He glanced up and saw the glowing dots of rose light reflected in Starhawk’s eyes. “Here?”
“Unless you’re willing to hire an agent to field job offers in the Middle Kingdoms.”
“We’ll have to go back to Kwest Mralwe, at least, to see what’s in Purcell’s house.”
She nodded. “And we’ll have to do that as soon as the roads are clear, before some other enterprising hoodoo gets the same idea. But...”
Footsteps clacked hollow on the veranda again, swift and clipped, and Sun Wolf had barely time to identify who it had to be before she slid open the door. “Wolf...”
She crossed the plank floor with her old, swift grace, holding up the wine-colored velvet of her skirt. To his surprise, Starhawk greeted her as a friend. Of course, he thought. Over the winter in the tavern, they, too, had time to get acquainted. Opium asked, “Did you see who came to camp this afternoon?”
“Messenger from Ciselfarge, wasn’t it?” He knew the arms of most of the small merchant cities of the Middle Kingdoms and the Gwarl Peninsula, and had identified the white castle on the green and red checkerboard embroidered on the courier’s tabard that afternoon, even through the crusted layers of mud. “That’s Ari’s business, not mine anymore.”
“Guess again.” Dim firelight splashed off the barbaric rubies of her gown clasps under the fur-lined cloak—clasps Sun Wolf remembered the Little Thurg having stolen years ago in the Peninsula somewhere. He’d undoubtedly sold them to her this winter when he ran out of credit at the tavern.
“After all that happened through the winter, you know the troop’s short—down to six hundred or so, fighting force. Ari’s taken Ciselfarge’s offer...”
“Kedwyr attacking them?” Opium looked startled at this piece of mind-reading. “I’ve been expecting that since they signed their nonaggression treaty the summer before last. Go ahead.”
“Yes,” she said, rather shaken; the Wolf did not comment on the fact that Opium was evidently being included in negotiations meetings these days. Considering how Ari and Penpusher had been taken at Kwest Mralwe, it wasn’t a bad idea. “Ari wants to, because he owes the cost of the troop twice over to Xanchus and the other tradesmen for food, medicines, and mules for the summer’s campaign. It’s not a debt he can welch on, either,” she added sapiently, “not unless he wants to carry his tents in his pockets from now on. But now Xanchus is saying he wants Ari to take out the debt in trade, and remain here to guard the diggings while they’re being set up.”
“At a rate of about a third what Ciselfarge is offering,” the Wolf guessed, and again Opium looked surprised.
“Half, actually. So, since the Mayor owns most of Ari’s debts, they’ve reached a compromise to leave a hundred men as a security force—and you, to recruit and train a hundred more.”
Sun Wolf jerked bolt upright on his bench, his one eye blazing. “ME!?”
Three months ago Opium would have flinched and gazed at him with those liquid eyes; now she folded her hands calmly before her jeweled belt buckle and pointed out, “I can see Xanchus’ point. Those diggings are worth not only money—they’re power to whoever can control the trade. That’s why we’re using go-betweens and conducting the negotiations in the south in secret—so we won’t get some Middle Kingdom army on our backs.”
“That’s their goddam problem,” Sun Wolf retorted. “I’m not working for that fat little crook...”
“But he owns most of your debts,” she informed him. “He’s been buying debts all winter, as soon as it was known there was no way to pay off the credit with real money.”
Sun Wolf’s voice cracked into a hoarse roar. “The hell I’ll stay here all summer as a—a guard over some festering hole in the ground! I’m no man’s poxy debt thrall...”
“I shoulda left him locked up,” Starhawk remarked to no one in particular.
“Legally, he can take the debts out however he wants, you know,” Opium pointed out. “According to him, you set up the precedents on debts and welching yourself...”
“I did, goddammit, but that was different!”
It wasn’t, he knew, even as he said it. The camp depended too much on the good will of the town to disrupt the economics of good faith.
“He’s over there now.” She nodded back toward the half-open door, through which, in a narrow bar of bright amber torchlight, figures could be seen between the smoke-stained brick of the corner of Ari’s house and the crumbling statues of the colonnade. Ari, the gold rings in his ears and hair glinting softly where the light caught them, was nodding gravely at the inaudible jobations of Xanchus, muffled like a cabbage in a dozen fur-lined robes, gimlet-sharp eyes peeking out from beneath the fur brim of his hat. Penpusher stood by, skewed white ruff lying dead over his black shoulders like a smashed daisy, his account books in hand, and next to him, the messenger from Ciselfarge with his mud-slobbered heraldic tabard pulled on awkwardly over several layers of woolen hose and a sheepskin doublet. “If you want to get away before he can ask you face-to-face, I can hold them.”
Her dark eyes met his, and held. “Fair trade,” she added, with the ghost of a smile.
“You mean because I am forty years old, and ugly?” He took her hands, and bent to kiss her lips lightly.
Her smile broadened with mischief, and the comfort of knowing that he would remain, if not a lover, at least a trusted friend. “Something like that. Over the summer I’ll see what I can do about buying your paper back...” Then she laughed. “And not to take it out in trade, if that’s worrying you. Unless you insist, of course... Poor Dogbreath’s been living in our back room with Gully for weeks. Bron’s going to sneak him out in the campaign wagon when the troop leaves, since the Goddess is staying here as commander of the mine guards.”
“That’ll teach him to bet the same twenty strat five times.” He kissed her again, and glanced over at Starhawk, only to see that she’d gone. A moment later, she emerged from the bedroom, buckling her sword belt on over the thick black leather of doublet and jerkin, into which she’d changed with her usual lightning efficiency.
“Now I know why I could never go on the run,” Opium laughed, releasing his hands and walking over to the Hawk in a silvery froufrou of swishing skirts. “It never takes me less than an hour to get dressed, and that’s without makeup...” Starhawk laughed, as the two women hugged. “I’ll give you as much time as I can.” And she was gone, slipping through the rear door into the garden so that Xanchus and the others in negotiation with Ari wouldn’t realize where she’d been.
“Hawk, can you get the horses while I pack your gear?” the Wolf said. “I think Little Thurg’s on gate duty tonight...” He turned back to Moggin, who had risen unnoticed in the gloom of the hearth pit. “You coming?”
The philosopher looked a little surprised that he’d been asked. “If you’ll have me.”
“It’s gonna be rough,” Sun Wolf cautioned, gauging with his mind the weather, the cold, and the frailty of that stooped gray form. “And Kwest Mralwe might not be easy for you, considering.”
The sensitive mouth flinched a little, then Moggin shook his head. “After four months of the bucolic amenities of Wrynde, believe me, I am willing to go almost any place where books and soap may be purchased at will. I don’t suppose anywhere will be easy for me, for a time,” he added more quietly. “But I’d really rather be in the company of friends, even if it is on a grossly substandard road, than alone here. I’ll try not to be a nuisance.”
“Get your sword and your astrolabe, and meet us by the stables, then. And don’t let them see you leave.” He strode for the kitchen to collect the food they’d need for the journey, his mind already running ahead to the road and to the weather, wondering if he should turn aside the driving rain he sensed not far off or whether it would be of more use to hide their tracks from his own incensed men.
In the gloom beyond the tiny stove, he could just make out Starhawk, a lanky black silhouette against the few inches of open door, the dim torchlight
from the colonnade catching blurry reflections on her pale hair and the metal of her jerkin, sword belt, and boot tops. Coming over to her, he saw why she was waiting. Xanchus and the messenger from Ciselfarge were standing at the corner of the colonnade, expostulating and pointing in the direction of the house. Past Ari’s shoulder, they would be able to see movement in the bare rocks of the garden.
A moment later Opium emerged from Ari’s doorway behind them, said something which caught their attention in her husky, drawling voice. They turned, looking back toward her, and it seemed to Sun Wolf that, in that moment, Ari gave her a querying look, and she replied with the most infinitesimal of nods. The young commander’s voice was clearly audible, saying, “Oh, before we present him with your proposition, I did mean to ask you about the terms for buying your mules...” And, draping a muscular arm around each man’s shoulder, he drew them back into the shadows of his house.
Sun Wolf grinned, put his arm around the Hawk’s waist and kissed her hard. “Come on,” he said. “We can be ten miles away before they know we’re gone.”
A Biography of Barbara Hambly
Barbara Hambly (b. 1951) is a New York Times bestselling author of fantasy and science fiction, as well as historical novels set in the nineteenth century.
Born in San Diego and raised in the Los Angeles suburb of Montclair, Hambly attended college at the University of California, Riverside, where she majored in medieval history, earning a master’s degree in the subject in 1975. Inspired by her childhood love of fantasy classics such as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Lord of the Rings, she decided to pursue writing as soon as she finished school. Her road was not so direct, however, and she spent time waitressing, modeling, working at a liquor store, and teaching karate before selling her first novel, Time of the Dark, in 1982. That was the birth of her Darwath series, which she expanded on in four more novels over the next two decades. More than simple sword-and-sorcery novels, they tell the story of nightmares come to life to terrorize the world. The series helped to establish Hambly’s reputation as an author of intelligent fantasy fiction.
Since the early 1980s, when she made her living writing scripts for Saturday morning cartoons such as Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors and He-Man, Hambly has published dozens of books in several different series. Besides fantasy novels such as 1985’s Dragonsbane, which she has called one of her favorite books, she has used her background in history to craft gripping historical fiction.
The inventor of many different fantasy universes, including those featured in the Windrose Chronicles, Sun Wolf and Starhawk series, and Sun-Cross novels, Hambly has also worked in universes created by others. In the 1990s she wrote two well-received Star Wars novels, including the New York Times bestseller Children of the Jedi, while in the eighties she dabbled in the world of Star Trek, producing several novels for that series.
In 1999 she published A Free Man of Color, the first Benjamin January novel. That mystery and its eight sequels follow a brilliant African-American surgeon who moves from Paris to New Orleans in the 1830s, where he must use his wits to navigate the prejudice and death that lurk around every corner of antebellum Louisiana. Hambly ventured into straight historical fiction with The Emancipator’s Wife, a nuanced look at the private life of Mary Todd Lincoln, which was a finalist for the 2005 Michael Shaara Prize for Civil War writing.
From 1994 to 1996 Hambly was the president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Her James Asher vampire series won the Locus Award for best horror novel in 1989 and the Lord Ruthven Award in 1996. She lives in Los Angeles with an assortment of cats and dogs.
Hambly with her parents and older sister in San Diego, California, in September 1951.
Hambly (right) with her mother, sister, and brother in 1955. For three years, the family lived in this thirty-foot trailer at China Lake, California, a Marine Base in the middle of the Mojave Desert.
Hambly (left), at the age of nine, with her brother and sister on Christmas in 1960.
Hambly’s graduation from high school, June 1969.
A self-portrait that Hambly drew while studying abroad in France in 1971.
Hambly dressed up for a Renaissance fair.
Hambly at an event for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. She served as the association’s president from 1994 to 1996.
The “official wedding picture” of Hambly and science-fiction writer George Alec Effinger, in 1998.
Hambly with her husband, George, in New Orleans around 1998. At the time, she was researching New Orleans cemeteries for her book Graveyard Dust (2002).
Hambly at her birthday party in 2005.
Hambly (right) with her sister, Mary, and brother, Eddy, at a family reunion in San Diego in 2009.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1990 by Barbara Hambly
maps by Shelly Shapiro
cover design by Jason Gabbert
978-1-4532-1683-5
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
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New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
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