Horror crawled like a tarantula along his flesh. Sheera’s face was like a stone; Amber Eyes turned away, cheeks blazing with shame, unable to meet his gaze.
“You’re lying,” he whispered, knowing that she was not.
“You think so? Yirth has been a midwife, a Healer, and an abortionist long enough to know everything there is to know about poisons—it isn’t likely she’d have made a mistake. If you hesitate to join us out of fear of Altiokis, I can tell you now that nothing the Wizard King might do to you if our plan fails would be as bad as that death. You have nothing further to lose by obeying us now.”
Weak as he was, he had begun to shake; he wondered how long it took for the symptoms of anzid to be felt. How long had it been since he had been given the poison? It flashed through his mind to take Sheera by that round, golden throat of hers and strangle the life out of her. But weakness held him prisoner; in any case, it would not save his life. And besides that, there was not even sense in cursing her.
When he had been silent for a time, the woman Yirth spoke again, her cold, green eyes looking out from the concealing shadows, clinical and detached. “I am not the wizard that my master was, before Altiokis had her murdered,” she said. “But it still lies within my powers to arrest the effects of a poison from day to day by means of spells. When we reach Mandrigyn, I shall place a bounding-spell upon you, that the poison shall not lay hold of you so long as you pass a part of each night within the walls of the city. The true antidote,” she continued, with a hint of malice in that low, pure voice, “shall be given to you with your gold when you depart, after the city is freed.”
The shaking had become uncontrollable. Fighting to keep panic from his voice, he whispered, “You are a wizard yourself, then. The woman who controls the winds.”
“Of course,” Sheera said scornfully. “Do you think we’d have dared consider an assault on Altiokis’ Citadel without a wizard?”
“I don’t think there’s anything you’re crazy enough not to dare!”
It was on his lips to curse her and die—but not that death. He lay back against the thin pillows, his eyes closing, and the trembling that had seized him passed off. He felt as bleached and twisted as a half-dried rag; even the fear seemed to trickle out of him. In the silence, he could hear the separate draw and whisper of each woman’s breath and the faint splash and murmur of water against the hull.
The silence seemed to settle around his heart and brain, white, empty, and somehow strangely calming. He knew he would die, then, hideously, one way or the other. Having accepted that, his mind began to grope fumblingly for ways of playing for time, of getting himself out of this, of fighting his way back to life. Not, he told himself with weary savagery, that I really think there’s a chance of it. Old habits die hard.
And by the spirits of my ancestors freezing down in the cold waters of Hell, I’m going to die a great deal harder.
He drew a tired breath and let it drain from his lips. Something stirred within him, goaded back to feeble and unwilling life, and he opened his eyes and studied the women before him, stripping them with his eyes, judging them as he would have judged them had they turned up, en masse, at the school of Wrynde, wondering if there was muscle as well as curving flesh under Sheera’s night-blue gown and which of them was a good enough shot to hit a man with a birding arrow at fifty yards.
“Damn your eyes.” He sighed and looked at Sheera again. “So who am I supposed to be?”
She blinked at him, startled by the sudden capitulation. “What?”
“Who am I supposed to be?” he repeated. Tiredness slurred his voice; he tried to garner his waning energy and felt it slip like fine sand through his fingers. His voice had grown weaker. As if some spell of distance had been broken, the women gathered around him, Amber Eyes and the porcelain doll going so far as to sit on the edge of his bunk. Sheera would not let herself so unbend; she stood over him, her arms still folded, her curving brows drawn heavily down over the straight, strong nose.
“If Altiokis has dragged all the men away in chains,” he continued quietly, “you can’t just have a strange man turn up in your household. Am I your long-lost brother? A gigolo you picked up in Kedwyr? A bodyguard?”
The porcelain doll shook her head. “We’ll have to pass you off as a slave,” she said, her voice low and husky, like a young boy’s. “They’re the only men whose coming into the city at this time of the year can well be accounted for. There won’t be any merchants or travelers in winter.”
She met the angry glitter in his eyes with cool reasonableness. “You know it’s true.”
“And in spite of the fact that you find it demeaning to be a woman’s slave,” Sheera added maliciously, “you haven’t really got any say in the matter, now, have you, Captain?” She glanced at the others. “Gilden Shorad is right,” she said. “A slave can pass pretty much unquestioned. I can get the ship’s smith to put a collar on you before we reach port.”
“What about Derroug Dru?” Amber Eyes asked doubtfully. “Altiokis’ new governor of the town,” she explained to Sun Wolf. “He’s been known to confiscate slaves.”
“What would he want with another slave?” Denga Rey the gladiator demanded, hooking her square, brown hands into the buckle of her sword belt.
Gilden Shorad frowned. “What would Sheera want with one, for that matter?” she asked, half to herself. Close to, Sun Wolf observed that she was older than he had at first thought—Starhawk’s age, twenty-seven or so. Older than any of the others except the witch Yirth, who, unlike them, had remained in the shadows by the door, watching them with those cool, jade eyes.
“He can’t simply turn up as a slave without any explanation for why you bought him,” the tiny woman clarified, tucking aside a strand of her ivory hair with deft little fingers.
“Would you need a groom?” Amber Eyes asked.
“My own groom would be suspicious if we got another one suddenly,” Sheera vetoed.
She looked so perplexed that Sun Wolf couldn’t resist turning the knife. “Not as easy as just hiring your killing done, is it? You married?”
A flush stained her strong cheekbones. “My husband is dead.”
He gave her a stripping glance and grunted. “Just as well. Kids?”
The flush deepened with her anger. “My daughter is six, my son, four.”
“Too young to need an arms master, then.”
Denga Rey added maliciously, “You don’t want anyone in that town to see you with a sword in your hand anyway, soldier. Old Derroug Dru suspects anybody who can so much as cut his meat at table without slitting his fingers. Besides, he’s got it in for big, buff fellows like you.”
“Wonderful,” the Wolf said without enthusiasm. “Leaving aside where this strike force of yours is going to practice, and where you’re going to get money for weapons...”
“We have money!” Sheera retorted, harried.
“I’ll be damned surprised if you’ll be able to find weapons for sale in a town that Altiokis has just added to his domains. How big is your town place? What did your late lamented do for a living?”
By the bullion stitching on her gloves, the poor bastard couldn’t have been worth less than five thousand a year, he decided.
“He was a merchant,” she said, her breast heaving with the quickening of her anger. “Exports—this is one of his ships. And what business is it of yours—”
“It is my business, if I’m going to be risking what little is left of my life to teach you females to fight,” he snapped. “I want to make damned sure you don’t get gathered in and sent to the mines yourselves before I’m able to take my money and your poxy antidote and get the hell out of that scummy marsh you call a town. Is your place big enough to have gardens? An orangery, maybe?”
“We have an orangery,” Sheera said sullenly. “It’s across the grounds from the main house. It’s been shut up for years—boarded up. It was the first thing I thought of when I decided that we had to bring you to Mandrigyn
. We could use it to practice in.”
He nodded. There were very few places where orange trees could be left outdoors year-round, yet groves of them were the fashion in all but the coldest of cities. Orangeries tended to be large, barnlike buildings—inefficient for the purpose of wintering fruit trees for the most part, but just passable as training floors.
“Gardeners?” he asked.
“There were two of them, freedmen,” she said and added, a little defiantly, “They marched with Tarrin’s army to Iron Pass. Even though they had not been born in Mandrigyn, they thought enough of their city’s freedom to—”
“Stupid thing to do,” he cut her off and saw her eyes flash with rage. “There a place to live in this orangery of yours?”
In a voice stifled with anger, she said, “There is.”
“Good.” Tiredness was coming over him again, final and irresistible, as if argument and thought and struggle against what he knew would be his fate had drained him of the little strength he had. The wan sunlight, the faces of the women around him and their soft voices, seemed to be drifting farther and farther away, and he fought to hold them in focus. “You—what’s your name? Denga Rey—I’ll need you for my second-in-command. You fight during the winter?”
“In Mandrigyn?” she scoffed. “If it isn’t pouring sideways rain and hail, the ground’s not fit for anything but boat races. The last fights were three weeks ago.”
“I hope you were trounced to within an inch of your life,” he said dispassionately.
“Not a chance, soldier.” She put her hands on her strong hips, a glint of mockery in those dark eyes. “What I wonder is, who’s going to look after all those little trees so it looks as if there’s really a gardener doing the job? If Sheera buys one special, somebody’s going to get suspicious.”
Sun Wolf looked up at her bleakly. “I am,” he said. “I’m a warrior by trade, but gardening is my hobby.” His eyes returned to Sheera. “And I damned well better draw pay for it, too.”
For the first time, she smiled, the warm, bright smile of the hellcat girl she hadn’t been in years. He could see then why men had fought for her hand—as they must have done, to make her so poxy arrogant. “I’ll add it in,” she said, “to your ten thousand gold pieces.”
Sun Wolf sighed and closed his eyes, wondering if it would be wise to tell her what she could do with her ten thousand gold pieces. But when he opened them again, he found that it was dark, the afternoon long over, and the women gone.
Chapter 5
THEY SAILED INTO Mandrigyn Harbor in the vanguard of the storms, as if the boat drew the rain in its wake.
Throughout the forenoon, Sun Wolf had stood in the waist of the ship, watching the clouds that had followed them like a black and seething wall through the gray mazes of the islands draw steadily closer, and wondering whether, if the ship went to pieces on the rocky headlands that guarded the harbor itself, he’d be able to swim clear before he was pulped by the breakers. For a time, he indulged in hopes that it would be so and that, other than himself, the ship would go down with all hands and Sheera and her wildcats would never be heard from again. This thought cheered him until he remembered that, if the sea didn’t kill him, the anzid would.
As they passed through the narrow channel between the turret-guarded horns of the harbor, he turned his eyes from the dark, solitary shape of Yirth, standing, as she had stood on and off for the past three days, on the stern castle of the ship; he looked across the choppy gray waters of the harbor to where Mandrigyn lay spread like a jeweled collar upon its thousand islands.
Mandrigyn was the queen city of the Megantic Sea, the crossroads of trade; even in the bitter slate colors of the winter day, it glittered like a spilled jewel box, turquoise, gold, and crystal. Sun Wolf looked upon Mandrigyn and shivered.
Above the town rose the dark masses of the Tchard Mountains, the huge shape of Grimscarp veiled in a livid rack of purplish clouds, as if the Wizard King sought to conceal his fortress from prying eyes. Closer to, he could identify the trashy gaggle of markets and bawdy theaters as East Shore—the suburb that Gilden Shorad had told him lay outside the city’s jurisdiction on the eastern bank of the Rack River. The colors of raw wood and cheap paint stood out like little chips of brightness against the rolling masses of empty, furze-brown hills that lay beyond; the Thanelands, where the ancient landholders still held their ancestral sway.
A gust of rain struck him, cold and stinging through the drab canvas of his shirt. As he hunched his shoulders against it like a wet animal, he felt the unfamiliar hardness of metal against his flesh, the traditional slave collar, a slip-chain like a steel noose that the ship’s aged handyman had affixed around his neck.
He glanced back over his shoulder, hatred in his eyes, but Yirth had vanished from the poop deck. Sailors, at least half of them women or young boys, were scrambling up and down the rigging, making the vessel ready to be guided into the quays.
There was little activity in the harbor, most shipping having ceased a week ago in anticipation of the storms. Of the sailors and stevedores whom Sun Wolf could see about the docks, most were older men, young boys, or women. The city, he thought, had been hard hit indeed. As the rain-laden gusts of wind drove the ship toward the wharves, he could hear a ragged cheer go up from the vast gaggle of unveiled and brightly clad women who loitered on the pillared promenade of the long seafront terrace that overlooked the harbor. Friends of Denga Rey’s, he guessed, noting the couple of nasty-looking female gladiators who swaggered in their midst.
Well, why not? Business is probably damned slow these days.
At some distance from that rowdy mob he picked out other welcoming committees. There was a tall girl and a taller woman whose ivory-blond hair, whipped by the wind from beneath their desperately clutched indigo veils, proclaimed them as kin of Gilden Shorad’s. With them was a lady as tiny, and as fashionably dressed, as Gilden—family, he thought, no error.
Farther back, among the pillars of the windswept promenade, a couple of liveried servants held an oiled-silk canopy over the head of a tiny woman in amethyst moire, veiled in trailing clouds of lilac silk and glittering with gold and diamonds. With that kind of ostentation, he thought, she has to be a friend of Sheera’s.
No one, evidently, had come to meet Yirth.
A voice at his elbow said quietly, “We made it into harbor just in time.”
He turned to see Sheera beside him, covered, as befitted a lady, from crown to soles, her hands encased in gold-stitched kid, her hair a mass of curls and jewels that supported the long screens of her plum-colored veils. She held a fur-lined cloak of waterproof silk tightly around her; Sun Wolf, wearing only the shabby, secondhand shirt and breeches of a slave, studied her for a moment, fingering the chain around his neck, then glanced back at the vicious sea visible beyond the headlands. Even in the shelter of the harbor, the waters churned and threw vast columns of bone-white spray where they struck the stone piers; no ship could make it through the channel now. “If you ask me, we cut that a little too close for comfort,” he growled.
Sheera’s lips tightened under the blowing gauze. “No one asked you,” she replied thinly. “You have Yirth to thank that we’re alive at all. She’s been existing on drugs and stamina for the last three days to hold off the storms until we could make port.”
“I have Yirth to thank,” Sun Wolf said grimly, “that I’m on this pox-rotted vessel to begin with.”
There was a momentary silence, Sheera gazing up into his eyes with a dangerous tautness to her face. By the look of it, she hadn’t gotten much more sleep in the last several days than Yirth had. Sun Wolf returned her gaze calmly, almost mockingly, daring her to fly into one of her rages.
When she spoke, her voice was almost a whisper. “Just remember,” she said, “that I could speak to Yirth and let you scream yourself to death.”
Equally softly, he replied, ‘Then you’d have to find someone else to train your ladies, wouldn’t you?”
; Sheera’s next words were forestalled by the arrival of Gilden, veiled diaphanously and preceding a whole line of porters bearing enough luggage for a year in the wilds. She said quietly to Sheera, “Yirth’s in her cabin. She’ll wait until the crowds have thinned off a bit, then slip away unnoticed. The ship’s coming in this way ahead of the storm will have attracted enough notice as it is; we don’t want any of Derroug’s spies reporting to Altiokis that Yirth was on board.”
Sheera nodded. “All right,” she agreed, and Gilden moved off, slipping back effortlessly into the role of an indefatigably frivolous, middle-class globe-trotter amid ‘the welter of her luggage.
They had come in among the quays now, the crew making the ship fast to the long stone wharf. The wet air crackled with orders, curses, and shouts. Farther up the rail, Denga Rey and Amber Eyes were leaning over to wave and call to their cronies on the dock. The fitful, blowing gusts of rain beaded the gladiator’s shaven scalp and the courtesan’s soft, apricot-colored mane of unveiled hair; both Gilden and Sheera, as was proper for women of their station and class, ignored them totally.
The gangplank was let down. A couple of sailors, a woman and a boy, brought up Sheera’s trunk. After a single burning, haughty stare from Sheera, Sun Wolf lifted it to his shoulder and carried it down the cleated ramp at her heels.
The wharves of Mandrigyn, as the Wolf had seen from the deck of the ship, were connected at their landward end by a columned promenade, undoubtedly a strolling place in the heat of the summer for the fashionable of the town. In the winter, with its elaborate topiary laid naked by the winds and its marble pillars and statues stained and darkened by flickering rain, it was drafty and depressing. At a score of intervals along its length, it was broken by brightly tiled footbridges that crossed the mouths of Mandrigyn’s famous canals; looking down through the nearest bridge’s half-hexagon archway, the Wolf could see a sort of sheltered lagoon there, where half a dozen gondolas rocked on their moorings. Beyond these rainbow-colored, minnowlike boats, the canal wound away into the watery city between the high walls of the houses, the waters shivering where they were brushed by squalls of rain. Everything seemed dark with wetness and clammy with moss. Against this background, the tiny lady who emerged from beneath her oiled-silk canopy to greet Sheera seemed incongruously gaudy.
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