The Ladies of Mandrigyn

17

“Captain Sun Wolf.”

The voice that penetrated the blackness of his mind seemed to come from a great distance away. It was the Dark Eagle’s, he recognized, obscured by the buzzing roar that filled his skull.

“And in such clothes, too. Open your eyes, you barbarian; I know you can hear me.”

The Wolf pried one grit-filled eye open and squinted against the burning glare of yellow light.

“They say when you hire out your sword, you meet acquaintances in all comers of the world,” the Eagle went on, “but I hardly expected to see an old friend here.”

Sun Wolf blinked painfully. The light that had blinded him a moment ago resolved itself into the smoldering fireball at the end of a torch stuck in a greasy iron wall sconce, just behind the Dark Eagle’s shoulder. He became slowly aware of the burning ache in his arms; when he tried to move them, he found that they were, in fact, supporting the weight of his limp body. The short chain that joined his wrists had been thrown over a hook a few feet above his head. He was hanging with his back to the stone wall of a room which he guessed was underground—under what was left of the Records Office, presumably—and the memory of another small underground room and the drifting sparkle of unknown fire on the air brought sweat to his stubbled face. He got his feet under him and stood, glaring at the mercenary chief, who was, for the moment, the only other man in the room.

“The least you could have done was keep your flapping mouth shut,” he growled hoarsely.

The Dark Eagle frowned. He was a stocky man of medium height, his black hair falling forward over his bright eyes. “Lost your tongue?”

“A lady poisoned me, and I lost my voice over it,” the Wolf answered quite truthfully, hearing, as he said the words, the metallic rasp of the sound.

The flicker of concern that had glimmered behind the blue eyes fled. The mercenary chief laughed, “I hope you had your revenge. The reason I took you in is that I’m paid to keep order in Altiokis’ domains. Why ever you’ve decided to winter in this lovely town, I’d have to clean up the mess sooner or later. Where are your men?”

“At Wrynde.”

“I didn’t mean your troops, I mean the men you’re leading. And believe me, Wolf, I’m not going to accept that you’re in this town to no purpose. What men are you at the head of?”

Sun Wolf sighed, leaning his head back against the rough rock of the wall behind him. “None,” he said. “No one.”

“You put up one hell of a fight for a man with a clear conscience.”

“You wouldn’t know a clear conscience if you found one in your bed. What in the name of all your sniveling ancestors are you doing serving that demon?”

The Dark Eagle frowned. “Demon?”

“Whatever was in that litter, it wasn’t human. I’ll take oath on that.”

The blue eyes narrowed to slits. “You always could spot them, couldn’t you? But Altiokis is no demon. I’ve seen him summon demons and I’ve seen him handle the things they dread to protect himself against them.”

“He’s no demon, but—I don’t know what he is.”

A white grin split the swarthy countenance, and the uneasy look vanished. “He’s the greatest wizard of the world—and a man of uncommon appetites to boot.” The smile faded. “Why do you say he isn’t human?”

“Because he isn’t, dammit! Can’t you tell it? Can’t you feel it?”

The blue eyes hardened. “I think we hit you harder than we intended, my friend,” the Eagle said. “Or maybe your light-skirts’ poison addled your never-very-stout brains. Altiokis is a man—and a man who can afford to pay damned well to keep trouble out of his lands. As you shall see.”

He moved toward the cell door, then paused, his hand on the handle. In a quieter voice, he said, “I’d advise you to tell him whatever you’re in, Wolf.”

He opened the door and stepped aside.

Altiokis entered.

Two impressions, spiritual and physical, seemed to overlap for a second in Sun Wolf’s brain.

The spiritual was the impression of a half-rotted tree, leprous with age, its cancered bark still standing but enclosing another entity, a black and lucid fire that showed through the cracks.

The physical was the sight of a man of medium height, impossibly obese from eating rich foods, with bad skin, the suspicion of a shadow of stubble on his pouchy jaw, and too many rings embedded in the flesh of his fat fingers. Contact with merchants’ wives had sharpened Sun Wolf’s appreciation of the value of cloth; the black velvet that formed the underpinning of the jewel-beaded embroidery of the immense doublet sold for fifty silver crowns a yard. The jeweled belts that supported the overhanging rolls of fat would have purchased cities.

In the back of his mind, the Wolf heard Lady Wrinshardin’s acid voice saying, “He is vulgar.”

And he knew, watching the Dark Eagle’s face and the faces of the gaunt harbor master, Stirk, and of Drypettis, who stood in the shadows of the corridor behind him, that the physical being was all anyone ever saw.

He wanted to scream at them, “Don’t you see it? Don’t you understand what he is?” But he did not understand himself.

Sunk m their pouches of fat, the cold little eyes gleamed with smug amusement. The Wizard King stepped forward, raising his staff. Like the pillars of his titter, it was carved of ebony in twisting patterns, its ornate tip flickering with the ghostly gleam of opal and abalone. The touch of it on Sun Wolf’s neck was like ice and fire, a searing dart of pain, and he flinched from it with a stifled cry.

A satisfied little smile decorated the puffy lips.

“So you’re the man who thought he could go against me?”

Sun Wolf said nothing. After the ordeal of the anzid, pain had changed its meaning for him, but the shock of being touched by that staff had taken his breath away. He was aware of Drypettis, standing in the doorway, like some monstrous orchid in her orange gown and veils; he could see her huge brown eyes watching him with an unreadable mixture of coldness and hatred and spite. He wondered if she had thought to tell Sheera where he was being held and what good it would do anyone if she had.

Or was she waiting to see if he broke, to slip away and warn the others when he did?

Altiokis’ voice went on. “Who hired you, Captain?”

The Wolf swallowed and shook his head. “He never told me his name,” he whispered. “He said he’d pay me to spy out the city, the gates, and the canals and to lay out a siege plan...”

“Probably one of the Thanes.” Altiokis yawned. “They’re always stirring up trouble—and it’s time they were put down.”

“Where did he meet you, this man?” the Dark Eagle asked.

In a stifled voice, the Wolf replied, “In the Peninsula, after the siege of Melplith. He arranged a meeting with me, three weeks from now, in East Shore. ! was to come here, which I did, overland, and lay out my plans...”

“Yes, yes,” Altiokis said in a bored voice. “But who was he”

“I tell you, I don’t know. “The Wolf glanced from the Eagle to Altiokis and back again, sensing that the Wizard King didn’t really much care who had hired him. Was he that confident of his own powers and of the magic that protected the Citadel? Or had he, as a result of his endless life, merely reached the point of bored carelessness with everything?

“The man chose an expensive spy,” the Dark Eagle commented thoughtfully. “The world abounds in cheaper ones.”

The Wolf flashed him what he hoped was an angry dagger of a glance. “Would you hire a cheap one?”

Then he flinched in agony from the glowing tip of the Wizard King’s staff.

“Remember to whom you’re talking, barbarian,” Altiokis said, with a kind of quiet relish. He brought the staff toward Sun Wolf’s face, the white metal of its tip seeming to glow with an unholy luminescence. The Wolf drew back from it, feeling the sweat that poured down his cheeks, staring as if hypnotized at the star-flash of the opals and at the twined jaws of the inlaid serpents that held them. Something that was not heat seemed to smoke from the jeweled tip, like a cold promise of unbearable pain.

“I am Altiokis,” the Wizard King said softly. “No one has the temerity to speak thus to my servants.”

The burning jewels were within a half inch of the Wolf’s eyes when he whispered, “I’m sorry, my lord.”

Past the opals, he saw the little smirk appear and wrenched his head aside as the staff touched him again. A cry of pain escaped him, and he felt the flesh along his cheekbone sear and curl, the shock of it piercing his whole body like a sword.

Savoringly, Altiokis said, “I could chip you away, piece by piece, until you begged for the chance to tell what you know and the mercy of a cut throat. I may do it yet, merely to amuse myself.”

Sun Wolf made no reply to this. For a time, speech was beyond him. Sickened with the pain, he hung from the chain above his head, trying to regather his thoughts, telling himself that, no matter how bad it was, the anzid had been far worse. But beyond that, he was conscious of both anger and outrage that a man with powers of the Wizard King should use them so, like a cruel child pulling the wings from a fly. He had met enough men in his time who were amused by pain. He had not expected a man who had mastered the hard disciplines of wizardry to be one of them.

“Governor Stirk ...” Altiokis said, and Stirk looked up, the surprised gratification on his face reminding Sun Wolf of a dog that hoped for a pat. The tall harbor master came forward, almost wagging his tail. In the doorway, Drypettis stiffened with outraged indignation. Stirk actually went down on his knees and kissed the Wizard King’s jewel-crusted shoe. Altiokis almost purred.

“Did the interrogation chamber survive the fire?” the wizard asked.

The new governor’s face fell. “Alas, no, my lord,” he said, rising and unobtrusively dusting his knees. “The upper level of the prisons was gutted by the fire the night Governor Derroug was murdered.”

My ancestors, the Wolf thought, through the raw anguish that seemed to be pouring into his flesh from the open burn on his face, are looking out for me, after all.

There was a pout in the fruity voice. “Then he shall go with me to the Citadel in the morning. When I depart. Governor Stirk, I shall leave a force of men here under the command of General Dark Eagle, to be billeted in the houses of citizens as you choose. Do not think that in the event of these disruptions, the annual tribute from this city will be excused. Moreover, I feel sure that you are moved to make some suitable show of gratitude for your elevation to your new position.”

Stirk almost fell over himself agreeing; Sun Wolf wondered what Altiokis could possibly want with more wealth.

“As for this arrogant barbarian...” The butt end of the staff licked out and cracked sharply on the side of Sun Wolf’s knee. Beside the agony of his seared face, he hardly noticed. “I scarcely feel that he is telling us all the truth; but in time, we shall learn from him the names of the men ill-intentioned enough to hire such a person to spy out my city. From my Citadel, I can see all. No army can approach without my knowledge. But it will save trouble to know whom to punish.”

The words were rhetorical, and Sun Wolf knew it. Altiokis didn’t much care whom he punished or why; to a man a hundred and fifty years old and of no great mental resources to begin with, the infliction of pain was one of few amusements left. Sun Wolf’s eyes followed the fat wizard as he waddled toward the door, with Stirk bowing along at his heels. The Dark Eagle, his face a smooth and cynical blank, brought up the rear.

Did others wonder about this, tool the Wolf asked himself, watching them mount the few steps to the hall. How could something that trivial, that spiteful and vicious, have acquired this kind of power?

Didn’t any of them see?

“One more thing.”

Altiokis turned back, the torchlight from the hall outside streaming over his jewels like a spent wave over a barnacle-encrusted hull. He snapped his fingers. Past him, the Wolf saw the guards in the hallway startle, heard Drypettis give a sharp squeak of alarm.

Two nuuwa entered the cell.

Sun Wolf felt his heart stop, then pound to life with a surge of terror that momentarily drowned out all things else. He cast one quick glance at the hook that held his chained hands helpless above his head, calculating whether he could get free before they began ripping at his flesh, then stared back at them, knowing he was trapped. Altiokis’ smile broadened with delight.

“You like my friends, eh?” he asked.

Both waggling heads turned toward Sun Wolf, as if they could see him or smell the blood in his veins. Drool glistened on the misshapen chins, and they champed their impossibly grown teeth and fidgeted as the wizard laid companionable hands on the sloped backs. Their uniforms—foul, torn, and crawling with lice—were so filthy the Wolf wondered how anyone could bring himself to touch even those, let alone the mindless, unclean flesh beneath.

“You’ll be quite safe.” Altiokis smiled. “As long as you make no attempt to get away, they shall curb their appetites and be content with—ah—contemplation. But believe me, should you try to get away, I’m sure they could chew off quite large portions of you before your screams brought the guards—if any guards would be willing to try to separate them from their victim.”

That pleased smile widened still more at the thought, and the most powerful wizard in the world paused thoughtfully to excavate a nostril with his jeweled finger. He wiped it fastidiously on Stirk’s sleeve. Stirk gave a fatuous smile.

“I hope I shall see you in the morning.”

The door shut behind him.

For a long time Sun Wolf stood, his twisted shoulders racked and aching from the drag of his body against the chain, his mind chasing itself blindly from thought to thought.

The most powerful wizard in the world! His stomach turned at the thought of that power and that waste.

But the power came from nothing within Altiokis himself. He was a man half rotted from the inside by something else; the power was not of his own finding. That first, fleeting impression was all the Wolf had to go on; afterward, he had seen the wizard only as others saw him—obese, omnipotent, and terrifying. Sun Wolf felt as he had in his childhood, frantically insisting to his father and to the other men of the tribe that he could see the demons whose voices taunted them from the marsh mists and being sharply told to shut up and follow. He had been right then, he knew. And he knew now that there was something in Altiokis that was neither human nor clean nor sane.

Tomorrow he would be taken up to the Citadel. He’d seen enough torture to harbor no illusions about his own abilities to withstand it for any protracted period of time. Altiokis was right—the threat of being given anzid again, or of being put into a room with whatever it was that could transform a man into a nuuwa, would have him selling off all these women he had come to be so fond of without a moment’s hesitation.

Except, he thought, that it probably would not save him, anyway. Even upon short acquaintance, he knew Altiokis too well for that.

His eyes returned to the nuuwa. Altiokis had left a torch, burning in its bracket on the other side of the room. The nuuwa wore the uniforms of Altiokis’ troops, but they were already ragged and fouled, for the creatures were too brainless to change them or even unsnag them if they caught on something. It occurred obliquely to the Wolf, in the one corner of his mind not occupied by horror, that what undoubtedly became of nuuwa, if they weren’t killed, was that they simply rotted away from self-neglect. One of these already had what looked like a badly festered gash on its leg, visible through the torn and soiled breeches.

Now that he had seen them made from men, the Wolf could tell that one of these was more recent than the other—the one eye seared out and scarred over, the other rotted out from within and already scarring. The second nuuwa was older, the bones of the face changed and deformed, the shoulders more slumped. It was impossible to tell through which eye the flame-creature had bored.

They stood unmoving, watching him from eyeless holes, their reek filling the cell. Sometimes one of them would shift from foot to foot, but neither stirred itself to brush away the roaches that crawled over its feet in the straw. Once Sun Wolf looked cautiously over his head at the chain and hook again, and they grew restless, snuffling and fidgeting.

He gave up the attempt.

His mind returned to that windowed cell in the burned-out wing of the prison. The flake of flame, the young slave screaming as he clutched his bleeding eye... Altogether it had taken nearly a minute, the Wolf calculated, between the time the thing had got the boy and the time it had bored through to the brain. Had he known what would happen to him in those endless, racking seconds? Or had the pain been too great?

The Wolf shuddered with the memory of it. In his heart, he already knew what was intended for him, whether he revealed any plans or not.

The anzid had changed his tolerance for pain, which was already higher than most men’s, but it had given him a hearty appreciation of how bad pain could get. And even with the blessing of ignorance, without the knowledge that one’s scooped-out husk would be ruled by Altiokis’ foul will, the sixty seconds or so that it took for the thing—fire, insect, or whatever—to bore its way inward would be like the distilled essence of the deepest Hells.

He glanced at the nuuwa and then back up at the chains.

It would be possible, he saw now, to stretch his body and arms enough to lift the manacles up over the top of the hook that held them. The hook was positioned for a slightly shorter man—few of the men of Mandrigyn topped six feet—and he thought that he could manage with a struggle. But it would take a short while; in the meantime, his body would hang exposed and helpless before those mindless things drooling in their comer.

He wondered how far his own abilities of nonvisibility went.

He’d experimented with them since the night he’d first called them into use on the roof of the palace kitchens, the night he and the women had rescued Tisa. With a little practice, he had found that he could, within certain limits, avoid the eyes of someone entering a fairly small and well-lighted room, provided he did nothing to call attention to himself. The nuuwa had no eyes—it stood to reason that they saw with their minds. But if that were the case, his nonvisibility should work better on them, since it was, in fact, avoidance of the attention.

It might be worth a try.

In any case, he was aware that, objectively, in the long run, he would not be worse off. Being devoured alive by them would be a messy and hideous way to die, but he wondered whether it would be worse than becoming a nuuwa himself.

It was a choice he had no desire to put to the test.

Hesitantly, he groped his mind out toward theirs, shifting their attention past him, toward the stones of the wall and the crawling straw at his feet, letting them look through him, around him, turning that intentness toward trivial things, and making them forget that he was there. He found himself sweating with the effort of it, trickles of moisture running down his aching arms and down his face and his body. He made himself relax into the effort, becoming less and less important in their minds against their general awareness of the cell and occupying their attention, their senses, with the crackle of insect feet in the straw, the smell of the torch smoke...

He braced his body, then began to reach upward, rising on his toes and stretching his stiff back and shoulders toward the iron hook.

The nuuwa stared stolidly at the walls to either side of him.

Delicately, he hooked the tips of his half-numbed fingers under the short links that joined the metal bracelets. He strained to lift them toward the tip of the hook, loosening his back muscles against the shooting fire of cramps that raced down them from their long inactivity. The sweat burned in the raw flesh of his opened cheek, and his arms trembled at the effort of movement. The tip of the hook seemed impossibly high. One of the nuuwa belched, the sound sharp as an explosion in the silent room; half hypnotized by the effort of concentration, the Wolf never took his mind from the illusion of nonvisibility that he held with his whole attention, despite the physical strain that occupied his limbs. He had been trapped once by having his concentration broken. Even if they tore him to pieces, he would not do so again.

The metal slipped over metal. The slacking of the hook’s support was abrupt, as the links slid over it. The Wolf felt as if all the weight of his body had dropped suddenly upon his exhausted muscles. He could have collapsed in a thankful heap on the fetid straw, but he forced himself to remain upright, lowering his arms slowly to his sides, shaking all over with the effort. The separate agonies of the day were swallowed in an all-encompassing wave of anguishing cramps in arms and back.

The nuuwa continued to look at the wall.

As soon as he was satisfied that his legs would support him, Sun Wolf took a cautious step forward.

There was no reaction.

His mind held their attention at bay, but the concentration required most of his strength, and he knew he could not keep it up for long. He took another step and another, without either of them appearing to notice... No mean feat, he thought in that clear cynical corner of his mind, to keep a nuuwa from going after ambulatory food.

The door was bolted with an iron dead bolt, not merely a wooden drop that could be lifted with a card. He glanced over his shoulder at the nuuwa, the nearest of which stood, a stinking lump of flesh, less than six feet from him.

He decided to risk it.

“Dark Eagle!” he yelled, lifting his raw voice to as carrying a pitch as he could manage. “Stirk! I’ll tell you what you want to know! Just keep them off me!”

His concentration pressed against the nuuwa, a sheer physical effort, like that of trying to hold up a falling wall. The nuuwa shifted, scuffling around the cell, arms swinging, lolling heads wagging, as if seeking for what they could not find. Rot your eyes, you poxy corridor guard, he thought, don’t you want to be the first with the news that your prisoner’s broken?

He yelled again. “I’ll tell you anything! Just get me out of here! I’ll tell you what you want!”

Running footsteps sounded in the corridor. One man, he guessed from the sound, hesitating outside the door. Open it, you cowardly bastard! the Wolf demanded silently. Don’t call your chief...

The bolt shot back.

Sun Wolf came slamming out of the cell, throwing his full weight on the door, heedless of any weapon the man might have had. The guard’s drawn short sword jammed in the wood of the door and stuck; the man had his mouth open, too startled to scream, showing a wide expanse of dirty teeth. Sun Wolf grabbed him by the neck and hurled him bodily into the arms of the advancing nuuwa.

He sent the door crashing shut and shot the bolt against the man’s screams, pulled the sword free, and ran up the empty corridor as if heading for the half-closed doors of Hell.