“We bet on it,” Ari said, as Sun Wolf—shivering violently with his long hair water-slicked to his naked shoulders—pushed his way through the crowding backs of the men between him and the halo of the torches, “because we couldn’t take that fort if it was a sunny day in April, and we’d never survive a winter with the countryside against us.”
“So you think a bunch of bumpkin farmers can beat us—pansy boy?”
There was little room on the wet strand of rocks and puddles that was now the only clear ground around the camp, but it was jammed with mercs, mostly men, but a sprinkling of women under arms. Across the cleared space around Ari and Zane, the Wolf glimpsed Starhawk with Ari’s supporters. She was in the plated metal jerkin of the King of Wenshar’s guards, a chain coif over her cropped head and her sword in her hand. The mutineers stood in huddled knots, with the man Louth at their head—heavyset, sullen, his hairless eunuch’s face like a floured potato. There were a lot of them: the men who’d left Krayth’s troops; the free-lance mercs and bandits who’d joined the troop on its way north; and a generous dollop of members of the troop itself. Standing in the torchlight before them, Zane seemed to glow in his gilded armor, his parti-colored crimson breeches, and his gold-stamped boots, his sword already in his hand. Ari, his frayed shirt unlaced as he dropped his cloak, unarmed save for his sheathed knife, watched him with the eyes of a calculating stranger.
“Don’t be a yammerhead, Zane.”
“I’d be a yammerhead to...”
And Ari struck—neat, fast, gauging Zane’s unshakable need to have the last word. He smashed the sword from Zane’s hand with the back of his bandaged fist, elbowed him across the face at the same moment he swept his foot from under him, and dumped him to the wet cobble of pebbles like a fallen meteor of red and gold.
Zane swept his legs, knocking him backward and rolling for his sword, neat, catlike, and deadly. Ari was before him, kicking it out of the way; someone flung him a blade from the crowd. Zane came up off the ground to meet him, a knife glinting in his hand. Ari parried, twisted, and struck it aside, every move succinct and sure, as they had fought hundreds of times on the training floor under Sun Wolf’s barked directions, like dancers who feel one another’s minds, each knowing what the other will do.
Beside Sun Wolf, Dogbreath said cheerily, “Six bits on Ari.”
“No odds,” said the Wolf, and accepted from him a rather grubby plaid cloak, since he was still soaking wet and all but naked from the river. He was beyond noticing the cold, however. Though Ari might lack Dogbreath’s lunatic savagery or Starhawk’s cold killer instinct—there had been times when the Wolf had despaired of making the young man mean enough to be a true warrior—Sun Wolf knew him to be strong, coolheaded, and technically perfect. Having trained Zane, sparred with him, and led him in battle, he knew quite well that at heart, in a one-on-one fight, Zane was a coward.
The ground was uneven, sloping sharply and slippery with puddled water and mud. Cod-proud fools, the Wolf thought bitterly, frittering away what could be only hours of low water! But his instincts told him now that if he bellowed at them to stop, only Ari would obey. The troop was no longer his to command. Ari’s foot slipped, and Zane ducked in, ripping the young captain’s sword arm from shoulder to elbow—not a deep wound, but bloody; the crowd exploded with yells and oaths. The Wolf had a momentary, hideous vision of a general riot erupting, as had taken place at Bron’s. But Ari rolled back as Zane pressed in on him with knife raised to kill and lashed at Zane’s legs with precise timing. Zane staggered, slipping in precisely the same wet patch that had felled Ari, and Ari dove upward inside his reach, hurling the sword aside and twisting the knife from Zane’s hand.
He flung the blade away into the crowd, caught Zane by the front of his armor, and threw him down into the fist-sized stones on his back.
Then, deliberately, Ari finished the beating with his fists, brutally, calmly, like an older boy trouncing a younger, and kicked him aside when done.
“Now get out,” he said, his voice steady and quiet despite the blood running down his arm. “You take the Gore Thane’s fort yourself if you want it so bad.”
Zane, half-unconscious, crouched a little at the sound, covering his face. His gilded armor had been half torn off him and his face was slimed with mud, snot, and blood—Ari’s and his own, from a broken nose and a split lip beneath which two of his front teeth were missing. His bare arms were purpling where the stones had bruised them.
Ari turned to the others. “Hog, Bron, get your wagons down here in ten minutes. Somebody find that sniveling little pimp Sugarman and tell him we’ll need his wagon, too. We’re crossing as soon as it’s light enough to see.”
Chapter 12
THERE WERE TIMES in the ensuing three weeks that Starhawk wondered mildly why she, Sun Wolf, and the others had once been so exercised over minor matters like ballistas misfiring, siege towers collapsing, and tunnels flooding. Those, she realized now, were relatively minor matters compared to the unrelenting sleepless hell of the journey to Wrynde in winter.
Knee-deep in half-frozen bogs with cold rain running down her face, half-starved and half-nauseated from bad food, her chapped hands bleeding as she dragged with cracking muscles at the harnesses of the wagons that stuck in what two years ago had been firm ground, she had to admire the wizard capable of producing such an unbroken run of bad luck. Much of her time was spent mentally devising lingering deaths for the aforesaid wizard, but she had to admire him all the same.
Without Sun Wolf, she suspected, they would all have been dead before they crossed the Gore.
The mistake Ari had made in not killing Zane had become evident within the hour. The camp had split, rumor flashing around that Ari had won only because, as Louth had spat at her at some point in the ensuing chaos, “He had a Mother-worshiping hoodoo on his side.” By that time, even killing Zane wouldn’t have stemmed the mutiny, and Ari, sustained against shock and blood loss by massive quantities of gin, had been unable to prevent nearly three hundred men from breaking off with the intention of storming the Gore Thane’s fort while the weather held good.
Ari had managed to keep most of the wagons, though there’d been a fight about it. There had been fights about everything: the division of the food; the chestful of Stratus-weight silver coins that had been their final payment for the rape of Vorsal; Hog’s portable forge and, for that matter, Hog himself, for good cooks were rare and armorers rarer; Bron’s still; Butcher and the medical tent; Sugarman the drug merchant and his wares; oxen and mules, liquor and whetstones; and, most of all, the women.
By first light, when the broken-down wagons-cum-ferries began their painful hauls across the river, it was raining, thin gray rain that fell steadily in spite of everything Sun Wolf could do to delay the oncoming storm. From where she sat on the money chest in the doorway of Ari’s tent, naked sword across her knees, Starhawk could hear the croaking mutter of his broken voice from the shadows within. He’d been meticulous in setting up his defenses, as he had in the house in Kwest Mralwe; still, she held herself ready to spring up and go to him at the slightest faltering in that whispered chant. He had said it was difficult to work weather against its own inclination in any case. Unable to put his whole spirit into it, unable to release himself for fear of being trapped in the strange trance state by the shadow hand, she doubted he’d hold off the river’s rise for more than a few hours.
Which, she thought, listening to the savage hubbub of yet another argument in the insane mill of the camp, might not be enough.
“Goddam it, I don’t care what she wants! She’s my woman and she goes with me...!”
“You heretical bastard, you’re taking all the good swords...”
“We’re gonna need those mules...”
Then Ari’s voice, not loud but cutting as carbon steel, slicing through the hysterical maelstrom as it could through the noise of battle.
Two of the camp’s three pimps, as well as Sugarman, had elected to stay with Z
ane, but a number of their whores, both women and boys, were trying to join Ari; and, as if there weren’t enough arguments already, assorted slaves and concubines of men on each side were trying to join the other. More of the curse? Starhawk thought, glancing at the cliffs where the canyon of the Gore narrowed upstream and where she thought she’d seen the brown, watching shadows of the Gore Thane’s men.
Then Zane had come from the direction of the barges, dragging the dancer Opium by the hair.
He had hold of her wrists in one hand. She was struggling, half bent-over and unable to straighten from the pain of his grip; by the bruise on her face, he’d struck her already. His own face was so swollen and scabbed from his beating by Ari it was hard to tell whether she’d gotten him with her nails or not. She was sobbing “NO! NO!” Tears of fury were running down her cheeks. Penpusher and Dogbreath, hurrying past with a couple of mules on lead, checked their stride a moment, but then went on toward the ferries as fast as they could. Women, after all, do not pull wagons. Starhawk was starting to rise, sword in hand, when she felt Sun Wolf’s bulk shadow the doorway at her back.
“Let her go, Zane.”
Zane started to drag her in another direction. Starhawk easily headed him off. He swung back toward the Wolf, his face a mask of purpled, puffy rage. “The hell I will! You and your nancy-boy Ari aren’t going to take all the skirts around here worth lifting...”
Men started at once to gather—Louth and a mutineer named Pinky, the Big Thurg, Goddess, Cat-Dirt, and another man whose affiliation she didn’t remember. There was a mutter of assent. Sun Wolf stepped forward out of the tent.
“She’s a free woman, Zane.” His face had a drawn look to it in the faded frame of his lion-colored hair. Even in a few hours, fatigue-lines had printed themselves like chisel cuts in the corner of his single eye. “She’s got the right to choose.”
“Rot that and rot you!” Zane’s voice was thick with rage and with sinuses swollen shut. “We need women, not just those scabby sluts you’re leaving us with! We have a right to take them!”
Sun Wolf covered the distance between them with no evidence of hurry, arms at his sides, his bite-scarred, gold-furred hands empty. “Why?” he asked mildly. “You thinking you’re not going to take that fort after all and have the women from it?”
Zane stepped back from him, twisting brutally at the glossy tangle of Opium’s curls and keeping an effortless grip on both slim brown wrists. Blood and spit flecked from his broken teeth as he spoke. “We’ll take it, all right. You let it be, Wolf.” He moved to turn away, but Sun Wolf was before him, again stepping easily while Zane’s movements were hampered by the woman he held.
“Zane,” the Wolf said affably, though his eye glittered with dangerous fire, “if you had any brains, I’d suspect you were stalling until the river could rise so Ari would have no choice but to join you in that witless attack.”
The blue eyes shifted, the puffed lips pulled back like an animal’s.
“I’m not sure you’re smart enough to think of something like that, but if you did, I’m telling you now it’d be a stupid trick to pull.”
“Not as stupid as the trick you’re pulling!” Shrillness skinned Zane’s voice. “This is twice you’ve left us in the lurch, with all your big talk about magic! I have yet to see you charm warts, O Mighty Sorcerer! What’s the matter, you want this bitch yourself, as a change from Ari?” He twisted her hair again, smiling just a little at her sobbing cry.
Ari had just come up, the Little Thurg and Battlesow at his heels; Starhawk saw the twitch of his hand toward his sword hilt, but too many of Zane’s men were in the increasing mob around them. If Ari attacked this time it would not be single combat.
“What?” the Wolf said, with deadly geniality in his cracked voice. “Don’t think you can take the fort yourselves? Think you need a little magic to help you out?”
“NO!” Zane spat instantly. “We can take anything, win anything, without any goddam hoodoos using magic for what they haven’t got the juice to do like real men! You’re the one who needs magic, old man, to make up for what you haven’t got any more on your own! Go on, take your boy and whoever else you can get to follow you for old time’s sake and go the in the wastelands! We’ll send a couple of sutlers out to look for your bones in the spring! Go on, get out!” He grinned crookedly through swollen lips. “Or you gonna do a little hocus-pocus on us before you leave, just to teach us a lesson?”
“Zane.” Sun Wolf sighed patiently. “You couldn’t learn a lesson—you couldn’t learn your own name if Helmpiddle wrote it on your back.”
Rage flared the blue eyes and Zane’s hands went for his sword, exactly, Starhawk suspected, as the Wolf had intended. Released, Opium twisted and was gone into the crowd. Zane took a step after her, but Starhawk and the Goddess—who must have weighed one-eighty without armor—were suddenly blocking his way.
Later, loading the ferries in the slanting rain, Starhawk got a glimpse of Opium’s striped silk dress under Gully the Bard’s filthy green coat and hood, being loaded by Bron into the barge. Bron, a slender, unobtrusive man with prematurely gray hair, was nobody’s idea of a knight errant, but, the Hawk supposed, damsels in distress had to take it where they could. She knew the tavern keeper well enough to know he wasn’t going to exact payment for his protection in kind. However much he might want to, she added to herself, catching a glimpse of a slim brown leg.
She and Sun Wolf were among the last to cross, guarding the dwindling piles of supplies against the possibility of Zane changing his mind. The river was rising fast, white and vicious over the drowned black rocks as their barge was hauled across. Dun and blue, the twisted sandstone cliffs reared over them like the potholed scales of a monster’s corpse, clouds mantling their broken sky line—water the color of wheat hulls churned and tore at their feet. Clinging to the gunwales and hearing the scrape of those rocks on the wood beneath her feet, Starhawk wondered abstractly if, after all this trouble, she was simply going to be drowned.
That would be typical, she thought dourly, glancing up at Sun Wolf’s set face, drenched with spray and rain, and fought the childish impulse to cling to him instead of to the side of the boat. She wondered academically whether the curse would divide itself, or remain with one group or the other.
But if the curse had divided, its strength was undiminished; and if it had selected one group, it speedily became obvious which.
Flayed by bitter rain that was never quite cold enough to freeze the sticky yellow-gray mud that seemed to be everywhere in the low ground, lashed by the winds, if they climbed to the bony ridges from which all fertility had long since eroded away, the troop had slowed to a crawl. What had once been the main road from Gwenth to its northern capital at Wrynde had been in decay for years, but now only a rutted track remained, new gullies cutting it every mile or so in the drowning rains. Brambles and the broken-off spears of seedling pine filled these crevasses, tangling wheels and the feet of men and beasts or covering over gaps and potholes until it was too late to avoid them. Twice wolves and once bandits emerged from the dark knots of forest and thicket to attack the train, taking their toll in livestock, injuries, and sheer exhaustion. Mold and spoilage cut rations still further, even as a thousand delays, great and small, stretched what should have been ten days’ journey into nearly a month, and what food there was, despite Hog’s best efforts, could be tensed edible only by comparison. No wonder, Starhawk thought, huddling by night over a smoky brazier of damp coals in Bron’s tavern, people have been ready to kill each other after a summer of his. She was ready to garrote Gully, if he sang the Lay of Naxis and Salopina one more time.
Across the table from her, Dogbreath was dispiritedly laying out a hand of solitaire. Few people had the energy to play poker these days, even had anybody been able to win more than a few bits at it. During the siege, Bron had forbidden the game in his tavern as the cause of too many fights; but, looking around her at the weary men, muddy to the eyebrows and too exhausted
even to avoid the rain dripping on them from the sagging tent roof, the Hawk doubted many of them had the spunk to fight these days.
Probably just as well.
A sharp riffle of voices broke into the numbed buzz of the general noise, and she saw men crowding in a jostling knot by the entrance, gesturing in anger and disgust. The noise level of the benches all around her was such that she couldn’t hear what the problem was. She was almost afraid to guess.
A moment later, she saw Moggin detach himself from the press and edge his way cautiously toward her, a boiled-leather mug of skink-water—hot gin and tea—in either hand. A week or so ago, some of the men might have moved away in sullen distrust, but by now no one cared whether he’d been a wizard or a slave.
“Yo, Moggy,” she greeted him in mercenary cant.
“And a pleasant yo to yourself, Warlady.” He handed her the mug.
Moggin looked tired—worse, in some ways, than he had the night they’d taken him away from Zane. Without complaint, he did his share of the work in setting and striking Dogbreath’s overcrowded tent, in loading mules, or levering wagons from slime holes; though he still wore the slave chain, none of the others in the tent—Dogbreath, Firecat, Penpusher, Sun Wolf, Starhawk—regarded him as other than a partner in the hellish business of getting out of the current mess alive. But looking at him now, Starhawk could see how badly the exertion was telling on him.
He was not, as they were, a trained warrior, inured to hardship. Beneath the baggy assortment of borrowed garments—a pair of Starhawk’s spare breeches, Bron’s second-best jerkin, and shirts taken by Butcher from the bodies of the dead—he was losing flesh; under his unfailing gentle courtesy, she sensed exhaustion and the strain of merely keeping on his feet and keeping up with the train from day to day.
The Dark Hand of Magic Page 22