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 corner 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.
Chapter 3
“ARI SENT YOU AWAY?” Starhawk looked sharply from Little Thurg to Ari, who stood quietly at her side.
Thurg nodded, puzzlement stamped into every line of his round, rather bland-looking countenance. “I thought it funny myself, sir,” he said, and the bright blue eyes shifted over to Ari. “But I asked you about it then, and you told me...”
“I was never there,” Ari objected quietly. “I was never in Kedwyr at all.” He looked over at Starhawk, as if for confirmation. They had spent the night with half of Sun Wolf’s other lieutenants, playing poker in Penpusher’s tent, waiting for word to come back from their chief. “You know...”
Starhawk nodded. “I know,” she said and looked back at Thurg, who was clearly shaken and more than a little frightened.
“You can ask the others, sir,” he said, and a pleading note crept into his voice. “We all saw him, plain as daylight. And after the Chief had gone off with that woman, I thought he met and spoke with Ari. May God strike me blind if that isn’t the truth.”
Starhawk reflected to herself that being struck blind by God was an exceedingly mild fate compared with what any man who had deserted his captain in the middle of an enemy city was likely to get. The fact that they were in the pay of the Council of Kedwyr did not make that city friendly territory—quite the contrary, in fact. You can dishonor a man’s wife, kill his cattle, loot his goods, Sun Wolf had often said, and he will become your friend quicker than any ruling body that owes you money for something you’ve done for them.
She settled back in the folding camp chair that was set under the marquee outside Sun Wolf’s tent and studied the man in front of her. The sea wind riffled her pale, flyaway hair and made the awning crack above her head. The wind had turned in the night, blowing hard and steady toward the east. The racing scud of the clouds threw an uneasy alternation of brightness and shadow over the dry, wolf-colored hills that surrounded Melplith’s stove-in walls on three sides and formed a backdrop of worried calculations, like a half-heard noise, to all her thoughts.
Her silence was salt to Thurg’s already flayed nerves. “I swear it was Ari I saw,” he insisted. “I don’t know how it came about, but you know I’d never have left the Chief. I’ve been with him for years.”
She knew that this was true. She also knew that women, more than once, mistaking her for a man in her armor, had offered to sell her their young daughters for concubines, and the knowledge that there was literally nothing that human beings would not sell for ready cash must have been in her eyes. The little man in front of her began to sweat, his glance flickering in hopeless anguish from her face to Ari’s. Starhawk’s cold-bloodedness was more feared than Sun Wolf’s rages. A man who had taken a bribe to betray Sun Wolf could expect from her no mercy and certainly nothing even remotely quick.
She glanced up at Ari, who stood behind her chair. He looked doubtful, as well he might; Thurg had always proved himself trustworthy and had, as he had said, been with Sun Wolf’s troop for years. She herself was puzzled, as much by the utter unlikeliness of Thurg’s story as by the possibility of betrayal. In his place, she would have thought up a far better story, and she had enough respect for his brains to think that he would have, also.
“Where did Ari speak to you?” she asked at last.
“In the square, sir,” Thurg said, swallowing and glancing from her face to Ari’s and back again. “He—he came out of the alleyway the Chief had gone down with that girl and—and walked over to where we were sitting in the tavern. It was getting late. I’d already talked to the innkeeper once about keeping the place open.”
“He came over to you—or called yo
u to him?”
“He came over, sir. He said, ‘You can head on back to camp, troops. The Chief and I will be along later.’ And he gave us this big wink. They all laughed and made jokes, but I asked didn’t he want a couple of us to stay, just in case? And he said, ‘You think we can’t handle City Troops? You’ve seen ’em fight!’ And we—we came away. I thought if Ari was with the Chief...” He let his voice trail off, struggling within himself. Then he flung his hands out. “It sounds like your grandfather’s whiskers, but it’s true! Ask any of ’em!” Desperation corrugated his sunburned little face. “You’ve got to believe me!”
But he did not look as if he thought that this was at all likely.
They said in the camp that Starhawk had not been born—she’d been sculpted. She considered him for a moment more, then asked, “He came out of the alley, came toward the tavern, and spoke to you?”
“Yes.”
“He was facing the tavern lamps?”
“Yes—they were behind me. It was one of those open-front places—I was at a table toward the edge, out on the square, like.”
“And you saw him clearly?”
“Yes! I swear it!” He was trembling, sweat trickling down his scar-seamed brown cheeks. Behind him, just outside the rippling shade of the awning, two guards looked away, feeling that electric desperation in the air and not willing to witness the breaking of a man they both respected. Frantic, Thurg said, “If I’d sold the Chief to the Council, you think I’d have come back to the camp?”
Starhawk shrugged. “If you’d thought you could get me to believe you thought you were talking to Ari, maybe. I’ve seen too many betrayals to know whether you’d have sold him out or not—but I do find it hard to believe you’d have done it this stupidly. You’re confined to quarters until we see whether the Council sends out the money they promised.”
When the guards had taken Little Thurg away, Ari shook his head and sighed. “Of all the damned stupid stories...How could he have done it, Hawk? There was no way he had of knowing that I wasn’t with ten other people—which I was!”
She glanced up at him, towering above her, big and bearlike and perplexed, the slow bum of both anger and hurt visible in those clear, hazel-gray eyes. “That’s what inclines me to believe he’s telling the truth,” she said and got to her feet. “Or what he thinks is the truth, anyway. If I’m not back from Kedwyr in three hours, hit the town with everything we’ve got and send messages to Ciselfarge...”
“You’re going by yourself?”
“If they’re hiding what they’ve done, I’m in no danger,” she said briefly, casting a quick glance at the piebald sky and picking up her sheepskin jacket from the back of her chair. “I can fight my way out alone as well as I could with a small bodyguard—and if the Council doesn’t know the Wolf’s missing, I’m not going to tell them so by going in with a large one.”
But on the highroad from the camp to the city gates, she met a convoy of sturdy little pack donkeys and a troop of the Kedwyr City Guards, bearing the specified payment from the Council. Thin and morose, like a drooping black heron upon his cobby little Peninsular mare, Commander Breg hailed her. She drew her horse alongside his. “No trouble?” she asked, nodding toward the laden donkeys and the dark-clothed guards who led them.
The commander made the single coughing noise that was the closest he ever came to a laugh. The day had turned cold with the streaming wind; he wore a black cloak and surcoat wound over the shining steel back-and-breast mail, and his face, framed in the metal of his helmet, was mottled with vermilion splotches of cold. “Our President came near to an apoplexy and took to his bed with grief over the amount of it,” he told her. “But a doctor was summoned—they say he will recover.”
Starhawk laughed. “Ari and Penpusher are there waiting to go over it with you.”
“Penpusher,” the commander said thoughtfully. “Is he that yak in chain mail who threw the defending captain off the tower at the storming of Melplith’s gates?”
“Oh, yes,” Starhawk agreed. “He’s only like that in battle. As a treasurer, he’s untouchable.”
“As a warrior,” the commander said, “he’s someone I would not much like to try and touch, either.” A spurt of wind tore at his cloak, fraying the horses’ manes into tangled clouds and hooning eerily through the broken lines of windbreak and stone. He glanced past Starhawk’s shoulder at the gray rim of the sea, visible beyond the distant cliffs. The sky there was densely piled with bruised-looking clouds. Over the whining of the wind, the waves could occasionally be heard, hammerlike against the rocks.
“Will you make it beyond the Gniss,” he asked, “before the river floods?”
“If we get started tomorrow.” It was her way never to give anyone anything. She would not speak to a comparative stranger of her fears that they would not, in fact, reach the river in time for a safe crossing. It was midmorning; were it not for Sun Wolf’s disappearance, they would have been breaking camp already, to depart as soon as the money was counted. With the rapid rise of the Gniss, hours could be important. As the wind knifed through the thick sheepskin of her coat and stung the exposed flesh of her face, she wondered if the commander’s words were a chance remark or a veiled warning to take themselves off before it was too late.
“By the way,” she asked, curvetting her horse away from the path of the little convoy, “where does Gobaris keep himself when he’s in town? Or has he left already?”
The commander shook his head. “He’s still there, in the barracks behind the Town Hall square. It’s his last day in the town, though—he’s getting ready to go back to his farm and that wife he’s been telling us about all through the campaign.”
“Thanks.” Starhawk grinned and raised her hand in farewell. Then she turned her horse’s head in the direction of the town and spurred to a canter through the cold, flying winds of the coming storms.
She found Gobaris, round, pink, and slothful, packing his few belongings and the mail that no longer quite fitted him, in the section of barracks reserved by the Council for the Outland Levies during their service to the town. Few of them were left; this section of the barracks, allotted to the men of the levies, was mostly empty, the straw raked from the bunks and heaped on the stone floor ready to be hosed out, the cold drafts whistling through the leak-stained rafters. The walls were covered with mute and obscene testimony of the rivalry between the Outland Levies and the City Troops.
“I don’t know which is worse,” she murmured, clicking her tongue thoughtfully, “the lack of imagination or the inability to spell a simple four-letter word that they use all the time.”
“Lack of imagination,” Gobaris said promptly, straightening up in a two-stage motion to favor the effect of the coming dampness on his lower back. “If one more man had tried to tell me the story about the City Trooper and the baby goat, I’d have strangled the life out of him before he’d got past ‘Once upon a time.’ What can I do for you, Hawk?”
She spun him a tale of a missing soldier, watching his puffy, unshaven face closely, and saw nothing in the wide blue eyes but annoyance and concern that the man should be found before the rest of the troop left without him. He let his packing lie and took her down to the city hall, shouting down the regular guards there and opening without demur any door she asked to see the other side of. At the end, she shook her head in assumed disgust and sighed. “Well, that rules out trouble, anyway. He’ll be either sodden drunk or snugged up with some woman.” It took all her long self-discipline and all the inexpressive calm of years of barracks poker to hide the sick qualm of dread that rose in her and accept with equanimity the Outland Captain’s invitation to share a quart of ale at the nearest tavern.
She was reviewing in her memory the other possible ways to enter the jail by stealth and search for other cells there when Gobaris asked, “Did your chief get back to the camp all right, then?”
She frowned, resting her hands around the mug on the rather grimy surface of the tavern table. “
Why would he not?”
Gobaris sighed, shook his head, and rubbed at the pink, bristly rolls of his jaw. “I didn’t like it myself, for all that Ari’s a stout enough fighter. If the President had wanted to make trouble, he could have trapped the two of them in the town. It was dangerous, is all.”
Starhawk leaned back in her chair and considered the fat man in the cold white light that came in through the open tavern front from the square. “You mean Ari was the only man he had with him?” she asked, playing for time.
“Only one I saw.” He threw back his head, revealing a grayish crescent of dirty collar above the edge of his pink livery doublet, and drank deeply, then wiped his lips with an odd daintiness on the cuff of his sleeve. “He might have had others up the alley, mind, but none whom I saw.”
“Which alley?” she asked in a voice of mild curiosity, turning her head to scan the half-empty square. No booths or other tavern fronts opened into that great expanse of checked white and black stone today—a rainsquall had already dappled the pavement, and the fleeting patches of white and blue of the sky were more and more obscured by threatening gray.
“That one there.” He pointed. From this angle, it was little more than a shaded slot behind the keyhole turrets of an elaborately timbered inn front. “We were at that alehouse there, the Cock in Leather Breeches, waiting for your chief to get back. Then Ari came out of the alley, walked slap up to the bodyguard, and sent ’em off back to camp. I thought it wasn’t like the Wolf to be that careless, but nobody asked me my opinion.”
The Ladies of Mandrigyn Page 4