The nuuwa were all dead.
He looked down to where the severed head still locked on his calf with a death grip. Fighting a surge of nausea, he bent down and beat at the joint of the jawbone with the weighted pommel of his sword until the jaw broke and he was able to pull the thing off by its verminous hair. Hands shaking, he knelt on the slimy steps and held out his hand for Denga Rey’s torch, since his own had been lost in the fight. Reversing it, he drove the flaming end into the wound. Smoke and the stink of burning meat assailed his nostrils; the pain went through his body like a stroke of lightning. Distantly, he was aware of the sound of Sheera’s being sick in a corner of the hall.
He flung the torch away and collapsed on his hands and knees, fighting nausea and darkness. It wasn’t the first time he had had to do this, from nuuwa or from other wounds, but it never got any easier.
Footsteps pattered on the clay floor. He heard the murmur of voices and opened his eyes to see Amber Eyes binding up Denga Rey’s bloody arm with someone’s torn, gold-embroidered scarf.
Both women hastened to his side, and Amber Eyes knelt to bandage his wounds. Her hands were sticky with gore. When he had breath to speak, Sun Wolf asked them, “You bitten anywhere?”
“Few slashes,” the gladiator said shortly.
“Burn ’em.”
“They’re not deep.”
“I said burn ’em. We aren’t talking about sword cuts in the arena; nuuwa are filthier than mad dogs. I’ll do it for you if you’re afraid.”
That got her. She damned his eyes, without malice, knowing he was right. Under her swarthy tan, even she looked pale and sick.
After a quick, brutal cauterization, he helped her to her feet, both of them leaning a little on Amber Eyes for support. They were joined in a moment by a very pallid Sheera, her hair in wet black strings before her eyes. Like theirs, her limbs were plastered in gore. Sun Wolf shook himself clear of Denga Rey and limped to put a gentle hand on her shoulder.
“You all right?”
She was quivering all over, like a bowstring after its arrow was spent. He sensed that it was touch and go whether she would fall on his shoulder in hysterics; but after a moment she drew a deep breath and said huskily, “I’ll be all right.”
“Good girl.” He slapped her comfortingly on the buttock and was rewarded with the kind of glare generally reserved for the humbler sort of insects in their last moments before a servant was called to swat them. He grinned to himself. She’d obviously got over the first shock.
There were no other women in the empty hall. Slowly, limping with the pain of their wounds, the four of them staggered to the narrow postern that let them into the ruined circle of the curtain wall. Like the steps, the ground there was littered with the bodies of dead nuuwa with severed heads and hands and feet. Dark blood dripped down the stones and soaked into the winter-hard ground. At the far end of the court, the women stood in a silent group, staring in nauseated fascination at a tall, rawboned woman named Kraken, who was kneeling, her face buried in her hands, over the dismembered and half-eaten body of sharp, little, red-haired Tamis Weaver. Kraken was rocking back and forth and wailing, a desolate moaning sound, like a hurt animal.
After a moment Gilden and Wilarne moved in, bitten and painted with the blood of their dead enemies, and gently helped Kraken to her feet and led her away. She moved like a blind woman, half doubled over with grief.
Sun Wolf looked around at those who were left. He saw women with scared faces, gray with shock and nausea, the ends of their tangled hair pointy with blood. Some of them had been bitten, clawed, chewed—there’d be more work, burning the wounds, the agonizing aftermath of war. The place stank with that peculiar battleground smell, the vile reek of blood and vomit and excrement, of death and terror. Some of them, like Erntwyff Fish, looked angry still; others, like Sister Quincis and Eo, seemed burned out, as if only cold ash remained of the fire that had carried them alive through battle. Others looked merely puzzled, staring about in confusion, as if they had no idea how they had come to be wounded, exhausted, cold, and sick in this slaughterhouse place. More than one was crying, with shock and grief and relief.
But none of them looked, or would ever again look, quite as they had.
The Wolf sighed. “Well, ladies,” he said quietly, “now you’ve seen battle.”
Chapter 8
THE RAIN THAT SLASHED against the bolted shutters of the Brazen Monkey made a far-off, roaring sound, like the distant sea. With her boots extended toward the enormous blaze that was the only illumination in the shadowy common room, Starhawk scanned the few travelers still on the roads in this weather and decided that she and Fawn would take turns sleeping tonight.
Inns in this part of the mountains were notorious in any event, but during the dry season, when the caravans from Mandrigyn, Pergemis, and the Middle Kingdoms filled even this vast common room to capacity, there was some degree of safety. Most merchants were decent enough fellows, and no traveler would suffer to see another robbed, if only from the knowledge that it could happen to him next. During the rains it was different.
Opposite her, on the other worn and narrow plank bench, an unshaven little man with a loose mouth and a looser eye kept glancing over at Fawn, who stood at the far end of the long room, haggling with the innkeeper. Two others were hunched over pewter mugs of beer and the remains of a haunch of venison at one of the tables, oblivious to their surroundings. The Hawk wasn’t prepared to bet on any of their help, if there were trouble.
In a businesslike fashion, she began reviewing exits from the common room and escape routes from the inn.
Down at the other end of the room, Fawn was still nodding, the occasional sweetness of her low voice punctuating the innkeeper’s ingratiating whine. They’d been haggling about the price of rooms, food, and supplies for the last fifteen minutes, a protracted process that Fawn was capable of continuing for upward of an hour without ever losing her air of grave interest. The heat of the room was drying her great plaid cloak; in the smoky amber of the firelight, Starhawk could see the steam rising from it, like faint breath on a snowy night.
From Kedwyr, they’d journeyed through the olive and lemon groves of the brown hills to the poorer inland cities of Nishboth and Plegg. Those cities had long ago knuckled under to Kedwyr’s dominance and had shrunk to little better than market towns, with their decaying mansions of stone lace and the crumbling ruins of their mosaic cathedrals dreaming of better days. After two days on the road, the rains had hit, freezing winds roaring in from the sea and torrents of black water pouring from the skies, flooding the roads and turning innocuous streams in the barren foothills behind Plegg into boiling, white millraces.
They had climbed toward Gaunt Pass and the wide road that twisted through the gray spires of the Kanwed Mountains from the East to the Middle Kingdoms. Snow had caught them three days from the pass itself, and for days they had plowed and floundered their way through that icy world of winds and stone, discouraged, exhausted, making sometimes as little as five miles a day. From the pass, they had taken the road along the rim of the mountain mass, with the tree-cloaked shoulders of the main peaks towering thousands of feet above them, invisible in the gray turmoil of clouds.
Through it all, Fawn had never complained and had done her loyal best to keep up with Starhawk’s surer pace. For all that she had spent the last two years in the soft living of a concubine, she was tough, and the Hawk had to admit that the girl was less trouble than she had at first feared. In Plegg, where they’d sold her jewels, she’d gotten a far better price than Starhawk had expected that sleepy, half-deserted town could have paid; and she’d shown an unexpected flair for bargaining for food, lodging, and fodder for the donkey along the way. Starhawk didn’t see how she did it—but then, like most mercenaries, the Hawk had always paid three times the local rate for everything and had never been aware of the difference.
She had asked Fawn about it one night, when they’d been camped in a rock cave above Gaunt
Pass, with a fire lighted at the entrance to frighten away wolves. Blushing, Fawn had admitted, “My father was a merchant. He always wanted me to learn the deportment of a lady, to better myself through an elegant marriage, but I knew too much about the cost of things ever to appear really well bred.”
The Hawk had stared at her in astonishment. “But you’re the most ladylike person I’ve ever met,” she protested.
Fawn had laughed. “It’s all the result of the most agonizing work. I’m really a storekeeper at heart. My father always said so.”
Fawn came back across the room now, the fire picking smoky streaks of red from the close-braided bands of her dark hair. The greasy little rogue in the inglenook looked up at her, and even the two blockheads at the table raised their noses from their beer mugs as she passed.
“You want to bet you get an offer of free room?” Starhawk asked as Fawn seated herself on the worn, blackened oak of the bench at her side.
“I’ve already had one, thanks,” the girl replied in a low voice and glanced across at the greasy man, who met her eyes and gave her a broken-toothed leer. She looked away, her cheeks even redder than the firelight could have made them. “I’ve paid for supper, bed, breakfast, bait for the donkey, and some supplies to go on with.”
Starhawk nodded. “He have any idea how far to the next inn?”
“Fifteen miles, he says. The Peacock. After that there’s nothing until Foonspay, twenty-five miles beyond, and that’s a fair-sized village.”
The Hawk did some rapid mental calculations. “Tomorrow night in the open, anyway,” she said. “Maybe the night after, depending on the road. If this rain turns to snow again, it’s going to be hell’s own mess.”
Movement caught her eye. The greasy little man had shuffled over to the bar, where he stood talking in a low voice to the innkeeper. Starhawk’s eyes narrowed.
“Did you ask for the supplies tonight rather than in the morning?”
Fawn nodded. “He said yes, later.”
She sniffed. “We’ll make damned sure of it, then. I’m going out to the stables to collect the packs. I don’t want there to be any reason we couldn’t get out of here in the middle of the night if we wanted to.”
Fawn looked unhappy, but Starhawk’s wariness was legendary in the troop and had more than once saved the lives of scouting parties under her command. She left the common room as quietly as possible, crossing the soup of mud, snow, and driving rain in the yard only after she was fairly certain of the whereabouts of the innkeeper and the slattern who did his cooking. The Brazen Monkey boasted no stableman. Inspecting the interior of the big stone stables built into the cliff that rose from the muck of the inn yard, the Hawk thought the place rather too well stocked and kept for the little traffic they must have had in the last few weeks before these late rains.
She collected all the supplies and equipment except the actual packsaddle itself, slinging them by straps over her arms and shoulders, and waited in the darkness of the big arched doorway until she saw both the innkeeper’s shadow and the woman’s cross the lamplight of the half-open door. They’d be going to the common room, with supper for Fawn and herself. Picking her footing carefully, she slipped back into the inn by way of the shadows along the wall and up the twisting stairs to their room.
Seeing the damp and bug-infested mattresses on the two narrow cots, she was just as glad she’d brought up their own bedding. The room itself was freezing cold, and the roof leaked in two places. Nevertheless, she wrestled the bolt of the shutters back and looked out into the streaming darkness of the night. A foot or so below the sill of the window, the thatch of the kitchen roof was swimming like a hay meadow in a flood, steam rising from it with the heat below. Satisfied, she closed the shutters again, but did not bolt them; she checked the door bolt, shoved the supplies well under the beds, and went downstairs.
The greasy little man was leaning against the table, talking to an unhappy-looking Fawn. Starhawk crossed the room to them, looked him up and down calmly, and asked, “You invite this cheesebrain to supper, Fawnie?”
The man started to sputter some kind of explanation. Starhawk looked him in the eyes, calculating, fixing his features in her mind to know again. His eyes shifted. Then he ducked his head and hastily left the room, the rain blowing in from the outside door as it opened and shut again behind him.
Starhawk slid onto the bench opposite Fawn and applied herself to venison stew and black bread.
Fawn sighed. “Thank you. I couldn’t seem to get rid of him...”
“What did he want?” the Hawk asked, around a mug of beer.
“He came over and offered to tell me about the road ahead. And I—I thought he sounded as if he knew what he was talking about, but I couldn’t be sure.”
“More likely he’s trying to find out which way we’re going and where we’ll be by dark tomorrow night. How much did that robber want for the kennel he’s stuck us in?”
As Starhawk hoped, Fawn cheered up at that. She’d talked the innkeeper down to half the asking price; recounting it brought a sparkle to her soft eyes. They spoke of other inns and innkeepers, of bargaining and prices, swapping stories of some of the more outrageous payments that Sun Wolf or other mercenaries they’d known had either asked or been offered. Neither spoke of their destination or of what they would do when they reached the impenetrable walls of Altiokis’ Citadel; by tacit consent, each kept her own hope and her own fear to herself.
In time, another man came down from upstairs, a wizened, spade-bearded little cricket in black who looked like a decayed gentleman from one of the more down-at-heels cities of the Peninsula with his starched neck ruff and darned, soot-gray hose. He settled himself beside the two blockheads in the padded coats who were drinking ale and talking in quiet voices; eventually they all went upstairs to bed.
Starhawk became uncomfortably aware of how her voice and Fawn’s echoed in the empty common room and how dark were the shadows that clotted under its smoke-blackened rafters. Outside, the wind groaned louder over the rocks. Its sound would cover that of anyone’s approach.
She was glad enough to leave the hall. By the light of a feeble tallow dip, she and Fawn climbed the narrow corkscrew of stairs to the cold room under the rafters.
“Well, these beds will have a use, after all,” she commented wryly as she dropped the door bolt into its slot. Fawn laughed and pulled one end of the heavy log frame away from the wall. “Not like that—here. We’ll lift. No sense telling that old cutthroat downstairs what we’re doing.”
It was a struggle to barricade the door quietly. Halfway through their task, a sound arrested the Hawk’s attention; she held up her hand, listening. The inn walls were thick, but it sounded as if others in the place had the same idea.
Fawn unrolled her bedding along the wall where the bed had been, carefully arranging it to avoid the major leaks in the roof. “Do you really think they’ll try to rob us in the night?” Her voice had gotten very quiet; her eyes, in the flickering light of the already failing dip, had lost the ebullience they’d shown downstairs. Her face looked shadowed and tired. Starhawk reflected that for all her bright courage, Fawn did not travel well. She looked worn down and anxious.
“I almost hope so,” the Hawk replied quietly. She blew on the flame, and the room was plunged into inky darkness. “I’d far rather deal with it here than on the road tomorrow.”
Silence settled over the inn.
Between her travels, wars, and the long watches of ambush, the Hawk had developed a fairly clear estimate of time. At the end of about three hours, she reached over and shook Fawn awake, talked to her in the darkness for a few minutes to make sure that she was awake, then lay back and dropped at once into the light, wary, animal sleep of guard dogs and professional soldiers. She surfaced briefly when the rain lightened an hour and a half later; she heard the drumming of it fade to a soft, restless pattering in the dark, like tiny feet running endlessly across the leaky thatch, and, below that sound, the soft murmu
r of Fawn’s voice, whispering the words of an old ballad to herself to keep awake and pass the time. Then she slept again.
She wakened quickly, silently, and without moving, at the urgent touch of Fawn’s hand on her shoulder. She tapped the knuckles lightly to show herself awake and listened intently for the sounds that had alerted the girl to danger.
After a moment, she heard it: the creak of a footstep on the crazy boards of the hall. It was followed by the sticky squeak of wet leather and the clink of a buckle. But more than any single clue, she could sense, almost feel, the weight and warmth and breath gathered in the darkness outside their door.
Starhawk sat up, reached to where her sword lay beside her on the dirty floor, and drew its well-oiled length without a sound. With luck, she thought, Fawn would remember to have her dagger ready; she wasn’t going to warn anyone that they were awake by asking aloud.
A single crack of light appeared in the darkness, a thin chink from the yellowish glow of a tallow dip. In the utter darkness, even that dim gleam was bright as summer sun. Then she heard the scraping of a fine-honed dagger being slid through the door crack under the bolt, pushing it gently up. There was a soft, distinct plunk as it dropped backward out of its slot. Then came another long and listening silence.
Fawn and the Hawk were both on their feet. Fawn moved back toward the window, as they had previously agreed; Starhawk stepped noiselessly toward the barricaded door. The slit of light widened, and bulky shadows became visible beyond. There was a jarring vibration, followed by a soft-voiced curse, rotting their eyes for a pair of impudent sluts. A heavy shoulder slammed against the wood, and the barricading bed grated and tipped back as the huge shape of a man slid sideways through the narrow gap.
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