The Ladies of Mandrigyn

9

“I DON T LIKE IT.” Starhawk frowned as she studied the town below her.

Beside her. Ram folded his great arms against him for warmth. In his wadded layers of purple quilting, he looked immense, his blunt, homely face reddened by the cold. “It all seems quiet,” he objected doubtfully.

Starhawk’s gray gaze slid sideways at him. “Very quiet,” she agreed. “But not one of those chimneys is smoking.” She pointed, and a stray flake of mealy snow, shaken from the pine boughs overhead, settled into the fleece of her cuff. “This snow fell two nights ago, and nothing’s tracked it since—not in the street, nor from any of those houses to the sheds behind.”

Ram frowned, squinting. “You’re right, lass. Your eyes are keener than mine, but ’twas stupid of me not to look. There are tracks round about the walls, aren’t there?”

“Oh, yes,” Starhawk said softly. “There are tracks.” She turned back, scrambling down from the promontory that overlooked the little valley in which lay the village of Foonspay. Her feet slid in the slick powder of the snow; even though she stepped in her own tracks, the going was rough. Ram lost his balance twice, falling amid great clouds of billowing powder; nevertheless, he offered her his arm for support with dogged gallantry at every swell of the ground.

Snow had fallen the night they had spent at the Peacock Inn, then rain and more snow. The road, such as it was, had become crusted and treacherous, and they had lost most of a day floundering through it, exhausted by the mere effort of taking a step. Around them, the woods had lain in silence, a silence that prickled along Starhawk’s nerves. She had found herself listening, seeking some sound—any sound. But no squirrel had dislodged snow from the green-black branches of the somber pines overhead; no rabbit had squeaked in the teeth of a fox. For two nights, not even wolves had howled; in her scouting to both sides of the buried road, Starhawk had seen no track of any bird or beast.

There was something abroad in the woods, something before which even the wolves ran silent.

The others felt it, too. Up ahead, she could see the six mules and the donkey as dark blobs on the marble whiteness of the snow, the vivid blue of Orris’ quilted jacket, Anyog’s rusty black, and Fawn’s green and brown plaid—a tight little cluster of colors, huddled together in fear. They all jumped when she and Ram emerged through the trees.

“The town’s deserted,” she said as she came near.

“The buildings are standing, but the Mother only knows what’s prowling around them. Let’s get into the open. Then I’ll take Ram and go ahead to scout the place.”

The brothers nodded their agreement, but she saw the doubt in their faces—Orris because, deep down in his heart, he believed that he should be giving the orders, in spite of the fact that he knew Starhawk to be his superior in matters of defense, Ram because he knew it, too, and considered it an unseemly thing for a woman to be.

She supposed, as she led the way cautiously down the gentle slope of the road, that most women would have been pleased and flattered by the big man’s protectiveness. She merely found it irritating, as if he assumed her to be unable to protect herself—and all the worse because it was both unconscious and well meaning. Sun Wolf, she reflected, glancing over her shoulder at the unnaturally silent woods, would help her out of trouble, but assumed that she could hold up her end of the fight just fine.

She scanned the sky, which was darker than the time of day could account for, then looked over her shoulder again—a habit she’d picked up these days. Ahead of them, the stone walls and snow-laden roofs of the town grew larger, and she ran her eye over them, searching for some sign, some mark. Her back hackled with nervousness. The shutters of several buildings had been broken and scratched, the marks yellow against the gray of weathering. She stumbled, her feet sliding and breaking through the crusts of the snow, and she gripped the headstall of the mule she led for balance. Behind her, the others were doing the same. The world was silent but for the hiss of Orris cursing and the crunching of hooves and boots in the snow. The dark buildings seemed to stare at them with shadowy eyes through the mauve-tinted twilight.

Orris’ voice sounded hideously loud. “You want to scout that great house there in the center of town? The door’s shut and the shutters are intact. There’ll be room for us there and for the beasts as well.”

“Looks good,” Starhawk agreed. “Ram—”

The mule beside her jerked its head free of her hold and reared up with a piercing squeal. Starhawk swung around, scanning the silent crescent of trees at their backs.

It came lumbering from the woods with that queerly staggering gait, the eyeless head lolling on the weaving neck. Starhawk yelled, “Nuuwa!” even as Orris cried out, pointing—pointing as three more shambling forms dragged themselves from the crusted brush of the surrounding woods. Starhawk swore, though she had known from what Anyog had said at the Peacock that there might be several of them, and flung Anyog the lead rein of the mule. “Make for the big house!” she called to the others. “And for God’s sake...”

Then she saw something else, a floundering in the brush all around the edges of the woods, and she heard Anyog whisper, “Holy Three!”

Fawn screamed.

Starhawk had never seen that many nuuwa together. There were twenty at least, floundering through the snow at a jagged lope, their misshapen arms swinging for balance. She plunged after the rest of the party, moving as fast as she dared, her boots breaking through the buried crusts of the snow, panic heating her veins like cheap brandy. Her memories threw up at her the child she had been, fleeing screaming toward the Convent walls with the groaning, mouthing thing slobbering at her heels—merging with the creatures that pursued her now. There was a hideous slowness to the flight, like running in a dream. The nuuwa fell and rose and fell again, lunging toward them with a terrible inexorability. As in a dream, she could see every detail of them with preternatural vividness—the deformed, discolored teeth in the gaping mouths, the rotted eye sockets seared over with dirty scar tissue, the running sores that blotched the flabby flesh.

Ahead of her, Fawn fell for the tenth time; Ram dragged her to her feet and fell himself. Starhawk, stopping to let them remain ahead of her, cursed them for a pair of paddle-footed oafs and calculated that, if they slowed the flight much more, none of them would make it to safety.

The walls bulked up like cliffs; she could see the scattered bones of humans and animals half covered with snow in the streets. She guessed that the nearest nuuwa, the ones lumbering directly behind her, were some hundred feet to the rear, their groaning yammer and the slurpy bubble of their breath seeming to fill her ears. She thought of turning and fighting. Once she stopped, she’d draw them, and the others would go on ...

Rot that, she thought indignantly. I’m not a piece of meat to be thrown to wolves..,

Great Mother, but I know what is!

She yelled, “Anyog, stop! Stop!”

Not only the old man but the whole train checked, the mules plunging and screaming on their leads. Fawn slipped again and fell to her knees in the deep snow. Starhawk yelled, “The rest of you go on! Anyog, bring back one of those mules! Now!”

“What is it you’re after doing...” Orris began.

Arguing, Great Mother!. Starhawk thought with what horrified indignation was left her. “Rot your eyes, get running!.” she screamed at them.

“But...”

“MOVE!”

Anyog was already beside her, hauling one of the screaming, pitching animals by its lead. For a moment, it was touch and go whether Orris would get them all killed by continuing the discussion, but the closing ring of nuuwa around him seemed to decide him. He threw his whole weight against the headstalls of the mules he led. Ram dragged Fawn to her feet, fighting their way along like a pair of wallowing drunks.

Gasping, his face under its little spade beard as white as his bedraggled ruff, Anyog managed to get the mule within Starhawk’s range. The nearest nuuwa were thirty feet away, howling as they slithered in the snow, drool foaming from their lips. The Hawk stabbed her sword point-down in the snow, whipped the dagger from her belt, and grabbed the mule’s headstall. Anyog realized what she was doing and added his own weight to bring the thrashing head down. The mule reared, and the steel bit deep into the great vein of the neck.

She’d shoved the gory dagger back into its sheath and pulled her sword free before the beast even fell. It rolled to the ground, heaving in its death agony, crimson spouting everywhere, searingly bright against the snow. She and Anyog plunged back in the direction of the town, Anyog going like a gazelle for two steps before he outraced his own balance and went down in a sprawling heap of bones.

Starhawk saw him fall from the corner of her eye; at the same time she saw the first nuuwa fall slavering on the screaming mule. The stink of the fresh blood drew the creatures; they were already tearing hunks of the live and steaming flesh from the mute where it lay. Anyog scrambled to his feet, neither calling out to her nor asking her to stop, and floundered after her. They were past the time when one could wait for the other. That would only mean that they would die together.

She heard the nuuwa mewing and wheezing behind her and the scrunch of those staggering feet in the snow. She caught them in her peripheral vision—one near enough to overtake her before she reached the black cliff of the building, two others farther back. She braced her feet and whirled, her sword a flashing arc in the wan twilight.

The nuuwa fell back from the slicing blade, blood and guts dripping down from the slit in its abdomen. Then it flung itself on her again, mouthing and grabbing and tripping over its own entrails, as another came lumbering up from the side. Others were close, she thought as she dispatched the first one. An instant’s delay would have them all on her. Two fell upon her simultaneously. As she severed the head of the one in front, the weight of the second struck her back, the stink of it overwhelming her as the huge teeth ripped at the leather of her coat. She twisted, hacking, fighting the frenzy of panic at the slobbering thing that rode her. Distantly, she could hear Anyog’s despairing screams. The clawing weight on her back bore her down, unreachable by her sword blade. The hissing, foaming mouth grated on the back of her skull. With a final writhe, she slithered free of her coat, springing clear and running frantically between the houses.

The gray bulk of the largest house in town loomed before her, broken by a black mouth of door with a mill of terrified mules around it. Scrunching footfalls seemed to fill her ears, staggering behind her with whistling gasps of breath. The steps of the house tripped her feet. Orris’ voice bawled curses at the mules, and from the corner of her eye, she glimpsed her nearest pursuer—not a nuuwa at all, but Anyog, with one of the foul things clutching at him, clinging and dragging.

It felled him on the steps, almost at Starhawk’s feet, the greedy, filthy mouth tearing gouts of flesh from his side. Starhawk sprang down toward them, her sword blazing in the gray murk of dusk, cleaving down like an axe on those writhing bodies. The rest of the nuuwa were six or eight paces behind; she dragged the old man up and flung him to the blurred purple bulk that she knew was Ram. Snapping jaws peeled three inches of leather from her boot-heel as she made it through the door. The slamming of it was like thunder in the empty building.

The nuuwa screamed outside.

They laid Anyog down beside the fire that Fawn managed to kindle in the great hearth of the downstairs hall. As Starhawk had suspected, the place had been the principal inn of Foonspay, and there were signs that much of the population of the village had lived here for several days, crowded together, for protection. While she worked over Anyog with what makeshift dressings she could gather, with needles and thread, boiling water, and cheap, strong wine, she wondered how many of them had been killed before they’d managed to get away, and if they’d made it to safety elsewhere, or had been killed on the road.

Ram and Orris took brands from the raised brick hearth to light their way as they explored the pitch-darkness of the inn corridors while Fawn went to find a place for the mules. Dimly, the hooting grunts of the nuuwa could be heard beyond the thick walls and heavy shutters. Within, all was deathly silent.

It had been said once that wizards were Healers—that their power could cleanse the hidden seeds of gangrene, close the bleeding for the flesh to heal. As she worked, bloodied to the elbows, Starhawk knew that it would take such power to save the old man’s life. Against the darkness of his beard, Anyog’s face was as colorless as wax, pinched and sunken. Long experience had given her intimate knowledge of the death marks, and she saw them here.

How long she worked she did not know, nor how long, afterward, she sat at the old man’s side, watching the colors of the fire play over the colorless flesh of his face. She had no idea where the others were, nor, she thought to herself, did it particularly matter. They had their own concerns, merely in staying alive; it wasn’t for her to trouble them with stale news. They must a!) have known, when they carried the old man in, that he would die.

In time, the thin, cold fingers under hers twitched, and Anyog’s creaky voice whispered, “My warrior dove?”

“I’m here,” the Hawk said, her voice carefully neutral in the still, fire lighted dimness of the room. To hearten him, she said, “We’ll turn you over to your sister yet.”

There was a thin whisper of laughter, instantly followed by an even thinner gasp of pain. Then he murmured, “And you, my dove?”

She shrugged. “We’re going on.”

“Going on.” The words were no more than the hissing of his breath. “To Grimscarp?”

For a long moment she was silent, sitting with her back to the chipped brickwork of the raised hearth, looking down at the shrunken form that lay among the huddle of stained blankets before her. Then she nodded and said simply, “Yes.”

“Ah,” he whispered. “What other destination would you hide with such care from our ox team? But they are right,” he murmured. “They are right. Do not go there, child. Altiokis destroys that which is bright and pure. He will destroy you and the beautiful Fawnie, for no other reason than that you are what you are.”

“Nevertheless, we must go,” she said softly.

Anyog shook his head, his dark eyes opening, fever-bright in the firelight. “Don’t you understand?” he whispered. “Only another wizard can enter his Citadel, unless to come in as his captive or his slave. Only a wizard can hope to work against him. Without magic of your own, you are helpless before him; he will trap you with illusion and trick you to your own destruction. His power is old; it is deep; it is not the magic of humankind. An evil magic,” he murmured, the lids sliding shut once again over the glassy eyes, the flesh around them stained dark and mottled with the sinking of his flesh. “Not to be defied.”

Something rustled in the darkness. Starhawk looked up sharply, the cool tension of battle leaping to her heart, but she saw nothing in the impenetrable shadows that loomed in every corner of the vast room. As lightly as a mother who wished not to disturb the sleep of her child, she slipped her hands from beneath Anyog’s and stood up, her sword springing almost of itself to her grip, the reflex of long years of war. Yet when she reached the stone archway that led into the hall, she found nothing and heard no sound in the passage beyond.

When she returned to his side. Anyog was asleep, the little white hands that had never done work harder than the making of music or the writing of poems lying as motionless as two bunches of crushed sticks upon the sunken chest. She satisfied herself that a thread of breath still leaked through those white lips, then sat where she had been and gradually let the silence surround her in a kind of despairing peace. She knew that Anyog was right—without the help of a wizard, she could not hope to enter the Citadel or to rescue the Wolf from the Wizard King’s toils. In a way, she supposed that she and Fawn had both known it from the first, though neither of them had been willing to admit it; neither had been willing to give Sun Wolf up.

From that silence, she sought the deeper stillness and peace of meditation, focusing her mind upon the Invisible Circle, upon the music that no one could hear. Many of the nuns had looked into fire to begin it; Starhawk was too good a warrior to night-blind herself that way, but she had learned, in her long years as a mercenary, that she could find the starting place in her mind alone.

The fire crackled and whispered in the grate, its unimaginable variations of color playing like silk over the edges of brick and wood and flesh. Starhawk became slowly aware of the air that stirred through the winding corridors of the dark inn, of the stress and weight of the beams where they joined overhead, and of the moldering thatch above, cloaked by the frost-silver of the moon. Her awareness spread out, like water over a flood plain—of the mules, sleeping in the darkness of what had become their stable, of Fawn weeping there, of the weighty tread of the brothers as they explored the inn, of the nuuwa prowling and yammering outside; and of the stars in the distant night.

She was aware when the still air of the room was touched by magic.

It came to her as faint as a thread of half-heard music, but clear, like the scent of a single rose in a darkened room. She had not thought that magic would feel like that. It was nothing like the blaze of thrown fire or the deadly webs of illusion woven by the Wizard King and spoken of in four generations of terrified whispers. It was a very simple thing, like the aura of brightness that had sometimes seemed to cling about old Sister Wellwa—akin to meditation, but moving, rather than still.

She heard the faint, trembling voice of Uncle Anyog, whispering spells of healing in the darkness.

In time, she came out of her meditation. Anyog’s muttering voice ran on a bit, then stilled. Without the shift in her consciousness, in her awareness, she might have thought only that he raved with fever, and perhaps he had counted on this. He lay motionless, his open eyes reflecting the embers of the fire like candles in a darkened room. She moved toward him and rested her hand upon his.

“You are a wizard,” she said softly, “aren’t you?”

A hoarse rattle, like a sob, escaped his throat. “Me? Never.” The dry fingers twitched beneath hers, lacking the strength to grip. “At one time I thought—I thought... But I was afraid. Afraid of Altiokis—afraid of the Great Trial itself. I ran away—left my master—pretended to love other things more. Music—poems—going in fear lest any suspect. Garnering little pot-bound slips of power, consumed by the dreams of what I might have had.”

The fever-bright eyes stared up into hers, brilliant and restless. Overhead, the boards creaked with the brothers’ heavy stride. Somewhere in the darkness, a mule whuffied over its fodder. “My warrior dove,” he whispered, “what is it that you seek of the Wizard King? What is this dream that I see in your eyes, this dream you will follow to your own destruction in his Citadel?”

Starhawk shook her head stubbornly. “It is not a dream,” she replied, her voice low. “He is my chief—Altiokis has him prisoner.”

“Ah.” The breath ran thinly from the blue lips. “Altiokis. My child, he does not lightly loose what he has taken. Even could you find a wizard—a true wizard—to aid you, you would not live long enough to die at your captain’s side.”

“Perhaps not,” Starhawk said quietly and was silent for a time, staring into the sunken glow of the hearth; the flames were gone, and only the deep, rippling heat of the coals was left, stronger than the fire, but unseen. At length she asked, “And did giving up your dream bring you happiness with your safety, Anyog?”

The withered face worked briefly with pain, then grew still She thought that he slept, but after a long silence, his lips moved. His voice was thin and halting. “This man whom you seek,” he murmured. “You must love him better than life.”

Starhawk looked away. The words went through her mind like the grinding of a sword blade in her flesh, shocking and sudden, and she understood that Anyog had spoken the truth. It was a truth that she had hidden from the other warriors of Sun Wolf’s troop, from Sun Wolf himself, and from her own consciousness; yet she felt no surprise in knowing that it was true. For years she had told herself that it was the loyalty a warrior owed to a chosen captain, and that, at least, had spared her jealousy toward the Wolf’s numerous concubines. From her girlhood, she had known herself plain, and the Wolf had his pick of beautiful girls.

But she was not the only one who loved him better than life.

She closed her teeth hard upon that bitterness and stared dry-eyed into the darkness. Once the thing had been brought into the open, she could not unknown it, but she understood why she had worked to deceive herself almost from the first. Anything was better than the chasm of this despair.

Ram’s voice echoed in the inn kitchen, through the half-open door that led into the common room where Starhawk sat. He was saying something to Orris—something about wedging the windows there tighter shut—and Starhawk sighed. Whether her feelings toward Sun Wolf were a soldier’s loyalty or a woman’s love, whether he ever knew it or was even still alive to care, didn’t alter the more immediate fact that she was trapped in an inn with the nuuwa yammering and chewing at the brickwork outside. First things first, she told herself wryly, getting to her feet. There’ll be time to mess with love—and magic—if you’re alive this time tomorrow.

She found the brothers conferring in the shadows beside the vast, cold kitchen hearth, the light of Orris’ torch throwing reflections like the gleaming eyes of dragons on the copper bottoms of the pans and on the drinking water in the stone basin nearby. The nuuwa could be heard from outside, scratching and mouthing at the window frames, their grunting moans occasionally broken by long, piercing wails. “How is he?” Orris asked.

Starhawk shook her head. “Tougher than he looks,” she replied. “I’d have bet he’d be dead by now—and lost my money. All secure here?”

They both looked deeply surprised. Orris recovered himself first and gave his opinion that the shutters would hold. “We’ve driven wedges in some of the downstairs ones,” he added. “God knows there are axes and wedges aplenty in the wood room, though little enough wood. But as to how we’re going to get out of this hole...”

“We’ll manage,” Starhawk said. “If worst comes to worst, we can pack Uncle Anyog on one of the mules and leave the rest of them as bait.”

“But the pelts!” Orris protested, horrified. “And the stores! AH this summer’s trading...”

“Mother will kill us,” Ram added.

“She’ll have to stand at the end of a long line,” Starhawk reminded him, jerking her thumb toward the shuttered windows. “Where’s Fawnie?”

She found Fawn in the parlor they’d converted to a stable, huddled in the shadows among the unloaded packs of furs, her face buried in her hands. The strangled sounds of her weeping were what had drawn Starhawk, for the room was lightless and the long corridor from the common room almost so. The Hawk stood hidden by the black arch of the doorway, listening to that horribly muffled sound, her instinct to go and comfort the girl’s fears forestalled by the new awareness that Anyog’s words had brought into consciousness within her mind.

She loved Sun Wolf. Loved him not as a warrior loved a leader, but as a woman loved a man; and she could conceive of loving no man but him.

Her childhood had taught her that love meant the subjection of the will to the will of another. She had seen her mother invariably bow to her father’s wishes, for all the love that had been between them. She remembered those girls who had competed in subservience to become her brothers’ humble wives, baking their bread, cleaning their houses, giving up the brightness of their youth to bear and care for their sons. She had seen Fawn—and all those other soft, pliant girls before her—girls who had been Sun Wolf’s slaves, whether bought with money or not.

There had been times when the Wolf had asked her to do things she did not like. But his requests had never been without a reason, and his reasons had always been honest. From being his student, she had become his friend, perhaps the closest friend he had. For all his easy camaraderie with his men, there was a part of himself that he kept hidden from them, the part of him that argued theology on long winter evenings, or arranged and rearranged rocks in a garden until they fitted his sense of stillness and perfection. To her he had shown that part of himself—to her only.

Yet this girl was his woman.

My rival, Starhawk thought, with a tang of bitter distaste. Is that what we’ll come to, I and this woman with whom I’ve shared a dozen campfires over the mountains? My companion in danger, who split watches with me and bargained with the innkeepers? Are we going to end up hair-pulling, like a couple of village girls fighting over the affections of one of the local louts?

The thought was ugly to her, like the base and soiling memories of her older brothers’ sweethearts and their cheap subterfuges to gain dances with them at the fairs.

And, for that matter, what has Fawn taken from me? Nothing that I ever would have had. I broke my vows for Sun Wolf and broke my body to learn from him the hard skills of war. I’ll never regret doing either of those things—but from the first, he never wanted me for his woman.

Isn’t it enough to be counted as his friend?

The woman in her remembered how Fawn had rested her small hands so lightly on the broad shoulders and kissed the thin place at the top of his hair. No, it wasn’t enough.

Yet she saw also, with curious clarity, that Fawn had all the things that she herself lacked—gentleness, the capacity to receive love without distrusting the motives of its giver, the yielding softness that complemented the Wolf’s overwhelming strength, and the magic garment of her beauty that made her precious in his eyes.

It would be easier, she reflected, if Fawnie were a spoiled, grasping little bitch. Then, at least, I would know what to feel, But then, of course, the Wolf would not have chosen her for his own. And she would certainly not have sold all that she had and left safety and comfort to seek him among the dangers of Altiokis’ Citadel.

Fawn was eighteen, wretched, and very frightened; it was this, rather than any consideration of Sun Wolf one way or the other, that finally drew the Hawk to her side, to comfort her in awkward and unaccustomed arms.

In spite of her exhaustion, Starhawk slept badly that night after her watch. Anyog’s words returned to her, again and again: You must love him better than life... Only another wizard can enter his Citadel... Only a wizard... His power is old; it is deep ... An evil magic, not to be defied...

Never fall in love and never mess with magic...

In her dreams, she found herself stumbling through tortuous. shadow-haunted hallways, where the trunks of trees forced apart the stones of the crumbling walls and weeds trailed in the water that pooled across the slimy floors. She was seeking for someone, someone who could help her, and it was desperately important that she find him before it was too late. But she had never sought anyone’s help before this; her battles she had always fought alone—she did not know the words to call out. In the darkness, she heard Sister Wellwa’s neat little footfalls retreating from her, saw the pale gleam of Anyog’s starched, white ruff. And behind her from the vine-choked turnings of the corridors, other sounds came to her—blundering bodies and harsh, snuffling breath. She struggled to break the grip of the dream, but she was too tired; the slobbering, mewing sounds in the dark seemed to come closer.

With a great effort, she opened her eyes and saw Fawn sitting on the raised hearth, bending over to catch the words that Uncle Anyog was whispering. The redness of the sunken fire outlined her face in an edge of ruby; her lips looked taut and set. The air of the room was stuffy. Through the muzziness of half sleep, Starhawk heard Ram and Orris making their rounds elsewhere in the inn—soft, blundering noises, bickering voices. Uncle Anyog fell silent, and Fawn reached down to wipe the sweat that beaded his sunken cheeks.

Then she got to her feet and gathered her plaid cloak around her over the white shift that was all that she wore. Her unbound hair glinted with slivers of amber and carnelian in the dying fight. Starhawk asked her cloudily, “Where are you going?”

“Just to get some water,” Fawn said, putting her hand to the kitchen door.

There was a basin there, Starhawk remembered, her tired mind moving slowly. She’d seen it when she’d spoken to Ram and Orris, standing next to the monstrous darkness of the overhanging chimney ... the chimney ...

Her shout of “No!” was drowned in Fawn’s scream as the door opened.

She thought, later, that she must have been on her feet and moving even as Fawn cried out. She caught up the blanket as a shield; that and the thick folds of the cloak that Fawn still clutched around her body were enough to entangle the first nuuwa and save Fawn from its ripping rush. The second and third blundered over the struggling, howling monster on the threshold. Starhawk decapitated one even as it plunged at her, then whirled to hack at the other as it ripped a mouthful of flesh from Fawn’s arm. The head went bouncing and rolling, the bloody mouth still chewing, the hands clutching at the girl as if it could devour her still.

Starhawk kicked shut the kitchen door and slammed the bolt, catching a vague glimpse of other movement, struggling and flopping, in the vicinity of the hearth.

When she turned back, Ram and Orris were already cutting loose the thing that gripped Fawn. By the Sight of Ram’s torch, it could be seen to be covered with soot that made a blackish muck, mingled with its spouting blood. Fawn was unconscious. For a sickening instant, Starhawk thought that she was dead.

The Wolf will never forgive me...

My rival...

Was I deliberately slow?

Great Mother, no wonder he says it’s unprofessional to love! It makes hash of your fighting instinct!

“They’re coming down the chimney,” she said. Ram was just standing up. It could not have been more than sixty seconds from the time Fawn had opened the kitchen door, “They’ll be all over the roof.”

With a quickness astonishing in so huge a man, Ram was at the nearest window, peering through a knot in the shutter at the thin moonlight outside. From within the kitchen, there was a crashing and a vast yammer of sounds; the great bolts of the door sagged suddenly under the heaving weight of bodies.

“Can we break for it?” he demanded, turning back. The dot of moonlight lay like a little coin on his flat-boned, unshaven cheek.

“Are you mad?” Orris demanded hoarsely. “They’ll be off the roof and on our backs—”

“Not if we torch the inn.”

“Look, you gaum-snatched cully, they’ll have left some to guard the doors—”

“No,” the Hawk said. She’d rushed to the other side of the room to open the shutter there a crack. The chink of air showed the white snow of the street empty between the blackness of the buildings. “They don’t even have the brains to work in concert, as wolves do. Having found a way into the inn, they’ll all take it. Listen, they don’t even know enough for them all to throw themselves against the door at once or to use the table in there for a ram.”

Orris got to his feet, with Fawn limp and white in his arms, except for the spreading smear of crimson on her shift. “By the Three, creatures more witless than my brothers!” he cried. “I never thought to find them.”

“You’ll find as many of them as you can do with, if you don’t stir those moss-grown clubs you’ve been calling feet all these years,” Ram snapped, making a run for the mules’ parlor. Starhawk was seizing torches and throwing together bedding, one ear turned always to listen to the growing din in the kitchen. She raked what was left in the wood box against the kitchen door and picked up a torch from the blaze on the hearth.

“What about Anyog?” Orris demanded, and knelt at the old man’s side. “We can’t make a litter, nor even a travois ...”

“Pack him like killed meat, then,” the Hawk retorted, having been taken off battlefields that way herself. “He’ll die, anyway, if he’s left here.” Already she could see the hinges of the kitchen door moving under the thrashing weight. Orris stared at her, gape-mouthed with horror. “Rot you, do as I say!” she shouted, as she would at a trooper in battle. “We haven’t time to waste!”

Orris scrambled to obey her. If Anyog is a wizard, she thought, Altiokis or no Altiokis, he’ll put forth what power he has to stay alive. That’s all we can hope for now.

But just as she was a professional soldier, the brothers were professional merchants and could pack five mules and a donkey with the lightning speed acquired in hundreds of emergency disencampments. In moments, it seemed, the mules were squealing and kicking in the hall, with Orris cursing them and lashing at them with a switch. Ram came running back to Starhawk’s side, an axe and wedges from the wood room like toys in his great hands. From the tail of her eye, Starhawk had a glimpse of the long, muffled bundle that was Uncle Anyog tied over the back of one mule and of Fawn, somehow on her feet and wrapped in the old man’s rusty black coat, stumbling to open the great outside doors.

Icy air streamed in on them. The ululations of the creatures in the kitchen had grown to fever pitch. The doors were sagging as she and Ram made the rounds of the other parlors. Flame licked upward over the rafters and blazed in the mules’ straw that they’d scattered across the floor. The kitchen door was breaking as she flung her torch at it, then raced back through the furnace of the common room to where Ram waited for her, framed against the snowy night beyond.

Half a dozen wedges sealed the doors. As they sprang down the steps to where Orris waited with the mules, the Hawk glanced back to see, silhouetted against the roof flames, the black shapes of the nuuwa, shrieking and screaming like the souls of the damned in the Trinitarian hells.

Nothing challenged them as they made their way from the town. As they wound their way up the road into the mountains beyond, they could see the light behind them for a long time.