The Ladies of Mandrigyn

21

The door of the windowed observation room was pushed carefully open. Altiokis, Wizard King of the greatest empire since the last rulers of Gwenth had retired in a huff to their respective monasteries, peeked cautiously around the door-jamb.

The big mercenary lay face-down on the floor a few feet away. He must, Altiokis thought, have gotten through the door somehow—a glance showed that it wasn’t bolted—in his final agony. A trickle of blood ran out from beneath his head.

Altiokis relaxed and smiled with relief. His earlier panic had been absurd. Drink is making me foolish, he thought with a self-indulgent sigh. I really should take less. He had always suspected that the Entity in the Hole had no real control over the gaums, and it was for that reason that he had never gone near it unprotected. But there was always the risk that some other wizard would know the secret of destroying them—if there was a secret.

He frowned. There was so much that his own master—whatever the old puff-guts’ name had been—had never told him. And so much that he had been told had not made sense.

He padded into the little room, two nuuwa shuffling at his heels. Really, it had only been sheerest luck that he hadn’t become a nuuwa himself, he thought, looking down at that huge, tawny body at his feet. All those years ago. How many had it been? There seemed to be so many periods of time that he couldn’t quite recall. It was only by sheerest chance that the men he’d been out with that night—the old Thane’s men, silly old bastard!—had their eyes burned out and their brains destroyed, while he hid in the brush and watched. Oh, he’d heard of the Holes, but he’d never thought to see one. And he’d never realized that Something lived in them.

Something, that is, other than gaums.

That was another thing old—old-whatever his name was—had never bothered to tell him.

Altiokis bent down. A wizard! After all these years, he’d hardly expected that any dared to oppose him still. But there were those he hadn’t accounted for, over the years, and perhaps they’d had students. That was the big advantage, he’d found about living forever, as the Entity in the Hole had promised him he might do.

Well, not promised; exactly. He couldn’t recall. Nevertheless, he had won again, and he gave a delighted little giggle at the thought as he bent down to examine his newest recruit to the ranks of the mindless.

A hand closed around his throat like a vise of iron. With bulging eyes, Altiokis found himself staring down into a face that was scarcely human; the one eye socket was empty and charred with fire, but the other eye was alive, sane, and filled with livid pain and berserker rage.

The fat wizard let out one gasping squeak of terror. Then Sun Wolf found himself holding, not a man, but a leopard by the throat.

Claws raked his back. His hands dug through the soft, loose flesh of the white-ruffed throat. Even shape changed, Altiokis was a fat, old animal. The Wolf rolled to his feet, dragging the twisting, snarling thing toward the narrow door of the room where the Hole waited. Peripherally, his single eye caught the bright movement of more of the fire-flecks beyond the glass, and the smoldering yellow glow of the torch where it lay, burning itself out on the stone floor. The leopard must have known, too; for its struggles redoubled, then suddenly changed, and Sun Wolf found himself with nine feet of cobra between his hands.

It was only for a moment. The tail lashed at his legs, but the poisonous head was prisoned helplessly in his grip.

The next thing was horrible, something he had never seen before, bloated and chitinous, with clawed legs and tentacles raking at him like whips. He yanked open the door.

The nuuwa stirred uneasily, held still by the tangle of forces in the room. The Wolf could feel Altiokis’ mind drawing and blocked it with his own. With the door open, the whispering in the thoughts was overwhelming. Past the shrieking mouths and flailing antennae of that horrible head between his hands, he could see the movement in the darkness, surrounded by the mindlessly devouring motes of flame. The thing in his hands twisted and lashed, and the blood ran fresh from his clawed shoulders and from the ruined socket of his eye. The monster was hideously strong; he felt the muscle and sinew of his arm cracking under the weight of it, but he refused to release his strangling grip.

As they struggled on the threshold of that vile room, Altiokis became once again a fat man, crazy and sweating with fear. Sun Wolf slung the man inside and crashed the door shut with all his strength. It heaved under the weight thrown against it. He shot the bolts and stood hanging onto them, as he had done before, feeling them jerk and pull under his hands with desperate spells of opening. The two nuuwa jiggled from foot to foot, and he threw the barriers of his mind against them, keeping them from understanding, wondering if it would be worth it, just this once, to yield to the drag in his mind and order them away.

Then the screaming started. The fight to free the door bolts ceased; he heard Altiokis blundering around the room, shrieking with agony, hitting the wall, and falling. Sun Wolf leaned against the door, sickened by the sound, remembering those endless seconds and counting them down.

He had been in enough dirty fighting to know how to gouge out an eye. He doubted that Altiokis had the knowledge and the resolution to do it or the determination needed to sear the bleeding socket with fire. The brutal action had saved him, but he was sure that he would never—could never—erase from his mind the long seconds that it had taken him to nerve himself to do it.

He knew by the screaming and by the change in the behavior of the nuuwa when what remained of Altiokis’ mind was gone. He turned the nuuwa’s attention to the opposite walls and walked nonvisible, between them and out into the Citadel.

The black flames tittered in his mind.

Hearing the yelling confusion that came to him from every corner, he guessed that the nuuwa, released from control, had become as they were outside Altiokis’ domains—randomly rampaging, turning on the troops beside whom they had fought.

He plunged down the corridors, finding his way back to the entrance into the ditch from whence he had come.

The doors were barred. He could hear the slam of a battering rams against them and, faintly, Tarrin’s ringing voice. But the defenders, clutched in a comer, fighting the small swarm of nuuwa that had suddenly turned upon them, were in no shape to prevent him from dragging back the bars.

Two of the nuuwa broke away from the main group and shambled toward him, groaning and slavering, as the first blazing crack of daylight opened through the doors. He started to order them away and stopped himself. His brain seemed to be swimming in dark, murmuring liquid, his thoughts struggling against insistent, alien urges.

Men poured through the gate around him. He found himself clutching the doorposts for support. Then hands were gripping his arms. A voice called him back to himself.

“Chief! What in the name of the Mother happened to you?”

He clutched Starhawk’s shoulders, holding to her as if to the last spar of sanity in the sea in which he felt himself sinking. “That Thing—the Thing in the room...”

“The Hole?”

His eye focused. He noted distantly, automatically, that his depth perception was gone and that he’d have to retrain to compensate. The slanted light of late afternoon that streamed through the gate showed him Starhawk’s face, grimy, bloody, and unsurprised. Her gray eyes were dear, looking into his. Though there was no reflection of it in her face, he realized that he himself must have been a choice sight. Trust the Hawk, he thought, not to ask stupid questions until there’s time to answer them.

“How did you know?”

“The wizard Anyog told me,” she said. He realized he hadn’t seen her in four months; it only seemed like yesterday. “Where is it?”

“Back there. Don’t go near it. Don’t go in that room with it...”

His hands left patches of bloody dirt where they rested on her shoulders. She shook her head. “Is there any room near it? Around it—to put blasting powder from the mines? We were bringing some up to take care of the gate.”

“Blasting powder?” The draw on his mind was growing stronger. He wasn’t sure he had heard.

“To blow out the walls,” she explained. “Daylight will destroy it.” She put a hand to his face, slimy with the scum of battle, gentle as a lover’s. “Wolf, are you all right?”

She wasn’t asking about his eye or the claw marks and sword cuts that covered his body as if he had rolled in broken glass. She knew his physical toughness. Her fears for him went deeper than that.

“Daylight,” he said thickly. “Then... The hut was built at night.”

“Yes, I know,” she said.

He didn’t bother to ask her how she knew. A darkness seemed to be edging its way into his thoughts, and he shook his head, as if to clear it. “Altiokis’ forces are still holding that part of the Citadel,” he said. “You’ll have to fight your way in.”

“Is the room itself guarded?”

He shook his head.

“Then we’ll make it. We can leave a long fuse...”

Others had come up to them. The battle was raging past into the corridors. Sheera’s voice gasped, “Chief! Your eye!” Amber Eyes’ hand on his arm was suddenly motherly in spite of the fact that her arms were smeared with blood to the shoulders. A viselike grip that he recognized as Denga Rey’s closed over his elbow, offering support.

Starhawk gave them a rapid precis of what needed to be done. The women nodded, evidently on terms of great friendliness with her. Sun Wolf wondered suddenly how Starhawk happened to be there in the first place, then discarded the thought as irrelevant. It was true that in the crisis of battle, the most appalling coincidences were commonplace.

Amber Eyes said, “We can’t leave a long fuse, though. It would have to be long enough to let us get clear of the Citadel. In that time, someone would find it.”

“You’re right,” the Hawk agreed.

“Could we wait until the battle’s over?” Sheera asked. “By nightfall we should have the place. Altiokis’ forces are holed up in the upper part of the tower—once they got clear of their own nuuwa, that is. Then we could—”

“No,” Sun Wolf said hoarsely. The Thing—the voice, the urge, whatever it was—he could feel it tearing at the fraying edges of his mind, growing stronger as final exhaustion took its toll on his body. Sunrise tomorrow seemed hideously far away. “It has to be before sunset tonight.”

Amber Eyes and Denga Rey looked at him, deeply troubled, but Starhawk nodded. “He’s right,” she said. “If there’s some kind of living thing, some kind of intelligence in the Hole, we can’t give it the night to work in.”

“We’ve only got about an hour and a half until sunset,” Denga Rey observed doubtfully.

“So we have to work fast. We can stack powder around it. Damned good thing Tarrin had it brought up from the mines to blow the gate or we’d be forever getting it.”

“Yirth could light it from a distance,” Amber Eyes said suddenly. “I’ve seen her light torches and candles just by looking at them. If we could get her out here, then she could light the powder...”

“Get her,” Sheera said.

The lovers vanished in opposite directions. He leaned back against the wall behind him, suddenly weak, his mind drifting. The roar of battle seemed to sink to an unreal whispering.

“Chief!”

He blinked into Starhawk’s frightened face. Somehow, Amber Eyes and Denga Rey were back, and Yirth was with them, standing with Sheera, grouped around him as they had been on the ship. He thought for a moment that he had fainted, but found he was still on his feet, leaning against the stone arch of the gate, the long fosse with its carpet of trampled dead stretching away to both sides.

He shook his head, with a sensation of having lost time. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Starhawk said. By the pale light that came through the gateway beside him, her scarred, fine-boned face looked as calm and cold-blooded as ever, but he could hear the fear in her voice. “You were—you were gone. I talked to you, but it was as if you were listening to something else.”

“I was,” he said grimly, suddenly understanding. “Yirth, can you set fire to something at a distance without having seen it first?”

The witch’s dark brows plunged in a startled frown. She alone of them, though she wore a man’s doublet and breeches for convenience, bore no marks of physical fighting. But under the crown of her tight-braided hair, her harsh face was set with fatigue, the ugly smear of the birthmark appearing almost black against her pallor. She looked older, the Wolf thought, than she had before she’d led the women through the traps into the Citadel. All her scars would be upon the fabric of her mind.

“I cannot set fire to anything at a distance,” she said. “I must see it to bring fire.”

The others stared at her, shocked at the limitation; the Wolf was puzzled. “You can’t—can’t bring fire to a place that you know in your mind?” he asked. “Can’t form it in your mind?” The act of bringing fire seemed so easy to him, though he had never done it—like turning away the minds of those who sought him, or changing the way he saw things, to pierce another wizard’s illusions.

She shook her head, clearly not understanding what he meant. “You can, perhaps,” she said. “But it lies beyond my power.”

So it was Sun Wolf, after all, who had to lead the small crew through the winding mazes, toward the Hole once again. Yirth followed them, though he had warned her against entering the observation room of the Hole itself; two or three of the freed miners helped carry the sacks of blasting powder. To Sun Wolf’s ears, the fighting was far off in the upper part of the tower and, by the sound of it, it was turning into the grim, messy business of mopping up, fighting in pockets here and there—the bloody scrag ends of battle.

Closer and more real in his own mind was the buzzing darkness that ate at the corners of his consciousness, demanding, insistent as a scarcely bearable tickling. He rested his hand on Starhawk’s shoulder for support and saw, almost disinterestedly, that his fingers were trembling. He was conscious in a half-detached way of the sun sliding down the outside walls of the Citadel, changing colors as it approached the ragged horizon; though, when he mentioned to Yirth this awareness of things he could not actually see, she shook her head and looked at him strangely with her jade-colored eyes. The Entity whispering in his mind was more real to him than his own body, more real than the stone halls through which he stumbled like a mechanical thing—more real than anything except the sharp bones of the shoulder beneath his hand and the cold, pale silk of hair that brushed the backs of his fingers when Starhawk turned her head.

Through the little window of the observation room, they could see that Altiokis was still moving. Rolling, flopping grotesquely, he would occasionally stagger to his feet or mouth at the window glass. The jewels of his clothing had caught on the rough walls and ripped as he’d moved, and fat, white flesh bulged through the rents. One eye was gone, the other already being eaten away from within; his face was starting to change, as the faces of nuuwas did. Sheera made a gagging noise in her throat and looked away.

Sun Wolf scarcely saw. He remained by the door while the sacks of powder were stacked in the room and in the hall beyond, where Yirth waited. There was enough powder to blow out the whole western wall of the Citadel. His gaze went past the window, past the darkness, to deeper darkness, where he could see the Thing moving.

The giggling, scratching sensation in his brain was almost unendurable. It knew him. Threads of it permeated every fiber of his consciousness; he had a momentary, disturbed vision of himself, visible in the shadows through the thick, black glass of the window, his half-naked body clawed and filthy, his wrists still weighted with the iron bracelets, the blood from the ripped flesh of them slowly dripping down his fingers; his left eye was a charred and gory pit in a face white with shock and strain. The other people in this vision were mere puppets, grotesque, jerking, and unreal as they stumbled about their meaningless tasks. The Entity—whatever it was—could no more see them than they could see it. They were only half-guessed shapes, more like monkeys than human beings.

He watched as one of the shapes shambled up to him and reached a fiddling, picking hand out to touch him.

He closed his eyes, and the vision dissolved. When he opened them, Starhawk was looking worriedly into his face. “Chief?”

He nodded. “I’m all right.” His voice sounded like the faint rasp of a fingernail scraping metal. He looked around him, fixing the room in his mind—the stone walls, the shadows, the grayish-white cotton of the sacks that he knew the flames would lick over when he called them, and the carved ebony chair, shoved unceremoniously into a corner.

Starhawk and Denga Rey supported him between them as they led him from the room.

“You sure this is going to work?” Sheera asked nervously.

“No,” the Wolf said.

“Could Yirth...”

“No,” Starhawk said. “We have enough problems without its getting its claws into another wizard.”

They turned a corner and followed a narrow passage toward the gate. With the smoothness of a door closing before them, the way was suddenly filled with armed men in black mail. The Dark Eagle stood at their head.

“I thought,” he said, smiling, “that we would still find you wandering around here. And Starhawk, too... You did bring your men, after all.” The Eagle’s swarthy face was grimed with blood and dirt in the torchlight, the swirling, petal-edged crests of his helmet torn and hacked with battle, their dark blue edges black in places and dripping; but through it all, his grin was no less bright.

“Let us out of here,” Sun Wolf said in a voice that shook. This is no time for fighting.”

“No?” One black brow lifted. “The nuuwa seem all to have gone crazy, but we should be able to drive them off the walls without much trouble. Altiokis should be pleased to hear—”

“Altiokis is dead,” the Wolf whispered, fighting to keep his thoughts clear and to keep the words that he spoke his own and not those that crowded, unbidden and unknown, to his throat. His harsh voice had turned slow and stammering, picking at his words. “His power is broken for good—there’s no need to fight—just let us out...”

The mercenary captain smiled slowly; one of his men laughed. Sheera made a move to draw her sword, and Starhawk caught her wrist, knowing it would do no good.

“Quite a convincing tale,” the Dark Eagle said. “But considering that I have here my lord Tarrin’s lady—no uncommon general, I might add, my lady—not to mention the witch who led the miners through the traps and into the Citadel—if my lord is dead, which I have yet to believe, the power he wielded will be up for the taking. We can—”

“If you can touch the power he had, it will snuff your brains out like a candle flame,” the Wolf said harshly. “Go down the corridor and through the door. Look through that pox-rotten glass of his—look at what you see. Then come back, and we’ll talk about power!” His voice was trembling with strain and rage, his brain blinded with the effort of holding itself together against those tearing, muttering, black roots that were thrusting it apart. “Now let us the hell out of here, unless you want that Thing in there to take root in my brain as it did in his!”

The Dark Eagle stood for a moment, staring up into Sun Wolf’s face, into the hagridden, half-mad, yellow eye that stared from the mass of clotted cuts, stubble, and filth. The captain’s own face, under the soot and grime of battle, was smooth, an unreadable blank. Then without a word, he signed to his men to let Sun Wolf and the women pass. The Dark Eagle turned and walked down the corridor toward Altiokis’ observation room.

Sun Wolf had no recollection of passing the gate of the Inner Citadel or crossing the causeway over the fosse that was littered with the bodies of the slain. The men the Dark Eagle had sent to guard them halted at the far end of the causeway, and the Wolf slumped down in the shadows of the turreted gates, with his back against the raw, powder-burned stone. Looking back, he could see the lowers of the Inner Citadel alive with men and nuuwa, fighting in the corridors or looting the gilded halls. The shrieking came to him in a vast, chaotic din, and the shivering air was rank with the smoke of burning. The sinking sunlight gilded huge, billowing clouds of smoke that poured, black or white, from the tower windows. Heat danced above the walls, and now and then a man or a nuuwa would come running in flames from some inner hall, to fall screaming over the parapet, gleaming against the sunset like a brand. In the direction of the distant sea, torn rags of cloud covered the sky. It would be a night of storm.

Wind touched his face, the breath of the mountains, polluted by the stinks of battle. Everything seemed remote to him, like something viewed through a heavy layer of black glass. He wondered idly if that had been how things appeared to Altiokis—unreal, a little meaningless. No wonder he had sought the grossest and most immediate sensations; they were all he could feel. Or had his perceptions changed after he had given up?

Darkness seemed to be closing in on Sun Wolf. He reached out blindly, not wholly certain what it was that he sought, and a long, bony hand gripped his. The pressure of Starhawk’s strong fingers helped clear his mind. His remaining eye met hers; her face appeared calm under the mask of filth and cuts; the sunset light was like brimstone on her colorless hair. Against the grime, her eyes appeared colorless, too, clear as water.

Beyond her, around them, the women stood like a bodyguard, their own blood and that of their enemies vivid on their limbs against the rock dust of the mines. He was aware of Yirth watching him, arms folded, those sea-colored eyes intent upon his face; he wondered if, when his mind gave up and was drowned in blackness, she would kill him.

He hoped so. His hand tightened over Starhawk’s.

There was a brief struggle on the far end of the causeway. A sword flashed in the sinking light; one of the soldiers at that, in the armor of Altiokis’ private troops, went staggering over the edge into the ditch.

The Dark Eagle came striding back, sheathing his sword as be picked his way carefully across the makeshift of rope and pole that had been thrown up to replace the burned drawbridge. Under the tattered wrack of his torn helmet crests, his face was green-white and gray about the mouth, as if he had just got done heaving up his farthest guts. The dying sunlight caught on the gilded helmet spike as on a spear.

When he came near, he asked, “How do you mean to destroy it?”

“Light the powder,” Sheera said. “Tarrin and the men are clear of the place now.”

“There are nuuwa all over the corridors,” the Eagle informed her, speaking as he might speak to any other captain. And so she looked, Sun Wolf thought, with her half-unraveled braids and black leather breast guards, her perilous beauty all splattered with blood. “By God and God’s Mother, I’ve never seen such a hell! You’ll never get back to put a fuse to it. And even if you did...”

“The Wolf can light it,” Starhawk said quietly. “From here.”

The Dark Eagle looked down curiously at the slumped figure propped among the women against the wall. His blue eyes narrowed. “His Nibs was right, then,” he said.

Sun Wolf nodded—Fire and cold were consuming his flesh; voices echoed to him, piping and far away. The shadow of the tower already lay long over the fosse and touched him like a finger of the coming darkness.

Fumblingly, as if in a drugged nightmare, he began to put together the picture of the observation room in his mind.

He could not see it clearly—there were nuuwa there, shambling over everything, blundering into walls, shrieking at their mindless brother and maker, who clawed and screamed through the black glass. He formed the shadows in his mind, the shapes of the powder sacks, the harsh lines of the broken chair...

The images blurred.

Suddenly sharp, he saw them from the other side of the window.

He pushed the image away with an almost physical violence. It intruded itself into his mind again, like a weapon pushed into his hands. But he knew if he grasped that weapon, he would never be able to light the flame.

Both images died. He found himself huddled, shaking and dripping with sweat, in the blue shadow of the tower, the cold wind licking at his chilled flesh. He whispered, “I can’t.”

Starhawk was holding his hands. Trembling as if with fever, he raised his head and looked at the setting sun, which seemed to lie straight over the mountain horizon now, glaring at him like a baleful eye. He tried to piece together the image of the room and had it unravel in his hands into darkness. He shook his head. “I can’t.”

“All right,” the Hawk said quietly. “There’s time for me to go in with a fuse.”

It would have to be a short fuse, he thought... There were nuuwa everywhere ... If she didn’t get out by the time it went off...

There would be no time for her to get out before the sun set. And it was quite possible that she knew it.

“No,” he whispered as she turned to go. He heard her steps pause. “No,” he said in a stronger voice. He closed his eyes, calling nothing yet, losing himself in a chill, sounding darkness. He heard her come back, but she did not touch him, would not distract him.

Small, single, and precise he called it, not in pieces but all at once—room, shadows, chair, powder, window, nuuwa, darkness. He summoned the reality in his mind, distant and glittering as an image seen in fire, and touched the gray cotton of the sacks with a licking breath of fire. The nuuwa, startled by the sudden heat, drew back.

The thunderous roar of the explosion jerked the ground beneath him. The noise of it slammed into his skull. Through his closed eyes, he could see stones leaping outward, sunlight smashing into the centuries of darkness... light ripping where that darkness had taken hold of his brain.

He remembered screaming, but nothing after that.