“A man, is it?” the scholar mused, and Starhawk unaccountably felt her cheeks grow warm.
She went on hastily. “In some places I know, they say that a man has only to walk out in the night air to become a nuuwa; I think your nephews’ tale about gaums—dragonflies—may have something to do with it. Not true dragonflies, but perhaps something that looks or moves like them. But no one knows. And I’m beginning to find that fact in itself a little suspicious.”
He looked sharply across at her, his dark eyes suddenly wary. Starhawk met his gaze calmly, wondering why she had the momentary impression that he was afraid of her. Then he looked away and folded his fine little hands around his bony knees. “A wizard might know,” he said, “were there any left.”
The memory came back to her of the eyeless, mewing thing that had beaten and chewed at the Convent gates; she remembered Sister Wellwa, flinging fire from her knotted hands, and a sliver of mirror angled in the corner of a room. She recalled Little Thurg’s speaking to a man who was not what he seemed.
“Anyog,” she said slowly, “in all of your travels—have you ever heard of other wizards besides Altiokis?”
The silence stretched, and the flickering gleam of the tallow dip outlined the scholar’s profile in an edge of gold as he continued to look steadily away from her into the darkness. At length he said, “No. None whom I have ever found.”
“Are there any yet alive?”
He laughed, a soft, cracked little chuckle in the dark. “Oh, there are. There are said to be, anyway. But those who are born with the Power have more sense than to say so these days. If they learn any magic at all, they’re careful to make their staffs into little wands that can be hidden up their sleeves, if they’re men, or concealed as broom handles. There’s even a legend about a wizard who hired herself out as governess to a rich man’s children and who kept her staff hidden as the handle of her parasol.”
“Because of Altiokis?” Starhawk asked quietly.
The old man sighed. “Because of Altiokis.” He turned back to her, the dim, uncertain glimmer making his face suddenly older, more tired, scored with wrinkles like the spoor of years of grief. “And in any case, there are fewer and fewer wizards who have crossed into the fullness of their power. They have the little powers, what they can be taught by nature or by their masters, if they have them—or so I’ve heard. But few these days dare to attempt the Great Trial—even such few as are left who remember what it was.”
He got to his feet, dusting the seat of his breeches, his scrawny body silhouetted against the dim light from the room where Ram and Orris were arguing over the time it took to sail from Mandrigyn to Pergemis in the summer trading.
“And what was it?” Starhawk asked curiously, looking up at Anyog as he flicked straight the draggled lace at his cuffs.
“Ah. Who knows? Even to admit knowledge of its existence puts a man under suspicion from Altiokis’ spies, whether he knows anything about wizardry itself or not.”
He strolled off down the hall, wiry and awkward as some strange daddy longlegs, whistling an air from some complex counterpoint sonata in the dark.
Chapter 9
“I DON’T LIKE IT.” Starhawk frowned as she studied the town below her.
Beside her, Ram folded his great arms against him for warmth. In his wadded layers of purple quilting, he looked immense, his blunt, homely face reddened by the cold. “It all seems quiet,” he objected doubtfully.
Starhawk’s gray gaze slid sideways at him. “Very quiet,” she agreed. “But not one of those chimneys is smoking.” She pointed, and a stray flake of mealy snow, shaken from the pine boughs overhead, settled into the fleece of her cuff. “This snow fell two nights ago, and nothing’s tracked it since—not in the street, nor from any of those houses to the sheds behind.”
Ram frowned, squinting. “You’re right, lass. Your eyes are keener than mine, but ’twas stupid of me not to look. There are tracks round about the walls, aren’t there?”
“Oh, yes,” Starhawk said softly. “There are tracks.” She turned back, scrambling down from the promontory that overlooked the little valley in which lay the village of Foonspay. Her feet slid in the slick powder of the snow; even though she stepped in her own tracks, the going was rough. Ram lost his balance twice, falling amid great clouds of billowing powder; nevertheless, he offered her his arm for support with dogged gallantry at every swell of the ground.
Snow had fallen the night they had spent at the Peacock Inn, then rain and more snow. The road, such as it was, had become crusted and treacherous, and they had lost most of a day floundering through it, exhausted by the mere effort of taking a step. Around them, the woods had lain in silence, a silence that prickled along Starhawk’s nerves. She had found herself listening, seeking some sound—any sound. But no squirrel had dislodged snow from the green-black branches of the somber pines overhead; no rabbit had squeaked in the teeth of a fox. For two nights, not even wolves had howled; in her scouting to both sides of the buried road, Starhawk had seen no track of any bird or beast.
There was something abroad in the woods, something before which even the wolves ran silent.
The others felt it, too. Up ahead, she could see the six mules and the donkey as dark blobs on the marble whiteness of the snow, the vivid blue of Orris’ quilted jacket, Anyog’s rusty black, and Fawn’s green and brown plaid—a tight little cluster of colors, huddled together in fear. They all jumped when she and Ram emerged through the trees.
“The town’s deserted,” she said as she came near.
“The buildings are standing, but the Mother only knows what’s prowling around them. Let’s get into the open. Then I’ll take Ram and go ahead to scout the place.”
The brothers nodded their agreement, but she saw the doubt in their faces—Orris because, deep down in his heart, he believed that he should be giving the orders, in spite of the fact that he knew Starhawk to be his superior in matters of defense, Ram because he knew it, too, and considered it an unseemly thing for a woman to be.
She supposed, as she led the way cautiously down the gentle slope of the road, that most women would have been pleased and flattered by the big man’s protectiveness. She merely found it irritating, as if he assumed her to be unable to protect herself—and all the worse because it was both unconscious and well meaning. Sun Wolf, she reflected, glancing over her shoulder at the unnaturally silent woods, would help her out of trouble, but assumed that she could hold up her end of the fight just fine.
She scanned the sky, which was darker than the time of day could account for, then looked over her shoulder again—a habit she’d picked up these days. Ahead of them, the stone walls and snow-laden roofs of the town grew larger, and she ran her eye over them, searching for some sign, some mark. Her back hackled with nervousness. The shutters of several buildings had been broken and scratched, the marks yellow against the gray of weathering. She stumbled, her feet sliding and breaking through the crusts of the snow, and she gripped the headstall of the mule she led for balance. Behind her, the others were doing the same. The world was silent but for the hiss of Orris’ cursing and the crunching of hooves and boots in the snow. The dark buildings seemed to stare at them with shadowy eyes through the mauve-tinted twilight.
Orris’ voice sounded hideously loud. “You want to scout that great house there in the center of town? The door’s shut and the shutters are intact. There’ll be room for us there and for the beasts as well.”
“Looks good,” Starhawk agreed. “Ram—”
The mule beside her jerked its head free of her hold and reared up with a piercing squeal. Starhawk swung around, scanning the silent crescent of trees at their backs.
It came lumbering from the woods with that queerly staggering gait, the eyeless head lolling on the weaving neck. Starhawk yelled, “Nuuwa!” even as Orris cried out, pointing—pointing as three more shambling forms dragged themselves from the crusted brush of the surrounding woods. Starhawk swore, though she had known f
rom what Anyog had said at the Peacock that there might be several of them, and flung Anyog the lead rein of the mule. “Make for the big house!” she called to the others. “And for God’s sake...”
Then she saw something else, a floundering in the brush all around the edges of the woods, and she heard Anyog whisper, “Holy Three!”
Fawn screamed.
Starhawk had never seen that many nuuwa together. There were twenty at least, floundering through the snow at a jagged lope, their misshapen arms swinging for balance. She plunged after the rest of the party, moving as fast as she dared, her boots breaking through the buried crusts of the snow, panic heating her veins like cheap brandy. Her memories threw up at her the child she had been, fleeing screaming toward the Convent walls with the groaning, mouthing thing slobbering at her heels—merging with the creatures that pursued her now. There was a hideous slowness to the flight, like running in a dream. The nuuwa fell and rose and fell again, lunging toward them with a terrible inexorability. As in a dream, she could see every detail of them with preternatural vividness—the deformed, discolored teeth in the gaping mouths, the rotted eye sockets seared over with dirty scar tissue, the running sores that blotched the flabby flesh.
Ahead of her, Fawn fell for the tenth time; Ram dragged her to her feet and fell himself. Starhawk, stopping to let them remain ahead of her, cursed them for a pair of paddle-footed oafs and calculated that, if they slowed the flight much more, none of them would make it to safety.
The walls bulked up like cliffs; she could see the scattered bones of humans and animals half covered with snow in the streets. She guessed that the nearest nuuwa, the ones lumbering directly behind her, were some hundred feet to the rear, their groaning yammer and the slurpy bubble of their breath seeming to fill her ears. She thought of turning and fighting. Once she stopped, she’d draw them, and the others would go on...
Rot that, she thought indignantly. I’m not a piece of meat to be thrown to wolves...
Great Mother, but I know what is!
She yelled, “Anyog, stop! Stop!”
Not only the old man but the whole train checked, the mules plunging and screaming on their leads. Fawn slipped again and fell to her knees in the deep snow. Starhawk yelled, “The rest of you go on! Anyog, bring back one of those mules! Now!”
“What is it you’re after doing...” Orris began.
Arguing, Great Mother! Starhawk thought with what horrified indignation was left her. “Rot your eyes, get running!” she screamed at them.
“But...”
“MOVE!”
Anyog was already beside her, hauling one of the screaming, pitching animals by its lead. For a moment, it was touch and go whether Orris would get them all killed by continuing the discussion, but the closing ring of nuuwa around him seemed to decide him. He threw his whole weight against the headstalls of the mules he led. Ram dragged Fawn to her feet, fighting their way along like a pair of wallowing drunks.
Gasping, his face under its little spade beard as white as his bedraggled ruff, Anyog managed to get the mule within Starhawk’s range. The nearest nuuwa were thirty feet away, howling as they slithered in the snow, drool foaming from their lips. The Hawk stabbed her sword point-down in the snow, whipped the dagger from her belt, and grabbed the mule’s headstall. Anyog realized what she was doing and added his own weight to bring the thrashing head down. The mule reared, and the steel bit deep into the great vein of the neck.
She’d shoved the gory dagger back into its sheath and pulled her sword free before the beast even fell. It rolled to the ground, heaving in its death agony, crimson spouting everywhere, searingly bright against the snow. She and Anyog plunged back in the direction of the town, Anyog going like a gazelle for two steps before he outraced his own balance and went down in a sprawling heap of bones.
Starhawk saw him fall from the corner of her eye; at the same time she saw the first nuuwa fall slavering on the screaming mule. The stink of the fresh blood drew the creatures; they were already tearing hunks of the live and steaming flesh from the mule where it lay. Anyog scrambled to his feet, neither calling out to her nor asking her to stop, and floundered after her. They were past the time when one could wait for the other. That would only mean that they would die together.
She heard the nuuwa mewing and wheezing behind her and the scrunch of those staggering feet in the snow. She caught them in her peripheral vision—one near enough to overtake her before she reached the black cliff of the building, two others farther back. She braced her feet and whirled, her sword a flashing arc in the wan twilight.
The nuuwa fell back from the slicing blade, blood and guts dripping down from the slit in its abdomen. Then it flung itself on her again, mouthing and grabbing and tripping over its own entrails, as another came lumbering up from the side. Others were close, she thought as she dispatched the first one. An instant’s delay would have them all on her. Two fell upon her simultaneously. As she severed the head of the one in front, the weight of the second struck her back, the stink of it overwhelming her as the huge teeth ripped at the learner of her coat. She twisted, hacking, fighting the frenzy of panic at the slobbering thing that rode her. Distantly, she could hear Anyog’s despairing screams. The clawing weight on her back bore her down, unreachable by her sword blade. The hissing, foaming mouth grated on the back of her skull. With a final writhe, she slithered free of her coat, springing clear and running frantically between the houses.
The gray bulk of the largest house in town loomed before her, broken by a black mouth of door with a mill of terrified mules around it. Scrunching footfalls seemed to fill her ears, staggering behind her with whistling gasps of breath. The steps of the house tripped her feet. Orris’ voice bawled curses at the mules, and from the corner of her eye, she glimpsed her nearest pursuer—not a nuuwa at all, but Anyog, with one of the foul things clutching at him, clinging and dragging.
It felled him on the steps, almost at Starhawk’s feet, the greedy, filthy mouth tearing gouts of flesh from his side. Starhawk sprang down toward them, her sword blazing in the gray murk of dusk, cleaving down like an axe on those writhing bodies. The rest of the nuuwa were six or eight paces behind; she dragged the old man up and flung him to the blurred purple bulk that she knew was Ram. Snapping jaws peeled three inches of leather from her boot-heel as she made it through the door. The slamming of it was like thunder in the empty building.
The nuuwa screamed outside.
They laid Anyog down beside the fire that Fawn managed to kindle in the great hearth of the downstairs hall. As Starhawk had suspected, the place had been the principal inn of Foonspay, and there were signs that much of the population of the village had lived here for several days, crowded together, for protection. While she worked over Anyog with what makeshift dressings she could gather, with needles and thread, boiling water, and cheap, strong wine, she wondered how many of them had been killed before they’d managed to get away, and if they’d made it to safety elsewhere, or had been killed on the road.
Ram and Orris took brands from the raised brick hearth to light their way as they explored the pitch-darkness of the inn corridors while Fawn went to find a place for the mules. Dimly, the hooting grunts of the nuuwa could be heard beyond the thick walls and heavy shutters. Within, all was deathly silent.
It had been said once that wizards were Healers—that their power could cleanse the hidden seeds of gangrene, close the bleeding for the flesh to heal. As she worked, bloodied to the elbows, Starhawk knew that it would take such power to save the old man’s life. Against the darkness of his beard, Anyog’s face was as colorless as wax, pinched and sunken. Long experience had given her intimate knowledge of the death marks, and she saw them here.
How long she worked she did not know, nor how long, afterward, she sat at the old man’s side, watching the colors of the fire play over the colorless flesh of his face. She had no idea where the others were, nor, she thought to herself, did it particularly matter. They had their own conce
rns, merely in staying alive; it wasn’t for her to trouble them with stale news. They must all have known, when they carried the old man in, that he would die.
In time, the thin, cold fingers under hers twitched, and Anyog’s creaky voice whispered, “My warrior dove?”
“I’m here,” the Hawk said, her voice carefully neutral in the still, firelighted dimness of the room. To hearten him, she said, “We’ll turn you over to your sister yet.”
There was a thin whisper of laughter, instantly followed by an even thinner gasp of pain. Then he murmured, “And you, my dove?”
She shrugged. “We’re going on.”
“Going on.” The words were no more than the hissing of his breath. “To Grimscarp?”
For a long moment she was silent, sitting with her back to the chipped brickwork of the raised hearth, looking down at the shrunken form that lay among the huddle of stained blankets before her. Then she nodded and said simply, “Yes.”
“Ah,” he whispered. “What other destination would you hide with such care from our ox team? But they are right,” he murmured. “They are right. Do not go there, child. Altiokis destroys that which is bright and pure. He will destroy you and the beautiful Fawnie, for no other reason than that you are what you are.”
“Nevertheless, we must go,” she said softly.
Anyog shook his head, his dark eyes opening, fever-bright in the firelight. “Don’t you understand?” he whispered. “Only another wizard can enter his Citadel, unless to come in as his captive or his slave. Only a wizard can hope to work against him. Without magic of your own, you are helpless before him; he will trap you with illusion and trick you to your own destruction. His power is old; it is deep; it is not the magic of humankind. An evil magic,” he murmured, the lids sliding shut once again over the glassy eyes, the flesh around them stained dark and mottled with the sinking of his flesh. “Not to be defied.”
Something rustled in the darkness. Starhawk looked up sharply, the cool tension of battle leaping to her heart, but she saw nothing in the impenetrable shadows that loomed in every corner of the vast room. As lightly as a mother who wished not to disturb the sleep of her child, she slipped her hands from beneath Anyog’s and stood up, her sword springing almost of itself to her grip, the reflex of long years of war. Yet when she reached the stone archway that led into the hall, she found nothing and heard no sound in the passage beyond.
The Ladies of Mandrigyn Page 15