The guards wavered, uncertain whether they had heard aright. The Dark Eagle grabbed Sun Wolf by the arm and pulled him backward, slamming the door to with a kick; Sun Wolf staggered, as if he had been released from a chain that held him upright, and found there was no strength left in him. He clutched the door bolts for support.
Altiokis was screaming, “Get him out of here! Get him away from here! He sees it! He’s a wizard! Get him away!”
“Him?” the Eagle said, rather unwisely. “He’s no wizard, my lord...”
Altiokis strode forward, swinging his staff to knock Sun Wolf’s hands from the door bolts, as if he feared the Wolf would throw the door open and fling himself inside. Ignoring his captain of mercenaries, Altiokis clutched with his fat, jeweled hands at the grubby rags of what remained of Sun Wolf’s tunic, his face white with hatred and fear.
“Did you see it?” he demanded in a stinking blast of liquor and rich food.
Exhausted, leaning against the stone wall at his back for support, Sun Wolf whispered, “Yes, I did. I see it now, in your eyes.”
“It might choose to call another wizard,” the fat man gasped hoarsely, as if he had not heard. “It could give him its power, if he were lucky, as I was lucky...”
“I wouldn’t touch that power!” the Wolf cried, the thought more sickening to him than the horror of that flake of fire boring steadily through his eye.
Again the Wizard King appeared not to have heard him. “It could even give him immortality.” The black, lifeless eyes stared at Sun Wolf, desperate with jealousy and terror. Then Altiokis whirled back to his guards, screaming, “Get him out of here! Throw him to the nuuwa! Get him out!”
Like the tug of a fine wire embedded in his flesh, Sun Wolf felt the touch of that black Entity in the Hole, whispering to his brain.
Furiously, he thrust it aside, more frightened of it than of anything he had yet seen, in the Citadel of Altiokis or out of it. He fought like a tiger as they half dragged, half carried him along the maze of corridors to where a shallow flight of steps led downward to a broad double door. Altiokis strode at their heels, screaming incoherently, reviling the Eagle for bringing this upon him, and cursing his own means of divination that had not shown him this new threat. One of the guards ran ahead to peer through the judas in the door, and the faint yellow bar of light from the westering sun picked out the scars on his face as he looked. He called, “There are few of them out there now, me lord. They’re mostly gone in their dens.”
“Open their dens, then!” the Wizard King shrieked in a paroxysm of rage. “And do it quickly, before I throw you out to keep him company!”
The man darted off, his footfalls ringing on the stone of the passageway. Sun Wolf twisted against the hands that gripped him, but far too many men were holding him to give him purchase to fight. The doors at the bottom of the steps were flung open, and sunlight struck him as the Dark Eagle shouted a command. He was flung bodily down the steps, the harsh granite of them tearing at and bruising his flesh as he rolled.
The filthy reek of the nuuwa was all around him. As he heard the doors clang shut above him, the shrill howls began to echo from all sides. He saw that he was in the long ditch between the inner and outer walls. From various points in the shade of the looming wall, a dozen nuuwa and two or three of the apelike ugie-beasts were lolloping toward him, heads lolling, dripping mouths gaping to slash.
Sun Wolf knew already that there was no further hope of escape. The walls of the ditch were too steep to climb. It was only a matter of time before he would be overpowered, torn apart, and eaten alive. He flung himself back up the few steps to where the embrasure of the door made a kind of hollow in the bald face of the wall, taking advantage of the only cover in sight. He put his back to the massive, brass-bound wood, gathered the five feet of chain that joined his manacled hands, and swung at the first of the things that hurled itself upon him. Brains and blood splattered from the burst skull. He swung again, slashing, the heavy chain whining through the screaming, stinking air. Anything to buy time—minutes, seconds even.
The chain, close to thirty pounds of swinging iron, connected again, flinging the creature that it hit back against two of its fellows. He brained one of them while they were fighting each other; the remaining monstrosities turned on him, spitting mouthfuls of rotted flesh, and he slashed, swinging desperately, keeping them off him as long as he could, praying to his ancestors to do something, anything...
You can control them, that black slip of fire whispered in his brain. Turn them aside. Make them do your bidding.
Chain connected with flesh. His wrists were scraped raw from the iron, and the smell of the blood was driving the nuuwa to madness. He could feel himself tiring, instant by instant, and knew to within a moment how long his strength would last. All the while, the thought of the Entity he had seen, that black intelligence glimpsed in the Hole and in the Wizard King’s possessed eyes, whispered to him the promise of the life that it could give him.
The world had narrowed, containing nothing but blood-mouthed, eyeless faces, ripping hands, pain and sweat and the foul reek of the air, screaming cries and that terrible, nagging whisper of uncertainty in his brain. He was aware of other sounds somewhere, distant noises in the Outer Citadel, a far-off howling like the din of a faraway battle.
An explosion jarred the ground. Then another, heavier, louder, nearer, and he thought he heard, through the shrieking of the mindless things all around him, the triumphal yells of men and the higher, wilder keening of women.
He was aware that no new attackers were running toward him. He swung grimly at those that remained, half conscious of things happening elsewhere in the long ditch—of fighting somewhere—on the causeway?—of fire...
Teeth slashed at his leg and he stomped, breaking the neck of the ugie that had crawled up below the arc of the swinging chain. Whatever else was happening was only a distraction, a break in his concentration that could cost him his life.
Another explosion sounded, this time very near, and it took all his will not to look. The chain crushed a final skull, the last nuuwa fell, wriggling and snapping at its own flesh, and he stood gasping in the doorway, looking up to see the causeway drawbridge fall in flames.
The top of the outer wall was a friezework of struggling men. A rear guard of black-armored soldiers was being cut to pieces on the causeway itself. What looked like an army of black and filthy gnomes was pouring through the causeway gate and down makeshift ladders into the ditch, brandishing picks, adzes, and weapons stolen, from the armories in the mines. The blood of their wounds gleamed bright through the rock dust, and their screams of triumph and anger shook the air.
Then he heard a voice pitched as only a warrior’s could be to carry over the roar of battle—the one voice that, of all others, he would have given anything he had ever possessed to hear again.
“DUCK, YOU OAF!”
He ducked as an axe splintered into the wood of the door where his head had been. He saw the advancing forces of the Dark Eagle’s mercenaries pouring down from the other side of the causeway to meet the miners in battle in the ditch. With a great scraping of bolts, the doors behind him were thrown open, and reinforcements poured through in a mixed tide of mercenaries, regulars, and nuuwa. The battle was joined on the corpse-strewn steps around him.
Somehow, Starhawk was there, where he knew she always should be, fighting like a demon at his side.
“I thought I told you to go back!” he yelled at her over the general chaos. His chain smashed the helmet and skull of a mercenary before him.
“Rot that!” she yelled back. “I’ve quit the troops and I’ll look for you as long as I bloody well please! Here...” She stooped to wrench a sword free from the dead fingers that still grasped it and thrust the bloody hilt at him. “This will get you farther than that silly chain.”
“Cheap, rotten, general-armory issue,” he grumbled, testing the edge on the neck of an advancing nuuwa. “If you were going to get me a sword,
you might at least have made it a decent one.”
“Gripe, gripe, gripe, all you ever do is gripe,” she retorted, and he laughed, teeth gleaming white through the filthy stubble of his beard, joyful only to be with her again.
They were silent then, except for the wordless yelling of battle, merging with the dirty mob of the advancing forces. But he was conscious of her at his side, battle-cold and bright, filled with concentrated fire, and he wondered how he had ever thought her plain.
The men now around him were gaunt as wolves but rock-muscled from hard labor, their dusty hides striped with the scars of beatings. He knew they were the husbands, the lovers, or the brothers of those crazy and intrepid wildcats he’d spent the winter training. There were more of them than he’d thought; the long ditch was rapidly filling with men. The gate at the top of the steps was disgorging more and more of Altiokis’ troops. The mêlée was deafening. A momentary sortie drove the miners down the blood-slick steps, and he heard a woman’s voice—Sheera’s voice—raised in a piercing rallying cry.
Someone came running up behind him, and he swung around, sword ready, heavy chain rattling. A dusty little man yelled, “Are you Sun Wolf?”
“Yes.” Under the grime, he saw that the man’s hair was flame-gold, the mark of the royal House of Her, and he asked, “Are you Tarrin?”
“Yes.”
“Does one of your people have the key to this mother-loving chain?”
“No, but we’ve got an axe to cut the links free. We’ll get rid of the bracelets later.”
“Fine,” the Wolf said. Eo loomed up out of the confusion of the fight, half a head taller than Tarrin and brandishing an enormous axe. Tarrin positioned the chain over a corner of the stone steps; they all winced as the axe blade slammed down.
“You girls make it in all right?” the Wolf asked, after Eo had whacked the chain free of the bracelet on his other wrist.
Her reply was drowned in the renewed din of the fighting, the sounds of the struggle rising like a voiceless howling, elemental as a storm. More men were pouring from the doors, impossible numbers of them—the Wolf had not thought there were that many in the fortress. He caught up his sword and plowed back into the fray on the steps at Tarrin’s heels. Eo followed with her axe. Battle separated them. Sun Wolf pressed upward, fighting his way to the shadow of the gate, where the line of defenders was weakening. Freed of the chain’s weight, he felt he could fight forever.
He slashed and cut, until the sword embedded in flesh and bone. He looked down to pull it loose and froze in nauseated horror at what he saw. The flesh of his arms was white with leprosy.
He didn’t see the enemy sword that slashed at his neck until Starhawk’s blade deflected it, so frozen was he by sickened despair. She yelled at him, “It’s an illusion! Wolf! Stop it! It isn’t real!”
He looked up at her, his face gray with shock. She, too, had momentarily stopped fighting, though the battle raged on all sides of them.
“It’s an illusion, rot your eyes! Do you think leprosy takes hold that fast? That’s how he won at Iron Pass. We’ve already been through six things like this coming out of the mines!”
Her own face was blotched with it, like lichen on stone. But as he blinked at her, his mind coming back into focus, he saw that what she said was true. As with the seeing of demons, he became aware that by changing his perceptions slightly, he could see the whole flesh under the superimposed illusion of rot. Blood and anger slammed, raging, back into his veins. The men and women struggling all around him didn’t have his power to see through, or Yirth’s power to combat, illusions—but they had seen the Wizard King’s illusions before. And now they were too angry to care.
Cursing like a bullwhacker, the Wolf threw himself back into the fray. He could see through the gate to the corridors beyond, clogged with Altiokis’ troops; and, as if the realization that the leprosy was an illusion had somehow cleared a block from his eyes, he saw that three-quarters of these new warriors were illusion as well. By the way they cut at them, the others could not tell the difference, and he knew himself to be fighting as a wizard would fight, and seeing as a wizard would see. Starhawk, at his side, slashed at one of the insubstantial figures as a real warrior cut at her with a halberd. Sun Wolf hacked the man’s head off before the blow landed and wondered how many others would fall to just such a fraud. Behind him, he heard a man cry out in terror.
He whirled, looking into the darkness of the Citadel gate. There was something there, visible behind the backs of the retreating sortie, a shapeless shape of luminous horror, a coldness that ate at the bones. Altiokis’ men were retreating through the doors. Tarrin and his miners were unwilling to follow, frozen by the coming of that horrible fog and what was within it. They fell back toward the sunlight of the ditch, and the doors began to swing shut, as if of themselves.
Sun Wolf, left momentarily alone with Starhawk by the ebbing forces, scanned the darkness, searching it with his mind rather than with his eyes...and finding nothing but the shape of Altiokis, far back among those glowing wraiths, his hands weaving the illusion from the air.
He bellowed, “It’s an illusion, dammit! Don’t let them close the gate!” He plunged forward, hearing Starhawk’s footfalls at his heels. He heard her voice somewhere in back of him, calling out to the others, and heard them follow. Then he heard the gate slam behind him.
The luminous fog vanished. His arms, as he glimpsed them, swinging his sword at the men who crowded toward him, were clean again. There were few of Altiokis’ men still around the gate, the rest having gone to the fighting on the walls, and those few he dispatched or drove away. Then he plunged after the retreating shape of the Wizard King.
The darkness beneath the Citadel seemed thicker than it had before, defeating even his abilities to pierce it. He tore a torch from its holder, and the smoke of it streamed like a banner in his wake. Altiokis’ fruity laugh taunted him from the black hole of a corridor arch; Sun Wolf sensed a trap and advanced cautiously, the curious perception that detected reality from illusion showing him the ghostly outlines of the spiked pit in the floor beneath the illusion of damp flagstones. He edged past it on the narrow walkway that the Wizard King had used; but by then his quarry was out of sight.
He seemed to be caught in a maze of twisting rooms and corridors, of doors that opened to nowhere, and of traps in the walls and floor. Once nuuwa attacked him in a room that had seemed empty—purposefully, controlled by another mind, as the nuuwa had fought in the battle. He cut at them with sword and fire, wedging himself into a niche in the wall. As he split skulls and burned the dirty hair and rotted flesh, he felt again that eerie little whisper at the back of his consciousness.
You can control them yourself. You only have to give a little part of your mind to that cold, black fire, and you can control them...and other things as well.
Turn away, and what can you offer this woman you want except a battered and poverty-stricken wanderer? Do you really think Ari will give up the troop to you?
He remembered the sightless blaze burning in the rotted remains of Altiokis’ failing brains and fought grimly, humanly, bloodily, exhaustedly. He killed two of the nuuwa, and the rest of them drew back, retreating into the stone mazes away from his torchlight, dodging through the stone walls like bats.
Altiokis, he reflected, must be running out of nuuwa if he’s started conserving them.
Grimly, he pursued.
There was a trap of some kind in one guardroom. His hypersensitive sense of direction let him pick out a way around it, seeking the source of the fat man’s wheezing breath. He saw Altiokis then, fleeing up a dark corridor. The torchlight bounced crazily over the rough stone of the walls as the Wolf ran. It glittered on the blood that smeared his arms and on the far-off glint of the jewels on the Wizard King’s doublet. He heard the gasping of Altiokis and the stumbling, clumsy footsteps. Ahead, he saw a narrow door, bound and bolted with steel. A darkness, a last illusion, confused his sight, but he heard the door o
pen and shut.
He flung himself at it, tore it open, and plunged through, holding the torch aloft to see. As he passed through the door, he realized that the wall in which it was set was the same as the wall of that tiny, windowed chamber—the rough stone wall of the original hut that Altiokis had built in a night.
And he knew that Altiokis had never come through that door.
It crashed shut behind him, and he heard the bolts slam home. He turned, gasping, his lungs stifling with terror. Black and empty, the Hole of darkness lay before him, absorbing and drowning the light of the flames. On the far side of the Hole, he could make out the window to the observation room and the narrow door beside it—the door, as he recalled, that Altiokis had not bolted when he’d ordered Sun Wolf out of the room.
But the width of the room lay between it and the Wolf, and the ugly, evil, screaming depths of that silent blackness lay between. The sword dropped from his nerveless fingers at the thought of having to walk past it; he could see the light of the torch wavering over the shadowy walls with the shaking of his hand. He stood paralyzed, conscious of the Entity that he would have to pass and of the mindless intelligence of fire and cold trapped these hundreds of years between this universe and whatever arcane depths of unreason it called its home.
Something bright flickered in the corner of his vision, like a spark floating on the air. Too late, he remembered the other danger, the horror that even the Entity that wanted his mind could not prevent. As he wrenched his face away, fire exploded in his left eye, a numbing, searing blast followed by the horrible wash of pain. From his eye, it seemed to be spreading throughout every muscle of his body. He could hear himself screaming, and his knees were buckling with agony. With a curiously clear sliver of the remains of rational thought, he knew exactly how many seconds of consciousness he had left, and the single thing that he must do.
Chapter 21
THE DOOR OF THE windowed observation room was pushed carefully open. Altiokis, Wizard King of the greatest empire since the last rulers of Gwenth had retired in a huff to their respective monasteries, peeked cautiously around the doorjamb.
The Ladies of Mandrigyn Page 34