers.

“You’ll be down there soon enough,” the Dark Eagle remarked at his elbow. “It’s a pity, for no one knows as well as I how fine a soldier you are, my barbarian. But I know that’s what my lord Wizard does with those who go against him. And after that thing gets through gnawing your brains out, you won’t much care about the accommodations.”

Sun Wolf glanced back at him. “What is it?” he asked, “What are those—those flame-things? Does he create them?”

The mercenary captain frowned, as if gauging the reasons for the question and how much he would give away in his answer. Then he shook his head. “I don’t know. There’s a—a darkness in the room at the bottom of the Citadel, a cold. They come out of that darkness; usually one or two, but sometimes in flocks. Other times there’ll be days, weeks, with nothing. He himself won’t go into the room—I think he fears them as much as anyone else does. He can’t command them as he does the nuuwa.”

“Can he command the darkness they come from?”

The Dark Eagle paused in his stride, those swooping black brows drawing together beneath the crested helmet rim. But all he said was, “You have changed, my barbarian, since we rode together in the East.”

The black doors of the Inner Citadel opened. Its shadows swallowed them.

The dread of the place, the eerie terror that permeated the very air, struck Sun Wolf like a blow in the face as he crossed the threshold. Like a dog that would not pass the door of a haunted room, he stopped, his breath catching in his lungs; the men dragged him through by the chain on his wrists, but he could see that their faces, too, were wet with sweat. Fear filled the shadowy maze of tunnels and guardrooms on the lower level of the Citadel, as if a species of gas had been spread upon the air; the men who surrounded him with a hedge of drawn swords looked nervously about them, as if they were not certain in which direction the danger lay. Even the Dark Eagle’s eyes darted from shadow to shadow, the only restlessness in his still face.

But more than the fear, Sun Wolf could feel the power there, cold and almost visible, like an iridescent fog. It seemed to cling to the very walls, as it had pervaded the tunnel of the gate—a strength greater than that of Altiokis, all-pervasive and yet tangible. He felt that, if he only knew how, he could have gathered it together in his hands.

They ascended a stair and passed through a guarded door. It shut behind them, and Sun Wolf looked around him in sudden, utter amazement at the upper levels of the tower, the inner heart of the Citadel of Altiokis, the dwelling place of the greatest wizard on the face of the earth.

Quite factually, Sun Wolf said, “I’ve seen better taste in whorehouses.”

The Dark Eagle laughed, his teeth and eyes bright in his swarthy face. “But not more expensive materials, I daresay,” he commented and flicked with a fingernail the gold that sheathed the inner side of the great doors. “A house, as my lord Wizard is fond of saying, fit for a man to live in.”

Sun Wolf’s eyes traveled slowly from the jeweled garlands that embroidered the ivory panels of the ceiling, down slender columns of pink porphyry and polished green malachite twined with golden serpents, to the tastelessly pornographic statues in ebony, alabaster, and agate that stood between them. Gilding was spread like butter over everything; the air was larded with the scent of patchouli and roses.

“A man, maybe,” he said slowly, realizing it was only a gross exaggeration of the kind of opulence he would have gone in for himself, not too many months ago. Then he understood what had shocked him in his soul about the place and about all the fortress of the Wizard King. “But not the greatest of the wizards; not the only wizard left on the face of the earth, damn it.” He looked back at the Dark Eagle, wondering why the man did not understand. “This is obscene.”

The captain chuckled. “Oh, come now, Wolf.” He gestured at the shamelessly posturing statues. “You’re getting squeamish in your old age. You’ve seen worse than this in the cathouses in Kwest Mralwe—the most expensive ones, that is.”

“I don’t mean that,” the Wolf said. He looked around him again, at the glided archways, the embroidered hangings, and the bronze lamp stands on which burned not flames, but round, glowing bubbles of pure light. In his mind, he was comparing the garish waste with Yirth’s shadowy workroom, with its worn and well-cared-for books, its delicate instruments of brass and crystal, and its dry, muted scent of medicinal herbs. “He is deathless, he is powerful; he has command over magic that I would trade my soul for. He can have anything he wants. And he chooses this trash.”

The Dark Eagle cocked an amused eyebrow up at the Wolf and signaled his men. They jerked on the chain and rattled their swords, leading Sun Wolf on through the wide, softly lighted halls of the upper levels, their feet scuffing over silken rugs or whispering over carved jade tiles. “I remember you almost cut my throat fighting over trash very much like this when we looted the palace at Thardin,” he reminded the Wolf with a grin.

Sun Wolf remembered it. He could not explain that that had been before the pit and the ordeal of the anzid; he could not explain, could not make the Eagle understand, the monstrousness of what Altiokis was. He only said, “How could a mind that trivial achieve this kind of power?”

The Dark Eagle laughed. “Whoa! Teach him a few tricks and he knows all about wizardry and power, does he?”

Sun Wolf was silent. He could not say how he knew what he knew, or why it seemed inconceivable to him that a man with a mind whose greatest ambitions rose no higher than dirty statues and silk rugs could have gained the power to become deathless, could have made himself the last, most powerful wizard on the earth. He understood, then, Yirth’s anger at his frightened rejection of his power; he felt it reflected in his own outrage at a man who would not only so waste his own vast potential but destroy everyone else’s as well.

Doors of white jade and crystal swung open. The room beyond them was black—black marble floor and walls, pillars of black marble supporting a vaulted ceiling of shadow. A ball of pale bluish light hung over the head of the man who overflowed the huge chair of carved ebony between the columns at the far end of the room, and the light picked out the details of the sculpted dragons and gargoyles, of the writhing sea life and shining insects, that covered the chair, the pillars, and the wall. The incense-reeking darkness seemed filled with magic; but with a curious clarity of the senses, Sun Wolf saw how flawed it was, like a prostitute’s makeup seen in the light of day. Whatever Altiokis had been, as the Dark Eagle had said, he was slipping now. Having destroyed everyone else’s power, he was letting his own run to seed as well.

Looking at him as he squatted, obscenely gross, in his ebony chair, for a moment the Wolf felt, not fear, but angry disgust. Not even unlimited evil could give this man dignity. Sun Wolf’s captors pushed him forward until he stood alone before the Wizard King, his shoulders dragged down by the weight of his chains.

Altiokis belched and scratched his jewel-encrusted belly. “So,” he said, in a voice thick with brandy, “you think the palace of Altiokis, the greatest prince this world has known, looks like a whorehouse?”

His wizard’s senses had spread throughout that tawdry palace; he had heard every word that they had said. The Dark Eagle looked frightened, but Sun Wolf knew how it was done, though he himself could not do it. He only looked at the Wizard King, trying to understand what unlimited life, unlimited power, and unlimited boredom had done to this man, this fast and most powerful wizard.

“You poor ass, did you really think you could get away from me that easily?” Altiokis asked. “Did you really have any idea of what you’d be up against when you accepted the commission of that fool, whatever his name was—the man who hired you? One of the Thanes, I think we said. Not that it matters, of course. I know who my enemies are. We’ll have them gathered in...”

The Dark Eagle’s bright blue eyes widened with alarm. “My lord, we don’t know—”

“Oh, be silent,” Altiokis snapped pettishly. “Cowards—I am surrounded by cowards.”

“My lord,” the Dark Eagle grated, “if you arrest without proof, there’ll be trouble among the Thanes...”

“Oh, there’s always trouble among the Thanes,” the Wizard King retorted angrily. “And there always has been—we needed only the excuse to put them down. Let them come against me—if they dare. I will crush them...” The dark, little eyes glittered unnaturally bright in the gloom. “... as I will crush this slave.”

He had risen from his chair, his eyes holding Sun Wolf’s, and the Wolf saw in the wizard what had struck him before. There was very little that was human left of the man. The fire within was eating it away, his soul literally rotting, like the minds of the nuuwa. Like them, the Wolf realized, Altiokis existed almost solely to devour.

Sun Wolf fell back a step as the Wizard King raised the staff with its evil, gleaming head. At a distance of several feet, he could already feel the searing pain that radiated like waves of heat from the metal. Altiokis raised it, and the Wolf retreated until he felt the sword points of the guards press his back.

“Are you stupid,” the Wizard King whispered, “or only a nerveless animal? Or don’t you believe what could happen to you here?”

“I believe you,” Sun Wolf said, keeping a wary eye on the staff, which hovered a foot or so in front of his throat. His voice was a dry rasp, the only sound in that hushed darkness of perfume and sweat. “I just don’t believe that anything I can say will stop you from doing what you choose.”

It was as polite a way as any he could think of to say that he made it a policy never to argue with a crazy man.

A sneer contorted the greasy face. “So it has wisdom, after all,” the wizard said. “Pity you did not exercise it sooner. I have lived longer than you know. I am versed in the art of crushing the soul from the body, while leaving the brain time for reflection. I could put the blood worms on you, until a month from now you would be nothing but a crawling mass of maggots, begging me for the mercy of death. Or I could blind and cripple you with drugs and find a job for you hauling bath water for my mercenaries—eh? Or I could wall you into a stone room, with only a cup of water, and that water filled with anzid, and leave you to choose between slow death from poison and slower from thirst.”

Sun Wolf fought to keep his expression impassive, knowing full well that the fat man had both the power and the inclination to mete out any one of those fates, merely for the entertainment of seeing him die. But, sickened as he was by horror, two things remained very clear in the back of his brain.

The first was that Altiokis had never passed the Great Trial. He clearly had no idea that anzid was anything other than a particularly loathsome poison. And that meant that he had derived his power from some other source.

It would explain some things, the Wolf thought, his mind struggling to grasp that awareness. The power that pervaded the lower level of the tower and that filled the mines was then not entirely from Altiokis’ attenuated personality. It was something else, something foul and filthy, not like Yirth’s academic sorcery, nor what the Wolf felt of the wild magic that seemed to fill his own soul. Was the power only channeled through the Wizard King from the darkness that the Eagle had spoken of, the darkness that dwelt in the innermost room of the tower? A power that had no ambitions, but that Altiokis had seized upon to fulfill his own?

The second thing Sun Wolf realized was that, like a cruel child, Altiokis was simply telling him this, not to learn any information, but in order to see him break. He knew from his own experience that a screaming victim was more satisfactory to watch. He did not doubt for a moment that they would get down to the screaming sooner or later, but he was damned to the Cold Hells if he’d give the Wizard King that pleasure now.

Altiokis’ face changed. “Or I could give you worse,” he snarled. He snapped his fingers for the Dark Eagle and his men. “Downstairs,” he ordered. “With me.”

The mercenaries closed in around Sun Wolf, dragging at his wrist chains, thrusting from behind with their swords. A door opened in the wall, where no door had been; the blue brimfire that floated over Altiokis’ head illuminated the first steps of a stair that curved down into darkness. The Wolf balked in sudden terror at the power, the evil, that rose like a nauseating stench from the pit below. The blackness seemed filled with an alien, hideous chill, like that from the demons he had seen in the marshes of his childhood—a sensation of seeing something that had risen from unknowable gulfs of nothingness, a sensing of something that was not of this earth.

Someone shoved a blade against his ribs, pushing him through the door. The soldiers seemed unaware of what lay below; they could not know what he knew and still be willing to go that way themselves. He almost turned to fight them in the doorway, but Altiokis reached forward with his staff and used the glowing head of it to drive the Wolf forward down the stairs. The men surrounded him again, and the eldritch cold rose about them as they descended.

The descent was less far than he had thought. The stair made one circle, then leveled out; the floor, he saw, was rock and dirt. They must be at ground level, at what had been the top of the crag, close to the cliff’s edge. At the end of the short, lightless vault of the hallway was a small door. Even as his soul shrank from it, he thought, I have done this before.

The room beyond was like the one Derroug Dru had shown him in the prison below the Records Office in Mandrigyn. It was small and dank, furnished with a huge, carved chair whose black velvet cushions boasted bullion tassels. The white glow of the witchlight gleamed oilily on the wall of glass before the chair. The only difference from that other chamber was that there was a door beside the wide window that looked into darkness.

Something like a restless flake of fire moved in that dark beyond the glass.

Sun Wolf had known this was coming to him, all the long road up the mountain. In a way, he had known it since Derroug Dru had first shown the abominations that Altiokis had given him, in the cell beneath the Records Offices. Horror went through the Wolf like a sword of ice; horror and despair and the terrified consciousness that in that room, not in the fat man chuckling throatily beside him, lay the center point of the evil power that pervaded the Citadel. Whatever was in there, it was the source, not only of the creatures that turned men into nuuwa, but of the power that had let Altiokis become the swollen and abominable thing that he was.

Behind the glass, the bright flake of fire zagged idly in the air, leaving a thin fire trail in the stygian dark. It was waiting for him, waiting to devour his brain, to make him one of the mewing, slobbering things that were filled, like the dead stones of the Citadel, with Altiokis’ perverted will.

Swords pressed into Sun Wolf’s back, forcing him toward the narrow door. All of his senses seemed to have dulled and concentrated; he was conscious of no sound but the frantic hammering of his own heart and of no sensation but the cold of sweat pouring down his face and breast and arms. The sharpness of the steel was driving him forward. His vision had shrunk to that idle flake of fire, to the dark door, triple-barred with iron, and to the hands of the men unbarring it.

Cold and evil seemed to flow forth from the black slot of the opening. With curious, instantaneous clarity, he saw the round stone walls of Altiokis’ original hut, the weeds that lay dead and tangled about the edges, and the scuffed, fouled dirt within. But all that was peripheral to the awareness of that black pit at the center, a boundary less, anomalous, and utterly hideous vortex of absolute darkness that seemed to open in the air of the room’s center. It was a Hole, a gap of nothingness that led into a universe beyond the ken of humankind. Through it flowed the power that filled the Citadel, filled the nuuwa, and filled Altiokis’ corrupted, deathless flesh and rotting brain.

But worse than the awareness of the power was the knowledge of the mind of the Entity that lived within the Hole, of the Thing that was trapped there, its thoughts reaching out to him, as shocking as ice water flowing over his naked brain.

Not human, nor demon ... demons were of this world, and quite ordinary and comforting compared with that ice-cold, streaming black fire. Yet it was alive, and it reached to fill him.

Hands thrust him, unresisting, forward to the threshold of that tiny room. Unaware that he spoke aloud, he said, “It’s alive...” And in the last second, as the guards shoved him in, he turned his head, meeting Altiokis’ startled, dilating eyes with a sudden knowledge of where he had seen that Thing before. He said, “It gave you your power.”

The Wizard King was on his feet, shrieking. “Bring him out of there! Shut the door!” His voice was frenzied, almost in panic.

The guards wavered, uncertain whether they had heard aright. The Dark Eagle grabbed Sun Wolf by the arm and pulled him backward, slamming the door to with a kick; Sun Wolf staggered, as if he had been released from a chain that held him upright, and found there was no strength left in him. He clutched the door bolts for support.

Altiokis was screaming, “Get him out of here! Get him away from here! He sees it! He’s a wizard! Get him away!”

“Him?” the Eagle said, rather unwisely. “He’s no wizard, my lord...”

Altiokis strode forward, swinging his staff to knock Sun Wolf’s hands from the door bolts, as if he feared the Wolf would throw the door open and fling himself inside. Ignoring his captain of mercenaries, Altiokis clutched with his fat, jeweled hands at the grubby rags of what remained of Sun Wolf’s tunic, his face white with hatred and fear.

“Did you see it?” he demanded in a stinking blast of liquor and rich food.

Exhausted, leaning against the stone wall at his back for support, Sun Wolf whispered, “Yes, I did. I see it now, in your eyes.”

“It might choose to call another wizard,” the fat man gasped hoarsely, as if he had not heard. “It could give him its power, if he were lucky, as I was lucky...”

“I wouldn’t touch that power!” the Wolf cried, the thought more sickening to him than the horror of that flake of fire boring steadily through his eye.

Again the Wizard King appeared not to have heard him. “It could even give him immortality.” The black, lifeless eyes stared at Sun Wolf, desperate with jealousy and terror. Then Altiokis whirled back to his guards, screaming, “Get him out of here! Throw him to the nuuwa Get him out!”

Like the tug of a fine wire embedded in his flesh. Sun Wolf felt the touch of that black Entity in the Hole, whispering to his brain.

Furiously, he thrust it aside, more frightened of it than of anything he had yet seen, in the Citadel of Altiokis or out of it. He fought like a tiger as they half dragged, half carried him along the maze of corridors to where a shallow flight of steps led downward to a broad double door. Altiokis strode at their heels, screaming incoherently, reviling the Eagle for bringing this upon him, and cursing his own means of divination that had not shown him this new threat. One of the guards ran ahead to peer through the judas in the door, and the faint yellow bar of light from the westering sun picked out the scars on his face as he looked. He called, “There are few of them out there now, me lord. They’re mostly gone in their dens.”

“Open their dens, then!” the Wizard King shrieked in a paroxysm of rage. “And do it quickly, before I throw you out to keep him company!”

The man darted off, his footfalls ringing on the stone of the passageway. Sun Wolf twisted against the hands that gripped him, but far too many men were holding him to give him purchase to fight. The doors at the bottom of the steps were flung open, and sunlight struck him as the Dark Eagle shouted a command. He was flung bodily down the steps, the harsh granite of them tearing at and bruising his flesh as he rolled.

The filthy reek of the nuuwa was all around him. As he heard the doors clang shut above him, the shrill howls began to echo from all sides. He saw that he was in the long ditch between the inner and outer walls. From various points in the shade of the looming wall, a dozen nuuwa and two or three of the apelike uglie-beasts were lolloping toward him, heads lolling, dripping mouths gaping to slash.

Sun Wolf knew already that there was no further hope of escape. The walls of the ditch were too steep to climb. It was only a matter of time before he would be overpowered, torn apart, and eaten alive. He flung himself back up the few steps to where the embrasure of the door made a kind of hollow in the bald face of the wall, taking advantage of the only cover in sight. He put his back to the massive, brass-bound wood, gathered the five feet of chain that joined his manacled hands, and swung at the first of the things that hurled itself upon him. Brains and blood splattered from the burst skull. He swung again, slashing, the heavy chain whining through the screaming, stinking air. Anything to buy time—minutes, seconds even.

The chain, close to thirty pounds of swinging iron, connected again, flinging the creature that it hit back against two of its fellows. He brained one of them while they were fighting each other; the remaining monstrosities named on him, spitting mouthfuls of rotted flesh, and he slashed, swinging desperately, keeping them off him as long as he could, praying to his ancestors to do something, anything...

You can control them, that black slip of fire whispered in his brain. Turn them aside. Make them do your bidding.

Chain connected with flesh. His wrists were scraped raw from the iron, and the smell of the blood was driving the nuuwa to madness. He could feel himself tiring, instant by instant, and knew to within a moment how long his strength would last. All the while, the thought of the Entity he had seen, that black intelligence glimpsed in the Hole and in the Wizard King’s possessed eyes, whispered to him the promise of the life that it could give him.

The world had narrowed, containing nothing but blood-mouthed, eyeless faces, ripping hands, pain and sweat and the foul reek of the air, screaming cries and that terrible, nagging whisper of uncertainty in his brain. He was aware of other sounds somewhere, distant noises in the Outer Citadel, a far-off howling like the din of a faraway battle.

An explosion jarred the ground. Then another, heavier, louder, nearer, and he thought he heard, through the shrieking of the mindless things all around him, the triumphal yells of men and the higher, wilder keening of women.

He was aware that no new attackers were running toward him. He swung grimly at those that remained, half conscious of things happening elsewhere in the long ditch—of fighting somewhere—on the causeway—of fire...

Teeth slashed at his leg and he stomped, breaking the neck of the uglie that had crawled up below the arc of the swinging chain. Whatever else was happening was only a distraction, a break in his concentration that could cost him his life.

Another explosion sounded, this time very near, and it took all his will not to look. The chain crushed a final skull, the last nuuwa fell, wriggling and snapping at its own flesh, and he stood gasping in the doorway, looking up to see the causeway drawbridge fall in flames.

The top of the outer wall was a frieze work of struggling men. A rear guard of black-armored soldiers was being cut to pieces on the causeway itself. What looked tike an army of black and filthy gnomes was pouring through the causeway gate and down makeshift ladders into the ditch, brandishing picks, adzes, and weapons stolen, from the armories in the mines. The blood of their wounds gleamed bright through the rock dust, and their screams of triumph and anger shook the air.

Then he heard a voice pitched as only a warrior’s could be to carry over the roar of battle—the one voice that, of all others, he would have given anything he had ever possessed to hear again.

“DUCK, YOU OAF!”

He ducked as an axe splintered into the wood of the door where his head had been. He saw the advancing forces of the Dark Eagle’s mercenaries pouring down from the other side of the causeway to meet the miners in battle in the ditch. With a great scraping of bolts, the doors behind him were thrown open, and reinforcements poured through in a mixed tide of mercenaries, regulars, and nuuwa. The battle was joined on the corpse-strewn steps around him.

Somehow, Starhawk was there, where he knew she always should be, fighting like a demon at his side.

“I thought I told you to go back!” he yelled at her over the general chaos. His chain smashed the helmet and skull of a mercenary before him.

“Rot that!” she yelled back. “I’ve quit the troops and I’ll look for you as long as I bloody well please! Here...” She stooped to wrench a sword free from the dead fingers that still grasped it and thrust the bloody hilt at him. “This will get you farther than that silly chain.”

“Cheap, rotten, general-armory issue,” he grumbled, testing the edge on the neck of an advancing nuuwa. “If you were going to get me a sword, you might at least have made it a decent one.”

“Gripe, gripe, gripe, all you ever do is gripe,” she retorted, and he laughed, teeth gleaming white through the filthy stubble of his beard, joyful only to be with her again.

They were silent then, except for the wordless yelling of battle, merging with the dirty mob of the advancing forces. But he was conscious of her at his side, battle-cold and bright, filled with concentrated fire, and he wondered how he had ever thought her plain.

The men now around him were gaunt as wolves but rock-muscled from hard labor, their dusty hides striped with the scars of beatings. He knew they were the husbands, the lovers, or the brothers of those crazy and intrepid wildcats he’d spent the winter training. There were more of them than he’d thought; the long ditch was rapidly filling with men. The gate at the top of the steps was disgorging more and more of Altiokis’ troops. The melee was deafening. A momentary sortie drove the miners down the blood-slick steps, and he heard a woman’s voice—Sheera’s voice—raised in a piercing rallying cry.

Someone came running up behind him, and he swung around, sword ready, heavy chain rattling. A dusty little man yelled, “Are you Sun Wolf?”

“Yes.” Under the grime, he saw that the man’s hair was flame-gold, the mark of the royal House of Her, and he asked, “Are you Tarrin?”

“Yes.”

“Does one of your people have the key to this mother-loving chain?”

“No, but we’ve got an axe to cut the links free. We’ll get rid of the bracelets later.”

“Fine,” the Wolf said. Eo loomed up out of the confusion of the fight, half a head taller than Tarrin and brandishing an enormous axe. Tarrin positioned the chain over a corner of the stone steps; they all winced as the axe blade slammed down.

“You girls make it in all right?” the Wolf asked, after Eo had whacked the chain free of the bracelet on his other wrist.

Her reply was drowned in the renewed din of the fighting, the sounds of the struggle rising like a voiceless howling, elemental as a storm. More men were pouring from the doors, impossible numbers of them—the Wolf had not thought there were that many in the fortress. He caught up his sword and plowed back into the fray on the steps at Tarrin’s heels. Eo followed with her axe. Battle separated them. Sun Wolf pressed upward, fighting his way to the shadow of the gate, where the line of defenders was weakening. Freed of the chain’s weight, he felt he could fight forever.

He slashed and cut, until the sword embedded in flesh and bone. He looked down to pull it loose and froze in nauseated horror at what he saw. The flesh of his arms was white with leprosy.

He didn’t see the enemy sword that slashed at his neck until Starhawk’s blade deflected it, so frozen was he by sickened despair. She yelled at him, “It’s an illusion! Wolf! Stop it! It isn’t real!”

He looked up at her, his face gray with shock. She, too, had momentarily stopped fighting, though the battle raged on all sides of them.

“It’s an illusion, rot your eyes! Do you think leprosy takes hold that fast? That’s how he won at Iron Pass. We’ve already been through six things like this coming out of the mines!”

Her own face was blotched with it, like lichen on stone. But as he blinked at her, his mind coming back into focus, he saw that what she said was true. As with the seeing of demons, he became aware that by changing his perceptions slightly, he could see the whole flesh under the superimposed illusion of rot. Blood and anger slammed, raging, back into his veins. The men and women struggling all around him didn’t have his power to see through, or Yirth’s power to combat, illusions—but they had seen the Wizard King’s illusions before. And now they were too angry to care.

Cursing like a bullwhacker, the Wolf threw himself back into the fray. He could see through the gate to the corridors beyond, clogged with Altiokis’ troops; and, as if the realization that the leprosy was an illusion had somehow cleared a block from his eyes, he saw that three-quarters of these new warriors were illusion as well. By the way they cut at them, the others could not tell the difference, and he knew himself to be fighting as a wizard would fight, and seeing as a wizard would see. Starhawk, at his side, slashed at one of the insubstantial figures as a real warrior cut at her with a halberd. Sun Wolf hacked the man’s head off before the blow landed and wondered how many others would fall to just such a fraud. Behind him, he heard a man cry out in terror. He whirled, looking into the darkness of the Citadel gate. There was something there, visible behind the backs of the retreating sortie, a shapeless shape of luminous horror, a coldness that ate at the bones. Altiokis’ men were retreating through the doors. Tarrin and his miners were unwilling to follow, frozen by the coming of that horrible fog and what was within it. They fell back toward the sunlight of the ditch, and the doors began to swing shut, as if of themselves.

Sun Wolf, left momentarily alone with Starhawk by the ebbing forces, scanned the darkness, searching it with his mind rather than with his eyes... and finding nothing but the shape of Altiokis, far back among those glowing wraiths, his hands weaving the illusion from the air.

He bellowed, “It’s an illusion, dammit! Don’t let them close the gate!” He plunged forward, hearing Starhawk’s footfalls at his heels. He heard her voice somewhere in back of him, calling out to the others, and heard them follow. Then he heard the gate slam behind him.

The luminous fog vanished. His arms, as he glimpsed them, swinging his sword at the men who crowded toward him, were clean again. There were few of Altiokis’ men still around the gate, the rest having gone to the fighting on the walls, and those few he dispatched or drove away. Then he plunged after the retreating shape of the Wizard King.

The darkness beneath the Citadel seemed thicker than it had before, defeating even his abilities to pierce it. He tore a torch from its holder, and the smoke of it streamed like a banner in his wake. Altiokis’ fruity laugh taunted him from the black hole of a corridor arch; Sun Wolf sensed a trap and advanced cautiously, the curious perception that detected reality from illusion showing him the ghostly outlines of the spiked pit in the floor beneath the illusion of damp flagstones. He edged past it on the narrow walkway that the Wizard King had used; but by then his quarry was out of sight.

He seemed to be caught in a maze of twisting rooms and corridors, of doors that opened to nowhere, and of traps in the wails and floor. Once nuuwa attacked him in a room that had seemed empty—purposefully, controlled by another mind, as the nuuwa had fought in the battle. He cut at them with sword and fire, wedging himself into a niche in the wall. As he split skulls and burned the dirty hair and rotted flesh, he felt again that eerie little whisper at the back of his consciousness.

You can control them yourself. You only have to give a little pan of your mind to that cold, black fire, and you can control them ... and other things as well.

Turn away, and what can you offer this woman you want except a battered and poverty-stricken wanderer? Do you really think Art will give up the troop to you?

He remembered the sightless blaze burning in the rotted remains of Altiokis’ failing brains and fought grimly, humanly, bloodily, exhaustedly. He killed two of the nuuwa, and the rest of them drew back, retreating into the stone mazes away from his torchlight, dodging through the stone walls like bats.

Altiokis, he reflected, must be running out of nuuwa if he’s started conserving them.

Grimly, he pursued.

There was a trap of some kind in one guardroom. His hypersensitive sense of direction let him pick out a way around it, seeking the source of the fat man’s wheezing breath. He saw Altiokis then, fleeing up a dark corridor. The torchlight bounced crazily over the rough stone of the walls as the Wolf ran. It glittered on the blood that smeared his arms and on the far-off glint of the jewels on the Wizard King’s doublet. He heard the gasping of Altiokis and the stumbling, clumsy footsteps. Ahead, he saw a narrow door, bound and bolted with steel. A darkness, a last illusion, confused his sight, but he heard the door open and shut.

He flung himself at it, tore it open, and plunged through, holding the torch aloft to see. As he passed through the door, he realized that the wall in which it was set was the same as the wall of that tiny, windowed chamber—the rough stone wall of the original hut that Altiokis had built in a night.

And he knew that Altiokis had never come through that door.

It crashed shut behind him, and he heard the bolts slam home. He turned, gasping, his lungs stifling with terror. Black and empty, the Hole of darkness lay before him, absorbing and drowning the light of the flames. On the far side of the Hole, he could make out the window to the observation room and the narrow door beside it—the door, as he recalled, that Altiokis had not bolted when he’d ordered Sun Wolf out of the room.

But the width of the room lay between it and the Wolf, and the ugly, evil, screaming depths of that silent blackness lay between. The sword dropped from his nerveless fingers at the thought of having to walk past it; he could see the light of the torch wavering over the shadowy walls with the shaking of his hand. He stood paralyzed, conscious of the Entity that he would have to pass and of the mindless intelligence of fire and cold trapped these hundreds of years between this universe and whatever arcane depths of unreason it called its home.

Something bright nickered in the comer of his vision, like a spark floating on the air. Too late, he remembered the other danger, the horror that even the Entity that wanted his mind could not prevent. As he wrenched his face away, fire exploded in his left eye, a numbing, searing blast followed by the horrible wash of pain. From his eye, it seemed to be spreading throughout every muscle of his body. He could hear himself screaming, and his knees were buckling with agony. With a curiously clear sliver of the remains of rational thought, he knew exactly how many seconds of consciousness he had left, and the single thing that he must do.