The Ladies of Mandrigyn

2

Sunlight lay like a thick amber resin on the surface of the council table, catching in a burning line on the brass of its inlay work, like the glare at the edge of the sea. For all the twinge of autumn that spiced the air outside, it was over-warm up here, and the Council of Kedwyr, laced firmly into their sober coats of padded and reinforced black wool, were sweating gently in the magnified sunlight that fell through the great oriel windows. Sun Wolf sat at the foot of the table between the Captain of the Outland Levies and the Commander of the City Guards, his hands folded, the glaring sun catching like spurts of fire on the brass buckles of his doublet, and waited for the President of the Council to try and wriggle out of his contract.

Both the Outland Captain Gobaris and the City Commander Breg had warned him. They themselves fought for Kedwyr largely as a duty fixed by tradition, and their pay was notoriously elastic.

The President of the Council opened the proceedings with a well-rehearsed paean of praise for the Wolf’s services, touching briefly upon his regrets at having had to go to war against such a small neighbor as Melplith at all. He went on to speak of the hardships they had all endured, and Sun Wolf, scanning those pink, sweaty faces and hamlike jowls bulging out over the high-wrapped white neckclothes, remembered the rotten rations and wondered how much these men had made off them. The President, a tall, handsome man with the air of a middle-aged athlete run to fat, came to his conclusion, turned to the ferret-faced clerk at his side, and said, “Now, as to the matter of payment. I believe the sum promised to Captain Sun Wolf was thirty-five hundred gold pieces or its equivalent?”

The man nodded in agreement, glancing down at the unrolled parchment of the contract that he held in his little white hand.

“In the currency of the Realm of Kedwyr...” the President began, and Sun Wolf interrupted him, his deep rumbling voice deceptively lazy.

“The word ‘equivalent’ isn’t in my copy of the contract.”

He reached into the pouch on his belt and pulled out a much-folded wad of parchment. As he deliberately spread it out on the surface of the table before him, he could see the uneasy glance that passed among the councilmen. They had not thought that he could read.

The President’s wide smile widened. “Well, of course, it is understood that—”

“I didn’t understand it,” Sun Wolf said, still in that mild tone of voice. “If I had meant ‘gold or local,’ I’d have specified it. The contract says ‘gold’—and by international contractual law, gold is defined by assay weight, not coinage count.”

In the appalled silence that followed. Captain Gobaris of the Outland Levies leaned his chin on his palm in such a way that his fingers concealed the grin that was struggling over his round, heavy face.

The President gave his famous, glittering smile. “It’s a pleasure to deal with a man of education, Captain Sun Wolf,” he said, looking as if he would derive even greater pleasure from seeing Sun Wolf on board a ship that was headed straight for the rocks that fringed Kedwyr’s cliffs. “But as a man of education, you must realize that, because of the disrupted conditions on the Peninsula, assay-weight gold coinage is in critically short supply. The balance of imports and exports must be reestablished before our stockpiles of gold are sufficient to meet your demands.”

“My demands,” Sun Wolf reminded him gently, “were made six months ago, before the trade was disrupted.”

“Indeed they were, and you may be sure that under ordinary circumstances our treasuries would have been more than sufficient to give you your rightful dues in absolute weight coinage. But emergency contingencies arose which there was no way to foresee. The warehouse fires on the silk wharves and the failure of the lemon crops on which so much of our export depends caused shortages in the treasury which had to be covered from funds originally earmarked for the war.”

Sun Wolf glanced up. The ceiling of the council hall was newly gilded—he’d watched the workmen doing it, one afternoon when he’d been kept kicking his heels here for an hour and a half trying to see the President about the rations the Council members had been selling them.

Gilding was not cheap.

“Nevertheless,” the President went on, leaning forward a little and lowering his voice to a confiding tone, which the Outland Captain had told Sun Wolf meant he was about to tighten up the screws, “we should be able to meet the agreed-upon amount in gold coinage in four weeks, when the amber convoys come in from the mountains. If you are willing to wait, all can be arranged to your satisfaction.”

Except that my men and I will not be stuck on the hostile Peninsula for the winter, the Wolf thought dryly. If they were paid promptly and left at the end of this week, they might make it over the Gniss River, which separated the Peninsula from the rolling wastelands beyond, before it became impassable with winter floods. If they waited four weeks, the river would be thirty feet higher than it was now in the gorges, and the Silver Hills beyond clogged with snow and blistered by winds. If they waited four weeks to be paid, many of the men might never make it back to winter quarters in Wrynde at all.

He folded his hands and regarded the President in silence. The moment elongated itself uncomfortably into a minute, then two. The next offer would be for local currency, of course—stipulated at a far higher rate than he could get in Wrynde. Silver coinage tended to fluctuate in value, and right now the silver content wasn’t going to be high. But he let the silence run on, knowing the effect of it on men already a little nervous about that corps of storm troops camped by the walls of Melplith.

It was General Gradduck, the head of all the Kedwyr forces who had taken most of the credit for breaking the siege, who finally spoke. “But if you are willing to accept local currency ...” he began, and left the bait dangling.

They expected the Wolf to start grudgingly stipulating silver content on coinage—impossible to guarantee unless he wanted to have every coin assayed individually. Instead he said, “You mean you’d like to renegotiate the contract?”

“Well—” the President said, irritated.

“Contractually, you’re obligated for gold,” Sun Wolf said. “But if you are willing to renegotiate, I certainly am. I believe, in matters regarding international trade, the custom in the Peninsula is to impanel a jury of impartial representatives of the other states hereabouts, to determine equivalent local currency values for thirty-five hundred in gold.”

The President did not quite turn pale at the thought of representatives from the other Peninsular states setting the amount of money he’d have to pay this mercenary and his men. The other states, already alarmed by Kedwyr’s attack on its rival Melplith, would love to be given the opportunity to disrupt Kedwyr’s economy in that fashion—not to mention doing Sun Wolf a favor that could be tendered as part of the payment the next time they needed a mercenary troop.

He was clearly sorry he had mentioned it.

A pinch-faced little councilman down at the end of the table quavered, “Of all the nerve!”

The President forced one last smile. “Of course, Captain, such negotiations could be badly drawn out.”

Sun Wolf nodded equably. “I realize the drain that’s already been put on you by our presence here. I’m sure my men could be put up in some other city in the vicinity, such as Ciselfarge.”

It had been a toss-up whether Kedwyr would invade Melplith or Ciselfarge in this latest power struggle for the amber and silk trades, and Sun Wolf knew it. If the President hadn’t just returned from swearing lasting peace and brotherhood with Ciselfarge’s prince, the remark could have been construed as an open threat.

Grimly, the President said, “I am sure that such a delay will not be necessary.”

The bar of sunlight slid along the table, glared for a time in Sun Wolf’s eyes, then shifted its gleam to the wall above his head. Servants came in to light the lamps before the negotiations were done. Once or twice. Sun Wolf went down to the square outside the Town Hall to speak to the men he’d brought into the town with him, ostensibly to make sure they weren’t drinking themselves insensible in the taverns around the square, but in fact to let them know he was still alive. The men, like most of the Wolf’s men, didn’t drink nearly as much as they seemed to—this trip counted as campaign, not recreation.

The third time the Wolf came down the wide staircase, it was with the fat Captain Gobaris of the Outland Levies and the thin, bitter, handsome Commander Breg of the Kedwyr City Guards. The Outland Captain was chuckling juicily over the discomfiture of the Council at Sun Wolf s hands. “I thought we’d lose our President to the apoplexy, for sure, when you specified the currency had to be delivered tomorrow.”

“If I’d given him the week he’d asked for, he’d have had time to get another run of it from the City Mint,” the Wolf said reasonably. “There’d be half the silver content of the current coins, and he’d pay me off in that.”

The Guards Commander glanced sideways at him with black, gloomy eyes. “I suspect it’s what he did last year, when the city contracts were signed,” he said. “We contracted for five years at sixty stallins a year, and that was when stallins were forty to a gold piece. Within two months they were down to sixty-five.”

“Oh, there’s not much I wouldn’t put past that slick bastard.” Gobaris chuckled as they stepped through the great doors. Before them, the town square lay in a checkwork of moonlight and shadow, bordered with the embroidered gold of a hundred lamps from the taverns that rimmed it. Music drifted on the wind, with the smell of the sea.

No, Sun Wolf thought, signaling to his men. And that’s why I didn’t come to this town alone.

They left their places in the open tavern fronts and drifted toward him across the square. Gobaris scratched the big hard ball of his belly, and sniffed at the wild air. “Winter rains are holding off,” he judged. “They’re late this year.”

“Odd,” the commander said. “The clouds have been piling up on the sea horizon, day after day.”

Obliquely, it crossed Sun Wolf’s mind that the woman Sheera had spoken of having someone on board her ship who could command the weather. A wizard? he wondered. Impossible. Then his men were around him, grinning, and he raised his thumbs in a signal of success. There were ironic cheers, laughter, and bantering chaff, and Sheera slipped from the Wolf’s mind as Gobaris said, “Well, that’s over, and a better job of butchery on a more deserving group of men I’ve never seen. Come on, Commander,” he added, jabbing his morose colleague in the ribs with an elbow. “Is there anyplace in this town a man can get some wine to wash out the taste of them?”

They ended up making a circuit of the square, Sun Wolf, Gobaris, and Commander Breg, with all of Sun Wolf’s bodyguard and as many of the Outland Levies as had remained in the town. Amid joking, laughter, and horseplay with the girls of the local sisterhood who had turned out in their tawdry finery, Sun Wolf managed to get a good deal of information about Kedwyr and its allies from Commander Breg and a general picture of the latest state of Peninsula politics.

A cool, little hand slid over his shoulder, and a girl joined them on the bench where he sat, her eyes teasing with professional promise. Remarkable eyes, he thought; deep gold, like peach brandy, lighting up a face that was young and exquisitely beautiful. Her hair was the soft, fallow gold of a ripe apricot, escaping its artful pins and lying over slim, bare shoulders in a shining mane. He thought, momentarily, of Fawn, back at the camp—this girl couldn’t be much older than eighteen years.

The tastes of wine and victory were mingled in his mouth. He said to the men he’d brought with him, “I’ll be back.” With their good-natured ribaldry shouting in his ears, he rose and followed the girl down an alley to her rose-scented room.

It was later than he had anticipated when he returned to the square. A white sickle moon had cleared the overhanging housetops that closed in the alley; it glittered sharply on the messy water that trickled down the gutter in the center of the street. The noise from the square had entirely faded, music and laughter dying away into four-bit love and finally sleep. His men, Sun Wolf thought to himself with a wry grin, weren’t going to be pleased at having waited so long, and he steeled himself for the inevitable comments.

The square was empty.

One glance told him that all the taverns were shut, a circumstance that bunch of rowdy bastards would never have permitted if they’d still been around. Dropping back into the sheltering shadows of the alley, he scanned the empty pavement again—milky where the moon struck it, barred with the angular black frieze of the shadows cast by the roof of the Town Hall. Every window of that great building and of all the buildings round about was dark.

Had the President had them arrested?

Unlikely. The candle lighted room to which the girl had led him wasn’t that far from the square; if there’d been an arrest, there would have been a fight, and the noise would have come to him.

Besides, if the Council had given orders for his arrest, they’d have followed him and taken him in the twisting mazes of alleys, away from his men.

A town crier’s distant voice announced that it was the second watch of the night and all was well.

Much later than he’d anticipated, he thought and cursed the girl’s teasing laughter that had drawn him back to her. But no matter how late he was, his men would never have gone off without him unless so ordered, even if they’d had to wait until sunup.

After a moment’s thought, he doubled back toward the harbor gates. It was half in his mind to return to the Town Hall and make a private investigation of the cells that would invariably be underneath it. But as much as his first instinct pulled him toward a direct rescue, long experience with the politics of war told him it would be foolish. If the men had merely been arrested for drunken rowdiness—which the Wolf did not believe for a moment—they were in no danger. If they were in danger, it meant they’d been gathered in for some other reason, and the Wolf stood a far better chance of helping them by slipping out of the city himself and getting back to his position of strength in the camp. If he did not return, it would be morning before Starhawk acted and possibly too late for any of them.

His soft boots made no noise on the cobbles of the streets. In the dark mazes of the poor quarter, there was little sound—no hint of pursuit or of anything else. A late-walking water seller’s mournful call drifted through the blackness. From a grimy thieves’ tavern, built half into a cellar, smoky and mephitic light seeped, and with it came raucous laughter and the high-pitched, shrieking voices of whores. Elsewhere, the bells of the local Convent—Kedwyr had always been a stronghold of the Mother’s followers—chimed plaintively for midnight rites.

The harbor gate was a squat, round tower, crouching like a monstrous frog against the starry backdrop of velvet sky. Slipping out that way would mean an extra mile or so of walking, scrambling up the precarious cliff road, but the Wolf assumed that, if the President had men watching for him, they’d be watching by the main land gates.

Certainly there were none awaiting him here. A couple of men and a stocky, plain-looking woman in the uniforms of the City Guards were playing cards in the little turret room beside the closed gates, a bottle of cheap wine on the table between them. Sun Wolf slid cautiously through the shadows toward the heavily barred and awkwardly placed postern door that was cut in the bigger gates—a feature of many city gates, and one that he habitually spied out in any city he visited.

Slipping out by the postern would put him in full view of the guards in the turret for as long as it took to count to sixty, he calculated, gauging distances and times from the dense shadows of the gate arch. If the guards were not alert for someone trying to get out of the city, he could just manage, with luck. For all his size, he had had from childhood an almost abnormal talent for remaining unseen, like a stalking wolf in the woods that could come within feet of its prey. His father, who was his size but as big and blundering as a mountain bear, had cursed him for it as a sneaking pussyfoot, though in the end he had admitted it was a handy talent for a warrior to have.

It served him well now. None of the card players so much as turned a head as he eased the bar from the bolt slots and stole through.

After the torchlight near the gate, the night outside was inky dark. The tide was coming in, rising over the vicious teeth of the rocks below the cliffs to the southwest, the starlight ghostly on the wet backs of the crabs that swarmed a! their feet. As he climbed the cliff path, he saw that there were chains embedded in the weedy stones of the cliff’s base, winking faintly with the movement of the waves.

He shuddered with distaste. His training for war had been harsh, physically and mentally, both from his father’s inclination and from the customs of the northern tribe into which he had been born. He had learned early that an active imagination was a curse to a warrior. It had taken him years to suppress his.

The cliff path was narrow and steep, but not impassable. It had been made for woodcutters and sailors to go up from and down to the beaches when the tide was out. Only an invading troop attacking the harbor gate would find it perilous. He was soaked to the skin from the spray when he reached its top, half a mile or so from the walls; the wind was biting through the wet sheepskin of his jerkin. In the winter, the storms would make the place a deathtrap, he thought, looking about him at the flat, formless lands at the top. Windbreaks of trees crisscrossed all the lands between the cliffs and the main road from the city gates, and a low wall of gray stones, half ruined and crumbling, lay like a snake a dozen yards inland of the cliff top, a final bastion for those blinded by wind and darkness. From here the waves had a greedy sound.

He turned his face to the sea again, the wind flaying his cheeks. Above the dark indigo of the sea, he could discern great columns of flat-topped clouds, guarding lightning within them. The storms could hit at any time, he thought, and his mind went back to the rough country of the wastelands beyond the Gniss River. If there was a delay getting those jokers out of the city jail...

He cursed his bodyguard as he turned his steps back toward the road that ran from the land gate of the city Melplith. He’d left Little Thurg in charge of them. You’d think the little bastard would have the sense to keep them out of trouble, he thought, first bitterly, then speculatively. In point of fact, Little Thurg did generally have the brains to keep out of trouble and, for all his height of barely five feet, he had the authority to keep men under his command out of trouble, too. It was that which had troubled Sun Wolf from the first.

Then, like a soft word spoken in the night, he heard the hum of a bowstring. A pain, like the strike of a snake, bit his leg just above the knee. Almost before he was aware that he’d been winged. Sun Wolf flung himself down and forward, rolling into the low ground at the side of the road, concealed by the blackest shadows of the windbreaks. For a time he lay still, listening. No sounds came to his ears but the humming of the wind over the stones and the slurred voices of the whispering trees overhead.

Shot from behind a windbreak, he thought, and his hand slipped down to touch the shaft that stood out from his flesh. The touch of it startled him, and he looked down. He’d been expecting a war arrow, a killing shaft. But this was short, lightweight, fletched with narrow, gray feathers—the sort of thing children and soft-bred court ladies shot at marsh birds with. The head, which he could feel buried an inch and a half in his leg, was smooth. After the savage barbs he had from time to time hacked out of his own flesh in twenty-five years of war, the thing was a toy.

He pulled it out as he would have pulled a thorn, the dark blood trickling unheeded down his boot. It was senseless. You couldn’t kill a man with something like that unless you put it straight through his eye.

Unless it was poisoned.

Slowly he raised his head, scanning the vague and star lighted landscape. He could see nothing, no movement in the deceptive shadows of the stunted trees. But he knew they were out there waiting for him. And he knew they had him.

They?

If he was going to be trapped, why not in the town? Unless the President was unsure of the loyalty of his city Troops and the Outland Levies? Would Gobaris’ men have rioted at Sun Wolf’s arrest?

If they’d thought it was the prelude to being done out of their own pay. they would.

Working quickly, he slashed the wound with his knife and sucked and spat as much of the blood as he could, his ears straining for some anomalous sound over the thin keening of the wind. He unbuckled his damp jerkin and used his belt for a tourniquet, then broke off the head of the slender arrow and put it in his pocket in the hopes that, if he did make it as far as the camp. Butcher would be able to tell what the poison was. But already his mind was reviewing the road, as he had studied it time and again during the weeks of the siege, seeing it in terms of cover and ambush. It was well over an hour’s walk.

He got to his feet cautiously, though he knew there would be no second arrow, and began to walk. Through the sweeping darkness that surrounded him, he thought he sensed movement, stealthy in the shadows of the windbreaks, but he did not turn to look. He knew perfectly well they would be following.

He felt it very soon, that first sudden numbness and the spreading fire of feverish pain. When the road dipped and turned through a copse of dark trees, he looked back and saw them, a flutter of cloaks crossing open ground. Four or five of them, a broad, scattered ring.

He had begun to shiver, the breath laboring in his lungs. Even as he left the threshing shadows of the grove, the starlight on the plain beyond seemed less bright than it had been, the distance from landmark to landmark far greater than he had remembered. The detached comer of his mind that had always been capable of cold reasoning, even when he was fighting for his life, noted that the poison was fast-acting. The symptoms resembled toadwort, he thought with a curious calm. Better that—if it had to be poison—than the endless purgings and vomitings of mercury, or the screaming hallucinatory agonies of anzid. As a mercenary, he had seen almost as much of politics as he had of war. Poison deaths were nothing new, and he had seen the symptoms of them all.

But he was damned if he’d let that sleek, toothy President win this one uncontested.

He was aware that he’d begun to stagger, the fog in his brain making the air glitter darkly before his eyes. Tiny stones in the road seemed to magnify themselves hugely to trip his feet. He was aware, too, that his pursuers were less careful than they had been. He could see the shadows of two of them, where they hid among the trees. Soon they wouldn’t even bother with concealment.

Come on, he told himself grimly. You’ve pushed on when you were freezing to death; this isn’t any worse than that. If you can make it to the next stand of rocks, you can take a couple of the bastards out with you.

It wasn’t likely that the President would be with them, but the thought of him gave Sun Wolf the strength to make it up the long grade of the road, toward the black puddle of shadow that lay across it where the land leveled out again. He was aware of all his pursuers now, dark, drifting shapes, ringing as wolves would ring a wounded caribou. Numb sleep pulled at him. The shadow of the rocks appeared to be floating away from him, and it seemed to him then that, if he pushed himself that far, he wouldn’t have the strength to do anything, once he reached the place.

You will, he told himself foggily. The smiling bastard probably told them it would be a piece of cake, rot his eyes. I’ll give them cake.

In the shadow of the rocks, he let his knees buckle and crumpled to the ground. Under cover of trying to rise and then collapsing again, he drew his sword, concealing it under him as he heard those swift, light footfalls make their cautious approach.

The ground felt wonderful under him, like a soft bed after hard fighting. Desperately he fought the desire for sleep, trying to garner the strength that he felt slipping away like water. The dust of the road filled his nostrils, and the salt tang of the distant sea, magnified a thousand times, swam like liquor in his darkening brain. He heard the footsteps, slurring in the dry autumn grass, and wondered if he’d pass out before they came.

I may go straight to the Cold Hells, he thought bitterly, but by the spirit of my first ancestor, I’m not going alone.

Dimly he was aware of them all around him. The fold of a cloak crumpled down over his arm, and someone set a light bow in the grass nearby. A hand touched his shoulder and turned him over.

Like a snake striking, he grabbed at the dark form bent over him, catching the nape of the neck with his left hand and driving the sword upward toward the chest with his right. Then he saw the face in the starlight and jerked his motion to a halt as the blade pricked the skin and his victim gave a tiny gasping cry. For a moment, he could only stare up into the face of the amber-eyed girl from the tavern, the soft masses of her pale hair falling like silk over his gripping hand.

Under his fingers, her neck was like a flower’s stem. He could feel her breath quivering beneath the point of his sword. I can’t kill her, he thought despairingly. Not a girl Fawnie’s age and frozen with terror.

Then darkness and cold took him, and he slid to the ground. His last conscious memory was of someone jerking the sword out of his hand.